"Because he was scared, sweetheart. Because if he walked in that door and his father looked up and said No such person, there'd be no more ninety-six miles. There'd be no more maybe." She looked at him. "He's not angry at her the way he says. He's angry that after all this time he's still waiting for somebody to come get him. And nobody ever came."
Carter thought about a pink stucco apartment with the boxes still taped. STUDIO — NEGS 1966–83. A bathroom with a red light in it, where an old woman stood bent under an enlarger, filling the holes back in. One at a time.
"She's been trying to," he said. "She just doesn't know where he is."
"I know," his mother said. "That's why I didn't stop you."
* * *
The truck came back at two in the morning. Carter heard it, because he was awake. He heard the engine cut off and then nothing for a long time, so long he got up and looked through the blinds, and the truck was sitting in the driveway with the cab light off and his father's shape inside it, not moving. After a while the door opened and his father got out and stood there in the driveway looking up at the sky, which was clear now, the storm all blown east, a thin moon over the Rincons. Then he came in, and went down the hall, and Carter heard his parents' door close and their voices through the wall, low, for a long time.
In the morning he rode to Elm Street.
He didn't call first. He just went. It was seven-thirty and already ninety degrees, and Mrs. Abbott was out on the walkway in a housecoat watering the half-dead geraniums with a coffee can. She looked down and saw him in the courtyard straddling his bike, and she set the can down on the railing very carefully, as if it were full of something more precious than water.
"You told him," she said.
"He told me."
She came down the stairs. She held the railing the whole way. When she got to the bottom she stood in front of him by the dry fountain, and he saw that her hands were trembling, and that she knew he could see it, and that she wasn't going to hide it.
"Is it him?" she said.
"Yes ma'am."
She closed her eyes.
He waited. A car went by on Elm with its radio going, Whitney Houston, the windows down. A mockingbird in the oleander ran through every song it knew.