Walter Mosley - Fortunate Son

“That’s what you call serendipity, ” Minas replied. “Sometimes something terrible happens to one man and leaves another alone.

“When I was a boy in Kansas, a tornado hit a neighborhood in my town. The twister set down at the beginning of the two-hundred block of Orchard Street. It knocked down four houses in a row, veered around the fifth, and then came back with a vengeance, destroying every other house on that side of the block. I suppose that there’s some scientific explanation for what happened, but for the people in house number five it was just good fortune.”

Eric went up to his room pondering the word serendipity. He often wondered why so many good things happened to him. He never counted on his luck, but things always seemed to go right. He was lying in his bed in the dark, in Thomas’s old room, thinking about Lester and the accident, when there came a knock on the door.

“Come in.”

The door opened, and Ahn shuffled in.

Eric had known Ahn his entire life. She was no longer his nanny. Now she was Dr. Nolan’s housekeeper and the family cook. Eric would have never said that he loved Ahn. He did love his father, but it wasn’t a very strong feeling.

“You have to be careful,” Ahn said to Eric.

“You mean about the fireworks?” the boy asked. “Dad already told me that I could have been burned too.”

“No. I mean, yes, you shouldn’t play with danger because you will hurt others.”

“Not me?”

“You are dangerous,” Ahn said.

Eric tried to decipher what the Vietnamese servant meant. Many times when they talked, she would say things like “you are dangerous,” really meaning that he was in danger.

“You mean I’m in danger?”

“No. You are the reason that boy is burned,” she said. “You are never hurt, but he is not lucky. Be careful with your friends. Do not put them in trouble.”

Ahn’s black eyes stared into Eric’s great blue orbs.

The boy wondered about what she was saying. Sometimes he felt like that, that he was lucky.

The housekeeper turned away.

“Ahn.”

“Yes?”

“Have you heard anything about Tommy?”

“Nobody ever answers your letters, but they don’t come back,” she replied. “I am not finding Mr. Trueblood in the phone book, and his grandmother says that Tommy is with him.”

“But he must be somewhere.”

“I don’t know. Maybe they left Los Angeles.”

“They have to be somewhere.”

“He is safe,” she said, and then turned away again.

Eric was angry at what she said. He knew that she meant Tommy was safe from him. But he would never hurt his brother. He loved Tommy. Always had. Tommy and Branwyn were the only people he’d ever felt passion for.

The door closed behind Ahn, and Eric was once again in darkness. He sat there worrying that maybe Ahn was right. Maybe he drove Tommy away.

That night Eric didn’t go to sleep. Instead he stayed awake thinking about his real mother, dead for so long, and Mama Branwyn, who was the perfect woman in his eyes. He thought about Tommy, whom he hadn’t seen or heard from in more than four years.

After Tommy had left, Eric’s father went back to working long hours. He was quiet at the dinner table, and they hadn’t taken a vacation, or even a weekend holiday, in all that time.

Eric still missed his brother every day. Now and then he made friends at school or summer camp, but he’d never met another soul who saw the world the way Tommy did. Tommy saw faces in rocks, and he laughed at big, broad things like fat trees and passing images in clouds. He knew Branwyn better than anyone and never got mad at Eric for needing her love too.

Eric didn’t feel close to Ahn. When he was smaller she was just always there — to dress him, feed him, make sure that he was in the right place at the right time. He played games with her after Tommy was gone, but he didn’t care about her.

Eric realized that he didn’t care about much. He had fun and was befriended by almost everyone, but he never minded having to go home or when someone he saw every day left for good.

No, he wasn’t close to Ahn, but he remembered one day sitting outside the pool area in a health spa in Palm Springs. He and Tommy were five, and the smaller boy wanted to sit on the brick wall and wait to see if a roadrunner, the fleet-footed bird, might pass by.

Eric got bored and started asking Tommy questions.

He asked how it felt to break a bone. (Tommy had broken his finger, an ankle, his right leg, and his collarbone in falls.) He wanted to know what Branwyn wore when she went to bed. He asked Tommy if he ever wished that he and Branwyn were white like everybody else that they knew.

Tommy answered every question in his soft and slow voice.

“When my ankle broke it hurt so bad that I had to think that I was in another room from my foot,” Tommy said.

His mother wore a white cotton slip to bed, and he didn’t care what color they were.

Finally Eric asked Tommy, “Why do you think Ahn’s crazy?”

For a long time Tommy stared out into the desert between the cholla cacti and Joshua trees. After a while Eric thought that his brother had forgotten the question.

Then Tommy started talking in a voice so soft that he was in the middle of his answer before Eric realized that he was being addressed.

“An’ she’s been in the places where everybody’s sad all the time,” Tommy was saying.

“Who?” Eric asked.

“Ahn. She comes from far away in a war, my mom says. She’s always lookin’ to see bad things comin’, and that’s why Dr. Nolan hired her, so she could see trouble before it gets here.”

Remembering these words in the bed, Eric sat up and turned the lamp on. She sees bad things coming, he thought.

Eric believed that Tommy understood things. Even now, after years, he listened to his brother’s words. Ahn knew what she was talking about. It was her job to see trouble coming.

With the sun rising over his dead mother’s garden, Eric decided that he would stay out of trouble as much as he could and that he would never put anybody in danger again.

The morning after Elton and May were arrested, and Thomas was put in the holding cell, Madeline Beerman came to retrieve her grandson. She brought him home to her fourth-floor apartment on Denker and served him cornflakes for lunch. Thomas didn’t mind the breakfast food. He hadn’t eaten since the afternoon before because May and Elton were away at dinnertime and there was nothing he could eat in the refrigerator or the cupboards.

“I don’t want you thinking bad about your father because of what happened last night,” Madeline told him at the pine dining table that was crowded into her tiny studio apartment.

“Uh-huh,” Thomas replied, gulping down cereal.

“It’s really that May that’s the problem,” Madeline continued. “She’s been a bad seed ever since a long time ago when she was friends with Branwyn. She wants every man she sees.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I went to visit Elton in jail. He’ll be out in a few days. He says he wants you to come back and live with him and that he’s showing May the door.”

Thomas stopped eating and turned his eyes to Madeline. He wondered what violent act occurred when you were shown the door, and he knew that he didn’t want to go back to live with his brutal father. But he understood that he couldn’t say what he wanted. Whatever he said would cause trouble, and so he kept his mouth shut.

It was just as well that he did so. After three days in Madeline’s house, Thomas would have gone to live anywhere else. There was only that one room besides the kitchen and toilet. Madeline slept on the sofa, and Thomas was given a mat on the floor. Madeline watched television day and night, and the boy couldn’t get to sleep or look for his mother with his eyes closed because there was always somebody talking on the tinny TV speaker.