The Red Garden - Alice Hoffman [99]
JAMES NAMED HIS collie Cody, after his grandfather’s dog, and preferred the collie’s company to all others. The outside world continued to call to him, and he rambled more as the years went on, going farther afield, defying his parents’ expectations and their rules. Tell him one thing, and he’d do the opposite. Say no, and he’d get a glimmer in his eyes. If punished, he would simply climb through his window at night, the dog leaping out behind him. Then he’d disappear at will, up to the woods, or making his way along the highway. He’d be grounded for weeks when found out, but soon enough he’d take off all over again. He fell into a sinkhole in the marshes where the mud was so deep it took five men from the Blackwell fire department to pull him out. One winter he surely would have frozen to death in a sudden snowstorm, if Cody hadn’t led him to an abandoned fox den. He’d had so many close calls, he began to wonder if he was meant to be among the living. But if James was willing to accept a dismal future for himself, his father most certainly was not. John refused to give up his watch. He nailed James’s bedroom window shut and put a lock on the door. It made no difference. Locks and nails could not keep his son confined. James had already decided that if he couldn’t avoid his fate, he might as well enjoy what little time he had.
BY THE TIME James entered high school, he and his father no longer spoke. If one walked into a room, the other walked out. His father still kept watch, but from a distance. That distance grew every day, until the only thing John Mott was watching was his son walking away from him. By then, James was six feet three, handsome, reserved, desperate to get out of Blackwell. One girl after the other fell in love with him, and in his senior year he briefly fell in love back with Brooke Linden. Brooke had a crush on him first. She was waiting for him one night when he climbed out his window, a big grin on her face. She was fun-loving, with a houseful of brothers, and danger didn’t scare her. All the same, James broke up with her when he crashed his mother’s car. Brooke had been his passenger, and though he might not mind endangering himself, he didn’t want to hurt anyone else. Brooke didn’t understand when he said he was cursed, although when he walked away, she herself threw out her own string of curses. His back was turned to her, but the words stung.
He tempted fate more than ever after that. He swam in the Eel River during the spring floods, hiked the mountain in bear season, never backed down from a fight at the Jack Straw Bar. He figured that if death was looking for him, he might as well face it head-on. As soon as he graduated he decided to move to New York City. He wanted to get as far away from Blackwell as possible and find a place where danger was an everyday occurrence. He stopped by the police station on his way out of town, his collie waiting in the car.
“What do you want me to say?” John Mott asked when James informed him he was leaving that day without a plan or any goal in mind. “Good-bye and good luck?”
“I don’t believe in luck,” James told him. “Not in my case.”
In New York, James got a job as an orderly; then, after a year of training, he became an EMT. Every time he rode in the back of an ambulance he was reminded of the many close calls he’d had. He was serious and practical, but that wild streak ran deep. He still had an affinity for disaster and longed for the adrenaline rush of