Beyond Recognition

35

Ben’s world had gone down in flames. First the guy trying to kill him, then the discovery of the body … he couldn’t even think about it. Calling 911 and returning to watch his stepfather being arrested. It had a dreamlike quality, distant and yet present at the same time.

And whereas he had forgotten so much of his mother, her reality clouded by his stepfather’s unyielding demands and punishments, she was suddenly a much greater part of him. He found her present in his thoughts, before him as a vision, a soothing, calming force at once transparent and yet palpably real, like an ocean current. Taking him somewhere new and different.

The days immediately after the incident had been among the best in his life. Emily had given him his own room, his own towels; she had cooked his meals and even made him a sandwich for school lunch. He didn’t tell her that he didn’t go to school for those days-he was too terrified the blue truck might return, that the nightmare might start all over again. So he skipped school, climbed trees, and watched boats and Windsurfers out on Lake Washington, looking like moths on a window. He didn’t even have the five hundred bucks. It was at the house, hidden in his room, and he sure wasn’t going back there.

They were good days, even though Emily wouldn’t let him help her with her clients, something Ben didn’t understand but didn’t protest too loudly. He wasn’t going to push things. At night she turned off her neon sign and locked her door, and together they either played cards or worked on a jigsaw puzzle. Emily didn’t own a television, something that stunned Ben when he had first learned of it, but he hadn’t missed it at all. Before bed she would read to him, which was a first. Aside from teachers at school, no one had ever read to Ben in his twelve years.

Being caught by the police had scared him to death. Convinced that they knew about the five hundred dollars, he had refused to speak at first. But when Daphne Matthews had given him the choice of a juvenile detention center or going home with her to her houseboat, Ben had spoken up loud and clear. He had never seen a houseboat; he could just imagine the detention center. Speaking had broken the ice. It had been hard not to talk, given all that had happened. Daphne proved to be both a nice woman and someone easy to talk to-almost as if she knew what he was thinking before he said anything. She amazed him that way.

Even so, he missed Emily with an ache in his heart unmatched since he discovered his mother’s ring in the crawl space.

At that moment he sat on a couch in Daphne’s houseboat, the television tuned to a black-and-white rerun on Nickelodeon.

For the past two days he had never been alone, except in the bathroom. When Daphne wasn’t there, Susan was. He considered running away, though the only place he could think to go was Emily’s, and it would be the first place they would look for him. Besides, Daphne had warned him that if he “misbehaved in any way whatsoever” it would hurt Emily. She hadn’t spelled it out, but it was pretty clear to him that Emily would be out of business and he would lose any chance of ever living with her again. That was unthinkable. Emily was all he had. No running away. He missed her something awful.

Daphne picked him up every afternoon from “school,” a place surrounded by wire fence, for juveniles in detention. They went for snacks. They drove around. She had taken him to the Science Center, a place he’d never been. After dinner she took him to her houseboat and he watched television or read a book. The houseboat was small, but he liked it okay. The walls were thin. When she thought he was reading, he was actually listening to her on the phone. She spoke to someone named Owen, and he knew enough to know that things weren’t going great between them. Twice she had hung up and started crying. It had never occurred to him that police ever cried.

Twice, he had stolen a look at Daphne’s papers, because she wrote at the little desk downstairs where Ben slept, and he had to know if it was about him or not. So he read everything he could find, including the thick file she carried back and forth between home and the office. To Ben it wasn’t much different from peering in car windows.

He wasn’t sure exactly why, but she made him write one page in a diary every day. If he wrote in the diary, he didn’t have to sit down and talk to her at night-only to the other woman, Susan, during the day. To avoid the extra talking, he did the writing. She had told him he could write about anything-school, home, Emily’s, his dreams-or he could make up a story.

The night before, he had dreamed about being part of an Egyptian archaeological dig, like on the National Geographic specials. He had to crawl on his belly inside the pyramid, crawl over rocks and dirt and mud. It reminded him of Indiana Jones. And when he got to the tomb, there was all this gold-gold rings of every size-and a mummy of the queen, all wrapped up in gauze. And when he unwrapped the mummy, it was his mother’s face. Frightened, he had run from the place, leaving all the gold behind. Losing his way. He had awakened right there on that fold-out couch.

He put his pencil on the third page of the diary and began to slowly scrawl out his dream.

Last nite I dreamed I was in Egipt….