Two If by Sea

Author:Jacquelyn Mitchard
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

CLAUDIA CLAIMED THAT there was no way of knowing what a child meant when he said his parents were dead.

“He means his parents are dead,” Frank said. They were huddled in the back of Pro’s cushy recovery stall, just after Hope had left to drive Ian to school. It felt as though they were hiding from the headmaster. They spoke in whispers.

“He has no real understanding of their deaths . . .”

“He’s almost four, Claudia. He’s not a newborn.”

“That’s only forty-eight months old, Frank. Whatever happened to Ian happened at a good time for Ian. It’s called the latency period, and it’s a very stable time of life that starts maybe just about when you start school and ends at about puberty. You’re not a baby, and you have deep feelings, but some people think that this is when a child is able to have a sort of amnesia about the earliest traumatic or evil memories. So we go nuts when we hear about somebody raping a two-year-old but for the two-year-old, it’s actually easier to recover from sexual abuse and adapt to live a pretty normal life, if she gets the chance, because of being little.” She paused. “Still . . . bad guys?” She regarded her nails. “Are you in trouble, Frank? Who were those men in the black car?”

“Claudia, I have no idea. Nobody like those guys ever came up this driveway before. Maybe I just overreacted.”

“If you overreacted, why didn’t you ever talk about it? You expected it.”

“I don’t know. Maybe I don’t want to think anything’s out of the ordinary. At least not until I have to. Claudia, let me tell you. I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t believe in predicting the future. I probably don’t believe in anything. Whatever I did believe in once, that probably hit the ground with the very first call I went out on, the three-year-old little girl her own father pushed off the fifth-floor balcony one sunny morning right after church. I remember driving up there with my partner Elena and this little girl was just on the grass like a doll, in her little yellow dress. No blood. Just like a little doll. The mom? The mom is upstairs crying with her arms around the dad and telling Elena it’s a big misunderstanding, that he really loved his little girl, and that he was possessed, and did we really have to arrest him? If I did believe in the woo-woo, I’d be standing outside the 7-Eleven every Saturday night at ten minutes to twelve to buy my Powerball. Visions, faith healing, God. It’s all the fucking Easter Bunny. But what Ian does, I can see. It’s like the scientific method. Try it, test it, try it again. I’m not the first person who ever saw it.” He told Claudia about the gladiators at McDonald’s. “So if I’m not the first person, who else has? When he puts bad guys together with his mother and father, I think,

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