Learning to Swim Read Online Free PDF Page A

she had been the one who had driven them into a lake to drown. If I saw a tearful news clip, would I be able to tell if that person was telling the truth?
    I didn’t know.
    I shook some food into Tiger’s bowl and climbed back upstairs. The boy was still sleeping. I sat at my computer and opened my browser.
    If this child had been snatched by someone and dumped, the story would be all over the news, and it would be safe to let him go home. I should have checked last night, but my brain simply hadn’t been working. I’d be guilty of letting his parents endure a sleepless night, but I could trot out the
too tired, too cold, too confused
excuse. Which would be true.
    Tiger climbed the stairs and wandered into the bedroom, and the bed creaked as she jumped on it. She was staying close to the boy.
    I pulled up Google and searched
missing boy Vermont
and
kidnapped boy Paul
, then a variety of combinations. I found a depressing 2006 story of a mother who had drowned her eight-year-old son in Lake Champlain near the Canadian border, but that was all. The Burlington newspaper had nothing, but I emailed the news desk asking if they’d had any report of a missing French-speaking boy, using my anonymous eBay email address. Montreal was less than a hundred miles from Burlington, so I checked the newspaper there. Nothing. If frantic parents were pleading for the return of a beloved child, I couldn’t find them.
    I Googled
missing children
, then searched MissingKids.com. I found the missing children’s website for the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and entered Paul’s name, gender, and eye and hair color.
Records found: 0
. I searched again, using no parameters other than gender, and came up only with two brothers, neither of whom resembled Paul in the slightest.
    Then I looked up the Lake Champlain ferry website, and from the schedule saw that Paul’s ferry should have passed mine roughly midway in the lake, not a mile or two from shore. Maybe mine had been late or his early, or both—but otherwise, I never would have seen him fall. Five minutes earlier or later, and one small boy would have drowned.
    I’d been hearing small noises from my bedroom, as if the boy was moving around. I went to the doorway, and it took a moment toregister that the bed was empty. No boy, no dog. For a moment I couldn’t breathe. I saw the window was open a few inches, just as I’d left it. For a split second I wondered if they could have crept past me while I had been engrossed in my research, but even I’m not that oblivious. Boy and dog had to be somewhere in the room, and there were only two options: under the bed or in the closet. My eyes went to the bedside table where we’d left the half-eaten piece of pizza. Okay, missing boy, missing dog, missing half slice of pizza.
    “Paul,” I called out softly. “Paul, where are you?
Où es-tu?
”
    A whine from Tiger. I eased back the hanging sheet that served as a closet door, and there was Paul crouched in the corner, one arm around Tiger, his other hand gripping the gnawed pizza slice—looking as if it were perfectly normal to hide in a closet with a dog and a piece of pizza. I knelt, a careful distance away. “Good morning, Paul,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “Would you like some breakfast?
Veux-tu prendre le petit déjeuner?
”
    He shifted but seemed unsure what to do. I snapped my fingers and Tiger obediently came toward me. “Did something frighten you?” I asked Paul.
“Tu as peur?”
No answer. “Paul, sweetie, come on out,” I said, opening my arms and letting a little emotion into my voice.
    He wouldn’t look at me, and I waited a long, long moment. Finally he moved into my arms. I could feel the frailty of his limbs; I could feel his heart beating; I could almost feel his fear and confusion and loneliness. I hadn’t known you could form an attachment to a person so quickly, so atavistically. Had my sisters experienced this when their children were born? I