Twenty-eight

“Come on in here, Pete.” My uncle, white-coated, crooked his finger at me. I followed him into the examination room at the end of the corridor. It was a little room with old equipment that Gene hardly ever used. He closed the door and sat down in the cracked leather chair facing the eye chart. “Yesterday I did a little chore for us. I had a chat with your friends. I laid everything out for them. I made it simple and direct, and I think I got the message across.”

I straightened up. “You had a chat with what friends?”

“I talked to the agents, Pete.”

“Frank Miner and Jay Beckman?”

My uncle nodded.

“They came here? They came to the office? I was afraid of that.”

“No, no, no. Relax. I went to them.” Standing up, he straightened a row of toy cars on a shelf. “Look at this, your old Car-a-Rama set. I’d forgotten they were here. I ought to bring them out to the waiting room for kids to—”

“Gene.” My voice rose. “You went to them?”

“Right. I went to the district office. I did it for you.”

“For me!” My voice went completely out of control.

“Pete, calm down and listen. I did something that had to be done. I talked to them straight. I told them—I told them emphatically—neither you nor I know anything about your parents’ whereabouts.” Gene spread out his hands. “I put it as plainly as possible, right out on the table. I said, ‘Look, if we knew anything, it would be different, but we don’t. We—just—don’t—know—anything. So, how about you stop wasting your time?’”

“Great. Great going, Gene.”

“Pete, you should be thanking me. I called off the dogs. As I pointed out to them, why should they waste their time on a sixteen-year-old boy? They have plenty of other problems—let them go out and find those three guys who robbed Brinks last week. By the way, I should say they were very nice, completely friendly and polite.”

“What’d you expect, the KGB?”

“I really thought you’d be glad I went to them.”

“Glad? Glad my own uncle is a traitor?”

“You’re getting a little rough there. Who’d I betray? What did I do so wrong?”

“Gene! Those are the guys who want to nail Laura and Hal and you went to them and played footsie.”

“I did no such thing! I didn’t do anything to hurt your parents. You think I’m that sort of person? Turn in my own sister! Look, you know very well I don’t agree with her politics—the methods—but that doesn’t mean I’m a fink! And I resent your implication, Pete. I resent it deeply.”

“Why didn’t you ask me before you went to them? It’s my life you’re messing in.”

“Your life has nothing to do with me, I suppose?”

“You suppose damn right!” I shouted. “My life! Leave my life alone!”

Gene looked at me for a long minute. “Fine,” he said softly. “That’s just fine. You’ve made yourself very clear.”

“Are you worried about something?” Cary said.

I threw a stone into the underbrush. We were in the little woods behind the post office. “I’ve been kind of depressed for a few days.”

“Well, we’re just on a seesaw, aren’t we? I got over my depression and now it’s your turn. What happened?”

“I had a fight with my uncle.” We’d barely talked since that afternoon. Hello, good-bye, pass the sugar—that was about it. Gene’s face told his side of the story. I’d hurt his feelings and he was waiting for me to apologize. I told myself he had it bass ackward. Let him apologize to me for trot-trot-trotting off to the agents. But I couldn’t forget how I’d shouted at him, Leave my life alone!

“A bad fight?”

“Yes. Bad. Very bad.”

“Come on, Pete. What could be so bad between the two of you?”

“Plenty. Remember what I told you about the agents trying to get me to talk about my parents?” She nodded. “Well, Gene went to them. He went to them of his own free will. I still can’t believe it! It’s just an act of, of—” I didn’t know what to call it. I pulled my knuckles in frustration, then caught myself. The same thing Gene did when he was agitated.

“He was thinking of you,” Cary said. “Trying to help you. And you know something? What if they did find your parents now? Did you ever think they might want to be found? If I’d been hiding for a million years—”

“Eight years, Cary, and if they wanted to be found, they wouldn’t need those hound dogs to do it for them!”

“All right, don’t get so excited. You sound so mad. I hate it when you yell.”

“I’m—sorry.” I knuckled my forehead. “I am sorry, Cary, I’m just taking it out on you.” I thought about all the times I’d taken my feelings out on Gene, shouted at him, gone into rages when he hadn’t done anything to me. Didn’t deserve it. Forget it, I told myself, you’re starting to feel sorry for him. Forget it!

I squeezed Cary’s hand. “Are you mad at me?”

She shook her head.

“You sure? I’m such a jerk sometimes.”

“Go ahead, crawl a little, I love it.”

“Oh, so that’s the way you are!” I flicked my finger at her nose and she punched me in the arm. We wrestled around for a little while …

When we settled down again, she said, “Pete. What about the statute of limitations? They can’t put people on trial for things they did years ago.”

“Cary, no, it’s different. That’s for things like finding out twenty years later that someone committed a crime. See, then they figure, okay, it’s too late to start hauling them into court—except, of course, if it’s a capital offense. But as far as my parents are concerned, ‘No statute of limitations shall extend to any person fleeing from justice,’ quote unquote.” I’d looked that one up a long time ago.

She thought about that for a minute. “I guess it makes good sense, or else everybody who committed a crime would run away and wait six or seven years, whatever it is, then come back and be free. But even so, nobody’s going to send them to jail for a long time just for bombing a laboratory.”

“Where’d you get that idea?”

“If I were on the jury and I knew they did it because they hate war and really had good intentions, just wanted people to listen to them and think about things like germ warfare, how terrible it is—isn’t that what you said? Why they did it? If I were on the jury, I’d take that into consideration. And another thing I’d take into consideration is that being in hiding for so many years is probably almost like jail, anyway. Don’t you think so? It’s really like being punished by yourself, isn’t it?”

I looked at her for a moment.

“Maybe.”

“It is,” she said insistently. “Any normal person on a jury would think so. Hiding—” As if the word itself were something foul, she drew herself together, into herself, almost shuddered.

And I thought how, in a way, it wasn’t only my parents who were in hiding. Cary and I were hiding too. I knew about me. And the more I knew about her, the more I knew that what she showed the world was just what she wanted to show the world. Or maybe just what she wasn’t afraid to show the world.

I felt close to her and took her hand. It was warm, or maybe mine was cold. “You don’t know the whole thing about my parents, Cary. I didn’t tell you everything.” She turned her face up to mine, and I went on doggedly, saying what I’d avoided saying or thinking for so long. “If my parents come back—Listen, two people died in that bomb blast.”

“Died?”

“They weren’t supposed to be there, nobody was supposed to be there in the lab, nobody.”

“Pete—”

“And my name’s Pax Connors, not Pete Greenwood. Pax Martin Gandhi Connors. And now you really know everything about me.”