The Stolen Child (27 page)

“She said, ‘How is life in the big, big world?’ and I thought that was funny.”

“Did she do anything         .         .         .         peculiar?” I asked.

“She can laugh like a seagull. Then I heard you started calling me. And she said, ‘Good-bye Edward Day,’ like that. And I told her to wait right here so I could get my mommy and dad.”

Tess embraced our son and rubbed his bare arms through the blanket. She looked again at the space the girl had run through. “She just slipped away. Like a ghost.”

From that moment to the instant our plane touched down at home, all I could think about was that lost girl, and what bothered me about her was not so much her mysterious appearance and disappearance, but her familiarity.

When we settled in at home, I began to see the changelings everywhere.

In town on a Saturday morning for a haircut with Edward, I grew flustered by a towheaded boy who sat waiting his turn, quietly sucking a lollipop as he stared, unblinking, at my son. When school resumed in the fall, a pair of twins in the sixth grade spooked me with their uncanny resemblance to each other and their ability to finish each other’s sentences. Driving home from a band performance on a dark night, I saw three children in the cemetery and wondered, for a moment, what they might be plotting at such a late hour. At parties or the odd evening out with other couples, I tried to work in veiled references to the legend of the two feral girls and the baby-food jars, hoping to find someone else who believed it or could confirm the rumors, but everyone scoffed when I mentioned the story. All children, except my own boy, became slightly suspect. They can be devious creatures. Behind every child’s bright eyes exists a hidden universe.

T
he quartet’s album,
Tales of Wonder
, arrived by Christmas, and we nearly wore out the groove playing it over and over for our friends and family. Edward loved to hear the dissonance of violins against the steady cello line and the crashing arrival of the organ. Even anticipating its arrival, the movement was a shock no matter how many times one listened to the album. On New Year’s Eve, well after midnight, the house quiet as a prayer, a sudden blast of my song startled me awake. Expecting the worst, I came downstairs in my pajamas, wielding a baseball bat, only to find my son bug-eyed in front of the speakers, hypnotized by the music. When I turned down the volume, he began to blink rapidly and shake his head as if awakened from a dream.

“Hey, pardner,” I said in a low voice. “Do you know how late it is?”

“Is it 1977 yet?”

“Hours ago. Party’s over, fella. What made you put on this song?”

“I had a bad dream.”

I pulled him onto my lap. “Do you want to tell me about it?” He did not answer but burrowed closer, so I held him tighter. The last drawn-out note resounded as the song lapsed into silence, so I reached over and shut off the stereo.

“Daddy, do you know why I put on your song? Because it reminds me.”

“Reminds you of what, Edward? Our trip out to California?”

He turned to face me until we looked eye-to-eye. “No. Of Speck,” he said. “The fairy girl.”

With a quiet moan, I drew him closer to me, where I could feel in the warmth of his chest the quickening of his heart.

•                    CHAPTER 32                    •

         
S
peck loved to be by moving water. My strongest memory is of her animated by the currents, empathetic to the flow. I saw her once, years ago, stripped to the skin, sitting with her legs tucked beneath her, as the water rolled around her waist and the sunshine caressed her shoulders. Under normal circumstances, I would have jumped and splashed in the creek with her, but struck by the grace of her neck and limbs, the contours of her face, I could not move. On another occasion, when the townsfolk shot off fireworks in the night, we watched the explosions upriver, and she seemed more enchanted by the waterflow than by the loud flowering in the sky. While the people looked up, she watched the light reflecting on the ripples and the sparks as they hissed on the surface. From the beginning, I had guessed where she had gone and why, but I did not act upon that intuition because of a fundamental lack of courage. The same fears that had prevented me from crossing at the riverbend also made me break off the search and come back to camp. I should have followed the waters.

The path to the library never seemed as long and foreboding as on the night of my first return. The way had changed since we had parted. The forest thinned around its edge, and rusty cans, bottles, and other refuse littered the brush. None of us had visited in the years since she left. Books lay where we had left them, though mice had nibbled the margins of my papers, left their scat in our old candleholders and coffee mugs. Her Shakespeare was lousy with silverfish. Stevens had swollen with dampness. By dim candlelight, I spent the night restoring order, pulling down cobwebs, shooing crickets, lingering over what she had once held in her hands. I fell asleep wrapped in the musty blanket that had long ago lost her scent.

Vibrations above announced the arrival of morning. The librarians started their day, joists creaking under their weight and the patterns of their routines. I could picture their goings-on: checking in, saying hello, settling at their stations. An hour or so passed before the doors opened and the humans shuffled in. When the rhythm felt normal, I began to work. A thin film of dust covered my papers, and I spent most of that first day reading the bits and pieces in order, tying the loose pages with entries in McInnes’s journal. So much had been left behind, lost, forgotten, and buried after we had been driven away the first time. Reduced to a short pile, the words documented time’s passage with deep gaps and yawning silences. Very little existed, for instance, from the early days of my arrival—only a few crude drawings and pathetic notes. Years had gone by without mention. After reviewing all the files, I understood the long chore ahead.

When the librarians left for the evening, I popped open the trapdoor underneath the children’s section. Unlike on other forays, I had no desire to pick out a new book, but, rather, to steal new writing supplies. Behind the head librarian’s desk lay the treasure: five long yellow pads and enough pens to last the rest of my life. To introduce a minor intrigue, I also reshelved the Wallace Stevens that had been missing.

Words spilled from the pen and I wrote until my hand cramped and pained me. The end, the night that Speck left, became the beginning. From there, the story moved backward to the point where I realized that I had fallen in love with her. A whole swath of the original manuscript, which is thankfully gone, was given over to the physical tensions of being a grown man in a young boy’s body. Right in the middle of a sentence on desire, I stopped. What if she wanted me to go with her? I would have pleaded for her to stay, said that I lacked the courage to run away. Yet a contrary idea pulled at my conscience. Perhaps she never intended for me to find out. She had run away because of me and knew all along that I loved her. I put down my pen and wished Speck were there to talk with me, to answer all the unknowables.

These obsessions curled like parasites through my brain, and I tossed and turned on the hard floor. I woke up in the night and started writing on a clean pad, determined to rid my mind of its darkest thoughts. The hours passed and days drifted one into the other. For the next six months, I divided myself between the camp and the library, trying to piece together the story of my life to give to Speck. Our winter hibernation slowed my progress. I grew tired in December and slept until March. Before I could go back to the book, the book came back to me.

Solemn-eyed Luchóg and Smaolach approached one morning as I crunched a farl of oats and drained the dregs from a cup of tea. With great deliberation, they sat on either side of me, cross-legged, settling in for a long talk. Luchóg fiddled with a new shoot of rye poking through the old leaves, and Smaolach looked off, pretending to study the play of light through the branches.

“Good morning, lads. What’s on your minds?”

“We’ve been to the library,” said Smaolach.

“Haven’t gone there in ages,” said Luchóg.

“We know what you’ve been up to.”

“Read the story of your life.”

Smaolach turned his gaze toward mine. “A hundred thousand apologies, but we had to know.”

“Who gave you the right?” I asked.

They turned their faces away from me, and I did not know where to look.

“You’ve got a few stories wrong,” Luchóg said. “May I ask why you wrote this book? To whom is it addressed?”

“What did I get wrong?”

“My understanding is that an author doesn’t write a book without having one or more readers in mind,” Luchóg said. “One doesn’t go through the time and effort to be the only reader of your own book. Even the diarist expects the lock to be picked.”

Smaolach pulled at his chin, as if deep in thought. “It would be a big mistake, I think, to write a book that no one would ever read.”

“You are quite right, old friend. I have at times wondered why the artist dares to bring something new into a world where everything has been done and where all the answers are quite well known.”

I stood and broke the plane of their inquisition. “Would you please tell me,” I hollered, “what is wrong with the book?”

“I’m afraid it’s your father,” said Luchóg.

“My father, what about him? Has something happened to him?”

“He’s not who you think he is.”

“What my friend means to say is that the man you think of as your father is not your father at all. That man is another man.”

“Come with us,” said Luchóg.

As we wound along the path, I tried to untangle the many implications of their invasion into my book. First, they had always known I was Henry Day, and now they knew I knew. They had read of my feelings for Speck and surely guessed I was writing to her. They knew how I felt about them, as well. Fortunately, they came across as generally sympathetic characters, a bit eccentric, true, but steadfast allies in my adventures. Their line of questioning posed an intriguing concern, however, as I had not thought ahead to how I might actually get a book to Speck, or, more to the point, about the reasons behind my desire to write it all down. Smaolach and Luchóg, ahead on the trail, had lived in these woods for decades and sailed through eternity without the same cares or the need to write down and make sense of it all. They wrote no books, painted nothing on the walls, danced no new dance, yet they lived in peace and harmony with the natural world. Why wasn’t I like the others?

At sunset, we stepped out of cover and walked down past the church to a scattering of graves in a green space adjacent to the cemetery enclosed by a stone wall. I had been there once before, many years ago, thinking it a shortcut back to safety, or perhaps merely a good hiding place. We slipped between the iron bars into a tranquil, overgrown garden. Many of the inscriptions on the stones were weathered and faded, as the tenants had lain beneath their vanishing names for many years. My friends took me on a winding path between the graves, and we stopped short among the memorials and weeds. Smaolach walked me to a plot and showed me the stone:
WILLIAM DAY
, 1917–1962. I knelt down on the grass, ran my finger along the grooves of letters, considered the numbers. “What happened?”

Luchóg spoke softly. “We have no idea, Henry Day.”

“I haven’t heard that name in a while.”

Smaolach laid his hand upon my shoulder. “I still prefer Aniday. You are one of us.”

“How long have you known?”

“We thought you should know for the truth of your book. You didn’t see your father that night we left the old camp.”

“And you understand,” Luchóg said, “that the man in the new house with the baby cannot be your father.”

I sat down and leaned against the marker to save myself from fainting. They were right, of course. By my calendar, fourteen years had passed since the end date on that gravestone. If he had died that long ago, William Day could not be who I thought he was, and that man was not William Day but his double. I wondered to myself how such a thing could be possible. Luchóg opened his pouch, rolled a cigarette, and calmly smoked it amid the headstones. The stars came out to define the sky—how far away, how long ago? My friends seemed on the verge of revealing additional secrets, but they said nothing, so that I might figure it out for myself.

“Let us away then, lads,” Smaolach said, “and think on this tomorrow.”

We leapt the gate at the corner and trekked home, our conversation turning to smaller mistakes in my own story. Most of their suggestions escaped scrutiny because my mind wandered down long-neglected lanes. Speck had told me what she remembered, but much remained mysterious. My mother faded in and out of view, though I could now see quite clearly the faces of twin baby sisters. My father was a nearly total void. Life existed before this life, and I had not sufficiently dragged the river of my subconscious. Late that night, while the others slept, I sat awake in my burrow. The image of Oscar Love crystallized before me. We had spent months investigating that boy, finding out in excruciating detail the nature and shape of his life, his family history, his habits of mind—all to assist Igel in the change. If we knew Oscar so well, then the others must have known my history, infinitely better than I knew it myself. Now that I knew my true name, there was no longer any reason for them to hide the truth. They had conspired to help me forget, and now they could help me remember. I crawled out of my hole and walked over to Luchóg’s spot, only to find it vacant. In the adjacent burrow, he was wrapped in Chavisory’s arms, and for a moment I hesitated to disturb their peace.

“Luch,” I whispered. He blinked. “Wake up, and tell me a story.”

“Aniday, for the love of—can’t you see I’m sleeping?”

“I need to know.”

By this time, she was stirring as well. I waited until they disentangled themselves, and he rose to eye level. “What is it?” he demanded.

“You have to tell me everything you remember about Henry Day.”

He yawned and looked at Chavisory curled into the fetal position. “Right now, I’m going back to bed. Ask me again in the morning, and I’ll help with your book-writing. But now, to my pillow and to my dreams.”

I woke Smaolach and Béka and Onions with the same request and was put off by each in much the same way. Despite my excitement, I drew nothing but tired glares at breakfast the next morning, and only after the whole clan had their fill did I dare ask again.

“I am writing a book,” I announced, “about Henry Day. I know the broad story that Speck gave me before she left, and now I need you to fill in the details. Pretend I’m about to make the change, and give me the report on Henry Day.”

“Oh, I remember you,” Onions began. “You were a baby foundling in the woods. Your mother wrapped you in swaddling clothes and laid you at the greyhound’s shrine.”

“No, no, no,” said Béka. “You are mistaken. The original Henry Day was not a Henry at all, but one of two identical twin girls, Elspeth and Maribel.”

“You are both wrong,” said Chavisory. “He was a boy, a cute, smart boy who lived in a house at the tip of the forest with his mother and father and two baby twin sisters.”

“That’s right,” said Luchóg. “Mary and Elizabeth. Two little curly-tops, fat as lambchops.”

“You couldn’t have been more than eight or nine,” said Chavisory.

“Seven,” said Smaolach. “He was seven when we nabbed him.”

“Are you sure?” asked Onions. “Coulda swore he was just a baby.”

The conversation continued in this fashion for the rest of the day, in contested bites of information, and the truth at the end of the discussion was the distant cousin of the truth at the beginning. All through the summer and into the fall, I peppered them separately and together with my queries. Sometimes an answer, when combined with my prodigal memory or the visual cue of a drawing or a piece of writing, cemented a fact in my brain. Slowly, over time, a pattern emerged, and my childhood returned to me. But one thing remained a mystery.

Before the long sleep of winter, I went off, intent upon climbing the highest peak in the hills surrounding the valley. The trees had shed their leaves and raised naked arms to the gray sky. To the east, the city looked like toy building blocks. Off to the south lay the compact village cut in two by the river. In the west, the riverbend and the big country beyond. To the north, ragged forest, a farm or two hacked out from the trees and stone. I sat on the mountaintop and read, dreamt at night of two Specks, two Days, what we are, what we would be. Save for a flask of water, I fasted and reflected upon the puzzle of existence. On the third day, my mind cleared and let in the answer. If the man who appeared as my father was not my father, who was he? Whom did I meet in the mist? Who was the man by the creek on the night we lost both Igel and Oscar Love? The one who chased us through the kitchen door? He looked like my father. A deer, startled by the snap of my head, bolted through the fallen leaves. A bird cried once; the note lingered, then disappeared. The clouds rolled on and revealed the pale sun. Who had taken my place when they stole me away?