Raising Stony Mayhall Read online

  Alice managed to get the girls into their pajamas, but none of them would stay out of the kitchen. They watched as Wanda worked, and soon she was sweating like a long-distance runner. After a half hour the baby was no better and no worse for all the forced resuscitation. In fact he seemed to like it. The air she gave him he turned into gurgles and sighs and whines. His first sounds.

  “We have to call the police,” Alice said.

  “We’re not going to do that.” Wanda lifted the boy out of the water and his arms waved as if he wanted to get back in. “Not yet.”

  Alice lowered her voice. “You know what he is. One of those things from that night.” Alice was old enough to read the paper, to watch the evening news.

  “Those were all back east,” Wanda said. “And they’re all gone now.” The president told them the creatures had all been killed—or whatever you called it when you destroyed their bodies. And if the police found out about this boy, they’d destroy him, too.

  At some point Junie had climbed up on the chair again. She softly patted his head. “Lit-tle babeee,” she sang to him. “Little old babeee.”

  Then the boy’s chest rose, and he let out a long sigh.

  “He’s learning to talk,” Chelsea said.

  “He’s just making noises,” Wanda said. Though how did he learn that? His ribs moved again, and his mouth made a breathy whistle. Wanda put her ear to his chest. She heard nothing but her own pulse in her ears. Maybe he could learn to pump his heart, too.

  And then she thought, Oh no, I can’t do this. But of course she’d have to.

  “Girls, I have something important to say,” Wanda said. She lifted Junie onto her hip. “Alice, Chelsea, give me your hands.” She made them place their palms atop one another’s on the boy’s head, a laying on of hands, just like the deacons did for someone who was terribly ill or troubled. Concentrated prayer.

  Alice said, “What are you doing, Mom?”

  “We have to make a solemn promise,” Wanda said. “An oath.” She took a breath. “We cannot tell anyone about this boy.”

  “Why not?” Chelsea asked.

  “Nobody,” Wanda said. “For a while at least. Can you promise that? Junie?”

  “I promise,” Junie said. And Chelsea said, “I won’t tell a soul.”

  “This is a mistake,” Alice said. “We should call the police.” Chelsea yelped indignantly and Alice said, “Fine. I promise.”

  Wanda leaned down and kissed the boy’s forehead. “Our secret,” she said.

  Her mind raced. She did need to call the police, to tell them about the dead girl. She’d say she thought she’d seen something out there, wasn’t sure what. She wouldn’t mention the child.

  “We should name him Gray,” Chelsea said.

  “He’s not a cat,” Alice said. “We shouldn’t name him anything.”

  “We’ll call him John,” Wanda said, surprising herself again.

  “That’s it?” Alice said. “John?”

  “Brother John,” Chelsea said.

  The boy looked up at them. Then he blinked. He hadn’t blinked before.

  “A boy like this,” Wanda said, “is going to need a normal name.”

  That first night, a Saturday, Wanda took the baby to bed with her, but he refused to sleep. He lay there, gurgling to himself, waving his arms and kicking his legs. Wanda eventually slept, for what seemed only minutes. The boy never settled down, but neither did he cry. Near dawn she picked him up and carried him to the living room, where she rocked him until the girls awoke. Wanda called in sick to the hospital, and sat back, exhausted, as the girls took turns holding him. He stayed up the whole day, never napping, hardly ever shutting his eyes.

  Feeding was also a problem. He often smacked his blue lips and worked his toothless mouth, but he turned his face away from water or milk. She was afraid of what he might be hungering for, but that day she taught him to swallow formula, and a few hours after each feeding he’d spit it back out. She doubted he was digesting any food at all.

  After supper she hauled the crib from the basement—Junie had only stopped using it a year ago—and set it up next to her bed. The boy refused to sleep in it. She sang to him and rubbed his back, but after a half hour of leaning over the rail she gave up and brought him to bed with her again, where he cooed and squawked and fidgeted until morning.

  On Monday she called in sick a second time, and again on Tuesday. She couldn’t afford any more absences, but neither could she deposit the boy with the old woman who watched Junie. On Wednesday morning she told Alice, “You now have mono. You’ll be out for two weeks. Chelsea will bring home your schoolwork.”

  “This isn’t fair!”

  “It’s temporary.”

  Wanda learned to fall asleep to his noises and movement, and grew used to his cool body next to hers. He spent the night experimenting with new sounds. Eventually he discovered a kind of cry that would get their attention, a long, high-pitched wail that would cease the instant Wanda or one of the girls picked him up. No tears—there were never tears—and he never seemed too upset. He simply liked being in their arms.

  The morning Alice was supposed to go back to school, Wanda dressed the boy in a special onesy she’d sewn from an old bathrobe. She threaded a leather belt through the back loops and fastened him to the inside of the crib. Alice was appalled. “He’s not a dog.” Wanda swallowed against the steely taste of guilt and said he’d be fine. She’d run home at lunch to check on him, then as soon as Alice got home from school the girls would let him out, got it?

  John seemed unperturbed by the new arrangement. He didn’t recoil from the onesy harness when she slipped it on him. Every morning he was happy to be tied down, and every afternoon he was happy to be let loose. They played with him, fed him, and he spit everything back up. He refused to die, and refused to grow.

  If he’d shown the slightest sign of distress she would have been forced to take him to a doctor. She’d worked at the hospital for years, and she trusted several of the nurses and even a doctor or two, but she didn’t think any of them could have, or would have, kept this secret. To them the boy would be a danger, a disease carrier. The government said that all the victims of the outbreak had been destroyed, but newspapers still reported sightings of the walking dead out in Pennsylvania and New York, and the grocery store tabloids ran stories every week about the hordes of unnatural creatures waiting out there, ready to attack. Alice brought a National Enquirer home one day, her eyes red from holding back tears, and slammed it down on the kitchen table. The cover showed a gray man with a bullet hole through his head.

  “Those pictures are fakes,” Wanda told her. “They do that all the time.” She was holding John in her arms, and he seemed excited to see Alice.

  “Does it matter?” the girl said. “This is what they’d do to him.” Wanda hugged her daughter, and John squirmed between them. “What are we going to do, Mom?” Alice had made a complete turnaround since the night they found John. Once she decided that she was protecting the baby from the world instead of shielding her family from the devil child, she appointed herself chief concealment strategist.

  But Wanda was the adult here. Ever since the cancer took Ervin, the only adult. “I’ll think of something,” she said.

  Somehow they had to keep the boy’s existence a secret. They’d been lucky so far. The body of his teenage mother had been recovered from the side of the highway, declared a Jane Doe, and cremated (because every corpse was being cremated as quickly as possible that year), without any mention of a missing baby. And fortunately, Wanda’s house was set back from the road, surrounded by corn and soy fields, so there were no neighbors to peek through their windows. The rare visitor could be seen coming down the lane in plenty of time for them to take the baby into the back bedroom.

  Alice, enforcer of secrecy, policed the younger girls. She quizzed Chelsea almost daily to see if she’d told anyone at school about John. And even Junie, who saw hardly anyone during the winter except when
she went to the babysitter or they all went to church, understood that he’d be taken away from them if anyone found out. Alice read to the girls from The Diary of Anne Frank, which Wanda thought was inappropriate, but it did seem to get the point across: Junie asked her if they were going to put John up in the attic.

  They were coping. They were keeping the secret. And then came the day in April that Junie snuck John out of the house and carried him across the road to see the calf that had been born that week.

  Wanda was walking back from the barn when she saw the strange car in the driveway. A skinny, black-haired man leaned against the front bumper, smoking a cigarette. The front door of the house was open.

  Wanda dropped the bag of cat food she’d been carrying and ran. When she was a few yards from the car she slowed to a fast walk and said, “Hello? Can I help you?”

  The man was Oriental—Wanda couldn’t tell if he was Japanese or Chinese or what. He said nothing, but waved toward the house, then took another drag on his cigarette.

  Wanda went inside, then froze at the kitchen doorway. A woman, foreign like the man outside, sat at the table, cradling John in her arms. Beside her stood Junie and a boy who looked five or six years old. His hand was on John’s chest, and the baby was gripping one of his fingers.

  Junie saw her mother and screamed, “It was an accident!” Then she bolted for her bedroom.

  The stranger woman watched her go, and then said something to her son in another language. The boy said, “This is my mom, Mrs. Cho. She says she’s sorry for going in your house.”

  “That’s all right,” Wanda said automatically, though her heart was pounding. She came forward, holding out her arms for the baby. The woman nodded and transferred John to her.

  The boy said, “That girl? She was walking by herself along the road. We almost hit her.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Wanda said. “Junie knows she’s not supposed to go in the road.”

  The woman nodded as if she understood. She was made up as if going to church: bright lipstick, curled hair, a blue polka-dot dress, high heels. Her son was dressed in shorts and a button-front shirt.

  “We just bought a house,” the boy said. His English was better than Junie’s. “Down the road. There are mice inside, but my dad’s going to kill them.”

  “I’m sure he will,” Wanda said. They had to be talking about the Allen house. No one had lived there since the widow died last year. “I’m going to put the baby down for his nap. Can you tell your mother that? And say thank you for watching out for Junie.”

  The boy spoke to his mother in that other language—Korean, she guessed. They exchanged some words and then the boy said, “She apologizes again, but she has to ask something.” He hesitated, then said, “She wants to know if your baby needs, uh, help?” He asked a question of his mother, and she spoke a few soft sentences. “Medicine help?”

  Mrs. Cho looked at her, her expression calm. Wanda couldn’t figure out if she knew what John was. Had she heard about the outbreak last fall?

  Wanda said, “No, no help needed. But thank you. He has a skin disease. Poor circulation. Do you know that word? Circulation?”

  Mrs. Cho stood and smoothed out her dress. Then she touched John’s head. “Good baby,” she said.

  The boy reached up to John, and the baby grabbed his finger again. “I think he likes me,” the boy said.

  The next morning, John had grown, Wanda was sure of it. She retrieved the cloth tape from the kitchen drawer and measured him from crown to foot. She weighed herself on the bathroom scale, first with John in her arms, then without. Then, even though she knew the numbers by heart, she got out the paper tablet and checked the figures she’d written down the night she’d found him—numbers that had not changed in all the weekly measurements that followed.

  He’d grown three inches. And he was nearly a pound heavier.

  That afternoon she made a red velvet cake, told Alice to take charge of John and Junie, then put Chelsea in the car and drove a quarter mile down the road. The Allen house was still as run-down as it had been when the widow had died, but the lawn had been mowed, and once Mrs. Cho had welcomed her inside, Wanda saw that they’d scrubbed the floors and walls and had already set up household. Wanda was disappointed that there were only a few Korean decorations in evidence: a floral print tablecloth with colors too bright for the Midwest, two exotic-looking candlesticks, and a book with pictograms on the cover that she thought—she hoped—was a Bible.

  Mrs. Cho accepted the cake while her son translated. “Could you tell your mother that we’d love to have you come over and play?” Wanda said.

  “You could help feed the cats,” Chelsea said. “We’ve got a barnful.”

  The boy, whose name was Kwang, was obviously excited, but he watched his mother’s face carefully as she considered the offer. Finally she spoke. Kwang said, “She wants to know about the stone baby. No, not stone. You know …”

  “The stone baby is doing just fine,” Wanda said. “He is no danger to anyone.”

  It took the boy almost a minute of talking to pass this on. Wanda had no idea what all he was telling his mother. But eventually she nodded.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Cho said. “Thank you. Tomorrow.”

  Kwang showed up the next day, and the day after. With each visit, Stony grew. Within a few days he was walking. The next week he was talking. By the end of the summer the two boys were exactly the same height and weight, and they were hardly ever out of each other’s sight.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1974

  Easterly, Iowa

  he day they created the Unstoppable, they decided to test him with an air rifle, a bow and arrow, and a knife. They started with the air rifle.

  Like most of their experiments, they decided to conduct this one inside the barn, away from the eyes of Stony’s mom and sisters. Stony stood up against the wall, wearing a red ski mask with a U drawn in Magic Marker on the forehead. Kwang took up position about ten feet away. He pumped the rifle five times, thought for a second, and pumped it again.

  “Don’t go crazy,” Stony said.

  Kwang said, “Put your hands down.”

  “You’re going to hit me in the face.”

  “I’m not going to hit you in the face. Besides, you’re the Unstoppable.”

  “I hate that name. Unstoppable what? It’s like calling the Hulk ‘the Incredible.’ ”

  “We talked about this! Just ‘Unstoppable.’ Like ‘the Thing.’ Now put ’em down.”

  “I can see right down the barrel. If you just—” A soft pop and the BB struck Stony just above the Adam’s apple. “You jerk!”

  “Shut up, you’re fine. Did it hurt?”

  “You hit me in the neck.”

  “But did it hurt?”

  No, it didn’t hurt, not really. Stung a little. Or maybe it was only the idea of it that stung. Pain was like that. It slipped away when he wasn’t paying attention.

  Stony pulled off the mask, then looked at the rafters while Kwang inspected his neck. Stony’s skin was a brownish gray—the color of last night’s pork chop, his sister Alice said—and dry as paper. “I can’t tell where it hit,” Kwang said. “Nope, no damage.”

  “Good,” Stony said. His mom told him not to come home with any more scars. He carried a half-moon of stitches on his shoulder from where he’d fallen onto a metal sewer pipe last summer. (Kwang was chasing him.) And just last week the lawn mower had thrown a rock into his right thigh that left a dent the size of a half-dollar.

  Kwang said, “Let’s try the bow and arrow.” Stony made a face and Kwang said, “What, you’re wimping out on me?”

  “I don’t think criminals use bows and arrows.”

  Kwang shook his head. “What, you want to go right to knives?” He picked up the bow and one of the steel-tipped arrows. “This? This is just a warm-up. It’s nothing.”

  “Why don’t we shoot a few at you, then?”

  “Hey, you’re the invulnerable one.” Invulnerable. A
comic book word. Kwang owned two cardboard boxes loaded with comics—The Teen Titans, The Mighty Thor, Tales of Suspense, and that was just the T’s—which he allowed Stony to read or touch only according to a strict set of rules, rules that only Kwang understood or would share. He’d let Stony read, say, issues 51 through 62 of The Invincible Iron Man, but not 63 or anything after. “What are you going to do when he comes after you?” Kwang said. “You want to know you can take it, right? Besides, I’ll only shoot at your leg.”

  “I know that if somebody comes after me with a bow, I’m running.”

  Kwang paced off a dozen feet, turned. “You have a superpower,” Kwang said. He notched an arrow and pulled back the string. “And with great power—”

  The barn door banged open, smacking Kwang, and Junie said, “There you are.”

  Then Stony was on his butt and Junie was screaming. Stony looked down. The shaft was buried an inch deep in the left side of his chest, straight through the red C in his blue Cubs shirt.

  “That was great!” Kwang said.

  Stony shook his head. “Mom’s going to kill me.”

  But Wanda Mayhall had taught her girls early to keep secrets, not realizing how easily their skills could be used against her. The sisters had formed an inner circle around Stony, a force field of Everything Is Fine, designed to keep their stressed-out mother from going off the rails, and to keep Stony out of sight of the world.

  Junie was shorter than Stony by several inches, but she was technically older than him and took her big-sister status very seriously. She grabbed him by the wrist and hauled him toward the house, yelling for Chelsea. During the school year it was Mrs. Cho who watched him while his mother worked, but during the summers his sisters were in charge, and with Alice at work it was Chelsea who was the next-highest-ranking officer of the sorority.

  They found her on the back porch in the rocking chair, bare feet up on the railing. She was thirteen, a teenager now, and had declared that she was not just stuck in the house with her siblings every day, she was in charge of them. She’d spent most of the summer screaming at Junie and Stony, reading Carlos Castaneda books, listening to KRNQ, and talking on the phone with her girlfriends. Mom checked on them whenever she could break through the busy signal, effectively pinning them all to the house. Stony thought this was only fair, since he was never allowed to leave the farm.