The Stolen Child(93)

questions. She put down her book, crossed the room, and wound me in her embrace. For the longest

time, she held on to me, rocking and soothing my fevered imagination with the lightest touch, caressing

away the chaos.

And then she told me my story. The story told in these pages was all she could remember. She told

me what she knew, and my recollections of dreams, visions, and encounters filled in the rest. She told me

why they kept it all secret for so long. How it is better not to know who you really are. To forget the

past. Erase the name. All this revealed in a patient and heavenly voice, until everything that could be

answered was answered, no desire left unsatisfied. The candles burned out, we had talked so long, and

into dark-ness the conversation lasted, and the last thing I remember is falling asleep in her arms.

I had a dream that we ran away that night, found a place to grow up together, became the woman

and the man we were supposed to be. In the dream, she kissed my mouth, and her bare skin slid

beneath my fingertips. A blackbird sang. But in the morning, she was not where I expected her to be. In

our long friendship, she had never written a single word to me, but by my side, where she should have

been, lay a note in her handwriting. Every letter is etched in mind, and though I will not give it all away, at

the end she wrote, "Goodbye, Henry Day."

It was time for her to go. Speck is gone.

• C H A P T E R 2 9 •

The first time I saw him, I was too frightened to say anything and too awestruck to touch him. He

was not a freak or a devil, but perfect in every way, a beautiful boy. After the long wait to meet him, I

found myself overcome by the sudden change, not so much his physical presence, his arrival after being

hidden away, but the change in me to something more sublimely human. Tess smiled at my confusion and

the look in my eyes as I beheld him.

"You won't break him," she said.

My son. Our child. Ten fingers, ten toes. Good color, great lungs, a natural at the breast. I held him

in my arms and remembered the twins in their matching yellow jumpers, my mother singing to me as she

scrubbed my back in the bathtub, my father holding my hand when we climbed the bleachers at an

autumn football game. Then I remembered Clara, my first mother, how I loved to crawl under the

billows of her skirts, and the scent of witch hazel on my father Abram's cheek, his feathery moustache as

he pressed his lips against my skin. I kissed our boy and considered the ordinary miracle of birth, the

wonder of my wife, and was grateful for the human child.

We named him Edward, and he thrived. Born two weeks before Christ-mas 1970, he became our

darling boy, and over those first few months, the three of us settled into the house that Mom and Charlie

had bought for us in the new development up in the woods. At first, I could not bear the thought of living

there, but they surprised us on our second anniversary, and with Tess pregnant and the bills mounting, I

could not say no. The house was larger than we needed, especially before the baby came, and I built a

small studio, moving in the old piano. I taught music to seventh graders and ran the student orchestra at

Mark Twain Middle School, and in the evenings and on week-ends, when I didn't have to mind the

baby, I worked on my music, dreaming of a composition that evoked the flow of one life into another.

For inspiration, I would sometimes unfold the photocopy of the pas-senger list and study the

names. Abram and Clara, their sons Friedrich, Josef, and Gustav. The legendary Anna. Their ghosts

appeared in fragments. A doc-tor listens to my heartbeat while Mother frets over his shoulder. Faces

bend to me, speaking carefully in a language I cannot understand. Her dark green skirt as she waltzes.

Tang of apple wine, sauerbraten in the oven. Through a frosted window, I could see my brothers

approach the house on a winter's day, their breath exploding in clouds as they share a private joke. In

the parlor stands the piano, which I touch again.

Playing music is the one vivid memory from the other life. Not only do I recall the yellowing keys,

the elaborate twisting vines of the scrollwork mu-sic stand, the smoothness of the rosewood finish, but I

can hear those tunes again, and feel the sensations he felt while playing—strike these keys, hear these

notes resound from the depths of the machine. The combination of notes makes up the melody. Translate

the symbols from the score to the cor-responding keys, and keep the right time, to make this song. My

one true link to my first childhood is that sensation of bringing the dream of notes to life. The song

echoing in my head becomes the song resounding in the air. As a child, this was my way of unlocking my

thoughts, and now, a century or more later, I attempted to create the same seamless expression through