Orient (27 page)

“What happened? Was it something you found out about in that book?”

“Don’t pretend you care.” Tommy smiled coldly. “I know why you’re up here.”

“Why am I up here?” Mills knew why he was up here. Or he thought he did. His reasons had changed, a motivational shuffle in his heart and underwear.

“How long are you going to stay in Orient?”

“Not long,” Mills lied. He planned to stay for as long as Paul would let him, but it was unwise right now to give Tommy an indeterminate timetable.

“Good. I figured.” Tommy widened the stance and took a teeth-filtered breath. “So it doesn’t matter, right?” His lip snarled. “Go on. If this is what you want, fine. I dare you.” Even desperate to perform an act that he couldn’t undo, Tommy stuck to the jingoisms of adolescence.

“Dare me?”

“Are you just going to stand there and repeat everything I say?” His voice was slick with momentum, though his body seemed frozen in place. Tommy waited with the tense posture of a man who had climbed into a lion’s pen. Mills froze in the center of the room, presumably the lion that didn’t know what to make of the unusual food source. Tommy’s voice erupted. “What? You too scared? You’re a pussy, Mills. You know that. Go on. You have my permission. There won’t be another time.”

“I don’t think I—” Mills stalled.

“Yes, you do. It’s them that don’t want you to.”

“Are you asking me—”

“Just shut up before I change my mind.”

Mills stepped forward. Tommy swiveled his chin, as if rejecting a kiss before it was even offered. The refusal broke Mills’s sympathy, and absent of sympathy, he found the courage to shove his hand against the zipper of Tommy’s pants. He felt the spongy bulge of delicate instruments. Blood rushed to his head, his vision numb and starry as if it were on some sort of time delay from reality. When he unsnapped the top button, he was shocked by how easily it opened. He consulted Tommy’s face one last time. Tommy squinted, took a breath, flicked his tongue across his overlapping front teeth, and brought his head to rest against the shelf above his desk. Mills dropped to his knees and unzipped Tommy’s pants.

Missing kids. Mills didn’t know why, as he leaned on his knees
and hooked his fingers over the waistline of Tommy’s jeans, he thought of missing children. Kids missing for years, for decades; kids who went out on bike rides or on walks to the store and never returned. Kids on milk cartons and on billboard posters in the last picture taken of them, “Have you seen this child?” though the picture was ten years old and the kid, if alive, wouldn’t look like that now. All their parents had left was a description: “Last seen wearing gray sweatpants, a green T-shirt, blue size nine Air Jordans, white socks,” as if the clothes were what the parents wanted back because they couldn’t have their child. Tommy wore blue jeans, a yellow T-shirt, black Converses, brown socks, and even as Mills lowered Tommy’s jeans he could not imagine the body underneath them.

Mills pulled the pants to Tommy’s kneecaps. Hair flurried around the bone and disappeared up his thighs. The skin turned from tan to white, like the sand on a beach when the tide went out. He lifted Tommy’s shirt to find a matching trail of hair swirling around his stomach. Mills tugged the underwear down until it fit into the valley of his jeans. Tommy’s penis bobbed like an animal that had been exposed from under a rock, moving clumsily without the protection of its hiding place. His pubic hair was a gnarled yellow, like the burnt edge of a fried egg. His penis shot upward, uncircumcised. Mills opened his mouth.

Not a missing kid at all, but a young man right in front of him, alive and well. Mills slowly rocked his head, acclimating his tongue and teeth. Tommy took over the task of holding up his shirt, the expression of his face strangely neutral, almost scientific, as he stared down. He whimpered and timidly pressed his hand on the back of Mills’s head. This is what Tommy wanted. And what Mills had wanted. He kept reminding himself of that as he dredged his glands for spit.
This is what I wanted, since that first day on the lawn
. But it was hard work, his neck muscles straining, his knees fatigued from the weight of holding himself up, his tongue feeling a slight uncertainty, which caused him to draw his lips tighter and quicken his rhythm. Mills’s foot kicked the desk chair. Sunlight found its
way across the carpet. A car alarm bleated down the block. It was hard work. It was what he wanted.

Tommy lifted his shirt over his head, until it stretched around the back of his neck but still sleeved his arms. His chest contracted with thin blue veins. Mills could taste brine mixing with his saliva, like the taste of expired Mountain Dew, and, with each breath through his nose, he smelled tinny sweat and soap. Maybe in all of the labored breathing he didn’t hear the footstep on the stairs, but Tommy did. Tommy suddenly shoved him on the shoulders, and Mills fell backward on his knees. From his seventeen years inhabiting the house, Tommy instinctively calibrated the exact amount of time between foot on stair and hand at door. He wrestled his shirt over his head, and waddled, jean-shackled, to the window, making safe distance. He stood next to the open safe, motioning Mills to get to his feet while he yanked his underwear back up around his hips.

As Mills rose, he saw Jeff Trader’s journal lying in the safe. His blood, which had traveled in so many directions in the last ten minutes, stalled in his throat.

“Can you at least give me—”

“Definitions,” Tommy hissed. “That didn’t mean—”

The bedroom door swung open, rearranging the shadows across the floor. Mills had assumed Tommy had locked the door. How could he not? A teenager who kept such minor secrets in a safe and a big secret out in the open in an unlocked room. Pam Muldoon gazed in, asking, “What is going on in here?” She looked directly at her son. His underwear was on, his T-shirt tucked into the elastic, but his jeans were still balled around his knees. Pam looked around, confused, and then saw Mills on the other side of the room. “What are you doing in my house? You are forbidden to be in my house!”

Tommy glared at him. Mills’s lips hurt when he tried to move them. He stood in the gray light of the bedroom, unsure of his place.

“Mom, calm down,” Tommy said, lifting his pants and struggling with the button. “Nothing’s going on. Jesus, can you knock first?”

“Oh, something is going on!” she shouted, her voice trembling. She stared at Mills almost hopefully, as if he might provide an answer, as if he could protect her. “What are you doing in here? What made you think you could come up here?”

“Stop it,” Tommy whined.

“I will not stop it.” Her fingers squeezed her forearms so tightly they yellowed. No, she wasn’t looking at him like he could help her. She was looking at him like someone had left a gate open at a house in California and he had run two thousand miles across the country to come sniffing around her family. “I’m thinking about your future,” she said to her son. “And this kid doesn’t have one.”

“Shut up,” Tommy screamed.

Mills was too stunned to ask for the journal now. The situation had moved past any chance of getting what he’d come for. He would be lucky to get out of the house without being hit.

“For God’s sake, why were your pants down?”

Mills knocked against Pam’s elbow as he raced out of the room. He rounded the hall and skidded down the steps, his left shoulder sliding along the lime green wall. He opened the front door, triggering the blare of an alarm, and broke into a headlong sprint. He didn’t look back, afraid he’d discover that Pam Muldoon was chasing behind him as if trying to get her son back.

He ran into Paul’s house, up the steps, and into his bedroom. He stripped off his clothes and fell against the beams of the floor. The wood took the beats of his heart, and the cement took the beats of the wood, and the soil took the beats of the cement. Kids in the world went missing every day and so did parents. Mills knew that no one was looking for him. No one was waiting for a phone call with news about where he was. So he delivered the news to himself.
I’m here. I’m alive
. He gave his excitement to the floor.

CHAPTER
15

W
hen the rain stopped, the seagulls stalked the road. They flapped their black-tipped wings on the cement and left the trees to inland birds. Mills kneeled on the sofa cushions, staring out the parlor window. He wasn’t there to bird-watch. He was scanning the front lawn for angry Muldoons to appear and pronounce their hatred of him, the violator of their blameless son. He half expected Pam or Bryan to ring the doorbell to have it out with Paul. Mills would be given fifteen minutes to pack his bag before being put on the first train back to New York. An hour passed, and then another. Paul worked on his laptop in the dining room, oblivious to the coming threat.

Paul asked him more than once why he was looking out the window. “Are you waiting for a delivery? Are there birds falling from the sky?” Paul left his chair to examine the view himself. “Seriously, Mills, enough. You’re making me nervous. There’s nothing out there.”

Mills had never told a foster parent about his sexuality. The secret swam inside of him like a great white shark that couldn’t escape the channel of his windpipe. It wasn’t that he was ashamed of being gay; in fact, it was one of the few dependable shelters he knew in the chaos of temporary homes, like a prayer he could recite every night in any unfamiliar bedroom or over any badly cooked meal. It simply made no sense to come out multiple times to multiple sets of foster families, each overcrowded kitchen falling silent
at the news, each eye staring interminably into the distance where other people’s messes began to undermine their own sense of order. So, early on, Mills toughened the parts of him that were weak, the weakest parts being the quickest to callus. He acquired the grunts and skirting eyes of secret-keepers. His plan since childhood had always been to move east to the city where no one cared what men did with each other.

He had now overshot that city by one hundred miles, and Paul stood in the center of his living room, waiting for an answer.

“I was over at Tommy’s,” he started.

“Tommy’s,” Paul said.

“Yeah, and I don’t know. His parents don’t like me.”

“I told you not to worry about the Muldoons.”

“Just for the time I’ve spent with their son. Like it’s my fault he gets into things they don’t approve of. I’m not sure there’s such thing as a bad influence, not if you want the same things.”

Mills glanced at Paul with a painful smile, and he was sure Paul knew, understood, right then. Paul let out a whistle and started clearing the dishes from lunch. Twelve oyster shells circled the plate. Paul had eaten six of them, but Mills had lost his appetite for quivering mucus.

“We’re not talking about drugs here, are we?” Paul asked. His face was an unreliable barometer.

“No, not drugs, of course not,” Mills replied. “I told you, I’m done with that.” How clean did he have to come? Should he tell Paul about the hand job he gave to a thirty-eight-year-old truck driver on a highway in Arizona? About the young, handsome hitchhiker with low-lidded eyes from Fort Bragg, California, a guy about his own age named Millford Chevern, who took his virginity in a cornfield near the Nebraska border? It was a little late for confessions, and explicit details only confused the point. Mills sat on the sofa, cupping his mouth in his hand. “I hope you know I wouldn’t consciously do anything to upset you. Or ruin your standing with your neighbors. You’ve been so kind to me.”

Paul didn’t hesitate. He rested the plate on the coffee table and leaned over the couch. “There’s no trouble with me. Got that?” he said. “There’s nothing you could do that would make you unwelcome here. So please, for the love of God, get away from the window. I’m willing to buy a television right now if you promise not to go near that window for the rest of the night.”

For a second, their eyes locked, as if they were test-driving each other for a future they were both too old to share: son to father and father to son. Paul held the stare until Mills broke it. If other details about himself had been a lie, this truth went deeper than the fact of his real name. Paul carried the dishes into the kitchen, and Mills got up to stack kindling into the fireplace. The fire ate the logs.

It was the sound of Beth’s car in the driveway that brought Mills racing back to the window. She slammed her car door and proceeded up the porch steps. Her clothes were rumpled and her skin was iridescent, glossy as porcelain left out in the rain. Still, Beth had the confident walk of someone beautiful, the stride of someone who had been told she was attractive early in life: even if the beauty eventually faded, the confidence remained. Mills opened the front door before Beth had time to ring the bell.

She gave him a tired smile. “Sorry it took me so long to come back for you,” she said. He returned the smile, aggressively festive, fearing at any moment that she’d ask for the book.

“No problem. I wasn’t just waiting around. Paul’s kept me busy. Do you want to go for another drive?”

“A drive? Where?” she asked. The sun had descended behind the roof, darkening the houses across the street.

“I was thinking Jeff Trader’s.” Mills felt the need to get far away from Youngs Road for an hour. “I want to make sure those animals have been fed.”

“I’m not sure we should go back there.”

“Please,” he whispered.

She nodded reluctantly and told him to bring a raincoat. “And the book,” she said. “I want to take it to the police. For what it’s worth.”

“There’s a problem,” he mumbled. “I don’t have it right now.” He fidgeted his foot on the welcome mat. “I’ll explain in the car.”

Beth’s jaw hung open, so wide that he could see three silver fillings. “What do you mean you don’t have it? I gave it to you to keep safe. That’s why I’m here. Mills, I need that book.”

“It’s not far from here, and I’ll get it back. Please let me explain in the car.”

She turned in irritation and headed down the porch. He studied the Muldoons’ home as he followed her, searching its windows for internal developments. A silver station wagon careened up the street, slowing in front of Paul’s driveway and stopping a few feet beyond it. The late afternoon breeze carried droplets from the Sound, cold and side-winding and unbraiding the leafless branches. Beth and Mills had almost made it to her Nissan when he heard the yawn of a screen door, and even before he lifted his head, he knew he’d find her marching toward him across her lawn.

Pam Muldoon had changed her clothes in the hours since he last saw her. Her brown hair was tied back, and she wore an Orient sweatshirt emblazoned with beach chairs and a candy-cane umbrella, the kind that must be sold in Greenport gift shops for tourists who never crossed the causeway to fact-check their purchases. Her mouth was etched with wrinkles. She pointed her finger as she advanced.

“You,” Pam Muldoon said. Beth stopped cold, and Mills knocked into her. “Don’t you walk away. I want to make things perfectly clear.”

“Hello, Mrs. Muldoon,” Beth called, trying to lighten the mood or merely resorting to the tone used to dispatch neighbors with an economy of words.

“Hello, Beth,” Pam responded, losing her mark for a moment to offer a dismissive nod. “This isn’t about you. This is about him.”

“About Mills?”

“Let’s get into your car,” he said.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Pam spat, halting a foot from the driveway. “I
don’t know what you were doing up there. But
you
. Are
not allowed. Anywhere
near my house. Or my children. Is that understood?”

Heat coursed through him. His body was standing still, but in his mind he was running away at high speed, going somewhere up above him, into the sky. The station wagon idled by the sidewalk. Mills turned to see Paul stepping onto the porch.

“That’s a little harsh,” Beth said, wrinkling her nose. “We aren’t going anywhere near your house. I’m taking him to my car.”

“Beth, I’ll ask you to keep out of this. Where is Paul? I want to talk to him about this abuse of my property and the endangerment of my children.”

“Ma’am, I think you’re overreacting,” Mills said, staring directly at her even as he drifted behind Beth’s elbow. “I’m sorry if you got the wrong idea.”

A simple apology, however halfhearted, was the worst offense. A cable snapped in the bridge of Pam Muldoon’s composure; then another cable broke, and the bridge began to crumble. She jammed her foot on the gravel, pointing her finger at his nose. Beth raised her hand and knocked Pam’s wrist aside, a gesture of protection that surprised Pam as much as it did Mills.

“There’s no need to point your finger at him,” Beth stammered, clearly also surprised by her own reaction. “He’s an adult. He doesn’t need to be treated like a child.”

“That’s precisely my point,” Pam cried. “He’s an adult, freeloading in the house next door to mine, and he’s a danger to my son. He’s a danger, and I’m not going to sit by while Tommy is victimized by some hooligan who was never given permission, not by me and not by Bryan—”

“Wait, what exactly happened?” Beth asked.

“Oh, plenty,” Pam wheezed. “Or plenty if I hadn’t been there to stop it.”

Paul’s feet lumbered down the porch. His shoulders were pitched back, a wider, taller Paul than Mills had ever witnessed, his freshly shaven lip pursed, his eyes blinded by lenses the color of frost.

“Good, there you are. Paul, I have been a very patient neighbor, but this is too much even for me.”

“I think we all need to calm down,” Paul said, placing his hand in front of Mills’s chest. Mills didn’t move a muscle. Under those muscles, rebellion was breaking loose. He felt suffocated by the mother in front of him and embarrassed by Paul’s display of protection. Was this the kind of a desperate family scenario he had avoided in his years as a foster kid—a child to talk over, a pawn at the mercy of squabbling grown-ups? “I think you need to stop yelling at my guest,” Paul said.

“Guest,” Pam repeated. Her anger was free-floating, a molecular rage collecting all of them in her storm. “I am not asking you, I’m telling you. This kid, this
adult
, has been in my home, up in the bedroom of my son, and I won’t stand for it.”

The screen door yawned again. Tommy darted from the house, striding halfway across the lawn before stopping with his arms crossed.

“Mom, stop it,” he whined, already bored by the subject, worn out by the fatigue of managing hostile forces. Mills had found him so beautiful earlier that afternoon, a rare specimen he had wanted so much that he would have given his pinkie for what they had done in his bedroom. Where had that beauty gone? Tommy was wearing the same yellow T-shirt and the same jeans that Mills had gently unbuttoned, camouflaged by the shadows of the oak trees and the gritty brick of his family’s ugly, turquoise-trimmed house. He looked like any young man haunting his own front yard, reckless in his pastime, kind when convenient, living beyond his emotional means, doomed to a life of crossed arms in the safety of his property. Mills smiled at him, trying to find the young man from before. Tommy looked at him coldly. “Mom, I was changing! Upstairs, I was changing! That’s all!”

“That’s what you might have
thought
you were doing, but I know what this kid was thinking.”

“That’s enough,” Paul said. “You have no right to come out here—”

“I have every right,” Pam shouted. “I have every right in the world. And I will call the police next time before I have to come over here again. You don’t let your
guest
get anywhere near my house or my children. Am I making myself clear?”

The doors of the silver station wagon opened. Sarakit Herrig climbed out, squinting up at the driveway as her two youngest children, pretty and fragile with plump lips and boneless cheeks, got out of the backseat. They were wearing fluorescent sweat suits, hot pinks and four-alarm oranges, hugging bright green backpacks. Their black hair was cut in the shape of cereal bowls. The smaller boy was crying. “I want to go to the mall! I don’t want to play with Theo. Please please please.”

“We will go to the mall this weekend,” Sarakit promised, pulling her youngest by the arm. Her attention was caught by the four figures huddled against the side of the yard.

“You’re on my property,” Paul whispered to Pam. “Please don’t come onto my property. Not if you’re going to behave like this.”

Pam’s face melted, a tight ball of newsprint slowly losing its shape.

“I’m a mother,” she said in anguish. “I have three children that I’ve raised in this house next to yours for twenty years. I helped your mother as much as I could when she was sick. This isn’t Manhattan, Paul. You’ve lived in the city too long to realize what this neighborhood means. He can do whatever he wants in the rest of the world. I have no problem with that. I don’t interfere with the goings-on of strangers somewhere else. But not on my property. Not with my son. Do you even know where he comes from?”

Paul responded in a voice that could have been asking for a stick of butter. “I’m sorry you feel that way. You’ve said your piece. Now please step off my property.”

Theo ran from the screen door, bypassing by his older brother as he charged his play dates with a stick. Sarakit’s two boys shrunk from the impending blows. Pam lifted her hands up, realized that Sarakit was watching, then stepped theatrically across the division
of gravel and grass. In that moment, Mills understood the meaning of private property: this side is mine and that side is yours. On this side, he was protected; on the Muldoons’ side he could be arrested or shot. It was as if all his rights evaporated as soon as the gravel ended and the grass began.

As Pam retreated she assumed the posture of a harried mother. She approached Sarakit and the three children on the sidewalk and palmed Theo’s head for stability. Tommy had disappeared.

“That didn’t go well,” Paul said, shaken. He looked at Beth. “I’m sorry about that. I suppose she’ll be asking for background checks on anyone I invite into my house in the future.”

Beth shrugged. “The Muldoons were like that with my mom too. Once they decided they didn’t like her, they just went after her until she moved.”

Mills no longer wanted to drive to Jeff Trader’s house. He no longer wanted to stay in Orient. Maybe the best solution was a train ticket back to New York.