They left for London on the second Friday in July, on the late flight.
The car was packed by eight. The two big gray suitcases and Caleb’s green stegosaurus bag, which he had insisted on, and which had a flashlight in an inside pocket that nobody mentioned. Danielle was inside on the phone with her mother, who had been ringing every hour since noon to ask if they had remembered their adaptors. Caleb was asleep in the back seat already, in shorts and a T-shirt, with his seat belt on and the blue leather passport wallet clutched against his chest in both arms. He had asked to carry it. Danielle had looked at Marcus, and Marcus had nodded, and Caleb had held it all the way through dinner and up the stairs and down again and out to the car, and had fallen asleep holding it, the way the old women at church held their Bibles.
Marcus stood alone in the driveway in the warm dark.
The sprinklers were ticking in the Halvorsens’ yard. A television flickered behind a curtain somewhere. The cul-de-sac looked exactly as it had on a night in September, the same streetlights, the same lawns, the same dark mouth of the road where it met Ridley Lake Road and went on out into the world, and he stood on the concrete at the spot, almost exactly the spot, where his son had come running out of the house barefoot and thrown himself against his hip.
He had thought about that moment more than any other in the months since. Not the kitchen. Not the welts, not his mother’s face, not the hood of a car on Avenue J. That moment, in the driveway, with the passport wallet. Dad! Please don’t let Mom take me! For a long time he had heard it as an accusation, against Danielle, or against himself, or against the whole frightened, failing world. It was only lately, standing here at night when he could not sleep, that he had begun to hear it differently. His son had not been running away from anything. He had been running toward something. He had seen the headlights turn into the driveway and he had run, barefoot, eight years old, with his legs striped and his arms bruised and a secret he had been told to keep, straight toward his father, because he believed—he simply believed—that his father would make it stop.
Marcus had not known, until that moment, that anyone believed that about him. He did not know, even now, whether he had earned it. He only knew that he meant to spend the rest of his life trying.
The front door opened behind him. Danielle came down the walk and stood next to him. She leaned her head against his shoulder.
"Mum says don’t forget the adaptors," she said.