In a few minutes there’s the bang of the trapdoor opening as Sonia arrives with breakfast, calling down for “some goddam help up here.”
“Why don’t you go help her,” Risa suggests gently, for she knows that nothing short of a call to duty will peel Connor away from her.
Upstairs, Sonia has groceries enough to feed an army. Between Beau, Connor, and Grace, who is aggressively helpful today, the supplies are brought down in two trips, and Connor finds himself with nothing to carry the third time he comes up the stairs.
Today the trunk has been pushed off the trapdoor at a haphazard angle, impinging on a small plastic trash can that got in its way.
That trunk has been the elephant in the room since Connor arrived, although he hasn’t dared to speak of its contents. Connor turns to see that Sonia has left to park her Suburban somewhere legal.
He’s alone with the trunk.
Unable to resist its gravity, he kneels before it. It’s a heavy, old thing. Antique to be sure. Old travel stickers adorn it, practically shellacked to the surface. Connor can’t tell whether the old steamer trunk has actually been to those places, or if the stickers are merely decorations applied once it stopped travelling and became a piece of furniture.
He doesn’t dare open it, but he knows what’s inside.
Letters.
Hundreds of them.
Each one was written by an AWOL who’d been through Sonia’s basement. Most wrote to their parents. They are missives of sorrow and disillusionment. Anger and the screaming question of “why?” Why did you? How could you? When did things go so wrong? Even the state wards, unloved but tolerated by the institution that raised them, found something to say to someone.
He wonders if Sonia ever sent his letter, or if it’s still in there, buried among the other raging voices. He wonders what he would say to his parents now, and if it’s any different from what he wrote. His letter began with how much he hated them for what they did, but by the time he reached the end, he was in tears, telling them that he loved them in spite of it. So much confusion. So much ambivalence. Just writing the letter helped him understand that—helped him to understand himself a bit more. Sonia had given him a gift that day, and the gift of the letter was in the writing, not in the sending. But still . . .
“I’d ask you to move the trunk back into place for me—but you’ve gotta be on the other side of the trapdoor before I do.” Sonia raises her cane, pointing down the steep basement steps.
“Right. I’m going—don’t use the cattle prod.”
She doesn’t whack him with her cane, but on his way down, she does tap him gently on the head with it to get his attention.
“Be good to her, Connor,” Sonia says, gently. “And don’t let Beau get to you. He just likes to be the big man.”
“No worries.”
He descends, and she closes the trapdoor above him. The basement smells like teen spirit, as the old prewar song goes. For a brief moment he has a flashback without words or images—just a swell of feeling—back to the first time he was herded down those steps two years ago. The invincibility he was feeling when he woke up is now tempered by the cold concentrate of that memory.
Risa’s at her little first aid station tending to a girl’s swollen, slightly bloody lip. “I bit my lip in my sleep—so?” the girl says, instantly on the defensive. “I have nightmares—so?”
Once the girl is tended to, Connor sits down in the treatment chair. “Doctor, I have a problem with my tongue,” he says.
“And what might that be?” asks Risa cautiously.
“I can’t keep it out of my girlfriend’s ear.”
She gives him the best Oh, please look he’s ever seen, and says, “I’ll call the Juvies to cut it out. I’m sure that’ll take care of the problem.”
“And it’ll give some other poor soul a highly talented sensory organ.”
She allows him the last laugh, studying him for a few moments.
“Tell me about Lev,” she finally says.
He’s a bit deflated to have the playfulness so totally squashed out of their conversation.
“What about him?” Connor asks.
“You said you were with him for a while. What’s he like now?”
Connor shrugs, like it’s nothing. “He’s different.”
“Good different, or bad different?
“Well, the last time you saw him, he was planning on blowing himself up—so anything is an improvement.”
Another kid comes to Risa with what looks like a splinter in his finger, sees the two of them talking, and goes away to take care of it himself.
Connor knows he can’t get out of this conversation, so he tells Risa what he can. “Lev’s been through a lot since the harvest camp. You know that, right? Clappers tried to kill him. And that asshole Nelson captured him, but he got away.”
“Nelson?” Risa says caught completely by surprise. “The Juvey-cop you tranq’d?”
“He’s not a cop anymore. He’s a parts pirate, and he’s nuts. He’s got it out for me and Lev. Probably you, too, if he could find you.”
“Great,” says Risa, “I’ll add him to my list of people who want me dead.”
Suddenly, with the specter of Nelson in the conversation, Connor finds bringing the conversation back to Lev is now a relief. “Anyway, Lev hasn’t grown any—except for his hair. I don’t like it. It’s past his shoulders now.”