Pucker (7 page)

“You're right; you're right, of course,” he says, his face knotted in pain. “But how do
I
bear it?”

“You just do,” I say.

TEN

“T
HOMAS!” MY MOTHER HOLLERS WHEN I get upstairs.

Now that she's ready to talk, I'm not. I stand in the kitchen ignoring her. After all these years, just like that, she tells me I have to go back to Isaura?

I pound down two Dr. Peppers and pick up the phone to call Patrick. Then I remember it's Friday night: he's out with Meg. I feel sorry for myself for about half a minute—oh, poor me, the rest of the world out on a Friday night, that kind of sorry-ass feeling that I rarely indulge—then I get up and leave. I have to get out, away from my mother and our insane past.

There are many trails in the woods behind my house and I know them all. I don't need a flashlight, nor do I need to drop any crumbs. Even if I wandered three miles into that thick, dense woodland, I could find my way out. But I'm not alone tonight.

The sight of the couple enrages me at first. These are my woods. Everybody else has the entire world.

“Here. Sit,” the girl says, patting the plaid blanket.

She lies back, arranging her hair so that it streams out from her head in ribbons. She rolls up her shirt, exposing her stomach. Her belly is taut and tanned.

“You can touch me,” she says to the boy.

He hesitates.

“I'm not a slut,” she says, sitting up on her elbows.

He doesn't need a second invitation. His hand descends and he lays his palm flat on her stomach. I imagine the heat of her skin. It would be like holding a little rabbit.

Everything is connected. You can't touch one thing without sensing the presence of another; it's simply not possible.

She rolls her shirt up to her clavicle. Suddenly, with a sigh of impatience, she sits up, unhooks her bra, and drops it to the ground. Her breasts are perfect, silvered by the moon. I've never seen real breasts before. For the first time in my life I forget I'm burned, and I'm just a boy and there is a girl and some invisible cord connects us.

But there's also another boy and it isn't me, and it's he who gets to touch her, he who gets to make her gasp.

I need to leave before I do something I'll regret, like stay longer than I should. Quietly, as has become my way in this world, I go.

ELEVEN

“W
HERE HAVE YOU BEEN?” MY mother asks.

“Out,” I say.

My mother stiffens. “Traipsing around town with your friends when I've just told you I'm going to drop dead any day!”

I stare at her emptily. “I don't have any friends,” I say softly.

Slowly the anger drains from her face. The cynic in me whispers that she can't afford to stay mad at me for long—I'm the one who makes sure our electricity doesn't get shut off.

“That's not true. Stop exaggerating. You have friends,” she snaps.

I'm breaking our unspoken agreement. Because my mother has been sick, part of what's required of me is a certain amount of dishonesty, or withholding of information. She's not strong enough for me to add the burden of my suffering to her own, and up until this moment I've abided by this rule. Suddenly, though, I need her to know who I am.

“You don't care about me. You left me here alone,” she sobs.

Her emotional theatrics are exhausting. I drop down on the bed. I feel like I did just after I got my first skin graft. I remember lying on a gurney in the recovery room. My morphine had run out and the nursing staff hadn't noticed. I was an eight-year-old boy dog-paddling in the middle of the ocean, waiting for the next giant wave of pain to pin me to the seafloor.

My mother's tears dry up and she finally notices me, as if I've appeared by some sleight of hand. For a second the mother who would be rightly mine had I not been burned, had her Seerskin not been flayed, looks benevolently at me.

“I miss Dad,” I say.

The corners of her mouth pleat in sympathy. “I miss him too.”

She reaches over and strokes my hair. I've been touched so few times in my life by anyone other than surgeons and nurses that I'm starved. I make the mistake of scooting up closer and her face clouds with despair.

“What am I going to do?” she moans. Her head lolls back on the pillow and my thirty seconds of being a kid are over.

I sigh. “First, you can stop being so melodramatic,” I say, sitting up. “I'll go.”

“You will?” she says, propping herself up on her elbows.

“Yes, but you need to give me some answers first.”

“Anything,” she says.

“Well . . . won't they be expecting me? I mean, they can see the future; they'll know I'm coming.”

“I don't think so. They'd have to be touching you to read your future. Plus Otak is related to us by blood, so he won't be able to forecast anything about you, and he's one of the few Seers I know of who would be strong enough to see something like this.” She frowns. “But there's no way to know for certain until you get there.”

I pause, absorbing this, and something else nags at me. “How do you know your Seerskin is still there?” I ask.

“Of course it's there,” she whispers, looking stricken. “Seerskins are valuable. The Ministry would never destroy it.”

“But how do you know?” I press her. “How can you be so sure?”

She shakes her head. “I just am.”

Her eyes flitter away from me. The light from the lamp shines through her ears and for a moment I see the girl that she once was.

“You know because you can sense it?” I ask her gently.

She nods. “
Yes.
That's it. It's like it's out there, a piece of me, and it's been waiting all these years for someone to rescue it and bring it home.”

Tears spring suddenly to my eyes and I turn away, not wanting her to see them. I see myself moments before the fire, my arms wrapped around my knees, rocking.

“All right,” I say briskly, trying to ward off this image. “How do I get there?”

She exhales loudly. “I'm afraid you'll have to be recruited.”

“Recruited? Like the Changed?” I ask.

“Like the Changed,” she repeats.

I stare at her incredulously. “But what about the portal? I'll just go back there. I'll sneak through,” I say.

She shakes her head. “It's not there anymore. I had Huguette check.”

“You told Huguette? About
us
?”

My mother looks at me defiantly. Two bright circles of red stain her cheeks. “I had to. Who's going to help me when you're gone? You can't expect me to manage on my own.”

“You swore,” I say. “
We
swore not to tell anyone.”

“That was before I foresaw my death.” My mother gives me a weak smile. “Bet your Barker's had nothing about this in it.”

“I haven't seen my Barker's in years,” I snap.

She leans over and opens her bedside table drawer. “Here,” she says, handing me the brown book. Nostalgia threads through me at the sight of it, not altogether unpleasant, but the book also makes me feel strangely claustrophobic, as if someone has just locked me in a tiny room. I push it away. She places it on the bed between us.

“There's a map of the Ministry in there. It'll help you remember,” she says.

“Remember what?” I say, irritated. As if I need any help remembering.

My mother hesitates. “How it was,” she says. “It wasn't all bad. We were happy there once.”

The last thing I want to hear is that we were happy in Isaura. I get up from the bed and glare at her. “So there's no portal.”

“There's a portal. You just need somebody to take you there. Thomas, believe me, I've thought this through. The only way for you to get back to Isaura is to go back as one of the Changed. And to do that you must convince a Recruiter that you're a qualified candidate. That means you have to pretend you're suicidal. That things are so bad you want out.”

I have a sudden vision of a storefront with a poster in the front window.
We want you.
And a long line of freaks from the circus: hollow man, seal girl, and me.

“The Recruiters are here in Peacedale?”

I fight down my nausea. The thought sickens me. Now that we live on Earth, the Recruiters seem like predators. Back in Isaura, when we depended on the Changed for our food, our clean linens, and our cobbled streets, those who recruited them were heroes.

“Yes. They're many places in America. They pose as psychiatrists. You remember Dr. Caro at the rehabilitation center?” she says.

Dr. Caro: I had always hated the guy, just on principle. He was loud and took up every speck of oxygen in the room and he was always after me to get evaluated. The last thing I wanted to do was tell some stranger I had been nicknamed Pucker.

“But won't he know? Won't he be able to tell I'm Isaurian?” I ask.

“No. Not if you're careful. Recruiters aren't Seers. He can't read you. But the Maker
is
a Seer, and that's a problem.”

I stare at my mother, bewildered.

“Once you get to Isaura, you'll be brought to the Maker. She'll have to go back into your past,” she says.

“But if she sees my past, she'll know I'm your son,” I say.

“Yes,” says my mother. “So you'll have to be very careful about letting her in. You must shield your memory from her. You'll need to give her details. But do not give her the big picture. Do not show her your father and me.”

“How am I supposed to do that?” I cry. Even now, so many years later, whenever I think of that day, all I can see is my father lying on the floor, dead, his Seerskin balled up on the counter.

“Just focus on colors,” my mother says. “Smells. Textures. The curtains were yellow, remember? The kitchen smelled of cobbler. That'll be enough for the Maker to work with.”

“I can't,” I whimper.

“You can,” says my mother sharply. “You must control your inner gaze. Just remember yourself sitting in the sink. Show her the curtains falling on top of you.”

“Then what?”

“Then she'll make it so that the fire never happened. Your scars will disappear. Your face will be healed,” my mother says.

My mouth drops open in shock. How had I never thought of this? My hands rise to my face, to the ribbons of scar tissue. I feel like I've just been told that it's been in my power the whole time to reverse my destiny. That with one savage tug I could have just peeled off my fate.

My mother takes my hands and places them back in my lap. “You'll have the face you were meant to have had the fire not happened. But it's only temporary, Thomas. Once you come back, the Maker's magic will fall apart. Do you understand?” she asks.

I don't answer her.

“Do you understand, Thomas?” my mother asks again, gently tilting my chin upward, forcing me to look at her.

I nod dully.

“Tell me what I just said.”

“When I come back, I'll be Pucker again.”

Her eyes bat involuntarily as if I've struck her, and I wrench my face out of her hand. Adrenaline surges through me. I have the sudden need to destroy something. I grab a figurine of a rabbit, a gift from one of her clients.

“Not that!” my mother shrieks.

“It's from the freaking Hallmark store!” But I obey her. I put it back on the bureau and grab a pillow. I ram my fist into it again and again.

“I'm sorry. Thomas. Please, stop!”

“Do you have any idea what you're asking of me?” I scream.

“I'd go myself if I could,” she moans. “I swear I would.”

She erupts into another coughing fit. This one's really bad, brought on by me, no doubt. She's not faking it.

“It's like somebody's shredding my bones,” she sobs.

“Stop talking,” I tell her. “Just stop it. Conserve your strength. You're making it worse.”

After a bit, when the pain has subsided and she's caught her breath, she touches my cheek softly. “It's horribly unfair. It's too much to ask of you, but I don't have a choice,” she says.

And here, finally, is the truth. It sits in the room with us like a long-lost relative just come back from a war.

TWELVE

I
DON'T SLEEP AT ALL that night. I sit in the kitchen and watch the clock until it's morning; then I call Patrick. His mother answers the phone.

“He's in the bathroom, sweetie; I'll have him call you right back.”

Clara Graves is a second mother to me. There's nobody who knows more about what it's like to be a burn victim than she does.

“That's all right. Just give him a message. Tell him we're going to breakfast this morning. My treat.”

There's a pause. “Everything okay?” she asks.

“Yeah, fine.” It isn't fine; it's so far from fine. I have the sudden urge to confess everything. Where we come from, what I am about to do.

I want to be little again. I want Clara to invite me for a sleepover. She fed us chocolate milk and Three Musketeers bars for dinner.

“Is it Meg?” she asks softly. “I don't think he's that serious about her.”

I don't answer. My throat feels like it's wadded up with cotton.

“Your Meg will come,” she says, and much to my surprise, her voice is all rough and pebbly. “I promise, Tommy.”

Oh, how I love her for lying.

“Yeah, sure,” I say. “Tell Patrick I'll be there in half an hour.”