Building Blocks (12 page)

“OK,” Kevin said. “If you lived here you'd be my friend, wouldn't you?”

Brann nodded and then remembered that Kevin couldn't see him in the dark room, with his eyes closed. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess so.” It was the truth after all.

He sat and thought how funny that was. Then, when he saw that Kevin was asleep, he got up off the bed. Quietly, he kneeled down by the block fortress, the castle close, and dismantled the central building. Careful not to knock anything down, careful to do it exactly the same way, he crawled through the large gateway and curled up within the wall of building blocks, with the wooden floor under his shoulder. He was pretty tired himself. He could feel sleep creeping up to him like a wave on the incoming tide. For a minute, before losing consciousness, he
felt a pinprick of fear: what if this wouldn't take him back? This fear hurt him deeper than the belt could begin to reach. Kevin didn't know how deep down inside frightened Brann could be. Or maybe he did. That was Brann's last thought before he slept.

Brann opened his eyes to a bright yellow light. Sunlight. He snapped his eyes shut.

It hadn't worked. He was still here. There. Then. He had been so sure that the blocks were the way back, but he had been wrong. A knot of panic contracted his body. What could he do? What terrible thing had happened to him?

His brain was frozen and didn't work. He wanted, desperately, to go back to sleep. He didn't want to have to think about what had happened to him, or what he should do. He was absolutely and entirely alone for all of his life now. Who would be Brann Connell then, his friend Kevin's third child when Kevin grew up? Would Brann just be erased from the future? If he told Kevin what had really happened, would Kevin believe him?

This should have happened to Kevin, Brann thought to himself, trying to force himself back into the unconsciousness of sleep and out of this
sun-brightened room. Kevin had the kind of courage to accept it.

The floor was hard under his shoulder. His body was stiff. In the background, he heard an unfamiliar sound, a smooth, sliding noise. Probably Mrs. Connell was sweeping the floors of the hallway. What would she say when she saw him still there? Brann wondered if he would live with the Connells now or go to an orphanage. His father never said anything about an orphan coming to live with them. Brann hoped he could be better at being a friend to Kevin Connell than he'd been at being a son.

He knew he had to open his eyes and deal with what had happened. Somehow. Kevin would help him.

He opened his eyes. He saw the wall of the castle close. The blocks had turned golden with the oils of many hands.

And Kevin's blocks were almost white, because they were new.

Brann twisted around onto his back. His feet knocked over walls and towers. He didn't notice that. He noticed instead, all at the same time, the damp cellar cement underneath him, the one yellow lightbulb in the center of the ceiling, and his father,
Kevin Connell, forty-seven years old, his wide mouth tight at the corners after the morning argument with his wife. Brann's father was planing down a long piece of dark-grained wood. The shavings curled off the top of the plane with a smooth, sliding sound.

His father lifted his head and looked at Brann. He smiled. “I thought you'd sleep forever,” he said. “Like King Arthur under the hill. To be reawakened in time of need.” His eyes within thick black lashes were muddy gray and secretive.

Brann could have laughed aloud. He felt like yelling. Instead, he stretched out his arms and legs as far as they could reach. The fortress tumbled down on him. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe I did. Maybe I am.”

He couldn't stop grinning. He was home.

He sat up, then stood up. His shoulders and legs hurt. “What day is it? What time is it?”

His father started planing again. “It's today, just like it was when you hid out down here. It must be near lunchtime. I've been down here—maybe an hour.”

“Doing what?”

“Planing.” His father didn't say anything else.

“What're you making?”

“Wood curlings,” with a reluctant half-smile.

“But why did you marry her?” Brann would never have asked that question of his father, but he didn't remember that in time. It was a perfectly natural question to ask his friend Kevin.

“Well, I love her.” His father's eyes were fixed on the smooth board. “She's got drive, and there's no one like her when she's happy. And she loves me.”

“She yells at you. She hammers and hammers.”

“She cares about us, and about herself too. She fights for herself—if you don't admire her—what she's accomplished—you're making a big mistake.”

Brann had never thought about that.

“I guess I figured that with all of her ambition and energy, she'd keep me up to the mark,” his father said. “I have a habit of letting things slide, and I thought she'd change that for me. But, nobody else can change you, that way. You've got to change things yourself. That's what I was thinking about. You never knew your grandmother. My mother. Your mother is a lot like my mother, at least what I remember of her because I was pretty young when she died. In some ways they are very
similar. She didn't let things slide, my mother.”

“I guess not,” Brann agreed, remembering.

“You don't have to humor me. It's OK. Anyway, anyway. It's fate and all that,” Kevin Connell said. He continued planing.

Brann stood right up close beside his father. It took some getting used to, his father being older than him again, and bigger again. “What about this farm, Dad?”

“What about it? I want to keep it and your mother wants to sell it.”

“No, I mean is it the one you used to work on with your uncle?”

“You know that.”

“Is it big?”

“Big enough to keep us in essentials, food and clothes. Not much else though,” Kevin Connell said.

“Is there a pond?”

“The Ohio River goes right past it—though you can't call that water. It's more like liquid sludge. I haven't seen it for, oh, almost thirty years, I guess. But it was bad the last time I was there. I don't like to think what that river looks like now. Or smells
like. The farm has a couple of small creeks, no fishing streams, no swimming holes. Let's not talk about it, OK?”

“But how come you stopped going there?” Brann insisted.

“I started working for my father in the summers instead. I was ten or so.
That
I remember, because he just announced that I wasn't going back to the farm. I thought I'd die. But I didn't, as you see. I toted bricks and stirred mortar. I learned how to build things from my father, do repairs, and plumbing too. My father was a worker, and he worked me. My brothers too, when they got old enough.”

“Did you do all right with him?” Brann asked.

His father shrugged.

“Dad? There are caves in that part of Pennsylvania, aren't there? Did you ever go spelunking?”

“Whatever makes you ask a question like that?”

“I dunno.”

“You haven't been doing that with your friends, have you? You do know it can be dangerous. Have you?”

Brann was tempted to tell the story, to find out from his father's reaction if it had really happened.
Then he remembered that he had promised never to tell—and he wanted to keep his promise to Kevin Connell. “No, I just wondered. I'm probably still half asleep.” Maybe it
was
all a dream he'd had. Why should that make him feel disappointed? After all, how could he have traveled back thirty-seven years in time and been himself, his father's son, when his father was only ten years old. That was impossible.

“But it's funny,” his father said. “Because I once had a nightmare about being lost in a cave. I can still taste the feeling of it—deep and dark, I don't know what made me have that nightmare. It's the only one I remember from when I was little. Kids have such vivid imaginations. Tell you what, maybe it really happened, and if it happened it was something I don't want to remember. But that's not the kid of thing you forget, is it?”

“I don't think so.” So, Brann thought, it had all been a dream. All the things he dreamed hadn't really happened. The boy he'd spent that faraway day with hadn't been his father really. He rubbed his lower lip with his fingers, to keep his mouth from drooping down the way it wanted to. He grunted
with surprised pain. His lower lip was swollen.

“Anything wrong? What happened to your lip, Brann? You look like somebody punched you.”

Brann ran an experimental tongue over it. “Nobody punched me,” he said. “It feels like I cut it, I wonder why—”

Then he knew why. And that was why his body was stiff, too, because it hadn't been a dream but a reality. Impossible, but real. There was one other way to check. “Dad? Why
did
you name me Brann? I mean, really why.”

Kevin Connell put down his plane and looked at his red-haired son. “The truth is, I don't know. I honestly don't. I was all set to name you Thomas, we'd decided. Then the nurse brought you in and I saw you—I'd not seen you before, remember. I held you, all eight squalling pounds of you, and the name—came into my mind. Exactly the way I said, Brann with two n's. I didn't even know it was a genuine name until I looked it up later. It felt so right for you; it was the name you were supposed to have. It was your name. I'll tell you,” Kevin Connell said, “it may sound crazy, but I had this feeling. I've had it a couple of times in my life—knowing what has
to be. When your aunt Rebecca was born, I had it then. When I first met your mother. That feeling is a good sign, as I take it. And that is all the truth I now about your name.”

Brann listened intently. When his father finished speaking, he bent his face down. He knew that his eyes were shooting gray lights out, and he didn't want his father to see. It
had
happened, but his father had forgotten all about it. That was OK. If his father had needed to remember, then he would have. There was no reason for Brann to try to remind him.

But how could a thing like that happen? If the Brann Brann was hadn't traveled back in time, then the Brann he was wouldn't have had his name. To be in either place, he had to be in both places. There was a hard-edged inevitability to it. Fate again.

“It doesn't make sense,” he said.

Kevin Connell picked up the plane again, running his fingers over its cutting edge. “I don't much care about that. Do you?”

Brann threw his arms around his father and hugged him as hard as he could. He felt his father's big rib cage and broad shoulders. “What's that for?”
Kevin Connell asked mildly, but he hugged Brann back and swatted at his backside affectionately.

Brann winced but he didn't draw away. “Because we're friends. Aren't we?”

You didn't really know somebody unless you knew him when he was a kid. Kids didn't have so many walls built up around them, to hide behind and keep safe; kids hadn't built all those walls yet. They had some—Brann had some, he knew that. But it was clearer with kids what they were really like. He could begin to know his father now.

“I guess so,” Kevin Connell said. “I hope so.” He rumpled Brann's hair.

Brann's father knew him, then, too, that way. Because Brann
was
a kid, his kid. Brann wondered what his father thought of him. He hoped his father respected him. He looked up at his father and stepped back.

“Listen, Dad?” The idea seemed to have been taking shape in his mind for a long time, but it was just now finished. “I've got an idea. No, listen, it's a good one.”

“You sound like your mother.”

“Well, I am,” Brann answered. “In lots of ways.
Now look—this farm. What if, instead of selling the farm, we sold this house? We could move to the farm, and Mom could go to law school out there. Isn't there a law school out there?”

“Probably. There's the University of Pittsburgh.”

“Is it a good school?”

“Good enough. It's not New York good, I guess. But that's not Harvard good either, so who cares? And who knows, anyway? What do we know about stuff like that?”

His father was only half-listening, Brann knew, but he kept talking: “We could farm for a living, and the money from this house could send her to law school and Sarah to college too. Would there be enough?”

“Maybe. But what about you?”

“I keep telling you. I'm twelve, and that's too young to being worrying about college. Besides, Mom's so smart, she'll be through law school and raking in the money by the time my turn comes around.”

Kevin Connell laughed. “Crafty. You're a crafty kid.”

“Could we? Dad? Pay attention—could we do it?”

Kevin Connell studied his son's earnest face. “I don't know. I don't think so. Unless—you know Will Whitcomb?”

“Sure, Billy's father.”

“I ran into him on the train one day—his car was in the shop or something. I was drawing something, I can't remember. He said—I ought to send the drawings to a publisher. He said publishers need people to do drawings and he thought mine were good enough.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing. What could I say?”

“And you didn't
do
anything either, did you? You never even told us. Why didn't you tell us?”

Kevin Connell shrugged. “People say things they don't mean. How could I tell about him? And I didn't want your mother on my back about that, too. It was quite a while ago. And he might be wrong.”

“But if he did mean it and he isn't wrong, would that mean we could get along on that farm?”

“It might. I don't know anything about it, Brann. But if . . . Lord, I could quit that job. I thought I was there until I just died at my desk. I can't imagine not sitting at that desk.” Brann's
father smiled quietly. Then the smile faded. “It's a grade-A idea, son. But I can't do it.”