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 batteries, 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 weeding 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 beneath a skirt of trees.
Two young men and a young woman, caps upon their heads, huge backpacks 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 lighten their loads. The first man took out a book and read something from it to the girl, while the third hiker went off behind the trees to relieve himself. He was gone a long time, for the man with the book had the chance not only to finish his poem but to kiss the girl, as well. When their small interlude ended, the threesome strapped on their gear and marched away. We waited a decent spell before running to the spot they had vacated.
Two empty water bottles littered the ground, and Luchóg snatched them up and found the caps nearby. They had discarded the cellophane wrappers from their snacks, and the boy had left his slim volume of poems lying on the grass. Chavisory gave it to me. The Blue Estuaries by Louise Bogan. I leafed through a few pages and stopped at the phrase That more things move/Than blood in the heart.
"Speck," I said to myself. I had not said her name aloud in ages, in centuries.
"What is it, Aniday?" Chavisory asked.
"I am trying to remember."
The four of us walked back to the garden. I turned to see if my comrades were following the same path, only to discover Luchóg and Chavisory, walking step by ginger step, holding hands. My thoughts flooded with Speck. I felt an urgency to find her again, if only to understand why she had gone. To tell her how the private conversations of my mind were still with her. I should have asked her not to go, found the right words to convince her, confessed all that moved in my heart. And ever hopeful that it was not too late, I resolved to begin again.
CHAPTER 31
I would not want to be a child again, for a child exists in uncertainty and danger. Our flesh and blood, we cannot help but fear for them, as we hope for them to make their way in this life. After the break-in, I worried about our son all of the time. Edward is not who we say he is because his father is an imposter. He is not a Day, but a changeling's child. I passed on my original genes, giving him the face and features of the Ungerlands, and who knows what other traits leapt the generations. Of my own childhood, I know little more than a name on a piece of paper: Gustav Ungerland. I was stolen long ago. And when the changelings came again, I began to believe they saw Edward as one of their own and wished to reclaim him. The mess they left in the kitchen was a subterfuge for a more sinister purpose. The disturbed photographs on the wall indicated that they were searching for someone. Wickedness hovered in the background and crept through the woods, plotting to steal our son.
We lost Edward one Sunday in springtime. On that gloriously warm afternoon, we happened to be in the city, for I had discovered a passable pipe organ in a church in Shadyside, and after services the music minister allowed me an hour to experiment with the machine, trying out what new sounds coursed through my imagination. Afterward, Tess and I took Edward to the zoo for his first face-to-face encounter with elephants and monkeys. A huge crowd shared our idea, and the walkways were crammed with couples pushing strollers, desultory teenagers, even a family with six redheaded children, staggered a year apart, a conspiracy of freckles and blue eyes. Too many people for my taste, but we jostled along without complaint. Edward was fascinated by the tigers and loitered in front of the iron fence, pulling at his cotton candy, roaring at the beasts to encourage them out of their drowsiness. In its black-and-orange dreams, one tiger twitched its tail, annoyed by my son's entreaties. Tess took advantage of Edward's distraction to confront me.
"Henry, I want to talk to you about Eddie. Does he seem all right to you? There's been a change lately, and something—I don't know—not normal."
I could see him over her shoulder. "He's perfectly normal."
"Or maybe it's you," she said. "You've been different with him lately. Overprotective, not letting him be a kid. He should be outdoors catching polliwogs and climbing trees, but it's as if you're afraid of him being out of your sight. He needs the chance to become more independent."
I pulled her off to the side, out of our son's hearing. "Do you remember the night someone broke into the house?"
"I knew it," she said. "You said not to worry, but you've been preoccupied with that, haven't you?"
"No, no, I just remembered, when I was looking at the photographs on the walls that night, it made me think of my own childhood dreams—years at the piano, searching for the right music to express myself. I have been looking for the answers, Tess, and they were right under my fingertips. Today in the church, the organ sounded just like the one at St. Nicholas's in Cheb. The organ is the answer to the symphony. Organ and orchestra."
She wrapped her arms around me and pulled herself against my chest. Her eyes were full of light and hope, and in all of my several lives, no one had shown such faith in me, in the essence of who I considered myself to be. I was so in love with her at that moment that I forgot the world and everything in it, and that's when I noticed, over her shoulder, our son was gone. Vanished from the space where he had been standing. My first thought was that he had tired of the tigers and was now underfoot or nearby, ready to beg us to let him in for a group hug. That hope evaporated and was replaced by the horrible notion that Edward had somehow squeezed through the bars and been instantly eaten by the tigers, but a quick glance at their cage revealed nothing but two indolent cats stretched out asleep in the languid sunshine. In the wilderness of my imagination, the changelings appeared. I looked back at Tess and feared that I was about to break her heart.
"He's gone," I told her, moving apart. "Edward."
She spun around and moved to the spot we had seen him last. "Eddie," she cried. "Where in the world are you?"
We went down the path toward the lions and bears, calling out his name, her voice rising an octave with each repetition, alarming the other parents. Tess stopped an elderly couple heading in the opposite direction. "Have you seen a little boy all alone? Three years old. Cotton candy."
"There's nothing but children here," the old man said, pointing a thin finger to the distance behind us. A line of children, laughing and hurrying, chased something down a shady pathway. At the front of the pack, a zoo-keeper hustled along, attempting to hold back the children while following his quarry. Ahead of the mob, Edward raced in his earnest and clumsy jog, chasing a blackfooted penguin that had escaped his pen and now waddled free and oblivious, heading back to the ocean, perhaps, or in search of fresh fish. The keeper sprinted past Edward and caught up to the bird, which brayed like a jackass. Holding its bill with one hand and cradling the bird against his chest, the keeper hurried past us as we reached our son. "Such a ruckus," he told us. "This one slips out of the exhibit and off he goes, wherever he pleases. Some things have such a will."
Taking Edward's hands in our own, we were determined to never let go.
Edward was a kite on a string, always threatening to break free. Before he started schooling, Eddie was safe at home. Tess took good care of him in the mornings, and I was home to watch him on weekday afternoons. When he turned four, Eddie went in with me on the way to work. I'd drop him off at the nursery school and then swing by from Twain when my music classes were through. In our few private hours I taught him scales, but when he bored of the piano he toddled off to his blocks and dinosaurs, inventing imaginary games and companions to while away lonesome hours. Every once in a while, he'd bring over a playmate for the afternoon, but those children never seemed to come back. That was fine by me, as I never fully trusted his playmates. Any one of them could have been a changeling in disguise.
Strangely, my music flourished in the splendid isolation we had carved out for ourselves. While he entertained himself with his toys and books, I composed. Tess encouraged me to find my own sound. Every week or so, she would bring home another album featuring organ music found in some dusty used record store. She cadged tickets to Heinz Hall performances, dug up sheet music and books on orchestration and instrumentation, and insisted that I go into the city to work out the music in my head at friendly churches and the college music school. She was re-creating, in essence, the repertoire in the treasure chest from Cheb. I wrote dozens of works, though scant success or attention resulted from my efforts—a coerced performance of a new arrangement by a local choir, or one night on electric organ with a wind ensemble from upstate. I tried everything to get my music heard, sent tapes and scores around the country to publishers and performers, but usually received a form rejection, if anything. Every great composer serves an apprenticeship of sorts, even middle-school teachers, but in my heart, I knew the compositions had not yet fulfilled my intentions.
One phone call changed everything. I had just come in the door with Edward after picking him up from nursery school. The voice on the other end was from another world. An up-and-coming chamber quartet in California, who specialized in experimental sound, expressed interest in actually recording one of my compositions, an atonal mood piece I had written shortly after the break-in. George Knoll, my old friend from The Coverboys, had passed along my score. When I called him to say thanks, he invited us to visit and stay at his place so I could be on hand at the recording session. Tess, Edward, and I flew out to the Knolls in San Francisco that summer of '76 and had a great few days with George and his family. His modest cafe in North Beach was the only genuine Andalusian restaurant among a hive of Italian joints, and his stunning wife and head chef did not hurt business, either. It was great to see them, and the few days away from home eased my anxieties. Nothing weird prowling around California.
The pastor of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco allowed us an afternoon to record, and the pipe organ there rivaled in tone and balance the ancient instrument I had played in Cheb. The same feeling of homecoming entered me when I pressed the pedals, and from the beginning notes, I was already nostalgic for the keyboard. The quartet changed a few measures, bent a few notes, and after we played my fugue for organ and strings for the seventh time, everyone seemed satisfied with the sound. My brush with fame was over in ninety minutes. As we said our good-byes, everyone seemed sanguine about our limited prospects. Perhaps a mere thousand people might actually buy the record and hear my piece, but the thrill of finally making an album outweighed any projected anxiety about the size of its audience.
The cellist in the group told us not to miss Big Sur, so on our last day before flying home, we rented a car and drove south on the Pacific Coast Highway. For most of the morning, the sun came in and out between clouds, but the rocky seascape was spectacular. Tess had always wanted to see the ocean, so we decided to pull off and relax for a bit at a cove in the Ventana Wilderness. As we hiked to the sand, a light mist rolled in, obscuring the Pacific. Rather than turn back, we decided to picnic on a small crescent beach beside McWay Falls, an eighty-foot straight drop of water that plunges from the granite cliff to the sea. We saw no other cars on the way in and thought the place ours alone. After lunch, Tess and I stretched out on a blanket, and Eddie, all of five years old and full of energy, had the run of the sand. A few seagulls laughed at us from rocks, and in our seclusion, I felt at peace for the first time in ages.
Maybe the rhythm of the tides or the fresh sea air did us in after lunch. Tess and I dozed on the blanket. I had a strange dream, one that had not visited me in a long, long time. I was back among the hobgoblins as we stalked the boy like a pride of lions. I reached into a hollow tree and pulled at his leg until he squirmed out like a breached baby. Terror filled his eyes when he beheld his living reflection. The rest of our wild tribe stood around, watching, chanting an evil song. I was about to take his life and leave him with mine. The boy screamed.
Riding the thermals above us, a gliding gull cried, then flew out over the waves. Tess lay sleeping, gorgeous in repose beside me, and a thread of lust wormed through me. I buried my head at her nape and nuzzled her awake, and she threw her arms around my back almost to protect herself. Wrapping the blanket around us, I lay on top of her, removing her layers. We began laughing and rocking each other through our chuckles. She stopped suddenly and whispered to me, "Henry, do you know where you are?"
