The Stolen Child(48)

beating. Her gentleness reminded me of my mother's touch, or what I thought I remembered. My own

mother might as well have been the phantom, or any other fiction to be conjured. I was forgetting again,

the distinction between memory and imagination blurring. The man I saw, could he be my father? I

wondered. He appeared to have recognized me, but I was not his son, only a shadow from the woods.

In the dead of night, I wrote down the story of the three ways in McInnes's notebook, hoping to

under-stand it all in the future. Speck kept me company while the others slept. In the starlight, her cares

had vanished from her face; even her eyes, usually so tired, radiated compassion.

"I am sorry they hurt you."

"It doesn't hurt," I whispered, stiff and sore.

"Life here has its compensations. Listen."

Low in a flyway, an owl swept between the trees, unrolling its wings on the hunt. Speck tensed, the

fine hairs on her arms bristling.

"You will never get old," she said. "You won't have to worry about get-ting married or having

babies or finding a job. No gray hair and wrinkles, no teeth falling out. You won't need a cane or a

crutch."

We heard the owl descend and strike. The mouse screamed once; then life left it.

"Like children who never grow up," I said.

"'The indifferent children of the earth.'" She let her sentence linger in the air. I fixed my eye upon a

single star, hoping to sense the earth or see the heavens move. This trick of staring and drifting with the

sky has cured my insomnia many times over the years, but not that night. Those stars were fixed and this

globe creaked as if stuck in its rotation. Eyes lifted, chin pointing to the moon, Speck considered the

night, though I had no idea what she was thinking.

"Was he my father, Speck?"

"I cannot tell you. Let go of the past, Aniday. It's like holding dandelions to the wind. Wait for the

right moment, and the seeds will scatter away." She looked at me. "You should rest."

"I can't. My mind is filled with noises."

She pressed her fingers to my lips. "Listen."

Nothing stirred. Her presence, my own. "I can't hear a thing."

But she could hear a distant sound, and her gaze turned inward, as if transported to its source.

• C H A P T E R 1 5 •

Moving back home from college brought a kind of stupor to my daily life, and my nights became a

waking dread. If I wasn't pounding out yet another imitation on the piano, I was behind the bar, tending

to the usual crowd with demons of their own. I had fallen into a routine at Oscar's when the strangest of

them all arrived and ordered a shot of whiskey. He slid the glass against the rail and stared at it. I went

on to the next customer, poured a beer, sliced a lemon, and came back to the guy, and the drink was

sitting undisturbed. He was a pixy fellow, clean, sober, in a cheap suit and tie, and as far as I could tell,

he hadn't lifted his hands from his lap.

"What's the matter, mister? You haven't touched your drink."

"Would you give it to me on the house if I can make that glass move without touching it?"

"What do you mean, 'move'? How far?"

"How far would it have to move for you to believe?"

"Not far." I was hooked. "Move it at all, and you have a deal."

He reached out his right hand to shake on it, and beneath him, the glass started sliding slowly down

the bar until it came to a halt about five inches to his left. "A magician never reveals the secret to the

trick. Tom McInnes."

"Henry Day," I said. "A lot of guys come in here with all sorts of tricks but that's the best I ever

saw."

"I'll pay for this," McInnes said, putting a dollar on the bar. "But you owe me another. In a fresh

glass, if you please, Mr. Day."

He gulped the second shot and pulled the original glass back in front of him. Over the next several

hours, he suckered four people with that same trick. Yet he never touched the first glass of whiskey. He

drank for free all night. Around eleven, McInnes stood up to go home, leaving the shot on the bar.

"Hey, Mac, your drink," I called after him.

"Never touch the stuff," he said, slipping into a raincoat. "And I highly advise you not to drink it,

either."

I lifted the glass to my nose for a smell.

"Leaded." He held up a small magnet he had concealed in his left hand. "But you knew that, right?"

Swirling the glass in my hand, I could now see the iron filings at the bottom.

"Part of my study of mankind," he said, "and our willingness to believe in what cannot be seen."

McInnes became a regular at Oscar's, coming in four or five times a week over the next few years,