Day 9
STEWART LONG SAT ACROSS FROM HIS WIFE, forking mashed potatoes into his mouth, thinking that despite his wife’s altercation with the doctor, on balance his day had been pretty decent.
“Well, I don’t care what Dr. Franklin says,” Barbara said. “I’m not going to let them take a knife to Peter’s legs. And that’s final. They can experiment on someone else’s legs.” She said it with a firm jaw, and Stewart knew that it was the end of the matter.
To say that the Longs were just an ordinary mother-father-and-son family who lived on an ordinary suburban street in an ordinary Southern Californian town like Altadena would miss the true flavor of the matter entirely. Not that any of this was untrue, no. But no amount of ordinary detail could strip away the extraordinary nature of walking through life with muscular dystrophy.
Or in little Peter’s case not walking through life with muscular dystrophy.
They lived about fifteen minutes from the Rose Bowl, just ten minutes north of the 210 freeway, and not more than eight minutes from Brookside Memorial Hospital, but in their hearts the Longs lived a thousand miles from the rest of the world. It hardly mattered that Stewart spent his days minding the streets as a bona fide policeman, saving humanity from itself in every way imaginable. It mattered even less in some ways that Barbara carried the credentials of a registered nurse around in her purse. Peter had come into their lives ten years ago and made such facts subservient to this other one—the one that had pushed them into their own personal hell. The one called muscular dystrophy.
At least that’s how Stewart saw it. But then that was unfair, because they had actually started to make some sense of life this last year, hadn’t they?
“He’s been through too much as it is,” Barbara added after some silence.
Stewart looked at his son. Apart from the braces on either leg, his body looked slight and perhaps even frail, but otherwise he looked quite normal. “Is that how you feel, Peter?”
The boy lifted his eyes. “Our most important thoughts are those which contradict our emotions,” he said. “What do my feelings have to do with it?” Stewart recognized it as a quote he’d heard from his son before. Peter’s body might be frail, but his mind was far from it, and he had no problem retreating there at the flip of some invisible switch. He often showed his genius through these quotes of his, memorized and put into perfect context at will.
“Who’s that one from?” Stewart asked, testing.
“Knowledge can be communicated, Father, but not wisdom,” his son responded.
“Please, dear . . .”
“It’s okay, Barbara. Indulge him.”
“Yes, indulge me, Mom. We’ve all had a hard day. Let’s give ourselves a break.”
For a moment Stewart thought the conversation could go either way: to heaven or to hell. And in truth he could hardly influence its course. It was Barbara and Peter who had suffered the most—she in forfeiting not only her career but most of the last decade, and he in his disability—and through their suffering they had earned certain rights, it seemed. Engaging each other as they saw fit was one of them.
Then with a smile Barbara averted their descent into hell.
Stewart grinned and Barbara chuckled.
“You see, a wise man knows everything; a shrewd one, everybody. I know you, Mother. You need sympathy as much as I.”
“Don’t get a big head, Peter,” Barbara chided. “You think you know so much.” She was smiling wide now, and that was a good sign, because there really was no humor. Yes, it was heaven for sure.
Peter grinned, delighted with her. “I am not young enough to know everything,” he said. That one Stewart recognized as Oscar Wilde.
“No. Neither are you old enough to know half as much as you do.”
“Up to a certain point every man is what he thinks he is,” Peter returned.
“And what do you think you are, Peter?”
The grin suddenly faded from his son’s face. He looked from one to the other as though lost. Not lost in a strange way, just lost in a ten-year-old-boy sort of way.
“What is it, Son?” Barbara asked.
Peter shifted his eyes and then lowered them to his pants. Stewart followed his son’s gaze and saw the dark stain spreading on his jeans. It was the latest development in his disease, this lack of bladder control. By the look of it, Peter had refused his “idiotic” diapers again.
Stewart glanced at his wife and saw that she’d seen the accident. A look of empathy wrinkled the skin around her eyes.
Peter turned beet red. For a moment none of them spoke.
“Mom . . .”
“It’s okay, dear,” Barbara said, standing. She ran her hand through his hair and kissed his head. “It’s okay.”
A tear dribbled down Peter’s cheek. He might be a genius, but he was still a ten-year-old boy who’d been through hell. And now in a moment of grace from heaven, this reminder that hell was still very much with them.
Peter slumped helpless in his bright blue wheelchair and fought a losing battle for his dignity.
For the millionth time in ten years Stewart swallowed hard, cursed the gods that had delivered this disease to them, and lifted his son from his wheelchair.
It was noon Monday when Jason whipped the Ford Bronco to the curb in front of Leiah’s new apartment and shoved the gearshift into park. The windshield wipers jerked noisily against a light rain. He shifted the cell phone to his right ear.
“They can do that!? File a challenge!”
The World Relief director responded quickly. “Not a chance. My hands are tied on this one, Jason.”
“That’s ridiculous! I don’t care who the INS thinks they are; even they have checks and balances on things like this!”
“Maybe. But the INS got their orders from the National Security Administration. And you don’t mess with them.”
“This is impossible!” Movement to his right caught his attention, and he turned to see Leiah running for the car with a hand lifted as if to fight off the rain. A ringing lingered in his head. He faced the windshield.
“So when? When is all this supposed to happen?”
“Twenty-four hours. Maybe a little longer.”
The passenger door opened and Leiah hopped in.
“Give me forty-eight.”
“Come on, Jason. You know I don’t have any—”
“Just forty-eight hours. I’m telling you, John, there’s more here than you think. We’re talking about an innocent ten-year-old orphan here, not some terrorist.”
“And we’re also talking the NSA here, not some family member who’s debating custody.”
“Then just stall them. Pull in a favor. Anything. Look . . . please.”
“What’s up?” Leiah demanded. Jason ignored her.
“I’ll do what I can,” John said. “But trust me, it won’t mean a thing. You’ve got twenty-four hours.”
“Call me if anything changes. You can do that, right?”
“Jason, what’s going on?” Leiah cut in again. He stopped her with an open hand.
“Sure,” John said.
“Thank you.”
Jason heard the line click and he snapped the cell phone shut.
“What’s—”
“They’re deporting Caleb,” Jason said without turning.
The Bronco fell quiet except for the patter of rain on the shell. Leiah stared at him, not comprehending.
“Deporting? As in sending him back?”
“Yes.”
“That’s impossible! They can’t do that! He’s a refugee!”
“Evidently the NSA seems to think he may pose a national security risk. They’ve ordered immigration to deport him.”
“Give me a break! He’s a kid! It’s Crandal, isn’t it? This has something to do with the press conference.”
“Probably. And I’m not saying it’s a good thing, but it’s a problem we have to face.”
“Caleb’s more than some problem we have to face! He’s a lost child desperate for understanding. We can’t let them take him away! You know as well as I do that he’s not safe in Ethiopia. They tried to kill him once; you don’t think they’ll try again?”
Jason looked at her, suddenly angry. “You think I don’t know that? I’m not the enemy here”—he jabbed out the window—“they are! I’m on Caleb’s side, remember? Quit taking your frustration out on me!”
They locked stares.
Leiah’s eyes misted and she looked away.
Jason immediately regretted his tone. He wanted to reach a hand to her shoulder and beg an apology. The bandana on her neck had slipped, and ugly scars rose above the white pullover she wore. A picture of scars covering her belly flashed through his mind and he swallowed. Leiah, Leiah, what did you do to deserve such a tragedy?
It occurred to him again that she and the boy weren’t so different. It was her unique connection to Caleb. She saw herself in him, and her frustration was perhaps as much for herself as for him.
But could he, Jason, love such a wounded spirit? He did love the boy. Maybe not in the same way as she, but he did love Caleb. And in a strange way, he cared for her as well.
To think of his caring in any other terms, especially ones laced with romance, felt wrong. Like an unspoken taboo. A perversion even. Heaven help him, but he could never yield to such an impossibility. She was out of reach. An untouchable.
He discarded his impulse to lay his hand on her shoulder.
“We should hear on the Temporary Restraining Order this afternoon,” he said.
She looked at him and gathered herself. “Of course that doesn’t mean anything now, does it?”
He shrugged. “No. I guess it doesn’t.”
“So why did you ask John for forty-eight hours?”
“I don’t know. I don’t like the idea of Caleb going back any more than you. I care for him too.” His words struck him and he turned from her.
The touch of her hand on his shoulder took him by surprise. Heat washed through his spine, and suddenly he was fighting tears. The madness of it all was catching him too, he thought.
“I’m sorry. I know you do,” she said.
Jason nodded and she removed her hand.
There was nothing to say. It was all ending. The government’s most powerful hand had reached in and trumped them all. Nikolous, Donna, an unsuspecting national audience—they were all having the world’s eighth wonder plucked from under their noses.
He slid the stick into drive and pulled the Bronco into the street. This visit with Caleb could be their last, a notion that resonated like a slanderous joke. He drove in an awkward silence.
The idea ignited in Jason’s mind on the 210 on-ramp, like an unusually large burst at a Fourth of July fireworks extravaganza. He even jerked the wheel enough to get a look from Leiah.
“What?”
He stared ahead, spinning the idea through his mind again. It was staring them down like a challenging bull.
“What?”
“Remember Elian Gonzalez?”
“The Cuban kid? Why?”
“What made the INS move so slowly in deporting him?”
She looked ahead. “The media?”
“Yes. The cameras. Or more to the point, his popularity.”
He ignored her stare and spoke his mind quickly. “What would the INS do if Caleb were a nationally known figure instead of a lost orphan?”
“I don’t know—”
“They would back off! At least until they could explain themselves!”
“I thought the National Security Administration was pulling the strings.”
“Yes, but through the Immigration Service.” Jason powered the Bronco down the freeway seized by the simplicity of the idea. “It could work! Think about it.”
“I am and it scares me to death.”
“And the idea of him being hauled back to Ethiopia doesn’t? Let’s face it, he goes and he’ll last a day if he’s lucky. At least here he has us. He has you.”
“Okay. You’re right. But Caleb isn’t a national figure. And we’ve got what, twenty-four hours? How?”
They exchanged glances. “Nikolous?” she asked.
“Nikolous,” he said.
Jason pulled off the freeway and roared toward the Greek Orthodox church. He snatched up his cell phone with the intent to call the man. “You remember the office number?”
“No.”
He grunted and tossed the phone down.
“I don’t know, Jason. Nikolous isn’t exactly a friend.”
“He’s crookeder than a saw blade. Granted. And he’s a greedy slime-ball. Which is exactly why he’ll be on our side.”
She was quiet for a moment. “So you’re saying we join forces with the devil to save Caleb’s soul.”
“I’m saying we do whatever we can to keep Caleb in the United States. Remember? Whatever is necessary? And unless you have a better idea, yes, siding with the devil fits my understanding of ‘whatever.’”
Leiah set her jaw and stared ahead, but she didn’t object.
Jason dispensed with the parking routine and screeched to a halt before the double glass door that led to the Holy Ascension Greek Orthodox Church’s office suites. He hurried Leiah through the doors and cut straight for the back offices without bothering a confused receptionist. He heard her “Excuse me, sir,” and ignored it as he turned the corner to Nikolous’s grand suite. Leiah ran to catch him, ten feet behind when he rapped on the heavy oak door.
Jason pushed the door in without waiting for a response.
Father Nikolous sat behind his mammoth desk, his mustache down-turned and his hair slicked back in customary style. Martha, the wench who fancied herself an appropriate caretaker, sat in a Queen Anne chair opposite him, bulging at her seams. They both glared with steely stares. He would have expected a startled look, but their stone hearts were beyond the response, he thought wryly.
The thought strengthened his resolve. If they were going to dive in with the fellow, they might as well do it on their terms and win back a little ground.
“Well, well, the masters of the house are conspiring to wreck the world, is that it?”
They did not flinch. Neither saw his humor.
“Tell the lady to see to her daily beatings, Nikolous. We need to talk.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Nikolous said. “Please leave. I’ll be with you in due time.”
“I’m afraid due time won’t do. We have a problem.”
“We all have our problems. Right now mine is your uninvited presence. If you do not—”
“They’re deporting Caleb tomorrow,” Jason said.
That snatched the sound from the room.
Martha’s left eyelid quivered and closed halfway, as if a nerve had shorted in her skull. The great black bags under Nikolous’s eyes lifted and he squinted. This all for a brief second, and then they were staring at him again, unmoved.
“Leave us, Martha,” Nikolous said without turning to her.
She hefted herself up and frowned at Jason. The caretaker walked out only when Jason and Leiah stepped aside to avoid her ample frame.
Jason closed the door. “You find her at a Halloween party, Nikolous?”
The Greek ignored the comment. “Who says they’re deporting the boy? Why haven’t I been told?”
“You are being told. Frankly I don’t think the responsible party wants you to know.”
“Tell me.”
Jason looked at Leiah and saw why the Father chose to avoid her stare; to say there was anger cast his way would trivialize her expression. She glanced at Jason as if to offer her agreement, and they sat in the two chairs facing his desk.
He told Nikolous of his conversation with John Gardner from World Relief, who called out of courtesy, only because he’d been incidentally informed by a friend at the INS that the deportation would go down. “So before you carry on with indignation, you should keep in mind that it’s thanks to me you’re learning of this at all.”
That seemed to temper the Greek long enough for Jason to explain that for all practical purposes, they were pretty much in a headlock. Caleb would be gone within twenty-four hours. Forty-eight if they were lucky.
Nikolous heard it all wearing his stately air of disapproval and then stood and walked for the window. He crossed his arms and stroked his mustache.
“There is one thing we might try,” Jason said.
Nikolous half turned and eyed him.
Jason could almost feel Leiah cringe beside him. “If we could get Caleb into the public eye, the INS might hesitate.”
Nikolous turned slowly and dropped his arms.
Jason continued. “It would have to be in a real big way, I think, but it would make them explain themselves.”
“And we have only forty-eight hours?”
“Or less.”
“The first meeting is not scheduled until Saturday,” Nikolous said.
“The first?” Leiah said.
Nikolous ignored her. “We would have to move it up.”
“And you’d need to have it well attended and well publicized. The networks would have to be persuaded to carry the event.”
“Tomorrow night?”
Jason nodded. Understanding lit the Greek’s eyes. He was walking toward his phone already. Jason gave Leiah a reassuring smile. She managed to return it.
Nikolous punched in a string of numbers and swiveled toward towering bookcases. He was clearly in his element.
“Hello, Donna. I’m afraid we have a problem. What does your schedule look like tomorrow evening?”
He listened and then quickly highlighted the situation. In under three minutes it was done. The Greek dropped the phone ceremoniously in its cradle and looked at them.
“We will have our meeting tomorrow night.”
“Where?”
“If we can’t reschedule the Old Theater, I will find a suitable location. In the worst case we will use our auditorium.”
“How will you find enough people to attend by then?” Leiah asked.
Nikolous grinned at her. “Don’t worry, my dear. I’ll deliver the people and the media. And you would do well to encourage our boy’s participation, yes?”
Jason spoke before she could. “Let’s hope the INS doesn’t show up before tomorrow night.”
“Yes, let’s hope,” Nikolous said.
The matter was settled, then. The Greek was reaching for his phone as they left; he had a meeting to plan. Perhaps the biggest meeting of his life.
Martha made them wait twenty minutes until the one-o’clock hour before she called them to cross the play yard and enter the West Wing, as she called Caleb’s prison.
Caleb was there, sitting on one of the large gray couches when they entered, and Leiah’s pulse surged. They kept him dressed in shorts that came to his knees and high socks, like a schoolboy all dressed up for his visits. His aqua eyes shone round, and he cracked a wide grin the moment he saw them.
Martha stood near the wall, her arms crossed, looking disinterested but hawkish nonetheless.
Caleb swung from the couch and ran for them. Leiah dipped to one knee and met him with open arms.
“Hello, Caleb.”
She hugged him tight, and truth be told, she did not want to let go. His long curls swept across her chin and she kissed his head. “Oh boy, do I love you.” Leiah rubbed his back and then pushed him back to look at him. “I’m so proud of you. Do you know that?”
He grinned and looked up at Jason, who ruffled his hair and then lifted him for a hug. They were like a small family. An impossible, disjointed one without the blessing of union, but a family anyway.
Jason carried Caleb over to the couches and plopped him down with a bounce. Caleb giggled, rolled onto his seat, and pushed himself back between them. He spoke very rarely, and then only in short sentences, often in Amharic. Although he possessed a decent enough command of the English language, he shied from it, as he did from nearly all things Western.
“So how are they treating you, son?” Jason asked, gripping the boy’s knee gently.
Caleb smiled and his eyes skipped to Martha.
Jason turned to the caretaker. “Don’t you have some laundry to do or something?”
She glared at him and then marched off with a humph. But she didn’t leave the room. The kitchen, forty feet off, was as far as she would remove herself during their visits.
Satisfied, Jason faced Caleb again. He winked. “Don’t worry; she can’t hear if we talk quiet. So are you okay?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
He tilted his head down. “Really good?”
“Yes.” He looked at them, self-conscious perhaps. But then he reached forward and put his small hands on top of each of theirs. They took his hands and he grinned, but he didn’t elaborate.
Leiah felt her heart melt as it always did in the boy’s company. At first, back on the road in Ethiopia, she’d guessed that her unique bond with Caleb came compliments of their shared isolation. He as a prodigy locked in a monastery; she as an outcast wrapped in scars. But in the nine days since their coming to California, she’d seen something else in the boy. Caleb wasn’t isolated at all. He was simply living in another world somewhere. A world very different from the one she saw. A world that held him in full contentment, like a child curled up in his mother’s lap, smiling and asleep.
She’d told Jason that Caleb was too wounded to know the difference between an abusive situation and a healthy one. In reality she suspected that he was too healthy to feel the difference. And she knew that whatever the boy believed, she craved. Because in many ways they were very much alike; their difference lay in their maturity. She wondered what it would take for her to rise to the boy’s level.
The thought of going further, of maybe even mothering the child, made her bones feel wobbly.
Leiah took his hand in both of hers and rubbed it. “Are they feeding you well?”
“Yes.”
“What do they feed you?”
He thought about that. “Milk. Bread. Porridge.” He flashed pearly white teeth.
“That sounds good. Milk, huh?” She looked down the hall and asked the same question she’d asked every visit. “And you’re sure you’re comfortable in your room?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Because if there’s any problem you would tell us, right?”
“Yes.”
Why Nikolous had banned any person but Martha from visiting his room, she could hardly fathom. The thought gave her a headache. But the Greek had promised a restraining order if they violated the terms of their visits. Jason had sneaked down the hall on the second day, during a moment when Martha had waddled off to fetch a screaming child in the yard. He’d poked his head in and returned to announce that it was simple but clean enough.
Still, the restriction alone was enough to fill her with doubts.
“And what about the . . . what about Martha?” Jason asked.
Caleb looked at him without answering.
“Is she good to you?”
“Not always.”
His answer took Leiah off guard. Not always? It was the first time he’d said anything less than glowing.
“What do you mean? She’s hurting you?” she demanded in a hushed tone.
“No. She is leaving the moving pictures on all the time.”
“What moving pictures?”
“The television?” Jason asked.
“The box with pictures that move.” Caleb lifted questioning brows.
“The television!” Jason said, smiling.
Caleb smiled with him. “Yes. The tele . . . vision.”
“They have a television in his room and he doesn’t like it,” Jason explained to Leiah.
“I think I got that,” she said. And then to the boy, “We’ll tell her to turn off the television, Caleb. I promise.”
He rattled off something in Ge’ez and then grinned wide.
They talked for another ten minutes in the same short spurts. Unless addressed directly, Caleb seemed content to sit by them, as if their presence alone brought great satisfaction.
“Caleb, there’s something I need to tell you,” Jason finally said. “There are some people who want to send you back to Ethiopia.”
“Yes?”
“But your father didn’t want you to be in Ethiopia. He wanted you to be here, with us.”
The boy nodded.
“Well, we may be able to keep you here, but we need your help. Tomorrow there’ll be a meeting. You should go to the meeting and . . .” He was obviously stumbling over how to describe what it was Caleb did. The boy just stared at him, and Leiah suppressed the urge to lean over and kiss his forehead. She smiled without thinking. “ . . . do your . . . use your power. You should show the people that you can do many strange, wonderful things. Very good things.” He stopped there and let his analysis rest.
He seemed bothered even by the simple description of Caleb’s power, she thought. Regardless of its source, you could hardly deny that feats like straightening crooked legs and opening blind eyes were miraculous.
“They want you to do lots of miracles,” Leiah said. “Can you do that?”
Caleb looked up at her with big eyes and then seemed to understand. “Maybe,” he said with a small smile.
Jason shifted on the couch. “That’s good.” He paused. “Caleb, I know we haven’t talked a lot about, you know, your miracles, as Leiah says. But it would be helpful to know how you do them. They say that it’s psychic, a power of your mind, but how? How do you make a blind boy see?”
They had agreed not to probe Caleb about the matter.
“Jason—”
The boy cut her off with a long string of words in Ge’ez. He sounded confident and strong but not angry. It was a diatribe neither of them could possibly begin to understand. Caleb ended, took a short breath, and then spoke in English. “Why is the way of God so unknown to you?”
Jason’s face flushed red and he turned away. “Well, I don’t really know the way of God, but if he does have a way with man, it makes about as much sense as the dialect of Ge’ez you insist on speaking.”
“Jason!”
He turned to her, unable to hide his frustration. “Come on, Leiah. He can heal people, for heaven’s sakes! I for one want to know how.”
“I’m sure we all do. But we agreed not to go there.”
“Well, now we are there. And frankly I wouldn’t mind knowing for myself why a little girl minding her own business at a convention hall is granted a full life, while my son lies six feet under.”
It was a frustration that seemed completely out of context to her. Had he lost his senses? “Get ahold of yourself, Jason!”
He closed his eyes and turned away.
A soft, high-pitched note suddenly filled her ears.
Leiah looked down at Caleb. He had pulled his knees up under his chin and was rocking back and forth with his eyes closed. He’d clamped his hands firmly over his ears, and his small lips quivered with wordless song.
Leiah didn’t understand what happened next; she only knew that one moment she and Jason (although mostly Jason) were venting frustration that had built for a week, and the next they were both crying inexplicably.
The notes from Caleb’s lips seemed to sweep through her like a drug, incapacitating her will to restrain the sorrow already hiding in her veins. That’s how it felt. And suddenly she was weeping.
It was an impossible moment; one that terrified her at first. She scrambled for understanding, and for a few seconds she tried desperately to recheck her emotion, but then with one loud sob she let herself go.
What anger she’d felt for Jason melted with the next few tears. She wept for the boy. No, she wept for herself. For her own wounded spirit that begged to find peace.
Leiah put a hand on Caleb’s head and stroked his hair. Her tears blurred her vision, but she saw that Jason’s shoulders were shaking under great silent sobs, and it made her put aside her last wedge of restraint. She pulled the boy to her chest and rocked with him, weeping. He stopped singing and let her hold him, and the sorrow flowed from her eyes like a tide.
Leiah didn’t know how long they held each other, only that when she looked up, Jason was leaning back on the cushions with red eyes and Martha was gone.
They sat dumbly in an afterglow for ten minutes, smiling and speaking little. But Leiah couldn’t remember what was said. When they stood to leave, she thought she saw Martha peering out at them from down the dark hall, but she couldn’t be sure.
They left Caleb sitting alone on the couch as they’d found him. She still had no clue what had happened. By the looks of it, neither did Jason. He blushed when she made direct eye contact, and his smile made her swallow.
Maybe they’d been touched by God, if there even was a God—she didn’t know. But she did know one thing: as long as she had breath to live and strength to fight, she would never, ever let them take away Caleb. Never.
It wasn’t until three o’clock that they remembered to call Martha and insist she get rid of the television. She grunted and then snapped a “Fine” before hanging up on them.