The Stolen Child(97)

her, and another trying to remember. There is no balm for such desire. The others knew not to talk about

her around me, but I sur-prised them after an afternoon of fishing, bumbling into the middle of a

con-versation not intended for my ears.

"Now, not our Speck," Smaolach told the others. "If she's alive, she won't be coming back for us."

The faeries stole furtive glances at me, not knowing how much I had heard. I put down my string of

fish and began to shave the scales, pretending that their discussion had no effect on me. But hearing

Smaolach gave me pause. It was possible that she had not survived, but I preferred to think that she had

either gone into the upper world or reached her beloved sea. The image of the ocean brought to mind

the intense colors of her eyes, and a brief smile crossed my face.

"She's gone," I said to the silent group. "I know."

The following day we spent turning over stones in the creek bed, gath-ering the hiding newts and

salamanders, to cook together in a stew. The day was hot, and the labor took its toll. Famished, we

enjoyed a rich, gooey mess, full of tiny bones that crunched as we chewed. When the stars emerged, we

all went to bed, our stomachs full, our muscles taxed by the long day. I awoke quite late the next

morning and drowsily realized that she had not once crossed my mind when we were foraging the

previous day. I took a deep breath. I was forgetting.

Speck's presence was replaced by dullness. I would sit and stare at the sky or watch ants march,

and practice driving her out of my mind. Anything that triggered a memory could be stripped of its

personal, embedded meanings. A raspberry is a raspberry. The blackbird is a metaphor for nothing.

Words sig-nify what you will. I tried to forget Henry Day as well, and accept my place as the last of my

kind.

All of us were waiting for nothing. Smaolach never said so, but I knew he was not looking to make

the change. And he hatched no plans to steal another child. Perhaps he thought our number too few for

the com-plex preparations, or perhaps he sensed the world itself was changing. In I gel's day, the subject

came up all the time with a certain relentless energy, but less so under Béka, and never under Smaolach.

No reconnaissance missions into town, no searching out the lonesome, neglected, or forgotten. No

face-pulling, no contortions, no reports. As if resigned, we went about our eternal business, sanguine that

another disaster or abandonment awaited.

I did not care. A certain fearlessness filled me, and I would not hesitate to run into town alone, if

only to swipe a carton of cigarettes for Luchóg or a bag of sweets for Chavisory. I stole unnecessary

things: a flashlight and batter-ies, a drawing pad and charcoals, a baseball and six fishing hooks, and

once, at Christmas, a delicious cake in the shape of a firelog. In the confines of the forest, I fiddled with

idle tasks—whittling a fierce bat atop a hickory cum laying a stone ring around the circumference of our

camp, searching for old turtle shells and crafting the shards into a necklace. I went up alone to the slag

hillside and the abandoned mine, which lay undisturbed, as we had left it, and placed the tortoiseshell

necklace where Ragno and Zanzara lay buried. My dreams did not wake me up in the middle of the

night, but only because life had become a somnambulant nightmare. A handful of seasons had passed

when a chance encounter finally made me realize that Speck was beyond forgetting.

We were tending to delicate seedlings planted on a sun-drenched slope a few hundred yards from

camp. Onions had stolen new seeds, and within weeks up came the first tender shoots—snap peas,

carrots, scallions, a watermelon vine, and a row of beans. Chavisory, Onions, Luchóg, and I were

weed-ing in the garden on that spring morning, when the sound of approaching feet caused us to rise like

whitetail, to sniff the wind, ready to flee or hide. The intruders were lost hikers, off the trail and headed in

our direction. Since the housing development had risen, we had a rare traveler pass our way, but our

cultivated patch might look a bit peculiar to these strangers out in the middle of nowhere. We disguised

the garden under pine brush and hid ourselves be-neath a skirt of trees.

Two young men and a young woman, caps upon their heads, huge back-packs strapped at the

shoulders, walked on, cheerful and oblivious. They strolled past the rows of plants and us. The first man

had his eye on the world ahead. The second person—the girl—had her eye on him, and the third man

had his eye on her backside. Though lost, he seemed intent on the one thing. We followed safely behind,

and they eventually settled down a hill away to drink their bottled water, unwrap their candy bars, and