Winter Oranges (14 page)

“No problem,” Jason told him. “Plenty of blockbusters to choose from this time of year.”

Once that was decided, they tackled the problem of actually getting Ben into the theater. None of Jason’s coat pockets were big enough to hold the globe. He tried stuffing it in his laptop carrier, but discovered that unless he left it unzipped, Ben had no way of escaping. Besides, who took their laptop into a movie? It was bound to raise suspicion. In the end, he wrapped the globe in bubble wrap. He left the top exposed, partly so anybody who checked the bag could easily see it was a snow globe, partly because they discovered that without some kind of gap, Ben couldn’t get out. Jason also left the bottom of the music box exposed so he could wind it frequently. He found a paper bag with a thin rope handle—the kind of bag used in many gift shops—and put the globe inside.

When they raised their eyebrows at the box office, he held it out for them to inspect.

“I’m afraid it’ll freeze and break if I leave it in the car,” he explained.

Given the small, shockingly hard flakes buffeting down the sidewalk—it’d felt like being stabbed by tiny needles as Jason had dashed toward the front door—the fear of something freezing seemed completely logical, but the girl behind the glass smacked her gum, narrowing her eyes at him. “You seem familiar. Do I know you?”

“Some people say I look like William Moseley.”

“Who?”

“Never mind. Can I go in, or not?”

She glanced again at the snow globe in the bag, and then toward the bitter outdoors. “Sure.” She shrugged. “Long as there’s no booze in there, it makes no difference to me.”

Jason picked seats near the back of the theater. Not that it mattered to Ben. Unseen by people and uninhibited by little things like solid matter, he walked straight through rows of seats and people’s legs blocking the aisles, wandering the theater in awe. At one point, he walked right up to the screen to inspect it, then stopped multiple times to listen to other people’s conversations before making his way back to Jason.

“It’s rude to eavesdrop, you know,” Jason said as Ben sank into a sitting position next to him. The bottom of the seat stayed upright though, and Ben hovered there, two feet above the sticky floor. “Move for a second,” Jason told Ben. It was silly, he knew. He could have left Ben how he was, or he could have messed with the seat with Ben still sitting there, but it felt wrong to reach through Ben’s spectral presence. Once he was out of the way, Jason wedged the seat down with his coat and the gift bag. The angle was still wrong, but it’d be less disconcerting than before. “Now sit down.”

Ben obeyed, then leaned close to Jason’s ear. “That lady in the front there? The one with the blonde hair? She saw you buy your ticket. She and her friend are arguing about whether you’re you.”

Sure enough, the woman in question glanced around at him. She quickly turned away when she caught Jason’s eyes on her.

“Great,” Jason groaned, sinking lower in his seat.

“She’s debating if she should ask you for your autograph.”

“Christ. Let’s book it out of here as soon as the credits start, all right?”

“Not like I have much of a choice. I leave when you leave, assuming you take the globe with you.”

“Not a chance in hell I’d leave you behind.”

Jason froze as a voice behind him whispered, “Who’s he talking to?”

He spun around in his seat. Two teenagers sat behind him, both of them starting at him in horror. They’d obviously been talking about him but hadn’t expected him to hear. To his relief, they didn’t seem to know him. Still, he gathered his coat and bag containing the snow globe and moved silently to the seat at the end of their row, where nobody was directly behind him. It’d make for an easier escape when the film ended anyway.

“What was that all about?” Ben asked as Jason prepared his seat again.

“Nothing.” But it was a rude reminder that he needed to be a bit more careful about talking to Ben in public. He was relieved when the lights dimmed a minute later.

Ben loved the movie. More than anything, he was impressed by the surround sound, and more than once he turned to look behind them, as if he actually expected to see something approaching from the back of the auditorium. And they didn’t get to leave as soon as the credits started, despite Jason’s hushed pleas. Ben insisted on sitting through to the very end. Luckily, Jason’s makeshift fan club had less patience, and the lobby was all but deserted by the time the two of them emerged from the theater.

“What do you want to do next?” Jason asked as they exited into the blustering, icy cold. The sleet had turned to snow, although it had slowed, so the wind wasn't blowing tiny daggers as it had when they’d gone in.

Ben glanced around, scoping out the area. The theater was set in downtown Coeur d’Alene, where old architecture had been given a facelift and turned into a bustling, modern-day shopping center. In less than forty-eight hours, the Black Friday madness would start, but now, whether due to the snow or simply because people had better things to do, the streets were practically deserted.

Ben pointed. “Let’s go in there!”

Jason followed his finger. “Best Buy?”

“I don’t even care what they sell. I just want to see more.”

A reasonable enough request, when he considered how little of the world Ben had access to. “Sure. Why not?”

An employee greeted them at the front door and requested that Jason leave his bag with them. “For security,” the man assured him. “I promise you’ll get it back on your way out.”

Jason glanced toward Ben, unsure what to do.

“I’ve never been in a place this big,” Ben told him. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to stay with you or not.”

“I won’t be able to hear you for long.”

“Excuse me?” the Best Buy employee said.

Jason’s cheeks burned. “Sorry, I was thinking about something else.” He reluctantly handed over his bag.

Ben passed quickly through the music section, literally walking straight through the racks, leaving Jason to hurry around them in order to catch up. He scowled at the section of iPads and tablets, until Jason picked one up and played with it, at which point Ben began to gush in silent excitement. The music box had run out, so Jason couldn’t hear a word he said, but he could read the delight in Ben’s eyes. But when Ben found the DVDs and Blu-rays, he stopped short, looking as if he’d stumbled into heaven. He gestured wildly at Jason over the rack between them, his lips moving far too fast for Jason to read, but Jason got the gist of it. It was something along the lines of, “Oh my God, look at these, come quick, come quick.”

“Hang on a minute,” Jason told him. “I can’t walk right through the damn shelves like you, you know. I have to go around.”

“Excuse me?” the woman next to him said.

He held his hand up to his ear on the side opposite her. “Bluetooth. Sorry.”

She rolled her eyes and walked away, and Jason took the opportunity to take his phone out and hold it up to his ear. Better for people to think him a rude asshole talking too loud on his phone than a lunatic talking to himself.

He finally made it around to Ben’s side of the display. He’d expected to find movies, but that wasn’t what had excited Ben so much. Instead, it was box sets of old TV shows.

Ben was practically beside himself, his pale hands pointing to different boxes and then fluttering in wild gesticulations around his head as he talked. His eyes were bright, his lips so perfectly expressive and mobile, and for a while, Jason could only watch him, still stupidly holding his phone to his ear, not catching a single word Ben was saying, just drinking in Ben’s enthusiasm and his joy and his beauty. It took him a minute to come up with something good to say.

“Pick some,” he said at last.

Ben froze, all of his motions settling into stillness like a bird finally fluttering to a perch.
Really?

“Sure. I mean, maybe not all of them, but we can buy a few. Which ones do you like best?”

Ben bounced on his toes, his hands clasped under his chin, and not for the first time, Jason found himself thinking about how young Ben was—not even twenty-one—and yet how strangely, terribly old at the same time.

Ben began scanning the shelves, occasionally pointing to boxes, at which point Jason would pick them up and flip them over so Ben could read the back. In the end, they left with season one of
Fantasy Island
, season three of
The Love Boat
, season four of
Dallas
—Jason realized with some guilt that he never had googled who shot J.R.—and the entire series of something called
Murder, She Wrote
.

“Are these for your grandma or something?” the teenage girl at the register asked.

“For a friend,” Jason told her, smiling at Ben. He didn’t need to hear Ben to read the
thank you
on his lips.

“What should we do today?” Jason asked Ben the next day when the latter finally made an appearance late in the morning. “It’s Thanksgiving, but I’ve never baked a turkey before, and it wouldn’t do you much good anyway.”

They were in the kitchen, sunlight streaming through the windows into the small space as Jason loaded the dishwasher. He used so few dishes each day, it made more sense to wash them by hand after each meal, but who had that kind of self-discipline? He’d let an embarrassing number of coffee cups pile up next to the sink. Time to fall back on modern technology.

Ben stood in the corner, by the entrance to the mudroom, ostensibly with a hip against the counter, although he’d missed by about three inches. “Anything is fine.”

“Well, there’ll be movies on TV, and there’s football, although don’t ask me to explain it to you, because as far as I can tell, they’re all just running into each other. And there’s the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Have you ever seen that?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Me neither, but I know it’ll be on.” He glanced at the clock on the microwave. It was nearly eleven. “Unless we missed it. It’s on the East Coast, and it might be a morning thing.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Ben crossed to the window, pushing his face right through the white curtain to peer outside so that it looked as if his head ended half an inch in front of his ears.

Jason found it disturbing and turned back to the dishes. “Do you want me to take you outside?”

“I don’t know. The sky is clear, but it looks awfully cold.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Maybe later.”

His response lacked his usual cheer, and Jason risked a glance his direction. Not that it did any good. Ben’s face was still obscured by the curtain. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” But his voice was pensive, and Jason waited, knowing there’d be more. “I remember the first Thanksgiving,” Ben said at last.

“What?” Jason dropped the little pellet of detergent in and closed the dishwasher, flipping it on as he did. “You mean like at Plymouth Rock? You’re not that old.”

Ben laughed, turning back into the room as Jason wound the music box back up in order to keep the conversation going. “No. I mean, I remember when President Lincoln declared it a holiday.”

Jason frowned, trying to recall what he’d learned about Thanksgiving back in grade school. All he really remembered was tracing his hand on construction paper and coloring it to look like a turkey. “It wasn’t a holiday before that?”

“Well, sort of. The president or the governor would occasionally decide to declare some random day ‘a day of thanksgiving.’ But it wasn’t a yearly thing. It was more of a religious celebration back then—”

“Really?”

“Sure. In Tennessee, the Episcopalians celebrated Thanksgiving early in November. But then sometimes the governors would try to declare the last Sunday of the year as a day of thanksgiving, which would piss all the Episcopalians off, because they’d already done that. But mostly, we thought of Thanksgiving as a Yankee idea. Something those silly superstitious Puritans did in New England. And anything they did in New England wasn’t something we were anxious to copy in the South. It was something of a joke.”

“So you didn’t celebrate it at all?”

“Some people did. I know Arkansas declared it a holiday a few years before the war, but Tennessee was a bit slower to embrace it. Nashville had a Thanksgiving parade in 1859—that was a big deal, it was all anybody talked about for weeks—but when the war started brewing, Thanksgiving became one more point of contention between the North and the South.”