“You’re not going to lose me. I’ll always protect you.”
He nodded, but she didn’t think he believed her. He was a smart boy. Promises were empty things. She was trying to be strong for him, and he was trying to be strong for her, but neither of them knew the future.
“How are you going to figure out who I am?” he asked her.
“Well, I need your help with that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know someone hurt you. I know you don’t remember everything. But I also think you remember more than you’ve told me. I wasn’t going to push you while we were trying to get out of town, but things are different now. You can’t hide the truth from me anymore.”
“I don’t remember anything,” he protested, but he had that nervous look again, the look of a boy who was keeping secrets.
“I think you do remember. At least you remember some things. I think that whatever it is, it’s really hard for you, but at some point, we have to figure out how to face hard things. Even memories that are awful and painful for us. Sometimes we really, really don’t want to do that, and our brains come up with ways to avoid thinking about them, but sooner or later you have to deal with the pain. You have to stare it down and let it out. That’s the only way you can begin to live with it. Does that make any sense?”
He didn’t answer. She could see him biting his lip, holding back tears.
“There are a lot of things in this house that I’d rather forget,” she told him, shivering as she stared at the closet door. “I haven’t been back in more than a year because it was so hard. But here I am. That’s the first step.”
She waited, hoping Purdue would open up to her. They sat in silence for a long time. The ghosts who were here must have been waiting, too, wondering if she’d meant what she said about facing down the hard things in life. Because she was a hypocrite. She couldn’t deal with the Dark Star that had taken her family. She was just like Noah, running away to Lake Bronson when the going got tough.
The house began to shake.
Literally. The floor trembled under her feet, and the windows rattled, and a whistle that was more like a scream split the air. Purdue’s eyes widened with wonder.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“A train. They go by right in front of the house. Want to see?”
“Yeah!”
They went to the bedroom windows, and Purdue pressed his nose against the glass. Across the street, the engine of a freight train rumbled through the crossing, dragging car after car, some stacked one on top of the other. The freight cars were a kaleidoscope of peeling paint, rust, and wild graffiti, and they went on forever. By instinct, Lisa counted the cars, and she got to seventy-one before the caboose brought up the rear and the earthquake eased under the ground.
Purdue stayed at the window, watching until the train had completely disappeared. Even then, he didn’t move; he just stared at the tracks the way he had when the two of them were creeping down the street toward the house. There was always something about boys and trains, but this was more than that.
“Purdue?” she murmured.
He said nothing, but she could tell that the rattling of the train had jarred something loose in his head.
“Purdue, talk to me.”
He looked up at her, and suddenly he was calm.
“That’s how I got here,” he said. “I came on a train. I was running away.”
23
“Running away?” Lisa said. “What were you running from?”
“I was in the hospital.”
Lisa took his hand. The two of them were still in her parents’ bedroom, looking down from the window at the train tracks. He recited the story with that odd detachment he often had in his voice, as if the events had happened to someone else. Maybe that was the only way he could face it, like a character in a novel.
“Why were you in the hospital?” she asked. “Were you sick? Or hurt?”
He shook his head and then wiped his nose with his sleeve. “It wasn’t me.”
Lisa didn’t understand at first. And then she did. She made a guess. “Was it your mother?”
Purdue nodded.
“Do you remember where you were?”
“No. We had to go somewhere because of what was wrong with her. I didn’t know where it was. We drove for a long time.”
“And where’s home? Do you remember that?”
“We didn’t really have a home,” he said. “We moved around a lot. My mom had friends in different places, and we’d go there and stay with them for a while. But we always kept moving. I don’t remember us staying anywhere for a long time. Sometimes we’d just sleep in her car if it wasn’t too cold. We kept all of our stuff with us there.”
Lisa thought of the key she’d found in his pocket. Not a house key. A car key.
“It was just the two of you?” Lisa asked.
“Yes.”
“What about your father?”
The boy shrugged. “I never met him. Mom never talked about him.”
Lisa realized that she really was dealing with a lost boy in Purdue. Homeless. The child of a single mother. She’d hoped there would be a better explanation for his missing past, something that gave him a family and a place to go. Instead, here he was. Alone. With her.
“Purdue, what happened to your mom?”
The boy took a long time to say anything more. “Months ago, she started having headaches. Really bad ones. We were staying with one of her friends, and she said Mom should go see a doctor, but Mom didn’t want to do that. Doctors cost a lot of money, and we didn’t have any. She said it was nothing. She said the headaches would go away, but they didn’t. They got worse. A lot worse. There was one night where Mom woke up in the middle of the night, and she was screaming because it hurt so bad.”
“That must have been very scary,” Lisa murmured.
He nodded. “I made her go to the doctor. She didn’t want to, but I said she had to. The doctor put her in a big tube where they could see inside her, and after that, he said she needed to go to a hospital right away.”
“Did the doctor say what was wrong with her?”
“Well, he said they were going to take out her brain.”
Lisa wanted to smile, but she knew what he meant. “A brain tumor? They were going to remove a brain tumor?”
“I guess so.”
“So you went to a hospital?”
“Yes. They shaved my mom’s head. I didn’t like that. It didn’t look like her anymore. I remember sitting in a room and talking with her before they took her away. We talked for a long time. We talked about places we’d been. Stuff we’d done. That was nice. But doctors and nurses kept coming in, and they were whispering to each other. My mom said everything was going to be fine, that I shouldn’t be scared or worry about anything. I didn’t believe her.”
“I understand.”
“She talked to me about Canada while we were there, too. She talked about it a lot. She said that’s where she grew up. She never told me that before. I don’t think her parents were very nice to her. She said her dad did some bad things, and after that, she ran away and never went back. But she said she missed Canada. She talked about how pretty it was in the snow. She wanted me to see it someday.”
“It’s a beautiful place,” Lisa said. “We’re pretty close to Canada here, you know.”
The boy said nothing.
“What happened next?” she asked.
“They came and took her away. Mom was crying. She was holding my hand and saying how much she loved me and that she would see me soon. Then she was gone. She was gone a long time. Everybody kept coming up and asking how I was, which was really stupid. I was fine. My mom was the one who was sick. They wanted to play games with me, and get stuff for me to eat and drink, and put on videos for me, but I just wanted my mom back.”