congratulations, this will soon be your life

—just like I couldn’t look at him without wincing at what had once been and what was to come.

His hairline was several inches closer to the brow line than mine but already receding, and it would be a few more decades before his crooked nose and uneven eyes came into their Picasso-like own, but he was already skidding down a slippery slope. I’d had that same thatch of sandy hair, and whatever I’d lost on top was replenishing itself in my nostrils and ears, conservation in action. I’d have to be blind to doubt he was my kid, and he’d have to be nuts not to want to trade me in for a better model. But he didn’t look disappointed. He didn’t look much of anything. I wondered if he was autistic or something. Glory be. Not only did I have a kid, but the kid was weird.

“Parenting’s not complicated,” Hilary said. “Accept that you’ll fuck him up, whatever you do. Just try not to fuck up so bad that it kills him.”

“I’ll put him out on the street as soon as you’re gone,” I warned her.

She grinned, the way only someone who’s seen you roll off her naked body with a groan and a

must’ve had too much to drink

while she said

it happens to the best of ’em

and you both thought

no, it damn well doesn’t

can grin.

“No. You won’t,” she said. And she was right about that, too.

• • • •

The kid was no prize. He knew how to talk, at least, turning into a regular chatterbox once his mother peeled away, informing me in nauseating detail about what he required in terms of food, bedding, shampoo brand, toothpaste flavor, internet access, a list that stretched on in such detail and scope that I had to call in one of the Children to take notes.

“What, no limo?” I said, once he was done laying out his demands. “You don’t want to throw in a request for a weekly manicure or your own personal masseur?”

Mandy Herman, who was scribbling down everything that came out of the kid’s mouth, shot me a sharp look, and I wasn’t sure if it was because she didn’t think sarcasm was appropriate or because every few days I called her into the office and rewarded her with the opportunity to rub some life back into my shoulders, spine, and ass.

“You said you didn’t know what to do with a kid,” the kid said. “I’m telling you.”

Mandy, that traitor, laughed.

He was, it turned out, like one of those preciously precocious movie kids, the kind who melts the smiles of old men, heals the hearts of bickering lovers, and teaches every neighborhood Grinch the true meaning of Christmas. This, despite the big ears and the lopsided face and the fact that he never shut up.

It did nothing for me, but the Children gobbled it up with a spoon. He wasn’t there twelve hours before they took up a collection of spare kid junk: secondhand clothes and filthy toys and a brand new racecar bed courtesy of our very own Scrooge Jeffries. Mandy Herman vied with the Babbage girls for babysitting duties, eventually compromising on a roster that had Mandy on the couch with him Monday through Wednesday afternoons while the three Babbages—buxom and blond in a way that the kid was a few years too young and I was a few decades too old to make use of—covered the rest.

Alison Gentry, who’d been a high school math teacher in her discarded life, had taken charge of the younger Children’s education, setting up a one-room schoolhouse in what used to be the stables, and it was no trouble to scoop the kid into the fold. We had no others exactly his age—a clutch of toddlers, some first and second graders, and of course the Babbage girls—but the kid seemed to prefer the company of adults anyway, if you could call the Children that, and with their naïve, infantile willingness to believe as they were told, maybe that made sense.

Because what child doesn’t love a story? And when you get down to it, that’s all I am: a storyteller. Nothing more, nothing less. Back in the Hilary days, I’d thought I needed more smoke and mirrors, some laying on of hands, but eventually I wised up. You don’t need to cure the lepers to be a faith healer. We’re all of us in my business doing the same work, because what is faith but another story that you tell yourself to feel better? That’s what these idiot skeptics, the do-gooders, the ones so desperate to snatch the wool from my Children’s eyes, would never understand: Lies don’t hurt anyone. Lies are the balm;

truth

is the wound.

Even the Man himself, if you believed in him up there, napping on his cloudy throne, doesn’t have much more than pretty stories to offer these days. Sure, Joseph, Moses, Jesus’s precious lepers,

they

got miracles. But now? God’s out of the direct action industry, and all he’s offering in its place is a bedtime story. The fairy tale of heaven, the promise that whatever shit happens, your story gets a happy ending. The Bible, boiled down: Once upon a time I helped some poor suckers out and someday, maybe, if you’re good, I’ll help you too, but in the meantime, isn’t it a nice story to fall asleep to?

You can’t say I’m not doing God’s work.

All those social workers, estranged relatives, those Pittstown neighbors who turned their nose up at the Church buying up property in their suburban midst, they called us a cult. Maybe so. But the word carried a sinister whiff that didn’t match up with its reality, something that maybe you had to be in a cult—or in charge of one—to know. My Children were gentle, most of them treading through life with the care of the permanently damaged, whether by drugs, abuse, or simply the ordinary existential indignities, loss of job, loss of love, loss of dignity, loss of purpose. That was their universal: Loss. Who else would so desperately need to be found?

That’s what I’d done when I first arrived in Pittstown, what I did when I arrived anywhere: I collected the lost, the ones who’d fallen through the cracks, like a dog-catcher scooping up strays for the pound. It was a service, not just to the feral, but to the tame and well-housed, all those cocky, secure, too good-for-it-all townsfolk satisfied with the comfort of their own homes who preferred not to acknowledge what I was doing for them, tending to their damaged so they wouldn’t have to.

Alison Gentry’s sister left nasty voicemails every few months, and once she’d set the local cops on us, but where was she when Alison’s three kids and husband plowed through a guard-rail and into Lake Michigan? Where was she a year later when her sister washed down the anniversary with a vodka and Percodan cocktail?

Where were Mandy’s parents—with their team of trust-fund-busting lawyers doing everything they could to keep her hands off her money—when she and her crack pipe had driven a Pontiac through a neighbor’s living room window, and then been promptly hauled off to jail, where she stayed, because mom and dad thought teaching her a lesson would be kinder than bailing her out?

Where were Clark Jeffries’ kids when his board of directors dumped him on his ass, or Merrilee Babbage’s husband when—having been traded in for a secretary with a bad dye job and a dick—she was feeding her three kids with food stamps and blowing the landlord when she couldn’t make rent?

I

was the one who wiped their tears and salved their wounds and fed them some bullshit to live for, and if I took a little something with me when I went, it was only fair payment for services rendered.

Despite my best efforts, plenty of the Children still had a hole to fill, and somehow, with his ugly, gap-toothed smile and post-nasal drip, the kid filled it.