Near the playground, the harbour gleamed, shaped like a three-sided square, lined with bustling cafés and speciality shops.
Tommy wriggled and teetered dangerously on Luke’s shoulders. He had no fear of falling. The only thought in his two-year-old head was down.
Luke put him on the ground and allowed him to run ahead. For a while, Tommy kept stopping and checking that we were still behind him. But when he spotted the first of the water play areas, he was off like a rocket. He was such a water baby. The water canals were his favourite. They were a series of interconnecting canals, only as wide as my forearm, and with no more than a few inches of water in them, but to Tommy they were as exciting as the ocean—more, because he could manipulate the tiny gates, raising and lowering the canals’ water levels.
Squatting near a canal, he zoomed his plastic yacht backwards and forwards in the water like it was a race car. He didn’t understand yet that boats were supposed to sail.
“Where are you headed today, Captain?” I asked him.
The sun turned his eyes a golden colour. “To Dizzy.”
Dizzy was his word for Disneyland. He’d seen an ad for it on TV once, and he’d asked to go there. I’d told him it was a long, long way away across the ocean but maybe we’d go there one day.
“Aye aye, Captain. All aboard for Dizzy.” I sat beside him, slipping off my shoes and letting the cool water run over my toes.
He gave a toddlerish shout of approval, his small face creasing then as he turned his attention to the complications of managing the ebb and flow of water through the canals.
Luke’s phone rang—it was his mother. I could tell by the sudden change in his tone. Even though she was staying with us, she called him several times a day.
“Tommy, do you want an ice-cream?” Luke said as soon as he’d finished the call.
Tommy thought for a second, his chubby fist tightening on the boat, then shook his head.
“Okay, well, I’m going to get one.” Luke dropped the phone back into his shirt pocket.
I shielded my eyes from the sun. “Just get one scoop in Tommy’s.”
“He just said he didn’t want one.”
“He thinks he’ll have to leave the water to get ice-cream. Of course he wants one.”
Luke laughed his booming laugh, shaking his head at Tommy’s toddler logic. His voice carried, and people glanced at us, smiling. Luke always laughed easily. It was one of the things I loved about him, about us. His easy-going nature had become so intertwined with me, I could take credit for it and bask in it.
A couple of mothers nearby gave their children grabby hugs and kisses on their foreheads. Luke’s feel-good nature was infectious. As he strolled away, the mothers watched him, but I watched them. They wore long cargo shorts and long pastel T-shirts and pastel hats. Their husbands were dressed in the same outfits as their tiny sons. They were nothing like Luke and I, in their pastel tutti-frutti. We were the café set in our greys and blacks and neutrals.
But as I watched the tutti-fruttis, something was wrong. A sadness crept inside me that I didn’t understand, draining the saturation from the day and giving a leaden quality to the air. Like something had just been snatched away from me.
No, that’s not right. I imagined I felt that way.
I was a trained actor, and actors sometimes slipped into roles without realising what they were doing. （Okay, so I’d only sometimes been a paid actor, but it had still been my profession.） I blinked as I turned back to the water canals, adjusting my eyes to the sun’s sudden glare as the day turned from grey to yellow again.
Tommy wasn’t in the same spot.
My stomach dropped, as it had a hundred times before when I’d momentarily lost sight of him. He moved like his feet were on wheels. But he was never too far away.
I raked my gaze along the snaking paths of the canals.
He wasn’t anywhere.
Jumping to my feet, I padded around the edges of the water park, searching. Having no idea which direction to head in, I looked for clues as to what had caused him to wander off. It’d have to be something pretty damned compelling to tear him away from the water. Some other kid’s toy? A puppy?
“Tommy,” I called.
There must have been a worried edge to my voice—one of the T-shirted mothers looked my way with sympathetic eyes.
“Tommy! Daddy’s got your ice-cream!” If he was accidentally-on-purpose ignoring me, that would make him come running.
But Tommy didn’t produce himself. How could he be so far away that he was out of earshot? I only looked away from him for a moment. Didn’t I? Didn’t I?