The Stolen Child(114)

had walked across it, but the studio was empty and silent. I took a long look around.

The score was gone—not on the table where I had left it, not fallen to the floor, not anywhere. The

window gaped open, and I ran to look at the lawn. A solitary page fluttered across the grass, pushed

along by a thin breeze, but there was nothing else to see. Howling with anger and pacing the room, I

stubbed my toe on the piano leg and began hopping up and down across the rug, nearly impaling my foot

on a piece of glass, when another crash sounded upstairs. Foot throbbing, I climbed the steps to the

landing, afraid of what might be in my house, worried about my manuscript. My bedroom was empty. In

our son's room another window had been broken, but no glass lit-tered the floor. Shards on the roof

meant the window had been shattered from the inside out. To clear my head, I sat for a moment on the

edge of his bed. His room looked the same as the day he'd left for the vacation, and thoughts of Edward

and Tess filled me with sudden sorrow. How would I explain the missing symphony? Without it, how

could I confess my true na-ture? I pulled at my wet hair till my scalp ached. In my mind, my wife, my

son, and my music were wound together in a braided chain that now threatened to unravel.

In the bathroom, the shower ran and ran. A cloud of steam billowed out into the hallway, and I

stumbled through the fog to shut off the water. On the cabinet mirror, someone had fingered words on

the fogged surface: We No Your Secret. Copied above, note for note, was the first measure of my

score.

"You little fuckers," I said to myself as the message vanished from the mirror.

After a restless and lonesome night, I drove to my mother's house as a new day began. When she

did not immediately answer my knock, I thought she might still be asleep, and went over to the window

to look in. From the kitchen, she saw me standing there, smiled, and waved me to her.

"Door's never locked," she said. "What brings you here in the middle of the week?"

"Good morning. Can't a guy come and see his best girl?"

"Oh, you're such an awful liar. Would you like a cup of coffee? How about I fry you a couple of

eggs?" She busied herself at the stove, and I sat at the kitchen table, its surface pocked with marks left

from dropped pots and pans, nicked by knives, and lined with faint impressions of letters writ-ten there.

The morning light stirred memories of our first breakfast to-gether.

"Sorry I was so long in answering the door," she said above the sizzle. "I was on the phone with

Charlie. He's off in Philadelphia, tying up loose ends. Is everything all right with you?"

I was tempted to tell her everything, beginning with the night we took away her son, going back

further to a little German boy snatched away by changelings, and ending with the tale of the stolen score.

But she looked too careworn for such confessions. Tess might be able to handle it, but the story would

break my mother's heart. Nonetheless, I needed to tell someone, at least provisionally, of my past errors

and the sins I was about to commit.

"I've been under a lot of pressure lately. Seeing things, not truly myself. Like I'm being followed by

a bad dream."

"Followed by troubles is the sign of a guilty conscience."

"Haunted. And I've got to sort it out."

"When you were a baby, you were the answer to my prayers. And when you were a little boy,

remember, I used to sing you to sleep every night. You were the sweetest thing, trying to sing along with

me, but you could never carry a tune. That certainly changed. And so did you. As if something

hap-pened to you that night you ran away."

"It is like the devils are watching me."

"Don't believe in fairy tales. The trouble is inside, Henry, with you. Liv-ing in your own head." She

patted my hand. "A mother knows her own son."

"Have I been a good son, Mom?"

"Henry." She rested her palm against my cheek, a gesture from my child-hood days, and the grief

over losing my score abated. "You are who you are, for good or ill, and no use torturing yourself with

your own creations. Little devils." She smiled as if a fresh thought had entered her mind. "Have you ever

thought whether you're real to them? Put those nightmares out of your head."

I stood to go, then bent and kissed her good-bye. She had treated me kindly over the years, as if I

had been her own son.

"I've known all along, Henry," she said.

I left the house without asking.

I resolved to confront them and find out why they were tormenting me. To flush out those

monsters, I would go back into the woods. The Forest Service provided topographical maps of the

region, the areas in green indicating woodland, the roads drawn in meticulous detail, and I laid a grid