Road and Beyond: The Expanded Book-Club Edition of The Road to You

by Brant, Marilyn

  Y = year.

  M + 1 (+ 0), D + 10 (+ 0), Y + 2 (+ 0) was the equation for both dates on the page, not just one. I just had to split them up—almost like the reverse distributive property in math—and factor them in with the correct dates.

  4/19/76 (M + 0) (D + 0) (Y + 0) = 4/19/76

  4/19/76 (M + 1) (D + 10) (Y + 2) = 5/29/78

  Granted, this was the hardest page to crack, but my brother would have known I wouldn’t be able to rest until I’d solved every single part of the puzzle. That I prided myself on taking intuitive hops, skips and jumps.

  “You’re kinda quiet over there,” Donovan said. “Everything still okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said, explaining what I’d figured out about the Start here page. “Gideon put a lot of thought into this.”

  He nodded. “Seems like it. But so did you as you’ve tried to solve it. I wouldn’t have made half of the guesses you did along the way. I’m pretty sure no one else would have either. And—” He sent me a look that had only a hint of his usual mockery. “After everything we learned from Amy Lynn about our brothers and their visits to Crescent Cove and to Chicago, it showed you haven’t been wrong about much. Well, at least not about the journal.”

  It was the way he’d phrased this almost-compliment that made me laugh aloud. “What? You’re saying I have been wrong about other things?” I poked him in the side of his ribs with my fingers.

  He responded by shoving my hand away—none too gently—and grinning.

  “Tell me, Donovan, what, exactly, have you been right about?”

  His grin broadened. It made my heart flutter with joy to see him smile again.

  “Been right about a couple of things,” he said.

  “Such as?”

  He lifted his right hand from the steering wheel and made a “V” with his index and middle finger. “Two big important things,” he said. “And I’m not telling you.”

  “Oh, sure. Like you can just say that and have it be true,” I told him in my most sarcastic voice.

  “Believe me or don’t. Doesn’t bother me.”

  And I knew it really didn’t bother him. That was one of the most maddening things about Donovan. Almost every experience affected me in some way, whether I admitted it aloud or not. But he—he was unfazed by most things. Aside from his responsibility to the few people closest to him, his commitment to his country and his sense of honor, he really couldn’t be swayed by much. I wouldn’t be able to goad him into revealing to me anything he didn’t want to share.

  So, I just shrugged. I closed the atlas and the journal. Stared out the window at the transforming landscape, which had been slowly mutating from city to countryside with each passing mile. But Donovan, in the driver’s seat, looked too smug for his own good, and I couldn’t let him get away with that.

  When I opened my mouth next, the lyrics to “Jive Talkin’” just happened to come out. I thought I did a pretty decent imitation of the first verse.

  Donovan didn’t share my sentiments.

  “Stop that horrible noise,” he cried.

  “I think this song is real catchy, and I’m gonna just keep sing—”

  “No! No. But…if you stop, I’ll tell you one of my two things.”

  I giggled like a little kid. See how powerful the Bee Gees were?

  “Okay.” I crossed my arms, closed my mouth and waited for the big reveal.

  “The first thing I know I’m right about is that disco sucks. Trust me, it’s a fad and the end is coming.” He shot me a wicked glance. “Though not soon enough.”

  I rolled my eyes. “C’mon, that’s not big or important. Doesn’t count. Tell me the other one.”

  There was a funny twist to his lips and, for a second, I thought he was going to give in. Allow me to take a few steps deeper into his carefully guarded private world.

  But, instead, he shook his head. “Nope. Not yet.” Then, “When did you say you were gonna turn eighteen?”

  “July first.” I calculated what was left of the month. “In thirteen days.”

  He shot me a speculative look. “Well, maybe I’ll tell you then.”

  12:05 p.m.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Pasadena, California ~ Saturday, August 16, 2014

  Charlie had turned eighteen before many of his high-school pals and had started college as one of the more developed members of his incoming freshman class. (I wouldn’t say he was more “mature” than average because, given the immaturity of many of his peers, that would be grossly misleading.) Hanging with the fast crowd, however, came with the territory for him, and he’d managed to attract a dedicated band of fellow risk takers.

  He and his buddies had been the direct cause of our parental concern on far too many occasions. Jay had been so different—a techie geek with similarly nerdy BFFs. Watching them was like watching an episode of The Big Bang Theory in progress. On the other hand, Charlie and his buds were more like the cast of Two and a Half Men.

  And, though my boys each made office friends and a few neighborhood pals, both of them still stayed oddly connected to the guys they’d bonded with during their university days.

  I went online and read through Charlie’s Facebook page. I despised Facebook and only had fourteen “friends”—two of them were my sons. Charlie wasn’t as obsessive about updating his status as his big brother, but he tended to post something once or twice per week. His last update had been this past Monday at 3:47 p.m.

  Charlie: Preseason football, dudes! Gotta watch my Chargers kick some TX ass 2nite.

  This was followed by a variety of related comments.

  Matt: Beer!!!

  Tim: Preseason cheerleader babes...

  Steve: Where’s my Cowboys jersey?

  Matt: Boo! Scooby, you loser.

  Charlie: WTF, Scoooobs?! No beer for you.

  Steve: LOL. Gotcha, you CA suckahhhs. So, where are we watching the game?

  Tim: How about Pub Krawl? At 7?

  I’d met Matt, Tim and Steve (aka “Scooby”—long story on the nickname, but it involved hefty late-night snacking and an affinity for the TV cartoon) when my son shared an apartment with them during their junior and senior years of college at USC. All four still lived in the greater L.A. area and met regularly.

  Although Charlie would strangle me (if he could) for what I was about to do, I direct-messaged all three of them and asked if they knew his whereabouts for the weekend.

  Steve/Scooby was the first to ping back with a reply, and it came within a minute:

  Saw him on Monday night but he didn’t say anything to me about weekend plans. Hope he’s not in trouble! ~S.

  I nodded grimly at the computer screen. Yeah, Scoobs. Me, too.

  Then I waited another fifteen minutes, hoping Matt or Tim would respond, but they didn’t...and time was running out. I grabbed my car keys, Charlie’s picture and fingerprints and, of course, my iPhone, and I rushed out the door.

  “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”

  ~Henry David Thoreau

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Normal, Illinois ~ Sunday, June 18, 1978

  Donovan surveyed the tree-filled Quad in the heart of the Illinois State University campus with the careful scrutiny of an army lieutenant before ripping an old flyer off of a nearby bulletin board. “This is not the ‘Promised Land,’” he muttered, regarding the flimsy sheet of paper with his typical skepticism.

  “No,” I said in a disgruntled voice. Hey, I could do disenchantment as well as anyone. “But it is Bloomington-Normal. The other Twin Cities.”

  He waved the yellow flyer at me. “This thing says the Grateful Dead actually played a concert here, on this campus, at the Horton Field House back in April.” He motioned toward the lush lawn and pretty foliage and raised his eyebrows at the absurdity. “Yeah, sure. Welcome to Deadhead Central.”

  I glanced around the Quad myself, taking in the laidback summer-school students weaving between the buildings or lounging idly under one o
f the trees. Donovan’s “promised land” song reference made sense now, and I had to admit that, pleasant as ISU was, this wasn’t a place that screamed out “musical hotspot full of generational trendsetters.” People looked to the coasts for that kind of thing, not a cornfield college in Middle America.

  “Think Jerry Garcia might still be hiding out somewhere in town?” I said, getting the snicker out of Donovan that I’d hoped.

  “Not unless he’s having a secret psychedelic party with a bong and a side dish of acid at a local frat house.” He pointed at the journal. “What did Gideon say about this place again?”

  “It was the entry with the step-by-step directions for draining coolant.” I grimaced. I wasn’t going to read it all to him a second time.

  “Oh, yeah,” Donovan said, folding up the Grateful Dead flyer and pocketing it. “The one where the date in the journal said May eighteenth, but it was really July sixth.”

  “Exactly.”

  He nodded. “So we know the dates were added later and that they were fake. That the equations are the key to figuring out when the guys were really in these places. But what about the stuff that was written above it on most of the pages? The chemicals and procedures at the top? A lot of that information had to already be in there, right?”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “Do you remember your brother writing in the book during high school? Did he keep it with him out in the garage or somewhere private?”

  I thought about this. I had no idea where Gideon had kept it, but I could remember a number of times when I’d caught him jotting down some notes inside of it. He didn’t seem worried about me watching him in the midst of his journaling, though. If anything, he struck me as amused, particularly when I insinuated that the journal was some kind of tawdry record of his encounters with girls. He dared me with his sly smiles to ask him about it for real, no teasing involved. But I didn’t. Not even once.

  I’d never regretted my lack of curiosity on any subject more than this.

  “He seemed pretty open about it, if that’s what you’re asking,” I told Donovan. “No evidence of him keeping any serious secrets. Honestly, I don’t even think he even hid it.”

  Not like I did with my diary.

  Which, I recalled with a cavernous ache in the center of my chest, Gideon had found one summer in the tool shed, in that cedar box. But, for once, he didn’t laugh at me. Didn’t read through what I thought then was an interesting personal life. He just put the key back in my desk drawer and told me to hang onto it. That the box was a good hiding place for my diary, as long as I was the only one with the key…

  Although, a few weeks later, after writing in my diary one evening, I realized I couldn’t put it back in the box. I’d somehow misplaced the key again, and it was forever lost—or so I’d thought.

  Donovan shrugged. “I don’t know then. Still think it’s strange that he’d write down so many easy procedures in that journal. Unless he was losing his memory and wanted to make sure he wouldn’t forget them.”

  This struck me as an odd theory and one I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around. “Do you really think that could happen? Is there any reason someone might fear getting amnesia at age eighteen?”

  He paused and stomped on a discarded cigarette butt at the edge of the Quad. “No, not really. Not unless he was a war vet. Sometimes the shock and terror of battle can make an otherwise healthy man lose his memory, but Gideon wasn’t a soldier. In fact, if anyone was anti-establishment…”

  He shook his head. “I have no idea what the hell was going on in your brother’s brain, Aurora. Or in my brother’s, for that matter. But I do wonder if…if…they’re really alive, where they are now and how we might find them.”

  We walked around the ISU campus for an hour more—reading signs, watching people, trying to make connections that weren’t there or that we simply couldn’t see.

  “Well, we now know that ISU was Illinois’s first public university,” I said, parroting the words on a plaque we’d read, which commemorated this. “I don’t know much else about it that’s relevant to our search, though.”

  “Look on the bright side,” Donovan said. “At least you won’t have to make up details about college campuses when you talk to you dad tonight. You can tell him all about this one.” He waved his palm at the, admittedly, eye-catching university tennis-court building—a place that looked like royalty might live there. It was, in fact, called Ewing Castle.

  For a moment, my vision—clouded by the past—cleared, and I saw ISU for what it was: A large, well-respected university in the heart of the heartland. College students, warmed inside and out by the summer sun, were engrossed in their studies, their sports and their social lives.

  They weren’t trying to parse out bits of meaning from a grease-stained document.

  They weren’t obsessed with their family’s recent tragic history.

  They were daydreaming of their futures and brimming with the excitement and hopefulness of youth.

  I felt a powerful stab of envy. But, when I glanced at Donovan again, none of my longing for a normal life seemed to register on his face. He either didn’t want it…or he’d forgotten what it felt like to have it.

  “Did you ever check out any colleges?” I asked him as we meandered back toward the Trans Am.

  He made a show of hunting for his keys and unlocking the car door for me. But I recognized the motion for what it was—stalling—and looked at him, expectant, until he couldn’t ignore me any longer.

  “I didn’t really think about it after Jeremy and Gideon disappeared,” he said finally.

  “But what about before that? You had to know when you first enlisted that you’d eventually qualify for the GI Bill,” I said. “Knowing you were eligible for several years of free tuition had to make the idea of college at least a little tempting, right?”

  “Just because you have the opportunity to do something, it doesn’t always mean it’s the right thing to do. Besides, when I enlisted, it was a long time ago. Everything was different back then.”

  I slid into the car and watched him mess with a couple of old receipts on the dash, but I wasn’t going to let him off the hook that easily.

  “No kidding,” I said. It wasn’t like I didn’t know just how different it was between the Before and the After. “But c’mon, Donovan. You had to have had some idea of what you wanted to do with your life. If our brothers hadn’t gone missing were you planning on being career military? Was there a subject you were hoping to study—if not at a university then at a technical college? A dream job? A rock band? A fantasy wife and kids?”

  He snapped his head to glare at me then started the car engine. “Man, you’re nosy.”

  I pursed my lips together, not feeling the slightest remorse for my inquisitiveness. I’d already spent five days traveling with the guy, if you counted our visit to Crescent Cove…and I did. For most of it, he’d treated me like a pesky little sister. Was it any wonder I was starting to act like one?

  I crossed my arms and waited.

  “Where are we headed?” he asked, driving a few blocks.

  “On a one-way street to the Truth.”

  He groaned and squirmed. “Be serious. If there’s nothing else to do in Normal, I’m putting in some miles toward St. Louis. We need to get there, see if we see anything and then get home. We can’t spend a month on the road.”

  “I am being serious,” I said.

  I didn’t know what it was about that moment—maybe because we seemed to be at some kind of unmarked crossroads, or maybe just because I’d been so lonely for so long—but it was vitally important to me that he answer my question. I had to know something real about this guy who’d been sharing my strange journey. Something true about the person he’d been before our lives were forever changed. I needed that.

  And I didn’t want us to drive even one more mile in any direction until I could grasp some genuine fragment of his character…and see a little more of the unguarded m
an. It was usually almost too easy for me to read a novel’s worth of emotions, frustrations and dreams on someone’s face. But with Donovan? He wasn’t as quick to let me do this with him.

  “You had to have had a plan for your life,” I whispered. “Once upon a time.”

  He let out a long, slow breath, and I could feel him, as well as see him, visibly try to relax. In no way was this working, but I appreciated even this small gesture. He was trying hard to wrestle with some demon from his past and, perhaps, the only thing that seemed clear was that it was a very old demon. I suspected it predated the summer of ’76. It may well have predated nearly everything.

  Donovan pulled into a parking space near the edge of the campus and let the engine idle.

  “Once upon a time,” he began, “I used to think it would be fun to be a car designer or an architect. When adults would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, that’s what I’d tell them. Mostly, they’d just humor me. Nod at me. Say something insincere but nice. ‘Sounds great, kid. You can do it.’ Stuff like that.”

  I honed my perception onto his every movement, like someone trying to tune into a hard-to-reach radio frequency. He was telling me the truth—I knew from the steadiness of his gaze, the depth of his breathing, the mild tension of his grasp—but the twitches of pain at the corners of his eyes and mouth also told me this wasn’t the whole story.

  “Mostly?” I asked as gently as I could. “You mean there were some people who weren’t as encouraging? People who told you that you couldn’t do it?”

  The stiffness in his fingers increased as he gripped the steering wheel more firmly, and the cord at the side of his neck jumped once or twice before he shrugged and said, “Yeah.”

  He glanced out the front windshield then over at me again. “Look, Aurora, my life was never much of a fairy tale, even before July two years ago. You know my dad left us. He was gone by the time I was six and Jeremy was three. My stepfather moved in when I was thirteen, and I’ve known warmer, sweeter drill sergeants. Can’t say I was sad when he left, but I wish he hadn’t chosen Jeremy’s disappearance as the reason. Almost killed my mom to lose them both within a year.”