Keeping Watch (43 page)

But in the end, all Allen could do was trust.

At some point during that long and sleepless night, the realization stole into Allen's mind that he was, again, keeping watch over a sleeping platoon. All his life, he had been assembling a far-flung platoon composed of nervy women with thousand-yard stares and their shell-shocked children who knew firsthand the meaning of “friendly fire.” He worked with them because it was the closest he could get to being with a bunch of vets: Until Rae, there was no bullshit with them, no need to explain hidden messages, no reason to pretend that life was pretty. They understood war stories, and although they didn't have any room in their minds for black humor at first, give them a few weeks of safety, they managed just fine. There was not one woman he'd ever slept with that he felt as close to as the women he'd helped to disappear, not a kid among his blood relations he'd choose over one of the beaten children he took in hand.

It was the reason, he supposed, that he loved Rae, who was as damaged as they come. And the reason he'd never felt as close to Jerry as he wanted to, because Jerry was basically a nice guy who knew the world's pain from the outside.

Thing was, a person needed a community that spoke the same language. People who had been there, whom he could trust not to get it wrong. People who could come to trust him, through shared ordeals. People like Jamie O'Connell.

All that night, Allen Carmichael kept vigil at the side of a boy twenty miles away, thinking of green things, sitting between The Wolf and a man with a streak in his dark hair, seeing before him a black hand gentling a blond head. And the next morning, driving through the rain, the whirl of Allen's mind calmed and grew still, until it seemed that he was traveling through a great and ringing silence. It persisted all the way to the jail, through the gates and the check-ins, into the conference room with its long table and forest of chairs, a room cleared of anything that might be adapted as a weapon, a private space set aside for their use. Jamie was already there, looking small and cold. Allen rested his hand on the boy's shoulder, said hello, asked if he was all right. Then he took a chair to the side, so as not to come between the boy and his father.

And with a rattle at the door, the man himself was there, wearing the ordinary shirt and jeans Allen had suggested instead of the orange jail-issue suit, the guards removing his handcuffs, his glance discarding Allen as he'd discarded the sight of Jerry's badge, seeking out the child with the huge, dark eyes filled with such terrible hope. The man rubbed his wrists and smiled, that warm, charming, self-assured expression he'd used so often, and his voice when he spoke resonated with affection, approval, and humor.

“Hello, son.”

And Jamie stepped into his father's arms like the last piece of a puzzle, fitting home.

Chapter 36

The two O'Connells held each other long and hard, blond hair bent over dark, a man's muscles around the boy's slimness. When O'Connell gently pushed his son from him, it was to look down into his eyes and say, “You've grown,” with a crooked smile that acknowledged the past months even as it dismissed them.

Jamie tentatively returned the smile. “Almost half an inch.”

“No, it's got to be more than that. Three-quarters, I'm sure.”

Pleased, Jamie shook his head and said without thinking, “I just got measured. Maybe it's your shoes.” Then he froze, catching too late his reference to the jail-issue footgear his father had on. But O'Connell only laughed, stretching out one leg to display the cheap canvas shoes he wore.

“You like the clothes, son?”

“They don't really look like you,” Jamie agreed, and Allen flashed briefly on the half-empty closet, its custom suits cleared out and as yet undiscovered.

“You should see the jumpsuit I usually wear—makes me look like that Vegas mechanic. The one you like—what's his name?”

“Nick,” Jamie provided. It was a flattery game—Allen would have bet his left hand that O'Connell remembered the man's name.

“Nick, that's right. The guy who wanted you to come work for him in the summer, thought he could pay Mark O'Connell's son minimum wages. Can you see that happening, Mr. Carmichael?”

He didn't look at Allen when he asked the question, nor did Allen look up from the contemplation of his own hands. “Nothing wrong with honest work. Teaches a man self-respect.”

“He's right,” O'Connell told his son. “You might even enjoy it for a couple of months, James, maybe during high school. Hey, that's only two years from now, isn't it? We ought to think about where you want to go. There are some great schools in the Bay Area. Or boarding schools, if you'd rather. But there's plenty of time to talk about that.”

Jamie nodded, and his father, picking up on some faint hesitation, deflected it with physical movement, resting his hand on the boy's shoulder and walking with him to the chairs at the table.

He was good, Allen saw, watching as the con man maneuvered his son into a chair angling away from Allen. He touched Jamie's shoulders just enough to remind the boy of his hunger to be held, and then stood away, taking one of the other chairs and moving it so he and the boy were facing each other. Allen could see why the man had made such a success of bilking Silicon Valley entrepreneurs out of their money: His words and body language were enormously self-assured and letter-perfect, letting his son know that this was the most temporary of situations, one that they both needed to regard with good-tempered resignation. Allen fought down the urge to yank Jamie out before it went any further.

“Anyway, son, you look great. You've been taking care of yourself over the summer, I'm glad to see.”

“I missed you.”

“Oh, man, I've missed you, too. Oh, James, you can't imagine how awful it was, getting that call from Mrs. Mendez. I was . . . devastated. When I found you were alive last month, I was so happy.”

“But I wrote you a letter, saying I ran away but I was safe.”

“You wrote—I never got a letter.” The look on O'Connell's face hastily arranged itself from puzzlement to dismay, but in between the two, Allen had seen the brief instant when the man remembered the letter. He didn't think Jamie had noticed his father's snap decision to lie.

“I wrote so you wouldn't worry, and so the police wouldn't look so hard. I didn't really say in it why I ran away, but I wanted to. And I want to now.”

“Son, that's all in the past. It's time to move on.”

“But Father, I—”

“Son, why don't you call me Dad, or Daddy? ‘Father' is finished with. You're practically grown up.” He reached out a finger to brush a lock of hair from Jamie's forehead; Allen felt a sudden urge to rip the finger off and stuff it down the man's throat. “I'll get this all straightened up and get out of here, and you and I will go off somewhere. Then we can talk and talk and figure out what went wrong and how to make it right. How about that?”

The pure, naked longing on Jamie O'Connell's face was obscene, as raw and tortured as a scream from out of the jungle night.
No, not this time, you bastard
—but the protest in Allen's mind was so weak, he was not even aware that it had passed through. For the first time he saw the physical resemblance between father and son, the shape of the mouth and chin, the way their shoulders leaned toward each other across the table, yearning. Oh Christ, oh shit, why had he imagined any good could come of this? O'Connell was as smooth and seductive as a polished stone, and in a minute Jamie would reach out and pick him up, and be lost.

But Jamie was looking down, a faint line puckering his forehead.

“I . . . I was thinking I should go back to Montana. I'm missing school.”

“Why the hell would you want to go to Montana?” Halfway through the sentence O'Connell caught himself and modulated his voice from irritation to puzzlement, but that time, Allen saw Jamie's wince, and was grateful for it. O'Connell had seen it, too, and made haste to cover it over. “Well, if Montana is what you want, that's fine—they tell me you've found yourself a nice family there, lots of animals to fool around with. And I suppose I'll be pretty busy with legal problems for a few weeks. So sure, why don't you go back there and enjoy yourself, and when Christmas vacation comes we can see where we stand?”

Jamie was silent, his head bowed. His father leaned forward, too, bending over until they were nearly touching, and he spoke in a quiet voice.

“It's just, son, that you're going to need to be really careful what you say to those policemen, and especially the FBI. They have a way of twisting a person's words around, and you'd hate to have something unimportant you've said turned into some major piece of evidence, now wouldn't you? James?”

The boy took a shaky breath, loud in the bare room, and pushed back his chair to reach for his father. O'Connell was startled, but as soon as his arms had closed around his son, his gaze locked on to Allen, his pale eyes triumphant and amused as he held the boy to his heart, murmuring endearments into the dark hair.

The boy pulled back a little, to say to his father, “From now on, I'm going to use the name Jamie. Like Mommy used to call me.”

“What? Oh, sure, son. Jamie it is. And you promise you won't tell those men anything, Jamie?”

But something was wrong. The boy was continuing to pull away from his father's arms, disengaging himself from the insistent hands, taking a step back, then another. O'Connell's face changed as he felt his son slipping away from him; his eyes blazed with disbelief and fury, and only the presence of Allen in the room and guards behind the glass kept him in his chair. Watching him, Allen thought it was a near thing. Jamie backed quickly away, exquisitely sensitive to his father's moods, and circled the long table until he was beyond reach of those hands, standing in front of Allen. Only then did he transfer his gaze from his father to Allen. The child's face looked like a man fresh from combat, haggard beyond his years with experience and understanding. He spoke to Allen, for the first time since he'd come into the room, his voice rough with emotion, but sure.

“He'd never give way like that,” he whispered to Allen. “He'd never let me live in Montana unless he wanted something. The only reason he says I can go there is because he thinks that if he does, then I won't talk before he can get someone to come after me.” He took a shaky breath, and the tears slipped down his face. “You can tell your brother that I'll tell him what he wants to know.”

 

After

Allen Carmichael and Jamie O'Connell sat on the rock promontory of Sanctuary Island, waiting for the morning fog to lift. The late October sun was out there somewhere, but down here by the water the swirls of gray and blue persisted, and the boy leaned in to the man as much for warmth as for shared solidarity. Jamie wore on his head a red baseball cap embroidered with the words
ORCAS ISLAND
. His suitcase waited on the boards of Rae's dock.

Neither of them had spoken for several minutes. They had talked so much over the past few days, about all that had happened and all that would come next, it was a relief just to sit on the cold boulders, small waves lapping near their feet, wrapped in mist and stillness.

It was Jamie who broke the silence, to say in a dreamy voice, “When I was a kid, I used to believe that if I tried hard enough, I could conjure up a magical cloak that would make me invisible. I even had a name for it:
The Quiet.
It was just those colors, gray and white and silver.”

Classic dissociative technique, Allen noted—but picturing the shattered frame of the boy's door, that small and bloodstained storage room between his room and his father's, he could well imagine how appealing such a garment would have been to the child. He still didn't know precisely what had gone on inside that small room, although Jamie had gone so far as to admit that it was something he didn't want to talk about with Allen, which in itself was a big admission. Better to leave it in the hands of the expert, scheduled to meet with Jamie twice a week for a long time. It was not Allen's business. He was not the boy's therapist, nor his rescuer any longer; just his friend.

He wrapped his arm around the thin shoulders and hugged the child to him.

“He really doesn't love me, does he?” Jamie asked.

How to answer a question like that?
He loves you like the hawk loves the squirrel? Like a mad platoon leader adores the men he wields? Like a bullet cleaves to flesh?

“I think he does, in his way. But he's just not equipped for anything more. I suppose you could call him an emotional cripple.” More comfort than truth, but sometimes that's what was needed.

“And I'm not.”

Allen's arm tightened, and he rested his face on Jamie's red hat. “No, thank God, you're not.” Hugely handicapped, yes, but not entirely crippled.

The mist was thinning, lifting free of the water's surface. Not long before Ed came, to take them to the mainland.

“You're really sure about going back to Montana?” he asked Jamie. The bending of fostering procedures and the government's willingness to overlook the wildly illicit nature of the Johnson link was directly tied to Jamie's willingness to testify. Allen wasn't about to tell the boy what to do, but he was very good at telling him how to get it done. And the boy had proved remarkably unencumbered by blood relatives to take the Johnsons' place.

“You sure I can't stay with you?”

“Jamie,” Allen began; they'd been over this before, more than once.

“I know, I know,” the boy cut him off. “ ‘Maybe I can come visit during summer vacation.' No, I'll go back there. I don't have anywhere else I want to go. Anyway, I can see what it's like to have a real winter.”

“Even if it means only half an hour of online time a day?”

Jamie ducked his head. “Yeah. I don't even know if I'll play for a while. The whole thing, knowing that my father was one of the players—it's just too creepy to think about. I somehow feel like, every time another player comes on I'll be wondering,
Is that him?
”

Silverfish, the ubiquitous, had been O'Connell's online name, the man's means of keeping track of his son, of coaxing out information, entering the boy's mind and life as surreptitiously as the insect occupied a house. Creepy, indeed.

Allen raised his head, hearing the first vibrations of a familiar engine across the water. As his head moved, the corner of his eye caught a dark shape on the opposite side of the cove. He looked closely, startled, but after a moment relaxed: only a tree trunk, enshrouded by the mist. Not a squatting figure in jungle fatigues, gazing approvingly across the water at him. Not a man with a white streak in his hair. Allen smiled to himself, and turned to the boy. “I think that's the
Orca Queen
.”

Jamie was hunched over, arms wrapped around his knees, and seemed not to have heard. “I've been . . . remembering,” he said. “It's like, there were things I knew, but I sort of forgot. Like I didn't want to see them or something. One of them is, my father did kill my dog, I know he did. His name was Snowflake—Mom named him, kind of a dumb name because he was always so dirty, but he was an okay dog. And then one day he peed on the rug and Father just kicked him and kicked him until he died. I was right there. And he made me clean it up, the blood and the pee, and made me bury Snowy. I never told anyone, because who'd believe me? But the weirdest thing was, he acted like I'd done it. Used to whisper that my secret was safe with him and then he'd laugh. It almost got to the point that I believed him, I could almost remember my foot kicking Snowy.”

“The mind is a mysterious thing, isn't it?” It was the only comment Allen could come up with. But Jamie didn't seem to hear; he wasn't finished.

“And I'm not sure, but I think maybe my father was there, the day my mother . . . when she died. I don't know why, but it just came to me the other day, I suddenly remembered walking down the block, going home from school. I remembered hearing this big noise just after I'd crossed the street, a bang that I thought was somebody backing into a garbage can or something. But when I got home, I was just sure there was someone else in the house. I don't remember why I thought that, whether I heard someone walking around or what, but when I went up and found her, somewhere in the back of my mind, I
knew
someone was there, 'cause I remember thinking, ‘Why didn't he stop her?' And Father had the only other key, and everything was locked, and when the police went looking there was nobody else inside. I never said anything, and after a while I just . . . forgot about it. How could I forget something like that?”

Because you'd taught yourself to forget,
Allen answered silently. One trauma in a happy childhood gets remembered; after a lifetime of them, the habit of repression is strong. Too bad his own childhood had been happy, Allen reflected with black humor; there were a few things he could have done with erasing from his memory, only he'd learned the techniques too late. “Talk to Dr. Marian about that,” he suggested. “She'll help you figure it out.”

The
Orca Queen
's engine was near enough now for Jamie to raise his head and watch for the shape to emerge from the fog. Allen gave the skinny shoulders a last squeeze, then rose, but Jamie, his eyes on the fading mist, said, “I never cried, you know. Not when he hit me, not since I was really small. Not even when . . . in the hunting game, when he'd drive off and leave me, even then I didn't cry, not after the first couple of times. I knew he'd come back, he wouldn't let me starve or freeze to death or anything. It was only when he hugged me that I couldn't help myself. He'd pick me up and hug me and kiss my hair and call me ‘son,' and I couldn't help it, I'd start to cry. I hated it and I'd tell myself,
Not this time,
but I couldn't stop. And it always felt then like he'd won.”

Allen's impulse was to pick the boy up and hug him and kiss his hair and call him
son,
to overlay one man's acts with another's; instead, he squatted down in front of the boy, to take hold of his shoulders and meet his eyes. “Jamie, you cried because you're human. Not because your father won, but because you couldn't let him. You cried because you were missing your mother, and because you were waiting for us to find you, me and Alice, and Rachel and Pete and the kids, and for Ed and Jerry and Rae and everyone. He never won, Jamie, you did. You won because you never forgot what your mother taught you: that you're worth loving.”

You won because you didn't kill the pale-eyed bastard,
Allen added to himself.
You won because you were strong enough not to go along with his game, because even though he carved a great fissure down the middle of your soul, a wound that will never, ever completely heal, and even though you'll never take a single step in your whole life when your feet don't expect the ground to fall out from under you and swallow you up, you've managed not to let it twist you. Somehow, you've managed to make the right choice every time.

All that was too much. So Allen simply leaned forward to give the boy's cold cheek a kiss, and say, “Jamie, you're very possibly the bravest person I've ever met.”

The boy didn't believe him, but that didn't matter as much as having said the words. Allen reached down to pull Jamie to his feet, and walked with him down the promontory to the future.