A Spool of Blue Thread (12 page)

When she heard a car at the rear of the house, she thought it was Peg Brown delivering Denny from nursery school. By the time she got to the kitchen, though, Red was walking through the back door. “Oh!” she said. “What are
you
doing home?”

“Lonesome died,” Red said.

“What?”

“Lawrence. He died.”

“But I thought it was just his appendix!”

“I know,” he said. “I went to his room but he wasn’t there, and the guy in the next bed said he’d been moved to Intensive Care. So I went to Intensive Care but they wouldn’t let me see him, and I was thinking I’d just leave and come back later when all at once this doctor walked out and told me they had lost him. He said they’d worked all night and they’d done what they could but they lost him: peritonitis.”

Something made Abby turn her head, and she saw Douglas in the kitchen doorway. He was gazing up into Red’s face. Abby said, “Oh, sweetheart.” She and Red exchanged glances. How much had he understood? Probably nothing, if you judged by his hopeful expression.

Red said, “Son …”

“It won’t come through to him,” Abby said.

“But we can’t keep it a secret.”

“He’s too young,” Abby said, and then she asked Douglas, “How old are you, sweetheart?”

Neither of them really expected an answer, but after a pause, Douglas held up two fingers. “Two!” Abby cried. She turned back to Red. “I was thinking three,” she said, “but he’s two years old, Red.”

Red sank onto a kitchen chair. “Now what?” he asked her.

“I don’t know,” Abby said.

She sat down across from him. Douglas went on watching them.

“You still have the keys, right?” she asked Red. “You’ll have to go back to the apartment, look for papers. Find Lonesome’s next of kin.”

Red said okay and stood up again, like an obedient child.

Then Peg Brown honked out back, and Abby rose to let Denny in.

That evening when she was in Denny’s room, getting Douglas ready for bed, Denny asked her, “Mama?”

“What.”

“When is that little boy going home?”

“Very soon,” she told him. He was hanging around her in a too-close, insistent way, still fully dressed because it wasn’t quite his bedtime yet. “Go on downstairs,” she told him. “Find yourself something to do.”

“Tomorrow is he going?”

“Maybe.”

She waited till she heard his shoes clopping down the stairs, and then she turned back to Douglas. He was sitting on the edge of the bed in his pajamas, looking very neat and clean. That night he’d had a bath, although she had let him skip it the night before. She sat down on the bed beside him and said, “I know I told you that you’d get to see your daddy today. But I was wrong. He couldn’t come.”

Douglas’s gaze was fixed on some middle distance. He appeared to be holding his breath.

“He wanted to, very much. He wanted to see you, but he couldn’t. He can’t.”

That was it, really—the most a two-year-old would be able to comprehend. She stopped speaking. She placed an arm around him, tentatively, but he didn’t relax against her. He sat separate and erect, with perfect posture. After a while she took her arm away, but she went on looking at him.

He lay down, finally, and she covered him up and placed a kiss on his forehead and turned out the light.

In the kitchen, Denny and Jeannie were bickering over a yo-yo, but Mandy looked up from her homework as soon as Abby walked in. “Did you tell him?” she asked. (She was thirteen, and more in touch with what was going on.)

“Well, as much as I could,” Abby said.

“Did he say anything?”

“Nothing.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know how to talk.”

“Oh, he has to know how,” Abby said. “It’s just that he’s upset right now.”

“Maybe he’s retarded.”

“But I know he understands me.”

“Mom!” Jeannie broke in. “Denny says this is his yo-yo, when it’s not. He broke his. Tell him, Mom! It’s mine.”

“Stop it, both of you.”

The back door opened and Red stepped in, carrying another grocery bag. All he had said on the phone was to go ahead and eat without him, so Abby’s first question was “What’d you find?”

He set the bag on the table. “The sitter’s this ancient old lady,” he told her. “Her number was Scotch-taped above the phone. By the sound of her, she was
way
too old to be in charge of a kid. She doesn’t know if he has any relatives, and she doesn’t know where his mother is and says she doesn’t want to know. He’s better off without her, she says.”

“Weren’t there any other numbers?”

“Doctor, dentist, Whitshank Construction.”

“Not the mother? You’d think at least Lonesome would know how to reach her in case of emergency.”

“Well, if she’s traveling, Ab …”

“Ha,” Abby said. “Traveling.”

Red inverted the grocery bag over the table. More clothes fell out, and two plastic trucks, and a thin sheaf of papers. “Automobile title,” he said, picking up one of the papers. “Bank statement,” picking up another. “Douglas’s birth certificate.”

Abby held out her hand and he gave her the birth certificate. “Douglas Alan O’Brian,” she read aloud. “Father: Lawrence Donald O’Brian. Mother: Barbara Jane Eames.”

She looked up at Red. “Were they not married?”

“Maybe she just didn’t change her name.”

“January eighth, nineteen seventy-seven. So Douglas had it right; he’s two. I don’t know why I thought he was older. I guess it was because he … keeps so much to himself, you know?”

“So what do we do next?” Red asked.

“I have no idea what we do.”

“Call Social Services?”

“Oh, God forbid!”

Red blinked. (Abby used to work for Social Services.)

“Let me warm up your supper,” Abby told him. And from the way she rose, all businesslike, it was clear that she was done talking for now.

The children went to bed one by one, youngest to oldest. Jeannie, as she was saying good night, asked, “Can we keep him?” But she seemed to realize she couldn’t expect an answer. The other two didn’t refer to him. And Red and Abby didn’t, either, once they were alone, although Red did make an attempt, at one point. “You just know Lonesome had to have
some
kin out there,” he said.

But Abby said, “I am so, so sleepy all of a sudden.”

He didn’t try again.

The next day was a Saturday. Douglas slept later than any of them,
later than even Amanda who had reached that adolescent slugabed age, and Abby said, “Let him rest, poor thing.” She fed the others breakfast, not sitting down herself but bustling between stove and table, and as soon as they’d finished eating she said, “Why don’t you kids get dressed and then take Clarence on a walk.”

“Let Jeannie and Denny do it,” Amanda said. “I told Patricia she could come over.”

“No, you go too,” Abby said. “Patricia can come later.”

Amanda started to speak but changed her mind, and she followed the others out of the room.

That left Red, who was reading the sports section over his second cup of coffee. When Abby sat down across from him, he glanced at her uneasily and then ducked behind his paper again.

“I think we should keep him,” Abby said.

He slapped the paper down on the table and said, “Oh,
Abby
.”

“We’re the only people he’s got, Red. Clearly. That mother: even if we managed to track her down, what are the odds she’d want him? Or take proper care of him if she did want him, or stick by him through thick and thin?”

“We can’t go around adopting every child we run into, Ab. We’ve got three of our own. Three is all we can afford!
More
than we can afford. And you were going back to work once Denny starts first grade.”

“That’s okay; I’ll go back when Douglas starts.”

“Plus, we have no rights to him. Not a court in this land would let us keep that kid; he’s got a mother somewhere.”

“We just won’t tell the courts,” Abby said.

“Have you lost your mind?”

“We’ll say we’re just looking after him till his mother can come and get him. In fact, that really
is
what we’ll be doing.”

“And besides,” Red said. “How do we know for sure he’s even normal?”

“Of course he’s normal!”

“Does he talk?”

“He’s shy! He’s feeling anxious! He doesn’t know us!”

“Does he react?”

“
Yes
, he reacts. He’s reacting just the way any child would who’s had his world turned upside down with no warning.”

“But it could be that something’s wrong with him,” Red said.

“Well, and what if it were? You’d just throw a child to the wolves if he’s not Einstein?”

“And would he fit in with our family? Would he get along with our kids? Is he our kind of personality? We don’t know the first damn thing about him! We don’t know him! We don’t
love
him!”

“Red,” Abby said.

She rose to her feet. She was fully, crisply dressed, at nine thirty on a Saturday morning. Which was, come to think of it, not her usual weekend custom. Her hair was already pinned up in its topknot. She looked uncharacteristically imposing.

“He was sitting on the edge of the bed last night in his pajamas,” she said, “and I saw the back of his neck, this fragile, slender
stem
of a neck, and it struck me all at once that there was nobody anywhere, any place on this planet, who would look at that little neck and just have to reach out and cup a hand behind it. You know how you just have to touch your child, sometimes? How you drink him in with your eyes and you could stare at him for hours and you marvel at how dear and impossibly perfect he is? And that will never again happen to Douglas. He has nobody left on earth who thinks he’s special.”

“Dammit, Abby—”

“Don’t you curse at
me
, Red Whitshank! I need this! I have to do this! I cannot see that little stem of a neck and let him go on alone in this world. I can’t! I’d rather die!”

Mandy and Jeannie and Denny were standing in the kitchen doorway. At the same moment, both Red and Abby became aware of that.
None of the three had dressed yet, and all of them wore the same wide-eyed look of alarm.

Then a soft, padding sound came from behind them, and when the children turned, Douglas walked up to stand at their center.

“I wet the bed,” he told Abby.

They didn’t adopt him. They didn’t notify Social Services. They didn’t even make an announcement to their friends. Everything went on as before, and Douglas went on being Douglas O’Brian—although, since Abby developed a habit of calling him “my little stem,” he did acquire a nickname. And sometimes the neighbors referred to him as Stem Whitshank, but that was just absentmindedness.

Outsiders had the impression that he was only staying till his mother got her affairs sorted out. (Or was it some other relative? Stories differed.) But most people, after a while, just assumed he was one of the family.

In a matter of weeks he took to calling Red and Abby “Dad” and “Mom,” but not because they told him to. He was merely echoing the other children, in the same way that he echoed Abby and addressed even grown-ups as “sweetheart,” till he got old enough to know better.

He grew more talkative, though so gradually that nobody could recall what specific day he became a normal, chattery youngster. He wore clothes that fit him, and he slept in a room of his own. It had once been Jeannie’s room, but they moved Jeannie in with Mandy because Stem certainly couldn’t continue sharing with Denny. Denny was sort of prickly about Stem. It all worked out, though. Mandy more or less put up with Jeannie’s presence, and Jeannie was thrilled to be living in a teenager’s room with cosmetics crowding the bureau top.

Above Stem’s bed hung a framed black-and-white photo of
Lonesome holding a Budweiser, snapped by one of Red’s workmen the day they finished a building project. Abby believed very strongly that Stem should be encouraged to cherish his memories of his father. Of his mother too, if he’d
had
any memories, but he didn’t seem to. The reason his mother had gone away was, she was unhappy, Abby always told him. It wasn’t that she hadn’t loved him. She loved him very much, as he would see if she ever came back. And Abby showed him the page in the phone book where his own name was listed year after year, “O’Brian Douglas A,” along with the Whitshanks’ number so his mother could easily find him. Stem listened to all this closely, but he said nothing. And in time it seemed he lost his memories of even his father, because when Abby asked Stem on his tenth birthday whether he ever thought about him, he said, “I maybe remember his voice.”

“His voice!” Abby said. “Saying what?”

“I think he used to sing me a song when I was going to sleep. Or
some
guy did.”

“Oh, Stem, how nice. A lullaby?”

“No, it was about a goat.”

“Oh. And nothing else? No recollection of his face? Or something you two did together?”

“I guess not,” Stem said, without sounding too concerned about it.

He was an old soul, Abby told people. He was the kind of person who adapted and moved on, evidently.

He went through school without a fuss, earning only average grades but fulfilling all his assignments. You could imagine him as the butt of school bullies, since he was small for his age in the early years, but actually he did fine. It may have been his friendly expression, or his general unflappability, or his tendency to assume the best in people. At any rate, he got along. He graduated from high school and went straight into Whitshank Construction, where he’d been working part-time ever since he was old enough; he said he didn’t see the need for college. He married the only girl he had ever shown
any real interest in, had his children one-two-three, seemed never to look around and wonder if he might be better off someplace else. In this last respect, he was the one most like Red. Even his walk was Red’s—loping, leading with his forehead—and his lanky frame, though not his coloring. You could say that he looked like a Whitshank who’d been left out to bleach in the open too long: hair not black but light brown, eyes not sapphire but light blue. Faded, but still a Whitshank.

More of a Whitshank than Denny was, Denny had remarked when he heard that Stem had joined the firm.