The Light

As snow fell in sheets past Dyer’s cruiser windows, the letter lay on the passenger seat, the envelope flap opened like a mouth. After a lifetime of it eating away at him, even now in middle age, he’d finally contacted state adoption services about the identity of his birth parents. There was no father of record, apparently, and it took a few months to track her down, but in an official note, his birth mother said that she welcomed reconciliation. Dyer had then reached out to her by mail, telling her about himself and his family, and she had quickly replied with a letter of her own. This was two months ago, in the days following Halloween, and although his wife, Diane, tried reading it to him, the experience proved too difficult. Dyer said he didn’t want to hear about his birth mother, Pam Jenkins, fifty-seven, a pharmacist from Toledo, living with regret. That was bullshit, he said.

On Thanksgiving, he’d tried to read the letter on his own after Diane was asleep and he’d pounded a few Coors, soaking in the silence of the kitchen, watching flurries dart past the window over the sink. Even then, he’d chickened out. What he didn’t want to fess up to was not the rage and resentment, but the raw, child’s fear of disappointment, rejection, and blame. He’d wanted her to have lived a carefree, careless life. He’d wanted to gloat. He’d wanted somebody easy to hate.

By New Year’s, he had grown sick of not having gotten over the missing pieces of his life, and yesterday, he had stuffed the letter in his policeman’s jacket, deciding to read it the next night on patrol, on break. If rage, he’d rage. If tears, he’d weep. At least then no one would see.
Now, parked at the back of the Wal-Mart lot, although there were few cars and the store was mostly dark, Dyer felt like the whole town was watching. Yet it also felt like he was the last man on earth, like there was just him and the letter. He didn’t know how to reconcile this, didn’t like feelings in general, didn’t have much use for them besides anger or contentment. Growing up, moving from foster home to state orphanage and back again, he’d had to be ready to pack his bags and split at any moment; for good, hardworking people to tell him that they just couldn’t do this anymore, and for the rest to slap him around or neglect him while still cashing the state checks. At school, he was a foster kid, bar none, a new face his classmates mercilessly understood would come and go with no one to speak for him. That was the way of the world, Dyer thought, and his years as a cop, even in a small Ohio town like Everton, hadn’t dissuaded him of the notion. He supposed that was why he had become a cop, to help turn the tide, to put some good into this world.

Day in, day out, he had to be steel, and so did his son. That was why the night Dyer left for shift after New Year’s Eve dinner, he gave Diane a peck goodbye, but shook his son’s hand.

“Goodbye, sir,” Steven had said, getting up from the living room carpet where he was playing with his Matchbox cars. He pumped his father’s hand once, twice, like Dyer taught him.

“See you in the morning,” Dyer said. “Don’t give your mom any trouble.”

He knew there were other ways, but this was the one that made the most sense.

He supposed he had Pamela Jenkins to thank for that.

Addressed to “The Dyers” in fine, looping script, there couldn’t have been more than a few pages inside the envelope, but his hands shook with the effort of lifting it, anyway. Cream-colored, of thick stock, the envelope was the kind one uses to make an impression, that when one writes on it, the pen leaves ridges on the back of the paper. She began by writing, in letters and punctuation so careful, neat and precise, “Dear Son.” Then, after “Son,” there was a comma, meaning she had more to tell, meaning Dyer was present in these pages, her boy, her baby, in thought and intention.

When his CB squawked, he couldn’t help jumping. Wiping both of his eyes with his thumb, he radioed to dispatch with his free hand, said the reservoir was two miles away and that he was on it, ten-four. He started the engine, set the letter aside, and threw his cruiser in drive.

A half mile south of the high school and just before a little tractor and supply company that always voted no on every levy, the reservoir, a couple-mile spread of blue-black water iced over in wintertime and dotted here and there with islands of tall pines and deadwood, was located off the State Route. Its driveway hitched up a small hill before fanning out into a gravel parking lot with no edges, no lines, no designated spaces. In summer, when the fish bit most, the place was a free-for-all of souped-up pickups and beat-up vans. In winter, it was dead save for the ice fishermen who had set up shacks and braved the unforgiving winds and odd pack of roving, hungry coyotes.

That night, two fishermen had placed the call to dispatch. Dyer met them in the reservoir parking lot, in ankle-deep slush.

The first fisherman, his face framed by a red beard and fur-lined hood, appeared to have had no experience with babies or cops. Hunched, arms crossed, he looked like he wanted to sink into his jacket, for it to enfold him in a warm casing. His friend, however, in flannel and suspenders, a knit hat pulled low over his ears, was a young father. That Dyer could tell. It was more than just that he had been the one to wrap his parka around the child. It was that he spoke softly to the bundle, nodded at the screams he got in reply, and held the baby closer, gentler, and rocking side-to-side on his feet. Sometimes, in front of the stove in the station kitchen or at home, Dyer found himself doing the same, the movement ingrained in his unconscious after having done it so much with Steven, their light sleeper, their little fuss bucket, when he was a baby.

They hadn’t seen anyone, the fishermen said. No lights. Nothing. They heard the kid crying and found him, no more than six weeks old, on the far shore. They pointed to the coal black tree line across the reservoir, saying that he had kicked his pajama bottoms loose, that one of his feet had come free, that it looked to have spent too long in the snow. They had covered him up and rushed him to the electric heater in their ice fisherman’s shack and called the police. Dyer said they had done the right thing, and although the irony of the situation was not lost upon him, he had been a cop for over ten years, and held out his arms for the child, expressionless.

He only broke character after ducking in his cruiser and turning the heat on blast. Ignoring the fishermen peering in his window, he turned on the dome light and pulled back the folds of the parka. A quaking purple ball, weighing hardly a thing, all tiny fingers and toes, his eyes shut tight, the infant wore a footless pajama onesie. Elmo. Big Bird. Grover. Trying to keep the parka around him as best he could, Dyer inspected the baby’s feet. Shaking his head, he saw what he needed to see, a foot turned purple, and wrapped the baby up tight again, leaving only his face exposed.

He rubbed his cheek and the little guy opened his eyes just a crack. “Hey, bud,” Dyer said.

They were the same words he had muttered after his son ripped his way into the world. Diane had only held him for a moment before the nurses passed him to Dyer, who fell back in the rocker by Diane’s hospital bed with that chalky, wailing thing, that open mouth, that scream. “Hey, bud,” Dyer had said, terrified, and Steven’s eyes popped open, nearly all black, but in each a pinprick of light so clear Dyer thought he was looking straight through Steven to the hospital floor, at some forever nestled there. It passed over his cheek, a living breath, warming him, and Dyer promised never to abandon Steven, to love him until his dying day, to protect him and make him strong, and through him, to put more good into this world. In that moment, rocking in the chair as the doctors stitched up Diane, Dyer became more than just a man. He felt it in his bones with every breath.

When the EMTs arrived, Dyer hurried the baby to the ambulance, whispering to him that he would be all right. The head EMT, Alex Pappas, an old pro, took the baby, fisherman’s parka and all. “We got it,” he said, and as the doors shut, he shouted, “Children’s Hospital—now!”

The wind picked up. At the ditch, Dyer licked snow off his lips, one hand on the butt of his pistol, the other making sure the wind didn’t blow off his hat. Soon, the ambulance’s taillights dropped out of sight and there was only the road, the flurries, and the black, creaking trees.

“Show me,” he said to the fishermen.

More cruisers arrived, and Chief Moseley, too, but Dyer told them snow had already covered the area where the fishermen found the baby. His flashlight had thrown all sorts of shadows as he wove between trees and pushed aside brush, listening carefully in case the ice cracked underfoot.

No tracks. Not even a boot print. The snow was coming down too fast.

When he got home around four in the morning, he stood in Steven’s doorway, listening to him breathe in steady shhhes, a sliver of hall light over his eye, his cheek. He was hugging a stuffed snow leopard, missing its left eye, the fabric nappy in spots, both ears chewed ragged.

Until Steven was two, in order to get him to fall asleep, Dyer had to lie beside his crib, holding his hand. Dyer had to be still, at peace, a Buddha. Finally, an hour later, he would sit up but no, the little hand would give his a squeeze. He would have to keep lying there, his back in knots on the hardwood. He could listen to entire Indians games on his Walkman, go through most of the Top 40. Then, when it was safe, he’d let go of Steven’s hand and army crawl out the door. Watch the floorboards, he’d remind himself. Turn the door handle firmly, but gently. Don’t let it rattle. Open the door, stick out a foot to keep the cat away, step, turn, and shut it behind you swiftly. Don’t bang the jamb. Pull against the hinges in summertime. The wood swells, remember. In winter, wait for the furnace to kick on before you make your escape. He had hated every moment of it, but God, standing there that night, an hour past New Year’s, he would do it all again in a heartbeat.

Chief Moseley said he would call Dyer when he heard about the baby, who had been transferred to Children’s Hospital’s critical care unit. As Dyer waited, drinking black coffee, he imagined the baby had cried the whole drive, trying to tell his parents, “Turn around, guys, take me home,” but they had cranked up music, continued eating up road. They had parked on one of the reservoir’s backstreets where kids made out, hell, where the boy might’ve been conceived. The girl waited in the car while the guy trudged through the snow, flakes smacking his face, sticking to his hair. The scum didn’t even say goodbye, just left his son and ran all the way back to the car, ignoring the faint crying that faded and was lost to the wind.

In the portion of the letter his wife had read to him, Dyer knew that his birth mother’s parents told everyone they had sent her to an “aunt’s” house one summer to recover from “an accident at home.” In actuality, she had had Dyer in a remote hospital upstate near Maumee and had given him up there. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she wrote.

No, Dyer had said. Hard is being shuttled between foster homes and orphanages. Hard is never being adopted, having to turn eighteen and make your way in the world with nothing and no one. Hard is trying to put all that away. Hard is scraping a sixteen-year-old off the State Route or asking Jeff King’s wife if Jeff was depressed, if she knew about the pistol in his drawer. Hard is pulling a car over, approaching the window, your eyes on the side mirror, hoping that something in those eyes looking back at you might tell you how the next few minutes will turn out. You ask for their license and registration, and as they hand them over, you keep an eye on their hands. Now, with your hands full, you turn your back. He had told Diane that was the worst part, those ten seconds it took to make it back to his cruiser. He had had to leave it up to them, leave it up to God.

“That’s hard,” he had said. “Pam Jenkins had it easy. She took the easy.”

Drinking his coffee, he thought of the letter in his cruiser. He didn’t want to read it anyway.

Finally, he sat eating popcorn in front of a late-night movie, something about a rascally mutt that brought joy to a troubled family over the holidays. He didn’t catch most of it. His thoughts wouldn’t quit. As the dog pulled down the Christmas tree and the entire family, including Grandpa, rolled their eyes and laughed, Dyer thought that the young couple had probably abandoned the baby because of drugs. There was a worsening meth problem in Everton. They had raided a few labs, hillbilly set-ups in trailers and barns, sometimes a basement if they were real rednecks who didn’t know the chemistry of the thing made it likely the whole house might blow. The shit made people crazy, too, so Dyer called up the station asking for Moseley, thinking he had a lead, and Harli at dispatch said the chief was already on it. “You got desk at noon, Bob,” she said. “Rest up.”

A few hours later in the kitchen, Diane was excited as she always was during New Year’s. “Time to begin again,” she sang while making Dyer and Steven eggs, bacon, and hash browns.

“No,” Dyer said. “That’s not how it goes. It’s ‘I.’ I will begin again.”

The call about the baby came at nine. He thanked Moseley and just before lunch, he hugged Diane, shook Steven’s hand, and dragged ass to the station.

The township police and EMTs were about finished mopping up that night’s car accidents, bar fights, and drinking violations. Dyer was on front desk duty, fielding phone calls, people who probably should have rung up dispatch. He ran the little switchboard there, shouting into the office around the corner to Harli, the chief’s sister, an old girl working dispatch with a nest of greying hair and beak nose, that he was sorry, she knew how it was, and what the hell was he supposed to do with these people? She just laughed and told him to drink another cup of coffee.

At three, two kids who couldn’t have been more than nineteen, dressed in jeans and puffy coats, the kind Dyer saw in Diane’s fashion magazines modeled by other kids dumb as hair, hurried into the station, the door banging open and shut, bringing with it a fresh batch of cold.

The scarecrow girl stood upright, neck out, chin forward, like she’d been taught to carry herself that way, but her face was drawn, lips chapped, bags under her eyes. Her teeth had begun to rot and her breath smelled like eggs and she kept picking the polish off of her nails.

Meth, Dyer thought.

The wiry bum she was with would have looked at home in an orange jumpsuit, his county number stamped on the back. His skin had yellowed and his shaggy hair was greasy, combed back. His patchy stubble would never be more than pubic- looking curls. He had a weak chin and puny neck and, like her, a rotting smile, through which he asked to see Chief Moseley. He said it like he was a friend, maybe a nephew, like he and the chief had one another’s numbers on speed dial.

“Follow me,” Dyer said, and led the two of them down the hall.

CHIEF was painted on Moseley’s door in gold relief. His office was cramped, like the station itself, a concrete box on the State Route with a flat roof that sprouted all kinds of antennae. It was a relic of the 1970s, all faded tile and pea-green upholstery. The conference room even had wall-to-wall orange carpeting. The police tried passing a levy for renovations, but the farmers in the southern part of the township shot it down every year. The cops had guns, cars. That was good enough, they said.

Weathered and worn as well, like the tall oaks that lined the station’s driveway, Chief Moseley sat the young couple in folding chairs across from him at his desk, the seats scratched to hell from decades of jean buttons. Moseley asked Dyer to stay by the door. He didn’t want to be outnumbered, and on the intercom asked Harli to cover the front desk. When she started in on him, saying his New Year’s resolution should be to make another administrative hire, he let go of the button, sat back in his chair and drummed his fingers on the armrests. “Well,” he said, “yes?”

The boy, Keith, talked too fast, dry-mouthed. Yellow spittle bubbled at the corners of his mouth. He said they had heard a lost infant notification over their CB. Had it been taken to a hospital?

“Was he,” Moseley said. “Was he taken to a hospital.”

The past tense frightened these two, it seemed. Caitlin doubled the pace that she picked at her polish while Keith said it was their baby. “We had to get out of the house for New Year’s. We hadn’t seen our friends in weeks. We’d usually leave him with Cait’s parents, except they’re cruising the Bahamas. So, we left it—him—with my mom, who sometimes don’t do well upstairs, if you know what I mean. I think she probably has dementia, but the old girl won’t see a doctor.”

Moseley nodded, urging the boy to go on, giving him more rope, but when Keith opened his mouth again his girl slapped him, caught his nose with the heel of her hand. Dyer went for his baton as Moseley’s eyes flicked over his desk, the pencils and pens in a jar, the stapler, a hole-punch. They’d once had an abused wife go after her husband in his office with a letter opener.

“Stop lying,” Caitlin hissed. “You said you’d swear to tell the truth.”

Moseley waved Dyer off. Caitlin’s hands were in her lap again and Keith, who had covered his nose, was glaring, boring holes into the front of Moseley’s desk, trying not to lose his cool.

“There was love in her eyes,” Moseley told everybody later in the break room, “and hate and pride, passion and forgiveness; all that brought them there, all they couldn’t leave behind.”

Fidgeting in her chair, Caitlin brushed shavings of nail polish off her lap and said she and Keith had liked one another in high school. They had each gone to college out of state, returned for spring break, and had seen one another at a party. After a few beers, they had stumbled into a bedroom. Two months later, she saw the good news after peeing on the magic wand. Most men would have turned tail, she said. Not Keith. No, he was a real man. So, they both transferred home to try and make it work. And it did work. They were more than lovers. They were soul mates, and Keith was going to marry her next summer. They had the date, venue, and colors picked out. Her parents would pay. His parents hadn’t wanted anything to do with it, but they came around eventually.

“They had to,” she said, scratching, picking at a whitehead on her cheek, “for the baby.”

Ugh, the pregnancy, she said. She was sick all the time and had to drop out of school. Keith moved in with her parents to dote on her when he could, but it was tough on him, too. He started staying out late and refused to quit school although he was flunking. Once, drunk, he punched her belly to get that thing out of her. Luckily, the baby was okay. Later, he slunk home and couldn’t stop apologizing. “He admits his mistakes,” she said, smiling her rotten smile again. Keith nodded, his hand still over his nose. “We both do when we get the chance. It’s only what’s right.”

She said that her parents kicked them out, so they moved in with his parents. That was hell was reasons she didn’t want to get into, but finally, Keith got a cashier job at the gas station and they found a one-bedroom near the highway. She had the baby, whose name was Derrick, on Thanksgiving. Everybody came to cuddle Derrick, give him presents. On Christmas morning, in front of the little light-up tree they’d bought from Wal-Mart, it felt like they were a real family.
She said, “If we didn’t have Derrick, we thought things would go back to how they were. We thought it would be quick, that he would just go to sleep. After we did it, we went to a party thinking we could live with it.”

Keith put his head in his hands and began to sob.

“Tell us where he is,” she said. “It was just a freak out. We’re ready now. We’ll be good parents.” She grabbed Keith’s hand and shook it at Moseley as if this confirmed the whole thing. Moseley had compiled a file, one of many containing rap sheets of local losers, on the pair that morning from several other departments in the county. Keith was a two-timer, possession and intent, Caitlin a manic-depressive, pink-slipped at sixteen. They had lived in Pittsburgh growing up before they moved to a trailer on the county line up north. Dyer supposed Caitlin thought Moseley would buy such a bullshit story as long as she conveyed sincerity, as long as she looked the chief in the eyes, and tried not to rock too much in her chair, not to pick at her face and fingernails.

Dyer couldn’t help picturing Pam Jenkins, what she might’ve looked like at that age, yet deep down he knew she wouldn’t have had yellowed skin, stringy hair or eggy breath that rolled out of her mouth like a green fog that clung to everything. She would’ve returned home from the hospital, from her “aunt’s,” with an entire family to support her. She had gone to college, after all, was now a pharmacist. No, she had lived a good American life. Still, he thought, she was no saint.

Moseley said it like everything would turn out fine: “You admit you tried to kill your son?”

Caitlin tried to smile. “Yes. It was stupid. We’re sorry, but we’re ready to be parents.”

Confession. Bingo.

“Ice fishermen found Derrick around midnight,” Moseley said. “They wrapped him up and kept him by the heater in their tent before giving him to Officer Dyer.” He pointed at Dyer, who glowered at Caitlin. She bowed her head to him in thanks as Keith continued to sob into his hands.

Moseley said, “When Officer Dyer handed him to the EMTs, the boy was already showing signs of hypothermia.”

Keith moaned. Caitlin clutched his hand.

“They got him warm, started an IV, and maintained his vitals. You’re lucky our guys are the best. At Children’s, they stabilized him, but I’m sorry to tell you, he lost a foot. The right one. Frostbite. It had to be amputated.”

Keith buried his face in Caitlin’s lap. She was slow to put her arms around him and kept staring at Moseley, her mouth moving open and shut, like a fish. Dyer couldn’t tell if this was feigned disbelief, part of Caitlin’s act, too, meant to solicit Moseley’s sympathy or if it was merely to put up a wall, to hold the world at bay, to outlast it in hopes of her being there when it resumed spinning in a manner that was familiar, in one that she desired.

The world did not work that way, and finally, as Dyer stepped forward and read them their rights, she joined Keith in tears.

All afternoon, they wept in their cells. Through the air vents, it made them sound like kids doing impressions of ghosts. In the break room, some of the officers said they couldn’t understand why they’d done it. Others said they were druggies, mental cases. There’d been no reason to it.

At the stove, fixing himself a grilled cheese, Dyer didn’t join the conversation. Holding the spatula, he rocked side-to-side as he sometimes did, and watched the rye bread sizzle in the pan.

The other cops were saying that they hoped Judge Deakin would sit on the bench for Keith and Caitlin’s case. “That hard ass,” they said, “won’t show those fuckers an ounce of forgiveness.”
Having poured himself another coffee, as Chief Moseley crossed the room, making for the door, he said, “I’m more worried about that baby. One foot and all, he’ll have it rough, and that’s even if he has good family to take custody. I just wonder who’ll ever forgive him, you know?”

Dyer knew what Moseley meant, and that evening, after he had a quiet New Year’s dinner of steak and potatoes with Diane and Steven, he said he was heading back out into the cold.

Before he left, at the door Diane asked when he was coming home.

“Not before morning,” he said. “I hope.”

At that hour, the ICU was quiet but for the wheezing machinery, now and then a cough, a sneeze, the whisper-whisper of soft-soled shoes. Ignoring the antiseptic smells that reminded Dyer of jail cells, of Keith and Caitlin, he told the night nurses who he was. As they took him past child after child, he kept his eyes to the floor, not wanting to see finality in any of the little faces.

Derrick lay asleep in one of the incubators in the back of the room, an IV in his wrist and a tube in his nose. He wore a blue knit cap and a white, long-sleeved onesie with the hospital logo—a candle and flame—printed on the chest. On his left foot, a blue sock was pulled up to his knee. His right leg, Dyer saw, shaking his head, ended mid-calf in a block of heavily taped gauze.
The nurses spoke in clichés. Derrick was doped up. He was a fighter. He had heart.

Dyer asked them about the prosthetic, if the state would pay for it, if there was some kind of hospital fund. Would they accept a check? They said they would have to get back to him about that.

He asked if anybody was coming to stay the night. No, they said, but the nurses would take turns checking on him and feeding him through the tube, and rocking him if and when he awoke.

Dyer motioned at a nearby chair. “Do you mind?”

They told him they’d get him a recliner, something comfortable.

On the way over, knowing the hospital gift shop was closed, he had bought a stuffed lion, the closest thing to a snow leopard he could find at the Everton Wal-Mart. He couldn’t put it in the incubator with the baby, so he hung it by the tag from the end of the cart that had the drawers of diapers, wipes, and swaddles.

After the nurses brought him the recliner, the lion watched him with its glassy, innocent eyes, the corners of its mouth sewn into a thin smile.

He couldn’t help it making him sad. He thought about Pam Jenkins and her letter, still in his jacket pocket in the hall closet at home. Mostly, however, he just stared, not wanting to imagine Derrick as anything but a baby, without choice, frozen in time. He wanted him to be as pure and pristine, as untouched and unencumbered as the day he was born, that light in his eyes, that fleeting, forever thing.

The words came from just over Dyer’s shoulder—“He’s a fighter.”

Dyer turned. Tall, slender, bald, Alex Pappas, the EMT who had taken the baby to Children’s the night before, wore a white windbreaker, track pants, and running shoes. Looking at the baby, he rocked slightly from side to side, a shiny wafer on the crown of his head from the light above.

“More clichés,” Dyer said. “They fit though, right?” “Yeah. I guess they do.”

After they had watched the baby a while, Dyer asked about Pappas’ kids. Pappas laughed.

“Teenagers. There’s nothing more to say, right? Yours is what, about eight or nine now? Ten?”
“Nine and a half.” “Keep him that way.” “Any advice?”

“Be there. It’s all you can do.”

Pappas reached out and touched the stuffed lion. “Cute,” he said.

“When you had kids—” Dyer began to say.

“When Christine had them. I take none of the credit. No, sir.”

Dyer laughed. “Okay, after Christine had them, do you remember the very first time you held your kids? You know, in the hospital, all swaddled and screaming?”

“Oh, yeah. I remember.” “There’s nothing like it.”

Pappas thought for a moment. “No,” he said, and nodded. “It is all there is.”

Before Pappas left, Dyer shook his hand and thanked him for all he had done the night before.

“You did your part, too,” Pappas said. “We all have to carry that weight.”

“Another cliché?”

“Hey, sometimes, that’s all you got.”

When he got home early the next morning, having only caught an hour or two of sleep here and there in the hospital recliner, he quietly took off his shoes and opened the hall closet. The house was quiet, Diane and Steven still asleep upstairs. As the cat rubbed against his ankles, looking for the day’s first scratch, Dyer took one of the wire hangers off the rod and hung up his coat beside his policeman’s jacket. After a moment, he reached into the pocket and held the letter in his hands. They didn’t shake, and he shut the door, set the letter on the couch, and picked up the cat, cradled it as he had cradled Derrick in the middle of the night after he woke screaming and kicking.

The nurses had taken Derrick out of the incubator and suggested Dyer try giving him a bottle. If Derrick refused, as he had done with them all day, they would have to put more cc’s of the sugar water and formula through the tube in his nose. “Give me a shot at it,” Dyer told them. “I’m an old pro.” Laughing good-naturedly, they had patted him on the shoulder and gone back to their duties.

Derrick took the bottle like a champ, holding on to it, sucking the nipple, wide-eyed. Dyer looked and looked into those pearly blues. He didn’t see that light like he had with Steven all those years ago, that shining forever thing, but it was there. He knew it, all right. He could feel the weight of it in his arms, in Derrick. He even felt the brush of its warm breath, and as Derrick dropped off to sleep in his arms, Dyer thought of doctor’s appointments and stitches, of the prosthetic and the stump, of kids teasing, he whispered to Derrick that he was whole, no matter what anybody said.

Now, running his fingers through the fine fur of the cat’s belly, the envelope on the cushion beside him, Dyer wondered what his birth mother could really tell him, what more of him, of the man, she could possibly reveal. A whole man wouldn’t need answers. He would walk on, light as air, warmed as much by what he knew as by all he didn’t, carrying all he had and what he would never know.

A whole man would get up, feed the cat.

He would start the coffee, make his family breakfast. So, that’s what he did.