All the while Eric screamed his brother’s name and shouted obscenities he’d learned from the older kids on the playground.
“Fuck damn!” he shouted.
“Shit!” he cried.
And for every curse or profanity, he broke something or struck the walls or floor with his metal bat.
When the baseball went through the window, Minas headed for the boy’s room. By the time he got there, Eric was wreaking havoc with his bat.
When Minas entered the room, Eric swung at him but missed. The surgeon’s hand darted out and pushed the boy down on the mattress that had been spilled off the bed.
Minas had never struck Eric before. The novelty and shock of that, plus the deep desolation he felt about losing his mother and then his brother, brought Eric to tears. He cried on the mattress and then rolled onto the floor. He caterwauled and howled, whined like a motherless cub, and shouted unintelligible sentences at the Infinite. Minas held his son, and even then, in the boy’s most miserable state, his father marveled at the depth of feeling that Eric was capable of. His sorrow seemed to diminish Minas’s own fears and losses. It was as if Eric was deserving of more care and consideration because he was more, much more, than other humans.
They sat there on the floor of the boy’s destroyed room, Minas thinking of how much they had both lost and Eric howling like some animal faced for the first time with a giant harvest moon.
Late in the afternoon Minas drove Eric down to the beach at Malibu. The boys had always liked it there, and so the father thought it might be good for his son.
“Why did you let them take Tommy?” the child asked his father on the drive.
“I couldn’t stop them, Eric. They had the law on their side.”
“You couldn’t stop them, but I would have,” the boy said. “And you should have too. Tommy is our family. You can’t let family go.”
They walked down the beach on sand left wet by the receding tide. Minas was wearing a yellow shirt and dark-blue pants. His shoes were made of woven brown leather; a thick golden watch hung from his right wrist.
Eric had taken off his shoes in the car. His T-shirt was yellow like his father’s pullover, but his pants were tan and rolled up past his ankles.
“Can I go visit Tommy?” the boy asked his father while scanning the waterline.
“Maybe after a while. His grandmother wants him to get used to being with them before letting us come see him.”
“He’s gonna be with them every day,” Eric said. “He’s gonna be used to them anyway.”
“We’ll see,” Minas Nolan said to his son.
At that moment Eric gasped and ran out into the shallows of the retreating Pacific.
“Eric,” Minas Nolan said, but before he could go out after his son, the boy was coming back with something wriggling in his hands.
It was a bright-green fish with brownish bumps along its back and big googly eyes that seemed somehow to contain mammalian intelligence. The tail was long and elegant, with a fin at the end shaped like a Japanese fan. The body was thick, and the fins below were so long and powerful they might have been used as legs.
“What is it?” Minas Nolan asked, forgetting his losses for a moment.
“A fish,” Eric said bluntly. “It was stuck in the sand.”
“But what kind?” his father asked. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. It’s certainly not a California fish. Maybe it’s from the tropics or the deep sea. Maybe this is some fish dredged up by an undersea storm, a fish nobody’s ever seen before.”
With a careless motion, Eric tossed the googly-eyed green fish back into the water, whereupon it darted away.
“I don’t like fish,” the boy said simply. “Let’s go home, Dad.”
That night Eric had his father write a letter to his brother, Thomas.
Dear Tommy,
Dad told me that you had to go away with your father. I don’t like it that you had to go, and I know that you want to be back here with us. I’m going to go get you as soon as I can figure out where you are and how I can get there. I will save you and bring you back here so we can play overhand catch and finish the first grade together.
p. s.
I found a green fish today that Dad said was real rare. If you were here I bet that you would have found him first.
Minas wrote the letter in bold characters that Eric could examine when he was done. They put the letter in an envelope, which Minas addressed and Ahn sent off to Madeline Beerman.
Madeline received the letter, but she never gave it to Thomas. She put it, unopened, in the bureau drawer next to her bed.
Eric returned to his life. At school he was the most popular boy in his class. He won every game he played at recess and was always chosen by the teacher to help clean the erasers and pass out papers.
Sometimes at night he would flip a coin with Ahn. It was a simple game. He’d flip an old Indian head nickel his father had once given him, and either he or Ahn would call heads or tails before it settled on the floor.
Eric won almost every time. Ahn was astonished by this. Even though she had little formal education, she knew that he shouldn’t win any more than she did. But there it was — time after time Eric would call heads and heads would turn up; Eric would call tails and tails it would be.
The nanny woke up one night from a deep sleep in which she was having a dream about flipping the coin with Eric. In the dream her faceless father was standing above her and the big blond boy. She and Eric were the same size in the dream. Ahn had lost sixty-three flips in a row when her father said, “One more loss and you will die, my daughter.”
That’s when Ahn awoke with a start.
“Every time he wins someone else loses,” she said to herself.
She gasped and suddenly saw her charge as some kind of monster.
“He killed his mother,” Ahn said to no one. “He killed Miss Branwyn.”
She lay back in her bed thinking of little Thomas.
“Maybe he’s safer away from Eric,” she thought. “Maybe Eric will destroy everyone he touches.”
The days and months and years passed in the Nolan household. Everyone wanted to be Eric’s best friend. Every girl wanted to be his girlfriend. The teachers loved him, and the sun illuminated his path.
He skipped the sixth grade because he knew all the subjects by grade five. It wasn’t hard for him to enter junior high school early because he was much bigger than his classmates anyway. He had natural agility and strength. And he was more mature than many adults at this early age.
And Eric was fearless. Nothing bad ever happened to him. He and another boy, Lester Corning, were once playing with fireworks when Lester’s parents were out. They were both leaning over the same Roman candle when instead of firing a flaming ball into the air, the rocket exploded. Lester took the full blast on the left side of his face, but Eric went unharmed. His hair wasn’t even singed. This was lucky for Lester, who was in so much pain that all he could do was roll on the grass of his backyard and scream.
Eric ran to the house and dialed 911. He explained the problem to the man on the other end of the line, and the ambulance came there in time to save Lester’s eyesight.