Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six(39)

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At the police station, the same man who’d come to tell him that his mother was dead was waiting for him with more questions he couldn’t answer. The same questions.

Where were you born?

Where did you live before?

Do you remember any place your mother might have worked?

He dug into his memory, and yes, he remembered one place his mom had worked, a café in a town in upstate New York, Lucky’s. A diner with really good fries and big creamy chocolate shakes.

“That’s good,” said the cop, Detective West. He had dark circles under his eyes, ran a thick hand through his salt-and-pepper hair.

“Because I have to tell you. You and your mom—”

He seemed not to know how to go on. Henry watched the older man’s face, his furrowed brow. West took and released a deep breath.

“You’re ghosts.”

“Ghosts,” Henry repeated.

Yes, that was right. They were barely there. Now Alice was gone altogether and he could feel himself fading.

“Your birth certificate and social security number,” he said. “They belong to someone else. A kid who died before he was a year old.”

The information landed but didn’t make any sense. What did that mean?

“And your mom. Alice? We haven’t found any identification at all. No driver’s license, no social security card, no passport. Not in her purse, or at your house. The social security number she gave the school belongs to a woman in Tucson, another deceased party.”

Henry and Alice had been in Tucson for a while. It came back to him vaguely. Alice worked for an elderly woman there, running errands, and doing housekeeping, shuttling her back and forth to the doctor. Faith. She’d smelled of lemons and was always baking for Henry. He remembered her kindness. They’d played checkers a lot. He told Detective West about it now, and the man scribbled notes.

“Do you have a last name for Faith?”

Henry shook his head. He realized in that moment that the world of a child was very small. It only consisted, at first, of what your mother told you was true, what was important. It was only later, when you went out into the world that you started to question what you’d been told. It was a terrible shock if you learned that the world was very different from the small sliver your mother had shared.

“She was afraid,” Henry said. He hadn’t intended to say it. But now that his mother had been killed, it seemed important.

The detective held him in a curious gaze. “Afraid of who, of what?”

“She said that there were people, bad people who would come for us, try to take me. We always had to keep moving.”

Slats of light came in through the blinds, landed on West’s messy desk, dust motes dancing in the brightness. There was the smell of burned coffee, a sandwich half-eaten on his desk. The detective’s frown deepened.

“She never said who? Or why?”

Henry shook his head again. “But she was right, wasn’t she? Someone came for her. Someone killed her.”

He kept seeing Alice, lying still and gray, her face grim but peaceful. He tried to remember her smiling, but he couldn’t.

“You don’t have any idea who would want to hurt your mother, Henry? Can you remember ever seeing anyone lingering around your house, or school? Did she have a boyfriend somewhere, someone who hurt her?”

Henry thought back but there was no one he could name or even picture. Maybe there had been a man once, somewhere. Someone with a smiling face and big jaw, blue eyes. But it was like the blond woman he sometimes saw in his dreams, the one who sang a song—you are my sunshine, my only sunshine; a fantasy, not real.

“They came for her. But they didn’t come for me.”

Detective West looked at Henry, seemed again at a loss for words. “This is hard, son. The hardest thing. I’m sorry this is happening to you.”

Things happen to you, Alice used to say. You don’t always choose those things. But you just make the best of it. You just keep moving.

“She said there was a sperm donor,” said Henry, again without planning to say it. It was like all the little pieces of himself and his life with his mother were trying to fit themselves together.

The detective cocked his head. “Come again?”

“My father,” said Henry. “She told me once that he was sperm donor. That she didn’t have any idea who he was.”

“Do you think that’s true?”

Henry shrugged. “I guess?”

“Did she say where the sperm bank was?”

“No.”

“No,” echoed West. “Of course not.”

“I’m sorry.”

The older man blew out a breath, rubbed at his wide neck. Henry noticed that there was a small stain on his tie, looked like ketchup.

“Nothing to be sorry for, son. I’m going to figure this out for you. Who you are, who your mom was, what happened to her. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Henry. But Henry didn’t believe him. Because Henry was a ghost, and he knew it.

“Is there anything else, Henry? Any other detail you can share about your mother that might help us?”

Henry shook his head. There were a million little details—that sometimes she stayed in the shower for more than an hour, that she liked old movies, that she tucked him in every night, read to him from the newspaper, always made sure he had a good breakfast, did his homework, had the things he needed. But that there was something—wrong. Something missing between them. He didn’t have any words for that.