Chapter Thirty: Fathers and sons

“They want to relocate my mother and me again.” Logan said the words simply.

My brain resisted processing their meaning. After a moment, panic seeped in.

“Should you be telling me this?” I said to buy myself time.

As ever, Logan was direct with me. “I’ll never lie to you, not even by omission.”

That struck a vein of guilt in me that ran long and wide.

He smoothed the hair away from my face and continued, “For some reason, I think you’re in hiding too. You don’t belong in Chatham anymore than I do. I won’t tell if you won’t and I won’t make you tell me about you until you’re ready to trust me.”

He smiled. It was just a simple contraction of some facial muscles and a release of others. But it made me want to clutch his shoulders like a soap opera star and say he couldn’t leave Chatham because that meant leaving me. But that sounded selfish and desperate. The next best thing was saying nothing. I could have stayed silent, let him hold me and hoped that Logan would realize that he could never leave me.

The right words pushed past the boulder in my throat and spewed their poisonous truth. “Maybe they’re right. Maybe you should go – for now. For yours and your mother’s safety,” I croaked.

His hands gripped my shoulders and he brought his face close to mine. “It wouldn’t be for just now. It would be forever. I would never be allowed to come back here or contact anyone I left behind. Would you be o.k. with that?”

Images of tiny, baby monkeys going crazy from lack of comfort played in my mind. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some influential medical experts instructed parents to withhold affection from their children. Hugs, kisses and loving words were suspected of irreparably harming children. To prove this theory wrong, one doctor showed what happened to infant monkeys who had contact with monkey mothers, a cloth covered construct with a feeding tube, and a wire mesh monstrosity that fed the monkeys but provided not even tactile comfort. The little monkeys that had nothing but a wire “mother” eventually went insane.

I wasn’t a monkey (putting aside evolution arguments for a moment). Logan wasn’t my mother (putting aside Freud completely). But he was my only real source of comfort since the death of my mother. He was touch, sight, smell and emotion. I loved him.

I closed my eyes and squeezed back tears. No matter how much I loved him, I couldn’t put my own needs before his safety. More than anything, I wanted him alive – even if he couldn’t be with me.

“Yes,” was what I tried to say. My lips moved. No sound emerged.

“You suck at lying,” he said.

If only he knew. I flexed my hands.

“Ouch!” cried Logan. His long fingers pried mine out of his chest. He plucked the front of his shirt away from his body and looked inside. “Leaving here would definitely hurt me more than it would hurt you.”

“Don’t joke,” I said. “You could have been killed last night.” I looked past him at Mina, who was helping her mother set tables for brunch. “You were hurt last night over something that isn’t even your fight.”

We were too far away for anyone else to hear me, but Logan pulled me to the shade of an old fig tree a distance from the house.

“Don’t blame Mina.” Logan tapped the hair-covered bump on his head with a finger and said, “That was my lesson not to provoke men with guns when I’m tied up and helpless. It’s the wrong time to try to protect my girlfriend.”

His face suddenly stilled before twisting in pain. He turned away from me and faced the fields. His eyes were open but I doubted he saw anything outside his own thoughts.

“What’s wrong? Logan?”

I tried to take his hand but he pulled away and wrapped his arms around himself. He slumped against the tree and closed his eyes.

Whatever anxiety I had felt the night before, when confronted by killers, was nothing compared to the panic that now made breathing and thinking impossible. He was hurting and shutting me out. My relationship with the world closed down to this moment and what Logan would do next. I knelt on the ground beside him and waited with head bent – my neck an easy mark for an executioner’s axe.

His voice was a cold, dead thing. “Her name was Amber. I ran into her at the beach near our summer houses. She was this gorgeous, fun girl. We started seeing each other secretly. I didn’t know about my father then. I just didn’t want the parents looking on. I was a stupid kid, blind to everyone and everything except what I wanted.”

“Her father did business with mine. Came to dinner a lot and brought her along a few times. He was so proud of her. If her dad had been smarter or really knew who he was dealing with, he would have given her up at birth or hidden her on another planet.”

“My father is the kind of businessman who has henchmen – brutal, psychopathic thugs. If he wanted to make a point, he’d have someone’s car pushed off a cliff. If he wanted someone to know he was unhappy with their performance, he had a hand, foot or other dangling appendage removed. If he was really angry with someone, he’d have their daughter kidnapped, raped and dismembered. Then the body parts dumped in a public place so the newspapers would advertise his brutality for him.”

Logan’s voice was so flat and lifeless in describing the last atrocity, it made me want to turn away from him.

“Amber.” I said in quiet horror. Whatever jealousy I had felt was gone in an instant. If I had the power, I would have gone back in time to save her. Even if it meant that I would never be with Logan. No girl deserved that. More than anything, I wanted to erase the hurt and guilt that was breaking Logan apart.

His eyes were open in a blind stare. “I wonder every day if he would have done it if he’d known, if I had told him we were dating, that I really liked her.”

“At first, it was ‘no.’ Then the FBI showed me their file on him. I got to revisit all the injuries my Mom got over the years ‘hitting the car door,’ ‘falling off a treadmill,’ ‘accidentally walking through a glass door.’ The lead prosecutor educated me on how my father singlehandedly raised Miami’s murder rate to a ten-year high last year.”

He continued in a voice so quiet I had to lean closer to hear. “Now, the answer always comes back ‘yes.’ And I think he would have made me watch.”

There was nothing I could say that would make anything better, so I said nothing.

After a while, he continued. “Last night, those thugs could have been my father’s men. I couldn’t protect you – just like I couldn’t protect my mother or Amber. If I stay, my father might come here. If I leave, he might still come here on the way to my next hidey-hell. He could find you and hurt you because I’m not here. I can’t let that happen.”

He finally looked at me and said, “I loved Amber. I loved her because she was shiny and perfect. I’m in love with you – warts and all. I’ve been drowning in it – like I might die from the weight of what I feel for you. If anything happened to you, I – ” He stopped as if he had found the end of language.

I slipped my hands gently over his, afraid he would reject my touch again. Instead he clutched them and pulled me against him. “I can’t leave you. Don’t ask me. Please.”

We stayed under the tree and were left alone by the others. Logan’s breathing slowed and deepened, warmth returned to his hands. He curled on his side, facing me and closed his eyes. He slept as I stared at his face.

I wondered about chance and fate. Logan and I were the children of killers. We were both being hunted by people who wanted us dead. Somehow, we had found each other and fallen in love. Romeo and Juliet for the Halo crowd. If the story could stop there, the world would be a perfect place. But having been raised by my father, I know the world was just too damn small to ever be a safe place.

Then the girl in me began to wonder. I poked Logan’s arm. “What do you mean by ‘warts and all?’”

Cars began arriving at the farm, trucks and late model sedans. More of Mina’s extended family. Her uncles all looked somber as they emerged from their vehicles. Their wives looked like they were committed to wearing cheerful faces no matter how they really felt.

Mina’s mother and aunts prepared a feast while the men conferred behind closed doors in the sitting room. But the women of the family knew as much – if not more – than the men. Ophelia wasn’t shy about her problems and spoke openly with her sisters-in law. Brunch that day was one last hurrah before the Reyeses decided what to do with the farm. They weren’t making it. They were falling deeper into debt every day. Water and energy prices were through the roof and there was something wrong with the crops. They were dying.

They were experienced farmers. They had tried everything in their organic arsenal. But aside from a few hectares of land, the crops were failing. The Reyeses couldn’t afford to have the soil tested. Even if the ground was analyzed, they didn’t have the money to fix any problems found.

I looked out at the brown and rust squares of land that outnumbered the green plots by three to one. Was Dire Dullness’ prediction of a California dust-bowl playing out?

Mina’s uncles came out of the house and joined the women and children on the yard. Eduardo Reyes shut the kitchen’s screen door behind him and walked to the far end of the porch. I followed his gaze to Mina and Riley, who whispered something in her ear before heading toward her father. They spoke quietly, facing away from everyone else so I couldn’t practice lip-reading.

However, I did see the tools Javier and Oscar had left out on the flat porch railing just beyond Mina’s father and boyfriend. I hoped that meant our Shop class project was nearby. I popped in an earpiece while checking that Logan was still engaged in a little soccer scrimmage with the other boys. The screen on my phone filled with wood plank flooring, a pair of dirt-stained work boots and Riley’s over-priced running shoes. Bingo. I engaged the audio transmitter and voices flowed through thin white cord into my ear.

“My money is good enough for you but I’m still not good enough for Mina.” Riley’s words came out clipped.

Riley wasn’t good enough for Mina. I had no argument with that. But there was hurt in his voice and a small part of me felt sorry for him. It was a part that I decided to squash like a parasitic bug.

Pressing the up arrow on my touch screen switched the view from their feet to Eduardo and Riley’s heads. The tiny cameras the Pater had secretly installed on the robot provided a black and white view of the undersides of their chins and part of their faces.

“I am her father. I must put Mina above my business, this farm. You will never be good for her. I’m sorry for that because you were a wonderful boy. Ophelia and I wanted to keep you, we told your parents we would look after you. But the drugs had already destroyed their minds.”

Mina’s father dropped his head and closed his eyes before continuing. “And now I must apologize for something else. I can not pay you back. The crops have been failing at a faster rate since the last earthquake and no bank is willing to extend us further credit. Even their accountants have heard our land is dying.”

Riley tilted his face toward the sun. He had not bothered to remove his dark glasses. “I used to think it was too bad you didn’t try harder to keep me. When I turned 10, my dad covered our kitchen walls with his brains. He pulled the trigger in front of me. Right now, you suck more than he ever did.”

Eduardo Reyes covered his face with his hands.

“Don’t ever say you’re sorry to me again, old man,” said Riley before heading back toward Mina.

I looked at the cars parked on the small gravel apron near the house. The decrepit Datsun wasn’t a collector’s item. It was Riley’s trade in for the large, shiny SUV he’d driven yesterday. What else had he sold to come up with enough money to repay the Reyeses’ bank loan?