Until I Find You (41 page)

“I’m sorry, baby cakes—this may hurt, but it would be criminal to let you grow up with ears like these poor guys. You’re gonna be too good-looking to ruin your prospects for the future with dog-turd ears.”

Jack could tell that Chenko and Pavel and Boris were offended. Their cauliflower ears were badges of honor, not dog turds! But Emma Oastler had made Jack’s future her business, and she was not to be denied.

A so-called cauliflower ear is caused by fluid; when the ear gets rubbed on the mat, or against your opponent’s face, it bleeds and swells. When the fluid hardens, you have a lump where you used to have an indentation. The trick is not to let the fluid harden. You drain it with a needle and a syringe. Then you take some gauze, dipped in wet plaster, and press it into the contours of the ear. When the plaster hardens, your ear can’t swell—it can’t keep filling with fluid. The original shape of the ear is retained.

“It’s a little uncomfortable,” Chenko forewarned Jack.

“It’s better than a sore penis, honey pie.” (Even the Minskies agreed with Emma about that.) So Jack went home with a gauze plaster on one ear and a mat burn oozing on the opposite cheek.

“Look at your Jackie, Alice,” Leslie Oastler said, when they were eating takeout that night. “Those thugs at the Bathurst Street gym are going to
kill
him.”

“It’s better than a sore penis,” Jack said.

“Not to mention the
language
those Russians are teaching him,” Mrs. Oastler said.

“Jack, I’ll ask you to watch your language,” his mother said.

The next night, Emma had a cauliflower ear. Jack and Emma were pretty proud of their matching gauze plasters. He’d caught her in a cross-face cradle, and while he was grinding his right temple against her left ear, she kicked out of the cradle and pinned him with a reverse half nelson.

“You can’t cradle someone who’s built like her, not if you’re built like
you,
” Chenko told Jack.

True enough, but Jack knew that it was good for him to have a workout partner as tough as Emma Oastler. The wrestling turned out to be good for Emma, too. She lost eight pounds in a week. Jack knew that Boris and Pavel had impressed her—if not their ears, at least their diet. The Minskies were disciplined—not only their workouts, but what they ate. “You could have saved your money by sending me to the Bathurst Street gym instead of the fucking fat farm,” Emma told her mom.

“I’ll ask you to watch your language, too, young lady,” Mrs. Oastler said.

“Penis, penis, penis—” Jack chanted.

“That about covers it,” Leslie Oastler said.

“Go to your room, Jack,” his mom told him.

But Jack didn’t care. He wanted to say, “You’re making Emma be a miserable
boarder
and you’re sending me to fucking
Maine,
and you want us to watch our
language
!” Instead, he said, “Penis, penis, penis,” all the way up the stairs.

“That’s really mature, Jack!” his mother called.

“Don’t be angry with him, Alice—he’s just upset about going away to school,” Jack heard Leslie Oastler say.

“No shit—that’s fucking brilliant,” Emma said.

“Go to your room, Emma,” Mrs. Oastler told her.

“Enjoy washing the dishes!” Emma said as she stomped upstairs. (Emma was usually the dishwasher.)

Emma and Jack were workout partners in more ways than one. They had at last become true friends—in part because their mothers were separating them. With each mat burn, split lip, black eye, or cauliflower ear that they gave each other, Emma and Jack thoroughly convinced Alice and Mrs. Oastler that the contact between them—whatever it was—wasn’t sexual. Jack could get up in the middle of the night and go to Emma’s room and get into bed with her—or she could come to his room and get into bed with him. Their mothers said nothing.

The summer was almost over anyway. What did Alice and Leslie Oastler care if Emma and Jack beat each other up at the Bathurst Street gym all day? (Not that Jack ever “beat up” Emma, but he succeeded with a shot or two.)

“It’s just hormones, in Emma’s case,” Mrs. Oastler said. In Alice’s mind, Jack was still about the business of learning how to defend himself from
boys.

In two weeks, Emma had lost twelve pounds—and it was clear that she would lose more. It wasn’t just the workouts; her eating habits had changed. She liked Chenko. “Everything but his ears.” With the exception of their ears, Emma liked Boris and Pavel, too.

When Jack lay next to Emma in her bed, or when she held him in her arms in his, it pained him to ask her who she was going to work out with—he meant after he had gone to Maine.

“Oh, I daresay I’ll find someone else I can beat the shit out of, baby cakes.”

Jack had learned how to kiss her and keep breathing, although the temptation to hold his breath until he fainted was strong. And Emma’s attention to the little guy never wavered; true to her word, his penis had healed. A combination of the moisturizer, which Emma continued to apply to the little guy—long after Jack could discern any visible need for it—and the welcome cessation of Mrs. Machado’s attention to his penis, which evidently had been excessive.

“Do you miss her, Jack?” Emma asked him one night. He had been thinking that he missed some of the things Mrs. Machado did, but not that he missed
her.
He felt awkward telling Emma about the things he missed. Jack didn’t want her to feel that he was ungrateful to her for saving him from Mrs. Machado. But they were true friends and workout partners. Emma understood him. “It sounds like you were excited but frightened,” Emma said.

“Yes.”

“I shudder to think what kind of trouble the little guy can get into in
Maine,
” Emma said.

“What do you mean, Emma?”

They were in her room. Emma had a king-size bed, if you didn’t count the stuffed animals. Jack was wearing just his boxers, and Emma was wearing a T-shirt that Pavel or Boris had given her. It was from a wrestling tournament in Tbilisi, but you had to be able to read Georgian to know where it was from; more to Emma’s liking, the T-shirt was faded and torn and it had old bloodstains on it.

“Take off your boxers, honey pie.” Emma was removing her T-shirt under the covers, which created a little chaos among the stuffed animals. “I’m going to show you how
not
to get in trouble, Jack.” She took his hand and placed it on his penis. “Use your other hand, if you prefer,” Emma told him. “Just do whatever’s comfortable.”

“Comfortable?”

“Just beat off, Jack! You can do that, can’t you?”

“Beat
what
?”

“Don’t tell me this is your first time, honey pie.”

“It’s my first time,” he admitted.

“Well, take your time—you’ll get the hang of it,” Emma told him. “You can kiss me, or touch me with your other hand. Just do
something,
Jack—for Christ’s sake!”

Jack was trying. At least he wasn’t frightened. “I think my left hand works better,” he told her, “even though I’m right-handed.”

“It’s not as complicated as a Russian arm-tie,” Emma said. “We don’t have to discuss it.”

He hugged her as hard as he could—she was so strong, so solid. When she kissed him, Jack remembered to breathe—at least at the beginning. “I think it’s working,” he said.

“Try not to make a mess all over the place, baby cakes,” Emma said. “I’m just kidding,” she quickly added.

It was becoming difficult to kiss her and keep breathing—not to mention
talk.
“What exactly are we doing? What
is
this?” he asked Emma.

“This is how you survive Maine,” Emma told him.

“But you won’t be there!” he cried.

“You have to imagine me, baby cakes, or I’ll send you pictures.” Oh, that aurora borealis—those northern lights! “Well, if
that
isn’t ‘all over the place,’ I don’t know what is,” Emma was saying, while Jack practiced breathing again. “Just look at this mess. I never want to hear you say I don’t love you.”

“I love you, Emma,” the boy blurted out.

“You don’t have to make a commitment or anything,” Emma said. “That you’re my best friend is enough of a miracle.”

“I’m going to miss you!” Jack cried.

“
Shhh,
don’t cry—they’ll hear you. Don’t give them the satisfaction.”

“The what?”

“I’m going to miss you, too, honey pie,” she whispered. She was putting her T-shirt back on—more stuffed animals were getting out of her way, in whatever way they could—when Jack heard his mother in the hall. Emma’s bedroom door was partially open.

“Was that
you,
Jackie?” his mom was calling. (No doubt he’d been making unusual sounds.)

Both Emma and Jack knew he hadn’t put his boxers back on. He didn’t even know where they were; he hoped they were under the covers. His head was on Emma’s shoulder; one of her arms was thrown loosely around his neck. The “loosely” made it not yet a headlock, but there was no question that they were snuggled together, under the covers, when Alice came into the room.

“I had a dream,” Jack told his mom.

“I see,” she said.

“There’s more room for him to have a bad dream in my bed than in his,” Emma told Alice.

“Yes, I see that there is,” Alice replied.

“It was that dream about the moat,” Jack said. “You remember the littlest soldier.”

“Yes, of course,” Alice said.

“It was that one,” he told her.

“I didn’t know you still had that one,” his mother said.

“All the time,” he lied. “More than usual, lately.”

“I see,” his mom said. “Well, I’m sorry.”

There were stuffed animals scattered everywhere, as if there’d been a massacre. Jack kept hoping his boxers weren’t lying among them. Alice started to leave Emma’s bedroom, but she paused in the doorway to the hall and turned back to face them.

“Thank you for being such a good friend to Jack, Emma,” Alice said.

“We’re gonna be friends for life, Alice,” Emma told her.

“Well, I hope so,” Alice said. “Good night, you two,” she called softly, as she went down the hall.

“Good night, Mom!” Jack called after her.

“Good night!” Emma called. Under the covers, her hand found and held the little guy, who appeared to have fallen asleep.

“How quickly you forget,” Emma whispered to his penis.

Like old times, Jack thought, as he was falling asleep—without ascertaining very clearly what had been good about the aforementioned “old times” and what hadn’t. It was even a comfort to listen to Emma snoring.

Emma had shot a whole roll of photographs of Jack with Chenko in the Bathurst Street gym. Various angles of Chenko’s wolf-head tattoo; Jack sitting cross-legged on the wrestling mat beside the old Ukrainian; Chenko’s arm around Jack’s shoulders in what the boy thought of as a
fatherly
way.

Jack lay listening to Emma snoring, just visualizing those photographs. Soon he would be in Maine, but he was no longer frightened. As he drifted away, Jack believed there was nothing in Maine that could scare him.

Jack Burns would miss those girls, those so-called older women. Even the ones who had molested him. (Sometimes
especially
the ones who had molested him!) He would miss Mrs. Machado, too—more than he ever admitted to Emma Oastler.

Jack even missed the girls who never abused him—among them Sandra Stewart, who had played the bilingual stutterer, the
vomiter,
the mail-order bride who gets fucked on a dog sled and wanders off and freezes to death in the snow, in a histrionic blizzard! How sick was it that he remembered
her
?

He would miss each one, every major and minor character in his sea of girls. Those girls—those
women,
at the time—had made him strong. They prepared Jack Burns for the terra firma (and not so firma) of the life ahead, including his life with boys and men. After the sea of girls, what
pushovers
boys were! After Jack’s older-women experiences, how easy it would be to deal with
men
!

III

Lucky

16

Frost Heaves

I
n those hectic last days before Jack left for Maine, his mother devoted herself to sewing name tags on his new clothes. Mrs. Oastler had taken him shopping. There were no school uniforms at Redding, no special colors, but the boys wore jackets and ties, and either khakis or wool-flannel trousers—not jeans. With Leslie Oastler choosing his clothes, Jack would be one of the best-dressed boys at the school.

Alice should have talked to him; she should have told Jack everything. But in lieu of conversation, she sewed.

It made no sense to Jack: when he was four, they’d spent the better part of a year searching those North Sea ports for his runaway dad; yet in Jack’s five years at St. Hilda’s, Alice rarely spoke of William. At ten, Jack was increasingly curious about his father; that William had been demonized made the boy afraid of himself and who he might become. But his mom would not indulge Jack’s questions about his dad. Alice was rarely cruel to Jack, but she could be cold, and nothing drew the coldness out of her as predictably as Jack asking her about his father.

Alice must have closed the door on that conversation a hundred times. “When you’re old enough,” she would usually say—a door-closing line if the boy had ever heard one.

He’d once spoken to Mrs. McQuat about it. “Don’t complain about a woman who knows how to keep a secret,” The Gray Ghost replied.

Since Emma had a list of grievances against her mother, Jack felt comfortable complaining to Emma about
his.
“I just want to know what kind of guy he was, for Christ’s sake!”

“Watch your language, baby cakes.”

Emma and Jack had both read the
School Philosophy Handbook
that Redding sent to new students and their families. So-called proper language was a big deal in the student code. Mr. Ramsey, who’d agreed to take Jack to Maine, had eagerly read the
School Philosophy Handbook,
too; he’d found the student code “very challenging.”