Lost Boys (25 page)

No way will we be able to sleep here tonight.

He set the lock on the front-door screen and left the door open. Maybe somebody could break in and steal everything, but they could do that with the windows open anyway, and the living room just wasn't airing out at all-when he went in there his eyes stung. Then he closed and locked the side door, got back in the car, and drove to the Cowpers'.

"You're home so early again," said DeAnne, happy to see him.

"Maybe from now on," said Step. "Unless they back down. But I can never be late again in the morning."

He kissed her. Jenny Cowper was standing right there watching, but Step only waved as he kissed DeAnne again.

"Don't mind me," said Jenny. "I already guessed that you two knew about kissing."

"We're still beginners at it," said Step, "so we need all the practice we can get." Jenny la ughed and then went back into the kitchen or somewhere.

"How did things go with Stevie?" asked Step.

"Not what we expected," said DeAnne. "A substitute."

"Ah," said Step. "So she couldn't face it."

"And Stevie came home with his ribbon. Mrs. Jones must have said something to Dr. Mariner, because she came into class today and said something about-"

But at that moment several children charged into the room.

Robbie and two unidentified Cowper children-Step hadn't even bothered to try to tell them apart; they all looked like identical twins of different ages. Stevie followed, carrying a book. Not part of the game, apparently.

But at least he was talking.

"Hi, Dad."

"I hear you had a substitute today."

He nodded. Step squatted in front of him, then realized that his knees didn't respond well to that position anymore, and he knelt on one knee. "Hear you got your ribbon."

"I didn't care about the ribbon," said Stevie.

"Well, I guess Dr. Mariner did."

Then Stevie looked Step in the eye and said, "Did you kill Mrs. Jones?"

"No!" Step said, appalled. "No, of course not! I didn't touch her, I didn't hurt her at all. Son, she stayed home today because she's ashamed."

Stevie didn't look convinced. "Dr. Mariner said she was sick. She said Mrs. Jones wouldn't be coming back the rest of the school year and our substitute would be our teacher from now on."

Mrs. Jones had taken the coward's way out, after all. She could be bold as brass when it came to heaping scorn on a seven- yearold in front of his classmates, but when it came to making up for it a little, she just couldn't face it. Well, too bad.

"Dad," said Stevie, "what did you do to her?"

DeAnne, realizing that they needed some privacy for this, herded Robbie and the Cowper creatures out of the living room. Thanks, DeAnne, Step said silently. "Door Man, all I did was tell her the truth about what she was doing, and I made it clear that if she didn't stop, I was going to tell the truth to everybody else, too. So she stopped. In fact, she stopped so completely that I wouldn't be surprised if she never teaches again, even after this year."

"Wow," Stevie whispered.

"I mean, that's what you do with bad people, when you can. You just name their sin to them. That's what the prophets always did," said Step. "Just name their sins, and if they have any spark of goodness in them at all, they repent. Maybe she's going to repent."

"What if they're bad all the way through? What if they got no spark?"

"Well, it's like Alma and Amulek. The Lord wouldn't let the evil people harm them, even though a lot of other people got killed. They finished giving their message and then they left."

"The bad guys burned Abinadi," said Stevie.

"Yes," said Step. "But not until he finished naming their sins. And that's what eventually stopped the wicked people from doing their wickedness. Telling the truth about them. They can only do their evil when they think that nobody knows."

"But Abinadi was dead."

"Son, I guess he knew and the Lord knew that death isn't the worst thing in the world. The worst thing in the world is knowing that something really bad is going on and then not doing anything about it because you're afraid. So when Abinadi died, death tasted sweet to him."

"Burning to death?"

"No, I don't think that was sweet. But then it was over, and he went to live with his Father in Heaven.

Anyway, Stevie, that isn't the point. Nobody was going to burn me to death for telling the truth about Mrs.

Jones. I'm no Abinadi, I was just a very angry father of a very wonderful son who had been treated very badly and now it's over. Mrs. Jones won't be able to hurt you ever again, and my guess is that she won't be able to hurt anybody."

Stevie threw his arms around Step's neck and clung to him for a long time. Then Stevie pulled away and took off out of the room, probably a bit embarrassed.

Step got up and wandered into the kitchen and joined in the conversation there. "You're going to sleep on our bed because you're pregnant, DeAnne," said Jenny.

"1'm not," said Step.

"Uh-oh," said Spike. "Hyper-courtesy alert."

"Oh, please," said Jenny. "We all know how this conversation goes. You protest that Step can sleep on the floor while DeAnne sleeps on the couch, only you both know perfectly well that DeAnne would wake up perfectly dead if she did that and we'd feel so guilty we couldn't sleep a wink. Besides, what you don't realize is that Spike and I went camping on our honeymoon."

"There's a way to zip two bags together," said Spike, in a confidential tone. "I'll show you sometime."

"It does not hurt our feelings to sleep in sleeping bags on the floor," said Jenny. "We actually find it romantic, not that anyone who knew our kids would think we needed any more romantic opportunities. So please, let's just skip the arguing part and all agree right now, you on the bed and us in the bag."

Step and DeAnne were laughing, and DeAnne said, "That's just fine."

It wasn't until about nine that night, with the children bedded down, that DeAnne realized that she had never even checked the mail.

"We can always get it tomorrow," said Step.

"Or we could take a walk over there tonight," said DeAnne. "And check on the house while we're at it."

Why not? The Cowper house was so intensely extraverted that Step was glad for a chance to get away for a while.

On the way to the mailbox he told her what had passed between Stevie and him. "So I guess we've finally gotten over the hump," he said. "Stevie's going to be fine."

"I hope," said DeAnne.

"You only hope?"

"Today when he got off the bus, I started to explain to him about the bug spray and how we couldn't get in the house, and finally he says to me, 'I know, Mom. Jack already told me about it. "'

The imaginary friends. "Well, I suppose we couldn't expect them to just suddenly go away."

"I'm worried, Step. He's way too old to have an imaginary friend. And besides, who ever heard of somebody having more than one? I mean, aren't imaginary friends supposed to be like Snuffy on Sesame Street? Just one big strange creature or something?"

"Give him some time," said Step. "As things get better at school, he'll let go of this fantasy life. I mean, let's face it-these imaginary friends got him through what amounts to a concentration camp experience. Let's not be too quick to kill them off!"

"It's not a joke, Step," said DeAnne. "Stevie just absolutely refuses to admit that they're pretend. I think he really believes in them."

"So what if he does? The fantasy wouldn't have done him much good if it hadn't seemed real."

"But these imaginary friends aren't real, Step, and what if they don't go away? What if he insists on having one of these imaginary friends as the best man at his wedding? It's going to start interfering with his social life sometime, you know."

"But not today," said Step. "Give him some slack. He's just come out of hell into daylight, and it takes a while to shake off the shadows."

They were at the mailbox. Step opened it and checked for spiders, as he always did, ever since the black widow had scooted right up his sleeve when he was getting the mail one time in Orem. He had never known that you really could rip all the buttons off your shirt in one smooth movement and tear a whole shirt off your body in less than a second. It hadn't bit him, but he hadn't forgotten, either.

DeAnne started tilting the letters so she could see the return addresses under the streetlight. "We can take them inside," said Step. "We do live here."

"I'm not going in there again till that stink is gone," said DeAnne.

"The Cowpers aren't going to be thrilled about having us live with them forever, you know," said Step.

"They might. I was very helpful today with the housework. Here's one from your brothe r." She tore it open and started scanning it.

"You know what Spike Cowper said to me?" said Step. "He said, I know you folks need a car, and we've got this ugly beat-up rusted-out Datsun B-210, it runs fine but it's so ugly we'll never get what it's worth. So why don't you take it off my hands? Five hundred bucks. And I said, We can't afford anything right now. And he said, So we'll send you our address, and you pay us when you can."

"I hope you said yes," said DeAnne.

"You think I'm an idiot? I almost kissed him. I can take the Datsun to work, and you can keep the wagon."

"It'll feel like emancipation day," she said. "I think your brother's letting you know that he needs you to pay him back the money we borrowed for the move."

"Blood from a stone," said Step. "I'll call him. He's probably just afraid that we've forgotten we owe it to him."

"I didn't make the house payment in Indiana this month," said DeAnne.

"I didn't think we could anyway," said Step.

"This is the second month in a row," said DeAnne. "I don't think we're going to be able to make up these missed payments unless we get a surprise royalty check or something."

"I know-I'll ask Ray Keene for a raise. No, I'll ask Dicky for a raise."

She held out the last envelope to him. A big manila envelope. "Agamemnon," she said.

"You're kidding," said Step. He tore it open.

"I can't believe we're reading our mail out here on the street," said DeAnne, looking around the neighborhood. There was nobody outside.

"Isn't that what everybody does when their house has been turned into a gas chamber?" asked Step. "It's the contract. Arkasian came through."

"Took him long enough," said DeAnne.

"It just felt like a long time. It's only been a few weeks. In fact, he probably did this right away and it just took this long to process it." He looked up from the letter. "You know, Fish Lady, if you had got the mail at the regular time and called me and told me this was here, I would have quit my job right then, before lunch, and that would have been really stupid and totally unnecessary, because after lunch things got better again at work. I mean, it was a really lucky thing that you didn't get the mail then. Because I really can't quit yet, not until I know whether Eight Bits Inc. is going to do IBM games or not."

"Lucky thing," said DeAnne.

"Yeah, right," said Step. He put his arms around her, there under the streetlight, each holding handfuls of mail behind the other's back. "Maybe the Lord really is looking out for us a little bit."

"Or maybe the law of averages said it was about time," said DeAnne.

"Yeah, well, who do you think wrote the law of averages?" He kissed her and they headed back to the Cowpers' house. As they walked away, Step stole a look back at the house, wondering whether Stevie's imaginary friends had also been driven out by the insecticide.

This is how it happened that Step found a psychiatrist for Stevie, even though he had vowed that he would never take his son to one of those charlatans.

Not that Step had anything against psychiatrists individually. Their best friends in grad school in Vigor had been Larry and Sheila Redmond; Larry was a fellow history student, while Sheila was just starting a private practice as a psychotherapist. Step had made himself obnoxious, teasing her about how she had gone into the ministry. "The only difference between psychotherapists and ministers is that psychotherapists charge more, and more people believe in their brand of miracle cure."

Sheila took it all in good humor-after all, patience was the mark of a good therapist-and, because of her, Step had to admit to himself that even though he thought all psychological theories were nothing more than competing sects in a secular religion of self-obsession, it was still possible that an individual therapist might do genuine good for a patient, much the same way that a good friend might help someone who was going through inner turmoil. And even the money angle began to make sense to him when he remembered that in America, people tended to think that anything with a high price tended to be worth more-so that paying a whole lot of money to have someone listen to you and apply meaningless theories to your troubles would feel more valuable and therefore provide more solace than getting nonsense advice from a friend for free.

But the one thing Step knew he would never do, despite his new tolerance for the possibility of helpful therapy, was take one of his children to one of those witch doctors. "Why should we?" said Step to DeAnne. "If we took him to a Freudian, we'd find out that he wanted to kill me and sleep with you. A Jungian would link up his imaginary friends to the collective unconscious and some kind of dual hero myth. A Skinnerian would try to get him to perk up and smile at the ringing of a bell. And the new drug guys would dope him up and he'd sleep through the rest of his life."

"We're out of our depth," said DeAnne. "And we need help."

"So does that mean we put our faith in the theories of men," said Step, "instead of trusting in what we claim we believe in? Is Stevie a physical machine, genes acting out the script we gave him? Or is he an eternal intelligence, responsible for his own actions? Do we try to help our own son find his own way out of his own problems? Or do we pay for a therapist to teach him strange new lies to believe in?"

DeAnne looked at him coldly, then, and said, "We're not Christian Scientists, you know."

"And psychiatrists aren't doctors, either," said Step.

"Yes they are," said DeAnne.

"Having an M.D. doesn't make you a doctor," said Step. "People on the waiting lists at clinics get better at exactly the same rate as the people who are being treated."

"I read that article, too," said DeAnne. "But I also noticed that the clinics seemed to do no harm. And maybe if we take Stevie to a doctor he'll realize how much we care about him."

"He'll realize that we think he's crazy," said Step.

"He plays with imaginary friends," said DeAnne.

"And psychiatrists cost thousands of dollars," said Step, knowing that his secret weapon in any argument with DeAnne was to say that they could not afford it.

"Ninety dollars," said DeAnne.

He realized how very serious she was about it. "You've already checked."

"On the cost, yes," said DeAnne. "I went to Jenny's pediatrician, Dr. Greenwald, and he gave me the names of three child psychiatrists in Steuben, and I called them all and asked what they were charging and it's ninety dollars an hour. The only question now is whether the insurance from Eight Bits Inc. will cover a psychiatrist."

"It won't."

"You won't even ask about it?"

And then it was Step's turn to confess. "I already did."

She laughed, but she was angry. "You hypocrite."

"You've been hinting around about this ever since you noticed these imaginary friends," said Step. "I knew you were going to want to do it, and I had to know whether it would be covered. And it won't."

She looked at him, wanting to say something really dangerous-he knew the look, knew she was deciding whether it was worth the fight that would ensue if she said what was on her mind.

He saved her the trouble of deciding. "You're about to accuse me of lying about it," said Step.

"I was not!" she said.

"You were deciding whether or not to tell me that you were going to call Eight Bits Inc. and find out for yourself if it's covered."

"That's not calling you a liar," she said. "That's checking to make sure. What if they thought you meant adult psychiatric treatme nt, and that's not covered, but psychiatric treatment for children is."

"Oh, I see. It's not that I'm a liar, it's that I'm so incompetent that I can't carry on an effective conversation with another adult. You have to check up to see if I missed a little thing like that."

"People can make mistakes!" she said.

"Yes, ma'am, they certainly can," said Step, and he started to leave the room.

"Don't do that!" she shouted at him.

"Don't do what?" he asked.

"Don't walk out on me."

The words hung in the air.

"There's a world of difference," said Step, "between walking out on you and walking out of a room. I'm walking out of a room right now." She started to say something, but he didn't give her a chance. "Right now," he said.

He opened the bedroom door and went into the hall and realized that Robbie and Betsy were playing quietly in Robbie's room, not in the family room as he had thought. Step and DeAnne had raised their voices during this argument-did the children hear? "Hi, kids," he said. "What brings you back here?"

"Stevie told us to get out."

"Are you fine here?"

"Yes.

But Robbie looked so solemn that Step knew that he had heard, that he was worried. "What's wrong, Road Bug?"

"Stevie doesn't like me anymore," said Robbie. His face twisted up to wring out his tears.

"Sure he does, Robot Man," said Step. He sat down by Robbie and put his arm around him. Betsy, of course, began to cry too, since crying was getting Robbie so much attention from Daddy. Step put an arm around her, too, but his attention remained on Robbie. "Stevie's just having a hard time right now."

"What's so hard about it?" asked Robbie. "He just sits around and plays computer games or he plays with Jack and Scotty and he never plays with me."

"Jack and Scotty?" asked Step.

"He's always playing pirates with them, or playing train or something, and he won't play with me, and Betsy's no fun."

"No fun," said Betsy.

"I mean she's just a baby"

"Baby in Mommy's tummy," said Betsy.

"Road Bug, it's hard, you think I don't know that?" said Step. "Stevie's having a hard time at school and I think he's still a little mad at me for making him move. And so he needs to be by himself a lot."

"Then how come he's always playing with Scotty and Jack?" asked Robbie.

Step had to think for a minute. What in the world could he say to that? You have to understand, Robbie, that your brother is retreating from reality into a wonderful magical world full of good friends, which has only one drawback- none of the rest of humanity can get to that place.

"Robbie, can't you just be patient with Stevie for a little longer?" said Step. "He doesn't hate you. He loves you, he really does. He just isn't able to show it as much right now. A year from now you'll look back on this time and you'll say-"

"Don't say 'a year from now,"' said Robbie disgustedly.

"Why not?"

"That's what Mommy always says. 'A year from now you'll look back and laugh."'

His imitation of DeAnne was dead on. Step had to laugh. "Can you do my voice?"

Robbie immediately deepened his voice and said, "Life's a bitch, ain't it?"

"Bitch," said Betsy.

Step was appalled. "I've never said that to you."

"No, you say it to Mom when you think we're not listening," said Robbie. He was very proud of himself.

"Well, now I know that you are listening," said Step.

"What's a bitch, Daddy?" asked Robbie.

"It's just a word for a mommy dog," said Step.

"Woof woof," said Betsy.

"Why did you say life's a mommy dog?" asked Robbie.

"That what a mommy dog say!" shouted Be tsy. "Woof woof woof!"

"Believe me, Robbie, when you get older, you won't even have to ask. The answer will just come to you."

Step unfolded himself and stood up. DeAnne was standing in the doorway to the boys' room, jiggling with silent laughter. "If you hold all that laughter inside," said Step, "it might make the baby pop out."

She laughed all the harder-but still silently.

"Could it really make Mommy pop?" asked Robbie.

"No, Road Bug, I was joking," said Step.

"Why is it a joke when 1 don't think it's funny," said Robbie,

"But when I tell a joke and you don't think it's funny, then you say, 'That's not a joke'?"

"Because I'm the official funny-decider of America," said Step. "Back in 1980 when they elected Ronald Reagan to be president, I got elected to be the national funny-decider, and so if I say it's a joke it's a joke, and if I say it isn't it isn't. Next year they'll elect somebody else, though, because I'm not running again."

"Is that true, Mommy?" asked Robbie.

"What do you think?" asked DeAnne, her eyes wide in a mockery of innocence.

"I bet this is a joke, too," said Robbie.

"You are right indeed, my brilliant boy," said Step.

"If Mommy's laughing does that mean you aren't going to yell at each other anymore?" asked Robbie.

At the word yell, Betsy opened her mouth and let out a fullthroated holler.

"Betsy, don't do that!" said DeAnne. "They can hear you on the street. People will think we're child-abusers."

"We weren't yelling at each other," said Step.

"Yes you were," said Robbie.

"We were arguing because we didn't agree about something," said Step. "That happens sometimes. And maybe we got too loud because we both care very much about the thing we were discussing."

"What were you discussing?"

Thank heaven he didn't understand the actual words we said, thought Step. "We were talking about stuff that only grownups talk about."

Robbie chanted derisively: "Grown. Up. Grown, up."

"Yeah, well, someday you'll be a grownup and then you won't think it's so cute. Now play with your sister."

That's where they left the question of taking Stevie to a psychiatrist-nowhere. It was the first clause in article one of the unspoken constitution of their marriage: If they disagreed about something it was a tie vote, and no one had the power to break a tie, but they both had to promise to think about the other person's side. So Step was thinking about DeAnne's point of view, and DeAnne was thinking about Step's, but this time Step knew that he would never, never agree with her, and he knew that she would never see things his way, either.

Except that in the back of his mind, he knew that he would see things her way. That somewhere in the future he would realize that they really were out of their depth in dealing with Stevie's problem, that Stevie wouldn't just give up on these imaginary friends, and Step would end up walking through the door of a psychiatrist's office one day, taking his own son to the witch doctor to get an incantation that would make the evil spirits go away. It made him angry to think about that, though, and so he put it to the back of his mind and hoped desperately that the whole issue would just stay there, would just go away along with Stevie's imaginary friends.

The memo finally came down from Ray Keene that it was time for all the creative staff to evaluate the IBM

PC and come up with a recommendation. This is it, thought Step. This is what will decide whether I can sign the contract with Agamemnon, the big one that will let me quit this job and never see Dicky Northanger or Ray Keene again. As long as Eight Bits Inc. decides not to support the IBM machine.

And there were plenty of reasons not to support it. The biggest reason was that it was a crippled machine from the start. The operating system was a kludged-together imitation of CP/M; color graphics was only an option, and even if you paid some obscene amount extra to get it, all you got was four colors on the screen at a time, and it was no compensatio n that you could switch between a set of cool colors and a set of warm colors.

The only sound came from a repulsive little onboard speaker that made you want to answer the door whenever it buzzed. It was like somebody had examined the Atari 800 and the Commodore 64 and said, "How can we strip these machines down so there is nothing left that would be remotely interesting to any human being?"

And that's what the other programmers were all saying. It would be easy enough for Step just to let their words go unchallenged. Dicky would take his negative report to Ray, the machine would be dropped, and Step would walk away clean.

Only he would not be clean. Because he knew that a failure to support the IBM PC would be the death knell, in the long run, for Eight Bits Inc. If he didn't speak the truth as he saw it during this time when Eight Bits Inc. was paying for his expertise, then he was a cheat and a liar, even if no one ever knew it, and Step couldn't live with that.

So he spoke up. "OK, it's crippled," said Step. "But it has one feature that no other microcomputer made today has."

"What's that?" asked Glass. His voice was full of challenge, since he was the most vociferous opponent of the PC.

Step pointed to the letters IBM on the case.

"What is that!" demanded Glass. "That's nothing!"

"That's everything," said Step. "That's a vast national sales force, that's credibility, that's reputation, that's big corporations being willing to spend a hundred thousand dollars or half a million dollars putting these things on people's desks."

"We don't do business software," said Dicky quietly.

"Business software will be done by somebody," said Step. "Somebody will do a terrific word processor loaded with features because you can put 256K of RAM in this thing, 512K, you can have a word processor that will stand up and dance if you want it to."