by Dan Chaon
She laughed. And I could swear that she had the same laugh as my mom. I guessed they were about the same age, and maybe there were a lot of women who were born in the sixties who learned the same intonations, something viral went across the generation and they all started making that sleepy, sweet, thoughtful laugh as one, but oh my God it sounded so much like her.
—
And then I noticed a weird thing.
—
The front door to the little house was open now.
—
A figure crossed through my peripheral vision, and without thinking I hung up on Wave. I was sitting in your mom’s car, and I was trying to take a three-sixty-degree look around myself when knuckles tapped on the driver’s side window.
1
IT’S GARBAGE NIGHT, and Aaron is supposed to take out the trash, but he’s not home.
I realize I have a little obsessive–compulsive thing about it. For whatever reason, it’s a chore that I hate more than any other, it upsets me, and I can only manage to do it if I break it into stages.
So I bundle up the newspapers with twine, and then I put on my overcoat and boots, and I step down the poorly scooped sidewalk. The yellow porch light reflects off the piles of snow, and I move quickly to drop off my parcel at the edge of the curb and then I hurry back to the house, glancing at my phone: 10:36 P.M.
He can do the rest of it when he gets home, I think, and I imagine some of the things that I could say about following through with your responsibilities, about maintaining order. I can be overbearing, and I don’t want to be overbearing. I realize that there’s a lot going on for you right now, I picture myself saying. There’s a lot going on for all of us. And we all have to pitch in.
Pitch in: Ugh! It sounds so awful and chipper. Cooperate? I think. But that sounds worse. Like something a thug would say to a prisoner he’s tied to a chair.
And then it’s after midnight, and I turn off the television, and he still hasn’t come home. It’s not that unusual, though it would have been considerate for him to text me.
I never thought he’d be the one who would be hard to communicate with. When he was little, he used to love to be close to me. We used to sit side by side on the couch, watching TV, and he’d lean his cheek against my arm, and then he’d take my hand and press it against the side of his head, pushing it to the exact spot that he wanted it to be. And I would hold my hand there in the exact spot and he would smile and nuzzle closer against me.
I know he loved me. I know he did.
Okay. I guess I will do it.
There are two garbage bins along the north side of the house, and I pull the large black plastic bags out of them and they’re heavy and frozen stiff. I drag them along behind me down the driveway, letting them slide like sledges, leaving a groove behind them.
I don’t know why I hate the idea of my neighbors watching. I’m sure, of course, that they are not—not really. Yet for some reason I feel self-conscious. I’ve got a coat over my pajamas, and I’ve stuffed my bare feet into winter galoshes, but I feel exposed. The fact that I have two big bags of trash makes me feel weirdly ashamed. Wasteful. I drop the bags off quickly on the snow berm at the edge of the drive and then hurry back into the house.
No one is watching you, I think, and as the leafless, snow-covered branches shake their shadows across my path, a figure assembles itself in the periphery.
Or—not a figure. Just a sound, just the memory of noise and movement—that night when I woke and heard the boy skateboarding in front of the house. Just the barest echo of it.
rooooll. Slap. K-chint. roooooooll. Slap! K-chint!
—
And then I wake up in bed and I look at my phone and it’s 5:14 A.M. I get up to go pee and I notice that Aaron’s bedroom door is still open.
I stand in the doorway and look at his tangled covers, the piles of unwashed clothes leaning against the laundry baskets full of clothes that are clean but unfolded; the Wu Tang Clan poster and the Jamaican flag with a marijuana leaf superimposed over it. He didn’t come home last night.
Not that unusual, I think. He used to sleep over at Rabbit’s house, for example. But he would always text.
That ache when you realize that you’ve reached the point where they don’t even text. Maybe I’m an overprotective parent. He’ll be nineteen in February, so legally he can do whatever he wants. Maybe he’s spent the night with a girl. Maybe he had a few too many beers and he slept on a friend’s couch. It’s none of my business.
—
Nevertheless, there is still the recycling left to do. He won’t be doing it, so I go downstairs to the basement. This is what I hate the most, the clinking jars and rattling cans and hollow, echoing plastic bottles. Something eerie and skeletal about the sound. Xylophone music.
I pull the recycling down the driveway in my slippers, and the snow and ice and salt soak through immediately. So stupid! Why would I not put on the boots? But I make it to the end of the driveway and I throw the clear blue bags of recyclables onto the pile and there is a percussive tinkle and clink as the bag hits the hard snow.
There’s nothing to be concerned about; it’s nothing, I think.
2
HE’S STILL NOT home when I leave for work, and, yes, I’m a little annoyed but it’s normal. He’s almost nineteen, flexing his independence, and I shouldn’t hover. I shouldn’t panic.
So I just send him a polite text.
Hey Honey!
I’m stopping by the market after work. Is there anything you want me to pick up?
Will you be home for dinner? If so, is there anything special that you’d like to eat?
And then, after I hit the send button, I regret it. Too pushy, I think. Too, too pushy.
3
WHEN I ARRIVE at the Cleveland Heights office, Mrs. O’Sullivan is already sitting in the waiting room next to the waterfall sculpture. Deeply engaged with her phone, so I tap the doorframe lightly so as not to startle her.
The hypnosis seems to gives her temporary relief from the pain, but it returns every few months. I hold her hand in mine, and we sit there for a while. Staring together at her hand.
Possibly, I think, there is actually something physically wrong with her, even if the doctors can’t find it. But there’s no swelling or redness, nothing from a visual or tactile perspective that indicates
If it’s psychosomatic, it must have some sort of powerful traumatic origin. Some sort of repressed memory? I think briefly.
But, no, I’m not going down that path again.
—
Afterward, I go out to the parking lot for a cigarette. I smoke a little surreptitiously—I don’t really want a patient to spot me—so I hold the lit end palm inward, and smoke trickles out from between my knuckles. It looks kind of cool. Kind of supernatural. I hold out my hand and pretend that I’m casting a magic spell over the rows of salt-streaked cars.
I was a good dad when I was pretending. The boys used to love it when I would twist my fingers up and tell them I was casting a spell. We’d be sitting at a stoplight, and they’d be in the back, and I’d lift my hand. “I’ll make this car in front of us turn right,” I said. “How much do you want to bet I can do it?” And they liked it. I think they sort of believed.
I raise my hand and at the far end of the lot an old van is running, the exhaust from its muffler denser, even, than the smoke from my fingers. I can see a silhouette in the passenger seat.
Then my phone vibrates and I reach in my pocket because of course it’s Aaron. About time!
—
But it’s Aqil.
Don’t we have an APPT?
I look at my watch: 1:05. I’ve kept him waiting for five minutes.
—
I turn on the microphone for speech recognition and try to talk slowly and distinctly at the phone. “I. Will. Be. Right. There,” I say. And I watch as the phone pauses and does its magic, converting my words into text, and even now this is still remarkable to me. I
can’t believe it is actually the future, where such things exist.
4
WHEN I OPEN the door, Aqil is leaning back on the couch with his eyes closed and he keeps his eyelids shut when I come in. It is a trust exercise that I invented, and I think it’s been helpful.
The idea is simple. I will not be present in the office when he arrives, but he should sit down and close his eyes and not open them. “Try to make your mind as blank as possible,” I told him when I first came up with it. “Once you’ve turned off the visual sense, then see if you can slowly turn down the audio…and then the senses of taste and smell…and, finally, focus on your skin. Try to forget that your skin is touching anything.”
“I don’t think that’s possible,” he said.
“Probably not,” I said. “We don’t need to be attached to results. Think of it as a challenge.” And that had caught his attention: a challenge.
Now, as I enter, I know that he can hear the soles of my shoes against the floor and the springs of the couch as I sit down across from him. He doesn’t open his eyes. He can hear me take out my notebook; he can even hear the pen marking the date on the surface of the paper.
The first time I’d suggested the exercise, he’d given me a hard, quizzical look. “Doc,” he said. “You realize that there’s a horror-movie aspect to this, right?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, and he laughed.
“In the horror movie, I’d have my eyes closed, and my therapist would come in, and I’d start talking…and then at some point, I’d crack open an eye…and I’d see you holding your Dr. Tillman mask in one rotted claw.”
“Well,” I said, and I looked down at my hand ruefully, wondering why he might imagine it as a rotting claw. “It is a trust exercise, so…” I noticed the veins on the back of my hand. “So it’s going to tap into some,” I said, and my nails were clean and manicured. I cleared my throat.
“Look,” I said. “We’re just attempting to find ways to break down some of the issues that you’ve been having. You’ve described yourself as a very suspicious person. A wary person—always, as you say, ‘hyperaware,’ to the extent that your upper-body muscles are constantly tight. To the extent that you wake up five to ten times a night. To the extent that you feel abnormally alert in public. You’re always keeping an eye open for the person who’s going to try to kill you: Isn’t that what you told me? And that’s not healthy for you.
“If you still want to do therapy, we have to find some way to get you to let your guard down.
“So this is just an idea. Close your eyes and try to imagine that you’re alone. Almost asleep. I’m only a voice in your head. And I promise that if you crack open an eye, I’m not going to be the bogeyman.”
—
So now he sits there on the couch with his eyes closed and I lower myself into the couch across from him. There are so many layers to this guy, I think. Though we’ve known each other for almost two years by this point, though we are actually, in many ways, close friends, there are still things that he’s never spoken about.
I know next to nothing about his childhood, about his family. There has been no discussion of his romantic life, no mention of girlfriends or dating, rarely any mention of social interaction of any kind. I know that he lives in Lyndhurst, but I’ve never been to his home. What does he do with his days? I sometimes wonder. He goes to the gym. He says that he’s been working on getting his private-investigator license, says that he’s been setting up a website to advertise his services, but nothing concrete has materialized that I know of. He watches a lot of sports and a lot of movies. Once he talked about re-watching an entire season of the television show Dexter in a single weekend, and that struck me as troubling. “How many hours was that?” I said, and he shrugged. “Thirteen?” he said. “Something like that?”
There was no discussion of what was going on between us. We met twice a week for therapy sessions and just as often to socialize as—what—friends?
I’d never really had a close male friend that I could think of. Many male acquaintances, of course, but I generally didn’t have much in common with them. I’ve always felt more comfortable with women. With Jill. With Kate. Women seem more trustworthy.
—
After the police discovered Slade Gable’s body, Aqil wanted to go out for a drink. This was something I generally didn’t do—go out to bars. But I’d agreed, and we met at a little place not far from my house in Cleveland Heights. Parnell’s Pub. The place was almost empty when we sat down, and a young blond woman named Liz came over and gave us beers and I said to Aqil, “I don’t think I should be your therapist anymore.”
“What?” he said.
“I feel like our relationship has changed,” I said. “We’re working together. We’re—”
I didn’t say friends.
“What are you talking about?” he said, and lifted a pint to his lips. He tasted the foam and raised an eyebrow. “I don’t have romantic feelings about you, Doc,” he said. “If that’s what you’re suggesting.”
“No, no,” I said. “Of course not. But there’s a line that’s been crossed,” I said, “a—”
“A what?” he said. He regarded me blankly. “I don’t see what the problem is.”
And then months passed. We did a few interviews with the relatives of victims, we looked at some police records and autopsy reports, but it seemed that whatever discoveries we had come close to in Painesville had slipped away. By June of 2013, seven months after Jill’s death, we had begun to meet more casually. We went out to the bar together once a week, even though I was still also ostensibly treating him. We went to movies, and once to an Indians’ game. We pored over news sites together, looking for drowned young men.
There were swimming accidents, of course, and drunk boys fell in rivers and died, but there wasn’t anything that had the particular frisson of Slade Gable.
Sitting at the bar in Painesville, when we were trying to walk our way through his disappearance, the two of us were connected as we told each other this story. That feeling. Being able to see something together that others could not. “We’re alike,” Aqil said. “Or—” he said. “Actually, we’re opposite, but we’re compatible. I feel like I’ve been looking for someone like you for a long time.”
—
And then it was fall. There was hope that a death might occur on 10/3/13, or 10/13/13, or 10/31/13. Then, possibly, 11/3/13, or 11/30/13?
“It’s going to happen soon,” Aqil said. “I’m sure of it.”
We wished, I thought. Which was awful. But—yes. A part of me was eager for a new death. A new murder, a piece of the puzzle that could bring us back to
5
I TEXT AARON again after my last appointment, and then I call him. I leave a message on his voicemail. “Aaron,” I say. “This is your dad. Please call me.”
I’m in the kitchen making dinner. Frying two turkey burgers with horseradish, the way he likes them—as if that might conjure him. I press on the meat with the spatula, and then I stand at the center island, making a beet and kale salad, which of course Aaron probably won’t touch. But beets and kale are considered “superfoods.”
I’m listening to a podcast on my headphones. Pop Culture Happy Hour, it’s called. They are talking about the movies that have been nominated for the Oscars, and they make pleasant conversation as I chop. The beets give off beautiful juice, the droplets like garnets.
For a moment I remember the pleasure of feeding people. The image of Jill and the boys at the table, talking companionably, waiting for me to put dinner on a plate and bring it to them—a simple, easy feeling of contentment. Everyone would be sitting in their specific chair. Who knew that would be the most beautiful memory? The thing you most long for?
“Now it’s time to talk about the things that are making us happy this week!” says the earnest young woman of the podcast, and I look up. Did the door just open?
I take off the headphones.
&nb
sp; —
“Aaron?” I say.
6
I’M SITTING IN front of the television with my burger and my beet salad and I have the phone pressed tight to my ear.
“Hullo,” Aqil says, the way he always answers the phone—his voice deep, unfriendly.
“Can I talk to you?” I say. On the TV, there is a channel that plays soft instrumental music and videos of playful puppies.
“I think Aaron is missing,” I hear myself say.
There is a long pause. And then Aqil says suspiciously: “What?”
“I imagine I’m losing my mind over nothing,” I say. “But he hasn’t been home since last night. I’ve left a number of messages for him that he hasn’t answered. I guess I’m a little”
“Concerned?” Aqil says.
I pick up my burger and hold it. It’s shaking a little, and I start to put it to my mouth but then I remember that I’m talking on the phone. So it just hangs there in my hand, and roly-poly bulldog puppies bound through a meadow in the background behind it.
“Yes,” I say. I clear my throat. “Quite concerned.”
“Have you talked to anyone?” Aqil says.
“I,” I say. “Not yet. Who should I talk to?”
“I’ll be right over,” Aqil says.
7
AQIL SITS ON the couch in the TV room. He’s wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, and he looks as if he just woke up, though it’s only seven in the evening. There is the glow of the television on his face, and the soft gurgle of the water in the radiator.
“I would say that there’s probably a simple solution,” Aqil says. “Maybe his phone ran out of juice and he doesn’t have a charger?”