out at the sight of him.
“Henry! Where have you been, oh my God! I’ve been looking everywhere for you!”
“Sorry, Mom,” he said dully.
“You had me so worried!” She clutched him tightly, weeping with relief. “I came back and couldn’t find you! Where were you? What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh my God, did you fall in the water or something? Why are you all wet?”
“I fell in the water. It was an accident.”
“Oh no! Oh, honey! Are you all right?”
Henry nodded sluggishly. Looking the gleaming white ferryboat, he asked, “Is it time to go?”
“Are you all right? You’re hurt! Shouldn’t we take you to the doctor?”
“No, I want to just go.”
“Are you sure? Oh, honey, I was so scared…”
“Yes, let’s go.” It required an extreme effort to focus, to crawl out of the depths of his shock and meet her frantic eyes. “Let’s go now, Mom.”
“But you—”
“I want to go now. Let’s go. Let’s go now.”
They boarded the boat.
PART II:
ANGEL’S TRUMPET
Chapter Seventeen
WAR DOGS
“You don’t have to come with me,” he says, tying his shoes.
“Of course I’m coming with you,” Ruby says. “I just don’t know what you’re hoping to accomplish up there.”
“One way or another I’m going to put an end to this crap. This has gone on long enough. I have a right to see my own mother—I owe it to her. Do you realize she turned down a dream job here because of me? Because of my girl problems? It’s totally because of me we moved away, and she’s probably spent the last thirty years feeling like she was kicked out of Paradise and wishing she could come back. Well, she finally got her chance, and now it’s my responsibility if she’s in trouble.”
“How so?”
“Because she got me out when I needed her to. Do you see what I’m saying? It’s come full circle.”
Henry didn’t say what else he had been thinking: that the island had frightened him off once before, had pried open his head and taken root in his nightmares, and he wasn’t going to let it happen again. He wasn’t a little boy any more.
“Do you intend to climb the fence, or what?”
“I don’t know what I’m gonna do, but something.”
“Well, I’m not bringing Moxie up there again—it’s too hard for me to film and watch her at the same time. We better see if that desk-girl can take her.” Ruby digs the card out of her purse. “Janet Bixby—‘Bix Bee Childcare.’”
Henry is a little surprised to hear her say this, but he’s not about to argue. “Fine, whatever.”
They go down to the lobby and are introduced to a cheerful, spry old lady in Reeboks who shows them the child-friendly back room where she and Moxie will be playing and doing activities. “Looks cozy,” Ruby says. “I like that there’s no television.” Henry agrees; the place has a warm, homey feel, with plastic tubs of well-chewed toys and books, but the main selling point is the enthusiasm of the caregiver, Mrs. Bixby.
Even as Moxie starts to protest their leaving, the old lady flashes a mouthful of enormous white dentures and says, “Now, you guys don’t worry about a thing. I’ve raised ten beautiful children, and I guarantee that by the time you come back, Moxie and I are gonna be bosom buddies. She’ll be begging to stay, mark my words. Does she have any allergies? Because we’re gonna bake cookies, yes we are!”
A few minutes later Henry and Ruby are free as birds. “Jesus, we should have done this a long time ago,” Ruby says, blinking in the daylight. “I feel like I just got out of solitary confinement.”
“It’s true,” Henry says. “I feel a hundred pounds lighter.”
Without any support network or so much as a babysitter, they’ve hardly had a minute to themselves since Moxie was born. It was so hard at the infant stage that they quickly fell into a combat mindset that tolerated hardships like the lack of a sex life or time alone together as acceptable losses; they were focusing on the essentials, their every waking second devoted to either work or the baby. Hardheads both, they took it as a challenge, and even as things have gotten incrementally easier they’ve kept to this regimen, though there are signs of fraying at the edges: In the last year, Henry has begun sneaking out to strip clubs and bars, and Ruby has begun taking an inordinate interest in yoga. Where they had once been able to talk for hours, their divergent interests have begun making them