Oren
‘So,’ I said, ‘the boy died, but extraordinary child that he was, he had a second birth. This second birth couldn’t have been more different from his first. Instead of crawling out of a tar box, he crawled into a room with white carpet, white bed linens layered twelve inches deep, and white overstuffed chairs that could swallow a child in comfort. Air conditioning poured from ceiling vents. Happy music piped into the room from a stereo controlled elsewhere.
‘You might think that a dusty, tar-coated child would look out of place in a room like that, but this child cleaned up well – so well that you would never know that the room was unnatural to him. It made him itch, though, and it made him sweat, which, in the air conditioning, gave him a chill. If you think that this child was ungrateful for having a second chance at life, you’re right. Once a child of tar, always a child of tar.’
Walter said, ‘You were never my child. Not Kay’s rightfully either.’
I said, ‘Now and then, a workman who had helped the child escape from his murderous mother would come to visit. He told the child about his little sister and brother. He told him about his mother’s growing fame as a painter who pretended that she was a perfect eggshell but whose bloodied yoke showed through the cracks – which made her more famous. He told him about his mother’s new husband, a self-righteous man of vicious habits, a man who believed he was doing God’s work, but he had no children of his own for a sacrifice so he went seeking another man’s.’
‘That’s a lie,’ Walter said. ‘I’ve always only meant to protect your mother.’
I said, ‘The workman who gave the child a second life made him promise never to return. Too dangerous, he said. Nothing good would come of it, he said.
‘For a long time – many years – the child kept his promise. He went to school. He played with other children. He slept at night in his fat white linens in his fat white bed in the fat white house.
‘Only after he became an adult did he question the workman’s reasons for him staying away. What was wrong with danger? he wondered. He’d come through more danger by the time he was ten years old than most people saw in a lifetime. He accepted danger as one of the conditions of being alive, whether for a first or a second time. And why should the idea that nothing good would come of his returning stop him? The house where his mother lived had long been a bad place. Why should it change for him?’