The door was close enough for me to see from my chair.<\/p>\n
I kept looking at it.<\/p>\n
Ramirez had told me Matthew was in the adjoining room.<\/p>\n
I had asked to see him.<\/p>\n
Now I was waiting for that request to become real.<\/p>\n
I did not know what Matthew looked like anymore.<\/p>\n
The boy in the photograph was the Matthew I remembered.<\/p>\n
A child holding a red bucket.<\/p>\n
A child standing in front of Robert.<\/p>\n
A child who had no reason to know that an ordinary day at the beach would become the last day I saw him.<\/p>\n
Eleven years had passed since then.<\/p>\n
I tried to imagine him older.<\/p>\n
I could not do it properly.<\/p>\n
Whenever I thought of his face, I saw the photograph.<\/p>\n
It frightened me to realize how much time had gone by.<\/p>\n
Matthew had been living somewhere beyond my knowledge.<\/p>\n
I did not know what those years had been like for him.<\/p>\n
I did not know what he remembered.<\/p>\n
I did not know whether he had thought about me.<\/p>\n
Those questions made me want to reach the next room even more.<\/p>\n
I looked at Ramirez again.<\/p>\n
He had said Matthew was there.<\/p>\n
I wanted to hear him repeat it.<\/p>\n
But I had already asked for what I needed.<\/p>\n
I did not want to delay.<\/p>\n
My thoughts went back to the day at the beach.<\/p>\n
I remembered leaving Matthew with Robert.<\/p>\n
I remembered the reassurance.<\/p>\n
I remembered going upstairs.<\/p>\n
I remembered coming down into confusion.<\/p>\n
There had been a point that day when I still believed Matthew would be found quickly.<\/p>\n
I had not known then how many years I would spend without him.<\/p>\n
I had not known I would come to believe the ocean had taken him.<\/p>\n
I had not known I would eventually sit across from Ramirez with an old photograph between us.<\/p>\n
I had not known Robert's position near the pool would return to my mind with such force.<\/p>\n
But it had.<\/p>\n
The memory was there now.<\/p>\n
I could not make it disappear simply by turning my attention to Matthew.<\/p>\n
I wondered whether Robert had known more than I thought.<\/p>\n
I wondered why he had watched instead of joining the search.<\/p>\n
I wondered how differently I might have remembered that day if I had questioned him.<\/p>\n
But I stopped myself.<\/p>\n
I did not have answers.<\/p>\n
I had a memory.<\/p>\n
I had a photograph.<\/p>\n
And I had Ramirez's statement that my son was nearby.<\/p>\n
Those were the only things I could honestly rely on.<\/p>\n
I looked at Matthew's red bucket one more time.<\/p>\n
It was such a small object.<\/p>\n
For years, it had belonged to the last day I remembered clearly.<\/p>\n
Now it was lying in a photograph that had brought me to the edge of seeing my son again.<\/p>\n
I wanted to put the picture down.<\/p>\n
I wanted to stop looking backward.<\/p>\n
I wanted to walk toward the person Matthew had become.<\/p>\n
I tried to imagine speaking to him.<\/p>\n
Would I recognize his voice?<\/p>\n
Would he know mine?<\/p>\n
Would he call me Dad?<\/p>\n
I had no way of knowing.<\/p>\n
I had spent so long believing he was lost that I had never learned how to prepare for his return.<\/p>\n
I understood something then.<\/p>\n
Finding Matthew would not return the eleven years that had passed.<\/p>\n
Nothing could give us those years back.<\/p>\n
He would no longer be the little boy in the photograph.<\/p>\n
I would not be the father who had walked upstairs to check on an excursion.<\/p>\n
We would have to meet as we were.<\/p>\n
That thought frightened me almost as much as the possibility of never seeing him again.<\/p>\n
But it did not change what I wanted.<\/p>\n
I wanted my son.<\/p>\n
I wanted to stand in the same room as him.<\/p>\n
I wanted to know, without relying on anyone else's words, that he was alive.<\/p>\n
The questions about Robert could remain unanswered for another moment.<\/p>\n
The memory of the pool could wait.<\/p>\n
The photograph could stay on the table.<\/p>\n
For the first time in eleven years, there was somewhere I could go to see Matthew.<\/p>\n
I turned my attention fully to Ramirez.<\/p>\n
I was ready to be taken to him.<\/p>\n
The door was close enough for me to see from my chair. I kept looking at it. Ramirez had told me Matthew was in the adjoining room. I had asked … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37200,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-insightdrama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37204"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37224,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37204\/revisions\/37224"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/37200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}