It did nothing for me, but the Children gobbled it up with a spoon. He wasn’t there twelve hours before they took up a collection of spare kid junk: secondhand clothes and filthy toys and a brand new racecar bed courtesy of our very own Scrooge Jeffries. Mandy Herman vied with the Babbage girls for babysitting duties, eventually compromising on a roster that had Mandy on the couch with him Monday through Wednesday afternoons while the three Babbages—buxom and blond in a way that the kid was a few years too young and I was a few decades too old to make use of—covered the rest.
Alison Gentry, who’d been a high school math teacher in her discarded life, had taken charge of the younger Children’s education, setting up a one-room schoolhouse in what used to be the stables, and it was no trouble to scoop the kid into the fold. We had no others exactly his age—a clutch of toddlers, some first and second graders, and of course the Babbage girls—but the kid seemed to prefer the company of adults anyway, if you could call the Children that, and with their naïve, infantile willingness to believe as they were told, maybe that made sense.
Because what child doesn’t love a story? And when you get down to it, that’s all I am: a storyteller. Nothing more, nothing less. Back in the Hilary days, I’d thought I needed more smoke and mirrors, some laying on of hands, but eventually I wised up. You don’t need to cure the lepers to be a faith healer. We’re all of us in my business doing the same work, because what is faith but another story that you tell yourself to feel better? That’s what these idiot skeptics, the do-gooders, the ones so desperate to snatch the wool from my Children’s eyes, would never understand: Lies don’t hurt anyone. Lies are the balm; truth is the wound.
Even the Man himself, if you believed in him up there, napping on his cloudy throne, doesn’t have much more than pretty stories to offer these days. Sure, Joseph, Moses, Jesus’s precious lepers, they got miracles. But now? God’s out of the direct action industry, and all he’s offering in its place is a bedtime story. The fairy tale of heaven, the promise that whatever shit happens, your story gets a happy ending. The Bible, boiled down: Once upon a time I helped some poor suckers out and someday, maybe, if you’re good, I’ll help you too, but in the meantime, isn’t it a nice story to fall asleep to?
You can’t say I’m not doing God’s work.
All those social workers, estranged relatives, those Pittstown neighbors who turned their nose up at the Church buying up property in their suburban midst, they called us a cult. Maybe so. But the word carried a sinister whiff that didn’t match up with its reality, something that maybe you had to be in a cult—or in charge of one—to know. My Children were gentle, most of them treading through life with the care of the permanently damaged, whether by drugs, abuse, or simply the ordinary existential indignities, loss of job, loss of love, loss of dignity, loss of purpose. That was their universaclass="underline" Loss. Who else would so desperately need to be found?
That’s what I’d done when I first arrived in Pittstown, what I did when I arrived anywhere: I collected the lost, the ones who’d fallen through the cracks, like a dog-catcher scooping up strays for the pound. It was a service, not just to the feral, but to the tame and well-housed, all those cocky, secure, too good-for-it-all townsfolk satisfied with the comfort of their own homes who preferred not to acknowledge what I was doing for them, tending to their damaged so they wouldn’t have to.
Alison Gentry’s sister left nasty voicemails every few months, and once she’d set the local cops on us, but where was she when Alison’s three kids and husband plowed through a guard-rail and into Lake Michigan? Where was she a year later when her sister washed down the anniversary with a vodka and Percodan cocktail?
Where were Mandy’s parents—with their team of trust-fund-busting lawyers doing everything they could to keep her hands off her money—when she and her crack pipe had driven a Pontiac through a neighbor’s living room window, and then been promptly hauled off to jail, where she stayed, because mom and dad thought teaching her a lesson would be kinder than bailing her out?
Where were Clark Jeffries’ kids when his board of directors dumped him on his ass, or Merrilee Babbage’s husband when—having been traded in for a secretary with a bad dye job and a dick—she was feeding her three kids with food stamps and blowing the landlord when she couldn’t make rent?
I was the one who wiped their tears and salved their wounds and fed them some bullshit to live for, and if I took a little something with me when I went, it was only fair payment for services rendered.
Despite my best efforts, plenty of the Children still had a hole to fill, and somehow, with his ugly, gap-toothed smile and post-nasal drip, the kid filled it.
That was my smile. Those were my mother’s big ears and my father’s vampire canines—and the way he chewed his nails, but only the ones on his left hand, was like seeing my brother’s ghost. This was the kind of genetic detritus that was, I knew, supposed to kindle a fire in me, as if it mattered that we came from the same stock.
I didn’t know whether my parents were alive or dead, and didn’t much care—had never understood it, this obsession people have with blood. This fixation on children, as if popping a baby out and watching him grow into your big nose and type 2 diabetes was your best shot at staving off oblivion.
Ask people to worship you? They call you a megalomaniac. Ask them to worship your kid? They call that good parenting.
Still, I played along, let them all believe what they needed to believe. That was, after all, my business. And it wasn’t the hassle I’d expected, raising a kid, especially with the Children so eager to do it for me. It was only once he started up with the questions and all that end-of-the-world shit, that the trouble really started.
He’d been at the compound for a week, and though I dumped him on the Children whenever I could during the day, at night he was all mine. He got himself set for bed all on his own—mom calls me her little man, he said, when I caught him flossing for the third time in a day, and that was the second and last time he mentioned her—but my responsibilities had been made clear.
“At eight, you tell me it’s time to go to bed,” he told me the first night. “I read for a while, and then at nine you come back and turn off the lights.”
So that’s what I did, standing in the dark for a while after, watching this kid—my kid—lie on his back with his legs straight and his arms crossed across his chest like a fucking corpse. I made that, I thought, and waited to feel something.
“You got everything you need?” I said. This was before the racecar bed and the hand-me-down pajamas. “Comfortable?”
He didn’t look it.
“Sometimes I like to practice being dead,” he said, staring up at the ceiling.
“You’re a weird kid, you know that?”
“She’s not coming back, is she?”
That was the first time he mentioned her. And because he wasn’t crying or behaving anything like you’d expect from a kid in his situation, I gave it to him straight. “Doesn’t seem likely.”
“Because I’m weird?”
“Because she’s a loser.”
“Oh.”
“Always was. Always will be. You’re probably better off.”