not smitten with Starlyn, and he seemed angry with his wife most of the time.
“Poor Heidi,” Tracy said. “If it wasn’t for her, I’m not sure I could go on being nice to that man. All this nonsense about some innocent little candy! And frankly, if bad breath isn’t from the devil I don’t know what is.”
Cole agreed to be on the radio even though he didn’t want to do it, and even though he’d been told several times he didn’t have to do it. He agreed because he wanted to please Boots, and he wanted to please PW. But no sooner had he agreed than he began to regret it, afraid that he was going to let them down. But then he couldn’t bring himself to say he’d changed his mind, afraid it would make him look like a coward.
He knew all about how this could happen, how your intentions could be not just good but noble, and still somehow you end up disgracing yourself and disappointing others. People you loved, people you wanted to make happy, people you wanted so badly to think well of you.
And now he would be forced to remember a time he had been trying to forget. He’d be forced to talk about things he didn’t want, or even know how, to talk about.
His father used to accuse his mother of not being able to let anything go. She needed to learn to put the past behind her, instead of dwelling on what couldn’t be changed. “Don’t be like your mother,” he warned Cole, “unless you want to be depressed.”
And wasn’t PW forever saying that letting go of the past was an important part of being a Christian?
“You take Paul. He had to learn to forget the bad things that had happened to him, forget the bad things he himself had done as Saul. ‘Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the heavenly prize to which God in Christ Jesus is calling us upward.’ That’s how he tells it in Philippians. Forget and press on. That’s what we’ve all got to do.”
But now they were asking Cole to remember.
He remembered being allowed to stay in bed for days after he arrived, even though he wasn’t sick anymore. So many cots were packed into the room, you had to walk sideways. All through the night you’d be wakened by noise: a boy shouting in his sleep, a boy sobbing, two boys having a fight.
All day long boys came and went, some approaching Cole’s bed to stare but rarely addressing him, and he’d watched one of them steal another one’s sneakers, shaking a silencing fist at Cole before making off with them.
He wasn’t sick anymore, but it still hurt sometimes just to think. He still zoned out, momentarily forgetting what he was doing or where he was; he still had memory gaps. He felt like a man in a spy movie he’d seen, whose enemy injects him with drugs to skew his mind. But Cole knew his own mind was actually getting better.
In the hospital, after his first bout of fever, he’d had to be told all over again that his father was dead. Pause. His mother was dead, too.
Passed, they said. Your mother passed a week ago.
Immediately, his temperature had shot up again.
He knew, of course, that it was a lie, for when he was alone she came to him. She was working on a plan to get him out. His job for now was to go along with his captors, to play dumb. He must understand, they were in serious danger: these aliens were capable of anything. He must be vigilant. One slip on his part could doom them both.
But he did slip. He panicked one day and bit one of them, the one he saw most often, a woman, tall and green, like a spear of asparagus. Always frowning. She and her evil syringe. After he bit her he was put in restraints. He cursed and cursed. To punish him they loosed stinging insects between his sheets. Because of the restraints he was at their mercy. He screamed and howled. He didn’t care anymore what the aliens knew, or what they would do to him, he kept calling for his mother. She came one last time. It was no good, no good, she said, twisting her hands; she couldn’t attempt a rescue now, it was too risky. She had to go