My Cousin's Keeper (19 page)

“And you're a bully,” I managed to reply. “Leave Bon alone.”

Mason walked away, a group of boys from our class falling into step with him.

“Hurry up, children!” Mrs. Barnes called from behind us. When I turned to look, it seemed as though she were standing guard against invading forces. Some of the television crew had walked back to their van, but I could see the camera now being aimed at Television Mike, and I could hear the vague sound of his voice in the distance.

Bon had gathered up his torn pages and reached out for his precious book.

I didn't hand it over. “I can help you fix it,” I reassured him.

“How?” he demanded. I could hear leftover anger in his voice that minutes before had shouted,
Nobody is saying the right thing.

“There'll be good tape in the library for fixing book pages,” I told him. “Ms. Tabor won't mind us borrowing it.”

His shoulders were heaving, and I saw that one hand was clenched into a fist. I put my own hand on his shoulder. “Bon, it's OK now. I can help you.”

He let me carry his book and, at a table in the library, watched as I carefully, steadily reattached the pages. They were pages full of the things I had become used to — diagrams, scribbled writing, something that could have been a treasure map. And the last one that I reattached was a busy, chaotic battle scene where horses collided and swords were raised.
Our resolve was tested by the opponents of good.

I read this messy scrawl of writing several times before looking sideways at Bon.

“This is about us,” I said. “It's not Kieran the Brave or Bon the Crusader. It's us right now, and everything that's happening. Everything here at school.”

Bon wiped a hand across his face. “They were talking trash about Julia. They didn't really know her.
I
knew her better than anyone.”

I didn't reply.

“I know Julia told you that you should look after me. But you don't have to, you know.” Bon pointed at the library window with the end of his pen. “You should be out there.” He took his book, turned past the damaged pages, and stared at a fresh, blank space. “You should be with your friends.”

I looked in the direction his finger had waved, and, through the library window, I saw Mason, Lucas, Brendan, Ethan — most of the boys from my class — as they played and called to one another in the quadrangle outside. They were passing a ball between them, flicking it from hand to hand, laughing and joking around. I saw Mason turn and seem to glance in our direction, then make a comment that the others seemed to agree with: something to do with Bon and me.

I sighed. There were probably a lot of words that would be left unsaid, things to do with Mason and Lucas and their best friends, which I knew didn't include me.

“No,” I told Bon. “It's OK. I don't know who my friends are, really.”

“You pushed Mason,” Bon said. “I saw that.”

“Yes. I had to. He deserved it,” I replied wearily.

“And you rescued my book. Thank you.”

I watched as Bon's picture became a landscape, a hillside of tall and mysterious trees. On the horizon lay a craggy mountain range, and in between, the rooftops of houses, the spire of a church, traces of chimney smoke. It almost could have been a view of our town, the view I remembered from the window of the hotel room where Bon and his mom had stayed. Except the drawing had a trace of fantasy or fairy tale: the houses looked centuries older, and the landscape looked creepier than the fields and hills that surrounded our town. I could almost forget I was here in the school library, that there were kids all around the place reading, talking, playing board games. That Ms. Tabor was over at her desk unloading a box of new books and talking with a couple of little kids.

Thinking about the television crew disrupted my little daydream. “Bon,” I said, “why didn't Julia tell someone? About her mom taking her and hiding her from her dad?”

Bon's pen stopped at the end of a curved line of black ink. He stared hard at his picture and then at me before resuming his drawing.

“Why were you the first person she told?” I asked.

“Julia was scared of her mom.
I
was scared of her mom when she got into our car that day.” Bon lifted his pen away from the page. “Julia said to me later that on the day her mom took her, everything seemed all planned out, because suddenly her mom had a different hairstyle and a different car. She had Julia's hair cut differently, too. There was another name on the documents Julia saw once or twice; someone else's address. Julia's last name got changed.”

“So she was never Julia Barrett?” My voice was close to a whisper.

“No,” Bon replied quietly, resuming his drawing, his mouth curved in a small smile. “She was Julia
Mitchell
.”

It took me a moment to absorb the sound of a different name. “Julia told you all of this?”

“Yes. It started when we gave them a lift. It was the first thing Julia said to me.
So who are you guys running away from?
She whispered that to me in the backseat, once our moms had started talking, because she could see all our things packed into the car, as though we were moving. I didn't know what to say to her, and then she didn't say anything for a long time. But Julia was listening to my mom talking about not being able to look after me anymore. She kept looking at me, and I could see she was really sad about something. We began to whisper things about places we had stayed and what we liked and didn't like. But it was only when we reached town and found the trailer park that Julia whispered the most important thing.
I was taken
from my dad two years ago. I shouldn't be with my mom.
We were alone in the car while our moms were in the park office, paying for the campers. At first I thought she was telling me a story. But when I knew she really was in trouble, I didn't know how to help.”

“What about her dad? Wasn't he already looking for her?”

“Probably. But he was working in different places, and Julia couldn't remember his phone number. She said to me that her mom's parents met up with them a few times in different places. She thinks they were helping her mom keep her. They were coming to pick up the car after it broke down. They would get it fixed and back to Julia's mom so they could leave again.” Bon stopped drawing. “Julia's mom got jobs here and there, stuff like cleaning hotel rooms or doing dishes in places. And if people asked, she'd tell them Julia was being homeschooled. Julia didn't get much of a chance to be with other people. But once she was in our car, once she got here, she was tired of being a scared little kid who did everything her mom told her. She wanted to come to school again. She bought herself the bike.”

“I was there,” I said. “At the garage sale where she found it.”

“Julia got into really big trouble,” Bon said, “because she'd gone off for a walk without her mom knowing, and then come back riding a bike that she'd paid for with money from her mom's purse. Her mom got really mad. She dragged Julia into their camper at the trailer park.” Bon paused and took a deep breath. “I heard them arguing about it. Julia's mom hated that bike, the same as she hated Julia being at school. She didn't want her talking to anyone. Except Julia had already been talking to me. And finally she told Mrs. Gallagher what her mom had done. So now,” Bon said, his voice quietly pleased, “Julia is back with her dad. Her mom would have had a good,
bad
surprise when the police came to visit. I'm glad about that part. I'm glad her dad found her, too.” His shoulders dropped and he added, “But not that Julia has gone. I liked how we talked to each other. I miss that.”

Bon looked at his drawing. I watched him write a sentence beneath his picture, his scrawly writing clearer somehow. Was I getting used to reading it?
The forces of evil were overwhelmed and life in the town gradually returned to normal.

My arm and elbow were on the table. I laid my head down and looked sideways at the library and at Bon as he drew. “Have you drawn any inventions lately?” I asked.

Bon closed his book. “Not for a while.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. The one new thing I thought of I haven't figured out how to draw yet.”

“What is it?”

He took a breath. “It's like . . . GPS, except to find people — or to find just one person. You key in their details — their name, age, appearance, last known address — and the person finder tells you where to locate them, where they've moved to.” After explaining it to me in an almost-too-quick voice, Bon stopped himself and looked away, embarrassed. “Something like that, anyway.”

I waited. “To find Julia?” I asked. To myself I thought,
And Connor
.

“Yes,” he said, looking back at his picture. “And Sam. I would use it to find him as well.”

I sat up again, remembering who he meant, the person who had once been my aunt's boyfriend — the only one Bon had liked, as far as I could tell. “Why?” I asked.

“Because he was nice. Because I did drawings for him when I was little, and he always said how good they were.” Bon slapped his book shut and then reopened it at the first page. “Because he gave me this.”

In the background, I heard the bell ringing for the end of lunchtime recess. Bon pointed at the inside front cover. In all the times I had snuck looks at whatever Bon was drawing, I had never taken much notice of this part of the book. I saw an adult's neat writing, which Bon traced a finger gently across. “There,” he said softly, and I followed the path of his finger, silently reading.

To Bon — be brave and determined, nurture your talent, draw your dreams. Sam Irvine
.

“Are you two staying the night?” Ms. Tabor called across to us, because suddenly we were the last kids left in the library, and now we were going to be late to our class lines.

“When did Sam give you this?” I asked.

“When I was seven. But I didn't start drawing in it until I was nearly nine.” Bon paused. “After I visited your house, that time it was your dad's birthday party. When I saw the toy castle in your bedroom, I knew what sort of pictures I had to draw. And when I met Julia, I knew what sort of story I had to tell.”

Bon's mom called.

It was me that picked up the phone when it rang in Nan's kitchen, and my
hello
was met with a moment of weird silence. And then came her voice: “Is that you, Bon?”

“No,” I replied. I could feel the shock waves in my voice. “It's me, Aunt Renee. Kieran.”

“Oh . . .” Another silence. “Is Bon there at the moment?”

“He's outside. He and Nan are getting the laundry in. It's going to rain soon.”

“I guess you think . . .” she began, and I could hear her take a deep breath before she continued. “I guess you think I'm a pretty bad parent.”

“No. No, I don't. Aunt Renee?”

“Yes?”

“Are you coming to visit Bon?”

“I don't know. Do you think he'd like to see me?”

“Yes. I think he'd like that a lot.”

There was another silence. I realized I was walking in small circles around the kitchen floor, and I nervously wondered what I could say next. “Would you like me to go get Bon for you?”

“Yes. And Kieran . . . ?”

“Yes?”

“Thank you.”

I went outside and swapped places with Bon, and in the minutes afterward, I glanced up at the kitchen window once or twice to see how the phone call might be going. Bon wasn't walking in nervous circles like I had been; he stood quite still at the kitchen window — watching us, but talking with his mom.

I looked at Nan, who said, “It's good she called. She needs to do it more regularly.” She smiled to herself then, and she reached for the last clothespinned shirt on the line. It gave me time to wonder that my aunt had actually called me by my name, that she had done the same for Bon. That she sounded calm. And that
thank you
might have been for more than simply fetching Bon inside.

Bon tapped the window glass, pointing at the phone and then at Nan, who left me to carry the laundry basket upstairs. I came inside in time to hear her say to my aunt, “But don't hesitate to give Bon a call more often. He hasn't heard from you in more than a month. He needs to hear from you at regular intervals, and he needs to see you, too. We all do.”

It was enough for me to know from Nan afterward that Aunt Renee was out of state again, that she was sharing a house with friends and had found a part-time job. And that, yes, she would drive up to visit Bon if she could take time away from work. I didn't want to ask Nan about whether Aunt Renee was taking her medication, but I wondered whether it was making things different for her.

“Are you OK?” Nan asked Bon afterward.

“Yes,” he answered. His voice seemed calm and matter-of-fact, and I couldn't tell whether he was happy or sad about the phone call. I couldn't tell whether he missed his mom or not, and I even worried a little that he was wishing to be with her, rather than here with us. “I might go do some drawing and writing,” he simply said, and spent a long while that afternoon by himself with his book of maps and inventions.