Now the door was open again.
Over Gabe’s bed, which he was supposed to have made that afternoon and never had, was a poster of Sly Stallone. It was from the movie Rambo II. Stallone was wearing a ragged strip of cloth across his forehead and holding some sort of gun in one hand—an M-something or other, according to Gabe. Teri hadn’t allowed Gabe to see the movie; he had just turned nine and nine was too young as far as she had been concerned. But she had allowed him to have the poster. It was a compromise that had managed to keep them both satisfied.
On the far wall, between the corner and the window, was a poster of Haley’s Comet. On top of the dresser was an army of war toys: tanks, rocket launchers, soldiers, jeeps, the same kinds of toys Teri’s foster brother had collected as a boy. And above the light switch on her right was a bumper sticker that said: I BRAKE FOR MUTANTS.
Nothing had been touched. Not even the small pile of dirty clothes he had hidden in the corner on the other side of the dresser. Standing in the doorway now, it was almost as if Gabe had been gone only a day or two. Maybe off to day camp or on a school trip of some sort.
Almost.
But then not like that at all.
She stood there, mulling over the past as if it were a script she hoped she might still be able to rewrite someday. Maybe if she hadn’t starting working at the post office. Or maybe if she had been home that day or if Gabe had done his homework before going out to play or if the park had been off limits. Maybe if she had taught him not to talk to strangers or if she had enrolled him in a self-defense course. Maybe then the story would have turned out differently.
Maybe.
Teri closed the bedroom door, and by the time she returned to the living room, the boy was awake again. She found him sitting up, looking a little tired, a little unhappy, and very much out of place.
“Can’t sleep, huh?” she said.
He shrugged, a little boy’s ambivalence.
She sat next to him and unfolded the towel, surprised to find her hands trembling. It had been a long time since she had last been called upon to dry a little boy’s hair. The smell was sweet, his skin soft and perfect. She placed the towel over his head, something fluttering in her stomach.
“You’re wet as a tadpole.”
He squirmed. “I can do it, Mom.”
[5]
“Don’t ever call me that again!”
The boy turned white as a sheet and sank back into the corner. “Sorry.”
“No,” Teri said, stunned by the ferocity of what had come out of her mouth. She touched him on the forearm. “No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you like that. It’s just that…” That what? she wondered. That he had scared her? That she had suddenly found herself looking into his face and seeing Gabe’s face, as bright and precious and loving as the day he had disappeared?
“It’s my bike, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“My bike. You’re mad because I wrecked my bike.”
“Oh, no. It’s not that.”
“I didn’t mean to; it was an accident.”
“I know,” Teri said. “Your friend, she explained what happened.”
“I was unconscious for awhile,” the boy added. He had somehow taken possession of the towel and ran it through his hair a few times before dropping it back on the coffee table. Then he stared at her a moment and Teri realized that he was looking at her intently for the first time. Not only that, but he was bothered by something.
“You look different,” he said.
“Different from what?”
“From the way you used to look.”
“You mean before the accident?”
“Yeah.”
“Which was all of two weeks ago?”
“Yeah, you look… older,” he said impishly.
Teri felt herself smile with him, though a little uneasily. It had been a long time since she had taken good care of herself. First Gabe had disappeared. Then Michael had walked out. And after that, well, it had seemed harder to focus on the day-to-day matters of life, the little things like getting her hair done or shopping for new clothes.
“Two weeks is a long time,” she said, brushing the hair back from his face.
“Not that long.”
“No, maybe not.” She got up from the couch, grazing her shin on the edge of the coffee table, and stood by the folding doors that separated the living room from the family room. Before she had boxed them up and stored them in the garage, there used to be dozens of family photos covering the walls on either side. You could still see patches where the wood paneling around the picture frames had faded from the afternoon sunlight slipping in through the living room window. Some scars were forever.
“She called you Gabriel,” Teri said. “The woman who brought you here.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s my name.”
“Then what’s your full name?”
“Mom…”
Teri tensed again. “Please, just don’t call me that. All right? Not just yet.”
“Gabriel Knight.”
“And how old are you?”
“Eleven.”
“What’s your father’s name?”
“Michael.”
“What school do you go to?”
“Banton.”
“What’s your sister’s name?”
“Mom…”
“Just tell me – what’s her name?”
“I don’t have a sister.”
She felt herself slump back against the corner of the folding door, the edge digging into the small of her back. Her breath caught somewhere between her lungs and her throat, a lump that she could neither swallow nor seem to exhale.
“Okay,” she said at last, speaking in a near whisper. She clasped her elbows in the palms of her hands, and stared out the window. It had turned cold in here. She could feel the coldness burrowing into the marrow of her bones. “Let’s say you are Gabe, just for argument’s sake.”
[6]
This was what she had been able to gather so far: according to the boy, he remembered going to the park on his bicycle to play, which was something he had often done after school. He remembered fooling around on the baseball diamond, running the bases a couple of times, tossing rocks from the pitcher’s mound to the backstop, and he remembered getting a drink from the water fountain behind the little league dugout. After that, he claimed he didn’t remember much of anything. He said he had looked up at the sky one moment and the sun had been bright and well above the horizon, and in the next moment he had found himself in the hospital.
“Well, what made you think it was the hospital?”
The boy shrugged. “I don’t know. There were these machines next to the bed, like the ones you see on TV, the ones that make that beeping sound like your heart.”
“An EKG.”
“Yeah, I think that’s it,” he said without a breath. “And I had this needle in my arm, with this tube that was hooked-up to a bag with this clear stuff dripping out. It looked like water, but I’m pretty sure it was some sort of medicine or something like that.”
He said he had fallen asleep after that, and when he woke up again there had been a woman standing over his bed. She told him her name was Miss Churchill, and that he had been in an accident on his bike and that it was going to take awhile before he would be strong enough to go home again. The boy wasn’t certain how long he had been in the hospital, but he thought maybe it had been as long as ten or eleven days.
“Was that Miss Churchill with you tonight?” Teri asked.