The Song Reader (28 page)

The lady who appeared that day was like the cloud, though she wasn’t fat and she wasn’t at all soft. Her arms were so skinny that when she bent her elbows, Michael thought of the paper clips he liked to twist apart when he was supposed to be learning geography. He didn’t really like geography, though he loved the maps hung up in the room where he studied—the
schoolroom
, his parents called it, though it was nothing like school, because there was only one desk. The map of the city was right in front of him, and he’d stared at it so many times that he knew the lady wasn’t lying when she said she was taking him to the ocean. He’d always wanted to go there, but his father said a jellyfish might bite him, or he might swallow a mouthful of dirty, germy sand, or, worst of all, a tide current might pull him out to the sea and he would never, ever come back.

The lady had asked him where he wanted to go more than anywhere in the world. She was so nice to him that he felt like it might be true when she said she loved him, even though he’d never seen her in his life until that morning. He was outside the house, in the backyard. It was the second day of the
outside alone half hour
, which his mother had decided he needed after she read a book about letting kids be
free range
, like the good-for-you kind of chicken. Michael didn’t know what to do outside—his mother had told him to go ahead and do whatever he wanted, but he was afraid to touch anything, because dirt on your hands could make worms grow in your stomach, and he knew he should never climb a tree, he could fall and break his neck—so he walked around in circles and waved back each time his mother waved at him. She could see him perfectly while she did the dishes. So she must have seen the lady, and it must have been okay for him to go with her, like the lady said.
It’s a surprise! Like on your birthday, except better!

He knew he wasn’t supposed to even talk to strangers, but the lady said she wasn’t a stranger.
You’re my little buddy
, the lady said, and she was crying, which made Michael feel bad for her. She was so skinny and sad, but in her car, she had lots of toys, just like she promised. She had toys he’d always wanted to play with, like robots with little parts that could break off and choke him, and bright red and blue and yellow cars that were probably made with lead paint. He was afraid to touch the toys at first, but then he decided that he wouldn’t choke or swallow lead paint unless the toy went in his mouth. And why would the toy go in his mouth, when it was so much more fun to move the robot arms and pretend the cars were zooming up and down his legs, like the lady’s car was zooming up the highway?

He might have had trouble believing that his parents had agreed to let the lady take him somewhere if he hadn’t overheard them just last night, talking about how they had to change.
It can’t be good for him to be trapped in the house all summer. Other children are out of school, going to camp, playing with their friends. The two of us are doing our best, but it’s not enough. He needs more people in his life.

His mother was the one who’d talked the most, but his father had made noises that sounded like agreement. So this trip with the lady that his parents had planned must be like the time they replaced the entire heating system in the house, rather than trying to get the old one fixed.
Sometimes you have to take extreme measures
, his father had said, and then he’d explained that an
extreme measure
was necessary when the problem was so big, the only way to deal with it was to give up on what you’d done before and start over from square one.

Being with this lady, sitting in a regular seat in the back of her car belted in with a regular seat belt, next to another seat covered with dangerous toys he’d taken out of a dangerous plastic bag, on the way to the ocean, was definitely an extreme measure. On some level Michael felt this, but most of him was just excited. The lady was happy now, too; her laughs sounded like Christmas bells. She had a really friendly smile and nice straight teeth, but when she pushed her hair back, he noticed a big scar on her wrist, and he wondered if it hurt sometimes, the way Mommy’s scar on her knee did whenever it rained.

If they talked about anything important on the way to the Jersey Shore, Michael didn’t remember it. What he remembered—and would for the rest of his life—was that afternoon on the boat. It wasn’t a rowboat like in his dream; it was a big fishing boat with an upper deck and a lower deck and lots and lots of people. Michael was on the upper deck looking out at the wavy sea when a giant fish jumped straight out of the ocean and landed with a huge splash. It was a humpback whale, the fisherman announced, and everybody on the boat was pointing and talking when the whale jumped up again! It did it seven times, which Michael heard people say was amazing, because a lot of times these whale-watching boats went out for hours and didn’t see anything.

It’s because we’re lucky
, the lady said. She pointed at the whale’s tail, which seemed to be waving before it disappeared back into the water.
It likes you.

Michael closed his eyes tight, but when he opened them it was all still there: the bright blue sky and the soft pillow clouds and the endless ocean lapping at the sides of the boat. His hand was still tucked in the lady’s bony hand, and the boat hadn’t tipped over and the seagulls hadn’t pecked his eyes out and the big scary fish wasn’t really scary at all.

“It likes me,” Michael whispered; then he grinned as big as he could, in case the whale was looking up at him through the water. In case the whale was like the lady, who’d promised when she appeared in his backyard that all she wanted was to be Michael’s friend, more than anything in the world.

A
t some point that afternoon, it did occur to Michael that his parents had to be very worried, without even a phone call to tell them that he was okay. Of course he was right, though his assumption that his parents knew this lady would also turn out to be true. (Actually, only one of his parents knew her, and
knew
was hardly a strong enough word for the relationship they’d had, but as this was a long time ago, it was all the same to Michael who, like most five-year-olds, thought of his mommy and daddy as fixed in time, with barely any life before he was born, much less complicated lives before they got married.) Even his feeling that the lady loved him was true, though her love was a desperate, entirely unexpected response that he couldn’t possibly have made sense of. But that his parents must be worried about him, that he understood all too well, even if he didn’t understand why. It had never occurred to Michael to wonder if something had happened to his parents to make them so chronically afraid. Until that afternoon on the boat, he had no basis of comparison other than the parents of his classmates at school, during the short periods he went to school, but since those parents weren’t in the classroom nearly every day, sitting in a corner, watching, as his mother or sometimes his father was, there was no way to tell what they were like.

Naturally, Michael had no idea that those other parents were often whispering about his mother and father, calling the Winters “ridiculously overprotective” and even “insane.” It made the other fathers and mothers feel better about themselves; for if they were a bit overprotective at times—or more truthfully,
when
they were overprotective—at least they were nowhere near as bad as David and Kyra Winter.

The other parents never wondered why Michael’s parents were this way, and no one else did, either: not the teachers at the four schools Michael briefly attended, not even the woman who’d been cleaning the Winters’ house since Michael was three and a half. The teachers did try to reassure Kyra and David: they insisted the bigger boys weren’t bullies, just high-spirited; that it was normal to catch colds the first few weeks of the school year; that Michael would have friends, if only they’d give it time—however, the teachers saw no mystery in the Winters’ behavior. To be fair, they hardly had a chance to think about it, and not because they were busy with their students, but because they had so many worried parents who required constant reassurance. Yes, the Winters were more extreme, but they still seemed like a type the teachers knew all too well: helicopter parents.

The cleaning woman who came every Friday thought the Winters were nice enough. They gave good tips; they kept the place tidy; they didn’t have any of the disgusting habits some of her other employers did.
Hey, they’re a hell of a lot better than the guy who trims his beard in the kitchen sink.
She did notice that the little boy was always there, that he seemed pale and lonely and kind of weird. Once she tried to give him a toy that her own kids had outgrown. It was a stuffed bear, “to sleep with,” she told him, because she thought it was sad that his little bed was as empty as a monk’s. He thanked her three times—always polite, that little boy, unlike her own kids—but he explained that he had allergies and so he couldn’t sleep with anything that might “harbor mold.” She might have known this if she’d washed Michael’s organic sheets the way she washed his parents’, but his mother always insisted on doing them herself. Must be because of the kid’s allergies, the woman thought, though she’d never seen the little boy sneeze or cough and part of her suspected these allergies were just something for the Winters to worry about. The cleaning woman had a theory that everybody needs worries. If rich people don’t have any, she figured, they have to make some up.

Michael’s parents weren’t rich, but they were rich enough to have their house cleaned once a week. They were rich enough to allow Kyra to work at home. Indeed, both of them were home when Michael disappeared, as they told the police during their frantic call to report that he was gone. They’d called the police immediately, even though each of them felt sure they knew who’d taken him. Even though on some level, they’d always expected this.

Of course their child had been taken away from them; how could it be any other way? He was the best thing in their lives. He was a miracle not only because he was smart and beautiful and a thousand other absolutely perfect things but also because his very existence meant that his parents had let themselves forget about the fear. He was born because, incredibly, after so many years of unrelenting doubt, David and Kyra had allowed themselves a brief period of hope.

And now he was gone, and somewhere deep inside, they weren’t even surprised. Because no matter how many locks they’d installed, the idea that they would lose what they loved best was always lurking around the corner, threatening in whispered memories, as close as the next breath.

If every marriage has three stories: the wife’s, the husband’s, and the story that is created when these two stories try to live side by side, in Michael’s parents’ case, their individual stories, as different as they were, had one common, overarching, tragic theme. They each came into the marriage with so many cracks inside themselves that it would have been nothing short of astonishing if having a child together had somehow sealed these cracks forever. Instead, sadly, all too predictably, their life together was shaped by their perpetual fear that
something
would happen; it had to, because they didn’t deserve this perfect child. They didn’t even deserve to be part of a family, because of what they’d done in the past. They never talked about this with anyone, not even with each other, but they thought about what they’d done in a startlingly similar way. Neither of them ever allowed themselves to use the beautiful word
mistake
.

A
my and Kyra Callahan grew up in a town so small it didn’t even have a fast-food restaurant; still, the townspeople often forgot Kyra’s name. They’d call her Mira or Lila or Kim or even Lima (as if she were a bean!), while Amy was always just Amy. Adorable Amy, with the easy-to-remember name, was the pretty sister
and
the smart sister, while Kyra was striking only for her ordinariness. She had an unusual sense of humor, true, but few people came close enough to hear the under-her-breath jokes that Amy swore would make Kyra immensely popular one day. Amy tried to help, for she was also the nice sister, always thinking of others, always trying to include Kyra when she went anywhere with her ever-expanding circle of friends.

In eighth grade, the effect of all this on Kyra was just what you would imagine. In fact, her resentment of Amy was the major theme whenever she went to confession. Bless me, father, for I have sinned. I wished my sister wouldn’t make the cheer leading squad. I wished my sister would get an F—or even a B—in Algebra. I wished my sister would have acne, and I wiped my face on her towel once or twice, trying to make her catch it from me.

None of Kyra’s wishes came true, which most of her was glad about, because she did care about Amy. Their mother was gone; their stepmother disliked teenagers in general and Amy and Kyra in particular; and their father was a computer programmer with no real interest in raising children because he considered them mystifyingly irrational. Kyra and Amy had each other, period. If their relationship wasn’t perfect, or even close to perfect, it was all they had. Sometimes after their stepmother had gotten mad at them for one thing or other, Amy and Kyra would retreat to their room and turn up the one song they knew their stepmother hated: “We are family. I got all my sisters with me.”

The grown-up Kyra sometimes wondered if she and Amy had really given their stepmother a chance. Yes, the woman seemed selfish and irritable and really, really uncool—her most damning flaw, from the teenage point of view—but she’d been placed in a very difficult position. She was a thirty-seven-year-old, shy, never-married billing clerk when she met their father and found herself taking care of two girls who’d been without a mother so long they saw no use for her. Indeed, by the time they were fourteen and thirteen, respectively, Amy and Kyra thought they were far more skilled at child care than their stepmother ever could be.

They knew to use baking soda to get baby spit-up stains out of their clothes. They’d taught themselves how to diaper infant boys without getting peed on by using the old diaper as a shield. They could do a good job distracting screaming toddlers, winning the trust of suspicious seven-year-olds, and entertaining any child from babies to preteens little younger than themselves. They were the only two members of the Callahan Child Care Company. Amy had insisted on the name; she thought it would make their babysitting business sound professional. They even advertised on handwritten flyers stuffed in mailboxes. If people smiled at the girls’ pretensions, they still used their services because everybody knew that those Callahan girls (Amy and what’s-her-name) were good with kids.