Free Fortunate Son: A Novel by Walter Mosley Page B

once playing with fireworks when Lester’s parents were out. They were both leaning over the same Roman candle when instead of firing a flaming ball into the air, the rocket exploded. Lester took the full blast on the left side of his face, but Eric went unharmed. His hair wasn’t even singed. This was lucky for Lester, who was in so much pain that all he could do was roll on the grass of his backyard and scream.
    Eric ran to the house and dialed 911. He explained the problem to the man on the other end of the line, and the ambulance came there in time to save Lester’s eyesight.
    Eric was not only unhurt but seen as a hero by everyone. The ambulance attendants praised him for keeping Lester from touching his severely burned face. Lester’s parents thanked Eric for having the presence of mind to call for help. (Lester admitted that playing with the fireworks was his idea and that Eric didn’t even want to.)
    That night Dr. Nolan took his son, then ten years old, aside and did the fatherly thing by explaining how risky it was to allow other children to persuade him to do something dangerous.
    “You could have been burned just as easily as Lester,” Minas told his son.
    “But why wasn’t I burned, Dad?” the boy asked. “We were holding the Roman candle between us. It was just as close to me as it was to him.”
    “That’s what you call
serendipity,
” Minas replied. “Sometimes something terrible happens to one man and leaves another alone.
    “When I was a boy in Kansas, a tornado hit a neighborhood in my town. The twister set down at the beginning of the two-hundred block of Orchard Street. It knocked down four houses in a row, veered around the fifth, and then came back with a vengeance, destroying every other house on that side of the block. I suppose that there’s some scientific explanation for what happened, but for the people in house number five it was just good fortune.”
    Eric went up to his room pondering the word
serendipity.
He often wondered why so many good things happened to him. He never counted on his luck, but things always seemed to go right. He was lying in his bed in the dark, in Thomas’s old room, thinking about Lester and the accident, when there came a knock on the door.
    “Come in.”
    The door opened, and Ahn shuffled in.
    Eric had known Ahn his entire life. She was no longer his nanny. Now she was Dr. Nolan’s housekeeper and the family cook. Eric would have never said that he loved Ahn. He did love his father, but it wasn’t a very strong feeling.
    “You have to be careful,” Ahn said to Eric.
    “You mean about the fireworks?” the boy asked. “Dad already told me that I could have been burned too.”
    “No. I mean, yes, you shouldn’t play with danger because you will hurt others.”
    “Not me?”
    “You are dangerous,” Ahn said.
    Eric tried to decipher what the Vietnamese servant meant. Many times when they talked, she would say things like “you are dangerous,” really meaning that he was in danger.
    “You mean I’m in danger?”
    “No. You are the reason that boy is burned,” she said. “You are never hurt, but he is not lucky. Be careful with your friends. Do not put them in trouble.”
    Ahn’s black eyes stared into Eric’s great blue orbs.
    The boy wondered about what she was saying. Sometimes he felt like that, that he was lucky.
    The housekeeper turned away.
    “Ahn.”
    “Yes?”
    “Have you heard anything about Tommy?”
    “Nobody ever answers your letters, but they don’t come back,” she replied. “I am not finding Mr. Trueblood in the phone book, and his grandmother says that Tommy is with him.”
    “But he must be somewhere.”
    “I don’t know. Maybe they left Los Angeles.”
    “They have to be somewhere.”
    “He is safe,” she said, and then turned away again.
    Eric was angry at what she said. He knew that she meant Tommy was safe from him. But he would never hurt his brother. He loved Tommy. Always had. Tommy and Branwyn were