by Drew Perry
“A feeling,” Carolyn said. “You’d at least call, right? You’d have probably called every hour on the hour.”
“Who knows what he would have done?” said Alice.
“He’d have called.”
“Here’s what I’d like to know,” Alice said.
Carolyn looked at her. “What’s that?”
Alice said, “Did you know how fucked up he was before we moved down?”
Carolyn waited a long time before she answered. “I knew he wasn’t right,” she said. “I didn’t know this.”
“OK,” Alice said, and it was clear she was spinning a little bit. “That’s fair. That’s good. But could I ask you another question?”
I said, “Alice, hold on.”
“It’s fine,” Carolyn said. “Let her do it.”
“Let her do it?” Alice said. “I get to decide what to do.”
I said, “That’s not what she meant.”
Alice turned back to Carolyn. “How the fuck could you not know?”
Carolyn set her glass down on the table. “Maybe the same way you ended up pregnant without Walter really wanting to be,” she said. “I just went on ahead with my life.”
“Take it back,” Alice said.
“You take it back. I told you, alright? I told you almost from the moment you got here that he wasn’t himself.”
“I thought you meant he needed help,” Alice said. “I thought you meant he might need a therapist. I had no idea you meant he was some kind of criminal mastermind.”
Carolyn said, “I did mean I thought he needed help.”
“He needs something.”
“He’s not a criminal mastermind.”
“That’s obvious now, isn’t it?” said Alice.
“How about you back off a little?” Carolyn said. “Your husband’s right here. We know precisely where he is. He’s not gone. Mid’s gone. Do you get that?”
“Wait,” I said. “Please.”
“Don’t you fucking lecture me, Leecy,” Carolyn said.
Alice said, “You’re the one sitting here doing deck chairs while—” She stopped. I knew she didn’t mean this. I at least knew she didn’t mean it this way.
“While what?” said Carolyn.
“Nothing.”
“Is it anything I can’t figure out? Are you getting ready to point anything out to me that I can’t figure out on my own?”
Maggie started splashing water out over the concrete. She looked like she was trying to empty the pool. “I wanted a baby,” Alice said, maybe to Carolyn, maybe to me. “OK? I wanted a child. I knew I was supposed to have a child.”
“And I thought he had things under control,” Carolyn said. “That’s why I didn’t say anything specific.”
“But why did you think that?”
“Because he always had before.”
Alice said, “Do you know where he is?”
“No.”
“Do you know places where he could be?”
“Who are you, the police?”
“I’m your sister,” Alice said. “Why aren’t you more worried?”
“I’m worried,” said Carolyn. “I’m plenty worried. But you don’t know how it goes with him. You’re sort of always worried. It’s a little hard to tell the difference between this and anything else.”
“That just can’t be true,” Alice said.
“It’s been true,” Carolyn said. She leaned back in her chair. “Lately, anyway.”
One of the twins kicked the ladder instead of the flowerpot, and went down in a pile on the lawn. She was holding her foot. What rattled through my mind was that if he didn’t come back—if we never saw him again, or if she never let him back in the house, then this was what our life would be. These kids. Carolyn. Alice and me on the sidelines, only partly able to help. “Mom,” the standing twin called, and Carolyn went to tend to her wounded child. She got down on one knee to assess the damage. She convinced Sophie-Jane to stand up, test it out, take a few limping steps. Carolyn told them to stop kicking things off the ladder. They complained. She backtracked, told them at least to be more careful, please, to stop kicking the ladder itself, and they said OK. Delton turned up in the back door. Carolyn saw her. She said, “If you drank that, I’m going to kill you.”
“There’s a van,” Delton said.
“What?”
“In front of the house,” she said. “A van. Just sitting there.”
Carolyn got the twins to watch Maggie, and the rest of us went to the front window. Sure enough, there was a van, plain navy blue with tinted windows, parked across the street from the house, and down a sewer inlet or two. Why anybody would bother with secrecy in a neighborhood of a single house was beyond me, but there it was: An unmarked van. “Are they watching us?” Delton asked.
“Probably,” I said.
Alice said, “This is so far out of control.”
“We’ll fix it,” I said.
“How?” she said.
“We will,” I said, but I had no idea. I just knew that was what you were supposed to say. You were supposed to say it would get better. You were supposed to believe that it would.
“We’ll go get him,” Carolyn said. “We’ll go looking for him.”
“I know where we can start,” said Delton.
“Where?” I said.
“Nic’s place,” she said. “You can’t find it. I got lost twice trying to get there last week—I mean, we got lost trying to find it when we went. When we went before.”
“You’re grounded,” Carolyn said. “And your dad found it.”
“He had help. Also, I’m already grounded.”
“You were on restriction. Now you’re grounded.”
“You need me to get you there,” she said.
“What makes you think that’s where he’d be?”
“It’s a great place to hide,” she said. “And doesn’t it seem like him?”
Carolyn closed the blinds, and we all stood in the fake-dark of the room. “Fine,” she said. There was some new note in her voice, something worse. “We’ll start there. Let’s go.”
“I thought I was grounded,” said Delton.
“You are. Just not right now.”
“Excellent,” she said.
“Be quiet,” Carolyn said. “Go get your sisters ready.”
Delton aimed for the backyard. Carolyn looked at her watch. “I didn’t even get my half-hour,” she said. Alice reached for her, but she slipped away, went off into the house. Alice picked up Carolyn’s drink, wiped the table with her sleeve, and then she turned back around, pushed one slat of the blinds back up. “Still there,” she said. I thought about Mid being out there, checking things off some list, while we sat in his yard and yelled at each other and drank Bloody Marys and tried to make sure his kids didn’t find new ways of maiming themselves. I took Alice’s elbow, held on. I expected her to try to pull away, too, to shrug me off, but she held still, did not move at all.
We were in Carolyn’s SUV, a monster of a thing, and Alice was riding shotgun. I was in the back with the kids. The whole truck smelled like Cheerios and ketchup and karate robes. Delton had her headphones in, and the twins were playing a video game with Maggie. I watched the back of Alice’s head, plotted complicated ways to make things up to her—marching bands breaking into formation, spelling out her name.
The van didn’t follow us. Carolyn, very much in charge and channeling what I hoped was not yet the ghost of Mid, had everybody put their heads down when we pulled out. I couldn’t see how that would have made any serious difference. Still, I kept checking behind us, and we kept being alone. There’d been some talk of not bringing everybody, a conversation about danger and harm’s way, but Carolyn shut all that down by saying that wherever we ended up, she was the only one getting out of the car. Alice and I were only there in case of emergency—and we couldn’t be there in case of emergency if we were back at the castle watching the kids, so there we all were, the Swiss Family Robinson, mar
auding and search-partying in leather seats at fifty-five law-abiding miles per hour. Carolyn stopped at stop signs. She signaled to change lanes. A state trooper passed us on the right-hand side and we all waited for the lights, the siren. Nothing.
Once we were on the island and as far south as the second bridge, Delton leaned up between the seats to give directions. Turn there, she said. And there. We left the highway, rode inland. That one, Delton would say, but then change her mind. I was already lost. But she started claiming she recognized landmarks, took us through a few last turns, and finally eased Carolyn onto a sand-and-shell path. We drove a couple hundred yards before the road turned soft. “Put it in four-wheel drive,” I said.
“I don’t know how,” said Carolyn.
“Walter?” Alice said.
“I don’t know, either,” I said. “I just thought—”
Alice said, “Isn’t there a button?”
“I thought so,” Carolyn said, looking at the dash.
Delton reached through, pulled a lever next to the shifter. A red 4 lit up on the stick. “It’s that thing,” she said.
Maggie’d fallen asleep a couple miles back, and the twins were keeping quiet, looking out the windows on either side. They were zen. Carolyn let the truck inch itself forward, and even though it groaned through a few of the wetter patches, we seemed to be making it alright. That kid Robbie had been right that night—the road was not good, and I couldn’t help feeling like we’d all have been better off to have Robbie or Hurley or somebody along with us. I was hard-pressed to name what expertise we might be bringing to this mission. Alice had been developing a heightened sense of smell, she’d been saying. The books said that was normal. So we had that and maybe not much else.
I didn’t recognize the house from the back. We came up on it suddenly, climbing out of the swamp and into a clearing featuring a long strip of grass and weeds that looked almost built for landing something, even if it did need mowing. There was nobody there—no car by the house, no buggy on the runway, no swath of fabric. No second cart, either. No Hank. No POW chute. I’d expected him even if I hadn’t expected anybody else, I realized. He’d pointed at me. So here I was. Carolyn put it in park, closed her eyes, said a prayer to some god—and then she got out of the truck, left the door open, and walked away. The warning chime played until Alice leaned over to pull the door back closed.
Carolyn stood in the high grass and looked at the house, looked up at the sky, then back at the house again. After a while, she sat down. The grass was so tall that we could really only see her head. Delton said, “What’s she doing?”
“She’s melting down,” Alice said.
“Maybe she’s just taking a minute,” I said.
“Maybe it’s both,” said Alice.
“I’m going out there,” Delton said. “I want to talk to her.”
“Me, too,” said Sophie-Jane.
“No one’s going out there,” Alice said. “That was the deal.”
Delton said, “I wish Nic was here. He’s good with stuff like this.”
“Like this?” I said. “Really?”
She said, “He’d have ideas.”
Maggie woke up. “I have to go potty,” she said.
“Can you wait, sweetheart?” said Alice.
She said, “I have to go now.”
“I have a key,” Delton said. “I could take her in.”
Alice said, “We’re not doing that.”
“She can’t pee in here,” I said.
“I can’t pee in here,” Maggie said, already edging up on tears.
Alice blew a couple of breaths through her fingers. “Here’s what we’ll do,” she said. “Delton and I will take Maggie in to pee, and Uncle Walter will stay out here and keep track of everything else.”
“Cool,” the twins said.
“Not cool,” Alice said. “Just plain and simple. Everybody else stays in the car.”
“OK,” they said.
“OK?” she said to me.
“OK,” I said.
“Nothing happens,” she said.
“He’s not even here.”
She said, “And isn’t that the problem?”
Alice got down out of the truck, holding the small of her back with one hand, something I’d seen her do several times in the past few weeks, but somehow hadn’t fully processed—and in that moment, I’d never been more aware of her being pregnant. Of her being so apart from me, but so bound to me at the same time. The fact of it tightened the skin across the backs of my hands. The way she walked had changed, I saw, and the way she moved and stood. Her hair was getting longer. Her jawline looked different. Her eyes. And it wasn’t the pregnancy itself, all those cells choosing up sides. It was Alice. It was this new Alice. I had missed it. It had been happening without me. But it was right there. And I wanted, suddenly, to tell her there was more I could do. I wanted to tell her I would not flee the scene. I wanted to get out of the truck and get my feet planted in what ground there might be and wrap both my arms around her and push my face into the back of her neck and just see how long that could hold us—see if that would be enough to start.
But she reached back in for Maggie, and all my halfassed gallantry receded into the busy simple need to get the child out, find her a bathroom. The twins unbuckled her and passed her up, and Delton and Alice lifted her to the ground. Maggie took hold of each of their hands. Alice shut the back door, and that fast I was sealed off from her again, had to watch them through the windshield as they passed Carolyn, who glanced up, but maybe didn’t really see them. She was too far inside a world of her own. Maggie looked tiny between Delton and Alice. They swung her up the front steps, making a game out of it. Delton shuffled through her purse, produced a key, jimmied the bolt on the front door and got it open—and they were inside the house, and when the door swung shut again there was only Carolyn, still sitting on the ground, and only Sophie and Jane and me in the truck. And then there was the Crown Vic pulling up beside us, a shimmering mirage, out of nowhere. Friendly and Helpful. It was not quite fear I was having. It was certainty. “Stay here,” I told the twins.
“Who’s that?” they said.
“They’re helping look for your dad.”
“It’s the cops,” they said.
I said, “In a manner of speaking.” With just the three of us in it the truck seemed gigantic, insane. I got out. “Stay here,” I told them again.
“She told you to stay here, too,” they said.
“I know,” I said, and shut the door. I walked to the Crown Vic and waited for them to roll down the window. Which did not happen. Instead, Friendly got out and stood next to me. Neither of us looked at each other. We both looked at Carolyn, who was still watching the sky.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” Friendly said. He was tan. Everybody was tan. “You know something we don’t?”
“I doubt it,” I said.
“He’s supposed to be here. Not you.”
“Which is why you’re here?”
“Which is why we’re here.”
“I haven’t understood one piece of this the whole time,” I said.
“That’s what Mid keeps telling us. Hopefully that’ll be true.”
“It is true.”
Friendly looked around. “This place is big. What the hell is it?”
“Fishing cabin?” I said.
“It’d be a lot of fishing.”
“Then I don’t know,” I said, and I felt the hum set up along my spine.
Helpful got out, too, and pointed back behind us at the trees. “Adding a few to the dance card,” he said.
“What?” Friendly said.
Helpful held up a radio, but he didn’t need to. Two green-and-white squad cars—maybe the same cars from that morning—came down the road and parked at the edge of the clearing. Green-shirted officers got out. With rifles. Friendly stared them down, said, “Motherfuck.” He took his sunglasses off and wiped a line of sweat from his forehead. “Who’s i
n the car with you?” he said.
“Me?” I said.
“You.”
“Everybody. Some of them are in the house. Maggie had to pee. The youngest.”
“What is this, a field trip?”
“Something like that,” I said.
“You gotta get them all out of here,” he said. “Everybody.”
I said, “What’s going on?”
“How did those guys end up here?” Friendly asked his partner. Helpful shook his head. “Who needs the goddamn infantry?” Friendly said.
“You need me to get them out of the house?” I asked him.
Friendly said, “Just get everybody the fuck out of the way. Please.” To Helpful, he said, “Any chance of raising their people on the dial, see if we can slow this down some?”
“Already tried,” Helpful said. “Nobody’s talking.”
“I thought he’d at least be ours to bring in,” Friendly said.
Helpful said, “Guess not.”
“Call somebody,” said Friendly. “Call anybody.”
We heard him before we saw him. The breeze slacked off and the birds went quiet, and then there was that telltale buzz and whine, and Mid came right over the top of us, low, just above the treetops. He dipped a little at the field before he saw everybody, and then he pulled back up. He was by himself. No Hank. Carolyn stood up. Friendly and Helpful were both already on their phones. Two of the local cops got back in one car, wheeled it around behind the SUV, bumpered us in to where we couldn’t go anywhere. They left the lights turning. I went over to explain to them about how Friendly and Helpful actually wanted me to move, but they weren’t paying a lot of attention to me. They were both back out of the car, looking up. They were impossibly young. Mid flew over again, this time yelling something down nobody could hear over the top of the engine. He was gesturing, pointing, waving us off, and every time he did the whole rig swung around with the effort of it. His face was red. Cords stood out in his neck. Whatever he was yelling was long and complicated. Instructions, maybe. Accusations and amendments. Alice and Delton came back outside. Alice had Maggie on one hip, and she was trying to keep Delton pinned to the porch railing with her other arm. They were staring. Everybody was. Carolyn tried flagging him, waving him down, and she was screaming at him, telling him to land, calling him a bastard, telling him she loved him. He disappeared again, but we could still hear him. We knew he was coming back. The engine thinned, then swelled, and he flew over a third time. As he passed across the front edge of the clearing, he started shooting. One shot. Another. The cops on the ground scattered, took cover behind the open doors of the squad cars. My whole head emptied out. Something hit the roof of the Crown Vic. They would kill him. They would kill him in front of all of us.