“I love you, too.”
I start to say something else, to reveal all that I have learned about my life in the last few moments, when I see a shadow across the street, small and insignificant, huddled at the dark post of a streetlight. Before I know why, I am moving, then running.
The light flickers in the rain, and I see him.
It is our Bradley, standing all alone, shivering with cold, clutching the slick canvas of his backpack. His rosy cheeks are streaked with dirt and dried tears.
I scoop him into my arms, holding him tightly, crying into the damp tangle of his little-boy hair. Ryan wraps his arms around both of us. The rain begins anew.
Brad hooks his legs around my waist and leans back in my arms, looking worriedly at us. “I missed the bus.”
I set him down on the ground and kneel in front of him. Sniffing hard, I swipe at my tears with my sleeve and draw a deep breath, trying to look grown-up. But the terror has left its mark deep, deep inside. I can’t seem to stop shaking. “I went to the school. I found—” It wells up again in my throat. All I can see is that lunch box, abandoned in the grass. I know it will be with me always, that horrible memory. With a supreme effort, I force myself to finish. “I found your lunchbox.”
“I musta dwopped it. I was following a cwow. He was eatin’ my lunch. When I looked up, the buses were gone. I knew I was in big twouble.”
Ryan is staring at him, unsmiling. “You should have gone into the office and told Mrs. Freemont.”
Brad’s eyes fill slowly, heartbreakingly, with tears. “I know.”
“How did you get home?” I ask quietly.
“I don’t wanna tell you.”
Ryan touches Brad’s shoulder. “Come on, son.” It is his best dad’s voice, infused with gentle steel.
Tears streak down my son’s apple cheeks, and each one seems to scald me. “Billy and Bonnie walk home from school every day.”
He walked home alone, my baby who has never been allowed out of the yard by himself. I squeeze my eyes shut, but this darkness is worse. All I can think is, What if?
Beside me, Ryan kneels. His knees pop at the movement, then thump onto the sidewalk. “All this time, while your mom and I have been…” His voice breaks, and for a second he is only mine, not a grown-up father talking to his son about something important, but my husband, my lover, who has just tasted his first helping of fear. Like me, he will never be the same again. Then he recovers. “You made it home all by yourself?”
I think: Bless him. Bless this man who has exchanged his boyhood dreams for a Wal-Mart register and full medical benefits. Bless him for finding his voice when mine is tangled somewhere so deep inside of me that I can’t even find the horse, ragged start of it.
It takes me a second to realize that Bradley hasn’t answered. I glance at Ryan and know instantly that he has noticed the silence.
“Bradley?” Ryan says. “You have to tell us what happened.”
Brad flinches, blinks back another bulbous tear. “Mommy—” He reaches for me.
I draw back from his tiny hands. As much as I want to hold and comfort him, this is a time for answers. “Bradley, how did you get home?”
His voice is tiny, a reversion to the baby talk he abandoned years ago. “She said she knew you.”
A stranger. He is talking about a stranger.
“Who said that?” It is Ryan’s voice, not mine. Mine is lost again.
“Alice,” Bradley says.
“Alice?”
“Like Alice in Wonderland. She found me. I walked for a long time… then I got scared. It started to rain, and it got dark out. I din’t know where I was. I sat down on the curb all by myself, and then she was there, sittin’ beside me.”
“What did Alice do?” Ryan asks in a thin voice.
“She said, ‘I been waitin’ a long time to meet you, Bradley.’ I told her I wasn’t allowed to talk to strangers, but she laughed and said she most certainly wasn’t a stranger. She said she knew my mommy and daddy.”
“Then what?”
Bradley sniffles and blinks away his tears. “She brung me home. I tried to get her to come into the house, but she said she couldn’t go no further. I told her my mommy would want to talk to her.”
“What did she say to that?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I think it made her sad, ’cause she started to cry. Then she said to give this to Mom.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls something out.
I stare down at the object in my son’s hand and feel suddenly as if I am falling. Behind me, I hear cars rolling down the street, the tires squealing on the slick pavement. But it seems light-years away as I stare at the tiny misshapen pottery heart in my son’s tiny palm. I can see the thumbprint, still as clear as day, made so many years ago in art class.
Remember? A voice whispers inside me. Remember how little your thumb was? And suddenly I can smell it, a whiff of Pert shampoo and Estée Lauder perfume. In the leaves overhead I hear a rustle of sound, and it sounds achingly like my mother’s laugh.