The Leaving Part 52

Scarlett sighed. She couldn't argue with that. She said, "What happened to all your magazines and stuff?"

Her mother looked around the room, seeming satisfied. "Oh, I figure it's just time for us to be moving on with things, don't you think?" She stood and threw out her tissue and took up the vacuum again.

"I'm pretty sure it wasn't him," Scarlett said. "John Norton."

Her mother shrugged. "Either way, I'm pretty sure now it wasn't aliens." She turned the vacuum back on and finished the job.

Lucas

"Do we have any old family photos?" Lucas asked when he got back to the house and after he'd explained everything-about the Everglades, the photos on the walls, the gun, his sense that it was all too . . . neat.

Miranda, for once, wasn't there.

Ryan turned off the TV. "Yeah." He got up and went down the hall into their father's room. He came out with a box and walked past Lucas with it and into the kitchen. He sat. Lucas sat, too.

"Looking for anything in particular?" Ryan asked as he opened the box.

"Not really," Lucas said. "It's just that I don't really remember, you know . . . Mom."

Lucas reached in and took a stack and started to sift through a pile of sepia-toned prints.

Women in skirt suits and old, square swimsuits.

A dog-not Walker-on the front porch of a house-not theirs.

There were no names or dates on the back, nothing to go on.

A bunch of people swimming-a double exposure so that some of them looked like ghosts.

Nothing of use to him at all.

"Here." Ryan handed over a print. It was one of those long, skinny sheets of four pictures, each frame featuring a woman making a different silly face. "That's her."

"And here"-he handed over a regular-size print-"this is you as a baby."

At first, the disconnect seemed so wide that Lucas didn't think it could possibly be true.

That that baby in that photo in that woman's arms could possibly be him.

But Ryan just kept pulling out photos and started telling stories.

You got stung by a bee that day.

I loved that bike but I outgrew it and had to give it to you.

I think this is Mom's mom.

This was Mom in high school, I think.

Oh, this was you . . . that morning.

Lucas took that one, his hand shaking.

This was what he'd looked like just hours before his life had become the stuff of headlines and movies.

He wore a striped polo s.h.i.+rt and khaki shorts and white socks and sneakers. He had a Superman backpack at his feet. Behind him was a cla.s.sroom wall, with signs and letters and numbers. Beside him were two boys.

"Do you recognize either of them?" he asked Ryan, who took the picture back to look.

Ryan looked at them, then said, "No, sorry."

Lucas looked again.

s.h.i.+NY FLOORS. STACKS OF TOWELS. SHOPPING CARTS.

AISLES OF TOYS.

POPCORN AND HOT DOGS AND COFFEE.

"I remember buying that backpack. Like at a Kmart or something?"

The memory annoyed him. If he could remember that-something so long ago, from before he was taken-why couldn't he remember things that maybe mattered?

He listened with awe as Ryan continued to rattle off stories.

Such a gift his brother had-memories-and he didn't even know it, would never understand what it was like to be without.

To not even know who you really were.

This is you and mom on your birthday.

Three candles on the cake. A cone hat on his head. His mother smiling, pointing at the camera. Him looking at the cake, ready to blow. He felt like maybe he remembered but couldn't fill in anything around it.

Maybe he remembered only the photo.

Maybe he'd seen it before.

"What about photos of after? You know. You and Dad."

"We pretty much stopped taking pictures." Ryan shrugged. "Mom was always the one with the camera. Dad lost interest."

"Any videos?"

"Not that I know of. People take videos of happy occasions, right? We didn't have many of those."

They both turned at the sound of a key in the front door, and Miranda came in, carrying a stack of T-s.h.i.+rts. She tossed them onto the couch, came back to the kitchen, and sat down. "Whatcha doing?"

"'Reminiscing' isn't the right word, is it?" Ryan said.

"Not exactly, no."

"You were cute kids," Miranda said, studying a photo. Then she smiled. "What happened?"

"Hardy har har," Ryan said.

"Aw, look at this one," she said, picking up a picture. "Is this Walker?" She showed it to Ryan, who smiled but then looked at her a little funny and said, "Yeah, that's him."

"What?" she said.

"I don't remember telling you about him."

"Well, you did."

Lucas was looking at another picture, this one of him and a girl. And for a second he thought it was Scarlett but no.

It was Avery.

They were squeezed onto a single swing together.

On a beach.

Sand at their feet.

Surf behind them.

His arm around her shoulder.

Her grin wide.

"Where's this?" he asked Ryan.

"Oh, those swings were death traps. They got taken down years ago."

Ryan said it like it wasn't anything at all.

Lucas absorbed it like a fist to the gut.

AVERY.

He texted that night when she was watching TV alone in the den: I'm outside She got up and went downstairs and out the front door and then down to the car. "My parents are out," she said. "Want to come in?"

"You sure?" he asked.

When she said "I'm sure" back, she said it in a way that was meant to be doubly meaningful, but of course he wouldn't notice.

She'd never been more sure of anything than her wish to be with him.

She led him through the house and out to the pool, and sat in a lounger. He took the one beside her.

"So?" She tucked her hands into her hoodie pockets.

"Well, they found clothes and stuff there. There were huge framed photos of the things we remember. Like the carousel horse I've been picturing. Scarlett's hot air balloon."

"Really?" Avery had certainly never imagined that.

He nodded. "They think it was really him. But I don't know. Nothing was familiar at all."

"I'm sorry," she said.

"They found a gun there and I feel like it's going to have my prints on it."

Not at all the conversation she'd been expecting.

She said, "Why would you think that ?"

"It turns out I know how to load a gun."