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1.
The eyes. His eyes. What was human is gone from them.
What was ours is gone from them.
Where?
2.
THE CHILD WAS SIX YEARS, three months old when what happened to him, happened.
Derek was healthy, big-boned and inclined to fleshiness, with a soft-rubbery feel to his fair skin that had given him the look, when younger, of a large, animated doll. His hair was silky brown and his moist warm brown eyes blinked frequently. His smile was sweet, tentative. He'd been named Derek (for his mother's nowdeceased father) which didn't at all suit him, so his parents began calling him "Derrie" from the start - "Derrie-darling" "Derrie-berry," "Derriesweet." He had the petted, slightly febrile look of an only child whose development, weekly, if not daily, is being lovingly recorded in a series of albums. Yet, surprisingly, he wasn't at all spoiled. His mother had had several miscarriages preceding his birth and by the age of thirty-nine when he was finally born, she joked of being physically exhausted, emptied out, "eviscerated." It was a startling, extreme figure of speech but she spoke with a wan smile, not in complaint so much as in simple admission; and her husband kissed and comforted her as they lay together in their bed by lamplight, reluctant to switch off the light because then they wouldn't be able to see their baby sleeping peacefully in his crib close by. "God, yes, I feel the same way," her husband said. "Our one big beautiful baby is more than enough, isn't he?"
And so, for more than six years, he was. 3.
If he would see me again. If his eyes would see me.
If he would recognize me: I am your child, born of your body, of the love of you and Daddy.
If he would tell me: Mommy, I love you!
They were devoted parents, not-young but certainly youthful, vigorous. They were Kate and Stephen Knight and they lived in the Village of Hudson Ridge, an hour's drive north from New York City on the Palisades Parkway. Hudson Ridge, like other suburban communities along the river, was an oasis of tranquil tree-lined residential streets, customdesigned houses set in luxuriously deep, spacious wooded lots. At the core of the...