Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

“Last night was New Year’s Eve.”

“I remember,” Mary Beth said, pinching the phone between her neck and shoulder and punching out the toll-free number for her airline. “But I’m still going to see if I can’t get on an earlier flight.”

The change of arrangements cost Mary Beth seventy-five dollars, and after she hung up, she told Mike, “My flight’s at noon.”

“Good. Then you have time to come back to bed.”

AS SHE moved through the center hallway of Mike Renfro’s home, running her hand along its textured, coffee-colored walls, Sarah Hensley listened for the stirrings of the child. Since he’d been in her care, Gabriel had established a routine, helping himself to a bowl of Cap’n Crunch and stationing himself in front of the den’s battleship-size television. But this morning the television was off. Sarah retraced her steps back to the guest bedrooms, where she found Gabriel sitting up in bed, running a toy ambulance across his covers, over the tops of his legs. He slept on a pull-out leather couch in a room crowded with all the accoutrements of a businessman who occasionally works from home.

Sarah had learned that the best way to deal with him was to ask simple questions, try to have no agenda, so she said, “What are you playing?”

“I’m playing disaster. The ambulance comes to pick up the injured, but there aren’t any, so they get to drive fast back to the fire station.”

“There aren’t any injured?”

“Everybody is dead. Nobody needs an ambulance. That’s what makes it a disaster.”

“What else have you been playing this morning?”

He pointed at Mike’s desk, a mahogany behemoth riddled with cubbyholes for documents, even two brass inserts for inkwells. Across the top of the desk were strewn several feet of paper, old adding-machine tape. Sarah picked one up and looked at the numbers, random seven- and eight-figure sums that did not compute. “I’ve been playing insurance,” Gabriel answered.

No question her charge was a weird kid. An eater of paste, a loner, the kind of kid who carried to school a lunch pail (as opposed to his peers and their neon lunch boxes that pledged allegiance to dolls, superheroes, boy bands, and NFL franchises and came with a matching backpack); he could be counted on to switch to a briefcase in high school. To Sarah, the kid was a type, an only child now and forever permeated with a simultaneous sense of entitlement and a last-to-be-picked-for-dodgeball kind of awkwardness. He talked in complete sentences, forswore slang, did not watch cartoons, and sounded in all ways like he was already consumed with his ratio of good cholesterol to bad, with the demands of paying for whole life insurance, saddled with a thirty-year mortgage, and saving to put his own children through college. Each time Sarah had asked Gabriel what he wanted to do, put in a movie (Mike had provided an impressive stack of Disney fare on DVD) or take a nap or walk to the park, he’d answered her with a weighty sigh, telling her, “That’s kid stuff.”

At his next birthday, in just a few weeks, Gabriel Blumenthal would be seven years old. He had the hair typical of his mother’s side of the family, an ample mop that gently faded from blond to medium brown close to the scalp. Only Mary Beth could see any semblance of Gabriel’s father in the boy. Quiet. Gabriel was lithe, thin. He didn’t have much to say.

Sarah had no idea what to do with him. The entire weekend, Gabriel had shown his usual disdain for the constructs of organized play. He was not interested in Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders, video games, anything that required the participants to take turns. He indulged only in the common, solitary escapisms—building elaborate planned communities of Lego and Lincoln Logs, clogging their imaginary commuter arteries with Matchbox cars. Sarah had been warned about this: his mother hoped he might move on to a more constructive hobby in a year or two, say, building model aircraft and miniature versions of the muscle cars of the past, each hand painted with Testors enamels using a fine-point brush.

Then there was the matter of his name, Gabriel. Sarah thought he carried it around as his own private burden, treating it as if it were an adversary. He would not permit his classmates or teachers to call him by a nickname or the more familiar Gabe, and he kept reminding them—and Sarah—that the name belonged to one of the four archangels. She could imagine how well this went over with the other children. Sarah spent the weekend trying to coax him into behaving more like her definition of normal. They talked football. He sampled liberally from a plate of foods he had never tried before, exotic fare like spring rolls and caramel chicken, along with staples of the American childhood, cheese puffs and Oreos and pretzel rods. How in the name of God could a little boy be six and never once have savored a pretzel rod liberally slathered in creamy peanut butter? She’d had to bribe him to do it. She tried to plant a seed, an idea, that he needed to become more like a boy before he could become a man; he needed a dog as his constant companion, a sidekick (like all great heroes), and he needed to be responsible for the dog, teach it to fetch and shake and only to bark at strangers.

Sarah sat on the bed next to him and noticed that the front of his pajama top was crusted with a bib of boogers and snot. And she laughed, because she was thinking how children never call things by their proper names. Booger was itself a word from her childhood, from all childhoods, really, and then eventually Booger was her favorite nickname for her younger brother; she did not know if there was some medical term for what was on the front of Gabriel’s shirt, but she helped him undress. He did not unbutton the top but rather raised both arms to the sky, and Sarah pulled it over his head. “Come on. We need to wash this, and then I’ll make breakfast. Huevos rancheros.”

“What are huevos?” It came out way-views.

“Seriously? You can’t be a Texan without knowing what huevos rancheros are. Eggs, Mexican-style. It’s breakfast.”

“Who says I want to be a Texan?”

Sarah pointed at a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt that hung over the back of the desk chair, and Gabriel obligingly put it on. “You are a Texan. That’s what they call people who were born here.”

The last thing he asked Sarah as they headed to the kitchen for breakfast was, “Was that my mom?”

THE WEATHER forecast promised Mary Beth an uneventful flight home. The Utah sun was bright, the air warm and dry, with the occasional gust biting down into the valley. Still, she preferred to travel on overcast days, chilled in the cool whirl of a car air conditioner, a sensual memory of a childhood spent crisscrossing the eastern United States in a wood-paneled Chrysler wagon, fighting her brother for elbow room in the backseat. Now, at the end of her getaway with Mike, she was thinking about this trip in terms of a mistake, an ill-advised decision. She had come to Utah seeking definition, and she’d gotten it, even if it wasn’t the result she’d hoped for. She prayed the fifteen-minute ride to the airport would pass in silence.

Surely all over America, other couples were headed home from romantic excursions, last-minute jaunts famous for room service and the abandon of hotel-room sex, the ability to be someone other than yourself for a few days. But Mary Beth felt as if she was one of the few anxious to get home. She did not resent the urge; stunned as she had been by Gabriel’s sudden arrival, after two years of trying for a child and then two years of trying to extricate herself from a dying marriage, she now better understood the instinctive drives of motherhood: the urge to protect her son, to know where he was at all times, to make sure he ate a balanced diet and watched a minimum of television, and, finally, this New Year’s morning, her sudden unwillingness to consign him to even one more hour under Sarah’s care.