Part Two
Chapter 28
(Vienna, Virginia)
Her kid brother Eddie used to joke when she first painted her house that it “was done by the same people who design Valentine’s Day cards.” Indeed, Virginia Hobbes’ house was painted pink with red trimming. Pink paint from stem to stern and blood red shutters. Her late nephew Chaz in the last couple of years of his life took to calling it “the Pepto Bismol house.”
Oddly enough, she didn’t grow pink carnations and red roses in her front yard garden in keeping with the house’s garish color scheme. A woman with a stereotypically feminine eye for pink or scandalous crimson, Virginia insisted on growing a vegetable garden. Spinach, for reasons neither she not anyone else could ever fathom, was her gustatory and gardening passion. Eddie’s nickname for her was “Popeye.”
Yet little of it was grown for her own consumption. Her primary reason for the spinach patch was her dogs, her “organic dogs” as the neighbors called them. Her pack consisted of an Afghan, a Great Dane, a St. Bernard and a Newfoundland. By the time they were fully grown, her main spinach patch in the back yard had grown to half an acre.
She stood in the middle of what remained of her garden from the last harvest and considered expanding it to three quarters of an acre. Lord knew she had room to spare- Her back yard was fifteen acres. Something moved beside her feet among the remnants of the yellowed and shriveled spinach plants. It was an earthworm and she delicately picked it up and examined it. It slowly expanded and accordioned through her fingers.
“Hello, little dude. Better get your rest. You have your work cut out for you next spring and summer.” She then gently placed him where she found him and hoped none of the dogs would squash him when she’d let them out after dinner.
A car’s engine then diverted her attention to her driveway and she walked out of the ruins of her vegetable garden to investigate, although Virginia had suspected who it was. Sure enough, it was her kid brother Eddie.
“Pee Wee! You still driving that Ford? I thought the car gods would have done you a favor and flushed that piece of shit into the ecosystem by now!” Despite having lived in Virginia for the past 27 years, Virginia never lost her earthy Boston accent and brash northeast way of expressing herself.
Ed Coffey looked embarrassed at hearing his big sister’s decades-old sobriquet for him, a relic of their childhood. Then when she saw Adam get out of the passenger side, she stopped and looked at him. My God, what a gorgeous boy, she thought as he tossed his long bangs out of his eyes, even if his haircut left something to be desired. The kid clutched a skateboard against his chest and she wistfully thought of her nephew Chaz.
“Hey, Pee Wee, you and Bea get into the adoption business?” She gave her little brother a hug. She was 53 but with her buxom figure and flaming red hair tightly pulled back in a permanent half ponytail, she could’ve passed for Ed’s younger sister. She’d always ascribed her youth and vitality to living the organic lifestyle and was always trying to get Ed to do the same. Coffey would counter that chili dogs and stale coffee made him a sexual brontosaurus.
“Virge, do me a favor, huh? Ixnay on the Eepay eeway, okay?” He jerked his head back toward Adam, who remained at the passenger side of the car.
“Alright, alright. Hey, kid. Come on over. I won’t bite. Besides, I’m a vegetarian.” The kid took a tentative step toward the pair but remained beside the Crown Vic. “Oh. My. God. You got a shy one! I love the shy ones!” She then did something that Adam never expected- she took off in a full sprint toward him. Adam barely had time to look at Coffey once before he was smothered in arms and full breasts. Ed shook his head and went back to the car to pull out the gym bag.
Adam got knocked down in the back yard again by Neptune the St. Bernard. The other behemoths danced in a circle around him, waiting for him to get up so they, too, could knock him off his feet. The kid never stopped laughing from the moment he ran out with them.
“He’s got the gift, Eddie, I’m telling you. When I hugged him and touched his skin, I knew.”
“You don’t have to tell me that, Virge,” Ed said while sipping a glass of lemonade with her on the back deck that overlooked the spacious back yard. “When are you going to wash those fucking beasts? I could smell them all the way from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.”
“Shut the fuck up… Pee Wee.”
“I told you to stop calling me that, Virge.”
“Only in front of the kid. That’s about as far as I’ll bend.”
“But you’re right about him, Sis. He is special. His sister’s boss said something to him yesterday back in Boston, something about him ‘developing.’ Developing into what?”
Virginia turned to see Adam again, who momentarily regained his footing and dodged Neptune just before getting decked again by Jupiter the Afghan. Adam looked nothing like Chaz and was already at least two-two and half years older than her nephew had the chance to be. Yet in the way he played with the dogs, the way he moved and dodged between them, the way he opened up his lovely face with that laugh… It made her eyes water and Virginia Hobbes never cried even when her late industrialist husband died 11 years ago of cancer.
“Something the world has never seen before, Eddie. I don’t know what but even novelists haven’t imagined anything like what that kid will be.”
“What do you mean?” Eddie asked, inching closer to his sister.
She looked at him again before continuing. “There’s a tremendous energy not only around him but emanating from him. I can practically see his aura without looking too hard. With everyone else, I have to concentrate but not with him, his energy signature is so strong. Like I said, Eddie, I don’t know yet what he’s gonna become but I’ll tell you this much: You two didn’t come alone.”
Ed looked at his charge again. The dogs began another pursuit but it wasn’t of Adam. Whatever they were chasing was moving in circles around them and about four or five feet in the air. And even for Vienna, Virginia, it was too late in the year for insects.
“Let me guess: You don’t like my spinach.”
“Oh, no, ma’m, I like it fine.” Nonetheless, Adam picked at the food on his plate and poked through the spinach that Virginia had pulled out of the freezer as if he’d never seen the vegetable before.
“Look, just because I feed it to my dogs doesn’t mean that it’s dog food.”
“Oh, I know! It’s great, really. In fact, this is the first home-cooked meal that I’ve had in days. Plus, my Mom’s not that great a cook to begin with.”
“So, your family’s Jewish?”
“Yes. Though we’re really not that fanatical about it.”
“Yet you have the one Jewish mother who can’t cook. You poor kid. No wonder you’re so thin.” Adam shyly smiled and tossed his bangs out of his eyes.
“Oh, I love when you do that with your hair. You remind me so much of Chaz.” Adam suddenly looked uncomfortable and glanced over at Coffey.
“Careful, Sis. You’re old enough to be his grandmother.”
“Oh, shut the f… Shut up… Pee Wee. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Uh huh. You know what they used to call her in high school, Adam? You know, since we’re bringing out the nicknames?”
“Don’t you dare, you fat fuck.”
“They used to call her 50 Yard Line ever since a rather embarrassing story about her and the varsity football team on prom night.”
“That is not true and you know it!” Virginia bellowed loud enough for Georgetown to hear.
“Uh huh.”
“Alright, it was only the star running back. How was I supposed to know that his voyeuristic teammates were watching from under the bleachers?”
“Thank God there weren’t any such things as video cameras and Youtube back then,” Ed said as he started to clear the table. Adam looked like he wanted to crawl under it with the dogs.
“It was just one guy and we weren’t even naked. Well, not totally. We were just, you know, making out.” Adam politely nodded. “The 50 yard line was Duane’s idea.”
Adam asked if he could be excused. Virginia said sure and after he was gone, she pinched the bridge of her nose. “God damn you, Eddie,” she whispered.
Ed came back from the kitchen and peeked into his sister’s living room. Adam was hunkered down on the couch, already flipping through the channels with the remote.
“Good, we’re finally alone.”
“You brought out that story just to get rid of him? Thanks a lot, asshole.”
“Hey, whatever works, right?” He handed her a slice of homemade apple pie and said as he licked his thumb, “Don’t call me Pee Wee in front of him ever again.”
“You have a point,” she said as she grabbed the plate from his hand. “It’s not as if you live up to your billing anymore. Unless Bea has something to add to that.” Ed gave her a caustic look.
“I think we’d better get off this track, Virge. I wanted to talk to you alone about Adam, anyway. You know why I brought him over here.”
“It wasn’t for my spinach and apple pie, that’s for sure.”
“You’re all I have. You’re the only other person in the world I can trust.”
“I know that. You think I’m stupid?”
“You have a gift, too. Something I never believed until just before Chaz died.”
Virginia had called Ed from this very same room nearly three years ago because of a nightmare and an unshakable sense of foreboding about Chaz. She dreamed that he fell from a great height and that Ed was going to see the whole thing. In fact, she’d described what would happen to him in almost perfect detail in her single dream. She’d had the gift her whole life although sometimes she’d call it a curse.
“I’ll do what I can with him, Eddie. But you have to understand, it’s not like a faucet I can turn on and off at will. The stars and houses have to be aligned just right and…”
“Yeah, yeah. Well, however you do it, just do it fast if you can. Because I just have a sense that they’re going to find us if we hang around here too much longer and I have no idea literally where to go from here.”
“I’ll do my best, Eddie. You know I will.” She turned in her chair and watched Jupiter, the smallest of the four dogs, get on Adam’s lap. The kid held his nose for a brief instant but kept the Afghan on his lap.
“And give those fucking dogs a bath, will ya? Before you get a visit from the Board of Health?”
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