Page 72 of Whale Harbor

“Just leave it,” Mac said.

Something crucial had changed for Mac ever since it sank in that Rian was no longer a nine-year-old boy and that he could have found Mac all this time. It began as a small thing, a tiny shift in perspective, but then it grew and the tiny shift turned into a bigger one, and next thing the whole story had a different tone. Five or ten years of silence was one thing. Almost forty years was something else. He felt guilty for so long, but then one day he realized Rian was an adult too. He had a whole life, just like Mac did. At that moment, Rian was walking around as a forty-eight-year-old man. And if a forty-eight-year-old man couldn’t see what that time had been like for the sixteen-year-old boy Mac had been, then Mac had nothing to say to him.

“But,” Mary said, when Mac told her an abbreviated version of his thoughts along these lines, “why are you deciding what he thinks without seeing him? You don’t know. There could be a million different reasons why he hasn’t been in touch.”

“Like what?”

“Well,” Mary said. “We don’t know what we don’t know. Maybe he’s embarrassed about something. Or maybe it’s just one of those things. You wait a little too long and it feels awkward and next thing it’s even longer and so it’s even more awkward and so on and next thing you think—does this person even remember me?”

“Of course I remember him.”

“No, not literally remember him.” Mary sighed. She was driving again, and Mac had extended the passenger seat all the way back so he was almost lying flat.

“Why don’t—”

“Mary. Stop talking.”

She was silent for two entire exits.

“Can I tell Bridget and Annie?”

“No.”

Another exit, traffic picking up on I-95.

“Can I tell Frankie?”

“No.”

“All right,” she said. “But let’s do some real thinking about this, Dad. I’m serious.”

Once they were home, after he’d had a shower and iced his back, Mac caught her in the kitchen before she went out to meet up with friends. “Mary,” he said. Lillie was on the phone. “Just—” But he couldn’t say not to tell anyone, that felt like a betrayal of Lillie.

“I know,” she said and made a zipping motion across her lips.

THIRTEEN

Martin couldn’t help it. Even if Mac didn’t want to know, Martin had to find out for himself. That time was hardest on the Joyces, no doubt about it, but the Lees had wondered and worried, too, and there was a time when all Honnie’s letters to Montana contained was news of where else they’d searched for Rian Joyce and not found him. Even just for the sake of his mother’s memory, Martin said, he had to know.

The number was linked to a house in the old miners’ village on the edge of Butte. It was one of the original houses built when all the pits were open and active and that used to be two apartments and one shared bathroom for two families. Over time these had been converted to compact single-family houses. The neighborhood had the feel of an army barracks, row after neat row of identical homes. Some were careworn—chipped paint, empty Blue Rhino gas canisters strewn about the yard, sagging chain-link fences. But some showed the optimism of their occupants—flower boxes and cheerful seasonal wreaths. The house attached to the address Rian left at the bar was a combination. The cement steps were cracked, but there was a string of lights along the low brow of the roofline and a bright blue planter beside the front door. There were no flowers in the planter but it might be those would come; winter lasted longer in Montana. Martin didn’t have the nerve to knock on the door, so he waited in his car until this Coleman Walsh appeared. But before Martin could get out of his car, the man slipped into his own car and next thing he was driving up the street. So Martin followed him.

“Oh god,” Mac said.

“I know, but wait until you hear,” Martin said.

“You’re sure it was him?”

“Absolutely certain. I told myself it might be a wild goose chase but then I saw his face. Even the way he walks, the set of his shoulders, something about him is so like the rest of you. As soon as he came out of the house I had no doubt.”

“But—”

“Will you let me tell the story?”

Rian went first to a diner, sat by himself at the counter and had a plate of eggs and home fries. Then he walked over to a library about a block and a half away.

“How in the world do you know what he ordered? Did you go in and sit?”

“Stop interrupting, Macdara. I saw from my car.”