Mary’s not overly worried about the storm. Those storms can terrifically damaging, shutting down power for days and blocking roads for longer. Now, a brutal winter storm is bearing down on Maine. Her own shrink tells her that she’s likely just hallucinating a bit-the product of too much work and not enough sleep.īut then there are the little scratches she sees on Stephen’s face … Sometimes, she even sees him in doorways. And when he doesn’t rematerialize in the morning, everyone fears the worst: Surely Tom has frozen to death.īut Mary can’t shake the feeling that Tom’s still around. On a cold winter’s night in Maine, with the temperature dipping well below freezing. And when Mary calls Tom’s caretaker, the deaf boy suddenly … vanishes. Mary realizes this when the boy shows up at her rural Maine farmhouse, hiding in her car. Only now, suddenly, his caretaker plans to ship him off to Boston.īut Tom doesn’t want to go. But Mary’s convinced that he was making progress while in her psychiatric care. Tom got in trouble for breaking another child’s arm at school, too, and he does seem to get a little touchy when touched. Sure, the kid had his problems: He’s deaf, for one thing, and parentless for another. One of them is Tom, a child about half Stephen’s age. Mary still finds time to work with other children when Stephen’s in front of the telly. Mary now doubles as his full-time caretaker: feeding him his porridge, bathing him, wiping his chin, hoisting him up in his wheelchair so he can watch television 12 hours a day. Then, as her husband was taking the kid to another school-the boarding variety for troubled teens-their car hit a semi head-on, killing her hubby and leaving Stephen essentially catatonic. The child psychologist’s troubles began the day that Stephen, her stepson, was expelled from school.
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