Keith Donohue_The Stolen Child

Everyone has an unnameable secret too dire to confess to friend or lover, priest or psychiatrist, too entwined at the core to excise without harm. Some people choose to ignore it; others bury it deep and lug it unspoken to the grave. We mask it so well that even the body sometimes forgets the secret ex-ists.

I do not want to lose our child, and I do not want to lose Tess. My fear of being found out as a changeling and rejected by Tess has made a secret of the rest of my life.

After hearing the true story of Gustav, it is no wonder that I remem-bered so little from those days.

I had been locked inside my own mind with music as my only means of self-expression. Had I not been stolen, I would never have lived among the changelings, never had the chance to become Henry Day. And had I not changed places with the boy, I would never have known Tess, never had a child of my own, and never found my way back to this world. In a way, the changelings gave me a second chance, and their reappearance—the break-in at our home, the encounter in California with Edward, the pair dashing across the lawn—was both a threat and a reminder of all that was at stake.

When I had first started seeing the changelings again, I attributed it to the stress of discovering my past. They seemed hallucinations, nightmares, or no more than a figment of my imagination, but then the real creatures showed up and left their signs behind. They were taunting me: an orange peel on the middle of the dining room table; an open bottle of beer on top of the television; cigarette butts burning in the garden. Or things went missing. My chrome-plated piano trophy from the statewide competition.

Photographs, letters, books. I once heard the fridge door slam shut at two in the morning when we were all asleep, went downstairs and found a baked ham half-eaten on the countertop. Furniture that hadn't been moved in ages suddenly ap-peared next to open windows. On Christmas Eve, at my mother's house, the younger children thought they heard reindeer tramping on the roof, and they went outside to investigate. Twenty minutes later, the breathless kids came back in, swearing they had seen two elves hopping away into the woods. An-other time, one of them crawled through a gap no bigger than a rabbit hole under a gate in our backyard. When I went outside to catch it, the creature was gone. They were becoming brazen and relentless, and I wanted only for them to go away and leave me at peace.

Something had to be done about my old friends.