Brian's Return Read Free

know his name.”
    “He attacked me.”
    “We were told several versions,” the policeman said to Brian’s mother. “Apparently they were fighting over a girl.”
    “A girl?” She looked at Brian. “You have a girl?”
    Brian shook his head. “No—it wasn’t that way at all. I was coming in the door and he slammed the door open and Susan was knocked down and he hit me and I . . .”
    But they didn’t hear him. Even if they had listened they wouldn’t have heard him, not really. They would never understand him.
    So he shrugged and played dumb and let them think what they wanted. It didn’t matter because he was starting to understand it now, was starting to see what had to happen, what he needed to do.
    I know someone, a counselor,” the policeman said. “He’s a retired cop and works with boys. I’ll give you his name.” The policeman took out a notebook and wrote a name and number on a page, tore it out and gave it to Brian’s mother. “Here. Call him and he can talk to your boy . . .”
    Animal-boy, thought Brian. Not boy, animal-boy. But he didn’t smile.
    “. . . maybe he can straighten him out.”
    Not unless he can see into my heart, Brian thought.

Chapter Four
    The sign was hung on the side of an office attached to a house.
    CALEB LANCASTER
    Family Counseling
    Please Come In

    It wasn’t really an office as much as it was a room stuck on the corner of a two-car garage. It had probably been a workshop, Brian thought. He stopped at the door. This cop retired and is making money on the side by counseling boys in his old workshop. Great. Just great. He’ll tell me to get good grades, don’t fight, don’t do drugs, obey my parents—
and
the police—and send me on my way. After getting a check from Mom, which is really a check from the money I’ve saved, since Mom doesn’t have any money. Great.
    He had talked to a counselor briefly the first year after he’d come back but there hadn’t really been anything wrong then. He hadn’t started to miss the woods as much as he would later—and football players hadn’t attacked him yet either, he thought, looking at the sign.
    For a moment he played with the idea of turning and leaving. This was so stupid. There was nothing wrong with him. He had come back at somebody who was attacking him. He had come back a little hard, maybe, but just the same . . .
    His hand turned the knob without his really meaning it to and the door opened.
    “Hello. You must be Brian.”
    Brian stopped just inside the door and his eyes moved and in two seconds he had taken in everything in the room. Plain white walls, some cheap pictures of woods and mountains that didn’t seem to match the rest of the space, a framed document of some kind. The desk was gray-green metal. There was one chair facing the front of the desk—an old iron office chair. Along one wall was a gray-green metal bookcase filled with books so heavy the shelves sagged. The floor was clean gray concrete.
    It was maybe the ugliest room he had ever seen.
    Behind the desk sat what Brian could only think of as a wall of a man. He wasn’t fat, just enormous and richly black, with a smile that grew wider as he stood and held out his hand. Brian almost moved back. This man had to be nearly seven feet tall. He literally almost filled the room.
    “I’m Caleb.”
    Brian took his hand and felt himself being moved toward the chair across from Caleb.
    “Take a seat, any seat.” He laughed. “As long as it’s this one.”
    Brian sat, waited.
    “They tell me you’re the boy who lived in the woods. The one who was all over television a couple of years ago.”
    Brian nodded.
    “Is that right?”
    Brian nodded again and realized with a start that Caleb was blind. “Yes . . .”
    Caleb laughed, deep and booming. “You were nodding.”
    “Yes. I’m sorry. I didn’t know . . .”
    “Don’t be sorry. It’s flattering that you took so long to see it.”
    “Did it happen when you were a cop?”
    Another