Chapter 20: Home
One year later. A Wednesday in October.
Michael's mornings still started the same way, coffee first, the apartment quiet before the noise, except now the quiet had an audience. On the shelf above the kitchen counter stood two framed photographs, side by side, and every morning he looked at them while the coffee brewed, the way other men read the news.
He made two lunchboxes now, every morning, his old precision applied to crustless triangles and apple slices cut the way Lily liked them, thin enough to see through. His drawer dividers had not survived Ethan. Nothing had survived Ethan, and Michael had never been happier about a demolition.
The old one: sepia at the edges, the crease visible under the glass, a laughing dark-haired woman at a waterfront in Newport, his own young arm around her shoulders. Nine years, a folded paper bag, a boy at a fountain, and here it was, kept.
The new one: August, the Esplanade, taken by a jogger Claire had flagged down. Claire laughing mid-sentence. Ethan grinning with a missing tooth. Lily's rabbit ears behind Michael's head. The river bright behind them all.
"You stare at those every morning," Lily said. She was eight now, third grade, pouring cereal with the concentration of a chemist.
"I'm memorizing you," Michael said. "Before you change your mind about me."
"Too late," Lily said. "I already have opinions."
"Noted for the record," Michael said.
"Put it in the agreement," Lily said. "The official official one."
Ethan, nine, fourth grade, shouldered his backpack and checked that his homework was in it twice, a habit he had picked up from Michael and would deny to his grave. The paper bag lived in his room now, on the closet shelf, holding ticket stubs and a new drawing: the house, five stick figures this time, the fifth one wearing what was either a firefighter's helmet or a very red bowl.
"Mom says hi," Lily announced. "She says don't let Ethan wear his good shoes to the fountain."
"Tell your mother my shoes are fine," Ethan said.
"Your shoes are not fine," Lily said. "I can see your sock."
"It's a good sock," Ethan said, with dignity.
"It's a sock with a hole," Lily said. "There's a difference and you know it."
It was his Wednesday. It had been a year to the day, and it was his Wednesday, and Ethan had asked, the night before, very casually, while brushing his teeth, whether they could walk to the fountain after school. Michael had said yes before the question was finished.
* * *
They walked through the Common in the low October light, leaves turning at the edges of the paths. Ethan waved at St. Catherine's as they passed, four blocks from the fountain, the way you wave at a place you are fond of and never want to visit again.
The Common was at its October best, the maples going red along the paths, the air smelling like leaves and hot dogs from a cart by the Park Street gate. Ethan kicked a chestnut ahead of him the whole way, and Lily narrated their expedition like a nature documentary. "Here we see the wild fourth grader in his natural habitat," she whispered. "He is migrating toward pizza."
Claire met them at the fountain, off work at three, her bag over her shoulder, not winded on the steps anymore. She had gone back to the hotel in the spring, front desk now, and she still touched the center of her chest sometimes without noticing, the way you check a pocket for your keys. She had cut her hair short in the summer, and Michael kept forgetting and then remembering, the way you keep noticing a room after it has been painted.
For a while nobody said much. The water fell the way it had always fallen. Ethan crouched at the edge and trailed his fingers in it, and Lily tossed a penny in and announced, "I wish for the same pizza as last Friday."
"You can't wish for pizza," Ethan said.
"Watch me."
The penny sank, and Lily watched it go with total confidence. "It's already working," she said. "I can feel it."
"Take one of us here too," Ethan said suddenly, holding out Michael's phone to a passing college student. "For the shelf."
They crowded together at the water's edge, Claire's hand on Lily's shoulder, Ethan leaning into Michael's side, the fountain going white behind them.
Michael thought about the year behind them, the agreement signed at his kitchen table, the Sunday calls to Worcester that had stretched from six minutes to twenty, the soup Vanessa had sent over in March when Claire had the flu, with a note that said only Feel better. He thought about a valve ticking in the quiet of a new apartment, and a boy asleep against a car window, and a word yelled across a baseball field that had known the way into the house before any of them did.
Michael stood between his children and looked at the water, and thought about a Wednesday a year ago, a boy in a thin jacket with a paper bag, a creased photograph, a question asked of a stranger. He thought about everything the year had asked of all of them, the hospital and the courtroom and the long drive to Worcester, and everything it had given back, which was this: an ordinary October afternoon, nobody waiting to be found.
"Dad," Ethan said, "the water's cold."
"I know," Michael said. "Don't fall in."
"I won't."
At the water's edge, with the fountain falling white behind them, Ethan slipped his hand into Michael's without looking, the way a child does when he is certain the hand will be there.