Learning to Swim

by Sara J. Henry

  The door opened. Jameson walked in, expression blank, carrying a squat black telephone with cord dangling. He plugged it into an outlet in the wall, put it in front of me, and pulled out a chair and sat.

  “The phone.” His voice was flat, his face expressionless.

  He seemed to be daring me to ask him to leave. But I wasn’t in the mood to play games, and didn’t care if he overheard me. I pulled my card of important phone numbers out of my wallet, and hoped my brother would be at his desk.

  I punched in the numbers. “Simon Chance, please. Troy Chance calling.” Because I was calling him at work, Simon would know it was important. Then I heard his voice: clear, decisive, hugely comforting.

  “Troy, what’s up?”

  “Simon, I’m at the city police station in Ottawa, Ontario,” I said. “I found a young boy in New York, who turned out to have been kidnapped. I returned him to his father here, and now police have been questioning me for several hours.”

  Pause. Simon was remembering our earlier conversation. He’d be pissed off, but he’d forgive me. “Have you been charged with anything?”

  “No. At least they haven’t said anything. But I’m tired and hungry and I’ve told them everything I know, and I want to leave.”

  Another pause. “Is there someone there I can speak to?”

  I held out the phone to Jameson. “My brother would like to speak to you.” His expression didn’t change, but he took the phone.

  Having a brother who is a policeman, a young and undistinguished one in the States at that, shouldn’t make much of a difference, but it did. Simon spoke volubly and Jameson answered tersely, but when he handed me back the phone his manner wasn’t quite as cold.

  “Troy,” Simon said, “listen, how soon do you need me there?”

  “Look, Si, you don’t need to come up—”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “I’m with Paul, the boy, and his father, at their home here in Ottawa.”

  A half-beat pause. “Give me the phone number there and I’ll call you with my flight information. I’ve got frequent-flyer points and plenty of use-or-lose vacation days. It won’t cost me a dime.”

  I recited Dumond’s name and phone number. I owed Simon, and if that meant tolerating him swinging into Protective Big Brother mode, so be it. And to say that I was out of my comfort zone would be putting it mildly.

  Jameson met my eyes as I clicked the receiver into place. “You can leave now, but we would like to talk to you again.”

  “Fine. I’m not going anywhere.” I was exhausted.

  On the way out of the room Jameson turned abruptly, pulled a card from his wallet, and scrawled across the back with a fat black pen. He handed it to me. “If you think of anything, call me. The office number’s on the front, home on the back.”

  I blinked, confused.

  He repeated, looking straight at me, “If you think of anything, if there’s anything I need to know.” I was too tired to try to figure out what he meant, and slid the card in my wallet.

  DUMOND AND PAUL WERE WAITING ON THE THINLY PADDED chairs in the lobby, Paul playing with a little plastic figurine.

  “You shouldn’t have stayed,” I told Dumond. I glanced at the clock on the wall—it was later than I had thought. “I could have called you or taken a bus.”

  Dumond looked at me as if I’d said something incredibly stupid. Maybe I had.

  “Troy, regardez, from McDonald’s,” Paul said, waggling the toy, a character from a recent animated movie. One more thing for him to catch up on—you can’t fit in with other kids without knowing every popular movie character, especially ones with Happy Meal status.

  Dumond gave me that wry What’s a father to do? look. Hey, if my kid I hadn’t seen for more than five months wanted to go to McDonald’s, we’d go to McDonald’s. As we pulled out of the parking lot Dumond called Elise to tell her we were on our way.

  “How was it?” he asked me, after he switched off the phone.

  “Okay, just tiring.” I closed my eyes for a moment, aware that Paul could hear us. “And repetitious.” The car moved silently through the thickening traffic. I opened my eyes. “Oh, my brother, Simon, is probably flying up.”

  “Your brother?”

  “Yeah. He’s a policeman, in Orlando. I called him for some advice, and he decided he wanted to be here. Probably just for a day or two.” He didn’t press me. We were both tired. And hungry. Somehow I doubted Dumond had eaten anything at McDonald’s.

  The smell of dinner cooking when we stepped into the house was enormously comforting. Paul threw himself to the floor to hug Tiger, then ran off to the kitchen to greet Elise. It would take him a long time to take all this for granted, I thought. If he ever did.

  Dumond followed, I assumed to tell Elise the results of the visit to the doctor.

  There were three of us now: father, nanny, rescuer, all here to protect and support Paul. Maybe there had been other supporters, back in Montreal, or maybe no one else had been let into the loop because of the kidnappers’ threats. Or maybe Dumond was the type of person who liked to march on alone—not that much unlike me.

  Which was about all the insight I could handle for one day.

  Elise had made a stew and homemade whole-grain bread, and served Paul small helpings he could easily finish. He was tired, eyelids drooping, and Dumond sent him off with Elise to get ready for bed.

  When I went in to tell him good night, he was pink and fresh from his bath, and his hug was tight. Less than ten minutes later Dumond joined me in the library for dessert and coffee; Paul had fallen asleep in the middle of his bedtime story.

  Dessert was homemade blackberry pie topped with whipped cream—the real stuff, not the gunk that squirts out of a can. I nearly groaned when the first mouthful hit my taste buds. We ate in silence until Dumond spoke. “So tell me about your brother.”

  I finished my last smidgen of pie. “Simon—he’s a year older than me. He’s a little worried and he has some vacation days, so he wants to come up.” I didn’t want it to sound like Simon was suspicious of Philippe, although of course he was.

  “If I had a sister, I’d do the same,” he said easily. “Of course he’ll stay here.”

  “Thanks.” I was relieved. “If I know Simon, he’ll be here soon.”

  “That’s fine. I have to take Paul back to the police station tomorrow to work with a sketch artist on pictures of the kidnappers.”

  “He saw their faces?”

  He nodded. “Apparently they wore bandannas when they came in his room, but he said if he lay on the floor and looked under the door he could see them across the room. And once the lock didn’t catch and he got out and saw them both briefly.”

  I asked the question that had been nagging at me. “Are the police worried they may know he survived, and track him down?” I had found Dumond easily; they could, too.

  He shook his head. “They doubt that anyone could have seen you rescue him because of visibility and the distance between the ferries. If we were still in Montreal, they might see that Paul is back. But here it’s not likely.”

  Not likely wasn’t particularly comforting. And eventually word would leak out. Someone would ask Dumond about his family; Elise would let something slip. The kidnappers were presumably from Montreal, not outer space.

  “Of course we can’t hide him away, but we’ll try to keep it quiet until the kidnappers are found,” Dumond said. “They wanted him to work on the sketch today, but I thought he’d had enough. He was tired and worried about you—he kept asking where you were.”

  I made a face. “I was worried about me, too—they seemed to think I was involved. But all they had to do was call Baker or my roommates or even ask Paul. The worst part was the ferry—they had a lot of trouble believing I dived off the ferry.”

  “Yes,” Dumond said, sipping his coffee. “That was the part I didn’t believe either.”

  “That I dived off the ferry?”

  “That you could
see him that far away, that you could swim that far, that you’d take such a risk when you weren’t even sure it was a child.”

  I looked at him wordlessly. He smiled, crinkling his face. “Paul tells us you appeared from nowhere to rescue him, like magic—he thought you were an angel, or a mermaid, like Ariel, except that you had legs instead of a tail. And now that I’ve met you and your dozens of roommates and your Baker friends, yes, I believe you would dive off a ferry because you might have seen a child fall in the water.”

  It was hard to remember I had found this man intimidating. I grinned. “I don’t have dozens of roommates. Only four, sometimes five.”

  “And all male.”

  “Right now they are. Sometimes I get a female, but guys are easier. Messier, but easier.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Guys leave more stuff lying around and don’t wash their dishes, especially the younger ones,” I explained. “But women either want to be in charge or want to be friends. Or both.”

  “What’s wrong with that? You’re friends with Zach.”

  “Yeah, but with him it’s easy. If I come home and I’m tired and don’t want to talk, I go to my room and he doesn’t care if I ignore him. But a female roommate always wants to know what’s wrong and if you’re mad at her, or what’s going on.”

  Dumond laughed. “Yes, well, you’ve captured the essence of marriage right there.”

  As his laughter died away, we fell silent. For a moment, I had forgotten that this time last year he had had a wife and Paul had had a mother, and this seemed unforgivable.

  He cleared his throat. “I haven’t properly thanked you. For saving Paul. For diving off the ferry and rescuing Paul like an angel mermaid,” he said, with a semblance of his former whimsy.

  “Ça n’est rien,” I said. It’s nothing. No one could understand that I’d made no conscious decision to save Paul, that I’d followed a compulsion too strong to resist.

  His eyes moved to mine. “You saved his life, at the risk of your own. You could have died. You both could have died.” We sat in silence. “And I am also sorry,” he added.

  My confusion showed. “For what?”

  “For yesterday, in my office.” I was still confused. He grimaced and reached toward me, touching his fingertips to my throat.

  I had to refrain from leaping in my seat. His touch felt like a jolt of static electricity. I’d almost forgotten the incident in his office, and now I felt it all again: the crackling intensity, the frightening intimacy. I couldn’t speak or move. The air around us seemed to tighten. I could hear his breath, almost feel the rhythm of his pulse. He took my hand loosely, not quite holding it, not quite shaking it. It was a struggle to breathe normally. Remember this man is not your type, I told myself. Remember he recently lost his wife. Remember he is so far out of your league it isn’t funny. Remember, remember, remember.

  I’d broken my habit of falling for unsuitable men. I really, really had.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said, speaking through lips that seemed to have thickened. “I’d have done the same to someone I thought had kidnapped Paul. Maybe worse.” My pulse was thudding. I pulled my hand gently away, breaking the spell. Cinderella back to earth.

  “I should go,” I said. “It’s late.” His eyes flickered, stirred. He stood when I did, the connection broken as if it had never existed. We’d stepped back from the precipice we’d been on. Or at least I’d been on.

  I walked down the hall, wondering with every step if being sensible was always the best thing. Maybe sometimes you should just grab at the brass ring without considering all the possible ramifications.

  But when a small child was involved, you couldn’t.

  I WAS SNUGGLED IN BED WITH TIGER AT MY FEET WHEN A thought swam into my consciousness and crystallized into something cold and unpleasant. Detective Jameson, the card he’d handed me, his saying, If you think of anything; if you need to talk to me.

  Was he suggesting that Philippe was involved? And that I knew something about it?

  It took a long time to get to sleep. Even on this really firm mattress.

  At breakfast Philippe seemed perfectly normal. No sidelong glances, no taps on my arm to accentuate a point, no casual brushes against me. Whatever seemed to have sparked between us last night had been one-sided or momentary, or both. This was good, I told myself. Falling for Philippe Dumond would be insane. Look at what happened to Jane Eyre—although Mr. Rochester did have that small problem of secret-wife-gone-mad hidden away.

  But I was, I realized, now thinking of Philippe by his first name instead of his last. And managing to completely forget Thomas back in Burlington, the sort-of boyfriend I’d never been able to make myself fall in love with.

  I winked across the table at Paul, who responded with a wan smile. Yesterday would have been too much for any small child, I thought, let alone one who had been locked away all those months.

  While we were finishing our coffee—I was fast getting hooked on this stuff—a phone rang distantly, and Elise appeared with a handset. “It’s your brother,” she said, smiling as she handed it to me. Count on Simon to have already charmed her.

  “Troy, I’m on my way. I’m changing planes in Atlanta now.” He rattled off airline, flight number, and arrival time.

  His tone dared me to complain, but I wasn’t going to. “Okay, I’ll be there,” I told him, and handed the phone back to Elise.

  “Simon’s getting in late this morning,” I told Philippe, realizing as I said it that my car was still in the parking garage at his office.

  “We have to leave soon; we could drop you off at your car, or Elise could take you closer to the time you need to leave.” Elise nodded, and Philippe added, “Elise, Troy’s brother will be visiting for a few days, and I thought we’d put him in the small study down the hall.” It seemed a bit lord-of-the-manor, but I was fast realizing that it was sort of a game the two of them liked to play.

  “Would it be all right if I plugged my laptop into your modem upstairs?” I asked. My laptop is so old it doesn’t have built-in wireless, and my plug-in card had broken.

  “Of course. But you’re welcome to use my computer.”

  “I’d love to.” I’d been itching to get my hands on it since I’d seen it.

  “I’ll get you set up.” He put down his napkin, and I followed him upstairs. As the computer booted up, he noticed my instinctive frown. “Yes, it’s been running a bit slowly lately, and freezing now and then,” he said.

  “You probably just need to clear out the registry and defrag,” I said, and it was clear from his expression that I might as well have been speaking Greek. “I can do a few things that will help.”

  He agreed, and handed me the pad of paper and pen I asked for before he left. I like to write down everything I do to computers, just in case things go wrong.

  It was odd to be there alone, and I more than halfway wanted to drape something over the photo of Madeleine across the room. But as soon as I sat at the computer I relaxed. Someday, I told myself. Someday I’d treat myself to a powerful new computer with a beautiful big monitor.

  First I set a Restore Point, which I named Just in case. To me System Restore is the most valuable function in Windows—if things go completely blooey, you just restore your computer to before things went wrong. But you do have to have a Restore Point set.

  Next I ran a hardware system check, updated and ran the virus program, and downloaded and ran a free program called Advanced System Care to clear out spyware programs, fix broken registry links, and solve other problems. I deleted several unused applications running in the background; they could still be opened, but wouldn’t be needlessly soaking up RAM. I opened Outlook Express to compact the folders—me, I’d switched long ago to Mozilla Thunderbird—and noticed a second identity called Julia. An assistant? A girlfriend? House guest? Feminine alter ego? I pictured Philippe as a cross-dresser, and laughed out loud.

  Defragging takes a while—it’s basically reorganizing st
ored data so it can be accessed more quickly—so I’d do that last.

  What I wanted to do now was research.

  First I ran a search for abducted children, and up popped page after page of children, abducted in the U.S., Italy, Japan, Belgium, Austria, and countries I’d never heard of. Some of the children had escaped or been rescued; most had not. It shouldn’t have shocked me that there were so many.

  But I wanted specific knowledge, so I searched for psychological results child kidnapping. The screen flooded with child custody cases, so I searched again, this time excluding the word parental, then clicked through and started reading sections of books on Amazon.com.

  In Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America, I read about the psychological power of kidnapper over victim, and learned it’s easier to track a stolen car than a stolen child. In Children Who See Too Much, I read about Californian children kidnapped on their way to summer camp in a school bus and buried underground for sixteen hours. Afterward the younger kids would hide whenever they saw a school bus, and had trouble imagining the future—something the author called a sense of foreshortened future or pervasive pessimism. Which seemed to be a fancy way of saying knowing the world is a scary place and not being sure tomorrow will come.

  Of course Paul would be having some of these same feelings.

  I wanted to download my emails, so I plugged my laptop into Philippe’s modem, and the first email to hit the screen was a Hi, Troy, hope everything is well from Thomas.

  Crap. I didn’t want to face this now. But even I couldn’t disappear for days without explanation, so after a few false starts I wrote that I’d found a Canadian boy, returned him home, and was staying to help him settle in. Short and simple. Leaving out death-defying rescue, kidnapped from Montreal, and mother murdered. I also emailed my parents that I was out of town, in case they happened to call, which wasn’t likely. I didn’t mention that Simon was coming up.

  And now it was time to go. I checked the route to the airport on MapQuest, set the hard drive to defrag, and went to tell Elise I was ready for her to drop me at my car.