by Dan Chaon
“Right,” I say. “That’s what I’m hoping.”
He tilts his head and scratches near his eye, squinting thoughtfully. “You guys didn’t have a disagreement, right? There’s not any reason to think that maybe he’s not returning your calls because he’s unhappy, maybe? I mean—I’m sure you’re a great dad, but young guys get sick of their parents. It’s part of nature.”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “I had a very nice talk with him only a couple of nights ago. And—no, I didn’t get the sense of any animosity or—”
I clear my throat. “Who knows?” I say. “He’s not good at communicating his emotions.”
“What about his brother? Did he say anything to Dennis?”
“I haven’t talked to Dennis yet,” I say, and Aqil nods thoughtfully.
“Well,” he says, and he gives me a sympathetic smile. “That’s a place to start. Before we call the police in. What about friends? Have you talked to friends? You’ve checked his Facebook status, all the social-media stuff?”
No, I haven’t done that. “I…” And what do I know about my son, really?
The fact is, now that Rabbit is dead, I don’t know who his friends are, and it didn’t even occur to me to call Dennis. The things that I haven’t thought of are surprisingly basic, and for a moment I feel my worry shrink to something more human-sized and manageable.
I look at Aqil and I’m aware that, maybe, he is the more levelheaded one of the two of us. I had diagnosed him as paranoid and conspiracy-prone, but in a dire situation he is much more reasonable than I am.
“I think I’ve been looking at too many autopsy photos of dead boys. I just—”
“I know, right?” he says. “And I’m not saying that I’m not worried.”
I watch as he shifts on the couch. I am petting the dry, almost crisp hair of my beard, and I take my hand away.
“Dustin,” he says. “Can I be straight with you?” I nod.
“What do you know about Aaron’s drug situation?”
“I don’t…I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Is Aaron a drug user, to your knowledge?” Aqil says.
I stare out the window at the backyard, and the dark shape of a bush coated with snow
“Uh,” I say. “Marijuana, I guess,” I hear myself say. “Probably other recreational I don’t have any specific”
On the couch, Aqil crosses his leg, and I watch as he glances uncomfortably at the puppies on the television screen. Which I realize is still playing: It’s apparently a channel that just shows puppies, the same puppies over and over, in a loop.
“Maybe I should have said something sooner,” Aqil says. “But I wasn’t sure if it was my place. I mean, I don’t want to interfere with you and your son’s relationship, right?”
I look at him and nod.
“So I was a cop, right? I’m very familiar with the ways that different kinds of drug use present themselves. And…I don’t know. Aaron set off alarm bells in me with his behavior. His countenance? His coloring, and his weight? The constriction of his pupils? My guess is that he would possibly be using an opiate of some sort?” He shrugs. “My guess would be heroin?”
“What?” I say.
But of course the things he mentions play over in my head. Coloring, weight, pinpoint pupils.
For some reason, I had thought it was a fashion choice—that he was trying to be what we used to call “Goth.” It was a good way for him to channel his angst and grief, I thought.
But now I recall the time in October when Aaron fell asleep. We were talking out on the porch, and I remember looking down and noticing his hands resting on his thighs. He was still holding a cigarette, and there was a black, burned circle on the cloth of his jeans where the burning ember was touching.
“I don’t think heroin,” I say.
Aqil doesn’t say anything for a while. He just looks at me, and it sinks in.
8
IT’S ALMOST ELEVEN when Dennis finally answers his phone. This is the eighth time I’ve tried to call him after leaving a number of messages, and he sounds irritated when he answers.
“What?” he says curtly. “Dad, I’ll call you back tomorrow; I’m busy.”
“Aaron’s missing,” I say. “He didn’t come home last night, and he doesn’t answer his phone. I’m very worried.”
“Ugh,” Dennis says, and lets out a long sigh. “It figures,” he says.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I say.
Then it appears that he is muffling his phone. I imagine that he covers it with his hand, and I can vaguely hear voices. A girl’s voice, also irritated. She sounds like she’s giving him instructions.
“Dennis?” I say. “Hello?”
I’m sitting on the bed in Aaron’s room with a laundry basket beside me, folding the clothes that seem to be clean. When he was little, five or six, I used to sit on this bed for hours because he was afraid to go to sleep without someone watching him. It would get to be so aggravating! Even when he seemed to be fully unconscious, any move I made toward standing up and leaving the room could wake him. So I would always test the waters. I would whisper in the softest voice I could: “Are you asleep?”
And he would whisper back, even more softly: “No.”
—
“Listen, Dad,” Dennis says at last. “I haven’t really talked to Aaron since Christmas. We haven’t really been…”
“But do you have any idea where he might be?” I say. I hold up a wrinkled black T-shirt: Horny Goat Weed! it says, and I fold it in half. “I’m extremely concerned, so…anything you can think of…that might shed light on the. On the. On the, uh”
“Situation?” Dennis says, in an unkind voice.
“Well,” I say. “Maybe we should try calling his friends? I want to make a careful. A careful inquiry before I”
Dennis sighs. “I really don’t know,” he says. “I mean, Aaron and I don’t really travel in the same circles anymore. Have you talked to Mike Mention?”
“Mike Mention?” I say. I’m not entirely sure I can place him. I have an image of the boys playing hoops in the driveway. “The…basketball…? He was the one who”
“You don’t remember who Mike Mention is?” Dennis says. “Really?”
“Do you happen to have his phone number?”
“No,” he says. “I don’t. But his mom’s name is Carol Mention? She was very good friends with Mom; I guess you don’t recall that? Aaron and I went to school with Mike from, like, kindergarten on?”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m drawing a blank. What does he look like? Is he tall?”
“Uff,” Dennis says, and I pull up another black T-shirt; this one says Keep Calm and Fuck Off, and I fold it and then Dennis says, muffled, I’m trying. And then I hear the girl say, quite sharply: Just hang up on him.
“Dennis,” I say. “Listen. Do you think Aaron might be on drugs?”
He makes a short sound—part laugh and part spitting, and it’s so close to a slap that I flinch. “Fuck,” he says. “Dad. How far up your ass does your head fit?”
I open my mouth and then close it. Because it’s so abrupt, this hostility. So unexpected. Weren’t we getting along great just a few weeks ago?
“He’s a junkie, Dad,” he says. “Him and Rabbit. Jesus. I tried to spell it out to you, like, ninety-nine ways over Christmas break, but you’re so focused on your buddy Aqil and the stupid book you claim you’re writing, it’s ridiculous. It’s—obscene, actually. There is no such thing as the Jack Daniels serial killer, Dad. It’s an urban myth.”
He takes a breath, but I don’t speak. I notice my hand is pressed to my throat—like some shocked lady clutching her pearls—and I lower the hand slowly and put it on my knee. I make an effort to gather my thoughts. “I think,” I say. “Listen. There are a lot of things that—there are some things that”
“I think you’re out of your mind, Dad,” D
ennis says. “You need to get help. Seriously. If Aaron isn’t answering your calls, there’s probably a reason—something you should know, but you don’t know, for whatever your own weird reasons are. Honestly, Dad, if Aaron left, he’s probably safer than if he stayed around you and your buddy’s insanity.”
“Wait,” I say—
Wait wait wait
But there is a rattle and thickening and I guess the phone is taken out of his hands.
—
The female voice comes on the phone.
“Why can’t you leave him alone?” she snaps. “He’s just starting to heal. He’s trying to get better! So enough—enough!—with your toxic family, okay?”
Then: disconnected.
9
You will walk safely in your way, and your foot will not stumble.
In the bathroom, I turn on the hot water and let the shower run, and I sit there on the toilet, watching it, still dressed in my sports jacket and jeans and loafers, taking long slow breaths of the steamy air and repeating the mantra until my mind has slowed. Then I call Aqil. Straight to voicemail. It’s past one in the morning, and the sound of Dennis’s short laugh keeps coming back to me. The laugh that felt like a sudden snarl and a bite, the sheer dislike in his voice, sent a dull, pins-and-needles sensation across my skin.
You will walk safely in your way, and your foot will not stumble.
When you lie down, you will not be afraid; yes, you will lie down and your sleep will be sweet.
I have had patients whose children hated them, and I can think of words that I would tell them, various kinds of advice. React with calm, rather than hurt or anger. The mask they are putting on you is not your own face. But they may need it at this stage in their fledgling adulthood. It may be exactly what they have to believe in order to
You will walk safely in your way, and your foot will not stumble.
I rest my face against my palms and close my eyes and listen to the white noise of the shower spraying against the surface of the tub. The worst thing is that, of course, I should have seen. I’m a psychologist; I should recognize the signs of heroin abuse, I’ve counseled people about it. I can see Aaron displaying each of them, posed like the pictures on a deck of cards. Constricted pupils—weight loss—inappropriate nodding off. They fix into place in my mind with a distinct, ratcheting click. And then my phone rings.
10
“I NEED TO talk to you,” Kate says.
I’m still seated on the toilet, still in the sports jacket and jeans and loafers that I wore to work in the morning. The shower is running.
“Kate?” I say. Completely disoriented for a moment.
“Are you asleep?” she says. “I forgot how late it is there.”
“No,” I say. “I’m up. I’m actually having a very difficult time. I can’t talk now.”
“What’s wrong?” she says.
I shake my head. The shower has been running so long that the small bathroom is opaque with steam, and I wipe sweat from my forehead. “Aaron didn’t come home last night,” I say. “He doesn’t answer his phone. I haven’t said anything, but I’ve been concerned about potential drug issues for a while now.”
She’s silent. Then she says oh, in this way that sends a trickle of dread through me. The hiss of the shower spray makes my neck prickle.
“Oh,” she says. “Oh my God.”
And then she doesn’t say anything. The phone is silent, and I press my hand against my free ear to muffle the noisy whispering of the shower.
“Are you okay?” she says. “Can I be truthful with you?”
Can I be truthful with you? It’s a terrible question to be asked, and I think suddenly of Grandma Brody’s house, of sitting on the bed with her in my mom’s childhood room, and
“I should have called you two days ago. There’s been some…weirdness. And I should have called you. I should have called you right away.”
I feel that I should get up and turn off the shower, because a bead of sweat runs down from my eyebrow and along my nose and when I breathe I accidentally pull it into my nostril. But I don’t get up. The shower keeps running, and the room has a kind of foggy cast at this point.
“I guess,” she says, “that Aaron is talking to Rusty? It’s all very murky to me still—which is why I didn’t want to call you. I can’t tell you exactly what’s going on. What Rusty’s told him…
“But apparently they’ve been in contact for a while now. There’s been this whole, like, back and forth, because I guess Rusty somehow told Aaron to call Wave, and then Wave called me, and
11
The things that Rusty might say about me.
—
I picture them talking together. Aaron reclining on his bed, his phone at rest on his pillow next to his ear, high, drifting, and Rusty’s voice comes through his earbud headphones.
Listening to Rusty talk about prison. About his life now. About just wanting a chance to talk to me and not understanding what my problem was. Rusty makes a self-deprecating joke. Fuh-huh-huh.
That laugh: the way it had a certain note in it, a certain music, that made people think that they liked him. My parents did. So did Kate and Wave. So would Aaron.
—
Jill and I had decided that it was not something we wanted them to know about, at least not until they were adults.
“It’s like a monolith,” Jill said once. “You don’t want that looming over them.”
The boys were only toddlers, and we were in a cheap Italian restaurant. Aaron was in a high chair, eating buttered pasta. Dennis was using crayons on the paper place mat.
“You don’t want it looming over you. You’re a completely different person when you’re not thinking about that stuff.”
—
Little did Jill realize that Aaron would hear the story for the first time from Rusty. Up until the moment that Rusty called him, he thought that my parents had died in an “accident,” and he hadn’t ever been particularly curious about it.
But Rusty—Rusty has a practiced version of the story. He’s had years to work it out. He told it to the grad students who worked for the lawyers who won his release, and then it made the news; he told the story to the press, how he’d almost given up on anyone believing him, how he was not angry about the past, not blaming anyone at all. Rusty was just feeling grateful. Feeling “blessed.” Smiling that sheepish grin. Fuh-huh-huh.
He starts very humbly. “I wasn’t such a good person,” he admits. “I was into drugs and heavy metal music, and I was a wild teenager.”
Maybe he even confesses to some of the ways that he used to hurt me. “I was just a mean kid,” he says, and Aaron, listening to the voice on his pillow, nods. He understands.
Rusty doesn’t mention the sexual stuff. He doesn’t talk about that night that he tried to convince me to burn the house down. We’d probably have to kill them, you know. Dave and Colleen. I mean, we could get the gun while they were sleeping and it wouldn’t even hurt them. The way he grinned. Come on. Don’t you want to get out of this dump?
He doesn’t talk to Aaron about things like the gibbeners. The murders he claimed to have participated in. The rituals that he told me that his biological mother’s coven would perform, the time he showed me what they had once done to an infant. “They put it on the altar,” he said. “Like this.” And he used some baby bunnies I had found as an example. “They put it on the altar, and they raised the brick…”
—
Whatever he does say, it’s probably kind of vague, but with enough specificity to demonstrate that I had a grudge against him.
He says how he used to like to scare me. He talks about how gullible I was, and there would be enough of my personality in his description that Aaron recognizes it. “Yeah!” Aaron says, like a patient on a couch who is in a deep hypnotic trance. “That sounds just like him!”
After Aaron talks to Rusty he looks it up on the Internet.
There are at least ten or fifteen things that he’d find with a Google search.
VICTIM OF SATANIC RITUAL ABUSE HYSTERIA RELEASED FROM PRISON. That’s one of the headlines.
—
“The thing I learned in the group home,” Rusty once told me. “I can get along with anybody.” This was in the time right after we’d adopted him, and I was in awe of the breadth of the people that he’d met. “Like, I can talk to one kid that’s completely into Nazis and Hitler and White Power, and we’ll get along fine,” he said. “And then at supper I’ll be sitting with the Mexican gang kid, and he’ll be teaching me Spanish. And then, you know, I’ll be smoking cigarettes with the kid that wants to dress like a girl. It doesn’t matter. I can relate to anybody.”
I can relate to anybody: I imagine him telling the same thing to Aaron. I can imagine Rusty hearing that Jill died and telling the story of his own mother’s death: murdered in prison. He could relate to what Aaron was going through. And Aaron, stunned, grief-stricken, adrift. It would have been easy for him to latch onto this charming stranger.
Rusty on the phone with Aaron: sad, funny, wronged. Rusty making Aaron his confidant. “What’s your dad up to right now?” Rusty asks, and Aaron lifts his head and listens.
“He’s just up in his study,” Aaron says. “I can hear him talking to himself.”
“Dude!” Rusty says, and laughs. “He still talks to himself? Ha-ha! When he was a kid he’d have the craziest conversations with himself! Like, he was never quite in touch with reality.”
—
They talk together once a week, twice a week? Rusty gets to know Aaron’s interests, his hobbies, his likes and dislikes. And after Jill dies, it is Rusty that Aaron turns to. Not me.
I remembered how I’d tried to insist that Aaron get some grief counseling. “I just think you need to talk to somebody,” I said, and he’d glowered.