Jaden Baker (45 page)

Where there had been twenty-seven men there was now one, lying on his back on the second floor and laughing harder than he ever had.

Not surprisingly, no one returned. Seth was worried that Joseph would learn of the haunted Seattle warehouse, rumors the homeless would sure to spread. Rumors that may expand beyond Seattle. But it was a necessary risk, as he had agreed yesterday. He and Seth wondered how Jaden was first discovered six years ago; their best guess were the police reports filed by CPS. If their theory was correct, Joseph’s organization had access to law enforcement files.

Rumors of the haunted building would disseminate throughout the homeless community, a warning to anyone who didn’t want to lose their head to the Trench Coat Ghost. To be safe, Jaden would keep the door locked when he was not coming or going.

Most of the items left behind were garbage. Jaden siphoned everything into hefty bags he bought at a grocery store. Once filled, he deposited them throughout the street, filling up dumpsters. PK made clean up a breeze, and he found himself enjoying the ability for a second time.

He didn’t like the idea of sleeping on the bottom floor, something about being upstairs felt safer and more secure. If someone wanted to come after him, they would have to come up a level, and the third floor above would serve as a buffer. Since the stairs had rotted away years ago, he would have to get a ladder. Coming and going by fire escape would get old.

Bleaching and scrubbing the floor took two days. There was one toilet on the ground floor but it did not flush. There was no shower either—why would there be? It has been an old warehouse, not an apartment complex. A lot of work lay ahead of him. The first task was securing the building.

During the nights, Jaden collected heavy things, like rocks, dislodged bricks, and discarded phonebooks, and put them in the abandoned crates and boxes. When he had a couple dozen, he used them to block the door, so anyone who tried entering would be met with a wall of heavy obstacles. As for the cellar door on the roof, Jaden chained it from the inside. It was a temporary solution.

“I need to borrow a truck,” Jaden said to Seth as he duct-taped hefty bags over the downstairs windows of the building. “Only for a day so I can get the supplies I need. I’ll return it as soon as I’m done with it and wipe it clean,” he said, talking himself into it. “I saw one for sale a few blocks up.”

“That old blue one with the cracked windows?” Seth asked.

“Yes,” Jaden said.

“Do you think it even drives?”

Jaden shrugged.

Stealing a car in the city where he wanted to live required extra caution. As he lay in his sleeping bag on the floor that night, Jaden made a list of things he needed for the building: wood planks for the rotted floor, bricks for the ground floor windows, tools, and food supplies. But he didn’t know how much everything would cost.

The library was helpful. He found a fourth grade math book and caught up on his multiplication and division whenever he needed to sit and rest from cleaning. No formal ID meant no library card, so Jaden copied formulas and problems from the book, then practiced every day. The math was useful: he calculated the floor area of the building (1,100 square feet) and would be able to make accurate estimates for general costs.

October drew to an end, bringing a colder and wetter November. Jaden wore the corduroy trench coat, freshly washed at a Laundromat, as he walked to the truck a few blocks away. Either the truck was worthless because it didn’t run, or the owners were tired of showing it. It sat in a grassy lot, alone and unattended.

Jaden popped the lock and sat on the torn bench seat, hoping the engine would turn over. It revved, whining in protest, then finally came to life. The truck wobbled severely, making it difficult to see out the side mirrors.

He drew a baseball cap down to his eyebrows, hiding his young face. Putting the truck in drive, and ignoring his churning stomach, Jaden eased on the gas and the truck lurched forward. Jaden breathed a little easier, but the hardest part was yet to come.

Jaden knew nothing about building. He parked the truck at a hardware and lumber store and grabbed a heavy duty cart, heading toward the aisle with the wood. The tall shelves of lumber dwarfed him. Jaden felt smaller by his idiocy. Pine, cedar, oak. What was the difference?

A older man with an orange vest came and stood beside him. First he looked at the wood, then at Jaden. His name badge identified him as “Ron” but he resembled “Santa.”

“Whatcha need?” he asked.

Jaden eyed, then sidestepped him. Maybe he would buy the cheapest wood, whatever got him out of here fastest.

“You okay kid?” Ron asked.

Jaden nodded without glancing at him, examining his rough sketch of the building. Ron was the first person to pay attention to him since escaping. It was unnerving.

“Whatcha got there?”

What Jaden wanted more than anything was for Ron to get the hell away from him. It might take a minute or two to figure this out, but he didn’t need help.

Jaden didn’t answer Ron, instead he scribbled numbers on a legal pad, trying to calculate the amount of wood he would need, and how much it would cost. Jaden’s lack of response piqued Ron’s interest in him. He did not give up and go away as Jaden hoped.

“Shouldn’t you be in school, young man?”

“Shouldn’t you be in the North Pole?” Jaden accidentally asked aloud. To cover his blushing face, he wheeled the cart around Ron and in front of a stack of pine planks.

“Ho ho, never heard that one before,” said Ron, following Jaden to the pine. “Where’re your parents?”

“At home,” he lied.

“Yeah, where’s that?” Ron asked.

“Like I’d tell you. They sent me here to get wood, we’re redoing part of a floor.”

Ron crossed his arms and fiddled with his beard. “What’s your name?”

“Heathcliff,” he said, recalling a book of Molly’s, one of the last he’d read. If Ron was familiar with classic literature, Heathcliff was a warning to fuck off. “We need 100 square feet. I’m home-schooled,” he added to stave off suspicion. Half of what he said was partly true.

Most of the second floor was sound, but yesterday he had noticed a gap that was nearly rotted through, probably from water damage. If he was going to live on the second floor, the wood had to be replaced. He didn’t want to fall through the floor and break a leg.

Truth or not, Ron was sold. He asked Jaden a number of questions about the remodeling project, which Jaden answered as best he could given his limited knowledge. Thankfully the integral beams, which held the planks, were stable. Ron piled wood into Jaden’s cart, and they sawed it to the correct measurements.

“Your dad got tools?” Ron asked.

Thinking quickly, he said: “Yes, but I don’t have my own.”

So Ron and Jaden got a hammer, nails, measuring tape, and a saw. Jaden always selected the cheapest tools Ron recommended, believing his advice that if Jaden picked the absolute cheapest, he would be back for replacements.

Jaden gulped when he doled out cash for the purchase, but tried not to appear worried. He needed a secure place to live. It was a necessary expense, for his safety.

Ron helped him to his truck, despite Jaden insisting he could do it himself. Ron had gotten chatty about his own building projects, and told Jaden he constructed a massive deck for his best friend a few years back. Decks were trickier than they looked, he added.

“You sure this truck will carry the load?” Ron asked as he strapped the wood inside, which stuck out the back, over the tailgate.

No he wasn’t, but Jaden would “help” the wood on the way to his building.

“Yes,” Jaden said. He left without waving or saying goodbye to Ron and drove to his new home.

Giving Ron the fake name Heathcliff got him thinking. People in classic literature named their estates. As he drove, Jaden tried thinking of clever names to call his new domain. Clever didn’t come. In the end he settled on Em House, thinking of Molly.

The journey to Em House was a nervous one, but the truck made it. He unloaded the wood then made a second trek to the thrift store, where he picked up a three-legged (originally it had four) coffee table, an old but comfortable couch, ice chest, a sack of warm clothes that fit him, mismatched plates and bowls, and flatware. At the local grocery store, he loaded his cart with ice and as much food as he could fit.

After returning the truck to its for sale spot, Jaden walked to Em House to set up his new home. He had already torn and ripped the rotted wood from the second floor, so he started nailing in the new wood as soon as he got there. After a while the hammer lay unused on the ground floor, as it was easier and faster to shoot the nails into the wood. Where it may have taken most people days to complete the project, Jaden finished in an afternoon. He used a stack of crates to climb up and down between floors. He had forgot to purchase a ladder.

All his things found their way up to the second floor as if carried by invisible movers. The new wood gave Em House a fresh smell, and Jaden smiled as he breathed it in. He set up the ice chest and rudimentary kitchen on the far wall, and put his living room on the opposite side. His sleeping bag lay on the couch for now.

It wasn’t an elite condo, but Jaden saw the makings of his own place coming together before his eyes. It made him proud.

On his way home from the public bathroom, his mind bounced and blundered over the long list of things still left to do, as it had been since leaving San Francisco. Figuring out how to install a shower into Em House had priority. But there were many projects needing completion, and the biggest, acquiring a job, was urgent.

His thoughts were interrupted by a tiny, desperate sound coming from an alleyway.

There was no one there. Yet Jaden was sure he heard a noise. He eased a dumpster from the wall and saw two yellow pinprick eyes looking up at him. The creature gave a soft
mew
, high-pitched and frightened.

Kneeling slowly to keep from frightening him, Jaden reached for the kitten. It backed away. After sniffing his fingers, it put its little tail up in the air and walked into Jaden’s hand.

He used the dim light from a streetlamp to examine the tiny kitten. It was black with one white dot on its chin. It mewed continuously as Jaden held it up so he could determine what it was. A boy.

The cat shivered in the cold. It couldn’t be more than six weeks old, alone in the alley, no sign of an adult cat around, and no brother or sister kittens either. Jaden tucked him in his coat, where his mews were muffled. He made sure to hold the kitten safely as he walked to Em House. Home.

Jaden opened the large door, then locked it shut. Once he climbed the crates to his second floor, the crates floated and barricaded themselves in front of the door. He sat on his couch and opened a can of tuna on his three-legged coffee table, stabilized with old books and magazines instead of a leg. As soon as the can’s top popped, the cat scrambled out of Jaden’s coat, jumped on the table, and scarfed the tuna like he hadn’t eaten in days.

The cat arched his back as Jaden stroked it. He purred so loudly it sounded like a growl, and after he finished the tuna, he hopped onto Jaden’s knee, crawled up to his face, and head-butted him, eyes closed in contentment.

The kitten’s small affection, licking Jaden’s nose with his rough tongue, plunged his insides into ice water, sucking the air out of his being. Reality caught up with him. For weeks he had been powered by the next thing, his list of tasks that needed completing, one more thing to do.

He had given little thought to what had happened. Intellectually he knew he had escaped, but only now, weeks later, did it feel real. This kitten, who kneaded his coat collar with its tiny paws, was a version of himself: small and afraid— thoroughly alone.

The world had gone on without him, not caring that somewhere in the bowels of the earth, a boy was captive to men seeking power for themselves. To mine his power, they dug deep, carving out his sense of humanity, leaving a shell of the person he had once been. Pride, dignity, even his personality had been brutalized, torn from him and dissected under a microscope. Every inch of him had been flayed and destroyed. Scars that would never heal crawled like webs from the back of his neck to his calves.

Corporeal sadness pierced him like a dull blade, hacking at his insides. Unable to cry, forever fearful of retribution for shed tears, he dry-heaved sobs, sucking in breaths like he was at the bottom of an ocean, with only a paper bag of air to keep him alive. The pressure kept building, but no tears leaked, dripped, or burst from behind his eyes.

Alarmed by his savior’s sudden affliction of grief, the cat jumped back to the table and licked the can.

Sessions of torture raced before his mind. His unanswered screams for help echoed back to him. Jaden curled into the couch, his head buried in the cushion as his gnarled hands clawed at the upholstery.

Making himself a home—how ridiculous it seemed now. Shopping at the lumber store, a home-schooled teenager in his first car, out to run chores for parents who didn’t know him, to build a house alone, separated from the world—that was all his fantasy. It was a pathetic display of his desperation, clinging to a life that was not there.