by Amy Faye
Which presented me with the second really big surprise of the day when I went back to the car, because he wasn’t in his seat when I got there.
Fifteen
Dave
I never liked having a wireless phone. It was just a waste of money for me. Something I didn’t want and didn’t need. Something I didn’t use much, if ever. That didn’t mean that I didn’t have one, though. Because there was always the possibility that I got stranded somewhere, and then I needed to be able to call a taxi or something.
So I had one, in spite of myself. It was too damn expensive, but it didn’t rely on cell towers. It was some kind of satellite model, which could have been a lifesaver if I were ever in the wilderness. I barely kept it charged. I had a second, to spite myself even more, because no matter how much I hated having it, I had to be able to take calls inside.
The second one rang by my bed as I laid there, too tired for words and wanting to go back to sleep. The painkillers hadn’t kicked in, not really. Not until I’d gotten back to my room. Because that was when I finally started feeling as if someone had struck a blow about my head and I could barely keep my eyes open.
I forced myself to, though, as best as I could. There was no reason that I needed to sleep the whole day away, and even less reason for me to be up all night, and there was no way that I was going to be sleeping for the next eighteen hours so that I woke with the sun.
I reached out without looking and grabbed the phone. It wasn’t fancy. The sat-phone, that was the fancy one. This one was exactly what it had to be for a phone I kept in my pocket because I needed to make sure I wouldn’t miss anything inside a building.
“Hello?”
The voice on the other side wasn’t immediately familiar, but in my exhaustion I wasn’t thinking very clearly. It started to come back to me eventually, but it took a while.
“Dave?”
I blinked and tried to think. “Uh… Laura?”
“Did I wake you up? I’m sorry.”
“I’m up,” I groused. “Just tell me what the problem is.”
“It’s about Charlie.”
“Okay?” My heart thumped in my chest. I couldn’t explain why, but the mere mention of his name had me on edge immediately. “Is he okay?”
“Uh…”
I didn’t like ‘uh.’ Uh sounds remarkably unlike ‘Yes,’ which was the only answer I wanted to hear.
“Give me a minute. I’ve got to get a cup of coffee, and then I’ll be on my way.”
“Jesus. I just, I didn’t know who to call.”
“What is the problem? Tell me that first. Once I know what’s going on, I can try to help, but I need to know first.”
“I just, Uh…” she sucked in a breath loud enough that I heard it through the phone. “I can’t find him.”
I didn’t like the sound of that, either. Of the whole thing, that was the worst thing she’d said yet. I’d been fighting to keep my eyes open barely a minute ago, but my legs swung out of bed before I could think of anything else.
“Where are you?”
I pulled open the bag that contained all my stuff. How I was going to get to her, I didn’t know. I’d run if I had to, but I wasn’t going to leave her high and dry.
“I shouldn’t have called,” she said. “You don’t even have a car, do you?”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. I was pulling on my pants, the phone buried in the crook of my neck. “I’m on my way, okay? Just tell me where I’m going.”
“I’ll come and pick you up.”
“Tell me where you are, and I’ll start moving in your direction.”
She finally told me. She was at the elementary school. The hospital here isn’t big, as hospitals go. I should be too tired for any kind of activity, but the adrenaline is surging so hard that I am pretty sure I could run a world-record mile.
I pull the gown off and pull my shirt on. It’s got a big red splotch in the midsection where my side tore itself open on the door as it crumpled into me. I felt my ribs protesting, and the truth was that I didn’t give a shit.
I was moving before I hung up the phone. The nurses thought that they could stop me, but they thought wrong. Apparently they didn’t want to stop me nearly as much as I wanted to leave. Once it became clear that verbally telling me to stop wasn’t going to do anything, they gave up and started on the second line of defense. Presumably they were calling security to meet me on the way out. I’d like to see them try.
I sucked in a breath as the elevator doors opened. A big guy, perhaps two-fifty and standing nearly my height, met me at the elevator. He had a badge pinned to his chest that said Security on it, just like I thought.
“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to come back to your room with me.”
I shouldered past him. “I’ve got places to be.”
“I can’t advise that, sir. Not without doctor’s orders.”
I gave him a hard look. Eight years ago I’d have already started throwing punches. It turns out that I can grow up. “I’m going. I’ll be back.”
He pursed his lips, but I was already turning away. I started the long, loping strides before I had really hit the door. Within twenty seconds of making it out I was hitting the pavement hard. Within four minutes, I was breathing hard. Two minutes after that I was passing a black sedan that turned hard to make a U-turn.
In the driver’s seat, Laura looked like she was about to have a heart attack. So I slowed down, in spite of myself.
Sixteen
Laura
I stepped on the gas. A thousand thoughts ran through my mind at once but I managed to cut through them with only a little difficulty.
“What happened?”
“I was at school,” I heard myself saying. I tried my best to make my voice sound hard, which helped a little bit to eliminate the awkward squeaking, but I still sounded completely unsteady. “I had to talk to Charlie’s teacher, so I left him outside. I locked the car, I’m certain of that.”
“Can you open the doors from the inside?”
“Not the back seats. And not without unlocking the doors, in any case.”
“So someone had to have unlocked the doors?”
“I had the only key, so…”
“Okay, so we have some pretty specific ideas about who opened the door from the word go, is that right?”
“Yeah,” I said. I had thought through all of this myself, but somehow hearing him say it made the whole thing feel more concrete, more manageable. More real, somehow. I sucked air and tried to make sure that I was as calm as humanly possible.
“So he must have left of his own free will. Voluntarily.”
“I guess you could put it that way, yes.”
“How would you put it?”
“He might have been getting bullied at school.”
“Bullied?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t talk to me about it, obviously. That was what his teacher wanted to talk to me about. She was concerned that there was something going on with him and his friends. Something that I might be concerned enough to want to follow-up on.”
“And did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Did you want to follow up on it?”
“Of course I did,” I said, sourly. “What do you think I am, some kind of witch? I didn’t get the chance.”
“I didn’t mean to imply… look, I’m just asking if it felt possible, or if the teacher seemed like she was overreacting.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I’d have closed my eyes if I could. But I was driving, and in a moment we would be near the school again.
“I don’t know. He seems okay, but I mean… you saw him. He’s not exactly keen on opening up all the time.”
“I guess,” Dave said. He was looking out the windows. “Hey, let me out here.”
“What?”
“Just trust me. You go search near the school. I’m going to do my own exploration.”
He looked like he knew what
he was thinking about. He’d been running around this town making a wreck for as long as I knew him. Before he left, he probably knew every single solitary inch of public land, and any private land that wasn’t locked up tight.
“Okay,” I said. I slammed on the brakes and the car jerked as it slowed. “Keep your phone on you, alright? And Dave?”
He leaned back into the car. “Everything’s going to be fine,” he said. He sounded more confident than I was feeling, that was for sure.
“Don’t do anything stupid, Dave.”
“Doing something stupid is exactly what I’m good at,” he said with a smile. Then he turned and pulled a chain-link fence apart a hundred feet back the way we’d come, to reveal an opening that was plenty for a child. For a full-grown man it was a tight fit. I didn’t watch him disappear into it.
I pursed my lips. It was all logical, when I thought about it clearly. I didn’t want to think very clearly. I wanted to panic and lose my mind and continue to freak out as long as possible. I wanted to have someone else solve my problems for me. I drove slower and kept my eyes open for something I didn’t expect to find.
Woodbridge was never a large town. It’s far from a ‘city.’ But if you want to hide in it, then there’s more than enough options. For someone who is still small enough to hide behind a trash can, the options are near infinite.
There was only one person who could have let Charlie out of the car: Charlie himself. Which means that he left because he wanted to, or because he thought that he had to.
What could possibly scare him as much as he’d been scared? I pressed my lips together and drove on in silence, scanning the sides of the road. I had the radio on when I’d gotten to the school; now it was off. It hurt my ears to listen to it. Hurt my head. I wanted silence, and by God I got it.
I started with a lap around the school. Slow enough that someone could keep up with a light jog, but it provided me plenty of time to look around. If I’d been on point, he couldn’t have gotten much further than the edge of the property by the time that I realized he was gone.
Which means that I didn’t find him when I looked the first time because I was farting around, or because he was moving fast and I looked in the wrong places. The third option was the least pleasant one: something could have removed him from the school grounds.
Of course, he had to have let himself out of the car. That was always the sticking point. Maybe there was something that I was overlooking. Or maybe there wasn’t.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I hoped that it was a call from Dave, telling me that I could stop worrying. That his efforts had turned Charlie up, no problem.
I looked at the screen. The caller ID only provided a number, and not one that I’d ever seen before. I frowned. I still had to answer, though. I knew that, deep down in my gut.
I squeezed my stomach tight and flicked the green circle. The screen changed to the phone menu.
“Hello?”
“Is this Laura Small?” The voice was a man’s voice, grown and adult, but aside from that it wasn’t familiar.
“Who is this?”
“Charlie’s mom, right?”
I repeated the question. “Who is this?”
“Your son came by with my little brother. He’s hanging out now, but I didn’t want you to worry.”
“You should have waited to ask.”
“I realize,” he said evenly. “I just realized that he hadn’t cleared it with you first. You should come by and pick him up.”
“Okay. You have an address?”
He gave me an address. It was on the south side of town. I wrote it down on a receipt and made sure to read it back to him.
“See you in a minute,” he said. I took a breath, tried to slow my pulse down a little, and started going through my contacts to look for Dave.
Seventeen
Dave
I have gone four years since I got out of the Army without needing to answer a telephone. My work is primarily a series of fairly smart investments. It’s not terribly much, but it’s enough to get me by, and that’s all I ever needed.
Today, I answered the phone twice. And the second time, I was actually looking forward to it, which surprised me almost as much. I held my breath as I put the phone to my ear.
“What’s up?”
“I found him.”
The breath escapes my chest. I had looked for the better part of ten minutes, and none of my first three guesses had panned out. It was a relief to hear that I wasn’t working on a dead-end. That would have been a big problem.
“Okay, where?”
“I don’t have him yet,” Laura said. It was a waste of an answer, because it didn’t answer the question at all.
“Where?”
“He got a ride from a friend.”
“He left your car so he could go get a ride?”
I could hear the relief in her voice, and it put me on edge because I didn’t trust the situation one bit.
“It’s fine. He’s just a kid, you know? I don’t worry too much about that sorta thing.”
“You should worry,” I said.
“Well, if you wanted to have your thoughts matter, then you should have stuck around,” Laura said. But I could hear the teasing in her voice, so I let it go. Besides, she wasn’t that far wrong, in either case.
“Well, just tell me where, okay?”
“South side.”
“Not the best part of town,” I said before I gave it a second thought. It wasn’t the best part of town, but it was someone’s house, too. No reason to talk trash about the place where someone lived.
“Well, I’m just happy to have some idea where he is,” Laura said.
“You got an address?”
“Why?”
“Indulge me.”
I started moving south, in long, loping strides that wouldn’t tire me out too much. I hoped that I wasn’t making too much noise with my clothes rubbing against each other right by the microphone of the phone.
She gave an address. I made a mental map in my head. It was four miles. I could make that in ten minutes.
“You still shouldn’t go alone,” I said.
“I’m almost there. You’re worrying too much,” she said. I was worrying too much. This wasn’t Iraq, after all. I wasn’t living in a war zone. It was some friend of Charlie’s. Kids don’t know about the idea that someone’s poor. Especially if they’re not living in it themselves.
“I hope so. I’m heading that way.”
She hung up the phone as I kicked into higher gear. Four miles was a long way, but it was going to be mostly downhill. That was a blessing, in a little way, but I had to force myself to keep pushing.
There was a bad feeling in my gut that I couldn’t shake, no matter how hard I tried, and that spurred my feet. There were too many things that could go wrong if I let them, and I’d already screwed up so much in my life that I wasn’t going to let worrying about it one time get me down.
I just had to keep hoping that I was being irrational, and keep convincing myself that there was nothing to worry about. Hopefully I would be right.
Eighteen
Laura
I took a deep breath and forced myself to repeat the phrase “everything is fine” again. I’d been so insistent with Dave, and now I was getting nervous again. Why? No reason, of course. Why would I get nervous? There’s nothing to be afraid of, not really. And yet, here I am. I take another deep breath and forced myself to repeat. I said it out loud and let the words hang in the air.
Then I pushed the door out and stood up. East down the street there was nothing. To the west there was one car, parked on the street. In the middle of the workday, I guess that’s what I expected. The red Corvette next to me was close enough that I had to squeeze out the door.
I closed my door, looked at the side of the car, and once I was satisfied that I hadn’t touched it, I started walking up the driveway to the door. There was a feeling in my gut that something was going wrong, but I
wasn’t about to tell anyone else that. After all, I’ve already made enough mistakes, haven’t I?
Someone appeared on the other side of the screen door, and waved. I sized him up as I walked up. I would have guessed seventeen, but I could have been low. I couldn’t have been high, that much I was sure of. He wore his hair cropped short, and had a narrow face and dusty-colored skin.
“Hey, are you the guy I spoke to on the phone?”
He called back through the screen without opening it.
“Yeah, come on. They’re in Terry’s room.”
I sucked in a breath. He was taller than me, that was sure. And bigger. My gut told me to get the fuck out of there, but I was being crazy. If I wasn’t being crazy, then my son was in danger, and that meant that I was damned if I did, and damned if I didn’t.
“You sure it’s alright?’
“My old man won’t mind,” the kid said. He looked me in the eye. More than that, though, he focused on it. Stared at my eyes. Like he was trying to memorize my face. Or like he was trying not to look somewhere else.
I rubbed the palms of my hands on my pant legs and took a breath. I was imagining things. There’s no reason to assume that it’s anything other than what it appears to be. I repeat that back to myself two or three times until I feel like it sticks.
I look at him and try to make another decision. One last time. It’s going to be fine, I tell myself. It’s got to be. Okay. Then there’s nothing to worry about.
“Sure.” He opens the door and I step inside. Breathe in. The place smells like alcohol. I look over at the far wall, and I don’t have to wonder why it smells that way. I’ve known plenty of people like this. The bad side of town is full of houses just like this one.
I sucked down a breath of that sour, alcoholic air. “This way,” he says, and disappears around the corner into a short hallway. I saw it, sort of, on the way through the front door. Two doors on either side. I guess that means three bedrooms and a bath, probably. Maybe one of them is a utility room.