-CEL
Danny didn’t enjoy going to rummage
sales nearly as much as his mother enjoyed taking him to them. He didn’t like the kind of kids he found
there. They were dirty. They smelled.
But worse than that, they looked at him like maybe—deep down where they
couldn’t see—he was just like them. But
Danny knew that wasn’t true; he was better than them, smarter than them,
special. He wasn’t there because he
needed looking after; he was there because his mother wanted him there.
The people doing the selling always
looked so happy, but why wouldn’t they be?
Didn’t every sale mean one less piece of crap for them to throw
away? These happy sellers were younger
than normal. They weren’t as old as
dirt, like most of the people who had rummage sales, and they didn’t smell like
smoke or used-up furniture when you got too close to them.
“Look around back,” his mother was
saying to him. “Find me something special. Something small.”
That was Danny’s task on most of
these outings, to find something small. It
wasn’t hard to do, it seemed the world
was filled with small things, and it didn’t require any thought. Danny usually grabbed something quickly and
then palmed it, acted like he was still looking so he could stay away from his
mother for a just a little bit longer.
Sometimes he would find a place to
hide, wondering if his mother would get worried about him or maybe even forget
him altogether and drive off without him.
But neither of these things ever happened. She would just wait and when he crawled out
she would ask him if he had found something unusual like she asked. And he always did.
Sometimes she was happy with what
Danny had found. Other times she was
not. Once Danny had found a locket with
a picture of a pretty woman inside it.
He had liked her face, had run his finger across it delicately, like he
saw people do in movies. He had stared
so long and so hard at the picture of the woman that he hadn’t even noticed his
mother had come up behind him until she started yelling at him.
Danny had never seen her so
angry. He had thought she was going to
hurt him, but she didn’t. She took the
locket from him and bought it, rushed off to the car and didn’t speak to him
for the rest of the day. He had never
seen the locket after then, had known that asking about it would just make his
mother angry. He still thought about it
though, all the time.
Danny found a box of books that
rested on a table beside a tiny guitar with a body shaped like a teardrop. Most of the books looked older than the
people who were selling them, which struck Danny as strange and funny and sad
all at the same time. One in particular
grabbed Danny’s attention and he pulled it out.
It wasn’t a proper book, Danny saw, but a journal. It was pale white, slightly yellow with age, and
a thin rust-colored line ran down the spine.
It looked like there was once a picture on the cover, but whatever it
had once portrayed, it had been rubbed away long before it made its way into
this cardboard box. A strange and even
printed handwriting filled the lined pages in a way that Danny liked. He took the journal away, knew that this was
his unusual thing. He found some shade a
small distance away from the rummage shoppers and his mother. He sat down and started to read.
I swear
to you that though you read these words on a printed page, I first wrote them
out by hand. That might not seem
important to you, but it is.
My name is
Tanner Roy and if at times what I’m about to tell you seems untidy and
contradictory, well that’s the way things were.
I fear I’ve already muddled up the beginning of the story by making it
about me. It isn’t about me, not
really. How many stories are about one
person, anyway? It’s about the CEO and
Morgan, or Arthur and Mordred, or Gary and Reggie, or any of hundreds of people
and one cat. It’s about her.
It’s about good
and evil and what lies between. This is
the story about who we were and what we did and how we saved the world, or,
perhaps, doomed it. And in this story I
had a part to play; it begins with a copy machine.
Danny thought that was funny. Not many stories began with a copy
machine. He read the names again. His mother’s name was Morgan. That was a neat coincidence. When the man who wrote the journal talked
about Morgan, Danny could imagine it was his mother the man was talking
about. Danny liked coincidence. He liked that his name even sounded a little
bit like the man who had written the journal.
He kept on reading. He had read
several pages when his light was blocked by a man standing in front of
him.
For a second Danny was afraid it was
his mother, was prepared to be angry with her and insist that this time the
unusual thing was his. But it wasn’t his
mother. It was the man selling the
crap. He looked even younger up close,
like he was still in college. Danny’s
mother had spent a year at a college a couple of years ago; most of the boys
there had looked like this guy.
“What you got there?” the man asked.
That was a dumb question, but adults
were always asking dumb questions. It
was clearly a book and Danny doubted the man had two books like this. Danny hoped that when he grew up he wouldn’t
get dumb like everyone else. That would
be horrible.
“A book,” Danny replied when the man
crouched down to look him in the eyes.
Somehow that made it better.
There was something Danny didn’t like much about looking up at someone
who was being stupid.
“That’s not your average book,” the
man continued on. “Most kids your age
like things with more pictures. But you
like this one?”
“Yeah,” Danny said. “It’s funny.”
The man smiled, but his eyes were
sad. They were strange, black, or at
least a very dark gray. Danny liked his
voice, though. It sounded like the voice
of someone from out of a movie, like he could break out into song at any
moment
“You know,” the man said, “there
used to be a picture on the front of that book.
Would you like to know what the picture was?”
Danny nodded.
“It was a knight holding a sword,”
the man said. “Do you like stories about
swords and knights?”
Danny shrugged his shoulders. He supposed those stories were okay. Any story was okay if it was written right.
“What’s your name?” the man asked.
“Danny,” Danny replied.
“Nice to meet you, Danny,” the man
extended his hand to the boy. “My name’s
Gary. I’m glad to meet you.”
Danny took a look at the hand and at
the man’s face. Danny knew that he
wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers, but he supposed it would be rude not to
shake his hand. He rested the book down against
his lap and reached for the man’s hand.
“Danny,” his mother called out
sharply, “put your hand down right now.”
Danny dropped his hand to his side
as quickly as he could. He recognized
this voice. This was the voice his
mother had used when he had found the locket for her, the one with the pretty
woman. This was the voice his mother
used when she was angry. He knew better
than to do anything that would upset her further. His mother was a different person when she
was angry.
“Morgan,” the man said softly. “It has been a long time.”
That this man knew his mother did
not surprise Danny. Many people knew his
mother. It seemed everywhere they went
there were people she knew, people who would let her and Danny stay the night,
or a week, or a month, but never forever.
They would always have to leave.
Lots of people knew his mother, Danny had learned, but very few of them
liked for them to stay for very long.
But this was different. This time
his mother wasn’t friends with the person who knew her, not even a little. He knew this because she would answer someone
who was her friend. She would talk to
them. She wasn’t talking to Gary.
“I knew you would come eventually,” Gary continued on, his
tone still soft. “I’ve heard that you’ve
been prowling around, looking for things that used to belong to him. I knew you’d eventually make it here.”
Gary pointed down at Danny, but he wasn’t
pointing at Danny, he was pointing at the book.
Danny picked it up again, ran his finger along the spine. He felt warm when he did it, like he was
almost remembering doing it before, almost but not quite. It was a strange feeling; Danny wasn’t sure
he liked very much.
“Well,” Gary went on as Danny’s mother kept
silent. “There it is. You’ve come here for it. It’s yours if you want it. You should read it. Danny should read it. Tanner would like that.”
“Don’t you ever say his name,” his
mother sounded like a snake to Danny when she spoke the words. “Not to me, not to my son.”
“As you wish,” Gary said, his eyes still sad. “But isn’t that why you came here,
Morgan? Isn’t that why you brought the
boy?”
Danny hated when adults did that,
talked about him like he wasn’t there and hearing every single word. It was another one of the dumb things they
did. Danny wondered when it was that
adults became dumb. He doubted they were
all born that way. There must have been
a time when some kind of hormone kicked in and took away their good sense.
“Why
I came here and why I brought Danny is none of your business,” Danny’s mother
said, her voice still angry but also a little sad.
Danny knew what it meant when her
voice got like that, too. It meant that
she was thinking about his Dad. She
didn’t do it often when Danny was around, but sometimes when she didn’t realize
he was there, Danny would catch her crying.
Did this man know his Dad? Was
the man who wrote this journal his Dad?
Danny opened up the book again, alive with the possibility of it
all. Danny saw that there was a Gary in the journal, wondered if this was the same Gary. He seemed too young for it to be true.
“You’re angry,” Gary said and Danny knew that the young man
would regret that. One stated the
obvious to Danny’s mother at one’s own risk.
“Yes, I am angry,” Danny heard his
mother say, and the chill to her words made him wonder how Gary
could stand there so still, why Gary
didn’t start running away. The man was
fearless.
“Take the book,” Gary said one last time. “Let it be my gift to you. For him.”
“For Tanner?” Danny’s mother asked.
“Also for him,” Gary replied.
Danny opened the journal at
random. He read a passage while the two
adults wasted time not saying the things that needed to be said, choosing to
let their personal history, whatever that was, come between them doing what
they needed or wanted to do now. Danny
saw that grown ups did that all the time.
He read the words of a man who might very well be his father.
The crystal ball was heavier than it should have been,
like it was weighed down by the soul inside of it. I could almost feel it speak to me, cry out
for release. It was all I could do not
to drop the ball, I would have had I been convinced that by so doing I would
free the tormented soul inside. But the
CEO had told me that there was no release for that soul, that so long as one
atom of the crystal remained, the soul would have no freedom. So I looked deep inside the glass and it grew
clouded. At first I thought this was an
angry reaction by the soul inside, but as the fog cleared and an image revealed
itself, I learned it was the contrary.
My sympathy for the soul had persuaded it to grant me a glimpse at that
which I most wanted to see. She was
beautiful, and much to my shock, she wore the same face that she did in the
locket.
“Put that down,” Danny’s
mother instructed him, his words striking him harder than her fist ever
could. “We’re going, Danny.”
“You’re making a mistake,” Gary said to her as she
grabbed Danny by the wrist, her grip tight, her fingernails digging into his
skin.
That the man could say such a thing
and think it might move her meant that he didn’t know Danny’s mother very
well. She was mule-headed. Danny knew this because she called him
mule-headed when he acted the same way she did. He was nothing if not a fast learner.
As Danny moved past Gary the young man stuffed
a piece of paper in Danny’s pocket. He
did it so quickly that his mother didn’t notice and Danny didn’t say
anything. After they walked past the
kids who stared at him Danny remained quiet.
He kept on being quiet until they stopped at a gas station and his
mother left the car.
Danny quickly pulled out the piece
of paper which looked like it had been torn from the journal. The front of the page had words written in a
different handwriting than the rest of the journal. It read simply, The
Keeper of Secrets. This
handwriting and the words didn’t mean much to Danny. He wanted more of the other handwriting, the
writing from the man who might be his father.
He flipped over the piece of paper and saw another brief message was
written on the back, this time in the handwriting he found so reassuring. It was also a short message, but reading it
made Danny feel warm and comforted in a way he had never felt before.
I love you. I
have always loved you. I will always
love you.
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