In Things Unseen

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  “No.”

  “Because you need to know how much pain I was in to understand how I could do it. Get down on my knees for eight months, every day and every night without fail, and pray to God for a miracle. For my baby to be brought back to me. If I can’t make you see how much it hurt, how painful it was just to breathe while he was gone, I’ll never be able to convince you that I never lost faith, that I never gave up believing because I couldn’t. I couldn’t let him go. It was either get down on my knees and pray or kill myself and risk never seeing him again, on earth or in heaven.”

  She studied Allison’s face, as if reading it for clues as to whether or not there’d be any point in continuing. Allison had to imagine that what she saw was a woman on the brink of screaming: confused and tired, tied up in knots with her own pain, and a growing fear that soon, nothing in the world was ever going to look the same again.

  “Now it’s your turn,” Diane Edwards said.

  Allison started. “Pardon?”

  “My husband’s told you the truth and you don’t believe him. So he’s brought you here to me. Ask me a question. Any question. Whatever you need to hear in order to drop this story of yours and leave us alone, I’ll tell you.” She sat down on the couch, waited for Allison to take a seat on the other end and her husband to lower himself into the chair facing them.

  “And after that, if you still don’t believe us, you can just go straight to hell.”

  * * *

  Michael had heard it all before, of course, but there was something different in Diane’s telling this time that made the wounds feel as fresh as on the day they were inflicted. He never said a word or moved. He sat there and let the two women talk, Diane making good on her promise to answer any question Hope cared to offer.

  His wife described their once tragic past in details so fine and clear, they brought hot tears to his eyes. He saw Hope make the turn. The tone of her questions changed and the space between them lengthened. She didn’t take a single note. Michael had brought her here in the belief she was halfway convinced of the truth, that all she needed was a little push from Diane to surrender her last vestiges of doubt. And now he knew he’d been right. Whatever reasons she may have had to enter their home fifty minutes ago, Hope was no longer listening to Diane’s story for the purpose of writing about it. She was listening to it because she needed to hear it, whether or not anyone else in the world ever did after this day.

  That Hope was struggling with more than a crisis of faith was clear. She’d seemed shaken and fragile, preoccupied by an unnamed suffering, from the moment he’d first met her at the park. Michael could have ventured a dozen guesses as to why—drugs, money, love, all the usual suspects—but he had little reason to speculate. Whatever was behind Hope’s state of emotional disarray, in the scheme of God’s great design, maybe it was the reason she was here, poised not to reject the truth but to fully accept it.

  A cell phone rang, snapping Michael from the trance his wife’s voice had lulled him into. Another phone had rung twice only moments ago, in a different room of the house where it had been easy to ignore, but this phone was Michael’s own, chiming at his waist. The two women watched him fumble it out of its holster, hit the button to silence it. . .

  . . .and freeze.

  * * *

  “What is it?” Diane asked. The way Michael was staring at his phone had turned her blood ice cold.

  He shook her off and took the call in the kitchen, not wanting to be overheard, but it was a wasted effort. The scarcity of his words and the panic in them told Diane all she needed to know.

  She ran to his side and asked him again: “What is it?”

  Hope trailed Diane into the room.

  “They can’t find Adrian at school,” Michael said.

  THIRTY-ONE

  “WHERE ARE WE GOING?” Adrian asked.

  They’d been riding in the car for several minutes, yet the question had not come up until now.

  “Just someplace quiet where we can talk. Is that okay?”

  Laura watched Adrian nod from the passenger seat beside her, as cool and unruffled as ever. He suspected nothing. A whisper in his ear back at Yesler was all it had taken to get him alone—

  I need to talk to you, Adrian. When you go back to class, ask to go to the bathroom and I’ll meet you outside.

  —and from there, it had been a simple matter of whisking him out to her car and driving away. Adrian trusted her and was not afraid.

  But Laura was afraid. The magnitude of what she was doing was not lost on her. She knew the words people would use to describe it: kidnapping, child abduction. Crimes that normal people did not commit. But the time for second thoughts had long passed. She and the boy were here, and there was nothing for her to do but finish what she’d started. She had to draw from him whatever details he might know about the great lie his parents were telling at her expense. She was not so far gone as to consider hurting him to extract the truth, but neither could she predict how she would react if, after all she had risked to arrange this meeting, he claimed to know nothing at all.

  So yes, she was afraid.

  “What are we going to talk about?” Adrian asked.

  Laura turned to him and smiled. “Resurrection. Do you know what a resurrection is, Adrian?”

  He seemed to give the question some thought before reaching a conclusion. “No.”

  If she had believed him, Laura would have driven him right back to Yesler. But she didn’t. Not yet.

  That she was operating on borrowed time was a given. By now, Adrian’s absence would have been noticed, and if the school hadn’t already connected his disappearance to her visit, it soon would.

  An idea came to her, and she acted upon it before she could question its merit.

  “How about some ice cream?” she asked.

  * * *

  It hadn’t taken Howard Alberts long to imagine where Adrian Edwards might have gone. Alberts had thought of Laura Carrillo the instant he heard the boy was missing, just short of an hour after morning recess. But the principal kept his suspicions to himself, not wanting to alarm the staff, until poor Giselle Ott, reduced by guilt and embarrassment to a sobbing mess, reported her brief encounter with Laura out in the yard. Once that cat was out of the bag, Alberts was not alone in his belief that Laura had stolen onto school grounds and snatched away the child who had sent her screaming into a corner three days earlier.

  It had taken several calls to reach the boy’s parents, and have his father confirm what Alberts feared he would, that neither Michael Edwards nor his wife had any knowledge of Adrian’s whereabouts. Both Edwardses were on their way to the school now, in a race with the police to see who would arrive first. Laura was ignoring every phone message left for her, and for the second time in one week, Yesler Elementary was on lockdown.

  The only reason Alberts didn’t call this the worst day of his life was that he didn’t know what horrors tomorrow might bring.

  * * *

  In the backseat of Michael Edwards’s car as they drove to Yesler, with Edwards weaving through traffic like a stuntman on a cocaine high, Allison kept thinking, This isn’t happening. None of this can really be happening.

  But it was happening, whatever it was, and she was right in the middle of it. Not as the objective observer she had planned to be, but as an invested participant, too enmeshed in a trap set by her own curiosity to walk away. Adrian’s parents had tried to leave her behind, but Allison had jumped in their car and refused to get out, such was her need now to follow this drama to the very end.

  Her certainty of anything at this point was negligible, if not nonexistent. The one thing she knew—without question—was that none of the usual explanations for people who claimed to have been touched by God could be applied to Michael and Diane Edwards. Their telling of their son’s resurrection had been unique to each, yet uniform in
general substance. They weren’t lying or delusional. There’d been no contradictions, no hesitations before replies. Their every statement was limned with detail, the small, elementary trappings of experience that only memory found worthy of note.

  Laura Carrillo had opened the door yesterday, Michael Edwards had drawn Allison through it this morning, and Diane Edwards had slammed it closed behind Allison shortly thereafter, sealing the deal.

  She believed them all. She believed Adrian Edwards had been resurrected from the dead.

  Everything she had thought about Carrillo she was now thinking about herself. She was deranged. It was either that or she had become privy to a seismic shift in the universe that made all the rules of the old obsolete. Even if she left God and the notion of miracles out of the equation, what was left meant, at the very least, that death didn’t have to be death at all, and time could be turned back for some while left untouched for others, and that these things could happen for no other reason than one person needing it to be so.

  Would any of it be easier to accept as the work of an all-loving God, rather than the arbitrary turn of a world gone mad? If Allison was honest about it, her answer would be yes. She had been clinging to her own paltry excuse for faith in the hope this very day would come, that she would be given proof the supreme being she addressed all her prayers to was more than just a myth.

  And yet, there was a frightening downside to accepting not only God’s existence, but His willingness to intervene in people’s lives. What happened when the prayers He answered were never yours? How could you go on believing in a god of unlimited power who reserved his miracles for others? Allison had an immediate need for a miracle of her own—she was certain nothing short of that would bring Flo back to her—and asking for it in vain, knowing what God had done for Diane and Michael Edwards, would put an end to her faith for good. Could she go on living without that faith and Flo, too?

  Allison didn’t think so.

  Less than twenty-four hours earlier, she had been a freelance journalist with but a single preoccupation: writing a story. A story with more potential to salvage her career—and more importantly, her relationship to the only woman she had ever loved—than any she had been fortunate enough to stumble upon. There was nothing she wouldn’t give now to get back to that place.

  But it was gone.

  So, sitting in the back of Michael Edwards’s car as it careened toward Yesler Elementary, Allison teetered from this side to the other of a grave dilemma: Go all in and accept she was here by the will of God, or follow Laura Carrillo’s lead and reject the idea with everything she had.

  There was a pad of paper on the seat beside her, open to a crude, crayon drawing of a little girl. She picked it up and tears filled her eyes in an instant, because the little girl was black and reminded Allison of Flo. Flo, who didn’t love her anymore. Flo, upon whom Allison had bet everything, and without whom she was soon to lose everything.

  Flo.

  Were she here now she would laugh, finding Allison’s indecisiveness too ridiculous for words. For Flo, the choice between belief in a miracle and acceptance of her own insanity would have been an obvious one, and Allison’s inability to see it that way now would astonish her.

  Allison gently tore the portrait from the pad and slipped it into her purse, her hosts in the car’s front seat oblivious. It was an odd act of petty theft, but she wanted some connection to Adrian she could claim for her own and this might be all she would ever get.

  She realized such sentimentality was something else with which Flo would find fault, and for a moment, the thought stung. But then Allison decided she didn’t care. She wasn’t Flo and she never would be. What she chose to believe from this point forward wasn’t going to be defined by anyone else’s approval. This call would be Allison’s to make, right or wrong, and she would live or die by it.

  She’d been living in Flo’s shadow too long. It was time to come back into the light.

  * * *

  In the beginning, they talked about nothing important.

  Knock-knock jokes and cartoons on television, food that was too gross to eat and second-grade girls who screamed at the slightest provocation. What made a substitute teacher great and what made one unbearable. The twin mysteries of multiplication and ice cream-induced brain freeze.

  Sharing a corner booth at a Baskin-Robbins in Bellevue, she making slow work of a vanilla cone while he sculpted shapes into two scoops of chocolate in a cup, Laura and Adrian fell into the easy small talk they had exchanged every day at Yesler before his “death.” When she had thought he was a specter or, worse, an impostor, the thought of being close to him filled her with revulsion, but once she decided this was really Adrian—seeing him in the schoolyard yesterday had left no doubt—her old feelings for him gradually came to the fore. He was the jewel of her class, bright and decent, and no child had ever made her feel more alive as a teacher. So she had brought him here planning to bribe him with ice cream and jump right in, pepper him with questions she needed answers to, only to end up chatting and giggling with him instead.

  And the clock was ticking. She knew that. She had kidnapped a child and it was just a matter of time before this opportunity to question him came to a sudden end. If she wasted it, she might never learn how, and for what reasons, the darkest days of her life had come to pass.

  “Adrian,” she said, “I need to ask you some questions. Some important questions.”

  The boy set his spoon down in his cup and faced her. “Okay.”

  “Can you be honest with me? Even if it’s hard, can I count on you to tell me the truth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Do you know why I was so afraid to see you at school Tuesday? Do you know why I acted the way I did?”

  “No.” He shook his head to emphasize the point.

  “It’s because they told me you were dead. I thought you were dead, Adrian.”

  “Dead?” He smiled at the absurdity of the thought.

  “Yes. Your parents told everyone you’d been killed. In a car accident in March. Did you know that?”

  “My Mom and Dad said I was dead?”

  “Yes.”

  He frowned, confused now.

  “Well, they did. And I’d like to know why. Why would they tell a lie like that, Adrian?”

  He shook his head. “They didn’t.”

  She knew lie had been an unwise choice of words, one certain to put the boy on the defensive, but she couldn’t resist. It had been a lie, a despicable one, and Adrian needed to understand that. “Yes, they did. They told everyone you were dead and kept you out of school for almost a year. That’s why I was afraid of you. I thought you were dead.”

  “But I wasn’t.”

  Laura’s breath caught in her throat. The truth, at last. “No, you weren’t. So where were you? Where have you been since March?”

  “I was at school. I always go to school, except when I’m sick.”

  Goddamnit! “Is that what they told you? That you were sick?”

  “Who?”

  “Your parents, Adrian. Your mother and father. Did they tell you you were sick, that that was why you couldn’t go to school?”

  “When?”

  He was either completely lost or faking it better than anyone his age had a right to.

  Laura took a step back, seeing she was getting nowhere. “All right. Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Okay.” He took up his spoon and resumed work on his ice cream.

  “Let’s talk about God,” Laura said.

  * * *

  His cell phone showed three voicemail messages when Milton came home from his daily lunch-hour walk. He always left his phone behind when he walked, contemptuous of people who couldn’t demonstrate a similar degree of self-control, but now he feared he’d made a mistake by not taking the phone with him today. Two of
the messages were from Janet and one was from Lisa, and listening to them, it was hard for Milton to say which of his daughters sounded more frantic. Both demanded a call back and neither gave a reason for wanting one, but it was obvious something had set them off worrying about him all over again.

  He was debating which daughter to call first, or whether he was up to calling either one for a while, when the phone rang in his hand to make the decision for him. Four calls in forty minutes. Now he was afraid for himself.

  It was Lisa.

  “Oh, thank God you’re home. Where have you been?”

  “I was walking. I walk every day at eleven o’clock. Why are you acting like you don’t know that?”

  “That’s all? You’ve just been out walking?”

  “Yes. What—”

  “Alone?”

  “Of course alone. Your sister’s been calling me, too. What’s going on?”

  Lisa fell silent. Janet never hesitated before blurting out the truth, but Lisa was more discreet.

  “Are you watching television?” she asked.

  “The television? No. I’ve been out walking, I just came in. I told you.” It had been a difficult walk, his mind on everything and anything but the fine weather. He’d gotten out of bed this morning feeling much the same as he had when he lay down the night before, like the world was made of crystal he was destined to shatter.

  “That little boy you said you killed. He’s missing.”

  Milton put his free hand out to brace himself against the wall, his legs threatening to buckle. “What?”

  “Adrian Edwards. Isn’t that his name? He disappeared from school this morning. They’re looking for him everywhere. Janet thought. . . .”

  She didn’t have to tell him what her sister thought.

  “Daddy, are you still there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Are you okay? I can come stay with you for a while, if you want.”