Grace bounds down the stairs away from the situation, leaving Connor once again alone with the trunk, only this time Pandora’s box is wide open. He has no idea where Sonia is, and what she’d say if she saw it like this.
There are hundreds upon hundreds of envelopes, many more than were there when Connor deposited his. The envelopes are mostly white and eggshell, but there is also the occasional colored one, as if Sonia got bored and started giving out brighter stationery to the kids. Each envelope is addressed by hand.
Now that he’s begun, Connor finds he can’t stop himself. He begins riffling through the sea of envelopes looking for a familiar address, in familiar handwriting. His envelope was simple white, and is hard to dig out of this snowstorm of correspondence.
“You’ll never find it in there,” Sonia says, coming up behind him, as he’s elbow-deep in the trunk.
He takes his hands out, feeling almost as guilty as Grace had, and sits back on the dusty floor. “Haven’t you mailed any of them?”
“Not a one,” Sonia says sadly. “Never had the heart to do it.”
“Did any kids who survived come to take their letter back?”
“Not a one,” Sonia says again. “Guess they had more pressing things to do. If any of them did survive.”
“A lot of them did,” Connor reassures her. “I know because I sent a lot of them on their way when they reached a safe age.”
“You sent them?” says Sonia. “I guess I should ask what you’ve been up to all this time, but I figure you’d rather not talk about it.”
Connor smiles. She’s got that right.
“You’re not mixed up with that awful Starkey person, are you?”
Connor grimaces and can’t hold her gaze. “He’s actually my fault. My own little wind-up psychopath.”
“Hmmph,” says Sonia, and mercifully doesn’t ask for details. “You may have wound him up, but he’s not following anyone’s marching orders but his own. We all have our accidental monsters.”
Connor looks back to the letter-filled trunk and finally understands why he’s still here. What’s been holding him back.
“Will you ever send them out?” he asks.
Sonia sits at her desk, leaning forward on her cane. “I suppose if the time is right to unveil the printer, the time might be right for a postal run.” Then she pauses, checks to see that no one is coming up from the basement, and proceeds to read Connor’s mind.
“But you don’t want me to mail yours, do you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Because you’re thinking you might deliver it yourself.”
Connor takes a deep breath and slowly lets it out. “Is that just me being self-destructive again?”
“I can’t say . . . but it would seem to me that wanting to bring closure is anything but self-destructive.”
He looks to the trunk one more time. “What’s the use? Like you said, I’ll never find it in there anyway.”
“No, you won’t.” Then she opens her top desk drawer and pulls out a single envelope. “Because it’s right here.”
Had she pulled out a stick of dynamite, it couldn’t have felt more dangerous.
“I went fishing for it the night you came back. I thought you might want it eventually.”
She hands it to him. His handwriting. The address where he grew up. On the back is the ripple of dried saliva where he licked it closed two years ago. He cannot yet tell if this letter is an enemy or a friend.
But now that he’s holding it in his hand, there’s something he knows beyond the shadow of any doubt.
God help me . . . before this is all over, I’m going to face them. I’m going to confront my parents. . . .
Part Two
Here Be Dragons
From The Telegraph:
GIRL SMUGGLED INTO BRITAIN TO HAVE HER “ORGANS HARVESTED”
By Steven Swinford, Senior Political Correspondent 10:00 PM BST 18 Oct 2013
The first case of a child being trafficked to Britain in order to have their organs harvested has been uncovered.
The unnamed girl was brought to the UK from Somalia with the intention of removing her organs and selling them on to those desperate for a transplant. . . .
The case emerged in a government report which showed that the number of human trafficking victims in the UK has risen by more than 50 per cent last year and reached record levels. . . .
Child protection charities warned last night that criminal gangs were attempting to exploit the demand for organ transplants in Britain.
Bharti Patel, the chief executive of Ecpat UK, the child protection charity, said: “Traffickers are exploiting the demand for organs and the vulnerability of children. It’s unlikely that a trafficker is going to take this risk and bring just one child into the UK. It is likely there was a group.”
According to the World Health Organisation as many as 7,000 kidneys are illegally obtained by traffickers each year around the world.
While there is a black market for organs such as hearts, lungs and livers, kidneys are the most sought after organs because one can be removed from a patient without any ill effects.
The process involves a number of people including the recruiter who identifies the victim, the person who arranges their transport, the medical professionals who perform the operation and the salesman who trades the organ . . .
The full article can be found at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10390183/Girl-smuggled-into-Britain-to-have-her-organs-harvested.html
7 • Sky Jockey
Trouble in the world, trouble at home. How can they expect a man to concentrate on his work with all this trouble? AWOLs wreaking havoc everywhere, clappers blowing things up—and then, of course, there’s my daughter. I thought she was finally wising up, getting a good head on her shoulders—and now she does this? What is she thinking?
“Earth to Frank!” the foreman’s voice booms over the intercom, startling him. “Are you on this freaking planet?”
“Yeah, I’m here. Are we ready?”
“Ready? We’ve been waiting here twiddling our thumbs. Start hoisting already!”
“Starting the hoist. Clear the area around the payload.”
“The arm’s clear. I’ll alert the media.”
Frank chuckles—because the foreman isn’t making a joke; he is literally alerting the media. They’re gathered around Liberty Island, cameras aimed upward at the statue, which is ensconced in construction scaffolding. It may be a momentous occasion to them, but to a crane operator, it’s just another job.
What the hell is my daughter thinking? How could she date such an obvious loser? She’s barely fourteen; what business does a fourteen-year-old from Queens have dating a sixteen-year-old delinquent from the Bronx?
“He’s got a good heart,” she tells me.
Fine. So rip it out and put it into another kid more deserving of her attention.
The cables go taut, and the new arm shifts on the barge, slowly, smoothly. This is not a job accomplished with cavalier speed. That’s the best way to wind up with snapped cables, dead coworkers, and lawsuits. Lots of lawsuits. The arm begins to rise, as if being levitated by a magician. He mans the crane’s controls, feeling the cables attached to the massive unwieldy object as if they’re his own sinews and the crane itself is just an extension of his body.
The boyfriend is not too old to be unwound. Not yet. That freaking tool won’t be seventeen for at least a few months. And then if they repeal the Cap-17 law, there’s a whole year of potential unwinding tacked on to his miserable life. The problem is, the lowlife’s parents won’t do it. Of course they won’t! They’re probably druggies or worse. No supervision, no boundaries. If you don’t raise a kid right, it turns into a weed that’s gotta be torn out. The whole damn thing is their fault!