The Stolen Child(41)

sprout, twist and meander along the trellis Ragno had built, but never a grape in all those years. Come

September, they cursed their luck and tore down the remnants, only to begin again when March teased

such dreams. The seventh time I saw them breaking the hard ground, I asked Zanzara why they

persisted in the face of continued failures. He stopped digging and leaned against the cracked and

ancient spade.

"When we were boys, every night we had a glass of wine at supper. I'd like to taste it again."

"But surely you could steal a bottle or two from town."

"My papa grew grapes and his before him and back and back and back." He wiped his brow with

an earth-caked hand. "One day we'll get the grapes. You learn to be patient here."

I passed much time with Luchóg and Smaolach, who taught me how to fell a tree and not be

crushed, the geometry and physics behind a deadfall trap, the proper angle of chase to catch a hare on

foot. But my favorite days were spent with Speck. And the best of all were my birthdays.

I still kept my calendar and had chosen April 23—Shakespeare's birthday—as my own. In my

tenth spring in the woods, the date fell on a Saturday, and Speck invited me to go to the library to spend

the night quietly reading to-gether. When we arrived, the chamber had been transformed. Dozens of

small candles suffused the room with an amber glow reminiscent of the light from a campfire under the

stars. Near the crack at the entranceway, she had chalked a birthday greeting in a scrolled design of her

own devising. The general shabbiness—the cobwebs, dirty blankets, and threadbare rugs—had been

cleared away, making the place clean and cozy. She had laid in a small feast of bread and cheese,

locked away against the mice, and soon the kettle boiled cheer-fully, with real tea in our cups.

"This is incredible, Speck."

"Thank goodness we decided today is your birthday, or I would have gone to all this fuss for

nothing."

At odd times that evening, I would look up from my text to watch her reading nearby. Light and

shadow flickered across her face, and like clockwork she brushed a stray lock from in front of her eyes.

Her presence disturbed me; I did not get through many pages of my book and had to read many

sentences more than once. Late that night, I awoke in her embrace. Instead of the usual kicking or

shouldering away when I woke up with someone all over me, I nestled into her, wanting the moment to

last. Most of the shorter candles had burned down, and sadly I realized that our time was nearly over.

"Speck, wake up."

She murmured in her sleep and pulled me closer. I pried away her arm and rolled out.

"We have to go. Don't you feel the air on your skin changing? The dawn's about to begin."

"Come back to sleep."

I gathered my things together. "We won't be able to leave unless we go right now."

She lifted herself up by the elbows. "We can stay. It's Sunday and the li-brary's closed. We can

stay all day and read. Nobody will be here. We can go back when it's dark again."

For a fleeting second, I considered her idea, but the very thought of stay-ing in town during daylight

hours, chancing discovery with people up and about, filled me with a holy terror.

"It's too risky," I whispered. "Suppose someone happens by. A police-man. A watchman."

She dropped back down to the blanket. "Trust me."

"Are you coming?" I asked at the door.

"Go. Sometimes you are such a child."

Squeezing through the exit, I wondered if it was a mistake. I did not like arguing with Speck or

leaving her there by herself, but she had spent many days on her own away from camp. My thoughts

bounced back and forth be-tween the two choices, and perhaps my worries over Speck affected my

sense of direction, for I found myself quite lost soon after abandoning her. Each new turn brought

unfamiliar streets and strange houses, and in my haste to escape, I became more hopelessly disoriented.

At an edge of town, a grove of trees invited me into its warm cloak, and there I picked a trail from three

options, following its twists and turns. In hindsight, I should have stayed put until the sun had fully risen,

so that it could serve as compass, but at the time, my thoughts were clouded by questions. What had she

been thinking, planning, doing for my birthday? How was I to grow older, be a man, stuck eternally in

this small, useless body? The waning sliver moon dipped and disappeared.

A small creek, not more than a trickle, bisected the path. I decided to follow the water. Tracing a

creek at dawn can be a peaceful experience, and those woods had appeared so often in my dreams as

to be as familiar to me as my own name. The creek itself ran beneath a stony road, and the road led me