“No!” he said, following that word with a gasp, when the moment of revelation finally arrived. “Please!”
“Nathan, you have to go to the doctor. Who knows what kind of germs or parasites you acquired while living in the woods? We’d be irresponsible parents if we didn’t make sure you had a clean bill of health.”
“What if he gives me a shot?”
“Then you’ll thank him for his concern about your well being. Many boys who need shots don’t get them.”
“What if he wants to take out my teeth?”
“Don’t be silly. He’s not going to try to remove your teeth. We’re not going to let him hurt you. And by that, of course, I mean we’re not going to let him cause any damage that has no long-term benefit. The shot itself may sting a bit.”
Though Nathan wanted to protest some more, he also didn’t want Penny and Mary to decide that they were caring for a bratty child, so he said nothing else.
“Don’t worry,” said Mary. “If he seems overly fixated on your teeth, we’ll tell him that you, being unintelligent, glued joke teeth into your mouth, and that our next visit is to the dentist to have the adhesive removed, with great physical discomfort to be endured on your part.”
“Okay,” said Nathan.
Nathan was not good at judging people’s ages, but the doctor seemed to be the oldest man who had ever existed. He was gray and wrinkled and frail, with a neatly trimmed mustache and beard.
“Dear me,” he said, as Nathan sat down on his examination table. “Such malnutrition! A wider array of blisters I’ve never seen. I should think that he was kept locked in a basement, with nothing to do but pace day and night.”
“He is the son of our cousin,” said Penny. “He was sent to us when his parents moved to an island that did not allow children.”
“Well, I would discourage them from returning to the mainland, because I would have a word or two with them, and they would not be words that they wanted to hear. They would be stern, menacing words. This is disgraceful, simply disgraceful. I would weep if I were the type of person who believed that it is okay for a man to weep.”
“Can you help him?”
“Yes. His body has not yet degenerated to the point of no return, which is why he is still alive. I’ll give him a shot to cure his obvious case of Deadly Forest Plague, another shot to replace six of the eight vitamins his body is sorely lacking, another shot to cure the mange, another shot just in case, and, finally, a shot to tame his urge to kill.”
Penny looked shocked. “Does he really have an urge to kill?”
“All children do these days.”
“Are you sure you’re not trying to sell us an unnecessary shot?”
“I’m not going to lie to you,” said the doctor. “I very well could be and probably am. But it’s not an expensive shot, and now that I’ve instilled that sense of unease about the boy’s possible murderous impulses, it will be well worth the purchase price to remove the fear.”
“You’re right,” said Penny.
The doctor smiled. “Tell me, Nathan, do you want the shots in your arm or in your eyes?”
“My eyes?” asked Nathan, horrified.
“Yes.”
“I don’t want a shot in my eye!”
“Good. For that was a test. If you’d said that you wanted me to stick you in the eye with a hypodermic needle, I would have known that you were deranged, and would have discretely suggested that you be sent to the care of a sanitarium. So, put out your arm, and we’ll get started.”
Nathan put out his arm and the doctor gave him the shots, one after the other. The doctor actually gave him six shots instead of five, looked confused for a moment, seemed to recount in his mind, and then chuckled at his own foolishness. Nathan didn’t enjoy the shots, but he’d spent much of his time in the forest stepping on sharp twigs and accidentally poking himself with branches, so the pain was minor.
“Very good,” said the doctor. He took a wooden tongue depressor from a jar and held it up to Nathan’s mouth. “Say ahhh.”
“Ahhh.”
“Actually, I wasn’t interested in hearing the noise itself. It was really just a ruse to get you to open your mouth. So let’s try it again.”
“Ahhh,” said Nathan, opening his mouth and sticking out his tongue.
The doctor held the tongue depressor in mid-air. “Is this some kind of joke?”
“Do we look like the kind of people who would play such a joke?” asked Mary, believing it to be a suitably evasive answer.
The doctor looked wistful. “My entire life, I’ve been ashamed of the normalcy of my teeth. Each night as I brushed I thought about how wonderful it would be to be a shark or a barracuda, swimming around in the ocean with a mouth full of jagged teeth.”
“Wouldn’t the other kids have made fun of you?” Nathan asked.
“They did! In a moment of poor judgment, I told one of my classmates about this fantasy, and he thought it was ever-so-amusing. ‘Hey, everyone, let’s ridicule the warped boy who wishes he had razor-sharp teeth!’ Those were dark times for me. But I had the final laugh, because now I am a rich and successful physician, with a huge house and a thin wife, while he has a small house and a huge wife. Did you want another shot?”
“No, sir.”
“Good. You passed another test.”
“See, now that wasn’t so bad, was it?” asked Penny, as they drove away. “Doesn’t it feel good to be healthy again?”
“It does,” said Nathan. “It really does.”
If one were to draw up a comparison chart between any two months of the year that Nathan spent in the forest, and the two remaining months of his first summer with the sisters, the line for the months in the forest would be drawn near the bottom of the page, indicating sadness, while the line for the months with the sisters would be drawn near the top of the page, indicating happiness. The bottom line would be drawn in an unhappy color, perhaps dark blue, while the top line would be a bright yellow or purple.
Nathan’s bedroom was small (they’d converted a room in the back where Penny used to like to sit and read) but comfortable. He stayed at home while the sisters went to work each day, since they supposed that a boy who’d lived by himself in the forest could stay by himself in a locked house during the daytime. He was given a list of chores to do each day, and almost always did them.
Each night they played games. Mary would usually win, and Penny would pretend to be furious and storm off, and everybody would laugh. Sometimes Penny would win, in which case Mary would also be furious and storm off, except that she wasn’t pretending. When Nathan won, he would do a dance, which would be adjusted in scope and intensity depending on whether he’d won by a little or a lot.
The sisters would scold him when he did something wrong, and even punish him when necessary, but he always felt loved.
Was he happier with them than with his real mother and father? That is an unfair question. Given the opportunity to change history, he certainly would have saved the lives of his parents and gone back to excitedly anticipating his candy store visit. Yet he also enjoyed being able to go grocery shopping, to eat in inexpensive restaurants, and live beyond his front and back yard.
He would have changed the past if he could, but since he couldn’t (to the best of his knowledge), he would simply live the life he’d been given and enjoy being happier than he’d ever been.
The happiness was impacted by a sense of dread, though, as the date for his first day of school approached. He liked social interaction such as ordering hamburgers, but to be stuck in a classroom all day? With other children? Who might chant “Fangboy” at him? And who might draw mean-spirited pictures of him depicting his teeth as even larger and sharper than they were? This seemed like it could go terribly wrong.