Signs and Wonders (9 page)

In the early morning light she could tell Jason agreed with Molly that this was her fault, and was amazed at her own foolishness, thinking that his sunniness, his composure, his ability to be optimistic even in terrible situations, were permanent conditions. He could only take so much and now, over the breakfast table, as they tried exhaustedly to make a plan, she saw how much he hated her. He was sitting across from her, with Molly in his lap.

“We should check in with the police first,” she said, hoping to sound helpful. Jason nodded dully.

“And then I guess we could make color photocopies of his passport picture and put them up around town with our hotel information. Maybe someone’s seen him.”

“There are so many flyers up for plays during the festival,” Jason said. “People will think it’s part of that.”

“There must be local TV channels,” she went on. “We’ll send a picture to them too.” She felt she was speaking to him across a vast, oceanic distance. He was silent, his whole face drooping.

Finally he said, “Damn it. I’ve got to call Paulina. She’ll know what to do.”

It was the first time he’d ever said anything like that about his first wife, at least in front of Judith, and she felt their future buckle beneath the weight of his words.

The same kindly police officer as before told them there was no news and suggested they go back to the hotel to wait. When Judith raised the question of the local news, he shrugged as if to say they could do whatever they wanted to. So she and Jason called the local news station, spoke to a secretary, and dropped off a photo. Molly was quiet throughout all this, her face drawn and pinched. The streets swarmed with tourists, actors handing out handbills for plays, people dressed in kilts and togas and other costumes, a hive of activity that seemed more sinister with every passing moment. They returned to the Scott monument, and Jason and Molly walked around the crowd holding up pictures of Lucas and asking people if they’d seen him. It had been hours since either of them so much as looked at Judith.

At the top of the monument, looking over the city, Judith thought that it had lost its fairy-tale charm and now was foreboding and sinister. In her mind she again saw Lucas’s pale face, the one in her dream, floating in space.

But he’s not in space,
she thought suddenly.
He’s in water.
The water of Leith: the words came to her and she supposed she’d read them in the guidebook, though it wasn’t something they’d ever discussed going to. Muscling through the crowd, she tugged on Jason’s sleeve and saw, in a heartbreakingly clear second as he was turning around, that he hoped it was Lucas tugging at him, and
that when he realized it was her, he felt not just disappointment but hatred, because she’d extended a moment of hope and just as quickly extinguished it.

“I’m going to look for him down by the water,” she said.

“What water? Where?”

“The water of Leith walkway.”

“Where’s that?”

“I don’t know. I just have a feeling, Jason. I can meet you back at the hotel.”

“A
feeling
?” He tugged on her sleeve in turn but his touch wasn’t gentle and surely couldn’t be mistaken for a child’s. “What do you know? What aren’t you telling me?”

“Jason,” she sighed. Next to him Molly was shrinking against his leg, as close as another limb. She was fading, this once-bright girl. How much more could she take? “I had a dream on the plane. I didn’t tell you about it. I saw Lucas in some water.”

“You’re telling me
about a dream
?” Jason said, his face twisted, agonized. “Judith, my child’s missing and I don’t know where he is or how to find him and you’re telling me about some dream?”

“I’m trying to help, Jason, I promise.”

“I don’t see how rambling on about this is helpful at all.” Underneath this was everything he didn’t say: that she didn’t know what she was talking about, she didn’t know his children, that she was overstepping herself.

Instinctively she backed away, as though he might strike her, a fear she could tell incensed him even more. “I’ll just meet you at the hotel later, okay?” she muttered, and quickly walked off, blinking tears from her eyes.

·    ·    ·

By asking directions she was able to find her way to the water, a stream that wound, through various neighborhoods, to the harbor town of Leith. A little wooden sign attached to a stick—something she might, in another mood, have found quaint—pointed the direction and gave the distance. Seeing it, her heart sank. There were miles of path to cover.

But what else was there to do but look? She began to walk, peering, with every step, into the water. Each mossy black stone or floating piece of litter drew her careful inspection. The path changed, as she went, from stone to dirt and back again, rising up to cross city streets, then submerging itself again. Tourists and dog-walkers gave her a wary berth, but her attention didn’t waver. The long green tendrils of trees were reflected palely in the water. She saw no fish, no life at all.

After around an hour she became distantly aware that a man behind her was observing her every move. Now that she noticed him, she realized he’d been there for quite a while. She wasn’t afraid of him, only annoyed to be distracted. Without hesitating, she spun around and said, “What do you want?”

He was in his late twenties and wearing a nondescript outfit: brown corduroys, blue shirt, darker blue windbreaker. His pale face had a ruddy, windswept look, and he only lifted his eyebrows, apparently unruffled.

“Good afternoon, madam,” he said. “My name is Lieutenant John McCrary.”

“You’re a policeman,” she said. She was pleased: another pair of eyes to help. “I’m looking for my son. You can help if you want.”

McCrary fell in step beside her. After a few quiet minutes he said, “I understand he’s in fact your stepson?”

His tone was so soft that she almost missed the accusation in it.
“Yes, that’s right,” she said. “His parents are divorced. His mother’s on her way to Edinburgh, flying in from New York.”

“And you’ve come to look for him here, because …”

Judith sighed. They were wasting time. “Because I have a hunch. You’ve heard of a hunch?” She stopped and spread her palms in appeal. “Anyway, it’s just good to do
something.
” She could hear herself trying to sound reasonable, convincing, despite the subtle tremor in her voice.

“This hunch you have,” McCrary said, still softly, “where did it come from?”

She saw, then, what he meant: that only the guilty have secret knowledge of any crime. Standing before him, with the damp air cooling her cheeks, she felt his indictment join Jason’s and Molly’s. A mother might have an intuition, but the stepmother could only be the villain. That’s how fairy tales go.

“If I could tell you where it came from,” she told him, “it wouldn’t be a hunch. Anyway, believe whatever you want. Follow me if you have to. I really don’t care.”

Another hour passed with she and McCrary walking together, a walk that in another context might have been romantic—the low-hanging branches, the glimmer of birdsong, the old buildings hunkering over the water. She experienced these things as quick flashes, whenever she momentarily turned away from the water to rest her eyes. McCrary said nothing, though she felt him watching her, and it angered her that he wasn’t paying more attention to the water.

She thought she saw Lucas, but it was a soda can, or a seagull. She thought she saw him, but he wasn’t there.

It was three o’clock when they reached the harbor at Leith at the end of the walk. She could go no farther. In front of her was the
sea. She hadn’t found him; he was out there somewhere all alone, and she had failed. She stood staring at the spot where the gray water met the gray sky. The wind was cold and her tears stung her face and her heart ached for him.

She stood there for so long that McCrary, apparently, lost patience. She sat down on a rock and, glancing up, noticed that he was gone. Though she’d resented his accusing presence, she felt abandoned by his departure. Now she, too, was alone. Somewhere in the city, Jason and Molly were probably still walking the streets, the closes and mews, calling Lucas’s name.

Then she saw him.

In the gray water his dark blue sweatshirt looked like a rock or a wave. It was the movement of his hair across his cheeks that caught her eye, an image that recalled, exactly, the dream she’d had on the plane.

He was in the water below a pier, where a kid could easily have fallen off while looking down. Without thinking, she threw herself in and swam out to him. It took her longer than she expected and she was already tired by the time she got close to him. Catching him was yet another difficulty; she was calling his name but couldn’t tell if he heard her.

Then she was wrapping him in her arms and heading back to shore. She didn’t know if he was conscious, or even alive. His arms and legs were stiff and she could barely make any progress, holding him with one arm and paddling with the other. She swallowed some water and lost a contact lens, the world now a blur of waves. She could no longer see land and seemed to be caught in a current, or was she almost there? She had one hand beneath his sweatshirt and his bare back didn’t feel human; cold, inert, it barely felt like anything at all.

She swallowed more water and was choking and couldn’t breathe when miraculously, his arms circled around her. He was strong and holding on, and with both hands free she knew they’d make it. She knew, too, that the dream she’d had on the plane had been only part of the premonition, that the stretcher also figured in it: a stretcher that could carry Lucas home again, to health, to safety, to his father and sister and mother.

McCrary, who’d gone off to find a restroom and a sandwich, and who swore to his superiors that he’d been gone for less than fifteen minutes, discovered them on the beach. Lucas was crying and shivering. Judith wasn’t breathing. She’d worked one arm inside the sleeve of his sweatshirt, apparently and correctly believing that this would bind them together. Trained in CPR, the policeman did his best, but couldn’t revive her; the ambulance came, but not in time.

“I was lost,” Lucas said, “and I kept getting more lost no matter what I did.”

He’d only walked off for a couple of minutes; he was upset about something, he couldn’t even remember what. He was afraid they’d be mad at him for walking away. And he was too afraid to talk to strangers, because he’d always been told not to. Then he was both tired and confused. He’d spent the night huddled in an alley, crouched inside his sweatshirt.

His father asked him question after question:
Where did you go next? Why didn’t you ask a policeman?
And he asked one question over and over again:
How did she find you?

The boy had no answer. Only nine, he didn’t have the words to explain any of this mystery, how it had happened or what it meant, what it was like for him to be there in the water, blind and frenzied and drowning, and for the woman to somehow come to him, as if out of nowhere, and carry him ashore.

Beth met Fowler at a party of sensible adults. She was divorced, her children were in grade school, and she had started to collect antique milk glass. She’d inherited a few pieces from her aunt and was now adding to the collection, rows of pale, frilly jars and gravy boats on her kitchen shelves. Why collect glass? Because it was there. It provided the only available momentum in a life that was losing speed. The party was full of other divorced people, eyeballing what they might be forced to settle for the second time around. When Fowler came in, the energy in the room crackled. He was wearing black jeans, a dirty white button-down shirt, and a sweater vest. His hair was long and tangled. He was very tall and too thin, as if he’d been starved or rack-stretched.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said to the room at large. “You’re not going to believe what happened to me on the way over here.”

It was the best entrance anyone had made all night, and Beth inched toward him. He seemed eager for his audience yet uncomfortable with it, and he kept staring at the floor while telling his story.

“I’m walking down Fifth Street,” he said, “and these guys come out of nowhere, these two young kids. They start yelling at me, right? They’re calling me a
faggot.
They’re telling me to get my
gay ass
out of their neighborhood. They’re telling me that
gays deserve to be punished by God.
”

“Wow,” a woman next to Beth whispered, as if starstruck.

“And the worst thing about it,” Fowler went on, “is that my first reaction—as if it mattered—was to tell them I’m
not
gay. Not that they cared. They threw me down on the ground, punched me in the face, took my wallet, and finally they ran away. I lay in a puddle for fifteen minutes before I could get up.”

He finished his drink and held it out for replenishment. People crowded around him and patted him on the back, then stood back when he winced. A man with a crew cut said, “Hey, wait a minute.” Beth had been talking to this guy earlier. He was a newspaper editor and had an appetite for fact. “How come there’s no marks on your face?” he said. “How come you’re not even dirty—or wet?”