by Crystal Chan
“So, how do you know Sam?” he asked me.
“We were friends. Are friends,” I corrected myself. “He would hang out at my house a lot.”
“Really?” He gave me a little smirk, as if I was such a loser that the only friend that I could have was a ten-year-old kid.
“I have a sister his age,” I said coldly.
“I see,” he said in the way that made it quite obvious that he didn’t believe me. He jotted something down on his pad of paper. Probably noting that I was some sort of pedophile.
“Did Sam say anything about where he would go?” Lieutenant Kowalski asked me.
“No,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“Really, I’m sure.”
“Mmmm.”
He peered at me then, and his eyes lingered on the shape of my nose, the shape of my eyes, my dark, straight hair. I knew what he wanted to ask me next, so I beat him to the punch. “I was born here,” I explained, meeting his gaze. I knew I was edging toward the line of being an asshole, but I couldn’t help it.
Lieutenant Kowalski jotted down more notes. “How often do you two hang out, and where do you go?”
“Every couple of days or so. He usually comes over to my house.”
“What was his mental state?”
For that last question the only thing I could say was, “He lost hope.”
Lieutenant Kowalski raised an eyebrow. “Lost hope?”
“Yeah,” I said. “He’s been waiting for his brother to come back.”
The officer flipped through his papers. “He ran away too, huh?”
“Yeah.”
He whistled softly. “No clue where this brother Nick is?”
“No,” I said. “But I did talk with him.”
“With Nick?” He raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah. He found my number and called me.”
“What did you talk about?”
“We told each other to go fuck ourselves.”
Lieutenant Kowalski stared at me.
I shrugged.
The cops took down whatever helpful information they could, and I was at Sam’s place until late into the evening. After they had left, Sam’s mother looked at me, a little awkwardly, and invited me to stay for a soda.
His dad frowned. “I’m tired,” he said loudly, and yawned the fakest yawn I’d ever seen.
His mom stiffened. “Oh.” She didn’t meet my eyes. “We’re pretty tired. Maybe next time.”
I wanted to tell her to grow some balls and get a new husband, but I held my tongue. I didn’t want to stay there, anyway. It was too stifling.
• • •
On that Thursday when Mina ran away from home and Dad was in the hospital getting his bullet removed, there was a moment when I entertained the same notion of running away myself. I’m not sure exactly why I wanted to run away, but I had this fear for him and then a larger, clawing fear for us all. I mean, if Dad could do this to himself, what else could happen? It’s like if your town is getting bombshelled, you do not just stand around with your finger up your ass. No, you get the fuck out of there. You go somewhere. Anywhere.
When I realized that Mina had beaten me to it, I still went through the house, calling her name, even though I knew she wouldn’t answer because she was gone. Regardless, I went to the bloody living room, the kitchen, her room, my room, and then to the bloody living room all over again, letting the reality of it all sink in. My empty house.
So I left the house and started looking for Mina, my younger sister who had done precisely what I wanted to do and who was hiding somewhere. At first I was afraid that she was on her own, but when I realized she was creamed shit if she had truly tried to set out by herself, I also realized that she was smart enough to know that too. That’s when I calmed down and started looking under bushes in the neighborhood, behind people’s porches, that kind of thing.
I have to say, it was cool when Mr. Smith, my neighbor, came out to help me look. Then Mr. Gomez and Mr. Jaffe joined us, until it was the group of us looking, and that’s when I really calmed down. There’s no way that any kid could get past a fanned-out brigade of dads and me. It felt great; before, it was just me looking for Mina in the whole entire world, and now somehow that world grew smaller by the moment, or maybe the dads and me grew bigger by the moment, until we were one motherfucker battleship scanning the ocean depths.
Or something like that.
We finally found her crouched in someone’s big old bush, bawling. When she saw me, she cowered even deeper into the bush, crying, “I’m bad, Ronney, bad. If I hadn’t gone to the movies and left Dad alone, this wouldn’t have happened,” like it was her fault or something, and I had to crawl in there because she didn’t want to come out. We sat in that bush, and I held her for a long time. The neighbors were relieved, of course. They were also concerned and asked where Dad and Mom were, and I said the hospital. Maybe one of them eventually told my parents about Mina running away, but I doubt it, because once word got out about why they were in the hospital in the first place, well, it’s kind of an embarrassing thing to chitchat about, and I could see no one wanting to add more shit to what was already there.
For the record, Mina has not been back to the movie theater since.
• • •
The first two nights after Sam left I didn’t sleep. I mean, maybe fifteen minutes here and there, out of sheer exhaustion, but nothing really close to resembling sleep. That third night the tiger made another appearance; it was found slinking around the edge of a parking lot at the high school football game and tried to attack two kids who were making out, but the good thing was that the kids were in a car and had locked the doors. Still, the tiger had gashed up the car and even hopped on top of the roof and tried to dig through it. Normally, I would have watched the online videos of this one, but not anymore.
On the fourth day I put my phone in my pocket and hopped on my bike.
It was a nice day, which sucked, because I felt crappy inside. I tooled around town hoping I wouldn’t run into anyone who would report my ass to the principal, and luckily the streets were quiet. I didn’t know where I was going, and I didn’t realize I was headed back to that forested place until I got there.
I laid my bike in the ditch, shoved my hand into my pocket, and took out my phone, waiting for him to text, to call, to pop out from behind a bush.
“I’m here, Sam,” I said to no one.
The sunlight filtered through the trees.
I gripped my phone.
When my hand started to cramp, I shoved my phone back into my pocket, wandered on the forest paths, and sat down on that rock in the stream that I’d sat on before. I sighed. Sam, for as much as I liked the kid, didn’t have that same sense about him as Mina did: He would actually run away. I talked to Sam’s mom every day to check and see if they’d heard anything. They hadn’t. The police hadn’t either.
That’s when the realization crushed me: I should have taken better care of him. I should have talked with his dad or done something to convince Nick to come back, or maybe talked with Sam more about how running away is stupid-ass shit. Something to prove that I’d done everything I could do to help Sam, because the truth is, I wasn’t sure I had really done my best.
Okay: I knew I hadn’t gone all the way.
I had failed him.
I put my head in my hands.
• • •
After a while I biked home, but the ride didn’t take the weight off my chest like I thought it would, so I got Dad to buy a garbage disposal from the hardware store and went to work replacing ours with the new one. The old one made a hell of a lot of noise—the kind of noise you’d expect it would take to purée a small cat—and it was slow and didn’t even do the job very well: The best it could do would be chunks of cat. I had to do the installation twice because the first time I didn’t put waterproof putty around the underside of the drain flange like I was supposed to, so the water started spraying out like a liquid firecracke
r. I was installing it for the second time when Dad came out of his room, into the kitchen.
“Any word yet?” Dad asked. He jingled the coins in his jeans.
“No,” I said. I stood up and wiped my hands on my pants.
Dad watched me, then looked at the sink. “Does it work?” he asked.
I ran the water and flipped on the switch, and the disposal ran like a charm. “Looks like it does,” I said.
Dad looked at my pants. “You’re wet.”
I shrugged. “I forgot the putty,” I said.
Dad nodded. “What do his parents say?”
“The police are over every day, giving updates, but there’s not much to say,” I said. I looked away, and my throat tightened. “You ready for me to tear down that moldy wall in the living room? The paint job is only a temporary solution. We really gotta rip it out.”
Dad shook his head. “Not yet.”
I made a face. “What does that mean?”
Dad looked away.
“Whatever,” I said. “We gotta do it sometime. It’s going to suck now just like it’s going to suck later.”
“His parents really don’t know where Nick is either, huh?”
“This is what you call evading a question.”
Silence. Dad grimaced, which is exactly how I felt.
“No, his parents don’t know, either,” I said. I shifted uncomfortably. I didn’t want to be talking about Sam or Nick with Dad. “The driveway is starting to crack. It needs to be sealed over.”
“Two sons gone.”
“Yup,” I said.
“His parents must be worried,” Dad said.
“Duh,” I said.
“You too,” Dad said.
I started. “A little.”
Dad nodded. “I understand.”
“You don’t even know him,” I snapped.
“You’ve been taking care of him.”
“Trying to,” I said. My neck muscle twitched.
“I understand,” Dad said again.
He might as well have shot me himself.
“What, exactly, do you understand?” I stood up and stared at him incredulously. “Taking care of people? You had a great fishing trip, as far as I can remember.”
“When you were four years old with bronchitis, I stayed with you in the hospital for nights on end—”
I sneered. “When I was four years old—what about last year? Or the year before that? Where the hell have you been?” I slammed my hand on the kitchen counter.
“You can’t put all that on me,” Dad said, running his hand through his hair.
“You know nothing about taking care of people,” I continued, grabbing the plastic from the garbage disposal package and ramming it into the garbage. “I just fixed this disposal because you wouldn’t. I care about the living room walls because you don’t. I’m going to reseal the driveway because you’re going to be in your bedroom, online, doing God knows what, drooling your life away.”
“Ronney,” he said. He ran his hand through his hair again.
“You can’t tell me you ‘understand’ about taking care of people.” My hands clenched into fists. “You’re taking care of absolutely no one now. Face it: You crapped all over your responsibility, and here’s fifteen-year-old me, staying at home fixing shit when I should be going after girls”—just thinking about George made my throat clench up—“or hanging out with my friends instead of playing parent to Mina.” I paused. “I know you wake up when Mina screams in the middle of the night. But who goes to her? Me. It’s sure as fuck not you.”
Dad crossed his arms over his chest, but he wasn’t angry.
“So I don’t want you to be my pal,” I continued, “or my guru, or tell me you understand, because if you really understood what you did to us, you wouldn’t be showing your ugly face around here.”
Silence.
“How long are you going to crucify me, Ronney?” Dad said quietly.
My stampede of anger suddenly slammed to a halt, leaving me feeling more exposed than I ever wanted to be in front of Dad. “It’s not my fault,” I said, walking to my room. My voice was barely a whisper. “Just leave me alone.”
Then I closed my bedroom door.
21
THE NEXT MORNING I WOKE with a headache and felt like crap. Why did Dad have to come into the kitchen and talk with me? Doesn’t he know that it’s just easier for us not to talk? Why is he trying to care? It was so much easier when he didn’t—then things could proceed in their typical crappy way. I mean, yeah, it’s a crappy life, but at least it’s my crappy life. Not that I really wanted that, mind you, but it’s stable. Predictable.
I had to admit, though, there was a tiny part of me that wanted Dad to put his arm around my shoulder and take me fishing again. I’d even offer to watch him eat a worm. Isn’t that weird? That you can be so angry at someone you want to be with so much?
However, I couldn’t stop the annoying question: If you want to be with him so much, Ronney, why are you acting like a dick? The truth was, Dad didn’t deserve me being nice to him. For everything he did to us, he deserves everything he gets, and it’s not my fault: He’s the one who caused all this suffering. If I’m pissed, that’s his problem. That’s what I was thinking as I put on my non-Thursday clothes. We floundered for two years, and I finally found my footing—without him—and I’m not going to throw that away. There were a lot of nights that I cried myself to sleep, and I’ll be damned if I go back to whimpering under my sheets like a kid.
Anyway, even if it was possible for Dad and me to hang like we used to, I have no idea how that would happen, what that would feel like, what I would need to do to get there.
And, of course, there was no guarantee he was going to continue to care about us. He already tried to leave us once. There was no guarantee he wouldn’t try to pull that trigger again, and I was not going to be the sucker who would let him kill me twice. In a bizarre but very real way he was like a stranger to me. And you don’t just go around trusting people you don’t know.
Damn, I had a fuckload of a headache as I thought about all of it. And though that headache was probably because of Dad, it could have also been because of Sam. Doesn’t everyone know that the longer a kid is gone, the smaller the chances get that he’s okay? It was now the fifth day, and there were no calls or texts or messages falling from the sky. At first I was like, Okay, the kid’s hanging out somewhere and will come back when his underwear gets crusty. But it was five days now and nothing. The police were over at his house all the time, updating his parents, but there was nothing to update except that the police had been looking and asking. The newspaper even ran an article on Sam, but that didn’t turn up anything new like the police had hoped.
Sam’s dad was pissed. He didn’t like me, which was fine because I thought he was the biggest jackwad I’d ever met. In fact, he defined the word “jackwad.”
“So, Ronald, with all the times Sam’s been with you, you don’t have any idea where that idiot has gone?”
“No, Mr. Smaldwell—”
“It’s Caldwell.”
“—I don’t know where he is and haven’t heard anything from him. Trust me, I would tell you, first thing.”
Sam’s dad frowned. “I don’t trust you,” he said. “That’s the thing.” The thin wisps of his hair fell over his eyes, which somehow made him look like a balding, overweight goat.
“Steve,” Sam’s mom said. “Ronney here is just trying his best.”
“Shut up,” his dad said. “I wasn’t talking to you.”
I stiffened. Then I smiled. Then I left.
• • •
The longer that Sam was missing, the more I was pissed with myself. Why didn’t I see that he needed help? Did I not care enough? What was wrong with me?
I was so preoccupied with Sam it barely fazed me when George came up to me in the hallway a day or so later.
“I haven’t seen you around much,” she said. She was wearing this glittery barrette or
whatever in her hair that looked really nice. And her lips were shiny too.
“I haven’t been here much,” I said.
She nodded. Everyone knew that Sam had run away. The two brothers. There were rumors that Nick and Sam were starting up some sort of underground colony for other runaways. I wanted to find those people who were talking and punch them.
“I’m sorry about Sam,” she said, and fidgeted, twirling a strap on her backpack around her finger.
I shrugged. “Nothing to do.”
Her eyebrows furrowed. “You look tired,” she said.
“Yup,” I said.
George ran her fingers through her long hair. At that point I realized she was wearing her tight jeans. Before, both of these things would have driven me crazy. Now my eyes wandered the hallway, watching the kids. Of course, this was a high school and none of them would be Sam, but by this point it was automatic. I wondered if he had eaten anything so far that day.
“Well . . . ,” George said, “let me know if I can help.”
I gave a small smile. “Sure.”
“No, I mean it,” she said.
“So do I,” I said.
George’s eyes flicked down the hallway, and she waved to some of her other valedictorian-track friends. Then she turned back to me. “Ronney.”
“What?” I said, slightly agitated. I wanted to skip my next class and walk around the block. Get out of here.
“I’m leaving for that competition tonight, on the late flight.” She smoothed her hair again with her hand. “I’ve been prepping for it nonstop.”
“That’s great, hope it goes well,” I said noncommittally. But I wasn’t really excited. Maybe if there wasn’t this missing kid or this huge hole in my chest, fine, but under the circumstances, a scholarship competition just wasn’t cutting it on the Interest-O-Meter. Not even with George.
“I have something for you,” she said tentatively.
I looked at her. I didn’t want pity. “I’m fine, thanks,” I said, shaking my head.
“No, really,” she replied, and looked through her backpack, took out a photo, and pressed it into my hand. She held her hand over mine so I couldn’t look at it.