Lost Boys (48 page)

Glass was silent for a minute, looking out the window. Then, finally, he settled back into his seat. "Well, it's not like you don't already know."

"If I knew, I wouldn't have asked," said Step, which wasn't true, but he didn't much care. Somehow being honest to Glass didn't seem to have the same kind of urgency as being honest to, say, his children or DeAnne or Mr. Douglas.

"I mean, you know about me." Glass sighed. "I've never actually done anything, you know? I don't even want to, really. But some parents complained because one of their older kids told them some cockamamy story, and so I got hauled in when I was sixteen, and that son-of-a-bitch lawyer my mom got for me told me that it was a real good idea to cop a plea as an adult in exchange for no time, instead of doing time as a juvenile and getting my record wiped. Because that's what the prosecutor really wanted all along- my new lawyer told me that I probably wouldn't have had to do time no matter what, the only evidence was some kid and he could have torn him to shreds in court and now here I am on their list of sex offenders." Step could feel Glass's eyes on him.

"I'm on the pervert list. Anytime somebody anywhere near Steuben looks cross-eyed at a little girl, I get a phone call and they ask me where I was. Well, I'm almost always at Eight Bits Inc. with plenty of witnesses and so they don't actually bring me in very much."

"So why this time?" asked Step, feeling a little sick; he didn't know if he liked having Glass tell him this stuff, especially since he knew that Glass was probably still lying and in fact there was more than the one witness and he had in fact molested little girls, and a lot more than once or twice, too. But he let Glass tell his story without argument because why get him mad?

"It's that serial killer thing, if you can believe it. The SBI is doing a haul of every known sex offender in six counties, and this is when my name came up. It's completely stupid, it's complete bullshit to bring me in." There was real outrage in his voice now. "This serial killer's been doing little boys, for heaven's sake. What do they think I am, a faggot?"

Step said nothing, just drove, gripping the wheel.

After a minute or so of silence, Glass got back to talking about the gossip at Eight Bits Inc., and then they reached the apartment complex and Glass directed him to the building he lived in. Step let him off and then watched him get safely to the front door of the building. Watching him like that reminded Step of all the times he had walked babysitters safely to their parents' door, and then he thought of Glass babysitting for people, and he shivered. But I was a babysitter, too, Step thought. When I was twelve. And how did those people know that I wasn't like Glass? They had to trust me. You've got to trust people even though sometimes they'll betray your trust, because otherwise there's no life at all.

And then he had another thought. Glass had a mother and a father. A father who loathed him-did that start before or after Glass started messing with little girls? But that mother, she still loved him. She had carried him just like DeAnne carried Stevie and Robbie and Betsy and Zap, she had nursed him or given him bottles, she had gotten up in the night with him, she had dreamed of what he might be when he grew up. And he must have been a really bright kid. She must have been proud of him in school, and comforted him when the other kids made fun of him. And then this happened to her-this boy of hers turned out to have a thing for little girls.

Something so dark and awful that even the worst criminals in prison find the presence of a child molester too loathsome to endure. And she has to live with that now-that her son is like this.

And Step thought of little Zap and he realized that there were worse things in the world than having a child whose body isn't working right. You can have a child whose soul is worthless. And Step thought of this serial killer loose in Steuben. If somebody forced Step to trade places, either with the father of one of those lost boys, knowing that somebody had taken him and used him and killed him, or with the father of the monster who had done the taking and the using and the killing, it wouldn't be hard to choose. The parents of those lost boys must feel the most terrible rage and hate and grief, and such a desperate sense of failure for not having protected their sons. But the parents of that serial killer would have most of that and one thing more: They would have the shame of having loosed a monster upon the world.

No matter what else happens, Step thought, all of my children are good. And even if something happened to them, if one of them was hit by a car like Rob Robles in fourth grade or got leukemia like Dr. Duhmer's little boy in Vigor, at least Step would know that every year of life that they lived was a gift to the people around them, their memory would be one of love and joy, not shame and despair.

I don't think it's you, Glass, thought Step. I don't think your monster has grown so large yet. But you were lying to me, you were trying to hide the monster from me, you aren't even the tiniest bit repentant about it, and that means that the monster has room to get bigger and more powerful inside you and you'll keep on plotting your little opportunities to possess the bodies of helpless children, and it might be kinder to everyone in the world if I went out tomorrow and bought a gun and came to Eight Bits Inc. and shot you dead, right in front of everybody. Could God call it murder if I did that, to protect all the children you might harm?

Yes, it would be murder. Because maybe the monster won't grow. Maybe somehow you'll get control of yourself. And if somebody killed you before that happened, you'd lose the chance to repent and be forgiven. If there is such a thing as forgiveness for the things you do, or want to do. God lets the guilty live right among the good, hurting them all they want; he lets the tares grow amid the corn. And all that the decent people can do is teach their children and try to be good to each other.

When Step got back into the house, he started to go to bed, but then he went to the kids' rooms and saw each one lying there asleep, and he kissed them, each one of them. Robbie, Stevie, Betsy, so familiar, he had seen them sleeping so often, he knew all the sweet beauties of their faces in repose. And little Zap, the helpless troubled stranger, his legs drawn up in frog position, his mouth open and his cheek always wet. All of you, Step said silently. I love all of you, I'm glad for all of you. I have so much hope for you. Even for you, Zap, with your reluctant body. Even for you, Stevie, though evil has sought you out. The world is better because you're in it, and though I want to hold you forever, I still know that even if I lost you, my life would always have joy in it because you were ever, ever mine.

This is how they finally found a name for Zap's condition: All through the autumn, every month they had a visit from Jerusha Gilbert, the nurse from the county high-risk baby clinic. Jerusha found on her first visit that everything she normally checked on, DeAnne and Step were already doing. She still stayed her full hour, however, and came back every month; as she told DeAnne, most of the kids she was tracking had fetal alcohol syndrome or prenatal care problems, so it wasn't hard to imagine that the homes Jerusha visited weren't usually the most pleasant places. And because she didn't have to do the usual remedial work, she began to research more advanced ideas that DeAnne and Step could be trying with Zap.

It was Jerusha who first said cerebral palsy. "It's not a diagno sis, of course," she said, "because it never is.

Cerebral palsy isn't a medical term, it's a catchall basket in which we throw all the conditions that seem to be related to some kind of brain dysfunction. The rigid kids, the floppy kids, some retarded, some bright as can be.

Some who walk, some who ride in motorized chairs, some who lie in bed emitting a continuous high-pitched whine the whole time they're conscious, if you can call it consciousness. At some point everybody sort of agrees that this particular condition is CP, and then a certain system takes over. So it's really your decision, you know.

Start calling Zap's condition CP, and nobody's really going to argue with you."

"What if it's really something else?" asked Step.

"It's always really something else," said Jerusha. "The CP label just means that we all agree that we don't know what it is, but the kid needs help with a certain group of activities. And you're very lucky, if you decide that it's CP, because Steuben has one of the four or five best facilities for cerebral palsy in the United States."

"It does?" asked DeAnne.

"On the east side of town. The Open Doors Education Center. A really nice building, too. The city runs it now, but it was originally set up from contributions from the citizens. The parents of the kids with CP went around collecting until they had enough. And that's still the feeling there. The full range of everything- no matter what Zap turns out to need, they'll have it there. And also for preschoolers there's the Daggett Center. They charge, because their support is from foundations rather than government, but it's not that expensive. That kicks in when Zap is two. I mean, if you have to have a kid with neural problems, this is just about the best city in the U.S. for him to grow up in."

Cerebral palsy. Well, at least they had heard of it before. As soon as they had this name for Zap's problems, they talked about it with the kids in family home evening. Step told them about the kid he had known who had CP. "He was sixteen when I lived in Mesa," said Step. " I was about thirteen. He was in the same ward as me. I thought when I first saw him that he was retarded, because he walked funny and his head rolled back and forth when he walked, and when he talked you could hardly understand him. But then I remember standing there in the hall one time-I was reading the Doctrine and Covenants, I think, it was my project right then-and he comes out of one of the classrooms and just stands there near me, and I guess he was so mad that he just couldn't keep it in, he started talking to me. And it scared me, because he was strange, but I stood there and I listened and I realized that I really could understand him if I paid attention, and he was talking in complete sentences, and what he was doing was complaining about how the ward leadership wouldn't let him do anything and it made him so mad. I remember he said, 'They think I'm retarded but I'm not retarded, I get straight A's, I'm smarter than they are, but they won't let me bless the sacrament! They didn't let me be baptized till I was twelve because they wouldn't believe I was smart enough to be accountable.' Of course he was saying all this really slowly, and he had a hard time forming the words, and I remember it was like a revelation to me. This guy wasn't dumb. He was a person. And his feelings were hurt, and I was one of the ones who might have hurt them sometime, because heaven knows 1 had been afraid of him, I had thought he was retarded. But when he was done with his rant about how they wouldn't give him a chance, I said, 'I think you should bless the sacrament.' And I guess that was all he needed to hear, just somebody agreeing with him, even a thirteen- year-old runt of a kid with a book in his hands, cause he said to me, 'Well someday I will."'

"Did he?" demanded Robbie.

"Before I left there, I saw him lurch up those stairs to the sacrament table. Must have taken him five times as long as anybody else to say the prayer, but he said every word, and when he handed the trays to the deacons the trays shook and sometimes the water spilled a little but he did it. And at first people were embarrassed, but then later I heard them saying, That's one spunky kid, things like that. They were proud of him."

Then DeAnne said, "You kids are going to have a special responsibility as Zap's brothers and sister. You have to make sure that you treat him as naturally as you'd treat any other kid. That you never act ashamed of him in any way. Because if you act as if there's something awful or shameful about Zap, then others will, too."

"He's my little brother!" said Robbie.

"That's right," said DeAnne.

"It won't always be easy" said Step. "My Aunt Ella is retarded, which isn't the same thing, but she had a kind of look about her that made her seem strange and funny, and she was growing up in the 1920s, and people weren't very nice about things like that, especially the kids weren't. And my mom was her younger sister."

"That's Grandma Sal!" cried Robbie.

"Gammah!" shouted Betsy.

"That's right, your grandma Sal," said Step. "And when she was seven or eight years old, she was walking to school one day with Aunt Ella, and my mother tells how she was so embarrassed, she was really horrible to Aunt Ella, making her walk way behind her or on the other side of the street sometimes so that nobody would know they were together-but then, my mom was a little girl and nobody told her that she shouldn't be ashamed.

And one time this bunch of kids came up and started throwing stuff at them and yelling ugly names at them, just because Aunt Ella was retarded, and my mom, just a little girl named Sally then, she sat down on the curb and cried and cried, with those kids still running around and yelling, and Aunt Ella sat down beside her and put her arm around my mom and said, 'Don't cry, Sally. They don't know. Don't cry, Sally. They're just mean."'

DeAnne looked at Step rather oddly. "Why are you telling this story, Step?"

It occurred to him that the kids might get the idea that because Zap was their brother, they'd be teased or mistreated, and surely that wasn't why he started telling it. For a moment Step was confused and couldn't answer, so he did what any confused parent does, he pretended that he intended it to be a "teaching moment."

"Why do you think I told this story, Robbie?" asked Step.

"Cause we don't care if they're mean to Zap, because we're going to walk to school with him anyway! And we're going to walk right with him and not cross the street without him because then he'd be scared!"

Robbie had found the right lesson in the story even if Step had forgotten what it was supposed to be.

Then Stevie, without even being called on, said, "I think Aunt Ella was the smartest one, even if she was retarded."

"Why?" asked Step, pleased that Stevie had come up with this on his own.

"Cause all she cared about was that Grandma Sal was crying," said Stevie. "She didn't get mad at the bad kids, she just tried to make Grandma Sal feel better."

"OK, I think we've all got the point of the lesson, haven't we?" said Step.

"We have to tell Zap that he mustn't cry!" said Robbie.

"Zap can cry if he wants," said Step. "You know that's a rule in our family, that we can cry whenever we feel like it. Stevie, what's the main point of this lesson?"

"We've got to help Zap to be part of everything and no t get left out and make sure people don't think he's retarded."

"That's very good, Stevie," said Step, "Now, it may turn out as years go by that we might find out that Zap really does have mental limitations, that he really is retarded, and that will be OK, too, because my Aunt Ella's been retarded all her life and she's a good person and she's made a lot of people happy. But chances are that Zap won't be retarded. And no matter what, we still treat him right and we're never ashamed of him."

"We're proud of him," said Robbie. "He's my very first little brother so I'm a big brother now!"

"Like me," said Stevie.

Step turned to DeAnne. "I think we've got this covered."

That ended the lesson. Robbie waved his arm around to lead the closing song and DeAnne helped Betsy say the closing prayer and then they had ice cream while DeAnne nursed Zap, shielding her modesty with a cloth diaper draped from her shoulder.

"Zap's getting his dessert, too!" cried Robbie.

"Bet it tastes an awful lot like his dinner," said Step. "And his salad, and his lunch."

"And his cornflakes!" shouted Robbie. "And his tuna fish!"

"Do I have to feed the baby in another room?" asked DeAnne. But she didn't really mind. None of their problems and worries had really gone away, but this was a good night. They were a happy family, for this hour, at least. That was enough for the day.

With only a few exceptions, that was how the autumn went. DeAnne drove Stevie and Robbie to their different schools every morning while Step stayed with Betsy and Zap. Even with two kids to take to school there was less stress in the mornings, because she didn't have to get Betsy dressed and fed, too.

Not that she could sleep in. She had to pull out of the driveway fifteen minutes earlier in the morning than last year, because so many other parents were driving their kids to school and picking them up afterward that traffic at the school was a nightmare. Fear of the serial killer had changed the lives of a lot of people in Steuben.

The parents who couldn't pick their kids up met the schoolbus at the stop. Working parents formed co-ops, and a lot of local businesses let people take their lunch hours at the time school let out so that fewer and fewer kids had to let themselves into an empty house after school.

Being a mother was a fulltime job for DeAnne now, so much so that she even let some of her church work slide now and then, giving a couple of lessons that weren't quite as well prepared as usual, though no one seemed to notice the difference. The focus of her life was now Zap-she had no choice, really. Whether it was lingering aftereffects of the phenobarbital or just Zap's native sleep pattern, he tended to sleep for eighteen or twenty-four hours straight and then wake up ravenous. This was very uncomfortable for DeAnne, of course-either she had to wake up and force him to eat at least every eight hours, or she had to pump her milk and freeze it for him. She had too much for the times he was sleeping and not enough for his first meal when he woke up.

Also, since he spent so little of his time awake, she couldn't bear the thought of him wasting any of that time lying alone in his bed. Because he didn't have the use of his arms and legs the way normal babies did, he couldn't experiment with rattles or even with his own body the way most kids did. Thus any time he spent awake and alone was completely empty, and DeAnne was afraid that he'd get bored and lose all interest in life and simply sleep himself to death. She was not about to let that happen. As far as she could manage it, there would be no empty hours. If he woke up at midnight, so did she, and stayed awake with him, talking and playing, moving his hands and feet for him, singing to him. She'd catch catnaps during the day when he was sleeping, and now and then she'd have a full night's sleep. But it was wearing her down and she didn't have much energy for the other kids. She couldn't help it-they were able to supply so much more for themselves that they just didn't need her the way Zap did. She still helped with homework and projects, as did Step, but Robbie and Betsy spent a lot of time entertaining each other-becoming quite good friends as Betsy began to catch on to some of the rules of civilized behavior. Stevie spent a lot of time alone.

Step tried to make up for DeAnne's preoccupation with Zap by playing games with the kids, but as often as not he was fixing meals or doing laundry while DeAnne napped, and so he wasn't actually involved in what the kids were doing. And whenever possible he closed himself off in his office, struggling with IBM PC assembly language until he finally realized that he could get similar results using the new Turbo C language, which amounted to throwing away all he had done so far and starting over. It was maddening work, in part because the computer was so annoyingly designed and he had to use so many kludges to make the graphics work halfway decently or to get the tiny PC speaker to produce sounds that didn't make you want to sledgehammer the machine into silence. When Step was finding a bug or puzzling out a solution to a particular problem, his concentration was so deep that he'd look up from his computer wondering if DeAnne needed him to help fix lunch, only to discover that it was dusk outside and she was already in the kitchen washing up after dinner.

Back in Indiana they had already determined that their lives worked more smoothly if she didn't make it a point to call Step to dinner. If he was concentrating so heavily that he didn't notice her calling the kids, then he wouldn't want her to interrupt him anyway.

So they were both a bit hit-and- miss when it came to the three older children that fall, and when they noticed, as they often did, that Stevie was still involved with his invisible friends to the exclusion of almost everything else, it bothered them, but they were able to console themselves that it didn't mean he was losing his mind or that anybody was out to get him. It was just a trial he was passing through, and in the end it might even strengthen him. In the meantime there was Zap and Hacker Snack and not all that much time left over.

On the first of September CNN was full of the news of Korean Air Lines flight 007, which had gone down over Soviet airspace, probably shot down by the Russians. Step and DeAnne were complete news junkies- they ate dinner with the TV blaring away in the family room so they could hear it in the kitchen.