Not a lot. There was nothing before the age of five. After five, there was the first foster family, the Marcams. That far back, he’d been so young that he didn’t know any better than to accept whatever happened as the same thing that happened to everybody. And the Marcams had given him no real reason to doubt it, at least in the beginning. They were rich. He couldn’t remember the whole story, but later, after they’d already sent him back, another boy told him that Mrs. Marcam couldn’t get pregnant, and that’s why she came in and tried new kids on for size so often. The man had almost never been home. He was thin and fit and austere and had rarely spoken to Matt. Mrs. Marcam, though, had taken him everywhere, had never left his side. He’d gone shopping with her and gone to the YMCA with her and accompanied the Marcams on vacations—there was a beach, even, and he could remember running across it, in the sand, and holding on to a flat stone he’d found, running back with it to show her.
