The Kingdom Land Read Free Page A

her.
    Â 
    â€œ Erik,
    Â 
    I love you very much, but I have been sick and I
need to go away. I will come back when I am feeling better, no
matter how long that takes. I know every day apart from you will
hurt me, but I want you to know I will think of you every
minute.
    I love you, and it’s best for both of us that I get
well.
    I love you, and you are always in my thoughts,
    Â 
    Your mom,
    Maggie.”
    Â 
    Aunt Mary lowered the paper. Her face and neck was
flushed scarlet. She forced herself, nearly defiantly, to meet
Erik’s eyes, and Erik knew she had just told the biggest whopping
lie of her life. There was a soft exhalation of relief from the men
in the room. For his aunt’s sake, for his dad and uncle’s sake, and
even for the two strange policemen’s sake, he swallowed once,
twice, and then nodded.
    He wasn’t sure if they had just protected him from
something, or made it worse.
    The dream shifted, morphed, melded
into a time ten years later. Erik was in the Cooper’s house alone
and found himself in front of his Aunt’s open jewelry box. He
opened the bottom hand carved drawer and found a poorly fashioned
fake bottom holding an old note yellowed with age He had found a
secret and suddenly became thrilled at his find, until he read the
words. It was very short, but instinctively Erik knew this was the note from
his mother.
    I’ll leave this so you don’t call
the cops. I’ve had enough. I’m leaving the state. Don’t try to find
me. I won’t come back no matter what you say. I can’t stand
Fairfield and this farm is even worse. I tried. I’m done
trying .
    The note wasn’t signed, but Aunt
Mary had noted in the margin: December 12,
1957, Maggie.
    Erik wondered why Mary would want to memorialize that
day. It would make more sense to burn the note; not burn the date
into everyone’s mind. Then Erik remembered it was his aunt’s insane
need to keep everything in place and filed away. At that moment he
hated his aunt. It was all her fault. He wanted to go mess up his
hallway sink.
    Erik quickly noticed he wasn’t mentioned in the note.
There was no way he could confront Mary since he was the intruder.
He simply had to wait and wonder and come to his own
conclusions
    He found the truth from complete strangers. He was
sixteen. Erik was waiting at the Fairfield Five and Dime for his
aunt to give him a ride home after football practice. The store had
a fountain counter and on this day there were two ladies sitting
two stools to his right.
    It was obvious they knew Erik. They kept looking at
him as if they had discovered someone on a wanted poster. At first
they spoke in low whispers, but as their excitement grew so did
their voices. This was prime gossip, and the fact Erik was there
only added to the thrill. One lady kept staring at Erik while the
other spun the story with increasing gusto. At first Erik couldn’t
hear her exact words, but that quickly changed.
    The fervor of her voice grew until
Erik’s ears throbbed with the sting of her words. That poor boy. I don’t know how he can even go
on! How can he handle it? Her voice feigned
sympathy, but her eagerness to share her gossip couldn’t be
disguised. Erik’s ears began to burn. He turned his head away,
trying to block the words from his mind, but it seemed as if the
harder he tried to not hear, the sharper his hearing
became.
    His mom abandoned that boy and his dad. She had
moved to Fairfield because her dad got a job transfer from Denver
with the railroad. She hated Fairfield and everything about it. It
wasn’t long before she started to get into trouble and everyone
knew… well, they knew she really wasn’t a lady, but a real fluzie.
She was doing whatever she needed to do to get a husband and get
out of Fairfield, and she did it with every young boy in town.
Finally she found a naïve farm boy who spent so much time on the
farm he hadn’t