Learning to Swim Read Free

I’ve always wondered if my mother would have liked me better if I had been a Christina or a Sharon or Jennifer.
    Not in a million years did I believe this boy didn’t know his name. He just didn’t want to tell me.
    “Qu’est-ce que s’est passé sur le bateau?”
I asked.
    He gave a little shrug, but didn’t speak. It didn’t surprise me. If he had wanted to tell me what had happened on the ferry, he would have told me by now.
    “Tes parents?”
I asked.
    I don’t think I’d ever seen such a completely blank expression on a child’s face.
    During college I’d volunteered two afternoons a week at an emergency children’s home, where police and social workers dropped children off, sometimes in the middle of the night. One thin blond girl named Janey had begged me to adopt her. I’d tried to explain that nineteen-year-old students couldn’t adopt anyone, let alone a nine-year-old—but when you’re desperate for a happy home, you keep asking. I kept having to tell her I couldn’t. Each time she returned to the shelter, she was increasingly hollow-eyed, thinner, and more withdrawn. Staffers at the center weren’t allowed to tell us details of children’s cases, so I could only guess at what was going on at home. And then she was gone. Maybe she went to foster care or a group home, or her family moved away, out of the reach of Social Services. I never knew what happened to her.
    For years, whenever I’d catch sight of a thin blond girl, I’d look to see if it was her.
    Our breath was fogging the car windows. I tried to force my brain to work. The ticket seller booth was empty. The passengers were long gone; the boy’s ferry was probably halfway back to Vermont. The ferries had no passenger list; you just paid your fare and drove or walked on. But the police could meet the boy’s ferry when it docked and ask for descriptions of anyone who had boarded with a small boy.
    My cell phone was dangling from its charging cord where I had forgotten it—which was the only reason it wasn’t sitting on the bottom of the lake. It wouldn’t pick up a signal here, but there was a pay phone just uphill, next to the Amtrak station. I pulled the car closer and took a fistful of change from my ashtray, gesturing toward the phone so the boy would know what I was going to do. As I leaned against the phone stand, I leafed through the pages of the phone book, my cold fingers turning more than one page at a time.
    People don’t want to believe bad stuff—they work hard at not believing it. They don’t want to think that teachers can be demons, that priests abuse children, that the apparently pleasant boy next door could be systematically molesting all the neighborhood girls, one by one. They ignore the evidence as long as they can.
    If I told authorities an adult-sized sweatshirt had been tied around this child like a straitjacket, they would smile pleasantly and tell me I must be mistaken, that the arms had simply been twisted or tied around his waist. Because that sweatshirt was now at the bottom of a four-hundred-foot-deep lake, I couldn’t prove anything.
    And this boy was clearly not going to tell them what had happened.
    I gave up leafing through the phone book and called Information, thumbed in change, and punched in the number for the Burlington police. When a woman answered, I said distinctly, “Someone threw a small boy off the ferry from Burlington to Port Kent. Less than an hour ago. He’s age five or six, dark hair, brown eyes, thin, speaks French.”
    Questions squawked from the receiver. I ignored them and repeated what I’d already said. I didn’t have any answers, other than my name, and I wasn’t about to tell them that. Next I called the police inElizabethtown, which I knew had a police station, told them the same thing, and hung up.
    I looked over at the boy, watching me through the windshield.
    I got in the car. “Let’s get going,” I said, gesturing for him to fasten his seat belt. He freed