Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

“Weren’t there any other numbers?”

“Doctor, dentist, Whitshank Construction.”

“Not the mother? You’d think at least Lonesome would know how to reach her in case of emergency.”

“Well, if she’s traveling, Ab …”

“Ha,” Abby said. “Traveling.”

Red inverted the grocery bag over the table. More clothes fell out, and two plastic trucks, and a thin sheaf of papers. “Automobile title,” he said, picking up one of the papers. “Bank statement,” picking up another. “Douglas’s birth certificate.”

Abby held out her hand and he gave her the birth certificate. “Douglas Alan O’Brian,” she read aloud. “Father: Lawrence Donald O’Brian. Mother: Barbara Jane Eames.”

She looked up at Red. “Were they not married?”

“Maybe she just didn’t change her name.”

“January eighth, nineteen seventy-seven. So Douglas had it right; he’s two. I don’t know why I thought he was older. I guess it was because he … keeps so much to himself, you know?”

“So what do we do next?” Red asked.

“I have no idea what we do.”

“Call Social Services?”

“Oh, God forbid!”

Red blinked. (Abby used to work for Social Services.)

“Let me warm up your supper,” Abby told him. And from the way she rose, all businesslike, it was clear that she was done talking for now.

The children went to bed one by one, youngest to oldest. Jeannie, as she was saying good night, asked, “Can we keep him?” But she seemed to realize she couldn’t expect an answer. The other two didn’t refer to him. And Red and Abby didn’t, either, once they were alone, although Red did make an attempt, at one point. “You just know Lonesome had to have some kin out there,” he said.

But Abby said, “I am so, so sleepy all of a sudden.”

He didn’t try again.

The next day was a Saturday. Douglas slept later than any of them, later than even Amanda who had reached that adolescent slugabed age, and Abby said, “Let him rest, poor thing.” She fed the others breakfast, not sitting down herself but bustling between stove and table, and as soon as they’d finished eating she said, “Why don’t you kids get dressed and then take Clarence on a walk.”

“Let Jeannie and Denny do it,” Amanda said. “I told Patricia she could come over.”

“No, you go too,” Abby said. “Patricia can come later.”

Amanda started to speak but changed her mind, and she followed the others out of the room.

That left Red, who was reading the sports section over his second cup of coffee. When Abby sat down across from him, he glanced at her uneasily and then ducked behind his paper again.

“I think we should keep him,” Abby said.

He slapped the paper down on the table and said, “Oh, Abby .”

“We’re the only people he’s got, Red. Clearly. That mother: even if we managed to track her down, what are the odds she’d want him? Or take proper care of him if she did want him, or stick by him through thick and thin?”

“We can’t go around adopting every child we run into, Ab. We’ve got three of our own. Three is all we can afford! More than we can afford. And you were going back to work once Denny starts first grade.”

“That’s okay; I’ll go back when Douglas starts.”

“Plus, we have no rights to him. Not a court in this land would let us keep that kid; he’s got a mother somewhere.”

“We just won’t tell the courts,” Abby said.

“Have you lost your mind?”

“We’ll say we’re just looking after him till his mother can come and get him. In fact, that really is what we’ll be doing.”

“And besides,” Red said. “How do we know for sure he’s even normal?”

“Of course he’s normal!”

“Does he talk?”

“He’s shy! He’s feeling anxious! He doesn’t know us!”

“Does he react?”

“ Yes , he reacts. He’s reacting just the way any child would who’s had his world turned upside down with no warning.”

“But it could be that something’s wrong with him,” Red said.

“Well, and what if it were? You’d just throw a child to the wolves if he’s not Einstein?”

“And would he fit in with our family? Would he get along with our kids? Is he our kind of personality? We don’t know the first damn thing about him! We don’t know him! We don’t love him!”

“Red,” Abby said.

She rose to her feet. She was fully, crisply dressed, at nine thirty on a Saturday morning. Which was, come to think of it, not her usual weekend custom. Her hair was already pinned up in its topknot. She looked uncharacteristically imposing.

“He was sitting on the edge of the bed last night in his pajamas,” she said, “and I saw the back of his neck, this fragile, slender stem of a neck, and it struck me all at once that there was nobody anywhere, any place on this planet, who would look at that little neck and just have to reach out and cup a hand behind it. You know how you just have to touch your child, sometimes? How you drink him in with your eyes and you could stare at him for hours and you marvel at how dear and impossibly perfect he is? And that will never again happen to Douglas. He has nobody left on earth who thinks he’s special.”

“Dammit, Abby—”

“Don’t you curse at me , Red Whitshank! I need this! I have to do this! I cannot see that little stem of a neck and let him go on alone in this world. I can’t! I’d rather die!”

Mandy and Jeannie and Denny were standing in the kitchen doorway. At the same moment, both Red and Abby became aware of that. None of the three had dressed yet, and all of them wore the same wide-eyed look of alarm.

Then a soft, padding sound came from behind them, and when the children turned, Douglas walked up to stand at their center.

“I wet the bed,” he told Abby.

They didn’t adopt him. They didn’t notify Social Services. They didn’t even make an announcement to their friends. Everything went on as before, and Douglas went on being Douglas O’Brian — although, since Abby developed a habit of calling him “my little stem,” he did acquire a nickname. And sometimes the neighbors referred to him as Stem Whitshank, but that was just absentmindedness.

Outsiders had the impression that he was only staying till his mother got her affairs sorted out. (Or was it some other relative? Stories differed.) But most people, after a while, just assumed he was one of the family.

In a matter of weeks he took to calling Red and Abby “Dad” and “Mom,” but not because they told him to. He was merely echoing the other children, in the same way that he echoed Abby and addressed even grown-ups as “sweetheart,” till he got old enough to know better.

He grew more talkative, though so gradually that nobody could recall what specific day he became a normal, chattery youngster. He wore clothes that fit him, and he slept in a room of his own. It had once been Jeannie’s room, but they moved Jeannie in with Mandy because Stem certainly couldn’t continue sharing with Denny. Denny was sort of prickly about Stem. It all worked out, though. Mandy more or less put up with Jeannie’s presence, and Jeannie was thrilled to be living in a teenager’s room with cosmetics crowding the bureau top.

Above Stem’s bed hung a framed black-and-white photo of Lonesome holding a Budweiser, snapped by one of Red’s workmen the day they finished a building project. Abby believed very strongly that Stem should be encouraged to cherish his memories of his father. Of his mother too, if he’d had any memories, but he didn’t seem to. The reason his mother had gone away was, she was unhappy, Abby always told him. It wasn’t that she hadn’t loved him. She loved him very much, as he would see if she ever came back. And Abby showed him the page in the phone book where his own name was listed year after year, “O’Brian Douglas A,” along with the Whitshanks’ number so his mother could easily find him. Stem listened to all this closely, but he said nothing. And in time it seemed he lost his memories of even his father, because when Abby asked Stem on his tenth birthday whether he ever thought about him, he said, “I maybe remember his voice.”