Ellen lingered on the threshold to Will's room, lost in her thoughts. She couldn't work any longer, not after what she'd learned, or what she thought she'd learned. She could barely give it voice inside her own head, but she couldn't ignore it, either.
Is Will really Timothy?
She tasted bile and Colgate on her teeth and sagged against the doorjamb, willing her brain to function. Tried to reason it out and spot any failures of logic.
Begin at the beginning. Remain calm.
Ellen thought a minute, trying to articulate the scenario she feared. If the composite matched the photo of the man on the beach, then Beach Man was the carjacker. He had shot Carol Braverman's nanny. Kidnapped W. Taken the ransom money but kept the child. He had a girlfriend who pretended to be the baby's mother. Amy Martin.
Why not kill the baby right after the kidnapping?
Ellen shuddered, but she could guess at some answers. Amy wanted a baby and couldn't have one. Or they thought they could sell the baby on the black market. She folded her arms against her chest, hugging herself, and picked up the narrative in her mind, detecting another fallacy.
Why give him up for adoption?
That answer, Ellen knew for sure. Because he got sick. Will had a heart problem no one knew about. At least she assumed as much, because the Braverman site didn't mention that Timothy had any heart problems. The doctors at Dupont Hospital had told her that his murmur had gone undetected, which wasn't unusual. Will would have failed to thrive. He wouldn't eat well and he'd have been sickly. That would have overwhelmed Amy, even her mother said so, and it would have made it too risky to keep him. Too many blood tests, forms, and questions that could show Amy wasn't the mother and the boyfriend the father.
So what do they do next?
Ellen composed it like a nightmare news story. They'd take the baby to a hospital far from Miami, back to where Amy had grown up. They'd essentially abandon the baby in the hospital, and then a solution would come, in the form of a nice lady reporter, who falls in love with the baby. She adopts the baby and takes him home, where he sleeps under a sky of ersatz stars.
My God.
Ellen let her gaze wander around Will's bedroom, over the shadows of Tonka trucks and Legos, over shelves of skinny books and Candy Land and plush bears and bunnies, their soft pastels reduced to shades of gray. The window shade was up, and outside the sky was oddly bright, the world aglow with a new snowfall that insulated the house like a sheet of practical cotton, keeping her and Will safe inside.
"Mommy?" he asked sleepily, from the bed.
Ellen wiped her eyes, padded over to the bed, and leaned over Will, brushing his bangs from his forehead in the light from the doorway. "Sorry I woke you."
"Are you home?"
"Yes, it's night and I'm home."
"Connie says you have to work hard."
"I do, but I'm home now." Ellen swallowed the knot in her throat, but she had a feeling it would only travel down to her chest and cause a heart attack, or maybe she'd just spontaneously combust. She eased onto the guardrail and tried to regain her composure. "Sorry I forgot your crazy shirt."
"It's okay, Mommy."
Ellen's eyes welled up. She reached down and stroked his cheek. "You're the best kid in the world, do you know that?"
"You brushed your teeth."
"I did." Ellen was uncomfortable, sitting on the guardrail. "I hate this guardrail. I'm taking it off." She stood up and began to slide the wooden rail from the bed, jiggling the frame.
"I won't fall out, Mommy."
"I know that. You're too smart to fall out of your own bed." Ellen jiggled one last time and finally wrenched the guardrail from the bed. "Sorry."
Will giggled.
"Stupid guardrail."
"Stupid guardrail!"
"See ya, guardrail." Ellen took the guardrail to the other side of the room and set it on the floor. "Wouldn't wanna be ya."
Will giggled again.
Ellen came back to the bed, where she could see Will wriggling in his bed. "Are you being a wiggle worm?"
"lam!"
"I'm coming in. We're having a slumber party."
"What's that?" Will scissored his legs.
"It's people having a party when they should be sleeping." Ellen eased onto the skinny bed, on her side. "Scoot over, wigglehead."
"Okay." Will edged backwards, and Ellen reached for him and wrapped him up in her arms. She didn't want to think about Amy Martin and the Bravermans anymore. She wanted to be where she was, right this moment, holding her son close.
"How's that feel? Good?"
Will hugged her back. "I made a snowball."
"You did? Cool."
"It's on the porch, did you see?"
"No." Ellen gave him a squeeze. "It'll be there tomorrow. I'll look at it in the morning, first thing."
"Do you have to go to work tomorrow?"
"Yes." Ellen didn't know what would happen at work tomorrow, with her story unfinished. Right now, she didn't care.
"I hate work."
"I know, sweetie. I'm sorry I have to work."
"Why do you?"
Ellen had answered this more times than she could count, but she knew it wasn't a real question. "I work so we have all the things we need."
Will yawned.
"Maybe we should settle down and go to sleep. Party's over, and slumber is beginning."
"I won't fall out," Will said again, and Ellen hugged him close.
"Don't worry. You won't fall out. I'm here to catch you."
"Good night."
"I love you, sweetie. Good night." Ellen cuddled him, and in the next minute, she could feel his body drifting back to sleep. She caught herself beginning to cry and willed herself to stop. If she went that way, she'd never come back, and this wasn't the time or the place anyway.
Flip it.
She really couldn't be sure that Beach Man was the carjacker. A tracing couldn't tell anything with accuracy, and composites were based only on a verbal description. Lots of men had narrow eyes and long noses. If the composite was too unreliable to prove that the carjacker was Beach Man, then there was no link between Will and Timothy.
Ellen smiled in the dark, feeling a tiny bit better. Maybe Amy would email her, tell her the story of Will's birth, and explain why she'd put him up for adoption.
Will shifted in his sleep, and she snuggled him. She couldn't resolve tonight whether her fears were founded or completely insane. But behind them lurked an unspoken question, one that she couldn't begin to acknowledge, much less articulate to herself. It had been lurking in the back of her mind from the moment she'd seen the infernal white card in the mail.
She hugged Will closer, there in the still, dark room, and the question hung in the air above the bed, suspended somewhere between mother, child, and the false stars.
If Will is really Timothy, what will I do?