He let that thought sit in silence for a moment. “Didn’t work real well,” he said. “Did it?”
“Didn’t,” Jeremy muttered, head hanging. Jeremy swiped his hair back with both hands. “I was scared, all right? I thought you’d beat hell out of me.”
“Did I give you that impression? Did I ever give you that impression?”
Jeremy shook his head and didn’t look at him.
“I thought the story was you were having a good time. Best time in your life. Was that it? Just having such a great time we can’t be bothered with telling me the damn truth, is that the way things were?”
“I didn’t want to spoil it!” Jeremy’s voice broke, somewhere between twelve-year-old temper and tears. “I didn’t want to lose you, Fletcher. I didn’t want it to go bad, and I didn’t know how mad you’d be and I didn’t know you’d beat up on Chad, and I didn’t know they’d search the whole ship for it!”
Fletcher flung himself down to sit on the rumpled bed.
“I didn’t know,” Jeremy said in a small voice. “I just didn’t know.”
Fletcher let go a long breath, thinking of what he’d lost, what he’d thought, who it was now that he had to blame. The kid. A kid. A kid who’d latched onto him and who sat there now trying to keep the quiver out of his chin, trying to be tough and take the damage, and not to be, bottom line, destroyed by this, any more than by a dozen other rough knocks. He didn’t see the expression; he felt it from inside, he dredged it up from memory, he felt it swell up in his chest so that he didn’t know whether he was, himself, the kid that was robbed or the kid on the outs with Vince, and Linda, and him, and just about everyone of his acquaintance.
Jeremy couldn’t change families. They couldn’t get tired of him and send him back for the new, nicer kid.
Jeremy couldn’t run away. He shared the same quarters, and Jeremy was always on the ship, always would be.
The history Jeremy piled up on himself wouldn’t go away, either. No more than people on this ship forgot the last Fletcher, shutting the airlock, and bleeding on the deck.
Jeremy was in one heavy lot of trouble for a twelve-year-old.
And he, Fletcher, simply Fletcher, was in one hell of a lot of pain of his own. Personal pain, that had more to do with things before this ship than on this ship.
What Jeremy had shaken out of him had nothing to do with Jeremy.
He stared at Jeremy, just stared.
“You said you weren’t going to give me hell,” Jeremy protested.
“I didn’t say I wasn’t going to give you hell. I said I wasn’t going to throw you out of here.”
“It’s my cabin!”
“Oh, now we’re tough, are we?” If he invited Jeremy to ask him to leave, Jeremy would ask him to leave. Jeremy had to. It was the nature of the kid. It was the stainless steel barricade a kid built when he had to be by himself.
“Jeremy.” Fletcher leaned forward on his bunk, opposite, arms on his knees. “Let me tell you. That stick’s sacred to the hisa, not because of what it is, but because it is. It’s like a wish. And what I wish, Jeremy, is for you to make things right with JR, and I will with Chad, because I was wrong. You may have set it up, but I was wrong. And I’ve got to set it straight, and you have to. That’s what you do. You don’t have to beat yourself bloody about a mistake. The real mistake was in not coming to me when it happened and saying so.”
“We were having a good time!” Jeremy said, as if that excused everything.
But it wasn’t in any respect that shallow. He remembered Jeremy that last day, when Jeremy had had the upset stomach.
Bet that he had. The kid had been scared sick with what had happened. And trying, because the kid had been trying to please everybody and keep his personal house of cards from caving in, to just get past it and hope the heat would die down.
House of cards, hell. He’d made it a castle. He’d showed up, taken the kids on a fantasy holiday; he’d cared about the ship’s three precious afterthoughts.
He knew. He knew what kind of desperate compromises with reality a kid would make, to keep things from blowing up, in loud tempers, and shouting, and a situation becoming untenable. That was what knotted up his own gut. Remembering.
“It wouldn’t have made me leave,” he said to Jeremy.
“Yes, it would,” Jeremy said. And he honestly didn’t know whether Jeremy had judged right or wrong, because he was a kid as capable as Jeremy of inviting down on himself the very solitude he found so painful—the solitude he’d ventured out of finally only for Melody and Patch.
And been tossed out of by Satin. To save Melody, Patch and himself.
Maybe the stick had a power about it after all.
He reached across and put his hand on Jeremy’s knee. “It’ll come right,” he said.
“It was that Champlain that took it,” Jeremy said. “I know it was. That skuz bunch—”
“Well, they’re a little more than we can take on. Nothing we can do about it, Jeremy. Just nothing we can do. Forget it.”
“I can’t forget it! I didn’t want to lie, but it just got crazier and crazier and everybody was mad, and now everybody’s going to be mad at me.”
He administered an attention-getting shake to Jeremy’s leg. “By now everybody’s just glad to know. That’s all.”
“I hurt the ship! I hurt you! And I was scared.” Jeremy began to shiver, arms locked across his middle, and the look was haunted. “I was just scared.”
“Of what? Of me being mad? Of me knocking you silly?” He knew what Jeremy had been scared of. He looked across the five years that divided them and didn’t think Jeremy could see it yet.
Jeremy shook his head to all those things, still white-faced.
Afraid of being hit? No.
Afraid of having everything explode in your face, that was the thing a kid couldn’t put words to.
It was the need of somehow knowing you were really, truly at fault, because if you never got that signal then one anger became all anger, and there was no defense against it, and you could never sort it all out again: never know which was justified anger, and which was anger that came at you with no sense in it.
And, finally, at the end of it all, you didn’t know which was your own anger, the genie you didn’t ever want to let out—couldn’t let out, if you were a scrawny twelve-year-old who’d been everyone’s kid only when you were wrong. You were reliably no one’s kid so long as you kept quiet and let nobody detect the pain.
God, he knew this kid. So well.
“That’s why you were sick at your stomach the morning we left Mariner. That’s why you wanted to go back and look for something. Isn’t it?”
“I could get a couple of tapes. So you wouldn’t know I got robbed. And I didn’t know what to do…” Jeremy’s teeth were knocking together. “I didn’t want you to leave, Fletcher. I don’t ever want you to leave.”
“I’ll try,” he said. “Best I can do.” Third shake at Jeremy’s ankle. “Adult lesson, kid. Sometimes there’s no fix. You just pick up and go on. I’m pretty good at it. You are, too. So let’s do it. Forget the stick. But don’t entirely forget it, you know what I mean? You learn from it. You don’t get caught twice.”
And the Old Man’s voice came on. “This is James Robert,” it began, in the familiar way. And then the Old Man added…
“… This is the last time I’ll be speaking as a captain in charge on the bridge.”
“God.” Color fled Jeremy’s face. He looked as if he’d been hit in the stomach a second time. “God. What’s he say?”