Fortunate Son: A Novel (15 page)

But there was no one there. What he had seen was his own reflection in the full-length mirror that hung from the bathroom door.

Thomas couldn’t remember the last time he had seen his naked image in a mirror. He knew that it had been years before, when he lived with Eric and Ahn and his mother.

Thomas was still short among boys his age. At his last visit to the infirmary he’d been told he was five foot five. He was slender and lopsided because of his shorter left leg. His face too had its abnormalities—a twice-broken nose, three scars, and a network of lines around his eyes from wincing at the light. There was the crater of flesh in the center of his chest from being shot in the drug bust, and then the various wounds he’d received in the street and at the facility. Thomas saw that his arms were long and that his hands were strong like Harold’s. His ribs were visible, and his skin was near-black, with ashen patches here and there.

Thomas moved close to the silvered glass and stared deeply into his own eyes. Something about what he saw made him think that those eyes had something to teach him. He touched the mirror, outlined the contours of the face with his fingers. He kissed the cold image of his own lips and placed his hands on top of his head in surrender to a fate not of his own design.

THOMAS CAME TO
stay at Monique’s house at the beginning of summer. In the morning Thomas would walk Lily to the day-care center where she spent from nine to noon playing with other children and getting exercise.

It was a seven-block walk to the day-care center at Compton Elementary School. On the way, Lily was full of questions and declarations.

“I wanna be a bird when I grow up,” she said to Thomas one morning.

“What kinda bird?”

“A hummingbird or a dragonfly.”

“And where would you go, little bird?” he asked.

“I’d fly to the North Pole to see Santa Claus, and I’d fly to Disneyland right over the fence so I wouldn’t have to pay all that money that Harold don’t wanna throw away.”

“That’a be fun,” Thomas said.

He loved those walks with Lily. When he was in the facility he used to think about her and wonder if they’d ever see each other again.

“Why they call you Lucky, Lucky?” Lily asked. “Is that your real name?”

“No.”

“What is your real name?”

“Thomas, Tommy.”

“Which one is it?”

“Both, really,” Thomas said. “My mother named me Thomas Beerman.”

“Oh. Where would you go if you were a bird, Lucky?”

“I’d fly deep in the woods,” he said without hesitation, “to the tallest tree I could find, and then I’d sit on the very highest branch and look out over the forest until it became the sea.”

“And what would you look for?” the girl asked.

“What I’m always looking for.”

“What’s that?”

“My mother.”

LATER THAT WEEK,
when Lily was explaining to Thomas how she made cookies in her lightbulb-powered play oven, the topic again turned to names.

“How come if your real name is Thomas or Tommy do they call you Lucky?” Lily asked.

“Your Uncle Bruno named me that,” he said. “It was the first day we met and I got to go stay at the nurse’s office, and he thought that was lucky.”

“Was it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe if it happened to Bruno it would be. But I’m not very lucky at all. Really my name is kinda like a joke—they call me Lucky because I’m not lucky at all.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know. I think I was born like that. I fall down and lose things. Other people have a nice life, like you with your mother and Harold who love you. And others just end up on the street like me.”

“Could you die from not bein’ lucky?” she asked, worry filling her large brown eyes.

“I don’t think so,” Thomas said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about that. The main thing about being unlucky is that bad things happen to you and you feel bad. If you died, other people would feel bad, and then they would be unlucky.”

HAROLD JUST DIDN’T
like Thomas; most of the time the plumber ignored his houseguest, even when he sat down to dinner with the family. After the first few weeks Thomas started eating in his room at night. He didn’t mind Harold’s cold shoulder, but the big plumber would also fight with his wife and adopted daughter if Thomas was there.

The final straw was on a day when Thomas was supposed to have cut the lawn. Monique had baked a chicken for dinner, and she was carving it when Harold said to Thomas, “That was a piss-poor job you did on the grass today.”

“I mowed it, Harold,” Thomas replied. “Front lawn and back.”

“But you forgot to do the edges along the path and out on the sidewalk. If you don’t do the edges it’s just a raggedy-ass mess.”

“I thought that it looked nicer to leave the edges,” Thomas said. “You know, it looked more like real grass instead of fake-like.”

“Listen, niggah,” Harold said, “don’t lie to me about bein’ lazy. You didn’t do it ’cause all you want is to lie around an’ live offa me instead’a gettin’ a real job an’ makin’ something outta yourself.”

When Thomas heard this he decided to stay silent. He saw that Harold was mad and found no reason to argue. Harold was a lot like Elton—angry at the world and needing to say so.

The whole thing would have blown over if Monique hadn’t driven her carving knife through the chicken, splitting the plate underneath in two and driving the blade deep into the pine dining table. The two halves of the plate leaped out from under the bird, flying off the table and shattering on the floor.

Monique’s eyes were wide with rage. Only her ragged breathing seemed to be holding back the violence in her breast. When she began to speak her voice was almost a whisper.

“You don’t know a damn thing, Harold Portman. You don’t know how hard and how long this boy worked at a age when you was livin’ up in your mama’s house, eatin’ her cookin’ an’ pickin’ your nose. You never took a knife or a bullet to feed your family and you never would. You get up and go to work and come home thinkin’ you did sumpin’. But you ain’t done a damn thing that anybody else couldn’t do. You ain’t done enough to earn the right to shine Lucky’s shoes.”

Thomas never ate dinner with the family again. He went back to his room realizing that he couldn’t stay around too long. But he didn’t know where to go. The police wouldn’t be looking for him, but if they stopped him and found out who he was he’d be put back in the facility. So he had to have a plan of action. He knelt down on the shag carpet and closed his eyes, hoping to find his answer in the earth.

A while later a heavy knocking came at his door. He could tell by the force of the knock that it was Harold. He didn’t answer, knowing that nothing good could come from their talking.

WHEN THE SUMMER
was almost over, Thomas was ready to go.

Monique had Wednesdays off from Ralph’s. So, after Harold was gone to work and Lily was at day care, she came out to bring Thomas his breakfast.

“Hi, Lucky,” she said.

“Hey, Mo.”

“What you doin’?”

“Thinkin’,” he said.

“’Bout what?”

She sat on his bed. He was on his knees on the floor.

“’Bout how you an’ me an’ Lily had our own little family way back then.”

“We sure did have some fun, didn’t we?”

“Yeah. And it felt good too. I guess I should’a done somethin’ other than carryin’ for Tremont.”

“You were only a child,” she said. “What else could you do?”

“Yeah. The worst thing at the facility was that I wished every night that we was in that bed together. I used to feel so safe in that bed.”

“Me too,” Monique said with a hum.

“You did?”

“Oh, yeah. You were the onlyest man I evah knew who wanted just t’take care’a me. You went out again after that fat man cut you ’cause’a me an’ Lily. You know, Harold wouldn’t do that. He might figure sumpin’ else out, but he’s a man, a full-grown man. If he was ten he’d’a run home cryin’.”

“I love you, Mo,” Thomas said.

“I love you too, baby.”

They were quiet for a while. Thomas closed his eyes. His mind was drifting when Monique said, “I’ll leave him an’ go off wit’ you if you want, Lucky.”

This brought Thomas out of his trance.

“But he’s your husband.”

“And I love him most the time. He good t’me an’ Lily, an’ he know how to do with money and build stuff too. But nobody evah been there for me like you have, Lucky. I will move out the house today if you tell me that’s what you want.”

“You don’t owe me all that, Mo. I mean, I did that for you because of Bruno an’ because’a the day you saved me from those boys. I didn’t do nuthin’ special. Anyway, nobody’d let a boy rent a ’partment alone. You made it so that I could have a home. No, you don’t owe me nuthin’.”

Monique got down on the floor and hugged Thomas to her breast. He let out a deep sigh and held tight to her. They stayed in that embrace for the rest of the morning—her kissing his head and him remembering the last night in his mother’s bed.

In the afternoon, when Monique and Lily went food shopping, Thomas gathered up his belongings in a backpack Harold had given him. Before leaving he went into Monique’s drawer, taking twenty dollars and Bruno’s old Social Security card.

12

E
RIC GRADUATED
from Hensley High at the age of fifteen. He applied to UCLA, was accepted, and moved in to live with Christie. Six months later Christie bore their daughter, Mona. He got a job at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club as their youngest tennis pro and spent his spare time restringing fancy rackets for the wealthier clients. He made good money in tips, and his salary would do. He enjoyed his daughter, was rather perplexed by the deep love Christie felt for him, and drifted further and further away from his father.

He majored in economics because he liked numbers and the objective approach that dominated the department. He didn’t feel overworked, and if some paper came due that he didn’t have time to finish, Christie helped him by typing, reading books for him, or even writing the essays.

He didn’t feel guilty taking her help—after all, he was working twenty-five hours a week, sharing the housework, and carrying a full load at school.

His father had told Eric that if he wanted to be a parent that he had to learn to support himself. The boy didn’t mind. Actually he felt relieved when he was no longer expected to spend time at his father’s house. Ahn still made him uncomfortable, and he felt guilty about his father’s empty life.

ONE NIGHT ERIC
and Christie were sitting in the beach-house living room, with eleven-month-old Mona rolling and crawling on the couch between them.

Christie said, “Isn’t she beautiful?”

Eric thought,
Yes, she is,
though he didn’t say it.

“She’s so happy because we love her,” Christie added.

Eric wondered about love. He felt respect for his father but not anything that he’d describe as the kind of love that he’d read about in books and saw in movies. He had more feeling for Ahn, but this too was not love—it was the remnant of fear that he felt when he was just a child. The only love that he’d ever really experienced was for Branwyn and then Thomas—who in Eric’s mind was a part of Branwyn. There was something else about Thomas that Eric felt drawn to. It was a quality that Eric remembered but couldn’t quite describe; Thomas was smart or clear or maybe even unafraid. He had something that Eric lacked, but the Golden Boy (a nickname they’d given him at college) couldn’t ever say for sure what it was.

Looking upon his straw-headed, violet-eyed daughter, Eric realized that he felt delight but not the kind of love that he knew as a child.

Even with Christie, whom he slept with every night, there was no driving passion. He compared his life to the pleasant garden that Ahn would take Eric and Thomas to when they were small. There was a big lawn and stone animals for the boys to play on. But very soon Eric became bored with the pretty grass and the whimsical creatures. He remembered that it was only Thomas who made those days bearable.

Thomas would talk to the animals, and they would tell him stories about what happened at night when all the people were gone. When the lawn became dark, the elephant battled the lion. Every night they fought and roared, baring claw and tusk, Thomas said in his breathless whisper, but no one could see them because no one was allowed in the children’s park after sunset.

At that moment Eric could see Thomas standing there in the middle of the broad lawn while Ahn sewed on the parents’ bench, chatting with the other domestics.

Eric recalled a day when he and Thomas were on top of the elephant, the largest animal in the menagerie. Thomas had raced Eric to the top, and for the first time the smaller boy won. But when he got up there he slipped on the slick head and fell to the ground below with a loud thump. Eric asked his brother if he was okay, but Thomas didn’t even cry. It wasn’t until the next morning that Branwyn noticed the swelling on his leg and took him to the emergency room.

“Eric. Eric,” Christie was saying.

“What?”

“I was talking about Mona. Don’t you care about her?”

“Sure I do. Of course.”

“Then why don’t you ever tell her that you love her?”

Because I want her to be safe,
he thought. But he said, “I tell her all the time; it’s just that I do it when we’re alone.”

AFTER A YEAR
Eric moved his family into special university housing that UCLA initiated for their younger students with children. One day he got the letter in the mail. The school took the top three floors of one of the fancy buildings on Wilshire, the Tennyson, for this experiment. Eric was chosen.

The apartment was a seven-room penthouse that looked out over a great part of L.A., even as far as the ocean. The rent was less though not quite enough less for Christie to quit her job.

But when the university was processing his papers for the apartment, they realized that Eric was now an independent minor no longer claimed by his father. A kindly clerk in the Student Housing Department felt sorry for the young father and passed his information along to the Financial Aid Office, where she knew there was a special stipend program for needy students with no other financial support.

Eric began to receive monthly checks instead of the rent bill, and all tuition expenses were taken on by the taxpayers of California. Christie enrolled in school, and the university provided full day care for Mona.

It was now Christie’s dream to become a doctor. She enrolled as a pre-med major at UCLA.

The next three years passed without incident. Anyone looking at Eric and Christie’s life together would have thought it was just about perfect. Eric rarely got sick, but whenever he did he stayed away from home, telling Christie his fear of making Mona ill. He never confessed that he was the cause of the deaths of both his mothers because of some insane fortune that allowed him to survive while others around him died.

He would usually stay in a motel down by the beach when he got ill. But during his last infection he stayed at a fellow classmate’s parents’ guesthouse in Bel-Air. The student was named Michael Smith. The guesthouse was rarely used, and Michael liked having Eric around because Eric was commonly acknowledged as the best undergraduate student in the Economics Department. Eric remained in isolation during the infectious period, but he promised to help Michael with his work once he’d recovered.

Eric liked Michael. He was a slender, anemic-looking young man with brown eyes, brown hair, deeply tanned skin, and almost no apparent personality. His mother had died delivering his sister, Raela Timor. His father, Ralph, remarried and then, soon after, died because of a freak aviation accident.

The accident had to do with a sudden downdraft over the Santa Monica freeway. Ralph Smith was driving his VW Bug home when a single-engine Cessna was coming in for a landing at Santa Monica Airport. The plane was blown down upon the nearly empty highway—empty except for the elder Mr. Smith. It was three in the morning, and Ralph, as usual, had been working late. His car was clipped by the plane’s right wing. The pilot survived with a broken ankle. Ralph only had a few bruises, but the hospital decided to keep him overnight. By morning the ill-fated bookkeeper was sick. The physician on duty, a heart specialist, assumed it was a heart condition. He prescribed blood-pressure inhibitors and bed rest. It wasn’t until after Ralph died three days later that the autopsy revealed a blood infection that he’d probably contracted on his first night in the hospital.

Ralph’s new wife, Maya, didn’t think that she could raise two children and so adopted Raela, giving the child her last name, with the intention of putting Michael up for adoption if no one else in the Smith family would take him.

Maya had already entered into the adoption process when she met Kronin Stark, a wealthy businessman who had no office but instead conducted his various businesses from a small table in the lounge of the posh Cape Hotel of Beverly Hills. Stark went to the hotel every morning to meet with international businessmen of every stripe and nationality. They would talk for either minutes or hours, at the end of which time the lucky ones would be smiling and leaving with a handshake. Some people had been noticed leaving Kronin’s table distraught and near tears. Once or twice his meetings had been followed by suicide a few days later.

Maya Timor had gone to the Cape Hotel looking for a job. She’d heard from friends that it was a great place to work with good benefits and some security. She left Michael at home because he was old enough to take care of himself, but she brought Raela along with her. Everybody liked the raven-haired Raela, and Maya felt that the child’s presence was something like a blessing.

“I don’t know, Mom,” Maya once said to Jayne Henderson-Timor. “When you look in those eyes you think that she can see right into your soul. It’s scary, but at the same time you can’t turn away.”

Jayne suggested that her daughter take the child to see a doctor. That had been the beginning of the deterioration of the grandmother-mother bond.

The hotel wasn’t hiring, but before Maya found this out, Raela wandered into the lounge and saw the great bulk of Kronin Stark. She came up to the empty chair in front of him (just vacated without a handshake) and sat down.

“Who are you?” the six-year-old beauty asked.

“My name is Stark.”

“It sounds like you have rocks in your throat,” she said.

“That’s because I’m very serious.”

“It’s no fun being serious all the time,” the child said. “If you’re too serious your mouth gets stuck in a frown and then nobody likes you.”

“Raela,” Maya Timor said. She was coming from the bad news at the front desk. “I’m sorry if she’s bothering you, sir.”

“Not at all,” the humongous businessman replied. “As a matter of fact, she’s done me a service. She reminded me why I’m sitting in this chair.”

The big man smiled, and Maya noticed the ten-carat ruby that festooned the baby finger of his left hand.

“Raela is your name?” he asked the girl.

“Yes, it is.”

“And what is your mother’s name?”

“Maya,” Raela and Maya said together.

Kronin told the girl that they served very good strawberry pancakes at the Cape and invited both mother and daughter to breakfast. After that they repaired to the roof, where there was an Olympic-size swimming pool. A little deal with the pool man and a swimming suit was found for the girl.

While the child swam, her long, dark hair flowing behind her like a fan, Kronin made polite conversation with Maya.

“Her father named her,” Maya said, “after a fantasy princess he made up when he was a child.”

“She is regal,” Kronin admitted. “You say her father died?”

“Mother too. I’m in the process of adopting her. It’s too bad, but I don’t have the wherewithal to keep her and her brother too.”

Maya was never certain if Stark kept calling because of her or her adopted daughter. But he’d call every week and take her and the children to some beach or restaurant.

Michael was in awe of Kronin—his size, his voice, the way people served him wherever they went. He traveled in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce and lived in a big house in Bel-Air. Kronin didn’t care about the boy, but he saw how much Raela loved him and so he asked Maya if they could keep the boy when they got married.

“You’re asking me to marry you?” was her response.

“If you will have me.”

Kronin was a force in the world of business. He created dynasties and destroyed men and businesses on a daily basis, rarely picking up the phone more than twice in a day. He was a giant both physically and mentally and saw the people around him as a different species somehow, lesser beings. And so when Raela appeared before him he was surprised. Something about the child’s eyes, her demeanor, enchanted him. That’s the reason he asked the hotel supplicant Maya to stay for breakfast—he wanted to see what made her child so fetching.

Over the weeks Kronin found himself falling in love, not with Maya but with the child. He found himself eager to leave the Cape in the evening, when he was to have a family date with Maya Timor, the nonentity Michael, and the transcendent child Raela.

He had had many women in his life: movie stars, heiresses, and divas of various ilk. And he wasn’t a snob, in the ordinary way. He’d dallied with barmaids and secretaries, lady lawyers and prostitutes of all races, ages, and states of relative beauty.

The billionaire wasn’t looking for companionship or sexual gratification or love. What he wanted, what he craved, was a queen: a woman that could carry his power with grace, a woman that would bear him children he wouldn’t want to drown. It was plain to see that the woman he wanted was the woman Raela would one day become.

Kronin adopted Raela and not Michael, but the boy was still deeply loyal to him. The reason that he studied economics was to impress the man he wanted to be his father. He dreamed that one day Kronin would need his help, and there Michael would be, ready to comply. But he didn’t have a good head for numbers, nor did he understand even the simplest part of his sister’s father’s business. That’s why when Eric had asked him if he knew where he could stay to keep his family from catching his cold, Michael was quick to suggest Kronin’s guesthouse.

Eric would sit in the small, glass-walled house reading advanced texts in economic theory and novels from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He loved James and Balzac, Dumas and Eliot. He also watched tennis and boxing on a small portable TV they had out back. He ate canned soup, heated on a hot plate, and avoided all other contact until, on the morning of the fourth day of his sojourn at the Stark home, he heard a knock on the door.

He pulled back the curtain and saw a tall, dark-featured girl who was a stranger to him. Raela was fifteen then and slender. Everything about her face was perfectly proportioned, but her eyes seemed large anyway. She smiled and waved.

“Hello,” Eric said through the closed glass door.

“Hi,” the girl said with a grin.

“Who are you?”

“Raela,” she said with a guttural roll at the back of her throat.

“I’m Eric.”

“I know. Mikey says that you’re afraid to get people sick so you stay out here.”

“That’s right,” Eric said. He too was smiling, though he wasn’t sure why. He found himself watching the girl’s eyes, not looking into them but observing them as if they were rough gems.