Chapter 11: The Swab

My parents' car turned into the street at the worst possible moment.

I had called my father an hour earlier to say I'd be home late, and he had called my mother, and my mother had cooked.

She got out of the passenger seat with a covered dish in her hands and a stack of mail under her arm.

"Elliot, you didn't answer your door, so we thought..."

She saw Lorna.

Then she saw the boy.

The dish tilted, and my father caught it before it fell.

Sam looked up at her from under his hood.

"Hello," he said politely.

My mother did not answer.

She put the mail on the car roof, crossed the sidewalk, and bent to look at his face.

He held still for her.

She reached out and touched his hair at the back, just above the collar, where it stood up in two swirls.

Her fingers stayed there.

"Oh," she said.

It was the smallest sound I have ever heard her make.

My father had come up beside her with the dish.

He looked at the back of Sam's head, and his hand went to the back of his own, and I watched his big face come apart.

"That's my father's hair," he said hoarsely. "That's mine. That's Elliot's."

"Mom," I said. "Dad. Wait."

"Who is this child?" my mother asked, without turning.

Lorna stepped forward.

"He's Elliot's son," she said.

The street went quiet.

Two women on the next stoop had stopped talking, and a man in a window across the road leaned out.

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