‘He looked like …’ and he tried to explain, but he couldn’t, even with mime. ‘He looked like …’ and then he suddenly rushed through to the bedroom and pointed to the poster of Boofuls pinned to the wall.
‘He looked like that?’ Martin asked him, with a deeper feeling of dread.
‘He’s a real boy,’ Emilio repeated. ‘He’s a
real
boy!’
Martin laid his hands on Emilio’s shoulders and looked him straight in the eye. ‘Emilio, he
was
a real boy, but he’s been dead for nearly fifty years.’
Emilio frowned.
‘I don’t know what you saw in that mirror,’ Martin told him, ‘but it wasn’t a real boy. It was just your imagination. Do you understand what I mean? It was just like … I don’t know, your mind was playing a trick on you.’
‘I saw him,’ Emilio whispered. ‘I
talked
to him.’
Martin couldn’t think what else to say. He stood up and rubbed his hands on the legs of his pants, the way pitchers do. ‘I don’t know, Emilio, man. It sounds pretty screwy to me.’
At that moment there was a cautious knock at the apartment door, and Emilio’s grandmother came in. She was carrying a glass oven dish with a checkered cloth draped over the top of it.
Martin had always liked Mrs Capelli. She was the grandmother that everybody should have had: cheerful, philosophical, always baking. She had white hair braided into elaborate plaits and a face as plain and honest as a breadboard. She wore black; she always wore black. She was mourning for her dead sister. Before that, she had been mourning for her dead brother. When she and Mr Capelli went out shopping in their long black Lincoln together, they looked as if they were going to a funeral.
‘I brought you lasagne,’ she said.
Martin accepted the dish with a nod of his head. ‘I’m trying to diet. But thanks.’
‘Well, you can share it with the boy.’ Mrs Capelli glanced around the apartment as if she expected to see someone else.
‘The boy?’ asked Martin.
‘Emilio told me you had a boy staying here. He was playing with him all morning. He’s your nephew you spoke to me about?’
Martin exchanged an uncomfortable look with Emilio. If he said that there was no boy, then Emilio would get a hard time for lying. On the other hand –
But, no. He needed Emilio’s confidence right now. If there
was
something odd in the mirror, if there
was
some kind of manifestation, then so far young Emilio was the only person who had seen it. Emilio might be the only contact with it, like a medium. After all, he was a boy and Boofuls had been a boy. Maybe there was some kind of left-over vibe in the mirror that Emilio was tuning in to. Or something.
He lifted up the cloth that covered the lasagne and inhaled the aroma of fresh tomatoes and thyme and fresh-grated Parmesan cheese. ‘Petey will probably eat all of this on his own,’ he remarked as casually as he could. ‘Petey’s a real pasta maven.’
He saw Emilio’s eyes widen; as if the Hershey chocolate of his irises had melted into larger pools. But he winked at Emilio behind the upraised cloth, and he could see that Emilio understood.
‘He’s here now?’ asked Mrs Capelli, beaming. ‘I love boys! Always rough-and-tumble.’
‘Well, he – er – he’s running an errand for me – down at the supermarket.’
‘You send a little boy all on his own to the supermarket? Ralph’s, you mean?’
‘Oh, no, no, just to Hughes, on the corner.’
‘Still,’ said Mrs Capelli disapprovingly. ‘That’s a bad road to cross, Highland Avenue.’
‘Oh, he’s okay, he walks to school in New York City, crosses Fifty-seventh Street every morning, hasn’t been squished yet.’
Mrs Capelli’s forehead furrowed. ‘I thought you said he lived in Indianapolis.’
‘Sure, yes, Indianapolis! But that was a couple of years ago. Now he lives in New York.’
Slowly, Mrs Capelli turned to leave, her eyes still restlessly looking around the apartment as if she expected ‘Petey’ to come popping out from behind a chair. Martin knew that she kept a constant watch on the landing from her chair in the parlor downstairs, and since she hadn’t seen Petey go out, she was obviously suspicious that Martin was keeping him hidden. Maybe he had measles, this Petey, and Martin didn’t want her to know, because Emilio may catch them.
‘You do me a favor,’ she said at last as she went out through the door. ‘You bring your Petey down to see me when he gets back. I give him chocolate cake.’
‘Sure thing, Mrs Capelli,’ Martin told her, and opened the door for her. She eased herself down the stairs, one stair at a time, holding on to the banister. When she reached the door of her apartment, Martin gave her a little finger-wave, and said, ‘Don’t you worry, I’ll bring him down. He’ll feed your canary for you. If there’s anything he likes better than pasta, it’s chocolate cake.’
Mrs Capelli paused, and then nodded, and then disappeared into her apartment, leaving the door slightly ajar.
Martin came back to Emilio and stood in front of him with his arms folded.
‘You believe me,’ said Emilio. ‘You believe there’s a boy.’
‘Did I say that?’
‘But you said “Petey”.’
‘Emilio, there is no boy. I said that just to get you out of trouble. What do you think your grandmother would have said if I had totally denied it? She would have thought you were some kind of juvenile fruitcake. She would have had you locked up, or worse.’
Emilio looked bewildered. ‘There
is
a boy,’ he insisted. ‘Come and see him.’
‘All right,’ said Martin, ‘let’s take a look at him; even if we can’t shake him by the hand.’
Emilio ran into the sitting room and stood right in front of the mirror, impatient to prove that he was right. Martin followed him more slowly, checking the details of the real room against the reflected room. Two realities, side by side, but which one was real?
He checked everything carefully, but there were no obvious discrepancies. The screenplay of
Boofuls
! lay on his desk at corresponding angles in each room; one of his shoes lay tilted over, under the chair. The Venetian blinds shivered in the sunlight.
Emilio pressed the palms of his hands against the glass. ‘Boy!’ he called loudly. ‘Boy, are you there? Come out and play, boy! Come say hello to Martin!’
Martin, in spite of himself, found his attention fixed on the doorway in the mirror. It didn’t move; not even a fraction; and no boy appeared.
‘Boy!’ Emilio demanded. ‘Come out and play!’
They watched and waited. Nothing happened. No blue and white ball, no laughter, no boy. Martin was seriously beginning to believe that this was all a hallucination.
‘Maybe he doesn’t feel like playing anymore,’ Martin suggested.
‘He does, too!’ Emilio protested. ‘He said he
always
wants to play. The trouble is, they make him work, even when he’s tired, and they always make him wear clothes he doesn’t like, and he has to sing when he doesn’t want to and dance when he doesn’t want to.’
‘Did he tell you what his name was?’ asked Martin.
Emilio said nothing.
‘Emilio, listen to me, this is important, did he tell you what his name was? He didn’t call himself Boofuls, did he? Or Walter maybe? Or just Walt?’
Emilio shook his head.
‘Well, what did he do? Did he play ball? Did he dance? Did he sing?’
Emilio stared at Martin but remained silent.
‘Listen,’ said Martin, turning back toward the mirror, ‘maybe he doesn’t want to play right now. Maybe it’s – I don’t know, bathtime or something. Even boys who live in mirrors have to take baths, right? Why don’t you come back tomorrow and we’ll try again?’
Emilio banged both hands on the mirror. ‘Boy!’ he shouted, his voice more high-pitched and panicky. ‘Boy! Come out and play!’
Martin hunkered down beside him. ‘I really don’t think he wants to come out, Emilio. Come back tomorrow morning, okay, and we’ll call him again.’
Emilio suddenly turned on him. His voice was a sharp little bark. ‘You don’t
want
me to see him, do you? You don’t want me to play with him! You think he belongs to you! It’s not your mirror! It’s not your mirror! It’s
his
mirror! He lives in it! And you can’t tell him what to do, so there!’
Martin had never heard Emilio screaming like this before, and he was mildly shocked. He took hold of Emilio’s shoulder and said, ‘Listen … this may be a story that you’ve made up to impress me, and on the other hand it may not. But either way, I’m on your side. If there is a boy in that mirror, I want to find him.’
‘And let him out?’ asked Emilio.
Martin made a face. ‘I don’t know. Maybe there just isn’t any way of
getting
him out.’
‘There’s a way,’ Emilio told him quite firmly.
‘Well, how do you know?’
‘Because the boy told me, there’s a way.’
‘All right, as long as it doesn’t involve breaking the mirror – I just paid seven hundred fifty dollars for that thing.’
‘We won’t break the mirror,’ Emilio assured him with unsettling maturity.
Martin leaned back against the peach-painted landing wall and looked down at this self-confident little child with his chocolate-brown eyes and his tousled hair and the catsup stains on his T-shirt, and he didn’t know whether to feel amused or frightened.
After all, the likelihood was that this was the biggest leg-pull ever. Either that, or Emilio was simply making it all up. After all, there were pictures of Boofuls all over Martin’s apartment. If he was going to pretend that he had played with an imaginary boy there, what could be more natural than pretending he looked like him?
He closed the apartment door and walked back into his bedroom. The soulful eyes of little Boofuls stared at him from the
Whistlin’ Dixie
poster. He reached up and touched with his fingertips the golden curls, the pale, heart-shaped face.
‘You don’t scare me, little boy,’ he said out loud. ‘You don’t scare me at all.’
But he gave the poster a quick backward look as he left the room, and went back to work on the
A-Team
.
He awoke abruptly at three o’clock in the morning, his eyes wide, his ears singing with alertness. He hesitated for a moment, then he sat up in his futon so that he could hear better. He was quite sure that he could hear somebody crying, a child.
The sound was muffled by the rattling of the yuccas in the street outside, and by the steady warbling of the wind through the crack at the side of his bedroom window. But it was a child, all right, a boy, keening and crying as if his heart were going to break.
Shivering with apprehension, and with the chill of the night, Martin reached across the floor and dragged his red flannel bathrobe toward him. He wrapped himself up in it and tied the belt tight, and then he climbed out of his futon and tiptoed across the bedroom and opened the door.
The sobbing kept on, high and despairing and strangely echoing. There was no doubt about where it was coming from, though. The sitting room door was half open, and the moonlight was shining hard and detailed on the wood-block floor, and that was where the crying was coming from.
The real boy
, thought Martin.
Oh, Jesus, it’s the real boy
.
But the real boy, whoever he was –
whatever
he was – would have to be confronted.
Come on, Martin, he’s only a kid, right? And if he turns out to be Boofuls, then he’s not only a kid but a ghost, too. I mean – how can you possibly be frightened by the prospect of coming face-to-face with a ghost kid?
He reached out his hand as stiffly as if it were attached to the end of an artificial arm, and pushed the sitting room door open wide. The door gave a low groan as it strained on its hinges. The boy’s crying went on, a hair-raising
oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
that aroused in Martin both urgency and terror. Urgency to save the child from whatever it was that was causing him to cry so pitifully. Terror that it might be something so unexpected and so dreadful that he wouldn’t be able to do anything at all but freeze.
Shortly after Jane had left him, Martin had dreamed again and again of being rooted to the spot, unable to move while people laughed at him, while bristle-haired monkeys ran away with his furniture, while Jane was gruesomely raped in front of him by grinning clowns.
The greatest fear of all was the fear of walking into this sitting room and finding that he couldn’t do anything but stand paralyzed and helpless.
He took a steadying breath, then another, and adrenaline surged around his veins like nighttime traffic on the interstate. Then he took three decisive steps into the room, and immediately ducked and turned to face the mirror, with a heavy off-balance interpretation of the football block that his high school coach had always been trying to teach him,
duck, Williams, weave, for Christ’s sake, you’re a quarterback, not a fucking cheerleader
, and he couldn’t help shouting out
ah!
because he came face-to-face in the mirror with his own terrified wildness – white cheeks, staring eyes, sticking-up hair, and his bright red bathrobe wrapped around him like bloodstained bandages.
He paused for a moment while his heaving chest subsided and his pulse gradually slowed, and he caught his breath.