The other men did their best to engage him. “Hey, there, big fellow,” they’d offer, and “What you say, my man?” But Douglas only squinched himself up tighter against his father and stared. Lonesome didn’t try to ease the situation the way most fathers would have—answering on his child’s behalf or cajoling him into showing some manners. He would just go on eating his sandwich, a pathetic, slapped-together sandwich on squashed-looking Wonder Bread.
“Where’s his mom?” someone new might ask. “She sick today?”
“Traveling,” Lonesome would say, not bothering to raise his eyes.
The new man would send a questioning look toward the others, and they would glance off to the side in a way that meant “Tell you later.” Then later one of them would fill him in. (There was no lack of volunteers; construction workers are notorious gossips.) “The kid there, his mom ran off when he was just a baby. Left Lonesome holding the bag, can you believe it? But any time anyone wants to know, Lonesome says she’s just taking a trip. He acts like she’s coming back someday.”
Abby had heard about Douglas, of course. She pumped Red for his men’s stories every night; it was the social worker in her. And when she heard that Lonesome claimed Douglas’s mother was coming back, she said flatly, “Is that a fact.” She knew all about such mothers.
“Well, apparently she has come back at least twice that people know of,” Red said. “Stayed just a week or so each time, and Lonesome got all happy and fired the babysitter.”
Abby said, “Mm-hmm.”
In April of 1979, a crisp, early-spring afternoon, Red phoned Abby from his office and said, “You know Lonesome O’Brian? That guy who brings his kid in?”
“I remember.”
“Well, he brought him in again today and now he’s in the hospital.”
“The child’s in the hospital?”
“No, Lonesome is. He had some kind of collapse and they had to call an ambulance.”
“Oh, the poor—”
“So do you think you could come by my office and pick up the kid?”
“Oh!”
“I don’t know what else to do with him. One of the fellows brought him here and he’s sitting on a chair.”
“Well—”
“I can’t talk long; I’m supposed to be meeting with an inspector. Could you just come?”
“Okay.”
She hurried Denny into the car (he was four at the time, still on half-days at nursery school) and drove up Falls Road to Red’s office, a little clapboard shack out past the county line. She parked on the gravel lot, but before she could step out of the car Red emerged from the building with a very small boy on one arm. You could see that the child felt anxious. He was keeping himself upright, tightly separate. It was the first time Abby had laid eyes on him, and although he matched Red’s description right down to the oversized jacket, she was unprepared for his stony expression. “Why, hello there!” she said brightly when Red leaned into the rear of the car to set him down. “How are you, Douglas? I’m Abby! And this is Denny!”
Douglas scrunched back in his seat and gazed down at his corduroy knees. Denny, on his left, bent forward to eye him curiously, but Douglas gave no sign of noticing him.
“After my meeting I’m going to stop by Sinai,” Red said. “See what’s doing with Lonesome, and ask him how to get ahold of his sitter. So could you just—I appreciate this, Ab. I promise it won’t be for long.”
“Oh, we’ll have a good time. Won’t we?” Abby asked Douglas.
Douglas kept his eyes on his knees. Red shut the car door and stood back, holding one palm up in a motionless goodbye, and Abby drove off with the two little boys sitting silent in the rear.
At home, she freed Douglas from his jacket and fixed both boys a snack of sliced bananas and animal crackers. They sat at the child-size table she kept in one corner of the kitchen—Denny munching away busily, Douglas picking up each animal cracker and studying it, turning it over, looking at it from different angles before delicately biting off a head or a leg. He didn’t touch the bananas. Abby said, “Douglas, would you like some juice?” After a pause, he shook his head. So far, she hadn’t heard him speak a word.
She allowed both boys to watch the afternoon kiddie shows on TV, although ordinarily she would not have. Meanwhile, she let Clarence in from the yard—he was just a puppy at the time, not to be trusted alone in the house—and he raced to the sunroom and scrabbled up onto the couch to lick the boys’ faces. First Douglas shrank back, but he was clearly interested, in a guarded sort of way, and so Abby didn’t intervene.
When the girls came home from school, they made a big fuss over him. They dragged him upstairs to look through the toy chest, competing for his attention and asking him questions in honeyed voices. Douglas remained silent, eyes lowered. The puppy came along with them, and Douglas spent most of his time delivering small, awkward pats to the top of the puppy’s head.
Around suppertime, Red arrived with a paper grocery bag. “Some clothes and things for Douglas,” he told Abby, setting the bag on the kitchen counter. “I borrowed Lonesome’s apartment keys.”
“How is he?”
“Mighty uncomfortable when I saw him. Turns out it’s his appendix. While I was there they took him to surgery. He’ll need to stay over one night, they said; he can come home late tomorrow. I did ask about the sitter, but it seems she’s got some kind of leg trouble. Lonesome said he felt bad about saddling us with the boy.”
“Well, it’s not as if he’s a bother,” Abby said. “He might as well not be here.”
At supper, Douglas sat on an unabridged dictionary Red had placed on a chair. He ate seven peas, total, which he picked up one by one with his fingers. The table conversation went on around him and above him, but there was a sense among all of them that they had a watchful audience, that they were speaking for his benefit.
Abby got him ready for bed, making him pee and brush his teeth before she put him in a pair of many-times-washed seersucker pajamas that she found in the grocery bag. Seersucker seemed too lightweight for the season, but that was her only choice. She settled him in the other twin bed in Denny’s room, and after she’d drawn up the blankets she hesitated a moment and then planted a kiss on his forehead. His skin was warm and slightly sweaty, as if he’d just expended some great effort. “Now, you have a good, good sleep,” she told him, “and when you wake up it’ll be tomorrow and you can see your daddy.”
Douglas still didn’t speak, he didn’t even change expression, but his face all at once seemed to open up and grow softer and less pinched. At that instant he was not so homely after all.
The next morning Abby had a neighbor drive carpool, because even back in those days, before the child-seat laws, she didn’t feel right letting such a small boy bounce around loose with the others. Once they were on their own, she settled Douglas on the floor in the sunroom with a jigsaw puzzle from Denny’s room. He didn’t put it together, even though it consisted of only eight or ten pieces, but he spent a good hour quietly moving the pieces about, picking up first one and then another and examining it intently, while the puppy sat beside him alert to every movement. Then after she finished her morning chores Abby sat with him on the couch and read him picture books. He liked the ones with animals in them, she could tell, because sometimes when she was about to turn a page he would reach out a hand to hold it down so he could study it a while longer.
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 would
n’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 norm
al!”
“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.”