He rests his head on the pillow again, bunches the blankets up to his neck. “I’m cold.”
He shouldn’t be cold; it’s actually quite warm in the room. I stroke his forehead again. “I’ll run you a hot bath, Connor,” I say. He doesn’t object, so I get up and do it. When it’s ready I return to him. “C’mon, sweetheart. A bath will warm you up.” I pull at him gently, get him out of bed, guide him to the bathroom, take off his things for him, help him in. He trembles as I trickle the hot water over his head with a washcloth.
“Good?”
He doesn’t say anything. I wash his unresisting limbs and face, watch him soak for a while. His body calms.
“Okay, honey, c’mon,” I say at last. “Time to get out.” I hold out the biggest towel I can find, ready for him to step into it. He does. I rub him dry, lead him back to the bed, help him get in between the covers.
“Okay?” I ask.
He nods.
I take a quick shower, dry myself, climb into the bed. He’s facing away from me. I spoon him, wrap myself around him as tightly and as warmly as I can, try to will some of my strength into his frail body. After a while he begins to shake again.
“Are you cold?” I whisper.
“No.”
But he keeps shaking. The shaking becomes violent, frightening, wild thrashings. I hold onto him, feeling that if I let go he might completely fly apart. “Shh, Connor, shh.” I hold him, hold him. He begins to cry, first quietly, then wildly, without any reserve, terrible agonized wailings. I hold his forehead, kiss his hair, tell him it’s all right, everything will be all right. When he gets too loud I place a pillow gently over his mouth. He screams into it, weeps, hiccoughs. I know I have to stay here, hold him, not let him go, not ever. It suddenly occurs to me that he could die without me, that if I were to get up and leave him now he might literally shake himself apart, cry himself to death.
“Connor,” I whisper into his ear, “come back. Come back. Bring yourself back to me. Come on. Come back, Connor.”
It goes on for a long time, the weeping, the screaming. But I ask him over and over, hundreds of times, to come back, come back to me. Finally it all slows. Quiets. The shaking fades to occasional tremors. The crying stops. He sucks his thumb.
He whispers something. I don’t catch it. I lean to his lips. “What, sweetheart?”
“I want,” he whispers hoarsely, “my mom.”
“I’m here, sweetheart,” I whisper in return. “I’m right here.”
He sleeps. In the middle of the night he wakes again and says he’s thirsty, thirsty and a little hungry. I give him more water, give him half of a giant cookie I bought from the vending machine. I eat the remainder and we get cookie crumbs in the bed. I almost think he smiles, just slightly, a mere shadow of a smile, when I say what a couple of pigs we are and make an oinking sound at him. He rests again, falls asleep again. I do too. Toward morning, my arms still wrapped tightly around his narrow shoulders, my breasts on his back, my legs pushed against his, I see he’s gotten an erection. I reach over, stroke it gently. He’s asleep, I can tell from his deep breathing. After a few minutes he moans softly and ejaculates into the sheets. He never wakes, not really, just sighs a little. After a while he turns over, his body relaxing into mine, and we sleep that way until the sun’s up. Face-to-face. Soul-to-soul.
21
The problem is that I’m running out of money. My own account is nearly depleted and I’m worried every time I make a withdrawal, make sure that we’re moving on immediately afterward so that we’ll be hundreds of miles away by the time anyone could trace the account activity. I have credit cards but these seem even more dangerous to use. Yet we have to have something. It’s amazing how quickly motel rooms, food, gas add up. We drive, drive, Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, the interstates all bleeding into each other, one endless gray-black ribbon of road stretching endlessly before us, endlessly behind us. I have no idea if anyone is following us, if anyone has the slightest idea where we are. I keep us moving, driving all night sometimes, into the following day. We follow no route, just drive, take exits impulsively, get back on the freeway for no reason, change direction, zigzag across counties and states. Connor rarely speaks. He eats when we go to a drive-thru, occasionally he fiddles with the radio, but mostly he just stares out the window. When we get to a motel, invariably out of the way, well off the freeway, he steps into the room and turns on the TV. I always initiate the lovemaking. He never says no, never says yes, just does it with a dispassion I find disturbing but that there’s nothing I can do about, at least not now. I understand that he’s adjusting to this new life, new reality. I don’t want to push him, don’t want to frighten him any more than he’s already been frightened. I know he’ll come around fully, be the apple-cheeked boy I once knew, the sweet bright boy who couldn’t wait to be with me under the Christmas tree all those years ago—no, not years, months, it only feels like years. I just have to be patient, let him adjust in his own way. I try to josh him along, point out interesting landmarks, stop once in a while if something looks worth stopping for. Yet I’m nervous about letting him be around people. I’m very aware that he could walk up to any one of them, say My name is Connor Blue, please call the police, I believe they’re looking for me and it would all be over. Yet I can’t believe he would really do that, not Connor, not my Connor. But he has odd moments, sometimes in the car, sometimes in a room, when his eyes grow strange and he says something disconnected like “Do we have any homework tonight?” or “Where’s Kylie?” There’s nothing I can do but go along, say, “No, no homework tonight, Connor,” or “She’s not with us now, Connor.” My answers always satisfy him, for that moment. But then the next moment comes. And the next.
Once upon a time in a dream I was Mona Straw and I lived in a lovely middle-class home in Silver Spring Maryland with my husband Bill and daughter Gracie and I taught children at Cutts School and my life was all anyone could ever ask of a life. Billions of people look for food and water and shelter every day on this planet and they go to bed hungry and their children die with their stomachs bulging and flies on their cracked lips and that’s when they’re not rounded up by armies, by juntas that haul away the boys and force them to carry guns and murder and pillage and line the rest up against a wall and shoot them or hack off their heads except for the pretty daughters, of course, who get raped by a dozen soldiers or two dozen and spat on and beaten and finally wind up with a bullet in the brain or a bayonet in the chest and by that time they welcome it as a blessed relief. That’s how people live in this world but it was not how Mona Straw lived once upon a time. In a dream Mona Straw had everything anyone could want or need, far more than she deserved, than anyone really deserves. But it wasn’t real. Reality is only Connor, Connor Blue, my love, my life. The rest is fantasy. Bill never existed. Gracie never lived. There is no house in Silver Spring Maryland, no Cutts School. There couldn’t have been, because there had been no Mona Straw, not that Mona Straw, that half-girl, one leg, one arm, half a head. She never existed. Nothing else ever existed except what I see before me right now, the road, the car, the steering wheel in my hands, and Connor, Connor, Connor.
One night we lay in bed with Cokes and potato chips and watch Gun Crazy, an old ’50s film noir. We’re both enraptured, Connor leaning toward the screen and shouting “Wow!” every time something new happens. It’s just like it was once, only better, now Connor and I don’t have to hide behind a veneer of respectability, appropriateness, we can do what we wanted to do then, be naked together, crawl into bed, touch each other, fill the bed with crumbs if we want to, and just escape into movieland, watch, watch, then make love afterward, make love all night long. I’ve not seen Connor like this in a long time. I’ve never been more joyful, more ecstatic, life is everything I want it to be, I have everything I’ll ever need in this room, this bed. We laugh, we wrestle with each other during the commercials, we play silly games with fingers and toes, we kiss, then the movie pulls us back, again and again, always the movie, the movie on the screen, the movie of our life. It occurs to me that I don’t know what town we’re in or even what state. It makes no difference. My state is Connor Blue. My life is Connor Blue. This night, I think, he’s finally better, he’s committed to me again, to us, his life is my life. He laughs, the color comes back to his cheeks, he’s a boy again, a happy boy with his first love.