I went down my creaky stairs to shut the door that closes off my stairwell. As I clicked the deadbolt, my brain went into replay, seeing the boy falling, me diving in, the long swim, the dreary walk, as if on a tiny screen inside my head.
If you threw a child in the lake, would you stay to watch him drown? Could anyone have seen me rescuing him? Like an icicle moving down my spine, the next thought arrived: If you threw a child in a lake and knew he survived, would you come looking for him? I tried to reason it through. But because I couldn’t imagine tossing a kid off a boat in the first place, trying to work out the subsequent thought process was futile.
The boy was curled up in the bed where I’d left him, facing the wall, with Tiger next to him. The bedroom window was open a few inches, as always during the months with no snow on the ground. But if someone banged a ladder against the side of the house to try to get in, I’d hear it. Or Tiger would.
As I brushed my teeth I scowled at my reflection in the wavery mirror. My face was haggard, with dark shadows under the eyes. I don’t know when I’d last needed sleep this badly. I had to concentrate to keep the toothbrush moving.
I tiptoed into the bedroom and eased into the bed. I pulled the covers up and settled down on my side, back to the boy, Tiger between us. I closed my eyes and was just about immediately halfway to Never Never Land.
“Trrroy,” came a quiet murmur beside me.
“Mmm,” I said, too tired to turn over.
“Je m’appelle Paul.”
I lay in silence for a moment, hearing the small sounds of his breathing. “Okay, Paul,” I said at last. “Sweet dreams. Fais de beaux rêves.”
I WOKE ABRUPTLY, IN THE SAME POSITION I’D FALLEN ASLEEP. Sunlight was streaming in the window, and the dust in the air seemed to dance on the windowsill. Tiger was standing beside the bed, giving me that look that said I was sadly neglecting her. I peered at my bedside clock: 8:47. I never sleep this late. I’m a roll-out-of-bed-at-7 kind of girl. Or earlier.
For a moment I wondered if I had dreamed it all: the drive, the ferry, the child, the swim. Maybe I’d never left the house to go visit Thomas. I pushed myself up on my elbows and turned and saw the small body, facing me, sleeping hard, curled into a tight ball.
Troy, what have you done? I could almost hear the words, an inner Jiminy Cricket. What the voice should have been saying was Troy, who are you? I’d woken up yesterday as one person and today as a different one. This person had dived from a ferry and rescued a child and brought him home with her. Troy Chance didn’t do things like that.
But I had.
It seemed to make sense at the time. I could hear someone saying this in earnest explanation: a driver who convinced herself that she hadn’t really hit someone, that it was just a bump in the road or a wild animal, and it wasn’t safe to stop. Or a woman who took home a baby she found in a pram outside a store, because clearly she could take better care of it than the person who left it alone.
I could wake this child now and walk him to the police station a block away and explain that I hadn’t been thinking clearly yesterday—that the coldness of the water, the length of the swim, the shock of finding a child thrown away, all had robbed me of the ability to think rationally. They’d believe me. This was a small town: people knew me and liked me. I’d been the sports editor of the daily newspaper; I’d covered their kids’ baseball and hockey games, soccer tournaments, and track meets, put their photos in the paper, spelled their names right. I’d be a hero for rescuing a child, and not reporting it right away would be swept under the rug.
But I had known what I was doing.
I had saved a boy someone else had thrown away, and had made the decision not to turn him over to authorities, not to risk him being sent to a bad foster home or returned to the person who had tried to drown him. I’d found him and he trusted me, and I’d made the decision that he needed to be with me. For now.
Sitting there propped up in bed, I watched the boy sleeping, his body moving slightly with each breath.
It wouldn’t sound rational to anyone. I knew that. But neither had it been rational to have been on deck on a gray misty day—or to have believed what I saw was a child, or that I could find him in the murky water. Or that we could survive that long cold swim to shore.
But we had. And maybe I wasn’t meant to blithely pass him on to someone else.
I eased myself out of bed and bit my lip not to groan. I wouldn’t have thought swimming could cause such pain; I felt a million years old. The boy didn’t stir. I hobbled out to my office and clicked my computer on before heading down to let Tiger out. As she gratefully relieved herself on the grass, my brain inched into gear. Maybe the boy’s parents hadn’t been on the ferry. Maybe someone had snatched him—like the young Las Vegas boy I’d read about who had been abducted by drug dealers and abandoned—and then dumped him into the lake.
But what if his parents or guardian or stepparent had done it, but claimed someone else had? Susan Smith had claimed that a carjacker had taken her car with her two small sons, but she had been the one who had driven them into a lake to drown. If I saw a tearful news clip, would I be able to tell if that person was telling the truth?
I didn’t know.
I shook some food into Tiger’s bowl and climbed back upstairs. The boy was still sleeping. I sat at my computer and opened my browser.
If this child had been snatched by someone and dumped, the story would be all over the news, and it would be safe to let him go home. I should have checked last night, but my brain simply hadn’t been working. I’d be guilty of letting his parents endure a sleepless night, but I could trot out the too tired, too cold, too confused excuse. Which would be true.
Tiger climbed the stairs and wandered into the bedroom, and the bed creaked as she jumped on it. She was staying close to the boy.
I pulled up Google and searched missing boy Vermont and kidnapped boy Paul, then a variety of combinations. I found a depressing 2006 story of a mother who had drowned her eight-year-old son in Lake Champlain near the Canadian border, but that was all. The Burlington newspaper had nothing, but I emailed the news desk asking if they’d had any report of a missing French-speaking boy, using my anonymous eBay email address. Montreal was less than a hundred miles from Burlington, so I checked the newspaper there. Nothing. If frantic parents were pleading for the return of a beloved child, I couldn’t find them.
I Googled missing children, then searched MissingKids.com. I found the missing children’s website for the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and entered Paul’s name, gender, and eye and hair color. Records found: 0. I searched again, using no parameters other than gender, and came up only with two brothers, neither of whom resembled Paul in the slightest.
Then I looked up the Lake Champlain ferry website, and from the schedule saw that Paul’s ferry should have passed mine roughly midway in the lake, not a mile or two from shore. Maybe mine had been late or his early, or both—but otherwise, I never would have seen him fall. Five minutes earlier or later, and one small boy would have drowned.
I’d been hearing small noises from my bedroom, as if the boy was moving around. I went to the doorway, and it took a moment to register that the bed was empty. No boy, no dog. For a moment I couldn’t breathe. I saw the window was open a few inches, just as I’d left it. For a split second I wondered if they could have crept past me while I had been engrossed in my research, but even I’m not that oblivious. Boy and dog had to be somewhere in the room, and there were only two options: under the bed or in the closet. My eyes went to the bedside table where we’d left the half-eaten piece of pizza. Okay, missing boy, missing dog, missing half slice of pizza.
“Paul,” I called out softly. “Paul, where are you? Où es-tu?”
A whine from Tiger. I eased back the hanging sheet that served as a closet door, and there was Paul crouched in the corner, one arm around Tiger, his other hand gripping the gnawed pizza slice—looking as if it were perfectly normal to hide
in a closet with a dog and a piece of pizza. I knelt, a careful distance away. “Good morning, Paul,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “Would you like some breakfast? Veux-tu prendre le petit déjeuner?”
He shifted but seemed unsure what to do. I snapped my fingers and Tiger obediently came toward me. “Did something frighten you?” I asked Paul. “Tu as peur?” No answer. “Paul, sweetie, come on out,” I said, opening my arms and letting a little emotion into my voice.
He wouldn’t look at me, and I waited a long, long moment. Finally he moved into my arms. I could feel the frailty of his limbs; I could feel his heart beating; I could almost feel his fear and confusion and loneliness. I hadn’t known you could form an attachment to a person so quickly, so atavistically. Had my sisters experienced this when their children were born? I realized I would do anything to protect this child. “Je ne te blesserai jamais,” I whispered to him. “I will never hurt you. Never.”
And I knew I wouldn’t be marching this boy down to the police station, not today, and possibly never.
THE BOY WAS LOOKING THOUGHTFULLY AT THE SLICE OF old, cold pizza he was holding, as if considering eating it. Time for breakfast.
Even if I had run his clothes through the washer and hung them up to dry last night, they’d still be wet. I searched through my dresser and pulled out my snuggest Lycra sports shorts and tiniest T-shirt, and knotted two bandannas around his waist to hold up the shorts. They came halfway down his legs like baggy pantaloons, making him look like a tiny pirate. I turned him to let him look at himself in the mirror on the back of my bedroom door. His mouth twisted with amusement, and for a moment he looked like anyone’s kid, playing dress-up.
I led him by the hand down my narrow stairs into the kitchen, where he seemed to think a picnic table with a plastic-coated checkered tablecloth made a fine dining room table. He emptied his bowl of Cheerios and looked at me wide-eyed, like the hungry orphan in Oliver! I know my Dickens—both movie and novel—and correctly concluded he wanted more. We negotiated: more Cheerios if he would give the half-eaten pizza slice to Tiger.
I watched him munch his cereal, and hoped if he had any food allergies he’d be smart enough to turn down whatever he was allergic to. While he was finishing his second bowl, I retrieved our wet clothes from yesterday and dumped them in the portable washing machine. I wheeled it to the kitchen sink, attached it to the faucet, and switched it on.
What now? I could try to coax Paul into talking or I could do more research to see if I had missed anything. We headed upstairs and were just stepping into my office when my phone rang. I jumped, and Paul scurried into the bedroom.
It was my brother, Simon.
“Hey, kiddo, what’s up?” he asked. I don’t think being eleven months younger warrants being called kiddo, but I let him get away with it. Most of the time. Simon had managed our family much better than I had: he had obediently gone to Vanderbilt, where our father teaches, and majored in pre-law. But when he was supposed to be sowing wild oats on senior spring break he’d slipped off to take the police exam in Orlando, and after graduation had accepted a job there, thereby managing to do exactly what he wanted after being comfortably supported through university. After the initial shock, everyone decided this was a singularly clever way to acquire experience before law school, and Simon lets them think what they want. What they don’t know is that he’s quietly building a second career as an artist, selling a few pieces here and there, and has no intention of going to law school.
But when I landed a scholarship to Oregon State and wanted to skip my last year of high school, it was Simon who calmed our mother and convinced our father to sign the admission papers—although I would have forged them if I’d had to. So if anyone comes close to understanding me, it’s Simon. He’d known I’d had to get away. Just as he knows I need to live in this mountain town more than a thousand long miles from Nashville.
“Not much,” I said. “Work, dog, house. Rode up Keene Valley. Hiked Algonquin.” I’d taken Simon up two of the Adirondack mountains; I hadn’t yet summited all forty-six, but I was marking them off, one by one.
He laughed. “Hey, it’s a tough life you lead up there in the boonies.”
“Yeah, well, have fun down there while you can, before it gets so hot you can barely breathe.”
“At least we don’t have black flies.”
“No, just cockroaches so big they fly.” I hesitated a moment. “Hey, Simon, what do you do at work if you find a lost kid and no parents show up?”
He answered without hesitation—like me, he can switch gears quickly. “Basically it gets publicized until a relative appears or you track them down. Like that kid abandoned in a shopping center out west. Or that little girl in New York found wandering the streets after her mother was killed by her boyfriend. She was in the papers and on TV until she was identified. What’s up, Troy?”
“Mmm.” There was a lump in my throat. “Just an article I’m working on.” This didn’t have to be a lie—I could write an article about missing kids, abandoned kids, kids tossed off ferries. I made noncommittal noises and slid into small talk. Simon told me he had two paintings appearing in a local show; I mentioned an article I’d sold to Triathlete magazine.
I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. Paul was standing in the doorway of the bedroom. I put up a finger—one minute—and told Simon goodbye, and as I hung up I thought of something to try.
I patted the sofa, and Paul climbed up beside me. I pulled a photo album off my bookshelf and opened it. First I showed Paul pictures of me and Tiger, then a photo of Simon. “C’est mon frère,” I said, and asked if he had a brother or sister. He shook his head. A dog? Another shake, with a little frown that made me think he had wanted one but hadn’t been allowed.
I flipped to photos of our parents and the house we grew up in. Paul began to shift uneasily, maybe guessing where I was heading. But instead I asked where he went to school. This he answered.
“Je ne vais pas à l’école.” No school.
Time to ask him where he lived. “Où habites-tu, Paul?” I tried to make the question sound casual. He frowned and shrugged. “Tu habites avec tes parents?” I asked next. At this he became visibly agitated and shook his head. He either didn’t live with his parents, or didn’t want to answer.
I looked at him, clownlike in the baggy T-shirt and shorts. He needed some regular clothes—and maybe being around other kids would help him relax. And although I would never have admitted it, maybe I needed to talk to someone.
I picked up my phone and speed-dialed my friend Baker in Saranac Lake. “C’est mon amie,” I told Paul. “Elle a trois jeunes fils—three sons.” I’d met Baker when she had filled in temporarily at the newspaper during someone’s maternity leave. Her first name was Susan, but she’d been called by her last name ever since working with several women who shared the same first name. Now she remains Baker, despite having acquired a large burly husband, a new last name, and three small sons.
Her husband answered.
“Hey, Mike, it’s Troy. Is Baker around?”
“She’s here somewhere.” He was almost shouting over the background din. “She’s playing Indian chief with the tribe. Hang on a sec.”
Baker was breathless when she got to the phone. If she thought it odd that I needed to borrow some of her oldest son’s clothes, she didn’t say so. “I suppose you’ll explain this when you get here,” she said dryly.
“Yup. I’ll be over within the hour. Do you need anything?”
“Nope, unless you’ve got an Algonquin chief’s outfit. See you.”
Paul was frowning, looking worried. “We’re going to go visit my friends. To borrow clothes,” I told him. “Pour emprunter des vêtements.” He seemed wary, but didn’t protest. I put my driver’s license and cash in my jeans pocket, leaving my still-wet wallet behind. Paul’s sneakers were damp and a bit shrunken, but I pulled them on his bare feet and tied the laces. He and Tiger watched me hang our wet laundry on the lin
e behind the house, and after putting Tiger back in the house we were off.
It was slow driving along Main Street. Lake Placid hosted the Winter Olympics twice, in 1932 and in 1980, and tourists seem to think this is an Olympic theme park and that the townspeople are part of the scenery. Of course they have no idea most locals don’t go anywhere for vacation because they can’t afford it at North Country rock-bottom wages. Or that the 1980 Olympic Village is now a prison camp, and that being a prison guard is considered a great job here because it pays so well.
I do love this area—I’ve lived here nearly five years now. You can walk your kayak to a clear lake for a paddle before breakfast and hike up a mountaintop after lunch. Saranac Lake has a spectacular Winter Carnival, with an amazing ice palace and a parade the whole town turns out to watch no matter how cold it is, and Lake Placid has the best July 4 fireworks I’ve ever seen.
I’d come here as sports editor on the daily newspaper in Saranac Lake, covering three area high schools and two community colleges, plus all the Lake Placid events: horse show competitions, boxing, luge and bobsled, biathlon, ski jumping, and more—and community sports: softball, bowling, dart tournaments, sled dog races, and ice fishing. On a small paper the editor is the editor, writer, photographer, and layout person—you’re it, the whole department. After spending too many nights sleeping on the couch in the newspaper office because I didn’t have either time or energy to drive home, I’d known it was time for a change.
Now I do freelance writing and editing and some computer and website consulting. I write press releases for the area chambers of commerce and theater reviews for the paper, and sell articles about sled dog races, rugby tournaments, three-day canoe races, and ski jumping to magazines like Southwest Spirit and Scholastic Scope. It’s not a huge income, and it’s sporadic. But my expenses are few, and I like the freedom. It had suited me fine.
Learning to Swim Page 3