In silence, the two of them locked their bikes, then walked down Denver’s downtown streets, forgoing the trolley that ran through the middle of town. Chelsea knew that Eli needed to think, and he did that best by walking or riding his bike. She knew without asking that Eli would never abandon his mother. If it came to a choice between Princeton and taking care of his mother, Eli would choose the person he loved best. For all that Eli managed to appear cool and calculating, Chelsea knew that when it came to the two people he loved the most—her and his mother—inside, Eli was marshmallow cream.
“You know,” Chelsea said brightly, “maybe you’re overreacting. Maybe your mother can get along without you.” Without us, she almost said. “Who took care of her before you were born?”
Eli gave her a sideways look. “No one, and look what happened to her.”
“Your father happened,” Chelsea said heavily. She hesitated as she thought about the matter. “They’ve been divorced for two years now. Maybe your mother will remarry and her new husband will take care of her.”
“Who will she marry? The last man she went out with ended up ‘forgetting’ his wallet, so Mom paid for dinner and a tank full of gas. A week later I found out he was married.”
Unfortunately, Miranda’s generosity didn’t just extend to children but to every living creature. Eli said that if it were left up to his mother, there would be no need for a city animal shelter because all the unwanted animals in Denver would live with them. For a moment, Chelsea had an image of sweet Miranda surrounded by wounded animals and uneducated men asking her for money. For Chelsea, “uneducated men” was the worst image she could conjure.
“Maybe if you tell her about the offer, she’ll come up with a solution,” Chelsea said helpfully.
Eli’s face became fierce. “My mother would sacrifice her life for me. If she knew about this offer, she’d personally escort me to Princeton. My mother cares only about me and never about herself. My mother—”
Chelsea rolled her eyes skyward. In every other aspect of life Eli had the most purely scientific brain she’d ever encountered, but when it came to his mother, there was no reasoning with him. Chelsea also thought Miranda was a lovely woman, but she wasn’t exactly ready for sainthood. For one thing, she was t
horoughly undisciplined. She ate too much, read too many books that did not improve one’s mind, and wasted too much time on frivolous things, like making Eli and Chelsea Halloween costumes. Of course, neither of them ever told her that they thought Halloween was a juvenile holiday. Instead of tramping the streets asking for candy, they would go to Chelsea’s house and work on their computers while dripping artificial blood. They sent the butler out to purchase candy that they’d later show to Eli’s mom so she’d think they were “normal” kids.
Only once had Chelsea dared tell Eli that she thought it was a bit absurd for them to sit at their computers wearing uncomfortable and grotesque costumes while calculating logarithms. Eli had said, “My mother made these for us to wear,” and that had been the final decree. The matter was never mentioned again.
As Eli rode his bike onto the cracked, weedy concrete drive of his mother’s house, he caught a glimpse of the taillights of his father’s car as it scurried out of sight.
“Deadbeat!” Eli said under his breath, knowing that his father must have been watching for him so he could run away as soon as he saw his son.
Every time Eli thought of the word father his stomach clenched. Leslie Harcourt had never been a father to him, nor a husband to his wife, Miranda. The man had spent his life trying to make his family believe he was “important.” Too important to talk to his family; too important to go anywhere with his wife and child; too important to give them any time or attention.
According to Leslie Harcourt, other people were the ones who really counted in life. “My friends need me,” Eli had heard his father say over and over. His mother would say, “But Leslie, I need you too. Eli needs school clothes and there are no groceries in the house and my car has been broken for three weeks. We need food and we need clothes.”
Eli would watch as his father got that look on his face, as though he were being enormously patient with someone who couldn’t understand the simplest concepts. “My friend has broken up with his girlfriend and he has to have someone to talk to and I’m the only one. Miranda, he’s in pain. Don’t you understand? Pain! I must go to him.”
Eli had heard his father say this same sort of thing a thousand times. Sometimes his mother would show a little spunk and say, “Maybe if your friends cried on the shoulders of their girlfriends, they wouldn’t be breaking up.”
But Leslie Harcourt never listened to anyone except himself—and he was a master at figuring out how to manipulate other people so he could get as much out of them as possible. Leslie knew that his wife, Miranda, was softhearted; it was the reason he’d married her. She forgave anyone anything, and all Leslie had to do was say “I love you” every month or so and Miranda forgave him whatever.
And in return for those few words, Miranda gave Leslie security. She gave him a home that he contributed little or no money to and next to no time; he had no responsibilities either to her or to his son. Most important, she provided him with an excuse to give to all his women as to why he couldn’t marry them. He invariably “forgot” to mention that all these “friends” who “needed” him were women—and mostly young, with lots of hair and long legs.
When he was very young, Eli had not known what a “father” was, except that it was a word he heard other children use, as in “My father and I worked on the car this weekend.” Eli rarely saw his father, and he never did anything with him.
But Eli and Chelsea had put an end to Leslie and all his Helpless Hannahs two years ago. It was Chelsea who first saw Eli’s father with the tall, thin blonde as they were slipping into an afternoon matinee at the local mall. And Chelsea, using the invisibility of being a child, sat in front of them, twirling chewing gum (which she hated) and trying to look as young as possible, as she listened avidly to every word Eli’s father said.
“I would like to marry you, Heather, you know that. I love you more than life itself, but I’m a married man with a child. If it weren’t for that, I’d be running with you to the altar. You’re a woman any man would be proud to call his wife. But you don’t know what Miranda is like. She’s utterly helpless without me. She can hardly turn off the faucets without me there to do it for her. And then there’s my son. Eli needs me so much. He cries himself to sleep if I’m not there to kiss him good-night, so you can see why we have to meet during the day.”
“Then he started kissing her neck,” Chelsea reported.
When Eli heard this account, he had to blink a few times to clear his mind. The sheer enormity of this lie of his father’s was stunning. As long as he could remember, his father had never kissed him good-night. In fact, Eli wasn’t sure his father even knew where his bedroom was located in the little house that needed so much repair.
When Eli recovered himself, he looked at Chelsea. “What are we going to do?”
The smile Chelsea gave him was conspiratorial. “Robin and Marian,” she whispered, and he nodded. Years earlier, they’d started calling themselves Robin Hoods. The legend said that Robin Hood righted wrongs and did good deeds and helped the underdog.
It was Miranda who’d first called them Robin and Marian, after some soppy movie she loved to watch repeatedly. Laughingly, she’d called them Robin and Marian Les Jeunes, French for “youths,” and they’d kept the name in secret.
Only the two of them knew what they did: They collected letterhead stationery from corporations, law firms, doctors’ offices, wherever, then used a very expensive publishing computer system to duplicate the type fonts, then sent people letters as though from the offices. They sent letters on law-office stationery to the fathers of children at school who didn’t pay child support. They sent letters of thanks from the heads of big corporations to unappreciated employees. They once got back an old woman’s four hundred dollars from a telephone scammer.
Only once did they nearly get into trouble. A boy at school had teeth that were rotting, but his father was too cheap to take him to the dentist. Chelsea and Eli found out that the father was a gambler, so they wrote to him, offering free tickets to a “secret” (because it was illegal) national dental lottery. He would receive a ticket with every fifty dollars he spent on his children’s teeth. So all three of his children had several hundred dollars’ worth of work done, and Chelsea and Eli dutifully sent him beautiful red-and-gold, hand-painted lottery tickets. The problem came when they had to write the man a letter saying his tickets did not have the winning numbers. The man went to the dentist, waving the letters and the tickets, and demanded his money back. The poor dentist had had to endure months of the man’s winking at him in conspiracy while he’d worked on the children’s teeth, and now he was being told he was going to be sued because of some lottery he’d never heard of.
In order to calm the man down, Chelsea and Eli had to reveal themselves to the son who they’d helped in secret and get him to steal the letters from his father’s night table. Chelsea then sent the man one of her father’s gold watches (he had twelve of them) to get him to shut up.