"Yes, you. That's why I was so worried when we couldn't find you that day." She gave my arm a sudden, almost violent little squeeze; even after all these years, I heard the strain in her voice. "I was panicking, you know. Everyone was saying, 'Sure, they've only run away from home, children do that, we'll have them found in no time…' But I said, 'No. Not Adam.' You were a sweet boy; kind. I knew you wouldn't do that to us."
Hearing the name cast in her voice sent something through me, something fast and primeval and dangerous. "I don't remember myself as a particularly angelic child," I said.
My mother smiled, out the kitchen window; the abstracted look on her face, remembering things I didn't, made me edgy. "Ah, not angelic. But thoughtful. You were growing up fast, that year. You made Peter and Jamie stop tormenting that poor wee boy, what was his name? The one with the glasses and the awful mammy who did the flowers for the church?"
"Willy Little?" I said. "That wasn't me, that was Peter. I would have been perfectly happy to go on tormenting him till the cows came home."
"No, that was you," my mother said firmly. "The three of you did something or other that made him cry, and it upset you so badly, you decided you'd have to leave the poor boy alone. You were worried that Peter and Jamie wouldn't understand. Do you not remember?"
"Not really," I said. Actually, this bothered me more than anything in this whole uncomfortable conversation. You'd think I'd have preferred her version of the story to my own, but I didn't. It was entirely possible, of course, that she had unconsciously recast me as the hero, or that I had done it myself, lied to her at the time; but over the past few weeks I had come to think of my memories as solid, shining little things, to be hunted out and treasured, and it was deeply unsettling to think that they might be fool's gold, tricky and fog-shaped and not at all what they seemed. "If there aren't any more dishes, I should probably go in and talk to Dad for a while."
"He'll like that. Off you go-I can finish up here. Bring a couple of cans of Guinness with you; they're in the fridge."
"Thanks for the dinner," I said. "It was delicious."
"Adam," my mother said suddenly, as I turned to leave; and that swift treacherous thing hit me under the breastbone again, and oh, God how I wanted to be that sweet child for one more moment, how I wanted to spin around and bury my face in her warm toast-smelling shoulder and tell her through great tearing sobs what these last weeks had been. I thought of what her face would look like if I actually did it, and bit my cheek hard to keep back an insane crack of laughter.
"I just wanted you to know," she said timidly, twisting the dishcloth in her hands. "We did our best for you, after. Sometimes I worry that we did it all wrong… But we were afraid that whoever had-you know-that whoever it was would come back and…We were just trying to do what would be best for you."
"I know, Mum," I said. "It's fine," and, with the sensation of some huge and narrow escape, I went out to the sitting room to watch Columbo with my father.
"How's work treating you?" my father said, during an ad break. He rummaged down the side of a cushion for the remote control and lowered the sound on the TV.
"Fine," I said. On the screen, a small child sitting on a toilet was conversing vehemently with a green, fanged cartoon creature surrounded by vapor trails.
"You're a good lad," my father said, staring at the TV as if mesmerized by this. He took a swig from his can of Guinness. "You've always been a good lad."
"Thanks," I said. Clearly he and my mother had had some kind of conversation about me, in preparation for this afternoon, although for the life of me I couldn't figure out what it might have entailed.
"And work's all right for you."
"Yes. Fine."
"That's grand, then," my father said, and turned the volume up again.
I got back to the apartment around eight. I went into the kitchen and started making myself a sandwich, ham and Heather's low-fat cheese-I'd forgotten to go shopping. The Guinness had left me bloated and uncomfortable-I'm not a beer drinker, but my father gets worried if I ask for anything else; he considers men drinking spirits to be a sign of either incipient alcoholism or incipient homosexuality-and I had some hazy paradoxical idea that eating something would soak up the beer and make me feel better. Heather was in the sitting room. Her Sunday evenings are devoted to something she calls "Me Time," a process involving
My phone beeped. Cassie:
