Kyle. What could she say? He’d once been part of her, she’d heard his heart beating at twelve weeks, she’d felt his movements within her the last five months of her pregnancy. After his birth, while still in the delivery room, she took one look at him and couldn’t believe there was anything more beautiful in the world. That feeling hadn’t changed, although she wasn’t in any way a perfect mother. These days she simply did the best job she could, accepting the good with the bad, looking for joys in the little things. With Kyle, they were sometimes hard to find.

She’d done her best to be patient with him over the last four years, but it hadn’t always been easy. Once, while he was still a toddler, she’d momentarily placed her hand over his mouth to quiet him, but he’d been screaming for over five hours after staying awake all night, and tired parents everywhere might find this a forgivable offense. After that, though, she’d done her best to keep her emotions in check. When she felt her frustration rising, she slowly counted to ten before doing anything; when that didn’t work, she left the room to collect herself. Usually it helped, but this was both a blessing and a curse. It was a blessing because she knew that patience was necessary to help him; it was a curse because it made her question her own abilities as a parent.

Kyle had been born four years to the day after her mother had died of a brain aneurysm, and though not usually given to believing in signs, Denise could hardly regard that as a coincidence. Kyle, she felt sure, was a gift from God. Kyle, she knew, had been sent to replace her family. Other than him, she was alone in the world. Her father had died when she was four, she had no siblings, her grandparents on both sides had passed away. Kyle immediately became the sole recipient of the love she had to offer. But fate is strange, fate is unpredictable. Though she showered Kyle with attention, it somehow hadn’t been enough. Now she led a life she hadn’t anticipated, a life where Kyle’s daily progression was carefully logged in a notebook. Now she led a life completely dedicated to her son. Kyle, of course, didn’t complain about the things they did every day. Kyle, unlike other children, never complained about anything. She glanced in the rearview mirror.

“What are you thinking about, sweetie?”

Kyle was watching the rain as it blew against the windows, his head turned sideways. His blanket was in his lap. He hadn’t said anything since he’d been in the car, and he turned at the sound of her voice.

She waited for his response. But there was nothing.

Denise Holton lived in a house that had once been owned by her grandparents. After their deaths it had become her mother’s, then eventually it had passed on to her. It wasn’t much-a small ramshackle building set on three acres, built in the 1920s. The two bedrooms and the living room weren’t too bad, but the kitchen was in dire need of modern appliances and the bathroom didn’t have a shower. At both the front and back of the house the porches were sagging, and without the portable fan she sometimes felt as if she would bake to death, but because she could live there rent-free, it was exactly what she needed. It had been her home for the past three months.

Staying in Atlanta, the place she’d grown up, would have been impossible. Once Kyle was born, she’d used the money her mother had left her to stay at home with him. At the time, she considered it a temporary leave of absence. Once he was a little older, she had planned to go back to teaching. The money, she knew, would run out eventually, and she had to earn a living. Besides, teaching was something she’d loved. She’d missed her students and fellow teachers after her first week away. Now, years later, she was still at home with Kyle and the world of teaching in a school was nothing but a vague and distant memory, something more akin to a dream than a reality. She couldn’t remember a single lesson plan or the names of the students she had taught. If she didn’t know better, she would have sworn that she’d never done it at all.

Youth offers the promise of happiness, but life offers the realities of grief. Her father, her mother, her grandparents-all gone before she turned twenty-one. At that point in her life she’d been to five different funeral homes yet legally couldn’t enter a bar to wash the sorrow away. She’d suffered more than her fair share of challenges, but God, it seemed, couldn’t stop at just that. Like Job’s struggles, hers continued to go on. “Middle-class lifestyle?” Not anymore. “Friends you’ve grown up with?” You must leave them behind. “A job to enjoy?” It is too much to ask. And Kyle, the sweet, wonderful boy for whom all this was done-in many ways he was still a mystery to her.

Instead of teaching she worked the evening shift at a diner called Eights, a busy hangout on the outskirts of Edenton. The owner there, Ray Toler, was a sixty-something black man who’d run the place for thirty years. He and his wife had raised six kids, all of whom went to college. Copies of their diplomas hung along the back wall, and everyone who ate there knew about them. Ray made sure of that. He also liked to talk about Denise. She was the only one, he liked to say, who’d ever handed him a r#233;sum#233; when interviewing for the job.

Ray was a man who understood poverty, a man who understood kindness, a man who understood how hard it was for single mothers. “In the back of the building, there’s a small room,” he’d said when he hired her. “You can bring your son with you, as long as he doesn’t get in the way.” Tears formed in her eyes when he showed it to her. There were two cots, a night-light, a place where Kyle would be safe. The next evening Kyle went to bed in that small room as soon as she started on her shift; hours later she loaded him in the car and took him back home. Since then that routine hadn’t changed.

She worked four nights a week, five hours a shift, earning barely enough to get by. She’d sold her Honda for an old but reliable Datsun two years ago, pocketing the difference. That money, along with everything else from her mother, had long since been spent. She’d become a master of budgeting, a master of cutting corners. She hadn’t bought new clothes for herself since the Christmas before last; though her furniture was decent, they were remnants from another life. She didn’t subscribe to magazines, she didn’t have cable television, her stereo was an old boom box from college. The last movie she’d seen on the silver screen was Schindler’s List. She seldom made long-distance phone calls to her friends. She had $238 in the bank. Her car was nineteen years old, with enough miles on the engine to have circled the world five times.

None of those things mattered, though. Only Kyle was important.

But never once had he told her that he loved her.

On those evenings she didn’t work at the diner, Denise usually sat in the rocking chair on the porch out back, a book across her lap. She enjoyed reading outside, where the rise and fall of chirping crickets was somehow soothing in its monotony. Her home was surrounded by oak and cypress and mockernut hickory trees, all draped heavily in Spanish moss. Sometimes, when the moonlight slanted through them just right, shadows that looked like exotic animals splashed across the gravel walkway.

In Atlanta she used to read for pleasure. Her tastes ran the gamut from Steinbeck and Hemingway to Grisham and King. Though those types of books were available at the local library, she never checked them out anymore. Instead she used the computers near the reading room, which had free access to the Internet. She searched through clinical studies sponsored by major universities, printing the documents whenever she found something relevant. The files she kept had grown to nearly three inches wide.

On the floor beside her chair she had an assortment of psychological textbooks as well. Expensive, they’d made serious dents in her budget. Yet the hope was always there, and after ordering them, she waited anxiously for them to arrive. This time, she liked to think, she would find something that helped.

Once they came, she would sit for hours, studying the information. With the lamp a steady blaze behind her, she perused the information, things she’d usually read before. Still, she didn’t rush. Occasionally she took notes, other times she simply folded the page and highlighted the information. An hour would pass, maybe two, before she’d finally close the book, finished for the night. She’d stand, shaking the stiffness from her joints. After bringing the books to her small desk in the living room, she would check on Kyle, then head back outside.

The gravel walkway led to a path through the trees, eventually to a broken fence that lined her property. She and Kyle would wander that way during the day, she walked it alone at night. Strange noises would filter from everywhere: from above came the screech of an owl; over there, a rustle through the underbrush; off to the side, a skitter along a branch. Coastal breezes moved the leaves, a sound similar to that of the ocean; moonlight drifted in and out. But the path was straight, she knew it well. Past the fence, the forest pressed in around her. More sounds, less light, but still she moved forward. Eventually the darkness became almost stifling. By then she could hear the water; the Chowan River was close. Another grove of trees, a quick turn to the right, and all of a sudden it was as if the world had unfolded itself before her. The river, wide and slow moving, was finally visible. Powerful, eternal, as black as time. She would cross her arms and gaze at it, taking it in, letting the calm it inspired wash over her. She would stay a few minutes, seldom longer, since Kyle was still in the house.

Then she’d sigh and turn from the river, knowing it was time to go.