Sheri Joseph was my dissertation advisor, so we have a special kind of friendship. Fortunately, it’s no feat to genuinely love her writing for itself, and not because I feel obligated to! Sheri’s books and the characters within them have touched me since I was her student eleven(!) years ago, when I read Bear Me Safely Over for the first time. Here’s an excerpt from her new novel, about a boy recently restored to his family after a three-year abduction.
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Down in the kitchen, Lark peppered her mother with questions. “It’s still just an idea,” Marlene said, aiming this at Jeff, who peered in wary silence from behind a coffee mug, “but I think we could go very soon. Say in six weeks, right after Christmas.” Caleb slumped in the doorframe as if unsure these matters pertained to him. “That way you can start school there in January, both of you. At that Cloud Forest School of your grandmother’s you’re always talking about!” Marlene sent Jeff a glance that said see, she’d been listening to Lark, and Lark would be on her side. “We’d stay, I don’t know, as long as necessary. We could just see how we liked it.”
Jeff glared at Marlene’s display of unreasonable enthusiasm. “As I have said, there are a lot of other things we’d have to consider, your mother and I—”
“Like what?” Marlene crossed her arms, crossed her ankles, tipped her head, as if no argument could disturb her perfect serenity. “The house will be fine. You can consult for Harry long-distance.”
“I’ll have speaking engagements. It’s really not feasible, for us, to be that far away. And besides, it’s a foreign country. What do you really know about this place?”
Only Lark knew much. As a distraction, her parents had encouraged her friendship with her grandmother and her obsession with the cloud forest without ever paying much attention to what she said about the country. But, Marlene argued, what more did they need to know? It was far. They had family there. Hilda’s little mountain town was as safe and modernized as could be expected of any remote place south of the border, and living was cheap. There were no scary diseases; the water was even drinkable.
“Dad,” Lark asked when they were alone, “are we really going?” He’d worn a look through most of this that meant I’m not going to say it but your mother’s gone crazy.
He puffed out his cheeks, helpless. “I don’t know. Your mother seems determined.” That meant not no, shocking her with the sudden reality. They were going to Costa Rica.
Caleb could not be roused to any sort of excitement, though their relocation seemed fine by him. He’d go if they told him to, be content with it if they wanted him to be—as if all his own desires were on permanent hold, awaiting their expectations, or left back in Washington state in that boy he had been.
Nick Lundy.
Nicky. He corrected Lark once when she said “Nick,” the name they used on the news she wasn’t supposed to watch.
If, beside him in the glow of the gameroom TV, she asked a question, he’d likely ignore it. Even something simple and obvious, like “Is that Jolly?” when the news showed a picture of Charles Lundy, and he would stare into the screen as if he hadn’t heard. It was hard to tell what the man’s face made him think. Looking at it, he didn’t seem scared or sad or angry or even like he was necessarily seeing it. She tried declarations instead, like “He doesn’t look that scary,” or “He looks kind of nice,” because Caleb might speak if she was wrong. If he was silent, she’d take it for agreement, and it was like they understood each other on this level just below expression.
Lundy had given a statement when arrested, which was printed sometimes on the screen and read by a newscaster: “I took this boy from a bad situation. I did not know he’d been kidnapped previously from his real parents. I lied only to protect him. I have been a father to him, and I love him dearly as a son. He loves me. I have done everything possible to give him a good home. Ask him and he will tell you.”
Well? she asked him with her eyes. There he sat, right next to her, telling her nothing.
On TV, people had theories for every little thing. Sometimes they acted like what Lundy said was a lie, and sometimes the opposite. Lark, gathering the crumbs Caleb dropped, thought the truth was somewhere in the middle. For instance, on TV they sometimes argued that Lundy was not only part of the mysterious pedophile ring but “the worst of them”: he was the doctor who treated all the kids, so no one would get caught by going to a regular doctor. And she had seen with her own eyes some of Caleb’s scars—on the palm of one hand, inside his right arm, above his left knee, on his scalp—stitched, he told her, by Jolly.
“How did you get cut?” she asked him. He was sitting at the end of her canopy bed, tracing the white line in the heel of his hand. Closed off in her room, he was more likely to tell her things.
“I did it myself.”
“How?”
“Different ways. This was on a window.”
“Why?”
He paused to consider before answering. “I wanted to get stitches.”
A pedophile ring, in Lark’s mind, was a dozen or so slobbery cartoon men sitting in a circle. The boy—also a kind of cartoon stick figure, not quite Caleb—might be caught in the middle of the ring like an animal in a trap. Or he might be off in another room marked with a red cross, sitting on a table before a man in a white coat who was kind of nice.
On TV, they said Caleb Vincent was brainwashed, like a cult victim, fed on sugar and drugs, that whatever the pedophiles told him he would believe to be true. Their mother had supplied a hint of support for this, mentioning a few times that Caleb would not be testifying in court because of some problem with what he remembered. “If y’all don’t even want his story,” she’d said to Agent Abernathy, while Lark was eavesdropping, “where does his story go?” She was complaining, in a way, but also glad, because it meant they were free to leave the country. Caleb could have sessions with his F.B.I. therapist by phone twice a week. Otherwise, whatever had happened would be in the past and far behind.
By the end of November, when the fever had calmed and TVs could be safely on in the house, it was easier to be caught by surprise, then snagged, flipping channels, by his sudden face—maybe the boy with ragged cropped hair on the BMX bike, stopped at a car window, or by some Doctor Somebody, speaking into the camera about Something Syndrome and you’d realize after a few minutes that he was talking about Caleb. “It’s unlikely a boy like this will ever be completely normal or able to fit in with other kids his age. Often a sociopathic tendency—”
The set clicked off—their mother with the remote, taking the third spot on the sofa beside Lark. If you listen to those lies, you’ll start believing them, she had told them both often enough. She wasn’t mad, though. She folded Lark in her arms, and Lark snuggled against her, luxuriating in her new mother’s warm, abundant presence.
“I know,” she said, “it’s hard, to turn that stuff off.” She was talking to both of them, but mainly to Caleb at the sofa’s opposite end. “Even when you know it’s just people making noise, making stuff up, filling up time on the TV. People who know nothing at all about you. But you still want to know. What’s being said, what other people might hear and be thinking about you.”
Caleb blinked, listening, the smallest shift of his head close enough to a nod to count. Marlene squeezed Lark closer, kissed her ear. “But where we’re going, none of that will matter. There won’t be American news. You’ll seem strange to them because you’re an American, nothing more. And you’ll be free there to be anything. Anything you want to be.”
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