Signs and Wonders

The Stepmother’s Story

On the plane, in that dizzy, fitful sleep that feels like slipping underwater, she dreamed that Lucas died. She saw his blue lips, his closed eyes, the damp blond hair plastered to his pale nine-year-old face. He was floating somewhere, and his dark sweatshirt billowed around him like a cloud.

“Luke!” she said out loud, waking herself up.

“He’s fine,” Jason said immediately, from the window seat. And, as always, he was right: her two stepchildren were just across the aisle, their blond heads islanded in headphones, watching the in-flight movie. Molly was laughing at an animated squirrel falling on the ice as it chased a nut. Lucas was scowling. He considered himself above children’s comedy and, as if sensing he was being watched, pulled his hood over his head and slouched down in the seat, his face invisible.

“You okay, Jude?”

“I’m good,” she said. She wasn’t going to tell him about the dream, because it was morbid and bizarre, and because, now that she was shaking the shreds of it from her mind, she thought she knew where it came from. Two rows behind the children, the seats had been removed and a stretcher bolted down there, a blanket and pillow covering the mattress like an empty hotel bed. When Judith, boarding, stared at the stretcher in surprise, the flight attendant explained quickly that it wasn’t being used. A person had been transported from Edinburgh to New York, and now, in the opposite direction, it was being returned. A person, she’d said, and Judith wondered at all the specific meanings this vague term was designed to avoid: patient, victim, corpse. Which was exactly the kind of thought that Jason would smile at and tell her to dismiss. He wasn’t dismissive of her, but he’d been through an agonizing, bitter divorce and had chosen — this was how he put it, on their first date — to look forward, to believe in life and happiness and the future. Judith was drawn to him just as the sun draws you outdoors on a perfect day you can’t bear to waste. Her own divorce had left a permanent smudge on her life, a shadow she couldn’t quite shake; even now, in love and remarried, she often felt it lurking inside and had to tamp it down.

Molly laughed, and the sound was like a butterfly, something delicate and uncontainable flapping its wings in the cabin’s air.

“Still five hours left,” Jason said to her, squeezing her arm. “Try to get some rest.”

By the time they landed in Scotland, cleared customs, and found the hotel, the children were exhausted, their eyes circled and hollow. Judith felt a pang of guilt. This trip had been her idea; she’d wanted them to do something different from the Disney World vacations of their past. On this trip, she’d thought, they’d start becoming a family. But maybe it was too much, too far? For the millionth time she wondered if she was making a stepmother’s mistake. The room had two double beds and an extra roll-out the hotel had brought up, and the kids collapsed, Lucas in one bed, Molly on the roll-out, without fighting. They fought much less often, in fact, than Judith had expected, and she didn’t know if this was because of everything they’d been through or was just the way they were. Molly was like her father, sunny, adaptable, friendly; she liked to sit on the floor while they watched TV and have Judith braid her hair. Lucas was darker. Sullen and withdrawn, he had few friends and spent most of his time at home playing graphic, violent video games. He skirted Judith as if she were a piece of furniture in the center of the room. Whenever she tried to talk to him, he answered in grunts and single syllables until she gave up. Because he was dark, because he was difficult, he was the one whose acceptance she most craved.

At nine o’clock, the kids groggy and pliant, they ventured out for dinner. It was July and still light, a pearly, enduring twilight that made the Gothic architecture and cobbled streets look like the setting of a fairy tale. Judith had been to Edinburgh once before, the summer after graduation when she and a girlfriend had Eurail-Passed through ten countries, but all she remembered was meeting some guys from Portugal at the hostel and staying up drinking with them all night, trying to teach them how to pronounce “Loch Ness Monster” correctly. In the morning they’d gotten back on the train. Now she was pleased to be here, with this new family of hers — an instant, add-water-and-stir family, as her friend Maggie had put it. They chose a homey-looking pub and ordered sandwiches. Outside, tourist couples strolled past the window fronts. She looked at Jason and smiled.

· · ·

They slept late and missed the complimentary breakfast, which Judith thought was perfectly fine, given what she’d heard about its black pudding and haggis. In a coffee shop around the corner they outlined a sightseeing plan for the day. Molly wanted to know if they could see some sheepdogs; she was the kind of girl who had pictures of kittens and horses in her room. When Judith asked Lucas what he wanted to do, he shrugged.

“There must be something,” she said.

He shrugged again. “I don’t know anything about Scotland,” he said, “so how can I pick?”

Instantly, she felt a tidal wave of unreasonable annoyance wash over her. With his intractability, Lucas drew from her a volatile, explosive emotion such as she’d never experienced with another person. She was trying so hard and he would never even meet her halfway. She wanted to yell at him, Why won’t you cooperate? to shake his arm, and he looked at her and could see it in her eyes. His lip curled, taunting her. I dare you, his expression said. Between them was the electricity of unspoken anger. Meanwhile, Molly and Jason were buttering their toast.

“I guess if there were Scottish video games,” she said, “you’d want to play those.” And instantly regretted it: she, the adult, was supposed to keep her cool.

But Lucas’s lip curled further into a sardonic smile, and his dark blue eyes — they were an otherworldly color, almost purple — twitched and he said, “Scottish video games are probably, like, Grand Theft Bagpipes.”

“Or Killer Haggis,” she said.

“Black Pudding Attack,” he said, and then they were all four laughing, Judith’s tension snapped and gone.

Everybody had warned her about the hardships of a blended family, but nobody had mentioned its pleasures: how fun it could be to sit in a coffee shop with your family, all of you jet-lagged and laughing at some dumb joke.

Just as quickly as it had arrived, the moment slipped away as Lucas put his cutlery back on his plate, his breakfast untouched, and stared out the window.

“Okay,” Jason said, doing his best to move them all along with his warm, sunny smile. “Let’s hit the sights.”

And they did: the castle, the Royal Mile, the parliament building. The kids yawned through various tours and were placated with gift-shop trinkets and snacks. Jason bought Judith a cashmere shawl when she wasn’t looking, and she scolded him for the expense and then hugged him; though they’d been married a year, she still felt strange kissing him in front of the kids. Sometimes she thought about Maggie’s reaction when she told her she was dating a divorced guy and that the kids seemed “great.”

“Those poor children,” Maggie said, and Judith, who’d only just met them, felt defensive on their behalf.

“They seem to be coping pretty well,” she said. “They say kids are resilient.”

“Yeah, they do say that,” Maggie said. “But is it just because the kids don’t, you know, actually explode?”

Judith imagined she meant that kids can’t explain themselves, because they often have no words to describe the things that had happened to them. “I don’t know the answer to that question,” she said. She still didn’t, and thought that probably nobody did.

“Hey,” Jason said, “come back to us,” and she realized that she was still holding the soft, pale blue cashmere to her cheek.

But all in all it was a good day, and they slept well that night and felt better the next morning, when they climbed the 287 steps to the top of the Walter Scott memorial, panted with the accomplishment, heard from a tour guide about his famous Lady of the Lake, then looked down at the gardens below. The Edinburgh skyline was shrouded in a gentle haze. And then it was time to climb down. Jason was holding Molly’s hand, and they glanced around for Lucas, but couldn’t find him.

The panic was not immediate. They just assumed he was exploring somewhere and had forgotten to let them know he was wandering off. They walked around for a few minutes calling his name. Then Judith and Molly stayed put while Jason canvassed a broader area. He was gone for fifteen minutes, then half an hour, then came back and left again for another half an hour. As Judith and Molly sat there, other tourists came and went, taking pictures, chattering, and she was offended by their blithe ignorance. Finally she saw Jason climbing back up the steps, and he was holding out his hands in a hopeless, empty gesture. Even though she was too far away to see his eyes, she could feel his heart turning over, and his alarm ignited hers, and her heart was pounding and she allowed herself to actually think the terrible thought that Lucas was missing.

Such a sweetheart was Molly that she stayed silent and polite through the lengthy interview at the police station, downed the muffin and milk a kind secretary brought for her, and didn’t cry. Jason, on the other hand, was falling apart. Judith had never seen him like this. She thought he’d permanently exorcised violent and dark emotions from his life but it turned out that they were all simmering underneath. When the police officer said they couldn’t do anything right away, his recognizable personality, the self she knew and loved, disappeared, and he became an entirely different person.

“Listen to me, you Scottish motherfucker,” he said. “My son’s somewhere out there, in a city he doesn’t know, in a foreign country, and he’s nine years old. You need to find him, do you understand? I’ll stand right in front of you and yell my fucking head off hour after hour until you do something about this.”

The police officer, a kindly, portly, gray-haired man with a bristly mustache, was unshaken by this outburst. He persisted in a long line of questioning, his Scottish accent underscoring, somehow, the methodical rhythms of his speech: had Lucas ever disappeared before, what kind of a child was he, had he been known to speak to strangers, had they had an argument? Children could be testy and difficult, especially when traveling or particularly tired. As he spoke he held Lucas’s passport open to the photograph, his stubby thumb so close to the image that, Judith could tell, it was driving Jason insane. Finally he stood up and snatched the passport out of the officer’s hand.

“I’m done answering questions,” he said. “Find my son.”

What to do in a foreign city where your child could be anywhere? Jason couldn’t sit still, and Judith thought she understood. She offered to take Molly back to the hotel while he looked for Lucas. It was early evening now, suppertime.

Jason agreed to this plan with a mechanical nod, then crouched down and gave Molly a hug. “Everything’s going to be fine. Okay, honey? I think Lucas probably just took a wrong turn and got disoriented.”

Heartbreakingly, the child tried to act like she believed him.

She and Molly took a black cab back to the hotel and ate in the restaurant downstairs, each of them just pushing food around the plate for ten minutes, then went back to the room. Somewhere in the city, she knew, Jason was retracing all their steps from both today and yesterday, scrambling frantically through the quaint cobblestone streets and alleys, the crowded maze of a very old city. All those Scottish words they’d laughed and wondered over: what was a close, exactly? What were mews?

As if echoing her own thoughts Molly suddenly sobbed, down in her little cot. “I wish we’d never come to Scotland. Why did we have to come here?”

“Oh, honey,” Judith said, kneeling down and putting her arms around her. Molly’s body felt hot beneath her Dora the Explorer nightgown. “Everything’s going to be fine.” The lack of conviction in her own voice embarrassed her, and she drew the girl closer, pressing her lips to her head. “We’ll find him, don’t worry.”

She was so intent on sounding sure that it took her a moment to register how stiff the girl’s posture was; then she felt a strange pressure on her stomach and realized Molly was fighting her, that her tiny hands were pushing her away as she cried hysterically, her pretty face distorted and monstrous. “This is all your fault,” she said. “It’s all because of you. Get away from me. Get away.”

Judith dropped her arms and awkwardly settled Molly back on the cot, where she curled into a sad little crescent, crying even harder when Judith touched her or adjusted the covers around her. Slinking back to her own bed, with no idea what to do, Judith pulled the blanket over herself. Molly’s tears subsided and she fell asleep, but Judith stayed awake, watching her, feeling like the worst person ever. It was her fault.

For hours she waited in bed as the city outside faded into blackness, wondering where Lucas could be and where Jason was. In a daze, she remembered the dream she’d had on the plane and saw Lucas’s pale face. I’m so sorry, she told him in her mind. She started crying and was somehow still crying when she woke up, a few hours later, to see Jason asleep in the other bed, above the covers, still wearing all his clothes.

In the early morning light she could tell Jason agreed with Molly that this was her fault, and was amazed at her own foolishness, thinking that his sunniness, his composure, his ability to be optimistic even in terrible situations, were permanent conditions. He could only take so much and now, over the breakfast table, as they tried exhaustedly to make a plan, she saw how much he hated her. He was sitting across from her, with Molly in his lap.

“We should check in with the police first,” she said, hoping to sound helpful. Jason nodded dully.

“And then I guess we could make color photocopies of his passport picture and put them up around town with our hotel information. Maybe someone’s seen him.”

“There are so many flyers up for plays during the festival,” Jason said. “People will think it’s part of that.”

“There must be local TV channels,” she went on. “We’ll send a picture to them too.” She felt she was speaking to him across a vast, oceanic distance. He was silent, his whole face drooping.

Finally he said, “Damn it. I’ve got to call Paulina. She’ll know what to do.”

It was the first time he’d ever said anything like that about his first wife, at least in front of Judith, and she felt their future buckle beneath the weight of his words.

The same kindly police officer as before told them there was no news and suggested they go back to the hotel to wait. When Judith raised the question of the local news, he shrugged as if to say they could do whatever they wanted to. So she and Jason called the local news station, spoke to a secretary, and dropped off a photo. Molly was quiet throughout all this, her face drawn and pinched. The streets swarmed with tourists, actors handing out handbills for plays, people dressed in kilts and togas and other costumes, a hive of activity that seemed more sinister with every passing moment. They returned to the Scott monument, and Jason and Molly walked around the crowd holding up pictures of Lucas and asking people if they’d seen him. It had been hours since either of them so much as looked at Judith.

At the top of the monument, looking over the city, Judith thought that it had lost its fairy-tale charm and now was foreboding and sinister. In her mind she again saw Lucas’s pale face, the one in her dream, floating in space.

But he’s not in space, she thought suddenly. He’s in water. The water of Leith: the words came to her and she supposed she’d read them in the guidebook, though it wasn’t something they’d ever discussed going to. Muscling through the crowd, she tugged on Jason’s sleeve and saw, in a heartbreakingly clear second as he was turning around, that he hoped it was Lucas tugging at him, and that when he realized it was her, he felt not just disappointment but hatred, because she’d extended a moment of hope and just as quickly extinguished it.

“I’m going to look for him down by the water,” she said.

“What water? Where?”

“The water of Leith walkway.”

“Where’s that?”

“I don’t know. I just have a feeling, Jason. I can meet you back at the hotel.”

“A feeling?” He tugged on her sleeve in turn but his touch wasn’t gentle and surely couldn’t be mistaken for a child’s. “What do you know? What aren’t you telling me?”

“Jason,” she sighed. Next to him Molly was shrinking against his leg, as close as another limb. She was fading, this once-bright girl. How much more could she take? “I had a dream on the plane. I didn’t tell you about it. I saw Lucas in some water.”

“You’re telling me about a dream?” Jason said, his face twisted, agonized. “Judith, my child’s missing and I don’t know where he is or how to find him and you’re telling me about some dream?”

“I’m trying to help, Jason, I promise.”

“I don’t see how rambling on about this is helpful at all.” Underneath this was everything he didn’t say: that she didn’t know what she was talking about, she didn’t know his children, that she was overstepping herself.

Instinctively she backed away, as though he might strike her, a fear she could tell incensed him even more. “I’ll just meet you at the hotel later, okay?” she muttered, and quickly walked off, blinking tears from her eyes.

· · ·

By asking directions she was able to find her way to the water, a stream that wound, through various neighborhoods, to the harbor town of Leith. A little wooden sign attached to a stick — something she might, in another mood, have found quaint — pointed the direction and gave the distance. Seeing it, her heart sank. There were miles of path to cover.

But what else was there to do but look? She began to walk, peering, with every step, into the water. Each mossy black stone or floating piece of litter drew her careful inspection. The path changed, as she went, from stone to dirt and back again, rising up to cross city streets, then submerging itself again. Tourists and dog-walkers gave her a wary berth, but her attention didn’t waver. The long green tendrils of trees were reflected palely in the water. She saw no fish, no life at all.

After around an hour she became distantly aware that a man behind her was observing her every move. Now that she noticed him, she realized he’d been there for quite a while. She wasn’t afraid of him, only annoyed to be distracted. Without hesitating, she spun around and said, “What do you want?”

He was in his late twenties and wearing a nondescript outfit: brown corduroys, blue shirt, darker blue windbreaker. His pale face had a ruddy, windswept look, and he only lifted his eyebrows, apparently unruffled.

“Good afternoon, madam,” he said. “My name is Lieutenant John McCrary.”

“You’re a policeman,” she said. She was pleased: another pair of eyes to help. “I’m looking for my son. You can help if you want.”

McCrary fell in step beside her. After a few quiet minutes he said, “I understand he’s in fact your stepson?”

His tone was so soft that she almost missed the accusation in it. “Yes, that’s right,” she said. “His parents are divorced. His mother’s on her way to Edinburgh, flying in from New York.”

“And you’ve come to look for him here, because …”

Judith sighed. They were wasting time. “Because I have a hunch. You’ve heard of a hunch?” She stopped and spread her palms in appeal. “Anyway, it’s just good to do something.” She could hear herself trying to sound reasonable, convincing, despite the subtle tremor in her voice.

“This hunch you have,” McCrary said, still softly, “where did it come from?”

She saw, then, what he meant: that only the guilty have secret knowledge of any crime. Standing before him, with the damp air cooling her cheeks, she felt his indictment join Jason’s and Molly’s. A mother might have an intuition, but the stepmother could only be the villain. That’s how fairy tales go.

“If I could tell you where it came from,” she told him, “it wouldn’t be a hunch. Anyway, believe whatever you want. Follow me if you have to. I really don’t care.”

Another hour passed with she and McCrary walking together, a walk that in another context might have been romantic — the low-hanging branches, the glimmer of birdsong, the old buildings hunkering over the water. She experienced these things as quick flashes, whenever she momentarily turned away from the water to rest her eyes. McCrary said nothing, though she felt him watching her, and it angered her that he wasn’t paying more attention to the water.

She thought she saw Lucas, but it was a soda can, or a seagull. She thought she saw him, but he wasn’t there.

It was three o’clock when they reached the harbor at Leith at the end of the walk. She could go no farther. In front of her was the sea. She hadn’t found him; he was out there somewhere all alone, and she had failed. She stood staring at the spot where the gray water met the gray sky. The wind was cold and her tears stung her face and her heart ached for him.

She stood there for so long that McCrary, apparently, lost patience. She sat down on a rock and, glancing up, noticed that he was gone. Though she’d resented his accusing presence, she felt abandoned by his departure. Now she, too, was alone. Somewhere in the city, Jason and Molly were probably still walking the streets, the closes and mews, calling Lucas’s name.

Then she saw him.

In the gray water his dark blue sweatshirt looked like a rock or a wave. It was the movement of his hair across his cheeks that caught her eye, an image that recalled, exactly, the dream she’d had on the plane.

He was in the water below a pier, where a kid could easily have fallen off while looking down. Without thinking, she threw herself in and swam out to him. It took her longer than she expected and she was already tired by the time she got close to him. Catching him was yet another difficulty; she was calling his name but couldn’t tell if he heard her.

Then she was wrapping him in her arms and heading back to shore. She didn’t know if he was conscious, or even alive. His arms and legs were stiff and she could barely make any progress, holding him with one arm and paddling with the other. She swallowed some water and lost a contact lens, the world now a blur of waves. She could no longer see land and seemed to be caught in a current, or was she almost there? She had one hand beneath his sweatshirt and his bare back didn’t feel human; cold, inert, it barely felt like anything at all.

She swallowed more water and was choking and couldn’t breathe when miraculously, his arms circled around her. He was strong and holding on, and with both hands free she knew they’d make it. She knew, too, that the dream she’d had on the plane had been only part of the premonition, that the stretcher also figured in it: a stretcher that could carry Lucas home again, to health, to safety, to his father and sister and mother.

McCrary, who’d gone off to find a restroom and a sandwich, and who swore to his superiors that he’d been gone for less than fifteen minutes, discovered them on the beach. Lucas was crying and shivering. Judith wasn’t breathing. She’d worked one arm inside the sleeve of his sweatshirt, apparently and correctly believing that this would bind them together. Trained in CPR, the policeman did his best, but couldn’t revive her; the ambulance came, but not in time.

“I was lost,” Lucas said, “and I kept getting more lost no matter what I did.”

He’d only walked off for a couple of minutes; he was upset about something, he couldn’t even remember what. He was afraid they’d be mad at him for walking away. And he was too afraid to talk to strangers, because he’d always been told not to. Then he was both tired and confused. He’d spent the night huddled in an alley, crouched inside his sweatshirt.

His father asked him question after question: Where did you go next? Why didn’t you ask a policeman? And he asked one question over and over again: How did she find you?

The boy had no answer. Only nine, he didn’t have the words to explain any of this mystery, how it had happened or what it meant, what it was like for him to be there in the water, blind and frenzied and drowning, and for the woman to somehow come to him, as if out of nowhere, and carry him ashore.