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.
The 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 ?
Speck 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.