The Stolen Child (19 page)

•                    CHAPTER 21                    •

I
am the only person who truly knows what happened in the forest. Jimmy’s story explained for me the mystery of the drowned Oscar Love and his miraculous reappearance several days later. Of course, it was the changelings, and all the evidence confirmed my suspicion of a failed attempt to steal the child. The dead body was that of a changeling, an old friend of mine. I could picture the face of the next in line but had erased their names. My life there had been spent imagining the day when I would begin my life in the upper world. As the decades passed, the cast of characters had shifted as, one by one, each became a changeling, found a child, and took its place. In time, I had come to resent every one of them and to disregard each new member of our tribe. I deliberately tried to forget them all. Did I say a friend of mine had died? I had no friends.

While gladdened by the prospect of one less devil in the woods, I was oddly disturbed by Jimmy’s account of little Oscar Love, and I dreamt that night of a lonely boy like him in an old-fashioned parlor. A pair of finches dart about an ironwork cage. A samovar glistens. On the mantelpiece sits a row of leather-bound books gilded with Gothic letters spelling out foreign titles. The parlor walls papered crimson, heavy dark curtains shutting out the sun, a curious sofa covered with a latticed needlework throw. The boy is alone in the room on a humid afternoon, yet despite the heat, he wears woolen knickers and buttoned boots, a starched blue shirt, and a huge tie that looks like a Christmas bow. His long hair cascades in waves and curls, and he hunches over the piano, entranced by the keyboard, doggedly practicing an étude. From behind him comes another child, the same hair and build, but naked and creeping on the balls of his feet. The piano player plays on, oblivious to the menace. Other goblins steal out from behind the curtains, from under the settee; out of the woodwork and wallpaper, they advance like smoke. The finches scream and crash into the iron bars. The boy stops on a note, turns his head. I have seen him before. They attack as one, working together, this one covering the boy’s nose and throat, another taking out the legs, a third pinning the boy’s arms behind his back. From beyond the closed door, a man’s voice:
“Was ist los?”
A thumping knock, and the door swings open. The threshold frames a large man with outrageous whiskers. “Gustav?” The father cries out as several hobgoblins rush to restrain him while the others take his son.
“Ich erkenne dich! Du willst nur meinen Sohn!”

I could still feel the anger in their eyes, the passion of their attack. Where is my father? A voice pierces the dream, calling “Henry, Henry,” and I awaken to a damp pillowcase and twisted sheets. Stifling a yawn, I yelled downstairs that I was tired and that this had better be good. My mother shouted back through the door that there was a telephone call and that she was not my secretary. I threw on my bathrobe and headed downstairs.

“This is Henry Day,” I grunted into the receiver.

She laughed. “Hi, Henry. This is Tess Wodehouse. I saw you out in the woods.”

She could not imagine the reasons for my awkward silence.

“When we found the boy. The first one. I was with the ambulance.”

“Right, the nurse. Tess, Tess, how are you?”

“Jimmy Cummings said to give you a call. Would you like to meet somewhere later?”

We arranged to meet after her shift, and she had me write down directions to her house. At the bottom of the page, I doodled the name:
Gustav
.

s
he answered the door and stepped straight out to the porch, the afternoon sunlight stippling across her face and yellow sundress. Out of the shadows, she dazzled. All at once, it seems in retrospect, she revealed what I grew to adore: the asymmetrical mottling of the colors in her irises, a blue vein snaking up her right temple that flashed like a semaphore for passion, the sudden exuberance of her crooked smile. Tess said my name and made it seem real.

We drove away, and the wind through the open window caught her hair and blew it across her face. When she laughed, she threw back her head, chin to the sky, and I longed to kiss her lovely neck. I drove as if we had a destination, but in our town there was no particular place to go. Tess turned down the radio, and we talked away the afternoon. She told me all about her life in public school, then on to college, where she had studied nursing. I told her all about parochial school and my aborted studies in music. A few miles outside of town, a new fried-chicken joint had opened recently, so we bought ourselves a bucketful. We stopped by Oscar’s to steal a bottle of apple wine. We picnicked on a school playground, abandoned for the summer except for a pair of cardinals on the monkey bars, serenading us with their eight-note song.

“I used to think you were the strangest bird, Henry Day. When we were in elementary school together, you might have said two words to me. Or anyone. You were so distracted, as if you heard a song in your head that no one else could hear.”

“I’m still that way,” I told her. “Sometimes when I’m walking down the street or am quiet by myself, I play a tune, imagine my fingers on the keys, and can hear the notes as clear as day.”

“You seem somewhere else, miles away.”

“Not always. Not now.”

Her face brightened and changed. “Strange, isn’t it? About Oscar Love, that boy. Or should I say two little boys, alike as two pins.”

I tried to change the subject. “My sisters are twins.”

“How do you explain it?”

“It’s been a long time since high school biology, but when an egg divides—”

She licked her fingers. “Not twins. The drowned boy and the lost boy.”

“I had nothing to do with either one.”

Tess swallowed a sip of wine and wiped her hands with a napkin. “You are an odd one, but that’s what I liked about you, even when we were children. Since the first day I saw you in kindergarten.”

I sincerely wished I had been there that day.

“And when I was a girl, I wanted to hear your song, the one that’s playing in your head right now.” She leaned across the blanket and kissed me.

I took her home at sunset, kissed her once at the door, and drove home in a mild euphoria. The house echoed like the inside of an empty shell. The twins were not home and my mother sat alone in the living room, watching the movie of the week on the television. Slippers crossed on the ottoman, her housecoat buttoned to the collar, she saluted me with a drink in her right hand. I sat down on the couch next to the easy chair and looked at her closely for the first time in years. We were getting older, no doubt, but she had aged well. She was much stouter than when we first met, but lovely still.

“How was your date, Henry?” She kept her eyes on the tube.

“Great, Mom, fine.”

“See her again?”

“Tess? I hope so.”

A commercial broke the story, and she turned to smile at me between sips.

“Mom, do you ever         .         .         .”

“What’s that, Henry?”

“I don’t know. Do you ever get lonely? Like you might go out on a date yourself?”

She laughed and seemed years younger. “What man would want to go out with an old thing like me?”

“You’re not so old. And you look ten years younger than you are.”

“Save your compliments for your nurse.”

The program returned. “I thought—”

“Henry, I’ve given this thing an hour already. Let me see it to the end.”

T
ess changed my life, changed everything. After our impromptu picnic, we saw each other every day of that wonderful summer. I remember sitting side by side on a park bench, lunches on our laps, talking in the brilliant sunshine. She would turn to me, her face bathed in brightness, so that I would have to shade my eyes to look at her, and she told me stories that fed my desire for more stories, so that I might know her and not forget a single line. I loved each accidental touch, the heat of her, the way she made me feel alive and fully human.

On the Fourth of July, Oscar closed the bar and invited nearly half the town to a picnic along the riverbank. He had arranged the celebration in gratitude to all of the people who had helped in the search and rescue of his nephew, for the policemen and firemen, doctors and nurses, all of Little Oscar’s schoolmates and teachers, the volunteers—such as myself, Jimmy, and George—the Loves and all their assorted relatives, a priest or two in mufti, and the inevitable hangers-on. A great feast was ordered. Pig in a pit. Chicken, hamburgers, hot dogs. Corn and watermelon trucked in from down south. Kegs of beer, bottles of the hard stuff, tubs of ice and sodas for the youngsters, a cake specially made in the city for the occasion—as big as a picnic table, iced in red, white, and blue with a gold
THANK YOU
in glittering script. The party began at four in the afternoon and lasted all night. When it became dark enough, a crew of firemen shot off a fireworks display, fading sparklers and candles popping and fizzing when they hit the river. Our town, like many places in America at the time, was divided by the war, but we put Vietnam and the marches behind us in deference to the celebration.

In the languorous heat, Tess looked delicious that evening, a cool smile, and bright lights in her eyes. I met all of her coworkers, the well-heeled doctors, a bevy of nurses, and far too many firemen and policemen, baked tan and swaggering. After the fireworks, she noticed her old sweetheart in the company of a new girl and insisted that we say hello. I could not shake the sensation that I had known him from my former life.

“Henry, you remember Brian Ungerland.” We shook hands, and he introduced his new girlfriend to us both. The women slipped away to compare notes.

“So, Ungerland, that’s an unusual name.”

“German.” He sipped his beer, stared at the women, who were laughing in an overly personal way.

“Your family from Germany?”

“Off the boat long time ago. My family’s been in town for a hundred years.”

A stray string of firecrackers went off in a rat-a-tat of pops.

“Came from a place called Eger, I think, but like I said, man, that was another life. Where are your people from, Henry?”

I told him the lie and studied him as he listened. The eyes clued me in, the set of the jaw, the aquiline nose. Put a walrus mustache on him, age Ungerland a few decades, and he would be a dead ringer for the man in my dreams. The father. Gustav’s father. I shook off the notion as merely the odd conflation of my stressful nightmares and the anxiety of seeing Tess’s old beau.

Jimmy Cummings crept from behind and nearly scared the life out of me. He laughed at my surprise and pointed to the ribbon hanging around his neck. “Hero for a day,” he shouted, and I couldn’t help but break into a broad grin. Little Oscar, as usual, appeared a bit dumbfounded by all the attention, but he smiled at strangers who tousled his hair and matrons who bent to kiss him on the cheek. Filled with good cheer, the warm evening passed in slow motion, the kind of day one recalls when feeling blue. Boys and girls chased fireflies in crazy circles. Sullen long-haired teens tossed a ball around with red-faced crew-cut policemen. In the middle of the night, when many had already headed for home, Lewis Love buttonholed me for the longest time. I missed half of what he said because I was watching Tess, who was engaged in animated conversation with her old boyfriend beneath a dark elm tree.

“I have a theory,” Lewis told me. “He was scared, right, out all night, and he heard something. I don’t know, like a raccoon or a fox, right? So he hides out in a hole, only it’s real hot in there and he gets a fever.”

She reached out and touched Ungerland on the arm, and they were laughing, only her hand stayed there.

“So he has this real weird dream—”

They were staring at each other, and old Oscar, oblivious to the end, marched up and joined their conversation. He was drunk and happy, but Tess and Brian were staring into each other’s eyes, their expressions real serious, as if trying to communicate something without saying a word.

“I personally think it was just some hippies’ old camping ground.”

I wanted to tell him to shut up. Now Ungerland’s hand was on her biceps, and they were all laughing. She touched her hair, nodded her head at whatever he was saying.

“.         .         .         other kid was a runaway, but still you have to feel sorry         .         .         .”

She looked back my way, smiled and waved, as if nothing had been happening. I held her gaze a beat and tuned in to Lewis.

“.         .         .         but nobody believes in fairy tales, right?”

“You’re right, Lewis. I think your theory is dead-on. Only explanation possible.”

Before he had the chance to thank me or say another word, I was five strides away, walking toward her. Oscar and Brian noticed my approach and wiped off the grins from their faces. They stared at the stars, finding nothing better to look at. I ignored them and whispered into her ear, and she coiled her arm around my back and under my shirt, tracing circles on my skin with her nails.

“What were you guys talking about? Something funny?”

“We were talking about you,” Brian said. Oscar looked down the barrel of his bottle and grunted.

I walked Tess away from them, and she put her head on my shoulder without glancing back. She led me into the woods, to a spot away from the crowd, and lay down in the tall grass and ferns. Voices carried in the soft, heavy air, but their proximity only made the moment more exciting. She slipped out of her shorts and unbuckled my belt. I could hear a group of men laughing down by the river. She kissed me on the stomach, roughly pulled off my shorts. Someone was singing to her sweetheart somewhere far away, the melody on the breeze. I felt slightly drunk and very warm all of a sudden, and thought for an instant I heard someone approaching through the trees. Tess climbed on top of me, guiding us together, her long hair hanging down to frame her face, and she stared into my eyes as she rocked back and forth. The laughter and voices trailed away, car engines started, and people said good-bye, good night. I reached beneath her shirt. She did not avert her gaze.