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“My mother hates that I have it all in my bedroom. She wanted me to take over another bedroom for it, but I refused. It’s practically the only thing in this house that’s mine, really mine. She picked out everything else I have, including most of my clothes. It’s the same for Summer. I s

uppose I should call this Beverly’s room, just like yours is called Alena’s.”

I walked over to look at his model planes and cars, and some ships in bottles. The work was very intricate. I looked at the one he was currently doing.

“That’s actually a replica of Columbus’s Santa Maria, ” he said.

“How do you get the ship into a bottle?”

“Pure magic.”

“No, really.”

“There are a few different ways. The secret is the masts. You turn them down and use a thread to pull them back up. They have hinges. Then you cut away the thread.”

“It must take a great deal of patience and concentration.”

“Which is why I do it. I escape into the bottle with the ship,” he said.

I thought he was only half kidding, if that much. I looked at the other models, and whenever I touched one, he would identify it, rattling off its history.

“You can learn a great deal from this hobby,” I said.

“It’s more than a hobby. It really is therapy,” he said.

I dropped my pretense. I couldn’t keep ignoring what was gnawing at me. “Why is there such tension between you and your parents, Ryder? I can understand the strain between them and Summer after what happened, but why between you and them? It can’t be that they blame you completely for what she did.”

He fingered one of his model cars. I thought he was just going to ignore me and go on to talk about another, but he pulled his fingers away from the one he was handling and turned to me with such pain in his eyes I thought I would lose my breath.

“They blame me for my mother’s miscarriage with their third child,” he said.

10

Passion

I left that little detail out of the movie I was describing at your lake. My parents base everything they do around their careers,” Ryder continued.

We were sitting on his bed. He leaned back on a pillow and put his hands behind his head as he looked up at the ceiling and began to talk as if he were in his therapist’s office. I had yet to say anything. My silence spoke for itself. I could see it in the way he glanced at me before he lay back. He was waiting for a sign of disapproval, something in my face that told him I was uncomfortable. I wasn’t judging him, but at the moment, I regretted asking him anything personal.

“I’m not saying other couples don’t plan, but most other prospective mothers don’t have to agonize over their looks and figures if they get pregnant like my mother did. She’s always accusing the camera of putting five or ten pounds on her as it is.”

He turned to me.

“It’s just not comforting to know that if your mother had gotten that part or that modeling job, you might not have been born.”

“You would have been born sometime, Ryder. They obviously wanted children.”

“Yeah, but it would have been a different sperm. I might have come out nicer.”

“You’re nice. Stop it.”

“Right. Anyway,” he continued, looking back up at the ceiling, “we were all in Italy at the time. My father had been cast in a lead role in one of those cheaply made westerns. You know, the ones that made Clint Eastwood famous? I guess he was thinking he would become the next Clint Eastwood, so we went to Italy. I was only nine, and Summer was four at the time. I guess it’s an understatement to say I was a mischievous brat. I hated being told what I could and couldn’t do, especially by some nanny.

“My mother used to threaten me with ‘I won’t love you anymore.’ I remember wondering if that was possible. Could your mother or your father turn off their love for you that easily? Even when I was that young, I would think that if they could, it couldn’t be real love.

“Anyway, I ran away from home a few times while we were there. One time,” he said, smiling, “I was hiding just outside the villa and watching everyone frantically searching and calling for me. I was spotted eventually, and they were really angry that I would let them agonize so much.”

“Why did you do that?”