Fortunate Son

5

But where’d he go?” Eric asked his father when he got home from school and was told that Tommy had moved away for good.

Ahn and Minas were both afraid to have Eric there when Tommy left. They knew that he would react loudly and violently, and it would have been harder on both children.

“Tommy’s father came to take him,” Minas told his son.

“But you’re his father,” Eric argued.

“No.”

“Mama Branwyn was my mother, and she’s his mother too. So you have to be his father.”

“I love Tommy like a son, but Elton Trueblood is his real father. He never married Branwyn, but Tommy is his blood and the law says that he has to go live with him or with his grandmother.”

Eric felt the color red in his head and in his fists and feet. He stormed out of the downstairs den, stomped up to his room, and systematically broke every toy that he owned. He broke the soldier action figures, the rocking horse, the colored lamp that turned slowly, showing horses and circus clowns on his wall at night. He shattered the screen of his television and crushed the clay drum his father had brought back from Algeria. He slung his mattress on the floor and threw his baseball through the closed window. Then he picked up his aluminum baseball bat and beat it against the wall and furniture with the intention of breaking the bat in two. But it wouldn’t break. Instead he dented his maple desk, put holes in the plaster of the wall, and made deep notches in the oak floor.

All the while Eric screamed his brother’s name and shouted obscenities he’d learned from the older kids on the playground.

“Fuck damn!” he shouted.

“Shit!” he cried.

And for every curse or profanity, he broke something or struck the walls or floor with his metal bat.

When the baseball went through the window, Minas headed for the boy’s room. By the time he got there, Eric was wreaking havoc with his bat.

When Minas entered the room, Eric swung at him but missed. The surgeon’s hand darted out and pushed the boy down on the mattress that had been spilled off the bed.

Minas had never struck Eric before. The novelty and shock of that, plus the deep desolation he felt about losing his mother and then his brother, brought Eric to tears. He cried on the mattress and then rolled onto the floor. He caterwauled and howled, whined like a motherless cub, and shouted unintelligible sentences at the Infinite. Minas held his son, and even then, in the boy’s most miserable state, his father marveled at the depth of feeling that Eric was capable of. His sorrow seemed to diminish Minas’s own fears and losses. It was as if Eric was deserving of more care and consideration because he was more, much more, than other humans.

They sat there on the floor of the boy’s destroyed room, Minas thinking of how much they had both lost and Eric howling like some animal faced for the first time with a giant harvest moon.

Late in the afternoon Minas drove Eric down to the beach at Malibu. The boys had always liked it there, and so the father thought it might be good for his son.

“Why did you let them take Tommy?” the child asked his father on the drive.

“I couldn’t stop them, Eric. They had the law on their side.”

“You couldn’t stop them, but I would have,” the boy said. “And you should have too. Tommy is our family. You can’t let family go.”

They walked down the beach on sand left wet by the receding tide. Minas was wearing a yellow shirt and dark-blue pants. His shoes were made of woven brown leather; a thick golden watch hung from his right wrist.

Eric had taken off his shoes in the car. His T-shirt was yellow like his father’s pullover, but his pants were tan and rolled up past his ankles.

“Can I go visit Tommy?” the boy asked his father while scanning the waterline.

“Maybe after a while. His grandmother wants him to get used to being with them before letting us come see him.”

“He’s gonna be with them every day,” Eric said. “He’s gonna be used to them anyway.”

“We’ll see,” Minas Nolan said to his son.

At that moment Eric gasped and ran out into the shallows of the retreating Pacific.

“Eric,” Minas Nolan said, but before he could go out after his son, the boy was coming back with something wriggling in his hands.

It was a bright-green fish with brownish bumps along its back and big googly eyes that seemed somehow to contain mammalian intelligence. The tail was long and elegant, with a fin at the end shaped like a Japanese fan. The body was thick, and the fins below were so long and powerful they might have been used as legs.

“What is it?” Minas Nolan asked, forgetting his losses for a moment.

“A fish,” Eric said bluntly. “It was stuck in the sand.”

“But what kind?” his father asked. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. It’s certainly not a California fish. Maybe it’s from the tropics or the deep sea. Maybe this is some fish dredged up by an undersea storm, a fish nobody’s ever seen before.”

With a careless motion, Eric tossed the googly-eyed green fish back into the water, whereupon it darted away.

“I don’t like fish,” the boy said simply. “Let’s go home, Dad.”

That night Eric had his father write a letter to his brother, Thomas.

Minas wrote the letter in bold characters that Eric could examine when he was done. They put the letter in an envelope, which Minas addressed and Ahn sent off to Madeline Beerman.

Madeline received the letter, but she never gave it to Thomas. She put it, unopened, in the bureau drawer next to her bed.

Eric returned to his life. At school he was the most popular boy in his class. He won every game he played at recess and was always chosen by the teacher to help clean the erasers and pass out papers.

Sometimes at night he would flip a coin with Ahn. It was a simple game. He’d flip an old Indian head nickel his father had once given him, and either he or Ahn would call heads or tails before it settled on the floor.

Eric won almost every time. Ahn was astonished by this. Even though she had little formal education, she knew that he shouldn’t win any more than she did. But there it was — time after time Eric would call heads and heads would turn up; Eric would call tails and tails it would be.

The nanny woke up one night from a deep sleep in which she was having a dream about flipping the coin with Eric. In the dream her faceless father was standing above her and the big blond boy. She and Eric were the same size in the dream. Ahn had lost sixty-three flips in a row when her father said, “One more loss and you will die, my daughter.”

That’s when Ahn awoke with a start.

“Every time he wins someone else loses,” she said to herself.

She gasped and suddenly saw her charge as some kind of monster.

“He killed his mother,” Ahn said to no one. “He killed Miss Branwyn.”

She lay back in her bed thinking of little Thomas.

“Maybe he’s safer away from Eric,” she thought. “Maybe Eric will destroy everyone he touches.”

The days and months and years passed in the Nolan household. Everyone wanted to be Eric’s best friend. Every girl wanted to be his girlfriend. The teachers loved him, and the sun illuminated his path.

He skipped the sixth grade because he knew all the subjects by grade five. It wasn’t hard for him to enter junior high school early because he was much bigger than his classmates anyway. He had natural agility and strength. And he was more mature than many adults at this early age.

And Eric was fearless. Nothing bad ever happened to him. He and another boy, Lester Corning, were once playing with fireworks when Lester’s parents were out. They were both leaning over the same Roman candle when instead of firing a flaming ball into the air, the rocket exploded. Lester took the full blast on the left side of his face, but Eric went unharmed. His hair wasn’t even singed. This was lucky for Lester, who was in so much pain that all he could do was roll on the grass of his backyard and scream.

Eric ran to the house and dialed 911. He explained the problem to the man on the other end of the line, and the ambulance came there in time to save Lester’s eyesight.

Eric was not only unhurt but seen as a hero by everyone. The ambulance attendants praised him for keeping Lester from touching his severely burned face. Lester’s parents thanked Eric for having the presence of mind to call for help. (Lester admitted that playing with the fireworks was his idea and that Eric didn’t even want to.)

That night Dr. Nolan took his son, then ten years old, aside and did the fatherly thing by explaining how risky it was to allow other children to persuade him to do something dangerous.

“You could have been burned just as easily as Lester,” Minas told his son.

“But why wasn’t I burned, Dad?” the boy asked. “We were holding the Roman candle between us. It was just as close to me as it was to him.”

“That’s what you call serendipity,” Minas replied. “Sometimes something terrible happens to one man and leaves another alone.

“When I was a boy in Kansas, a tornado hit a neighborhood in my town. The twister set down at the beginning of the two-hundred block of Orchard Street. It knocked down four houses in a row, veered around the fifth, and then came back with a vengeance, destroying every other house on that side of the block. I suppose that there’s some scientific explanation for what happened, but for the people in house number five it was just good fortune.”

Eric went up to his room pondering the word serendipity. He often wondered why so many good things happened to him. He never counted on his luck, but things always seemed to go right. He was lying in his bed in the dark, in Thomas’s old room, thinking about Lester and the accident, when there came a knock on the door.

“Come in.”

The door opened, and Ahn shuffled in.

Eric had known Ahn his entire life. She was no longer his nanny. Now she was Dr. Nolan’s housekeeper and the family cook. Eric would have never said that he loved Ahn. He did love his father, but it wasn’t a very strong feeling.

“You have to be careful,” Ahn said to Eric.

“You mean about the fireworks?” the boy asked. “Dad already told me that I could have been burned too.”

“No. I mean, yes, you shouldn’t play with danger because you will hurt others.”

“Not me?”

“You are dangerous,” Ahn said.

Eric tried to decipher what the Vietnamese servant meant. Many times when they talked, she would say things like “you are dangerous,” really meaning that he was in danger.

“You mean I’m in danger?”

“No. You are the reason that boy is burned,” she said. “You are never hurt, but he is not lucky. Be careful with your friends. Do not put them in trouble.”

Ahn’s black eyes stared into Eric’s great blue orbs.

The boy wondered about what she was saying. Sometimes he felt like that, that he was lucky.

The housekeeper turned away.

“Ahn.”

“Yes?”

“Have you heard anything about Tommy?”

“Nobody ever answers your letters, but they don’t come back,” she replied. “I am not finding Mr. Trueblood in the phone book, and his grandmother says that Tommy is with him.”

“But he must be somewhere.”

“I don’t know. Maybe they left Los Angeles.”

“They have to be somewhere.”

“He is safe,” she said, and then turned away again.

Eric was angry at what she said. He knew that she meant Tommy was safe from him. But he would never hurt his brother. He loved Tommy. Always had. Tommy and Branwyn were the only people he’d ever felt passion for.

The door closed behind Ahn, and Eric was once again in darkness. He sat there worrying that maybe Ahn was right. Maybe he drove Tommy away.

That night Eric didn’t go to sleep. Instead he stayed awake thinking about his real mother, dead for so long, and Mama Branwyn, who was the perfect woman in his eyes. He thought about Tommy, whom he hadn’t seen or heard from in more than four years.

After Tommy had left, Eric’s father went back to working long hours. He was quiet at the dinner table, and they hadn’t taken a vacation, or even a weekend holiday, in all that time.

Eric still missed his brother every day. Now and then he made friends at school or summer camp, but he’d never met another soul who saw the world the way Tommy did. Tommy saw faces in rocks, and he laughed at big, broad things like fat trees and passing images in clouds. He knew Branwyn better than anyone and never got mad at Eric for needing her love too.

Eric didn’t feel close to Ahn. When he was smaller she was just always there — to dress him, feed him, make sure that he was in the right place at the right time. He played games with her after Tommy was gone, but he didn’t care about her.

Eric realized that he didn’t care about much. He had fun and was befriended by almost everyone, but he never minded having to go home or when someone he saw every day left for good.

No, he wasn’t close to Ahn, but he remembered one day sitting outside the pool area in a health spa in Palm Springs. He and Tommy were five, and the smaller boy wanted to sit on the brick wall and wait to see if a roadrunner, the fleet-footed bird, might pass by.

Eric got bored and started asking Tommy questions.

He asked how it felt to break a bone. (Tommy had broken his finger, an ankle, his right leg, and his collarbone in falls.) He wanted to know what Branwyn wore when she went to bed. He asked Tommy if he ever wished that he and Branwyn were white like everybody else that they knew.

Tommy answered every question in his soft and slow voice.

“When my ankle broke it hurt so bad that I had to think that I was in another room from my foot,” Tommy said.

His mother wore a white cotton slip to bed, and he didn’t care what color they were.

Finally Eric asked Tommy, “Why do you think Ahn’s crazy?”

For a long time Tommy stared out into the desert between the cholla cacti and Joshua trees. After a while Eric thought that his brother had forgotten the question.

Then Tommy started talking in a voice so soft that he was in the middle of his answer before Eric realized that he was being addressed.

“An’ she’s been in the places where everybody’s sad all the time,” Tommy was saying.

“Who?” Eric asked.

“Ahn. She comes from far away in a war, my mom says. She’s always lookin’ to see bad things comin’, and that’s why Dr. Nolan hired her, so she could see trouble before it gets here.”

Remembering these words in the bed, Eric sat up and turned the lamp on. She sees bad things coming, he thought.

Eric believed that Tommy understood things. Even now, after years, he listened to his brother’s words. Ahn knew what she was talking about. It was her job to see trouble coming.

With the sun rising over his dead mother’s garden, Eric decided that he would stay out of trouble as much as he could and that he would never put anybody in danger again.