Cabeswater is not the boss of you, Persephone’s voice said.
“Adam, I’m being real decent here, but you’re trying my patience sorely,” his father told him. “At least pretend like you heard what I said.”
“I heard,” Adam replied.
“Sass. Nice.”
Just because it tantrums doesn’t mean it’s more right than you.
To the shelf, Adam said, “I think you should go.”
He felt cowardly and boneless.
“So that’s how it’s going to be?”
That was how it was going to be.
“You should know, then, that you’re going to look like a fool in that courtroom, Adam,” Robert Parrish said. “People know me and they know what kind of man I am. You and I both know this is just a pathetic cry for attention, and everyone else will, too. It’s too easy to look at you and see what kind of shit you’ve become. Don’t think I don’t know where this comes from. You prancing around with those entitled bitch-boys.”
Part of Adam was still there with his father, but most of him was retreating. The better part of him. That Adam, the magician, was no longer in his apartment. That Adam walked through trees, running his hand along the moss-covered stones.
“Court’s gonna see right through that. And you know what you’re going to be then? In the papers as that kid who wanted to put his hardworking daddy in jail.”
The leaves rustled, close and protective, pressing up against his ears, curled in his fists. They didn’t mean to frighten. They only ever tried to speak his language and get his attention. It was not fearsome Cabeswater’s fault that Adam had already been a fearful boy when he’d made the bargain.
“You think they’re really gonna look at you and see an abused kid? Do you even know what abuse is? That judge will’ve heard enough stories to know a whopper. He’s not gonna blink an eye.”
The branches leaned toward Adam, curling around him protectively, a thicket with thorns pointed outward. It had tried, before, to cling to his mind, but now it knew to surround his body. He’d asked to be separate, and Cabeswater had listened. I know you are not the same as him, Adam said. But in my head, everything is always so tangled. I am such a damaged thing.
“So we’re back where we started, you and me, when I came here. You can call off that hearing quick as you please, and this all goes away.”
The rain splattered down through the leaves, turning them upside down, trickling onto Adam.
“And look at you, and I’ve just been talking to you. Practicing for your day in court? At least pretend like I haven’t been talking to a wall. What the hell —?”
The braying note in his father’s voice brought Adam rushing back to himself. One hand was poised in the air, as if he had meant to touch Adam, or had already, and was withdrawing.
In the meat of his palm, a small thorn protruded. A thread of blood trembled from the wound, bright as a miracle.
Plucking the thorn free, his father regarded Adam, this thing he had made. He was silent for a long moment, and then something registered in his face. It wasn’t quite fear, but it was uncertainty. His son was before him, and he did not know him.
I am unknowable.
Robert Parrish began to speak, but then he didn’t. Now he had seen something in Adam’s face or eyes, or felt something in that thorn that pricked him, or maybe, like Adam, he could now smell the scent of a damp forest floor in the apartment.
“You’re going to be a fool in that courtroom,” his father said finally. “Are you going to say anything?”
Adam was not going to say anything.
His father slammed the door behind him as he left.
Adam stood there for a long moment. He wiped the heel of his hand over his right eye and cheek, then dried it on his slacks.
He climbed back into his bed and closed his eyes, hands balled to his chest, scented with mist and with moss.
When he closed his eyes, Cabeswater was still waiting for him.
33
The thing that amazes me,” Greenmantle mused aloud, “is that there are some people who actually do this as a form of leisure. People who trade vacation days for this experience. It dazzles, really. I have absolutely no idea where we are. I’m assuming you’d have said something if we were lost and/or were going to die down here.”
The Greenmantles were in a cave: wife, husband, dog, an American cave family. Piper had discovered that Otho, when left alone, ate through the bathroom doors of rental homes, so he now minced ahead of her. The cave was dark and armpit-scented. Greenmantle had done a perfunctory amount of research on caving before setting out this afternoon. He’d discovered that caves were supposed to be vessels of natural untouched beauty.
It turned out they were just holes in the ground. He felt caves had been extremely oversold.
“We’re not going to die down here,” Piper said. “I have book club on Tuesday.”
“Book club! You’ve only been here two weeks and you’re in a book club.”
“What else am I supposed to do while you’re out finding yourself? Just hang around the house, getting fat, I suppose? Don’t say ‘talk to your little friends on the phone’ because I’ll put this pickax through your right eye.”
“What’s the book?”
Piper pointed the flashlight at the ceiling and then the damp floor. Both the flashlight beam and Piper’s lip curled in disgust. “I don’t remember the title. Something about citrus. It’s a literary memoir of a young woman coming of age on an orange plantation set against a backdrop of war and subversive class struggle with possible religious undertones or something like that. Don’t say ‘I’d rather die.’ ”
“I didn’t say anything,” Greenmantle replied, although he had indeed been considering “I’d rather die” as a candidate to further the conversation. He preferred spy thrillers that involved dashing men who were slightly over thirty darting in and out of high-technology shadows while driving fast cars and making important phone calls. He held up the EMF reader in his hand to see if he could vary the degree of flashing going on across its face. He could not.
Otho had stopped to relieve himself; Piper flicked out a plastic baggie.
“This is pointless. Did you just put that shit in your bag?”
“I saw a spot on ABC about how ecotourism is denuding caves,” she informed him. “That face? The one you’re wearing now? Is part of the problem. You are part of the problem.”