I find it difficult to reconcile the emotions I had then with what I know now. Did I have any way of knowing the dynamics active in what I considered to be my family at the time? All I felt then was petulant annoyance, that the life I had made had been disrupted. I say petulant because I now see that I behaved like a selfish child denied time to play with its toys. My reaction had no relationship with the real world, or anyone's concerns besides my own. Even Yuki reproached me at the time for letting my feelings get in the way of sense, but I was unkind to everyone for awhile. Sometimes he remonstrated with me in front of my father, made me feel isolated which only made me worse. 

We stayed at my father's in South Carolina for several weeks, during all of which time Dasius tried to see me, and I refused to set a date to meet. I hadn't seen Dasius for several years and thought of him as Laurent's factotum, a man of all seasons and all work, and refused to alter that simplistic notion even as time and again it proved false. Dasius, of course, is far more than factotum, but rather an essential and neutral force for peace-making, and I couldn't accept that because I was angry. I still thought ill of him for talking me up as a child, certain that he'd had some agenda I couldn't discover. In that way and in many ways I poisoned my happy memories, and therefore the happiness of reunion I could have felt then. It seemed to me that everyone had secret plans and demands of me, including Yuki, who swore that if he hadn't promised me he wouldn't he would strike me for calling him dishonest. In that time we endured the hardest, dirtiest fights we ever had, and in that fighting I often forgot all about the baby, a symptom of troubling forgetfulness that has endured. 

Of course, Javie was all right, because there was another who liked a baby, and it was Quinn. So one evening I found my father in the farm kitchen, at the sink and washing my baby. When Quinn laughs, he often growls and snorts very quietly, which is a product of his not wanting to smile very wide and show his snaggletooth. I found him talking to Javie in a nonsense language of half-sounds and French pidgin, because what few words Javie knew then were all French. Javie had soaked all down the front of Quinn's white T-shirt by kicking water at him, which he often did to me, too. He showed a pernicious streak of mischief, even then.

Seeing me approach, my father acknowledged me with a look. 

"He does that to me, too, with the water. Sorry about that."

"No, it's all right," he said, familiar accent, a mixture of South London and the Carolinas, comforting to my ears. 

"I need to turn up the lights a bit. The darkness is bad for Baby's eyes."

"Oh, that's right."

Quinn's eyes followed me to the dimmer switch, and all the lights in the house were on dimmers, which even turned to their highest setting were 40 watts. "The light is bad for my baby's eyes," he murmured, narrowing his own.

"I'm fine," I said, as quietly. "Did I make such a fuss, as a baby?"

"You? No," he smiled, reaching for a towel. He dried Javie on the counter gently, and passed him to me warmed up in a flannel. 

Javie always slept after a warm bath, and he quickly fell into deep sleep against me when I sat down at the table. The blanket was overwarm on my skin, but I didn't mind it, a whole piece with my baby in my arms.

"You were an exceptionally quiet baby. Leis was always checking to make sure you hadn't died, because you were so quiet in your crib. When I washed you, you only looked up at me with your big black eyes. You blushed easily when you were happy. You've always been sensitive but kept to yourself. We thought of you as a little old man, thoughtful-looking. And you were flexible. You were happy to sleep when we slept, and barely ever cranky when we woke you."

"You say 'we', but wasn't it only you?"

"See you are so sensitive. Leis would be here if he could. He has other things to deal with."

"Like what? Are you serious? He should be with you."

Quinn shrugged and sat across from me at the table, picking at his teeth with a wooden toothpick. He didn't bother to cover his mouth while he did that, wearing now only his creamy floral robe, tied tightly at the waist. 

"You don't think so? You don't want to know what he's up to?"

"Your Leis doesn't make elaborate plans. He's simpler than that, and I like him for it. If he does things he shouldn't, he usually has direction. Look at yourself. He had time to shave your legs and armpits before he made you. You think he planned that by himself? I won't say more. If he's away it's because he's been told to be. Perhaps that creature has a view to follow him to us. He doesn't even dare call me. But it's temporary."

"I guess you're right."

"I guess. You could be nicer to your Yuki. I'm only giving you a little advice."

"Nicer?"

"He gives you a reason for living. It is all about keeping each other alive, all of these politics. This one needs that one to live, and he needs someone else. Look after your relationships even if naught about them pleases you at present. That's the most important thing."

I extended my hand to him across the table and he took it. He was happier to see me than he let on, and I felt that in his hand, how he squeezed me, and how his heart fluttered to touch me. What anger I had felt toward him, of jealousy and whatever other thing, had faded. He stroked me with his thumb. 

I didn't say anything, and so he spoke, which was rare. Quinn when he is mild, he's humble, he's quiet. "It's interesting to me, how people are these days. When I was young, when I was your age, happiness... You see it wasn't a right or a mandate. Happiness is a rare thing, brief. You work in your life so that sometimes you may glimpse it, and sometimes it may take hold of you, and one does not judge it when its gone or for its briefness. Much more common is pain, and pain is natural and  constant. These days, if you are not happy you think that something is wrong. If you are not happy, you are angry at it, and at those you think have kept it from you. I think about your Leis, and I think that I think of joy the way he thinks of God. I worship it from afar, but demand nothing of it. Hold it when you think it around you, and make a good temple for it in your heart so that when it returns it may inhabit you well for the comfort of you both. It owes you nothing. Keep peaceful, it will come. It will come, little baby. You'll be all right."

I felt shamed by it, that he expected me to be a better man. But he would never think that of me, which I know now. He had adjusted his notion of goodness around the shape of my soul. I felt his love around me like a second skin. 

"See Dasius. I've told him, be doveish. It's natural for you to be suspicious of their aims. I will stay with you in the room if you like."

"You told me once that if they tried to hurt me you would kill them all."

"That sounds like something I would say," he said, smiling, stroking my hand.

"Don't do it. I don't want you to be hurt."

"Perhaps I only said it because I knew you would be the sort of man who would say that in turn. A good man, loving. Keep after me, too, be quiet about it, that I love you and would not see you hurt, for the safety of us both."

"I love you," I told him.

"Hush," he said, embarrassed. "I'll have Dasius come. He's only in town, waiting for you to be ready. Put that baby to bed with your Yuki, and it will all be over before he wakes."

But I'll tell you that it was never over, danger. Dasius came and sat down with us in the sitting room, and admired me, and it left a bitter taste in my mouth that he seemed attracted to me, so that in the future when it counted most I felt I couldn't rely on him. How could I know that he only touched me because he was lonely and held an affection for me in his heart? I misread it terribly. 

He sent us away to California, Beverly Hills and then Calabasas, far away from anyone else. Is it any wonder at all that Javie grew up oversensitive and stuck up? We had too much money. An erratic schedule and drug-use made his already sickly constitution difficult to manage, and Yuki often turned a hard back to Javie when he asked for fairness or a second chance. Maybe I was as scattered as I'm told I was, not sleeping and tearing myself to pieces with guilt whenever Javie disappeared for lengths of time. He couldn't adapt to us. He often screamed at me that he hated me, hated both of us but me especially, because we weren't blood, and imagined that if I were gone things would somehow be easier for him. Javie was so easy to shatter emotionally, and when he was like he needed his father. But Yuki was self-destructive, more and more often, unable to deal with his son and tormented because it made him feel as he if he didn't belong anywhere, that he had died. It was that old thing, and it made Yuki feel as if he were walking in a dream, and he began to take on a lost and ghostly look. I tried to hold onto him, but to look on him was to see that he had begun to fade away, and it made me desperate, that he would never leave me, please God. 

What do we know about how young men will turn out? How can we know what will pass in their character, and what will grow inside of them? I will tell you that when Javie was loving, he loved well and hard. He was always leaving us flowers, whenever he came back from a runaway and ready to go back to school. He could be very thoughtful, and he was terribly intelligent. He grew up to be delicately beautiful, with his father's eyes and a patient look. He was bottle blond from the age of twelve, and even when he began to snort coke at fifteen, his nails were always manicured. He needed the influence of his father, because at times he couldn't listen to me, but his father was a ghost. 

Around that same time, when he was fifteen, the danger relaxed, and we were often feted at Leechtin's. For Javie's birthday, we went down, and found out that they were calling him "Miou-Miou" because of his quiet and patient look, his watchfulness, and because as a child we had gotten Javie a cat, and they had seen photographs of it. I am told that Javie had cat-like features, and perhaps that is also why. Perhaps a lot of things. Perhaps it's true also that when he sneezed it sounded like a kitten. 

I learned there also that in the mid-60s, Laurent had taken up with a boy who went by "Bellamy", though I'm sure he had a first name too. I suspect Bellamy was after happiness as well. God knows why things happen. I don't care. There were three children with them, which an obviously ailing and unsatisfied Laurent treated like pets and that I ignored. But though they were younger than my Javie, several years younger, they "Miou-miou'd" him and teased him to the point of tears. I will tell you this, if I'd had my handgun I would have lined up each one of those little shits and shot them. Even now, if I could get my hands on them in the dark, cutting them and making them scream would give me pleasure. 

In 1977, Quinn whispered to me on the phone that it would be safer if we would go live with Leechtin. By then I was too tired not to comply. I thought that it would be a relief, that Javie would be safer there if only because he would be away from the friends that gave him drugs and took him to sex clubs. I thought that it would be better because I had to think that. Even now I am so confused, and can barely wonder if I should have done it differently. Oh, what could I possibly have done? When I think of it I feel so lost.

At Leechtin's, Laurent was often there, alone, and in spite of myself, I found that we needed each other, and oh, he was my best and only friend. Oh help me, I don't want to tell it. I feel sick.