Today, all around her people were laughing, talking. Dogs were barking, jumping up to catch Frisbees. Teenage boys threw footballs back and forth.
“Look!” MJ said, pointing up at the pink Congratulations Graduate! balloon bobbing at the end of a yellow streamer. He had a half-eaten cupcake in one hand and wore a goatee of frosting.
Leni knew he was growing up fast （a first-grader now）， so she had to snuggle and kiss him while he still allowed it. She scooped him into her arms. He gave her a sweaty, buttercream kiss and hugged her in that way of his, all in, arms thrown around her neck as if he would drown without her. The truth was that she would drown without him.
“Who else is ready for dessert?” Grandma Golliher said from her place by the picnic table. She had just finished setting out Leni’s favorite dessert: akutaq. Eskimo ice cream made of snow, Crisco, blueberries, and sugar. Mama had saved clumps of winter snow in the freezer, just for this.
MJ sprang free, hands raised triumphantly （both hands, just to be sure he was seen）。 “Me! I want akutaq!”
Grandma came around the picnic table and stood beside Leni. Grandma had changed a lot in the past few years, softened, although she still dressed for the country club even on a picnic.
“I’m so proud of you, Leni,” Grandma said.
“I’m proud of me, too.”
“My friend Sondra from the club. She says there’s an opening for a photographer’s assistant at Sunset magazine. Should I have her make a call on behalf of Susan Grant?”
“Yeah,” Leni said. “I mean, yes, please.” She could never quite adjust to the way things were done down here. Life seemed to reward who you knew more than what you could do.
One thing she knew, though: she was loved. Grandma and Grandpa had welcomed them from the beginning. For the past few years, Leni and Mama and MJ had lived in a small rental home in Fremont and visited her grandparents on weekends. At first they’d been on guard constantly, afraid to make friends or talk to strangers, but in time, the Alaska police had stopped looking for them and the threat of discovery had faded into the background of their lives.
MJ made so much noise and had so much energy that the staid house on Queen Anne Hill had become a boisterous place. On their nights together, they gathered around the television to watch shows that made no sense to Leni. （She read, instead; she was on her third consecutive read of Interview with the Vampire.） MJ was the wheel; they were the spokes. Love for him united them. As long as MJ was happy, they were happy. And he was a very happy child. People remarked on it all the time.
Leni saw her mother, standing off by herself at the edge of the playground, smoking, a hand splayed across her lower back in a way that looked unnatural.
In profile, Leni could see how sharp her mother’s cheekbones were, how colorless her lips, how thin her face was. As usual, she wore no makeup and she was almost translucent. She had stopped dyeing her hair a year ago; now it was a washed out, gray-threaded blond.
“I want akutaq!” MJ yelled, tugging on Leni’s sleeve. His voice was sluggish from the stuffiness of his latest cold. Ever since he started at the private school near the house, he—and all of them, really—had battled colds.
“And how do we ask for that?” Leni asked.
“Pleeeease,” MJ said.
“Okay. Go get Grandma. Tell her to put out the dang cigarette and come to the table.”
He was off like a shot, scrawny white legs moving like egg beaters, his blond hair streaming back from his pale, pointed face.
Leni watched him drag Mama back to the picnic table, her face flushed with laughter.
Leni glanced sideways, turning her attention away for just a moment. She saw a man standing near the entrance gate to this public park. Blond hair.
It was him.
He’d found her.
No.
Leni sighed. She hadn’t called the rehabilitation center in years. She’d picked up the phone often but never dialed. It didn’t matter that the threat of discovery had lessened; it still existed. Besides, when she had called, all those years ago, his condition had always been the same: No change.
She knew he’d been irreparably damaged by the fall and that the boy she loved lived only in her dreams. Sometimes, at night, he whispered to her in her sleep, not always, not even often, but enough to sustain her. In her dreams, he was still the smiling boy who’d given her a camera and taught her that not all love was scary.
“Come on,” Grandma said, taking Leni by the arm.
“This is great,” Leni said. The words felt wooden at first. Perfunctory. But when MJ shot up and started clapping and yelled, “Yay, Mommy!” in that Mickey Mouse voice of his, she couldn’t help smiling.