"The what?"
"I'm going to miss you, too, honey pie," she whispered. She was putting her T-shirt back on--more stuffed animals were getting out of her way, in whatever way they
could--when Jack heard his mother in the hall. Emma's bedroom door was partially open.
"Was that you, Jackie?" his mom was calling. (No doubt he'd been making unusual sounds.)
Both Emma and Jack knew he hadn't put his boxers back on. He didn't even know where they were; he hoped they were under the covers. His head was on Emma's shoulder; one of her arms was thrown loosely around his neck. The "loosely" made it not yet a headlock, but there was no question that they were snuggled together, under the covers, when Alice came into the room.
"I had a dream," Jack told his mom.
"I see," she said.
"There's more room for him to have a bad dream in my bed than in his," Emma told Alice.
"Yes, I see that there is," Alice replied.
"It was that dream about the moat," Jack said. "You remember the littlest soldier."
"Yes, of course," Alice said.
"It was that one," he told her.
"I didn't know you still had that one," his mother said.
"All the time," he lied. "More than usual, lately."
"I see," his mom said. "Well, I'm sorry."
There were stuffed animals scattered everywhere, as if there'd been a massacre. Jack kept hoping his boxers weren't lying among them. Alice started to leave Emma's bedroom, but she paused in the doorway to the hall and turned back to face them.
"Thank you for being such a good friend to Jack, Emma," Alice said.
"We're gonna be friends for life, Alice," Emma told her.
"Well, I hope so," Alice said. "Good night, you two," she called softly, as she went down the hall.
"Good night, Mom!" Jack called after her.
"Good night!" Emma called. Under the covers, her hand found and held the little guy, who appeared to have fallen asleep.
"How quickly you forget," Emma whispered to his penis.
Like old times, Jack thought, as he was falling asleep--without ascertaining very clearly what had been good about the aforementioned "old times" and what hadn't. It was even a comfort to listen to Emma snoring.
Emma had shot a whole roll of photographs of Jack with Chenko in the Bathurst Street gym. Various angles of Chenko's wolf-head tattoo; Jack sitting cross-legged on the wrestling mat beside the old Ukrainian; Chenko's arm around Jack's shoulders in what the boy thought of as a fatherly way.
Jack lay listening to Emma snoring, just visualizing those photographs. Soon he would be in Maine, but he was no longer frightened. As he drifted away, Jack believed there was nothing in Maine that could scare him.
Jack Burns would miss those girls, those so-called older women. Even the ones who had molested him. (Sometimes especially the ones who had molested him!) He would miss Mrs. Machado, too--more than he ever admitted to Emma Oastler.
Jack even missed the girls who never abused him--among them Sandra Stewart, who had played the bilingual stutterer, the vomiter, the mail-order bride who gets fucked on a dog sled and wanders off and freezes to death in the snow, in a histrionic blizzard! How sick was it that he remembered her?
He would miss each one, every major and minor character in his sea of girls. Those girls--those women, at the time--had made him strong. They prepared Jack Burns for the terra firma (and not so firma) of the life ahead, including his life with boys and men. After the sea of girls, what pushovers boys were! After Jack's older-women experiences, how easy it would be to deal with men!
III
Lucky