Noah had always been the kind of child who noticed things.
I say this first because it matters to everything that followed, because the story begins not with Daniel’s kiss goodbye or the taxi or the blue-shuttered house, but with my son, who was five years old and who had a way of watching the world that was older than five, the particular attention of a child who has learned that adults do not always tell the full truth about what is happening.
He had inherited this quality, I thought, from my mother, who had spent thirty years as a school librarian and who had developed, through decades of watching children and books interact, a quality of listening that went past what was being said into what was being meant. My mother could tell, from a child’s choice of book, what that child was carrying at home. She had told me this once and I had believed it completely because I had watched her do it, the specific attentiveness that looked like ordinary attention but was something more.
Noah had this quality at five.
He was also, and I want to be clear about this, an entirely ordinary five-year-old in most other ways. He liked dinosaurs and fire trucks and the specific genre of superhero media designed for his age group, and he had a best friend at kindergarten named Marcus with whom he had a daily philosophical dispute about whether a hot dog was a sandwich, which they had both separately brought to me for adjudication on multiple occasions and which I had declined to rule on definitively. He ate his vegetables under protest. He had strong feelings about the correct order in which his bedtime story should precede his glass of water and not the other way around.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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