Lost Boys: A Novel Read online

  At that, Stevie shoved his chair back and staggered into the corner of the kitchen near the window. He looked savagely, desperately angry. “You can’t! That’s the only thing they’re staying for! If I can’t play they’ll go away!”

  DeAnne and Step looked at each other, both reaching the same conclusion. Has it been that easy to get rid of the imaginary friends all along? Just turn off the computer?

  “You’ve got no right!” Stevie screamed at them. “I’ve been trying so hard!”

  Stevie’s words were so strange that Step couldn’t help but flash on his conversations with Lee during his madness. No, Step thought, rejecting the comparison. I just don’t understand the context of what Stevie is saying. It’ll be rational if I just understand the context.

  “Calm down, Door Man,” said Step. “Calm down, relax. Your mother didn’t say that we were definitely going to take the computer away. But look at yourself. You’re out of control. That’s really pretty scary, and it makes us think maybe you’ve been spending way too much time on the Atari.”

  “Not as much as you spend on the IBM in there,” said Stevie.

  “That happens to be my work,” said Step. “That happens to be what pays for our house and our food and for Zap’s doctor bills.”

  “Are you the only one in the family who has work to do?” Stevie demanded.

  The question took Step aback. “Why, do you have work to do?” he asked Stevie.

  “Please don’t make me stop playing the game. I’ll never be bad again ever, please, please, please.”

  “Stevie, you weren’t bad, you were just—”

  “Then I’ll never be whatever it was that I was, only don’t make me stop playing with them, they’ll go away and I’ll never find them again. It was so hard to get them all together, it was so hard.”

  Suddenly a picture emerged in Step’s mind. This game with the pirate ships had become, in Stevie’s mind, the whole world of his imaginary friends. He used to play with them in the back yard, but it must have all moved indoors so that now he could only find them when he was playing with the computer. That meant that maybe Stevie wasn’t hallucinating them anymore. Maybe the only time he could actually see them was when they were pixels moving on the screen, and he was afraid that if they slipped away any further, they’d be gone.

  Well, wasn’t that what Step and DeAnne wanted? They had thought that Stevie wasn’t showing any progress, but without their even knowing it, he had stopped having hallucinations. It was gradually getting better by itself, and so they didn’t need to push it, didn’t need to force the issue. He had made up these boys to fit the names that were forced on him, to give them substance, and then he had built his whole life around them. Let him outgrow them, as he was already starting to do. Let him gradually wean himself back to reality.

  “How about this?” said Step. “Instead of cutting you off from the game, we put a time limit on it. If your homework’s done and you’ve had your dinner and your bath and everything by seven-thirty, you can play until eight-thirty, and then no matter what the computer’s off and you’re in bed.”

  “Every day?” asked DeAnne. “That doesn’t sound like much of a restriction to me.”

  “Why don’t we talk about it ourselves later,” said Step. “We’ll start with an hour a day and go from there. All right, Stevie?”

  “Even today?” he asked.

  “Today is still off-limits,” said DeAnne.

  “Why not say this,” said Step. “No computer after school for sure, and then your mom and I will talk it over and decide about later tonight.”

  DeAnne looked at him, her face full of exasperation, but Step remained expressionless, insisting on holding her to the bargain that they never play good-parent, bad-parent in front of the children—though in fact he had just violated the bargain himself.

  Actually, the bargain included an unspoken agreement that if one parent felt very, very strongly, the parent who felt less strongly about it would go along. And even though DeAnne clearly thought that she should have been given precedence, the very fact that Step had insisted anyway told her that maybe she should back off.

  So she did.

  In the meantime, Stevie had calmed down a lot, though his eyes were still red-rimmed, his face white.

  “Do you think you can still go to school today?” asked Step.

  He nodded.

  “Stevie, have you made any friends at school this year?”

  He shrugged.

  “I mean, do the kids talk to you?”

  He shrugged, then nodded.

  “Stevie, do you ever have fun?”

  Stevie just looked at him. “Sure,” he finally said.

  “I mean, besides with the computer?”

  When Stevie didn’t answer, DeAnne interrupted. “If we’re going to get either of you boys to school on time, we’ve got to go now. And then your father and I are going to have a long discussion.”

  They had the discussion, but it wasn’t rancorous. Step explained his thinking, DeAnne agreed with him, and they decided that limiting Stevie to an hour a day would help him taper off without giving him the stress of quitting the game and losing his friends all at once.

  “The funniest thing,” said DeAnne. “You know when he said, ‘You’re not the only one with work to do?’ or whatever it was he said?”

  “Yeah, I didn’t know whether to be delighted to see him showing so much emotion or appalled that for the first time in his life he was yelling at his father.”

  “Do you know what went through my mind when he said that?” said DeAnne. “I thought, ‘Wist ye not that I must be about my father’s business?’”

  Step just looked at her. And then said, “Do you know what that reminds me of?”

  She shook her head.

  “Lee Weeks,” Step said. “First he thinks he’s God, and then you think you’re the virgin Mary.”

  “I wasn’t joking.”

  “I was hoping you were,” said Step.

  “Maybe he’s doing something really serious, Step. Maybe he’s got a clearer vision of the world than we have. I mean, we already know that in some ways he does understand more than we do, and he always has.”

  “I know,” said Step. “But we’re talking about computer games here.”

  “We’re talking about Stevie being aware of evil in the world. Have you forgotten that he knew the names?”

  “The serial killer hasn’t done anything since that article.”

  “But the boys he killed are still dead,” said DeAnne. “And Stevie is still playing with imaginary friends that have their names. How do we know what is or is not important? When the boy Jesus stood there talking to the learned men in the temple, that was more important than Joseph’s carpentry and more important than Mary’s worry about him.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” said Step. “But nevertheless, Mary worried about him, and Joseph still kept doing his carpentry, because that was their job. And when they came and got Jesus from the temple, he went with them. He didn’t stand there and cry and scream at them. I mean, I know we believe in likening the scriptures to ourselves, DeAnne, but it can be carried too far.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “I was just telling you what went through my mind.”

  The last phone call from Lee Weeks came on the twenty-sixth of October, a Wednesday night. It was the second day of the invasion of Grenada, and Step had stopped working the whole day, watching the news. At one in the morning Step was still up, sitting in the family room flipping the TV back and forth between news broadcasts and stupid old movies. When the phone rang Step thought either someone had died or someone in Utah was calling and had forgotten the time difference again.

  “The war is on,” said Lee.

  “Hi, Lee,” said Step.

  “I saved the quarter you sent me. I picked it up from the sidewalk where you left it.”

  Please, thought Step. Please just don’t call me again.

  “They saw me pick somet
hing up on my walk, and they strip-searched me, but I swallowed it.”

  “You swallowed a quarter?”

  “I knew I’d get it back, and when I did, I’d call you. I found it on the day they blew up the U.S. Marines. I knew that God was through with the world, and then you sent me the quarter and I thought, I am prepared. And now when war is raging over the face of the earth, I got the quarter back.”

  “Where are you calling me from?” asked Step.

  “The payphone in the waiting area. I don’t have long to talk, because the attendants will find out I’m not in bed pretty soon. That’s why you’ll have to act quickly. Is the submarine ready?”

  “Lee, I don’t have a submarine.”

  “No!” he shouted. “No! No!”

  Step almost shushed him, but then he realized, if Lee is in an institution somewhere and he’s hiding, having him yell into the phone will help them find him.

  After a moment, though, Lee stopped shouting. “She put me here,” he said. “But God is getting impatient. He is tired of the way I keep falling asleep, but I can’t help it. I can’t help it.” He started to cry.

  “Lee, it’s all right, really. Everything’s going to be all right.”

  “Step, you’re my only friend. You’re the only one who ever understood the glorious being inside my humble body.”

  “That’s still true, Lee. You’re trapped inside a body that isn’t working right. It keeps giving you a distorted version of reality.”

  “I tried to see the truth,” said Lee. “But I didn’t see enough, did I? I didn’t measure up. So you’re going to leave without me, and I’ll be here for the day after. But I’m not afraid. I’d rather the than live on, knowing that I didn’t have what it took to be saved.”

  “Lee, you didn’t fail a test. You just have to take the medication they give you.”

  “That’s what you have to say to the ones who fail. I understand that, Step. You could have burned me up when you saw how weak I was. But I’m not as weak as they think. I got even with them. This is so beautiful, you’re going to love this! You want to know what I did?”

  “Sure,” said Step.

  “I didn’t wash the quarter.” Lee burst out laughing, long and hard. “I didn’t . . . wash . . . the quarter!”

  There was a flurry of noises. Lee stopped laughing and said, quite cheerily, “Ta-ta for now!”

  The line went dead.

  14

  CHRISTMAS EVE

  This is what Stevie bought with his Christmas money: For Robbie, a Go-Bot, since Robbie was called Robot sometimes and he liked vehicles and the Go-Bot turned from one into the other whenever you wanted. For Betsy, two blue ribbon bow clips for her hair, because she was so proud of how long it was but it always got into her eyes. For Zap, a cassette tape of songs for Mormon children, sold by Dolores LeSueur’s daughter, Janet, the Bright Music distributor in Steuben, on the day when she came over to the house to make a combined sales call and visiting-teaching visit for the Relief Society.

  For Jack, a Hot Wheels race car because he was so fast. For Scotty, a deck of cards because he bragged about what a good poker player he was. For David, a small fake-ceramic dog because he liked dogs. For Roddy, a harmonica because he liked songs. For Peter, a ball of string because he liked kites. For Van, a Star Wars button because it was his favorite movie. For Sandy, a squirt gun because he was such a good aim.

  Stevie had saved his allowances and added it to the twenty dollars of Christmas money Step and DeAnne doled out to each of the kids, so he had enough—barely. DeAnne had Stevie with her, and Zap in a stroller, while Step had Betsy and Robbie, so that the two pairs of kids could buy presents for the others and for the parent they were not with; later, they would meet in the food court of the mall, have sweet rolls, and then redivide the kids so they could finish the shopping. So it was DeAnne who first realized who it was Stevie was shopping for. She made an attempt to deflect him from his purchases, but it came to nothing.

  “Stevie,” she said, “we don’t allow our kids to buy presents for friends, just for family.”

  Stevie looked at her and said, “Nobody else is going to buy presents for them.”

  She didn’t have the heart to forbid him then, even though she thought it was foolish of her to let him carry it this far. Well, she thought, at least he’s never required us to set a place at table for his imaginary friends, the way some lads do. We’d have to rent a banquet hall every night if we did.

  When the shopping was done and they were all walking out to the cars in the cold night air, Stevie spoke up. “Mom and Dad.”

  “Yes, Stevie.”

  “I didn’t buy presents for the two of you, but that’s OK, because I’m doing something else.”

  “That’s fine, Stevie. We don’t really need anything except for our family to be together and to be happy and kind,” said DeAnne.

  Stevie said no more about it.

  But that night, alone in their room, DeAnne and Step talked about the problem of his presents for his imaginary friends. “What are we supposed to do with them?” asked Step. “Handle it like letters to Santa Claus or something? He leaves them under the tree and the next morning we have little faked-up presents supposedly from his friends?”

  “We can’t do that,” said DeAnne. “We can’t encourage him to believe even more than he does.”

  “I don’t know,” said Step. “Maybe he has his own way of giving things to them or something.”

  “All we can do is play it by ear.”

  Christmas was going to be on Sunday this year, which was always something of a pain because it meant that there’d be a conflict between the American custom of present-opening on Christmas morning and the Church requirement of going to sacrament meeting. It was a relief when they found out that the Steuben wards had a tradition of holding a single combined sacrament meeting at ten A.M. and then canceling Sunday school and all the other meetings so everybody was home well before noon. That way even if the present-opening had to be split in half, the kids would have all their stocking presents—the only ones from Santa under the tree—and a few of the family presents before they went to church. The edge would have been taken off their anxiousness.

  But the special Christmas sacrament meeting meant a serious choir program. The choir leader of the 2nd Ward apparently regarded herself as the queen of music in the western hemisphere, and Mary Anne Lowe found herself quickly outmaneuvered as a combined choir was formed exclusively under the direction of the 2nd Ward choir leader. DeAnne toyed with the idea of boycotting the choir out of loyalty to Mary Anne, but Mary Anne just laughed at her. “It’s Christmas,” she said. “What do I care who’s the boss of things? I just want to sing and have us sound great so that it really feels like Christmas to the rest of the ward.” So the last few weeks in December were a flurry of ward and stake and Relief Society and quorum Christmas parties and socials and programs, with choir practices shoehorned in wherever possible. Step attended as many practices as he could, alternating with DeAnne so that they didn’t have to take the kids outside very much. The weather was turning bitterly cold, and there was talk that a cold front would be coming through Christmas Eve that would make Steubenites think their town had been swapped with Duluth in the night.

  In the meantime, Step was working at a frenzied pace to finish debugging the PC Hacker Snack, which was really shaping up as a terrific program. He had to get it done before New Year’s, so that they’d get the completion check in time to cover the Christmas credit card bills, not to mention the final installment of Zap’s hospital bills and the last of the back taxes owed to the IRS. Their collection officer had sworn faithfully to them that this year the IRS would not come in and strip their checking accounts while all the Christmas shopping checks were outstanding, the way the Indiana IRS office had done the year before. But Step and DeAnne kept what money they had out of the bank during Christmas anyway, paying for everything with cash or credit card; the IRS had never once kept a single pr
omise in their sorry history of dealing with them over back taxes, and they didn’t really expect anything different this year, either.

  The Sunday before Christmas was a disaster at Church, because Dolores LeSueur found out that the two bishoprics had decided to do something new for the Christmas program this year. In past years, Dolores’s husband, Jacob (not Jake, not Cubby, no matter how long you had known him before he married Dolores), had always read the entire text of “The Other Wise Man,” which Dolores had been told in a dream was not fiction at all, but a true story which was originally in the Gospel of John but was removed by wicked scribes working for the sun-worshiping Emperor Constantine in the fourth century A.D. This year, the bishoprics had decided to have a short talk by Emil Houdon, who had visited the Holy Land in the summer despite the hot weather and the fighting in Lebanon. Emil had promised to tell a couple of inspirational anecdotes and quit talking after ten minutes, and everybody who knew what was being planned thought this would be the best Christmas Sunday in a long time. Sister LeSueur, however, knew that it was a sign that both wards were on the high road to apostasy, and she caused such a fuss that by the time the 1st Ward had wrapped up its meetings at noon on Sunday the eighteenth, it was decided that the entire program, including the choir numbers, would be replaced by the reading of “The Other Wise Man.”

  Then the 2nd Ward choir leader found out that she had been preempted, and she raised such a stink that by four P.M., when the 2nd Ward meetings were finished, the choir program had been restored and the special Christmas sacrament meeting would now run to about two hours, if all went smoothly. The bishopric members went home knowing they had been utterly defeated, but grateful that at least this brouhaha had been settled without Dolores calling one of the General Authorities in Salt Lake City.

  Through all of this, Step and DeAnne watched with a mixture of disgust and despair. “And to think that when I was a child, I wondered how the true Church of Christ could ever have been lost from the earth,” said DeAnne.