What does this all mean? Is this abandoned child Aiden? No. No, of course not. There are photographs of Gloria and Aiden in the hospital at birth.
The baby bump. The second child.
I close the photo album and leave the bedroom. In the kitchen, there is a door that could possibly be a door to a pantry, but my money says it’s a door to the basement.
The basement with those wax figures, arranged perfectly, like a family portrait.
It’s time I got a better look at them.
86
I OPEN THE basement door, flip on the switch, and head downstairs.
The basement is unfinished, with an aging washer and dryer, an unused sink.
I walk toward the back of the basement, the part I saw through the open window last time. But this time, the lights are on.
The creepy wax figures, the Norman Rockwell setting around a coffee table, the faux fireplace.
On the love seat, the wax figure of the man, in a tweed coat, hair greased back, beady eyes, looking a lot like the man in the photo album.
In the rocking chair, the woman, seated and wearing a shawl over her shoulders—a dead ringer for Aiden’s mother.
A third chair, empty. For Aiden?
For Aiden to sit down here and play “let’s pretend” with his family?
Weird. Creepy.
Sad, actually.
I get a closer look at the woman and see, for the first time, something I didn’t notice when I was shining a flashlight in here from the backyard.
On the floor, next to the woman’s chair.
A tiny toy crib, for an infant.
Not a wax figure this time, just a doll—a naked doll, a tiny, bald newborn, swaddled in blankets.
A newborn.
Trying to connect it now.
Aiden at the cemetery, urinating on the tombstone of Holden VI.
Holden VI, the man notorious for frequenting prostitutes.
Gloria Willis, a prostitute—in that photo, pregnant with a second child.
The caption from that photograph in the paper: NEWBORN ABANDONED AT POLICE STATION.
“Shit,” I mumble. “That’s it.”
Gloria Willis had two children. Aiden first, then a child she gave up at birth, abandoned anonymously at the police station.
And why would she abandon her son at the police station anonymously?
Because she didn’t want him? Because she didn’t want a child whose father was a monster? Because she didn’t want the father to ruin the son?
I don’t know. There are still some questions.
But at last, finally, I might have a few answers.
Aiden Willis had a brother. Or more accurately, a half brother.
Whose biological father was Holden Dahlquist VI.
And somehow, in some way, that abandoned boy found his way back into dear old Dad’s life.
BOOK VI
BRIDGEHAMPTON, 1993–94
87
TONIGHT IT WILL be the beach. Sometimes it’s a park, sometimes one of the taverns as it’s closing and drunk patrons are stumbling out. The beach is always the best. Because there’s always someone there, and they’re asleep, unaware—easy prey.
His trombone case feels heavy. The boy alternates hands as he carries it along Ocean Drive toward the Atlantic, the beach, just past two in the morning.
The wind coming sharply off the ocean. Darkness, and roiling, chaotic waves.
And light.
Three small beacons of light. Lanterns, or some form of them, for the beach bums, the ones not comfortable sleeping in pitch darkness. He knows how they feel—he slept with the closet light on for years, his mother yanking on the shoestring to turn it on, then sliding closed the closet door, leaving it open just a crack. He’d beg for another inch, for additional light, and they’d negotiate it every night. She usually let him win.
Kind of funny, though, that they’d sleep out here on the beach, in a natural setting, and still require the comfort of artificial light.
What are they afraid of, scary monsters?
What scares you? Dr. Conway always asks him. Scary monsters, things like that? Or does something else scare you?
The boy climbs to the small perch where the parking lot meets the sand. He opens the trombone case and removes the BB rifle, fully loaded.
Safely enveloped in darkness, further shielded by the wild grass on his perch, he closes his left eye and nestles his right eye against the rifle’s scope, slowly moving the barrel of the air gun through the deep blackness, through the dark, until he finds the small glow of light.
You wanna know how I feel, Doctor?
When the rifle’s sight is perfectly aligned with the lantern, when the circular scope is filled with nothing but the yellow-orange glow, he pulls the trigger.
A quick, hollow clink as the glass breaks, and the light disappears.
Over the wind, over the rush of the crashing waves, he hears it, ever so faintly. Movement. Rustling. Someone jarred awake.
He imagines that person’s reaction: disoriented. Confused. Alarmed. And worse—not knowing. Not knowing whether he should be scared. Not knowing whether he’s safe. Not knowing whether something really bad is about to happen.