Fortunate Son

“And you should have too. Tommy is our family. You can’t let family go.”

They walked down the beach on sand left wet by the receding tide. Minas was wearing a yellow shirt and dark-blue pants. His shoes were made of woven brown leather; a thick golden watch hung from his right wrist.

Eric had taken off his shoes in the car. His T-shirt was yellow like his father’s pullover, but his pants were tan and rolled up past his ankles.

“Can I go visit Tommy?” the boy asked his father while scanning the waterline.

“Maybe after a while. His grandmother wants him to get used to being with them before letting us come see him.”

“He’s gonna be with them every day,” Eric said. “He’s gonna be used to them anyway.”

“We’ll see,” Minas Nolan said to his son.

At that moment Eric gasped and ran out into the shallows of the retreating Pacific.

“Eric,” Minas Nolan said, but before he could go out after his son, the boy was coming back with something wriggling in his hands.

It was a bright-green fish with brownish bumps along its back and big googly eyes that seemed somehow to contain mammalian intelligence. The tail was long and elegant, with a fin at the end shaped like a Japanese fan. The body was thick, 7 1

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and the fins below were so long and powerful they might have been used as legs.

“What is it?” Minas Nolan asked, forgetting his losses for a moment.

“A fish,” Eric said bluntly. “It was stuck in the sand.”

“But what kind?” his father asked. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. It’s certainly not a California fish.

Maybe it’s from the tropics or the deep sea. Maybe this is some fish dredged up by an undersea storm, a fish nobody’s ever seen before.”

With a careless motion, Eric tossed the googly-eyed green fish back into the water, whereupon it darted away.

“I don’t like fish,” the boy said simply. “Let’s go home, Dad.”

That n i g h t E ri c had his father write a letter to his brother, Thomas.

Dear Tommy,

Dad told me that you had to go away with your father. Idon’t like it that you had to go, and I know that you want to beback here with us. I’m going to go get you as soon as I can figure out where you are and how I can get there. I will save youand bring you back here so we can play overhand catch and finish the first grade together.

Eric Tanner Nolan

p.s.

I found a green fish today that Dad said was real rare. If youwere here I bet that you would have found him first.

Minas wrote the letter in bold characters that Eric could examine when he was done. They put the letter in an enve-7 2

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lope, which Minas addressed and Ahn sent off to Madeline Beerman.

Madeline received the letter, but she never gave it to Thomas. She put it, unopened, in the bureau drawer next to her bed.

E ri c returne d to his life. At school he was the most popular boy in his class. He won every game he played at recess and was always chosen by the teacher to help clean the erasers and pass out papers.

Sometimes at night he would flip a coin with Ahn. It was a simple game. He’d flip an old Indian head nickel his father had once given him, and either he or Ahn would call heads or tails before it settled on the floor.

Eric won almost every time. Ahn was astonished by this.

Even though she had little formal education, she knew that he shouldn’t win any more than she did. But there it was —

time after time Eric would call heads and heads would turn up; Eric would call tails and tails it would be.

The nanny woke up one night from a deep sleep in which she was having a dream about flipping the coin with Eric. In the dream her faceless father was standing above her and the big blond boy. She and Eric were the same size in the dream.

Ahn had lost sixty-three flips in a row when her father said,

“One more loss and you will die, my daughter.”

That’s when Ahn awoke with a start.

“Every time he wins someone else loses,” she said to herself.

She gasped and suddenly saw her charge as some kind of monster.

“He killed his mother,” Ahn said to no one. “He killed Miss Branwyn.”

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She lay back in her bed thinking of little Thomas.

“Maybe he’s safer away from Eric,” she thought. “Maybe Eric will destroy everyone he touches.”

Th e days and months and years passed in the Nolan household. Everyone wanted to be Eric’s best friend. Every girl wanted to be his girlfriend. The teachers loved him, and the sun illuminated his path.