Stolen Child

Chapter One

I turned my nose up at the offer of tea and I hated everyone in the room. Especially Mom who was sitting on the ugly floral couch in the corner with Aunt Maggie having the chats, as they called it. All I wanted was to go back home to America, to see my friends. But we were only a week into our month - long holiday, as they called it, so I slumped in my seat and wished I was dead.

My seat being a rocking chair with pale pink cushions. I swore a cloud of dust erupted out of it when I sat. Everything in Aunt Maggie's house (and probably every other house in Belclare) was like that. The carpet here was mottled, thin, and dirty because everyone wore their shoes in the house. The air was cold and damp. Outside it reeked of turf fire. Every house in Ireland must have been burning one, including the one that crackled in the fireplace of Aunt Maggie's den. It was the only bit of comfort in the room since the heat was turned on just once during the day: an hour in the morning to get the chill out. But that never seemed to work.

I crossed my arms and put my head halfway in my hooded sweatshirt like a turtle as I tried not to think of the cold. There was a wooden clothes rack in the corner with socks still slung over the rungs. Aunt Maggie had been ironing the damp out of their clothes that morning and I couldn't fathom why they wouldn't just buy a clothes dryer to save themselves the trouble. Too bad there wasn't a way to iron the damp out of me.

"Why are you moping, Isaac?" Mom asked. Her grip on the ceramic mug was white-knuckled and her jaw was clenched as it had been in the months since Dad's diagnosis.

"I'm not moping, I'm cold," I said.

"Have a cuppa," Aunt Maggie offered again.

"No thanks."

"Then go out and play with the others. We're not here to mind ye."

"It's too cold!" I argued. Mom wasn't having it. She glared at me with her eyebrows doing that scrunch - together thing they always did when she was angry. I took the hint and heaved my dead weight out of the chair as if it was the most difficult thing on planet earth for me to manage.

Two of my cousins and my sister were outside that morning, playing in the yard that backed up to a damp boggy area. I stepped onto the patio that was the home of countless potted plants of some kind or another. Out of nowhere, something whooshed by my head and struck a hanging planter. There was a shatter and a rain of dirt and terra cotta shards as the pot broke. A hurling ball, a sliotar, as they called it, rolled across the patio and stopped right beside my foot.

Evan and Mary, twins who were eight years old, were both standing in the yard with grins on their dumb-looking faces. Evan's was obscured by the facemask of a hurling helmet and both were holding wooden hurleys. I reached down, grabbed the ball, and pitched it at them as hard as I could. They scattered in a fit of giggling.

"Your mom is going to kill you for breaking her plant!" I shouted after them.

"Will not!" Mary said, "we break 'em all the time!"

That may have been true. Aunt Maggie's motto seemed to be: "it's not the end of the world!" She probably wouldn't have cared. I slumped down on the concrete patio and picked at some of the grass that was growing in one of the cracks. Why did Mom and Aunt Maggie have to lump me in with these little kids? I was older than all of them. Twelve and seven months to be exact. That should've been enough to earn me a place in the den with the adults.

I couldn't wait to be home and away from this place with its horrible weather and the light switch on the outside of the bathroom. Evan turned it off while I was in there taking a shower the night before. Who puts a light switch on the outside? In any case, I was glad I didn't grow up here and at least had a home in Minnesota to go back to.