"Because I said I was sorry. I wrote Grandma a letter. Mrs. Pruitt helped me with the spelling. I never mailed it because I didn't know if she'd want it."
"It wasn't the cake plate."
"Then it's because I'm hard." He said it very matter-of-factly, the way he talked about the brown pelican and its thin, cracking eggs. "I know I'm hard. Everybody always says I'm a lot. Caleb says it. Ms. Okonkwo at school says it, nicely, but she says it. I heard Aunt Rachel say it to Uncle Tom at Thanksgiving. Eli's a lot. I'm a lot." He looked up, finally, and his eyes were wet and furious and confused all at once. "I practiced, Mom. I practiced at Mrs. Pruitt's with the radio. I was going to try the food."
"I know you did, baby."
"So what was I supposed to do? What was I supposed to do that I didn't do?"
"Nothing," Laura said, and she was crying now, openly, and for once she didn't try to stop it in front of him. "Nothing. You did everything. You did more than anyone. I'm the one who didn't."
Eli looked at her face, at the tears on it, with the careful puzzled attention he gave to everything he didn't understand. Then he looked away.
"I don't want to go anymore," he said.
"Eli..."
"I don't. I don't want to go somewhere where Grandma doesn't want me. I'll stay with Mrs. Pruitt. It's fine. It's what you wanted anyway." He lay down and rolled over to face the wall, the binoculars still clutched against his chest. "Can you turn off the light, please."
She sat there for a long moment. Then she turned off the light and went out and closed the door behind her and stood in the dark hallway with her forehead against the wall.
After a while she heard it, very faintly, through the door. Not the thump of his heel. Something worse. Her son, who almost never cried where anyone could hear him, crying into his pillow so quietly that if she had not spent thirteen years listening to every sound he made, she would never have known.
Laura did not sleep. At five-thirty, when the sky outside the kitchen window had gone from black to the color of dishwater, she sat down at the table with her phone and called her mother.
Margaret answered on the second ring. She had always been an early riser.
"Laura. You hung up on me yesterday."
"I know. I'm sorry. Mom, I need you to listen to me for a minute without saying anything. Can you do that?"
A pause. "I suppose."
"Mark came home yesterday. He heard everything. And last night I told Eli the truth. All of it." Laura took a breath. "He's coming to the beach, Mom. If he wants to. And if he doesn't want to, then none of us are coming, because I'm not leaving my son behind so I can be a good daughter for one week. I did that once. Not the leaving. The being left. You remember."
The line went very quiet.