Lost Boys: A Novel Read online

  “Oh, this is small potatoes,” said Step. “People have been killed over the question of what date they should celebrate Easter.”

  “Yes, but we’re supposed to know better,” said DeAnne.

  “We do,” said Step. “After all these years, no one has yet arranged for a public stoning of Dolores LeSueur. The Steuben wards are populated by true Saints.”

  DeAnne went to choir practice that evening and shared a music book with Dolores LeSueur. They got along fine with the singing, but at the end of the choir practice, after the closing prayer, as people were gathering their coats and purses and, in a few cases, children, Dolores put her hand on DeAnne’s arm and said, “Sister Fletcher, I’ve been praying and praying about your little boy, and I want you to know that the Lord truly loves him.”

  “I know that,” said DeAnne.

  “I cannot share with you all the sacred things that I have seen in vision about your little boy, but I can say that it must surely be a blessing to you to know that his spirit is so righteous and perfect that he will be caught up into the celestial kingdom without having to taste of sin and temptation.”

  DeAnne realized that Sister LeSueur was assuming that Zap was retarded, and therefore had the same promise as children who died unbaptized before the age of accountability, that they would be exalted. It was really annoying to have her assume what even the doctors did not dare to predict—that Zap was going to be mentally impaired. And what made it downright infuriating was the sweet, beatific smile on Dolores’s face when DeAnne knew perfectly well that this woman had browbeaten and backbitten her way through two bishoprics that morning and that because of her, she and her family were going to have to sit through a two-hour sacrament meeting on the coldest Christmas morning in Steuben’s history.

  So DeAnne placed her hand firmly on top of Dolores’s, pinning her there, and moved her face in very close to Dolores’s face. Then, in a quiet but extremely intense voice, DeAnne said, “My son Jeremy is a child of God like any other, and he will have to pass through the same trials and choices in this life as any other. If he gets to the celestial kingdom, it will be because he chose righteousness. Furthermore, Sister LeSueur, if you ever again speak to me or anyone else on this planet about any vision or inspiration you think you have had about my family, I promise you that when we are both dead and you are standing before the judgment bar of God, I will leap to my feet and tell the Lord all about your horrible, selfish behavior this morning as you bullied the bishoprics into letting your husband read that wretched story for the fifteenth year in a row, and I assure you that if God is just, he will send you straight to hell.”

  Through about the last half of this, Sister LeSueur had been trying to withdraw her hand from DeAnne’s arm, but since DeAnne had her pinned, Sister LeSueur could only turn her head away like a child refusing to listen to a stern parent. When DeAnne finally released her, Sister LeSueur staggered a couple of steps away and then turned back and spat out the words, “I forgive you, Sister Fletcher! And I will pray for you!” The words themselves were, by habit, a blessing; but her tone was so loud and nasty and hateful that everyone still remaining in the chapel turned and looked at her. DeAnne couldn’t have composed a better picture if she had choreographed it: DeAnne herself, standing calmly with a rather surprised look on her face, and Dolores LeSueur, leaning toward her, her face a mask of fury, her mouth open with her lip in a sneering curl, her eyes glaring, and her face so red that it actually showed pink through her makeup.

  The vignette remained only for a moment. Then DeAnne said, “Thank you, Sister LeSueur.” Dolores recovered her composure and turned to float out of the building, but from the way people averted their gaze, DeAnne could see that if anyone in this group, at least, had any delusions about Sister LeSueur’s sincerity and balanced temperament, those delusions were now destroyed. “I’ll regard it as my Christmas present to the ward,” DeAnne told Step later.

  On Wednesday night, Step was pounding away at the vanity-board subroutine in Hacker Snack, which was causing the program to hang about a quarter of the time for no discernible reason. He was aware, in the back of his mind, that DeAnne was getting the kids to bed and having a little trouble doing it, partly because tomorrow was not a school day and Stevie and Robbie didn’t seem to think that they should have any bedtime at all.

  Finally, Step heard DeAnne telling Stevie, “I’ve asked you three times to turn off the computer and go to bed, Stevie, and you always say yes and then I come back a half-hour later and you haven’t budged. Now just because there’s no school tomorrow doesn’t mean that our one-hour rule about computer games is over.”

  The tone of her voice was really agitated, and Step was already upset at the program because he couldn’t seem to find an error anywhere, so he got up from his desk and rushed out into the hall to use the full power of the wrathful male voice to get some obedience. He and DeAnne had long since learned that while the children tuned out her voice quite easily, Step seemed to get the same results one would expect from the voice of God. He strode into the family room, stood behind Stevie’s chair, and said, “Your mother shouldn’t have to ask you three times to do anything, Stevie.”

  While he said this, though, Step could see that there was a new game on the screen, one he couldn’t remember seeing before. A train was speeding along a track, with the scenery passing behind it very rapidly. The animation was every bit as fast, the graphics just as realistic as in the impossible pirate game, and, just as in the pirate game, there were characters swarming over the train. Now he remembered that between DeAnne’s bedtime calls, he had heard Stevie calling out the names of his friends and saying things like, “You can do it. You’ve got to do it!” But the game itself didn’t really look all that fun—the kids were just running along the top, jumping from car to car, with no enemies or obstacles or anything. Just each other. Beautiful graphics, but pointless.

  Stevie was reaching his hand behind the machine to turn it off.

  “Stop!” cried Step. “Don’t move your hand. Don’t turn off the machine. Just stand up, right now, and go to your bedroom. I’ll shut everything down in here.”

  Stevie held his pose there for a moment. Step could see that he was deciding whether to obey or not. Step could have reached down and physically coerced him, but he did not. It had to be Stevie’s choice, and after that moment of hesitation, Stevie left the room, leaving the computer on.

  “I wish I could just borrow your voice at bedtime,” said DeAnne. “I yell at them and bellow at them till I feel like some kind of fishwife, and you come in and say three sentences and they go.”

  Step was barely listening as he slid into Stevie’s chair, trying to resume the play of the game. But somehow the people had all disappeared from the screen. There was just a train speeding along the track. As Step moved the joystick to see what would happen, the background stopped, too, so there was just a train and nothing else. And then the track disappeared, and the wheels stopped turning.

  Then the screen turned blue. Blank.

  “Step, why did you make him leave it on if you were just going to turn it off?”

  Step reached for the keyboard, typed “list.” He pressed the return key, hoping that some part of this program’s extraordinary code might remain in memory for him to examine. But nothing happened. Not even an error message. The cursor just went to the left margin of the next line. Step typed some more, hit the return key a lot of times. The screen started scrolling, but that was all. “There’s no program,” said Step.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Atari’s in memo-pad mode. It’s dead.”

  “Well, you’re typing.”

  “That’s all it’ll do. You can’t run a program from memo-pad mode.”

  “Can’t you boot it up again?” asked DeAnne.

  Step popped open the disk drive. No disk. He popped open the cartridge bay. No cartridges. “There never was a program here.”

  “What are you talking about?” said D
eAnne. “There are disks all over around here.”

  “Have you ever seen that train game before?”

  “No,” said DeAnne.

  “Well, I haven’t bought any games since Stevie’s birthday. And we sure never saw that train game at Eight Bits Inc. before I left. I’ve been all through these disks looking for the pirate ship game, and I sure didn’t see any train-game disks.”

  “Stevie’s eight years old, Step. He didn’t program it himself.”

  “DeAnne, nobody programmed it. Don’t you understand? There was no program in this machine.”

  DeAnne stood there, staring at the blue screen. “I wish you hadn’t turned it off,” she said. “I wish I could have looked at them longer.”

  “Who?” asked Step.

  “The boys. The lost boys. His friends.”

  They both looked at the screen for a while longer, and then Step sighed and stood up. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Don’t know what?”

  “What to do. What to think. Anything.”

  On Thursday, Zap got sick. It was the first time he had ever been ill, apart from his neural condition, and DeAnne and Step weren’t quite sure how to handle it. For one thing, even at almost five months of age, Zap still couldn’t consistently turn his head at will. If he was lying on his back when he threw up, there was a risk that he wouldn’t be able to turn his head to empty his mouth, and he’d choke on it, drown in it. But if he was lying on his stomach, then his face would be in it and it would get in his nose and eyes and he still might end up breathing it in. He wasn’t crying, though, and he didn’t seem to have much fever, if any. DeAnne called the doctor anyway, and he told her over the phone to do exactly what she was already doing. So she just kept holding him and rocking him, waiting for him to throw up again, or not to throw up for long enough that she could feel safe in laying him back in bed. “No formula for a while,” she told Step. “But maybe he can keep down my milk.”

  This began shortly after lunch, and continued through the afternoon. Step gave up on working, of course, and played with Robbie and Betsy between helping DeAnne and working on dinner and answering the phone and all the other things that kept coming up. Step couldn’t understand how DeAnne could live with this, never able to concentrate on something, to follow through on it without interruption.

  Stevie, of course, wasn’t part of the little-kid games, but that was no surprise anymore. The surprise was when Step passed through the family room on the way to answer the doorbell and realized that Stevie wasn’t playing computer games, either. Must still be in his room, wrapping presents, Step thought. He had borrowed the tape and scissors earlier in the day.

  It was Bappy at the door. He had a kind of sheepish grin. “I don’t mean to be a bother,” he said, “but I’m just a sentimental old fool and I was driving by a couple nights ago and I saw y’all didn’t have no Christmas lights up.”

  “We haven’t had time,” said Step.

  “Well, time is all I got these days, and I still got the lights we put up on this house last year and the year before. I bet all the old nails and such are still right where I put ’em. Y’all won’t mind if I haul my ladder out and tread your roof awhile? It doesn’t add that much to the electric, specially seeing as how there’s only a few days till Christmas.”

  “No, that’s fine,” said Step. “That’ll be nice. Where will I plug them in?”

  “There’s an outlet out back, by the utility room door. I just run me a long extension cord up over the house. Brought the same one I used last year, so I know it works.”

  “That’s great. Thanks,” said Step.

  Bappy nodded and waved, even though he was standing right there by the door, and then he was off for his pickup truck and Step closed the front door.

  Just as Step was heading for the kitchen to check the meatloaf he had made, Zap started throwing up again, proving that DeAnne’s milk wasn’t going to stay down any better than the formula had. And now Zap was getting fussy instead of just being complacent after he vomited. DeAnne checked his temperature again with the plastic forehead strip, and it was over a hundred. “I’ve got to take him to the doctor,” she said. “If he was a normal kid I’d wait, but he’s so weak.” So once they got Zap cleaned up again, Step found the phone number and called Dr. Greenwald’s office and the answering service relayed the message and a couple of minutes later he called back. DeAnne talked to him and then said, “He’s going to go back to the office just to see Zap. Isn’t that sweet of him?”

  “What if he throws up while you’re driving him there?” asked Step.

  “I didn’t think of that,” said DeAnne.

  “Do you think Mary Anne would come over and watch the kids while I drove you down?”

  “She will if she can,” said DeAnne.

  She could, and since she didn’t live far away, she would be there in only a few minutes.

  Step remembered the meatloaf. “I can’t believe the timer hasn’t rung yet,” he said.

  “Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the timer was never set.”

  “Oh, no, it must be burnt to a crisp by now,” said Step.

  “I don’t think so,” said DeAnne. “The oven isn’t on.”

  “I didn’t turn the oven on?”

  Sure enough, the meatloaf was dead raw.

  “Well, we can’t eat that,” said DeAnne.

  “We can cook it now, can’t we? Mary Anne can serve it to the kids when it comes out.”

  “No, Step,” said DeAnne. “You can’t serve meatloaf that’s been sitting around this long at room temperature.”

  “You can’t tell me the meat would go bad this fast.”

  “Not the meat,” said DeAnne. “The eggs.”

  “I forgot the eggs,” said Step.

  “If I weren’t here, Step, the kids would have salmonella all the time.”

  “Probably. So what about supper?”

  “Throw some bowls and cold cereal on the table and call the kids in to eat,” said DeAnne. “It’s the last resort of the mother in a hurry but hey, that’s me.”

  Robbie and Betsy came right in. “Stevie!” Step called again. “Come on in to supper now!” Knowing he would be obeyed, Step headed outside to open the car door for DeAnne. Just as DeAnne was settling in with Zap in her arms, Mary Anne pulled up into the driveway behind the Renault. Step waved her back, and she put her hands to the sides of her face to show her embarrassment. Then she put her car in reverse and parked out on the street just ahead of Bappy’s pickup truck. It was getting dark, and it occurred to Step that if Bappy wasn’t done with the lights, he probably ought to quit for the night. It wasn’t safe to be wandering around on the roof in the dark.

  Mary Anne came running up the driveway. “How’s little Zap doing?” she asked.

  “He’s probably not even that sick,” said DeAnne. “But we just have to be sure.”

  “If the doctor calls wondering where we are, tell him we’re on the way,” said Step. “The kids are in the middle of coating the inside of the kitchen with a layer of cornflakes, so enter at your own risk.” As Mary Anne jogged up the two steps and into the house, Step called after her, “And lock the deadbolts!”

  “I always do!” she called back.

  Dr. Greenwald didn’t seem to mind that they had taken so long getting to his office, and after poking and probing and listening, he reassured them that it was nothing all that serious. They apologized for wasting his time, but he assured them that they had been right to be concerned. “With a baby this fragile,” he said, “everything is serious.”

  When they got back home, the house was completely rimmed with white lights. “It looks like gingerbread,” said DeAnne.

  “For an impressively ugly house, it lights up real nice,” said Step.

  When they got inside, however, chaos reigned. Betsy and Robbie were standing on chairs in the kitchen, and the second DeAnne and Step got in the door they started screaming, “Spiders! Daddy longlegs!”
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  There weren’t any spiders in the kitchen that Step could see. He held the baby while DeAnne took off her coat. “Where’s Mary Anne?” asked DeAnne.

  “Is that you at the door?” shouted Mary Anne from back somewhere deep in the house.

  “Yes it is!” called DeAnne. “Where are you?”

  “In the land of the monster spiders!” shouted Mary Anne. “I could sure use some help and another roll of paper towels!”

  “You take care of Zap and the kids,” said Step to DeAnne, “and I’ll see what’s going on in the bathroom.” He ducked into the laundry room to get another roll of paper towels.

  “You don’t suppose we’re having another invasion of insects, do you?” asked DeAnne.

  “Nope,” said Step. “Spiders are arachnids.”

  In the bathroom, it looked as though someone had tried to resurface the entire room in wet paper towels, and then reconsidered and spattered ink on it. But the ink turned out to be daddy longlegs spiders, and the wet paper towels were Mary Anne’s strategy for immobilizing as many spiders as possible while stomping the ones that weren’t pinned down under the wet towels.

  Apparently Mary Anne had kept her cool quite well while she was the only adult present. But as soon as Step came into the room and she tried to explain what was happening, she began to shudder and shiver, then screeched as a daddy longlegs crawled up onto her ankle. She stamped and stamped until it fell off; Step gripped her by the shoulders and guided her out the door into the hall. “You stand there and keep watch to make sure none of them get out. Remember to look up and check the ceilings.”

  Outside the bathroom, she was able to calm down as Step methodically slaughtered spiders. “They were coming up out of the drain in the bathtub,” said Mary Anne. Step glanced into the tub and sure enough, it had been plugged with wet paper towels. “Betsy was on her little potty when she started yelling ‘pido, pido,’ and I finally realized that it wasn’t some cute bathroom word like peepee, she was saying spider.”