Andrew’s Gift
by Bill Kowaleski
Part 1 appears
in this issue.
conclusion
The next morning, events overtook us. Andrew walked softly up to Alyssa as I sipped tea in my favorite chair. He tugged at her robe and whispered, “There are bad men out there. They want to take me away. I have to tell you even though the devil told it to me. Mrs. Mehmed said it was OK if somebody wants to hurt me.”
I heard this and said very softly, “Can you see them out the window, Andrew?”
He pointed silently to two young men, slender, in dark hooded sweatshirts, standing at the bus stop just two buildings to the left, pacing nervously, never taking their eyes off of our front door. I watched them until a bus came. When it left and they were still at the stop, I knew we had a serious problem.
I went upstairs, where Mrs. Mehmed seemed to already be aware of the situation. Before I could say a word she whispered, “I thought about what to do if this happened. I have a large suitcase. He can crawl into that, then you can help me with my bags to a taxi. Once I get to the bus station, I can take him out, and they will never know what happened to him.”
It was a very tense moment but, for the first time, suspicion entered my mind. How did she know about the men? Andrew had not left our apartment that morning. But the immediate problem was for him to escape, so we brought down her bags, including the large suitcase.
“Andrew,” I said, “we are going to have some fun. You will hide in the big box and take a ride. Mrs. Mehmed is going to take you to a fun place in the country for a while. You have to be very, very quiet. Do you want to do that?”
“Yeah, yeah!” He was enthusiastic, and I think also understood that we would fool the scary men outside.
As we awaited the taxi, I asked Mrs. Mehmed for the address and phone number of her daughter in Wisconsin.
“I’m not sure I should tell you that,” she said. “If you don’t know it, you can’t tell it to anyone. I have a cell phone and will call you once we’re on the bus. Here is the number.”
“Mrs. Mehmed, I would die, I would suffer terrible torture rather than tell anyone where you are taking Andrew. You must believe that!”
She looked me closely in the eye, tilted her head, and said, “Yes, of course. I should have known that. I will tell you the address, but you must memorize it. Do not write it down or they may find it.”
The taxi came. I grabbed the big suitcase hiding Andrew, and Mrs. Mehmed carried a smaller bag. We stepped outside the door, keeping our eyes focused on the taxi. Inside, Alyssa watched the men at the bus stop, ready to alert me if they approached us. We put the big suitcase in the trunk. How I hated to put Andrew in there! The driver slammed the trunk shut, I pushed some money into Mrs. Mehmed’s hand, and they were off. I walked as calmly as I could back inside, tears welling in my eyes.
“They watched, but they did nothing, no phone calls, no moves toward the house. It worked!” Alyssa was excited, but I feared our anxiety was just beginning.
“Alyssa, why did she hesitate to give us the address? And do we even know if this address is correct? I am full of doubts. Something is not right. How can we verify if this information is correct?”
“Yes, we must call her soon if we do not hear from her.”
Two hours later, the phone rang. When I put the receiver to my ear I heard a loud roaring and a faint voice, breaking up. It might have been Mrs. Mehmed, but the call abruptly cut out before I could be sure. Fifteen minutes later, the same thing happened again. The day dragged into night but we received no more calls. When we tried to call her, we got a message saying the phone was not in service.
By ten o’clock, Alyssa, my brave rock, the one who had kept me sane in that horrible shipping container we lived in during our escape from the war zone, broke down into uncontrollable tears.
“She will sell him into slavery! I heard about it at the hairdresser! They steal children and sell them to—”
“Alyssa!” I shouted. “We cannot think this way. We must have hope. Perhaps her phone is just not working. And we have an address. We will go there as soon as we can.”
Morning mercifully ended a sleepless night, but the new day brought us only more fear.
At about eight in the morning, there was a knock on our door. I opened it to see one of the young men we’d observed loitering at the bus stop yesterday.
“Hello, I am wondering whether there is an apartment available in this building?”
“No,” I said, “all units are occupied.”
“But someone told me that Drago Besic has recently moved out.”
“You are misinformed. His wife is still living there.”
“I see. Say, when I came to visit them last month, I met your wonderful young son. How is he doing?”
“Why do you ask? What do you know about him?”
He put up his hands and took two steps backward. “OK, sorry, just trying to be pleasant. I’ll look elsewhere for an apartment.”
He retreated out the building’s front door and down the street. I had overreacted. Now he surely knew that I was aware of his real intentions. But at least it appeared that he and the people he worked for did not know where Andrew was.
Alyssa came to the door, phone in hand. “Still no answer. We must go today, John, we cannot wait.”
I was so torn between my obligations to our tenants and the need to find out what had happened to our son. I fell to my knees right there in the hall and began to pray for guidance. Alyssa joined me, and we held hands, feeling as small and helpless as we had in the darkest days of the war we had fled.
We prayed, and God listened. The door to Mr. Young’s apartment opened, and he looked down on us from the railing two stories up.
“John, Alyssa,” he said. “Is there anything wrong?” He ran downstairs, and we invited him into our apartment.
“Mrs. Mehmed has taken Andrew to her daughter’s. But we cannot reach her. We don’t know if he’s OK. We must go there and find out. But—”
“But you don’t have anyone to watch over the building.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“Well, perhaps I have a solution for you. I was just about to come down here to ask you whether you’d be able to give me some odd jobs to do. I lost my job yesterday, and I really need to have some kind of an income. I’m very good with plumbing and electrical work, even though I know you must think that people like me wouldn’t be like that.”
“I don’t make such judgments, Mr. Young, but there is an electrical problem in 2D. Would you like to go up there with me now and show me what you can do?”
He impressed me. It was clear he understood wiring, and he diagnosed and fixed the problem quickly. Then he came into our apartment and removed and re-installed the garbage disposal, just to show me that he knew plumbing too. I asked him if he could take over the building for a week and he enthusiastically agreed.
I feared very much that those men we’d seen at the bus stop were watching us. So we bought rail tickets only as far as Milwaukee, because no train went to the small town where we hoped Andrew was hiding. We saw no evidence that someone had followed us when we arrived in Milwaukee, but still we left the station and walked around downtown for a few minutes. Then we returned to the station, which served both the trains and the inter-city buses, and bought our bus ticket.
An hour into our journey on the half-empty bus, Alyssa again tried to call Mrs. Mehmed. The phone was still out of service. She called again an hour later, with the same result.
“Wait until we get there,” I said. “We will need some battery left when we arrive.”
“Yes, we will arrive,” said Alyssa. “And then we go to this address, and then what if he is not there? What do we do? It will be late. Where will we sleep?”
“Alyssa, we slept five days in a shipping crate. We slept in a ditch outside our village when the Serbians attacked. We are strong! Do not let fear conquer you.”
She nodded, but I could see the tears fighting to escape her eyes.
We arrived in the late evening, dropped off in the deserted parking lot of the small grocery store that served as the town’s bus station. To our right we saw the lights of a gas station. We marched over to it, bags in hand, and asked the clerk inside about the address.
He looked like he was only in high school. Yawning, rubbing his eyes as he spoke, he said, “That’s on this highway right here, about two miles out of town. You came on the bus?”
“Yes,” I said. “If we must walk, we shall.”
He laughed. “Walk? This is when the drunks start driving home. You’re risking your life walking along that road. Most people pay at the pump these days. I’ll lock up and drive you over there. It’ll only take ten minutes.”
He looked more closely at us. “You’re a lot like the others that visit that farm. Same accent, same look. Where are you people from?”
“We are Bosnians,” I said.
He stared, his eyes flickered a moment. “You mean Bosnia, Idaho? I never knew they talked like that there.”
I just nodded. It was best he didn’t know more. And correcting him would be rude, considering the help he was giving us.
He left us at the end of a gravel driveway that disappeared into a thick stand of trees. As we walked slowly in a darkness that was broken only by starlight, we heard a dog barking. Alyssa stopped. “Remember those dogs that attacked us when—”
“Of course I do. Keep walking. I will shout if it challenges us.”
We took ten more steps and then heard a crunching sound coming from the darkness. A woman’s voice, young, yet strangely familiar called out, “Identify yourselves or I’ll loose this dog on you.”
I shouted our names and then I said, “We are looking for our son, Andrew. Mrs. Mehmed said he would be here.”
“Kaiser, sit!” the voice said. The crunching came closer, and then a bright white light flashed on. It illuminated a tall young woman in a robe, a shotgun in her hands pointed toward us. A large German Shepherd sat in the middle of the driveway behind her.
“Stay there. I will wake Mrs. Mehmed and have her identify you.”
Our hearts leapt. Mrs. Mehmed was there! But was Andrew?
We waited one minute, two, three. Then we heard the crunching again, but the light was between us and the people approaching. One of the people began running; small, quick steps. A shape emerged from the blinding light. It was Andrew, running toward us!
Never can I remember a happier moment! I was filled with joy and relief. We hugged and hugged. I had never seen him happier, and it was only a little later that I fully understood why.
Mrs. Mehmed emerged into the light. “I am so sorry,” she said. “That horrible cell phone. I have to get a new one, but to do that, we must go all the way to Wausau. We were going to do that tomorrow.”
“Why didn’t you use the land line?” I asked.
“It could be traced. I couldn’t risk that. But come in, sit down. We’ll find something for you to eat.”
Inside, Andrew eagerly told us about the farm. “The rabbits are afraid of the cats that run around here, and the deer just think about food; the devil told me so. And there are other kids here that the devil talks to: Markus and Nancy and Esad.”
“Really!” Alyssa said. “Do they live nearby, in the town?”
“No, they live right here on the farm! It’s so cool! We can all play together, and it’s like they’re my brothers and sisters.”
Andrew stopped, looked around, and then whispered, “Oops. I forgot I’m not supposed to tell you what the devil says. Everybody here talks to the devil, so I don’t have to worry about keeping quiet about what he says.”
“The adults talk to the devil too, Andrew?” I asked.
He shook his head and put his finger to his lips, but it was suddenly all making sense. Alyssa and I looked at each other; we finally understood. When Mrs. Mehmed came into the room, she peered closely at us and then smiled.
“I was going to tell you, but it seems Andrew did that already. Yes, all of us here were devil children at one time, and we all suffered for it. The adults on this farm are the survivors. There were others who were not so lucky. When we discover others like ourselves, we do what we can to protect them. The world does not like people who are different, and it especially doesn’t like those who know its darkest secrets. We must protect ourselves as best we can. When Andrew is older, he will know how to take care of himself, but now he needs us. This farm, and a few other places are where we take the threatened children.”
“This has nothing to do with the devil, does it, Baba Mehmed?” I said. “All of you can read minds.”
“Yes, of course. So sorry to insult you by dredging up that old superstition, but it helps people to come to terms with the situation. Your son will always be different; he must learn how to use his special gift and not be destroyed by it.”
“He seems so happy here,” said Alyssa.
“Of course he is happy here; he is with his own kind. And he is welcome to stay as long as is necessary. There is no time limit.”
That night, as we lay together in bed, we decided that it would be best if Andrew stayed at the farm for some time. We knew how empty our home would seem without him, but his safety was far more important than our desire to be with him.
We are grateful that God gave Andrew people who could protect him and, while we will never understand why we were chosen to bear so much sadness and fear, we count our blessings in this land, a place we’ve come to realize is not quite as different from our homeland as we had once believed. Like that homeland we fled, this new one, too, is a place of good people and bad, of safety and fear, of desperation and hope.
Copyright © 2018 by Bill Kowaleski
