Until I Find You

"This is a frightened little boy!" Bonnie Hamilton had told her sister and Ginny Jarvis, when those older girls were trying to get Jack's penis to respond.

In Mrs. Machado's company, Jack was still a frightened little boy. She circled him in the corridor as if she were setting up her customary single-leg attack; she underhooked his left arm, the thick fingers of her left hand closing tightly around his right wrist. Jack knew the takedown she appeared to be looking for, b

ut he couldn't overcome his inertia; he made no move to defend himself.

Mrs. Machado pressed her forehead against his chest. The top of her head--entangled with gray, wiry hair--touched his throat. Jack was surprised by how short she was, but of course he'd been shorter when they last did this dance together--with Chenko repeating his familiar litany, like a call to prayer. "Hand-control! Circle, circle! Don't lean on her, Jackie!"

It wasn't wrestling that Mrs. Machado had in mind. With her insistent grip on Jack's right wrist, she guided his hand under her blouse; with her broad nose, Mrs. Machado nudged his necktie out of her way and unbuttoned the second button of his shirt with her teeth. Jack thought he detected the smell of anchovies in her hair. It was the contact his right hand made with her sagging breasts, which was quickly followed by the feeling of her tongue on his chest, that filled him with revulsion and gave him the strength to push her away.

Until that moment, he'd never believed in so-called recovered memory--namely, that various acts of abuse or molestation from one's childhood are mercifully erased, only to return with a vengeance, vividly, many years down the road. As Jack recoiled from Mrs. Machado in the semidark Sunday corridor of his old school, he remembered the button trick. How she had unbuttoned and unzipped him with her teeth--and all the other clever things she'd managed to do with her mouth, which he'd blanked from his memory.

"Don't be cruel, Meester Penis," Mrs. Machado whispered, as Jack retreated from her. She was shuffling after him, in her laceless running shoes, when she suddenly halted. It wasn't Jack's feeble resistance that had stopped her. Her gaze had shifted. She was peering around him, or behind him--and the second he turned to look where she was looking, Mrs. Machado was gone.

She must have been in her late sixties or early seventies. How could she have been that agile, that quick on her feet? Or was the bend in the corridor closer to them than Jack had thought? It was more probable, of course, that Mrs. Machado had never been there at all.

In any case, Jack hadn't heard the wheelchair behind him; the wheels on that smooth linoleum floor didn't make a sound. (He was, after all, on haunted ground.) "Jack," the woman in the wheelchair said, "you look like you've seen a ghost."

He'd expected to be confronted by Mrs. Malcolm--ever the protector of those girls, whose violation, she imagined, Jack sought. But the woman in the wheelchair was an attractive, forty-year-old real estate agent in a black pantsuit.

Bonnie Hamilton had managed to park her wheelchair in some out-of-sight place, near the back of the chapel, and limp to and from her pew unseen. She'd been successful in the real estate business, she would tell Jack later, because she always left her wheelchair at the front entrance and limped with her clients from room to room--even, as Leslie Oastler had cruelly suggested, up and down stairs. "My clients must feel sorry for me," Bonnie would joke. "Nobody wants to disappoint a cripple--to add insult to injury, as they say."

But at public events, or whenever there was a crowd, Bonnie Hamilton was also successful at keeping her limp to herself; she had a knack for sneaking in and out of her wheelchair without anyone seeing her. In the wheelchair, she looked elegant; she was as beautiful to Jack as she'd been when they were students together.

Jack was still speechless from his encounter with Mrs. Machado, real or not--and how grotesquely he now recalled the lost details of everything Mrs. Machado had done to him. It was too much for him, on top of all that--to be rescued by Bonnie Hamilton, who'd tried her hardest to protect him from her sister and Ginny Jarvis when he'd been nine or ten.

Jack dropped to his knees and burst into tears. Bonnie, wheeling closer, pulled him headfirst into her lap. Bonnie must have thought that she had made him cry; it must have been Jack's memory of being coerced to ejaculate on her sister's forehead that was traumatizing him still! (That terrible loss of his innocence in the big girls' residence when he'd been a frightened little boy--this in addition to his losing Emma, no doubt, had undone him.)

"Jack, I think about what an awful thing we did to you--every day of my life, I think of you!" Bonnie cried. Jack tried to shake his head in her lap, but Bonnie probably thought he was attempting to get away from her; she held him tighter.

"No, no--don't be afraid!" she urged him. "I'm not surprised it makes you cry to look at me, or that you dress up as a woman or do other weird things. After what we did to you, why wouldn't you be weird? Of course you're weird!" Bonnie cried.

She's completely crazy, Jack thought, struggling to breathe; she gripped his hair with both hands, squeezing his face between her thighs. Bonnie Hamilton felt very strong; she clearly worked out a lot. But you can't wrestle a woman in a wheelchair; Jack just let her hold him as hard as she wanted to.

Bending over him, Bonnie whispered in his ear: "We can put it all to rest, Jack. I've talked to a psychiatrist about the best way to get over it. We can just move on."

She didn't hear him ask, "How?" in her lap; Jack's voice was muffled between her thighs. Her fingers, combing through his hair, stroked the back of his neck.

"Normal sex, Jack--that's the best way to get over an upsetting experience," Bonnie Hamilton told him.

How Jack wished Emma had been alive to hear this! Wouldn't she have gotten a kick out of the very idea of normal sex?

Wasn't it destiny, after all? Hadn't Bonnie and Jack once looked at each other and been unable to look away? And that had been when he was in fourth grade and she in twelfth!

Besides, he was Jack Burns. Wasn't he supposed to sleep with everybody? Just how would it have made Bonnie Hamilton feel if he hadn't slept with her, a cripple?

Still, it gave Jack pause--she was definitely nuts. Bonnie must have seen the reservation on his face when she finally released his head from her lap. Her confidence wavered; she became unbearably shy. "Don't feel that I'm forcing you, Jack. You poor boy!" she cried. "You've been forced enough!"

She backed her wheelchair away from him; it was a disturbing image. Jack had the idea that they were rewinding a film; they were returning in time. At any second, Mrs. Machado would reappear; he could sense her coming around the bend in the corridor, reemerging from the shadows.

Under the circumstances, Jack chose to leave with Bonnie.

All night, at the Four Seasons, Bonnie Hamilton never once limped for Jack. She didn't limp when she was lying down. Once, when she got out of bed to use the bathroom--and again, when she got dressed in the morning--she asked him to look away.

Jack never fell asleep. He was too afraid of the nightmares Mrs. Machado might give him. In the dark, when he felt the first nightmare approaching--even though he was wide awake--Jack asked Bonnie if she'd seen the short, stout woman he'd been talking to in the corridor. Jack's body might have blocked Bonnie's view; down low in her wheelchair, she'd had the impression that he was talking to himself. "I thought maybe you were acting," she said.

This didn't prove that Mrs. Machado was a ghost, or that he'd only imagined her. There was a hair on Jack's necktie; he saw it when he undressed for bed. (More gray and wiry than a hair belonging to Bonnie Hamilton or Jack, and no one else had put her head on his chest.) And then there was the second button of his shirt: it was already unbuttoned when Jack undressed that night. This made him shiver.

Naturally, the button trick was the source of the nightmares Jack feared would beset him--not because of the trick itself, which for so many years he'd happily forgotten, but because of what it led to. All those other games Mrs. Machado had played!