The Winters in Bloom (7 page)

Ford Trundale. Kyra had more or less forgotten everything about him except his name, when, a decade later, she and David had been dating long enough that they were ready to talk about past lovers. Naturally, she started with the boy named after the car. She tried to make it funny by connecting the boy with Ford’s biggest automotive failure, the Pinto, a car her father had briefly owned. Her joke had something to do with blowing up at the wrong time, but of course there is no right time for a car to blow up, and David just looked confused and a little sad.

They were sitting on a blanket at Fairmount Park. They’d packed a picnic lunch, but they hadn’t opened anything but the wine. David felt around for a flat spot in the ground and set his glass down carefully. He picked up Kyra’s hand and kissed her palm. “Why are you joking about this guy?”

He was so sincere. It was one of the things Kyra loved about him. She immediately realized she’d handled it all wrong. “I didn’t joke about him then,” she explained. “I would never have hurt him like that.” It was true. She’d picked Ford because he was moving to California the next week. He’d been accepted as a transfer student at UC Berkeley. He didn’t want a girlfriend; he just wanted what she wanted: to stop being a virgin as soon as possible, and definitely before turning into an adult, meaning age twenty.

“I don’t care about him,” David said. The sun made his hair look auburn. His big brown eyes seemed so innocent. “Did he hurt you?”

David had a bedrock belief that men hurt women far more often than women hurt men. Kyra assumed this had started in his childhood, but she wasn’t sure what had happened, other than that his parents had gotten divorced. What she was sure of was that David treated all the women in his life with the utmost respect: from his mother to the people he worked with to an overburdened waitress or grumpy dry-cleaning clerk. No surprise, he also spoke very highly of Kyra herself. He talked about her as though she was beautiful, brilliant and, just as important, extremely responsible. He knew she’d been a scholarship student as he was. He loved that she’d worked hard for her success. And he concluded—though he didn’t share this part with Kyra or even fully admit it to himself—that his wonderful girlfriend was incapable of doing something as rash and irresponsible as what his first wife did.

Kyra didn’t know what had happened in David’s first marriage, but she sensed that he viewed her as a much better person than his former wife and, frankly, as a much better person than she actually was. Of course she told him that Ford Trundale had burned her with the candles, and accepted his sympathy for that, because anything else would have led to what she’d felt for Zach and what she’d done to Amy and all the things she didn’t want him to know.

She already knew that David was going to be the love of her life, and she knew all too well how lucky she was to have found him. Most of the time she was deliriously happy, but occasionally she would find herself stricken with fear that he would realize the secret truth that she’d been running from since the last time she saw Amy, and maybe even before, maybe since that hot summer day when her mother left—that there was something wrong with her, something inside herself that she couldn’t see or change, which eventually, always, would make her impossible to love.

SIX

D
avid had
not hesitated to tell the police that he believed his ex-wife had taken his son. They promised to investigate; for now, though, they needed answers to some questions. Many of the questions were exactly what anyone would expect—the what, where, when, and how of what had happened to their son—but some of them seemed bizarre. That’s what David thought anyway. And he certainly didn’t expect to end up in a conversation with a detective about the philosophical theory that even very young children had some rights to self-determination.

It started when the first two officers wondered why they’d chosen homeschooling. The police were from the city: David assumed they’d dealt with murders and domestic violence and robberies and drug busts, and yet they talked like homeschooling was some kind of
crime.

“And you’re not religious?” one of the officers asked. Sitting at their dining room table, he seemed like a giant. His hands were so big that when he picked up the coffee mug Kyra had given him, the mug became invisible.

It was the second time for this question. David repeated the answer. No. He and his wife were sitting on the other side of the table, holding hands. He thought his hand was sweating—or was it Kyra’s hand? He could feel her trembling, but at least she’d stopped crying and saying it was all her fault. She’d done absolutely nothing wrong. She was in the kitchen; David was in his office. She’d gone down the hall to ask David if he wanted her to pick up vegetables for supper tonight, and when she came back, Michael was gone.

This time, David also told the police, thinking it might help somehow, “We do believe in God, though.”

“Does your god allow Michael to attend school?”

“Of course,” David said, and, once again, explained that their decision to homeschool was based on Michael’s educational needs, pure and simple.

“Does your son have any friends?” the second officer asked. He wasn’t small, but he seemed small next to the other one. He was older, with wisps of gray hair coming out of his ears.

“How is that relevant?” David said.

The officer just stared. Kyra whispered, “Because he could be over at one of his friends’ houses now.”

“All right then, no. But he’s only five years old. He’ll make friends,” David said firmly. “But he can’t get back these years if he spends them in a school where he’s afraid to be himself because the teacher can’t control the classroom bullies.”

“Was your son bullied?” the giant officer said. He put down his coffee cup and picked up his pen and pad. “I’ll need the names.”

“You think another five-year-old kidnapped him?” David snapped.

“He wasn’t really bullied,” Kyra said. “But he was only four years old—” She broke off because she was crying again. David squeezed her hand. “He’d started a year early,” David explained, “because he was gifted. Some of the other boys seemed a little threatening. We were just worried it wouldn’t be a good environment for him.”

“What do you mean by
threatening
?” the second officer asked. And David tried to explain. And the large one asked another question. And on and on, until the officers were satisfied that homeschooling had nothing to do with what had happened to Michael. But then the older officer went in another ridiculous direction.

“Do your beliefs keep you from taking Michael to the doctor for medical treatment?”

“Of course not,” David said. Kyra stood up and said she wanted to talk to the lead detective, who was upstairs, examining Michael’s room. In the meantime, David told the officers that yes, their son’s vaccinations were up to date, and moreover, he was at the doctor’s office more than most children because he had allergies. “If you want to call his doctor, her name is Sheila Upland. She’s an excellent pediatrician. I can give you her number if you like.”

The giant officer said yes, they wanted the number. He said the police would have to call Dr. Upland to see if there had been any “incidents.” “Has he ever been in the hospital?”

“Yes,” David said. “He had—”

“Then we’ll need those records, too.”

“But it has nothing to do with this. He had—”

“No need to discuss it, Mr. Winter, until we get the records.”

“But it was meningitis when he was two!”

“He was sick—got it.” The older officer looked at David. “It’s okay, I’m writing it down. We’re only trying to help you here.”

When Kyra returned, a man was walking behind her whose mere presence silenced the other officers. His name was Detective Ingle. He looked about forty, very thin, with a red nose that made him look like a drinker. His voice was gravelly but so quiet David had to concentrate to hear him.

The detective sent the officers outside to do another sweep of the backyard. Detective Ingle leaned against the dining room hutch and explained how the investigation would proceed. It all made sense, and it had a calming effect on David, who hoped that this man knew what he was doing. David hoped Kyra felt calmer, too, but he wasn’t sure. She’d said she had something to do and disappeared in the direction of her study.

He was still wondering what his wife could possibly have to do right then when the detective cleared his throat. “Hope you don’t mind, but I’m curious. You told my colleagues you have no recent pictures of your son. Why’s that?”

At least this was actually relevant to finding Michael. David was angry with himself for not having a picture the police could use. It had been fourteen months since the last photo, and, as the detective pointed out, children grow very quickly. It was true: Michael at five and a half looked very different from the picture on the mantel of the fireplace. He was taller, of course, and his blond hair had darkened considerably. His hair was cut shorter, too. His baby face had turned into the face of a little boy.

David tried to explain to the detective that they were only trying to hear and respect their son as much as possible. At four, Michael had started acting like having his picture taken was having something stolen from him. He hated it, and so they were waiting until he didn’t, simple as that. “Convincing him to try tomatoes took almost two years,” David added, hoping he didn’t sound defensive. “But now he loves them.”

The detective was stuck on the phrase
hear and respect
. “Hope you don’t mind, but I’m curious,” he said. Apparently his favorite sentence. And if I do mind? David thought. Does that mean you’re not curious anymore? “Let’s say your son wanted to run out in traffic. Would you let him?”

“Of course not,” he sputtered. “That’s absurd.”

“So you decide what you’re going to hear and respect?”

“The issue of the rights of children is complicated,” David said. “And it’s irrelevant to finding my son.”

“Unless your son decided that he wanted to leave this morning.” Detective Ingle rubbed his hands together, as if they were cold or in pain. “Would he have a
right
to take a little trip if he wanted?”

David couldn’t resist explaining that the children’s rights movement was never about giving children more rights than adults. And adults have to let their families know where they are. “It’s part of basic respect for the people you live with.” He shook his head. “But the point is that Michael would not decide to take a trip by himself. He’s not that kind of child.”

Detective Ingle paused for a moment. “Would you say he’s an adventurous boy or more fearful?” He shook his head. “I think I can answer that myself.”

The man looked like he was trying not to laugh. David found it difficult to swallow back his anger. “Protecting your child is not wrong, Detective. Frankly, I think you would know this if you had a child. I assume you don’t.”

“You’re right.” Ingle shrugged. “Don’t have kids, never wanted kids. You got me there.”

David might have felt as if it was a victory, getting the man to admit it, except that
none
of this had anything to do with finding Michael.

Detective Ingle walked from the hutch to the table and back again. He was looking at the light pouring in from the kitchen “Tell me something. Do you remember how old Michael was when he decided he wanted to be homeschooled?”

“He didn’t decide that. We did. Because we’re his parents and—”

“You know better?”

“No, we know,
period
. A four-year-old has no idea what homeschooling is.”

“You could say the same thing about a photograph, couldn’t you? And the value of eating tomatoes?”

The consequence of the choices in those cases was completely different. It was a simple matter of logic, but David saw no point in continuing this conversation. He was tired of this guy pacing around, looking down on him, instead of doing his damn job. He was considering contacting someone to complain about the detective—the university community liaison? a lawyer?—when one of the police officers came in to tell Detective Ingle that they needed him to come and look at something in the backyard.

David hoped it was a clue, but at this point, it seemed possible that they needed to discuss why Michael didn’t have a swing set. The detective could rub his hands together and act like he’d proved that David and his wife were inconsistent, because if Michael had wanted a swing set and they’d refused to give him one, then they weren’t hearing and respecting him. But if he hadn’t even wanted one, they’d screwed him up so badly that he didn’t hear or respect himself. Either way, they were failing as parents, which seemed to be what the detective really wanted to prove, though David had no idea why.

At least they weren’t suspects in Michael’s disappearance. David was walking down the hall to find his wife when he overheard one of the officers talking on the phone. “No way. Their kid is everything to them. Trust me, these two are the kind who got on a nursery school waiting list the day after they got married.”

In other circumstances, David would have laughed. They hadn’t even bothered to use a cliché that fit with homeschooling.

SEVEN