Surrogate Child Read online

“Parents can drive you crazy,” he finally said. “Look what my parents did to me.”

  “It’s bad; I know. But you’re a strong, intelligent boy, Jonathan. I think you’re going to be all right.”

  “Unlike Solomon, huh?” he said. It sounded almost like a joke. Joe looked at him and raised his eyebrows. Jonathan turned away and stared out the window. He acts as if he knew Solomon all his life, Joe thought, and blames me for his death.

  Joe went back to the office and showed Jonathan around the service area. Once again, the boy was interested in the things Joe had to say and asked good questions about computers and the work being done. The upbeat mood returned. Afterward Joe took him to the new Roy Rogers in their area for lunch. They had a good talk about some of the things Jonathan hoped to do in his life. He said he had an aptitude for writing and wanted to do something with journalism.

  “Maybe a sports writer,” he said. “I like describing sporting events.”

  “So then maybe we will go down to the Garden to watch a Knicks game,” Joe replied. Jonathan nodded, looking more enthusiastic about such a prospect.

  Joe sensed that the boy was caught between contradictory feelings. He wanted to relax and be trusting, and yet he was frightened and hesitant. It was understandable, Joe thought. Martha was right about giving him time. They had to move slowly, carefully, and be sensitive to his scarred feelings. He had been abused emotionally as well as physically.

  Sitting in the fast-food restaurant and talking to him casually like this was just as encouraging for Joe as he thought it must be for Jonathan. He couldn’t remember a time when he and Solomon had gone somewhere alone to eat. The father-son act just wasn’t in their repertoire.

  He concluded that despite all the similarities Martha had found and was finding between Solomon and Jonathan, this boy really was quite different. He could be . . . yes, Joe had to say it this way . . . he could be normal. Solomon wasn’t normal. His reactions to his own son were understandable.

  On the way home, Jonathan reminded him about his intention to paint the trim on the house. He said he would have time to help him on Sunday, after all. Joe was cheered by the fact that he was returning home with the same upbeat feelings as when he had left it this morning. In fact, he was so happy about the way he and Jonathan were hitting it off, he almost completely forgot about their intense few minutes discussing Solomon’s suicide.

  But it would come back to him. Every single word would come back to him, especially Jonathan’s statement that Solomon didn’t like himself.

  The reason why was like a festering sore. Joe would rather keep it hidden, but he was beginning to sense that Jonathan wouldn’t let it remain so.

  “My God,” Martha said at the end of dinner that night, “what did you do to that boy? All he’s been talking about since you came back from your service call is you and your work.”

  “Really?” Joe smiled. Jonathan had gone up to his room right after finishing his meal to get ready to go with Audra Lowe and some of the other kids to the movies.

  “Yes, really. Don’t pretend you didn’t notice his conversation at dinner. I couldn’t get him to talk about anything else but computers. He’s impressed.”

  “Well, he seemed to show some interest, so I filled him in on a few things.”

  “I’ll bet you never shut up the whole time he was with you. I know how you are when you get started on the subject. Especially when you have a captured audience.”

  “That isn’t so,” he replied, feigning an angry defense. “If he asked questions, I provided answers. Nothing more.”

  “Uh huh.”

  He thought he detected a note of jealousy, but shook the idea off. Why would she be jealous of his success with Jonathan? It was something she wanted all along.

  “So,” he said, deciding to change the subject, “since the kid’s going to be with his friends, maybe you and I should go to a movie, too. We haven’t done that in a while.”

  “I don’t know,” Martha said. She looked threatened by the idea.

  “Come on. We deserve a night out.”

  “Deserve?” She grimaced as if the word were a profanity.

  “Well, we’ve been working hard at making things comfortable for the boy, besides our regular work, that is.”

  “You make it sound like a job, Joe. He’s not an assignment; he’s not some kind of penance,” she added, her eyes widening with emphasis.

  “Of course, I don’t mean it to sound like that,” he said. Why does she jump on everything I say about Jonathan? he wondered. “But don’t you want to go out on a date and not think about anything else but ourselves? Just for a little while? That’s not selfish or sinful. In fact, it’s healthy. And,” he said, feeling more like a salesman pushing a new item than a husband asking his wife to go out to the movies, “if we feel better about ourselves, we’ll treat the boy better. It’s only logical.”

  She was quiet for a moment.

  “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “What movie do you want to see?”

  “Not the one the kids are going to. Let’s take in that new foreign film over at the Strang. Curt Philips over at the office saw it and said it was good.”

  “You mean the one about the two sisters who fall in love with each other?”

  “Well, it’s different.”

  “Why is it the movies today are either ridiculous or kinky?” she asked. He shrugged and watched her clean up. “All right,” she said finally. “I suppose we should do something different.”

  “Good.” Joe slapped his hands together and got up from the table to help clear off the dishes. He began bringing them to her at the sink. “I’m surprised Kevin or Mindy didn’t call. I saw Kevin this week and he mentioned something about a new restaurant in Goshen.”

  “She did call,” Martha said without turning around. She continued to place the dishes in the dishwasher.

  “She did? So what did you tell her?”

  “I didn’t think we should go to dinner just yet.”

  “What? Why not? Because of the boy,” he said, answering his own question. “What difference would it have made? You could have made something for him and then we would have gone out with them.” She didn’t say anything. “Martha.” She turned around.

  “I thought we’d wait until he was here a few weeks before doing that. He’s been through so much loneliness.”

  “Oh, Christ.”

  “Well, he has.”

  “You’re babying him. You did the same—” He stopped himself, but her shoulders went up as if he had dropped an ice cube down her back.

  Suddenly her expression changed, and she looked very calm. She took on her Mona Lisa smile and made him feel as though he were a patient in a mental ward who was on the verge of hysteria. Once again, he felt like someone being handled.

  “It’s not babying him to help him make a smooth transition into a new home, Joe. Apparently, you weren’t listening too carefully when Mrs. Posner outlined some of the potential difficulties associated with children in the program.

  “Really,” she continued, turning back to her work, “sometimes you’re the one who acts like a spoiled child, a jealous child.”

  He said nothing for a moment. Her cool and intelligent tone made him wonder. Was she right? Was he as possessive as a child? He thought about his own childhood and the natural sibling rivalry between him and his sister, Brenda. The competition between them had been for their mother’s attention. His father couldn’t have been more aloof from their upbringing. Like Martha’s father, his father was Old Country, with a clearly indicated set of male responsibilities, none of which included dressing, feeding, and caring for his children. He was there to discipline and to make serious decisions for them, but there rarely seemed to be occasions for any insignificant conversation.

  His father was a plumber who appeared forever tired and dirty, weighed down by the struggle to make a living. For men like his father, the scope of what was considered to be trivial was much wider than it was f
or men today. Joe couldn’t ever imagine his father being upset because his wife turned down a dinner party.

  He didn’t go on with the discussion. Instead, he got up and went into the living room to catch some television news. A little while later, Jonathan poked his head in to say good night.

  “And thanks for taking me along today,” he added.

  “Nothing to thank me for,” Joe said. “Glad to have the company.”

  “See you later,” Jonathan said, and left.

  Joe went to the window and watched him get into a car to sit beside Audra Lowe. After that, he went back to watching television. It was nearly a half an hour later before he realized Martha hadn’t come into the living room. If they were still going to a movie, they had to get started very soon.

  She wasn’t in the kitchen, even though the lights were still on. Puzzled, he listened for her movements in the house. If she had gone by the living room and up the stairs, she had either done it very quietly or he had been so involved in some news story, he hadn’t heard her. Convinced the latter was the case, he went to the stairs and ascended.

  Just before he reached the top, he thought he heard voices and stopped to listen. He shuddered when he realized the sounds were coming from Solomon’s, now Jonathan’s, room. He took another step and then another until he was at the landing. Martha was speaking just above a whisper behind the closed door. He went to it and strained to understand her words. He clearly made out the sentence “I want you to leave him alone.”

  Unable to contain his curiosity any longer, he opened the door. Before she spun around, Martha was sitting on the bed looking at the pillow as though someone were reclining there. Joe stopped and simply gaped at her.

  “My God,” she said, “why did you open that door like that? You scared the hell out of me.”

  “What are you doing in here?”

  “Straightening up.”

  Joe looked around. The room couldn’t be any more orderly, nor the furniture more spick-and-span.

  “I thought I heard voices. For a moment there, I thought Jonathan had returned and something was wrong.”

  “Nothing’s wrong.” She got up. A confident and self-satisfied smile took form on her face. “Everything will be fine now.”

  “Who were you talking to?”

  “I was talking to myself. Don’t you do that?”

  “Sure,” he said. He still felt he had heard another voice.

  “So why are you standing there and making a big deal out of it, Joe? What is it with you tonight?”

  “Me?” He stared at her a moment and then relaxed. “It’s getting too late to go to the movies,” he said.

  “I’d just as soon stay home and finish my book,” she said, and started out of the room.

  “Okay,” he said. He, too, had lost the desire to go out. He looked around the room again. He noticed the covers were off both the computer keyboard and the monitor.

  He turned it on, curious as to what Jonathan might have been doing with it. After it warmed up, he called up the files, noting the dates beside each. One file, nearly one megabyte, the equivalent of a novel, had been written while Solomon was still alive. He called for its retrieval, only to discover it had a password. Without that password, there was no access to the file. It was something Solomon wanted kept as secret as a diary.

  He couldn’t help wondering why. Perhaps he should work on breaking into that memory, he thought. Could Jonathan have broken into it? Was that why he was working on it so much? He would have had to find the password. Joe searched the desk for notes, but found nothing. He looked about the room, wondering where the password might be hidden. It could be anywhere—in a book, in that carton, even in an article of clothing. Wherever it was, he sensed that it was important for him to find it.

  He knew Martha would wonder why he was still in the room, so he shut the computer off quickly and left. He followed her down the steps to the living room, still thinking about the computer.

  But he said nothing more about it. Martha began reading her book. Every once in a while, she would pause, press the book against her breasts, and look up at the ceiling. Whenever she did so, there was more of a look of anger on her face than a look of fatigue.

  “Everything all right?” he asked her after she had done it a number of times. “You look like that story is getting you upset.”

  “What? Oh. No. It’s very good. One of her best.” She went back to her reading. Sometime before the late news, she said she was tired and went upstairs to bed. He lingered to watch some of the news and then went up to join her. He thought she was already asleep, so he didn’t put on any lights and moved as softly as he could through the room, but she was awake.

  “You left the outside light on for Jonathan, didn’t you, Joe?” she asked.

  “Sure. What time did you tell him he had to be in?”

  “I told him not late.”

  “That’s a little vague, considering it’s really his first night out here.”

  “It’s what we used to tell Solomon, isn’t it?”

  “He’s not Solomon. In some ways, Jonathan’s more of a responsibility. It’s like taking care of someone else’s child while they’re away,” he added.

  “What a terrible attitude. As long as you feel that way, he’ll be a stranger in this house,” she said, and turned her back to him. She was still sleeping in the nude. She had done so all week. He shook his head, feeling very confused, and decided the best thing would be to get some sleep.

  The shadowy figure that had been hovering around Donald Pedersen’s car stepped away quickly and seemed to simply be absorbed into the night only moments before Donald and his friend Stanley Weiner came out of the Crossways. The Italian restaurant was something of a hangout for the high school students. It was well after one o’clock in the morning.

  Donald, a tall, lean seventeen-year-old, lived alone with his mother since his father’s desertion, and was somewhat more independent than most boys his age. For the last four years, he had been more or less on his own. During the last two and a half years, he worked in the Shop Rite Supermarket after school and on weekends, as well as the summers, and earned his own spending money.

  Although he wasn’t an arrogant boy, life had toughened him and made him somewhat intolerant of those who had things much easier. He had never been friendly with any of Solomon Stern’s crowd, but he never had wanted to be. To him, they were all spoiled and soft. They were the arrogant ones, and because Solomon was their leader, he was the epitome of what Donald hated. When Solomon committed suicide, Donald felt his feelings were validated. Even though Solomon and his friends were supposedly the more intelligent and the more sophisticated and talented students, they were corrupt and degenerate. And this new foster child living with the Sterns didn’t seem any different, even though his background should have allied him more with Donald than with Solomon’s friends.

  Donald never got into any fights with Solomon; they never exchanged bad words between them. They didn’t need to confirm their dislike for each other. They simply avoided each other as much as possible, like two dogs who had a natural disdain for each other but who respected each other’s turf. Just in the short time Jonathan was at the school, the same unspoken understanding took effect.

  Donald didn’t mind. He had his own friends, his own activities, and his own likes. Sometimes paths crossed, but most of the time, he and Solomon’s crowd were miles apart in distance and in interests.

  Earlier tonight, however, he and Stanley had run into Jonathan and some of his friends at the same movie. He saw from the smirks on their faces that they were mocking him. He and Stanley went to a hamburger spot in Monticello after the film, but they grew bored with the crowd and headed for the Crossways. Fortunately, by the time they arrived, Jonathan and his friends were leaving. They had remained to talk, dance, and even have some pizza. Neither he nor Stanley had any kind of curfew. Finally growing tired, they left the restaurant.

  “Hey,” Stanley said as h
e opened the door on the passenger’s side, “smell that?”

  “Yeah,” Donald said. “Gas. Like it flooded.”

  “Didn’t give us any trouble on the way here.”

  “I put new points and plugs in and changed the filter in the gas line two weeks ago,” Donald said.

  “Lotta good that did,” Stanley said, and laughed.

  Donald’s car was one of the few things his father had left behind. Now nearly nine years old with a little over a hundred thousand miles on it, it was battling to remain on the road. The bottom side panels had rusted out, and the shocks were nearly gone. But it still served its purpose, and investing in a new vehicle was beyond his and his mother’s financial capacity at this time. The insurance alone ate up a large portion of what he made at the supermarket.

  “Jeez,” Stanley said, getting in. “Why didn’t we smell this on the way here?”

  “I don’t know.” Donald hesitated. “Now the son of a bitch probably won’t start.” He thought about opening the hood and checking the engine, but he remembered he didn’t have a flashlight in the car. “Maybe we’ll be lucky,” he said, and got in quickly. “Phew.” He rolled down his window quickly.

  “This floor rug feels soaked,” Stanley said.

  “Yeah, my side, too. How the hell . . . ?”

  “Did you leave a can of gas in the rear?”

  “No.”

  Stanley leaned over the back of his seat.

  “Looks like one back there.” Stanley reached over and straightened up the can. “Fell over and must’ve spilled some under the seat.”

  “That’s funny. I don’t remember doing that.”

  “Maybe your mother did it.”

  “Naw, she hates this car.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t know,” Donald said. He put the key in the ignition, but he didn’t turn it. “I don’t know,” he repeated. “I can’t remember doing that.”

  “Well, it’s too late now. Let’s get the fuck out of here. I’m tired.”

  “Yeah,” Donald said. He turned the key. He didn’t see the electrical wires dangling from the bottom of the dash. The spark was instantaneous.