Blue (26 page)

“And to be honest, I don't give a damn what you think about my taking on the Catholic Church with Blue. You're always looking down your nose at me. And let me tell you, that boy has more balls than either of us. Do you know what it took for him to come forward? And go against a priest, for chrissake? While you tell me how immoral it is to go after a priest who sexually molested seventeen little boys! And where do you get off always disapproving of me? Well, let me tell you, I'm goddamn sick of it. Who died and made you queen?”

Blue was staring at her when she finally finished, and Becky was nearly choking. But Ginny's speech had been a long time coming and was overdue. She was tired of her sister criticizing her for everything she did. “I'm done,” Ginny said, feeling better after she'd said it.

“So am I,” Becky said, in a voice shaking with fury. “I'm through being embarrassed by you, or explaining you to people, or making excuses for you because they think you're weird. And don't drag me into this mess with you. You may not mind being in the tabloids, but I do. Just leave me alone!” she said, and slammed down the phone.

“Is she really pissed at you?” Blue asked, with eyes filled with remorse, convinced it was all his fault, no matter what Ginny said.

“She's always pissed at me about something,” Ginny said, smiling at him. “She'll get over it.”

“It's all my fault,” he said miserably, and when he went to bed, Ginny reassured him again and kissed him goodnight. “If it weren't for me, you wouldn't be in the newspapers, and they wouldn't have said that stuff about Chris and Mark,” Blue said as he looked up at her from his bed.

“It doesn't matter. Whatever anyone says, they're still gone. You didn't do anything wrong. In fact, you've done everything right since you came into my life. Now stop worrying about it and go to sleep.” She smiled at him and kissed him again.

She tried not to think about it herself that night, or the fight with her sister. Some of it had needed to be said. And finally, after playing it over in her head several times, she fell asleep.

The next morning when she got up, she made herself a cup of coffee and read
The New York Times
online. There was nothing in it about her, although there was a very good op-ed piece about priests who molested kids and how they all needed to be brought to justice and not hidden by the church. She would have liked to send it to her sister, but she didn't want to start the fight all over again. They had said enough.

She waited for Blue to get up so she could cook him breakfast, and suddenly she realized he was going to be late, and she hadn't heard his alarm go off, so she went to his room and pulled up the shade. She turned to smile at him, and saw that he was burrowed under the covers. She gently poked his shoulder with her finger and told him it was time to get up. But what she poked was not his shoulder. It was a pillow. She gently pulled the covers back and saw that he had stuffed the bed. And on top of the pillow he had left a note for her. She read it, and it nearly broke her heart.

“Dear Ginny: All I ever do is cause you trouble. I'm sorry about the newspapers and what they said, it was all because of me and Father Ted. And I'm sorry about your fight with Becky, and that she's mad at you because of me, too. You don't have to be my guardian anymore if you don't want to. Thank you for everything you did for me. I'll never forget it. I love you, Blue.” Tears rolled down her cheeks as she read it, and then she looked around the room and in his closet. He had taken his rolling overnight bag, a couple of jackets, some shirts, socks, and underwear, and his Converse and running shoes. His toothbrush and toothpaste were gone, and his comb and brush. All his schoolbooks were piled up on his desk, and then she saw that his laptop was gone and his cell phone, so she could at least communicate with him. She called him immediately, and he didn't answer. She left him a message and sent him a text. “Where are you? None of it's your fault. Come back. I love you, Ginny.” But he didn't answer that, either. She sent him an e-mail that said the same thing, and then with a trembling hand, she called Andrew. She didn't know what else to do.

“He ran away,” she said, sounding upset and frantic.

“Who did?” He was busy and distracted.

“Blue.”

“When?”

“Sometime last night. I just found his bed stuffed with pillows, and he's left me a note.”

“What does it say?”

“He apologizes. He feels terrible about the stuff in the newspapers yesterday. And Becky and I had a fight about it last night, and he overheard it. She said I'm an embarrassment to her. Blue blames himself for everything.” She was on the verge of tears again.

“Did you try calling him?” Andrew sounded worried, too. Blue and Ginny had been under a lot of strain for months with the court case and everything else.

“I called, texted, and e-mailed. He hasn't answered yet.”

Andrew thought about it for a minute. He was a fourteen-year-old kid, and he knew life on the streets better than they did. And New York was a big city. “Why don't you wait and see what he does today? He may just calm down and come home this afternoon.”

“He won't. He thinks he's ruining my life. He isn't. He's the best thing that's happened to me in the last four years.”

“Don't panic,” Andrew said gently. “Even if he stays away for a day or two, he'll be back. He loves you, Ginny.”

“That's what he said in his note,” she said, with tears in her eyes and a lump in her throat.

“Just try to relax, he'll come home. Boys do this stuff. And he has a lot going on in his head.” Even though Andrew had no answers for her, his voice was soothing.

“I don't know where to start looking for him.”

“You don't need to right now. It's daytime. I'll come over after work, and we can look for him together,” he said. “Call me if he turns up.”

She spent the day waiting to hear from Blue, calling his cell phone regularly, and she sent him a few more texts, and an e-mail. But he didn't answer anything. She felt like she'd been going around in circles all day by the time Andrew came at six o'clock. She hadn't eaten but had had about four cups of coffee, and she looked jangled beyond belief.

“What if he never comes back? He's all I have,” she said, as tears rolled down her cheeks. Instinctively Andrew put his arms around her and held her. He could feel her heart pound against his chest.

“Let's have something to eat, and then we'll go out and take a look,” he said calmly. He texted Blue from his cell phone, too, but Blue didn't respond to him, either. And when he called his cell, it went straight to voice mail.

Andrew made them each a sandwich with what was in the fridge. He had gone home to change into jeans, and was wearing a hooded jacket and a dark blue sweater and running shoes. He had a feeling they were going to do a lot of walking that night, to all the places Ginny could think of where he might be.

They started at McDonald's, where they had had dinner the night they met. His favorite pizza restaurant. A couple of other burger places. The bowling alley downtown. They stood outside a movie complex for a while, and didn't see him, and at eleven p.m. they went to Penn Station, and crossed over the tracks to the tunnel where he'd been living when he ran away from Houston Street. There were half a dozen kids, and only one of them said he knew him, but he said Blue hadn't been around in months. She called Houston Street, but they hadn't seen him either, and they said they'd tell their street outreach team to keep an eye out for him. But he was nowhere. She didn't bother to call his aunt, because she knew there was no way he would go to her. At midnight, they sat on a bench in Penn Station and Ginny put her face in her hands and Andrew put an arm around her shoulders.

“What am I going to do?” she said, looking at him miserably.

“All you can do is wait. He'll come home.” And then she thought of Lizzie, her niece in California. It was still early enough to call there. When she did, Lizzie picked up, but said she hadn't heard from him all day. She figured he was busy at school.

“Is something wrong?” she asked her aunt, and Ginny didn't want to explain it to her.

“If you hear from him, just tell him I'm looking for him, and to come home.”

“Okay.” Lizzie hung up, sounding unconcerned, as Ginny looked up at Andrew.

“Thank you for doing this with me.”

“Don't worry about it. I haven't been much help.”

“It's nice to have company,” she said, looking exhausted. All she wanted to do was find Blue and bring him home. “I guess we might as well go home,” she said as they wandered slowly through Penn Station, walked up the stairs, and Andrew hailed a cab. She leaned against him on the way home, and it was comforting to have him there next to her. And when they got to her address, she suggested they walk along the river, to see if he was sleeping on a bench there. It was October, and the nights were chilly, but the days were warm. Walking along, looking down at the river, reminded her of when she'd seen Blue for the first time. They sat down on a bench, and Andrew pulled her closer. He could see the sadness and defeat in her eyes.

“The poor kid feels like everything is his fault,” Ginny said sadly. “All that crap in the tabloids yesterday, and my sister getting mad at me and calling me a weirdo and an embarrassment to her.” She smiled up at Andrew. “I guess I have been kind of a weirdo for the last few years, running around the world, trying to get myself killed. I felt so guilty for letting Mark drive that night, and for not realizing how much he'd had to drink. My sister's life is about the size of a teacup, and she doesn't get it. Nothing like that has ever happened to her.”

“You and Blue have a lot in common,” he said gently. “You feel guilty about your husband and son. Blue still has Father Teddy's voice in his head telling him that he ‘tempted' him, that it was his fault. He knows better now, but it's going to take a long time for that voice in his head to go away. The best thing you've done for him is prove to him, not just with words but with actions, that he's worth everything you've done for him, that you stand behind him, and that he's not guilty of anything. You told me when I met you that you wanted him to have an ‘amazing' life, not just a good life. Well, he does, thanks to you. And one day, because of you, that accusing voice in his head will go away, because your voice telling him what a good kid he is, in spite of everything, will be louder than Father Teddy's.”

What Andrew said to her touched her deeply, and she looked up at him with questioning eyes. “How do you know all that?”

He hesitated for a minute before he answered, and he looked off into space while he told her, remembering. “The same thing happened to me when I was a kid. I was eleven. Father John—he was a big, fat, funny, jolly guy. He had a fantastic collection of comic books he promised to let me read, and baseball cards to show me. So I went to his house, and he did pretty much the same thing that Father Teddy's been doing to all these kids. And he told me it was my fault because I tempted him, and that the devil would kill me on the spot if I told anyone. It took me months, but I finally told my parents.

“They didn't believe me. Everyone in the parish loved Father John, and I was always kind of a mischievous kid. We never talked about it again. I knew what a bad person he was, and I felt guilty for what he did to me, so I decided that one day I would become a priest, but a really, really good priest, so I could make it up to God for what I thought I had ‘tempted' him to do. I went right into the seminary straight from high school. And I became a very, very, very good priest, just as I promised God I would.

“But I was miserable. I didn't have the vocation I thought I did. I wanted to go out with women, and have a family.” He smiled at Ginny as he said it. “But I felt guilty again, about leaving the priesthood. And then these incidents started to surface in the church. People started talking about priests like Father John and Father Teddy. Nothing ever happened to Father John, he must have molested hundreds of kids over the years, and he lived out his days in peace. But when people started talking about it openly, all I wanted to do was get out of my vows, and work as a lawyer defending these kids that no one ever used to believe, just like me. I knew that if I tried to do it from within the church, they would pressure me into defending the perpetrators or even covering for them.

“So I finally left and stopped feeling guilty. I miss being a priest sometimes—there were some things I liked about it. But I'm much happier helping kids like Blue put the bad priests behind bars. And I don't even have to be a priest to do it. The strange thing is,” he went on, “I think I still had some kind of residual guilt from my childhood, and when I saw how you believed in Blue, how you stuck by him, and defended him, I think it healed something in me, too. You're a very healing woman, Ginny, and a very loving one. Maybe that's enough to undo the damage done to people like Blue and me, or at least start the process. It's a little late for me, but I hope so.

“And you don't need to feel guilty about anything. Your husband did whatever he did that night. You couldn't have stopped him. You didn't know. And Blue couldn't have stopped Father Teddy any more than I could have stopped Father John. Whatever they did is their responsibility, not ours. What we have to do is what you've been telling Blue. We owe it to ourselves to allow the healing to happen and move on. And even my life is going to be better now because of you. Everybody has something they can beat themselves up for. It's just not worth the energy to do it.” They sat there quietly for a long time, and he pulled her closer to him, and she looked at him and smiled.

“I'm sorry that happened to you,” she said.

“So am I, but I'm fine now. And Blue will be, too. We're among the lucky ones. You taught me that. I've learned a lot from watching you with Blue.” She nodded, thinking about Blue, and hoped he'd come home soon. And then as she looked at Andrew, he leaned toward her, put his arms around her, and kissed her. He had been wanting to do that since the day they met. He remembered how beautiful she was when he saw her on TV, and she was even more so now. He had never dreamed that he'd meet her one day and fall in love with her. She kissed him back, and they sat together for a long time on the bench next to the East River. They got up after a while, and started to walk slowly back to her apartment, and then she thought of something and turned around.