The boy glanced toward the street, and the calm in his face slipped. "She's sick. She's at St. Catherine's Hospital. She promised she would come back, but she didn't come back yesterday, and the nurse said to wait in the waiting room, but I got scared."
"St. Catherine's is four blocks that way," Lily said, pointing. "We could walk there right now."
Michael felt the word Dad land twice, once from Lily and once, unspoken, from the boy who had not said it.
"Slow down," Michael said. It came out sharper than he meant. Ethan flinched, and Michael hated himself for it. "Sorry. Let's slow down. When did your mother go to the hospital?"
"Monday," Ethan said. "She told me to bring the bag and the photo. She said, if anything happens, find Michael Rourke."
"She said that?" Michael said.
Ethan nodded. "She says your name sometimes, when she thinks I'm asleep. And today, Lily said I look like her, and you..." He glanced at Michael's face. "You look like me. So I asked."
Lily swung their joined hands. "She remembered us and we never met her." She turned to Ethan. "Do you go to school? Do you like the fountain? Are you hungry? You look hungry."
"Lily," Michael said.
"What? He has a paper bag and a thin jacket. Those are facts."
Ethan's mouth twitched, almost a smile. "Thank you," he said. "I'm okay."
"You say thank you a lot," Lily observed.
"Mom says it matters," Ethan said.
Michael looked at the photograph again, and nine years collapsed into a hot point behind his ribs. She had left for Ohio when her mother Ruth had a stroke. He had called for two weeks. No answer. He had told himself she was overwhelmed, grieving. He had never done the math, because there had been no reason to do it. Now the math stood in front of him in a thin jacket.
"Ethan," he said carefully, "did your mother tell you anything else? About me? About that summer?"
"She said you took the picture," Ethan said. "She said it was the best day. She said you were kind, and that kind was the most important thing." He hesitated. "She said she was sorry she didn't tell you sooner."
Sorry. Nine years, an eight-year-old boy, a hospital four blocks away, and sorry.
Lily tugged his sleeve. "Dad, are you going to answer his question? That's the whole point of the photo."
Michael opened his mouth. Closed it. The organized part of his brain, the part that ran depositions and color-coded calendars, screamed for documents, for a test, for time. The rest of him looked at a boy with his own jawline at eight years old, who said thank you too often, who had walked to a park on a Wednesday because his mother had remembered.
"I need to think," Michael said finally.
"That's okay," Ethan said quickly. "Mom said you might need to think. She said thinking is what you're good at."
Despite everything, Michael almost laughed. It came out as a breath. "She did, huh?"
"She said a lot of things," Ethan said. "Mostly at night. When she couldn't sleep."
Lily leaned closer to the photo. "She's pretty. She looks like she's about to tell a joke." She looked up. "Do you remember taking it?"
Michael nodded, because his throat had stopped working properly. He remembered the wind. He remembered her hat. He remembered saying hold still, and her laughing harder, deliberately not holding still.
"Ethan," he said, "we're going to figure this out. All right? Nobody's going anywhere."
It was a promise he had no right to make yet, and he made it anyway, because the boy's shoulders dropped half an inch, and Lily squeezed his hand, and the photograph was warm from his own palm.
Chapter 3: Four Blocks
The walk to St. Catherine's took them past the edge of the park and down Mercer Street, four blocks, Ethan had said, with the certainty of a child who had walked it alone more times than any adult would like to count.
"This way," Ethan said, tugging the strap of his paper bag tighter against the wind. "You go past the laundromat, then the corner store."
Lily skipped to keep up with his pace. "Do you always walk by yourself?"
"Mostly." Ethan nodded. "Mrs. Gloria Figueroa watches me after school. She's seventy-something. She makes soup and she makes me do my homework at her kitchen table."
"What's her soup like?" Lily asked.
"Chicken. She puts extra carrots because she says I need them." Ethan glanced sideways at her, then added, "She counts her plants, too. Twelve."
Michael walked half a step behind them, the creased photograph burning a hole in his coat pocket. He had taken that picture. He remembered the weight of the camera in his hands, the lake water catching the late light, Claire throwing her head back and laughing at something he had said. Nine years. The math kept assembling itself in his head: nine years, and Ethan was eight.
"Dad," Lily said, "Ethan says Mrs. Figueroa lets him water her plants. She's got, like, a million."
"Twelve," Ethan corrected. "She lets me pick the tomatoes, but only the red ones. The green ones aren't ready."
Lily laughed. "That's a funny thing to say."
Michael tried to smile. His organized world had tilted sometime between the fountain and the laundromat, and he could not quite locate the moment it had happened. He kept returning to the photograph, to Claire's laughing face, to the sentence Ethan had spoken so plainly it had rearranged the air: She said ask if he's my dad. Claire Rourke. She kept your name.
"Dad, you're being quiet," Lily said. "You're doing the quiet thing."
"I'm listening," Michael said. "You two are doing most of the talking."
"Because we're interesting," Lily said, and Ethan smiled, a quick shy thing, and Michael felt something in his chest contract.
They crossed Alder Street. Ethan pointed out the bus stop like a tour guide.
"That's where I catch the 14," he said. "Mrs. Gloria Figueroa walks me in the mornings but in the afternoons I take the bus. Mom showed me where to sit. Near the driver, where he can see me."
"You ride the bus by yourself?" Lily's voice carried exactly the awe an adult would have tried to hide.
"I'm eight," Ethan said.
Michael's throat tightened. He did the subtraction without meaning to and immediately regretted it. May, eight years ago. August, nine years ago. The lake. Her laugh. He did not want to do arithmetic on a sidewalk with his daughter skipping beside him. He was a man who scheduled his weeks in fifteen-minute increments, who won arguments by staying calmer than the other side. He could be calm for four blocks.
"Why were you at the fountain?" Lily asked. "Were you waiting for somebody?"
Ethan's steps slowed. "Mom's at the hospital. I was supposed to go home with Mrs. Gloria Figueroa but I wanted to see Mom. Visiting hours end at six." He looked up at Michael. "I thought maybe I could find somebody who knew her. And then you were there, and Lily said we look alike, and I just asked."
The honesty of it knocked the breath out of Michael. Brave, the kid was, asking a stranger at a fountain the one question that mattered.
"You look exactly alike," Lily announced. "Same nose. Same eyebrows. It's kind of wild."
Ethan seemed to grow an inch under the observation. "Mom says I got my dad's eyebrows."