I’d got it wrong. Simple enough. Lots of little boys had blond hair and mournful eyes.
I tried to bring back the image of the boy’s face as he dodged the woman’s slaps. It was the sadness that got to me. The kid had been jumping up and down in the backseat without joy, his face blank. Maybe it meant nothing, but if it meant anything, it was worth looking into, just to draw attention to a child who needed help.
I got out and opened the back of the truck, digging for my work stuff. Tucked into a pocket of my computer bag were some of the Spectator clippings I’d saved. When I saw the photo of Aidan’s round face, the hairs on my arms stood on end.
I grabbed all the files and my computer and filled the parking meter with quarters. In the pharmacy I made fifty grainy color copies of the clipping, watching Aidan’s face shuffle again and again to the top of the pile. The cashier accepted my money and glanced at the stack of pages.
“Have you seen him?” I asked.
The cashier was a young woman with fading purple hair, and a metal toothpick through her nose like a bull’s ring. I wondered how hard it was for her to live in such a small town, or if she’d found her crowd anyway. “Cute,” the girl said in an unconvincing monotone.
“He’s missing.”
The cashier looked more closely. “From Sweetheart Lake?”
“From Indiana. I think he might be—maybe someone brought him up here.”
“Oh.” The cashier fed me a receipt. “Why?”
It was the perfect question. I couldn’t think why. “So you haven’t seen him?”
“They all look the same to me, really. Small.”
“Will you keep one behind the counter? If you see him—” What? What plan did I have? “Call the police, I guess.”
The girl looked at me, blank.
“I’m working with the police. The Indiana police, I mean.”
The cashier seemed to believe me less. “I’ll keep it back here?”
Up and down the street, I handed the posters to skeptical shopkeepers. No one could say that they’d seen him. And maybe they hadn’t. Or maybe they had and hadn’t noticed him. There were no news alerts here, no Aidan Watch time lines in the daily paper. To them, he’d be just another little boy on vacation with his family. Just another tourist.
The woman running the real estate office said he looked just like her grandson when he was a baby. “I hope you find him,” she said, displaying the copy I gave her prominently on her desk. “His poor mama.”
In one of the last shops, a tourist T-shirt emporium, a teenage girl welcomed me through a mouthful of braces. Her skinny arms stuck out of a candy-colored Sweetheart Lake T-shirt too large for her.
“Is the manager or owner here?”
The girl went to get someone, her ponytail swinging.
I glanced around at the shirts, instinct drawing my eye to one that seemed closely related to the shirt I’d had in high school, the pair of matching shirts Theresa and I bought to wear together that the other students hadn’t liked. It was pink with, inexplicably, a palm tree scene and the words Sweetheart Lake Welcomes YOU! blazoned across the chest. I pulled it off the rack.
“That one is sort of funny,” said a woman’s tentative voice.
I glanced up and did a double take. Things were funny, when you were least ready to laugh.
Chapter Thirty-four
Theresa. This time I was sure of what I saw. The only living person I might have wanted to reclaim from Sweetheart Lake stood before me, a little older, a little more chin, a little more hip. I looked at the shirt in my hand.
“Those shirts were funny,” I said, finally.
Theresa’s eyes flickered to my face and away. “I can’t believe it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I feel like—like I just got punched.” She held her hand to her stomach. She couldn’t seem to look at me directly. “How—I mean—I don’t know where to start.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Stop it. There’s nothing to apologize for. You made it out. It’s what we—it’s what I always wanted. I thought you were . . .”
I hung the shirt’s hanger back on the rack with a clatter. “Murdered.”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t think it through. I should have written you. I should have called.” None of it seemed like enough.
“Should-haves are like apologizing except no one’s listening, is what my gammie used to tell us,” Theresa said. “You remember her. Crazy lady.”
“Sweet lady. Your whole family—”
“She’s gone now. And my mom.”
“It’s not apologizing to say I’m sorry for that.”
“Over ten years, but—well, I took it hard. So soon after—” She looked to the door, though no one had come in. “I thought he killed you. They told me he didn’t, that you were living in a trailer in Tennessee—”
“For a while.”
“—but I tried to find you and I couldn’t. I didn’t believe them.” She covered her mouth with her hand. Over it, her eyes went soft and then snapped back. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”
“I didn’t, either,” I said.
“I didn’t know you at all.”
I dug in my bag, my wallet, and finally found a tiny photo of Joshua from Chicago. The photo wasn’t that old, but he still looked so young. I paused with it in my hand. If I didn’t find him, would every photo of him catch me like this? I held it out to Theresa. “This is how.”
“What,” Theresa said, smiling for the first time. “No kidding. That is—wow, is that his kid.” She glanced up.
“I’ve seen him.”
“Born again,” Theresa said.
“He seems to think so.”
“His wife is nice,” Theresa said, studying Joshua’s picture. “She might be an idiot, though, I can’t tell. All that ‘I believe in love’ stuff.”
“She’s said that more than once?” I said. “Wow.”
“I believe in what people do,” Theresa said. “You know? Not what they say. I know what he did. Except—what happened to you? All that blood.”
I blinked away, trying not to remember just now what he’d done. Ray seemed a million miles in the past. And so did Theresa, even as she stood with Joshua’s photo in her hand.
“Did you bring him with you?”
“Joshua? No. It’s—complicated.”
She handed back the picture. “If you say it’s complicated, I’m going to believe it.”
“He disappeared,” I said.
“He takes after you, then, too.”
It hurt. Apologies weren’t allowed, but I could see how they were necessary, would always be necessary, and would never be accepted. We’d lived without one another for thirteen years, and now I saw how small the reunion would be. I’d be an anecdote to tell.
“He’s here?” she said.
“I thought he’d figured out where his dad was.”