chapter
4

The night before he left to go live with his father, Michael had set two alarms to make sure he did not oversleep, into which he had put new batteries to make sure they did not fail. He also wore his watch to bed, and from twelve-thirty in the morning until four-thirty, he watched the glowing digital numbers change.

Now, in the airport, he did not know what he had been expecting when he lay awake all night long. Whatever it was, it had not existed, and Michael was filled with dread at what stretched ahead.

So many things he could not ward off.

Like Jamie.

Jamie worshipped his own dad, who ran the town soccer program when he wasn’t running his company, which delivered heating oil. Jamie got to help repair engines and fix furnaces and his dad played every ball game with Jamie, or took him to one. Since Jamie’s dad was perfect, Jamie had explained that Michael’s dad too would be perfect, and that going to live with him was a perfect idea.

Michael would never betray his father. He decided never to talk to Jamie again so that Jamie would not suspect.

Michael slid into the midst of some young men who stood in a long ticket line. They never looked down to where Michael was. For eleven minutes he was safe. Then an airline attendant began working her way down the line, examining each ticket and making sure the person was in the right line.

She got closer. She was heavy, very black, with complex braids. She was stern with people, but nice about it. Michael almost said to her, “I don’t have a ticket. I don’t have anything,” because she would make it better. But it wouldn’t be better for Dad.

Grown-ups got into deep and serious trouble when they left kids on their own. There had been this woman who left her two little kids in car seats while she went into the grocery for a gallon of milk, and she was gone five minutes, and got charged with child abuse.

Of course, her kids had been babies.

Michael was no baby.

Still.

If I can get home, he thought, nobody will know Dad did anything wrong.

Especially not Mom, who in some terrible divorce way would rejoice. See? I was right! she would say. Kells would not say any such thing. Kells stuck to subjects like baseball and dinner.

It came to Michael that his stepfather was a better person than his real father.

He could not allow such a thing to be said. He could not permit a comparison. The ticket agent got closer, so Michael slid out of line and went back to the play area.

He passed a gift shop selling stuffed animals. They were colorful: monkeys in lime green and puppies in orange. He thought of York in a landfill. Filthy broken things thrown on top of York to stain and crush him. Michael wished he had gone to the landfill with York. It wouldn’t be any different, and at least he’d have York to hold.

He picked up a newspaper somebody’d left on a bench and felt slightly better. Every single person at the airport was carrying something, and now Michael was carrying something too. He fit in.

He tried the stairs and found an observation room, where he sat for quite a while, nose pressed to the window, watching Southwest planes come and go.

The four hours seemed a forever thing, his heart and soul suspended like a plane.

Nathaniel was so perfect on board the plane that Lily could have sold him for enough money to pay for the tickets.

The flight attendants adored him.

The lady across the aisle played his favorite card game, where Nathaniel threw the card on the floor and the other person picked it up.

The man in the seat directly behind them shook hands with Nate about six hundred times through the crack in the seats and each time, Nate burst into giggles of joy.

“What’s the fun part?” asked another passenger, after about a hundred times.

“Who knows?” said the guy. “He sure likes shaking hands, though.”

“Is he bothering you?” asked Lily, who knew perfectly well that Nate was bothering him; that was all Nate did—bother people.

But the man just laughed. “It’s a short flight,” he said.

Lily had run into enough kind people to staff a hotel. How come her very own father wasn’t one of them?

Her heart was pounding faster and faster, as if she were turning into a hummingbird. Michael could not call her. He had had complete faith in her, and now she too had abandoned him at the airport. Three times she’d called that pay phone Michael had used. Nobody answered the first time, a stranger answered the second time and nobody the third time.

Nate tucked himself up in her lap and ate Cheerios one at a time, curling his stubby fingers carefully around a Cheerio and squishing it into Cheerio dust just before he put it on his tongue.

“Gonna get Miikooo?” he said fifty times.

“Going to get Michael,” she agreed fifty times. Half the Cheerios got dropped on the floor. Lily needed to conserve snacks, so she picked them up and stuffed them back in the bag.

I don’t want to save denrose with excuses, she thought. I want him to be punished! I want him to suffer. I want him to end up in the meanest, roughest jail in the world. One with snakes and rats and cholera.

Enraged, she was panting like a dog in summer.

How dare you? she thought. How dare you?

Michael’s need to talk to Lily almost tripped him, like an invisible wire strung across the corridor. But no matter how calm he tried to be, no matter how carefully he tried to press the right numbers, he couldn’t make the call.

I told Lily I had her number by heart, he thought. But I don’t.

The list of things he had done wrong seemed so long. Michael could not see how he could go on. Or why. What was he worth, anyway?

Nothing to Dad.

Michael tried the phone number at other phones in other locations. He never got the numbers right.

Darkness enveloped Michael. He had no thoughts to go with it. He thought he would fall down, but there were still things to do: he had to cover for Dad. Nobody must know or see or guess.

The darkness became deeper. He could hardly keep his eyes open from the suffocating pressure of it.

I didn’t grow up, he thought. That was the problem. Dad is right. I have to grow up. Right now.

Instead, he had an odd enticing vision of those open girders high above the ticket counters. He saw himself balancing there for a moment, and then letting go on purpose.

Nate picked out a Cheerio and gave it to the guy who had been shaking his hand.

“I especially like the lint on your Cheerio,” said the guy’s seatmate.

“Eat it!” demanded Nate.

In an act of true love, the guy ate it.

Around the third hour, Michael remembered that he had to find the luggage carousels because he was meeting Lily at Baggage Claim. How could he have wasted all this time without finding Baggage Claim?

It took forever to locate the escalators down. He was sick with fear that he had missed her. He hadn’t had his watch on when they left so fast in the morning, so he had to check the time on the flight monitors, and the complexity of the information up there made the clock part hard to find.

The carousels were motionless. Security guards stood there anyway, also motionless, frozen until they were needed.

Michael trudged along car rental counters and past free hotel phones. There were lots of brochures for places to go and things to do. Michael took every one he could reach. He hated reading, but he could take his brochures back to the toy yellow and blue plane, curl up under a seat, and look at pictures.

“Passenger MacArthur, Passenger MacArthur,” said an overhead voice. “Meet your party at the information booth at Baggage Claim.”

That was where Michael was.

Two middle-aged women were definitely the ones worried about Passenger MacArthur. They bobbed up and down, peering this way and that. It was several minutes before Passenger MacArthur appeared, and Michael was astonished to see another little chubby middle-aged woman. Passenger MacArthur had sounded like a dad to him.

I could have Dad paged, he thought.

The three women hugged and cried, “It’s so good to see you!” and “The car’s in short-term parking, not much of a walk,” so Michael walked with them.

I thought we would play catch, thought Michael. I thought we would be outside in his yard and play catch.

He clung to his brochures.

The garage was a cavern, like a sunken Japanese car dealership, hundreds of black four-door sedans lined up between great concrete pillars and tiny glowing Exit signs. Michael went over a few aisles where the shadows were thicker. He turned around and could no longer see where he’d come in, and when he tried to find the terminal, it wasn’t there, and when he found a door, it led in some other direction entirely, and when he ran back to the four-door sedans, there were none. Only huge SUVs brushing side-view mirrors with the next SUV.

When they finally landed, Nathaniel was exhausted. He desperately needed a nap. Lily had no stroller. She was going to have to carry him and hope he slept against her shoulder. She felt very thin, as if her slamming heart had made her lose weight, and lose brain capacity, and lose hope.

It had been four hours since she talked to Michael.

Nathaniel began to cry that infuriating whine of little kids who should be asleep.

He was unbearably heavy.

She thought of the word “unbearably” and wondered if “bear” was inside it.

Bears. York.

She was filled with fear.

She could think of a thousand terrible things that could have happened to Michael during these hours of silence. Things much worse than what Dad had done.

The flow of people carried Lily along. She didn’t have to make choices. Everybody else knew where to go. They paraded to the baggage claim, where Michael should be.

But there was no Michael.