The Stolen Child(90)

sideboard. In and out in minutes, disturbing no one.

The second house—where the baby in blue lived—proved stubborn. All of the doors and

downstairs windows were locked, so we had to shimmy under the crawlspace and into a closetlike room

that sheltered a maze of plumbing. By following the pipes, we eventually made our way into the interior

of the house, ending up in the cellar. To make ourselves quieter, we look off our shoes and tied them

around our necks before sneaking up the steps and slowly opening the door to the kitchen. The room

smelled of re-membered bread.

While Smaolach and Luchóg raided the pantry, I tiptoed through the rooms to locate the front door

and an easy exit. On the walls of the living room hung a gallery of photographic portraits that read mainly

as uninterest-ing shadows, but as I passed by one, illuminated by a white shaft of moon-light, I froze.

Two figures, a young mother and her infant child, lifted to her shoulder to face the camera. The baby

looked like every other baby, round and smooth as a button. The mother did not stare directly into the

lens but watched her son from the corners of her eyes. Her hairstyle and clothing suggested another era,

and she, with her beguiling smile and hopeful gaze, appeared hardly more than a child with a child. She

lifted her chin, as if pre-paring to burst out laughing with joy at the babe in arms. The photograph

triggered a rush of chemicals to my brain. Dizzy and disoriented, I knew, but could not place, their faces.

There were other photographs—a long white dress standing next to a shadow, a man in a peaked

cap—but I kept coming back to the mother and child, put my fingers on the glass, traced the contours of

those figures. I wanted to remember. Foolishly, I went to the wall and turned on the lamp.

Someone gasped in the kitchen just as the pictures on the wall jumped into clarity. Two older

people with severe eyeglasses. A fat baby. But I could see clearly the photograph that had so entranced

me, and beside it another which disturbed me more. There was a boy, eyes skyward, looking up in

expectation of something unseen. He could not have been more than seven at the time the picture was

taken, and had the snapshot not been in black) and white, I would have sooner recognized his face. For

it was mine, and me, in a jacket and cap, eyes awaiting—what? a snowfall, a tossed football, a V of

geese, hands from above? What a strange thing to happen to a little boy, to end up on the wall of this

unfamiliar house. The man and woman in the wedding picture offered no clues. It was my father with a

different bride.

"Aniday, what are you doing?" Luchóg hissed. "Hush those lights."

A mattress creaked overhead as someone got out of bed. I snapped off the lights and scrammed.

The floorboards moaned. A woman's voice mut-tered in a high, impatient tone.

"All right," the man replied. "I'll go check, but I didn't hear a thing." He headed for the upper

stairway, took the steps slowly one by one. We tried the back door out of the kitchen but could not

figure out the lock.

"The damned thing won't budge," Smaolach said.

The approaching figure reached the bottom landing, switched on the light. He went into the living

room, which I had departed seconds earlier. Luchóg fussed with a rotating bar and unlocked the

deadbolt with a soft click. We froze at the sound.

"Hey, who's there?" the man said from the other room. He padded our way in his bare feet.

"Fuck all," said Smaolach, and he turned the knob and pushed. The door opened six inches but

hung fast by a small metal chain above our heads. "Let's go," he said, and we changed to squeeze

through the gap one by one, scattering sugar and flour behind us. I am sure he saw the last of us, for the

man called out "Hey" again, but we were gone, racing across the frosty lawn. The floodlight popped on

like a flashbulb, but we had passed its circle of il-lumination. From the top of the ridge, we watched all

his rooms light up in sequence, till the windows glowed like rows of jack-o'-lanterns. A dog began to

yowl madly in the middle of the village, and we took that as a sign to retreat home. The ground chilled

our bare feet, but, exhilarated as imps, we escaped our treasures, laughing under the cold stars.

At the top of the ridgeline, Luchóg stopped to smoke one of his purloined cigarettes, and I looked

back one last time at the ordered village where our home used to be. This is the place where it had all

happened—a reach for wild honey high in a tree, a stretch of roadway where the car struck a deer, a

clearing where I first opened my eyes and saw eleven dark children. But someone had erased all that,

like a word or a line, and in that space wrote another sentence. The neighborhood of houses appeared