the home they’d shared would haunt him. But that little voice in my head asked,
How could you abandon it so quickly? Wouldn’t you want to stay in the home you’d shared, on the tiny chance they would return someday?
Unless, of course, you knew they wouldn’t.
In Nashville in the late 1990s, a lawyer named Perry March had killed his wife, apparently after she threatened to divorce him and take their two small children. He got away with it for a decade, until his father confessed to helping him dump the body. And in a notorious Washington, D.C., case I’d read about, a former Motown recording engineer had his ex-wife and disabled son killed, along with the son’s nurse, so he would get the child’s huge trust fund. The killer apparently consulted a how-to book called
Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors
. The surviving family sued the publishers, who lost.
Paul had turned to a new page in the coloring book and begun filling in the characters in bright colors. He was a neat crayoner, staying carefully inside the lines.
I couldn’t locate a home address for Philippe Dumond in Ottawa or suburbs, but found an address for the downtown business, with phone and fax numbers. For one insane moment I thought of sending a fax:
Dear Mr. Dumond: Are you missing someone?
I flicked off the computer and moved to the sofa. I admired the pages Paul had colored, and read
Harold and the Purple Crayon
to him. Which he liked so much we did it twice more. Fortunately, it’s a short book.
I’d almost forgotten about the play I was due to review that evening for the newspaper. I usually ask Baker or Kate along, but tonight I’d take Paul.
I ran a bath for him, setting out clean clothes from the ones Baker had loaned us. His own had dried, but they were too small, and I didn’t want to put him back in them, anyway. When he emerged from the tub, his wet hair was hanging down past his eyes, several inches too long.
Time for a trim, I thought. I draped a towel around Paul’s shoulders and perched him on the edge of my desk, explaining with a combination of French, English, and gestures that I wanted to
couper
his
cheveux
with my
ciseaux
. I’ve been cutting friends’ hair since high school—nothing fancy, but I can do a decent simple cut. He seemed agreeable, so I got out scissors and comb.
His hair was full and straight, but long and uneven. I combed and snipped and layered, and when I finished, his face didn’t seem as thin and he didn’t quite have that abandoned, neglected look. “Very nice.
C’est beau,
” I told him, and he smiled shyly. He hopped down and without prompting held the dustpan as I swept up the hair. Someone had trained him to do this, which didn’t seem to fit with being a child someone would throw away, a child wearing too-small clothes that were gray from wear.
On the way to Saranac Lake we zoomed through the McDonald’s drive-through, which I disapprove of on several counts. Fast food and drive-throughs seem to represent a lot that’s wrong with this country: fatty, salty, cheap food delivered while you sit in your fossil-fuel-wasting, pollutant-spewing vehicle. But it wouldn’t kill me to doit once. I hesitated before ordering a Happy Meal for Paul, not wanting to remind him of the ones he’d gotten in captivity. But he seemed pleased with the brightly colored carton and cheap toy, and not at all traumatized.
Damn
. Damn damn damn. Time to shut off my brain.
Going to the theater that evening was probably the best thing we could have done. It was a Larry Shue play called
The Foreigner
, by a local theater group founded by a couple who had left Off-Broadway. The play features a timid Englishman stuck in a lodge in Georgia for three days, introduced as a foreigner who knows no English. I wouldn’t have thought we could have laughed so hard. I’m not sure how much Paul understood, but the exaggerated dialects and facial expressions required no translation. Or maybe it was just
How could you abandon it so quickly? Wouldn’t you want to stay in the home you’d shared, on the tiny chance they would return someday?
Unless, of course, you knew they wouldn’t.
In Nashville in the late 1990s, a lawyer named Perry March had killed his wife, apparently after she threatened to divorce him and take their two small children. He got away with it for a decade, until his father confessed to helping him dump the body. And in a notorious Washington, D.C., case I’d read about, a former Motown recording engineer had his ex-wife and disabled son killed, along with the son’s nurse, so he would get the child’s huge trust fund. The killer apparently consulted a how-to book called
Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors
. The surviving family sued the publishers, who lost.
Paul had turned to a new page in the coloring book and begun filling in the characters in bright colors. He was a neat crayoner, staying carefully inside the lines.
I couldn’t locate a home address for Philippe Dumond in Ottawa or suburbs, but found an address for the downtown business, with phone and fax numbers. For one insane moment I thought of sending a fax:
Dear Mr. Dumond: Are you missing someone?
I flicked off the computer and moved to the sofa. I admired the pages Paul had colored, and read
Harold and the Purple Crayon
to him. Which he liked so much we did it twice more. Fortunately, it’s a short book.
I’d almost forgotten about the play I was due to review that evening for the newspaper. I usually ask Baker or Kate along, but tonight I’d take Paul.
I ran a bath for him, setting out clean clothes from the ones Baker had loaned us. His own had dried, but they were too small, and I didn’t want to put him back in them, anyway. When he emerged from the tub, his wet hair was hanging down past his eyes, several inches too long.
Time for a trim, I thought. I draped a towel around Paul’s shoulders and perched him on the edge of my desk, explaining with a combination of French, English, and gestures that I wanted to
couper
his
cheveux
with my
ciseaux
. I’ve been cutting friends’ hair since high school—nothing fancy, but I can do a decent simple cut. He seemed agreeable, so I got out scissors and comb.
His hair was full and straight, but long and uneven. I combed and snipped and layered, and when I finished, his face didn’t seem as thin and he didn’t quite have that abandoned, neglected look. “Very nice.
C’est beau,
” I told him, and he smiled shyly. He hopped down and without prompting held the dustpan as I swept up the hair. Someone had trained him to do this, which didn’t seem to fit with being a child someone would throw away, a child wearing too-small clothes that were gray from wear.
On the way to Saranac Lake we zoomed through the McDonald’s drive-through, which I disapprove of on several counts. Fast food and drive-throughs seem to represent a lot that’s wrong with this country: fatty, salty, cheap food delivered while you sit in your fossil-fuel-wasting, pollutant-spewing vehicle. But it wouldn’t kill me to doit once. I hesitated before ordering a Happy Meal for Paul, not wanting to remind him of the ones he’d gotten in captivity. But he seemed pleased with the brightly colored carton and cheap toy, and not at all traumatized.
Damn
. Damn damn damn. Time to shut off my brain.
Going to the theater that evening was probably the best thing we could have done. It was a Larry Shue play called
The Foreigner
, by a local theater group founded by a couple who had left Off-Broadway. The play features a timid Englishman stuck in a lodge in Georgia for three days, introduced as a foreigner who knows no English. I wouldn’t have thought we could have laughed so hard. I’m not sure how much Paul understood, but the exaggerated dialects and facial expressions required no translation. Or maybe it was just
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