Your Son Is Alive

by James Scott Bell

  The moment he said it, something broke in him, a cracking of the wall of ice erected around his heart. It was rubble now, and then rushed in wave after wave of heaving sobs, relentless.

  Traffic was horrendous on the 101. What a shock. But it was okay with Dylan this time, because he listened to soft music on the retro station and that allowed his mind and heart to rest.

  The Pomona Freeway—what every Angeleno called the 60—was likewise jammed. It took Dylan almost an hour to cover fifteen miles.

  But he felt a strange and wonderful comfort as he pulled into the driveway of his Whittier home. He loved this old house, a Craftsman style from the early 20s that he’d lovingly restored. It was there for him. He owned it outright. Had paid off the mortgage a year ago. His father would have been proud.

  He went to routine by making an omelet—cheese and spinach—and sourdough toast. A little salsa verde over the eggs. Warmth for the soul.

  Good prep for the call he had to make to Tabitha Mullaney. They’d met via a dating site—Dylan’s tentative step back into the world of mating rituals. They had a second date scheduled and he was supposed to confirm it.

  Dating! It sounded so archaic, and yet still mysterious. The nerves of that first meeting, the up-tempo pumping of the heart, and even though you’re fifty-one years old, you feel like a high school kid with a pimple on your chin and hair that won’t stay in place. It had been that way the first time he asked Erin to go out with him, in high school. He was supposed to be Mr. Popular, at least according to the prevailing social winds that blow through every school hallway that has ever existed. But any bravado he managed to put on was only a costume hiding a fear of rejection. If Erin noticed, she did not let on. She seemed just as nervous as he was. It was like they were meant for each other, and that was how it turned out. For a time, at least.

  With Tabitha, though, they’d had a first lunch and both of them worked through the nerves into a comfortable, get-to-know-you conversation.

  Afterward, Tabitha offered to pay, but Dylan said he’d take care of it, and she said at least let her leave the tip, and again he said no. He knew she was as nervous as he was, anxious to please, but she didn’t overdo it. She accepted his largesse with a simple thank you.

  It was the kiss on the cheek that cemented the good impression. Outside in the parking lot, Dylan was as stiff and unmoving as the statue of David, though with considerably more coverage on the old bod. He had planned to shake Tabitha’s hand, but it suddenly felt out of sync with what was going on inside him and, he sensed, inside her.

  Then Tabitha took the initiative, stepped in and kissed him on the cheek. It was a classy move. And he said, “Let’s do this again,” and she said, “Definitely.”

  In a follow-up call Dylan had asked if she’d like to go to dinner at one of his favorite places, and she’d said yes. Set up for Friday.

  He entertained the quick thought of canceling, wondering how he’d be acting because of the note business. But no, this was life, as Erin said. You’ve got to power on or it will lay you flat.

  He made the call.

  “Hi there,” Tabitha said.

  “We still on for Friday?” Dylan said.

  “Absolutely,” Tabitha said. “Clearman’s, right?”

  “You’ll love it. Old school. And my treat.”

  “Let’s split the bill this time,” she said.

  “Tell you what,” Dylan said, “we’ll negotiate.”

  “As long as I win.”

  “Some negotiator!”

  She laughed. He laughed. And that was a good way to end things for the day.

  After the call, Dylan clicked on the TV. He felt like diving into whatever TCM was showing. Turned out it was a movie called Detour. He hadn’t heard of it before. It looked like one of those shoestring budget jobs from the 1940s. A guy with a worried look on his face was sitting in a diner. Dylan caught himself thinking, I could play that part.

  He arranged the pillows on the sofa and popped off his shoes. He put his feet up on the coffee table. The poor sap in the diner was flashing back to better days.

  Dylan put his head back on one of the pillows.

  And promptly fell asleep.

  When he woke up, the man was walking away from a diner. In a voiceover, as a police car pulled up to him, he was saying something about fate putting the finger on you for no reason.

  Cheery.

  Dylan got up, stretched, went to make sure the front door was locked.

  Then stopped like he was hit in the chest.

  And stood there, staring at the envelope on the floor.

  5

  At night, she goes into the churches, alone.

  She has for years.

  She’s mapped them out like an archipelago in a dark sea.

  For the first five years she went every night, to one, two, sometimes three.

  St. Mel’s Catholic church. St. James Presbyterian. St. Paul’s Methodist. The little Baptist church on Shoup and the megachurch in Porter Ranch.

  As her hopes of seeing Kyle again dimmed,—like dying votives in the vestibules of plaster saints—she did not go as frequently. She felt as though she’d fallen off a cruise ship at night, in the middle of the ocean, her screams for help unheard, the lights of the ship and the laughter of the passengers dancing and drinking and having fun, fade in the distance, leaving her in the dark waters, treading as long as her strength could hold out.

  Tonight, with the gossamer thread of thought that Kyle might be alive—though she knows that Dylan is most probably right, that this is a sick joke—she feels drawn to Our Lady of Grace in Encino. She always liked that name.

  Inside is the alcove, and the candles, and she takes a long match and lights it by one of the small flames, and then lights a candle. And another. And another.

  It’s quiet and there is only the sound of a souped-up car on White Oak Avenue, thrumming its engine.

  Erin Reeve gives voice to her prayer. “Dear Lord, if he is alive, please bring peace and comfort and protection to my boy, wherever he is. If he is dead, please let him be in Heaven. Please give him a room in Heaven and let him know that I’ll be with him soon, if you will allow me. And if he’s alive, may we see him again? May we know that he’s all right? Please let me know. Please …”

  When she finishes, she is spent, it feels like the last leg of a marathon when your body screams that it can’t go on but you make it so, and you fight through all the pain in your legs and the burning in your lungs. Because when you cross the line—or even if you pass out trying to reach it—you know you’ve done everything you are capable of doing, you don’t have to bear any shame for failing to try.

  6

  Dylan’s fingers tingled, little needles shooting out of the envelope like electrical charges. Dizzy, he got to a chair so he could sit and catch his breath.

  What if he didn’t open it? What if it all just went away? What if whoever was doing all this was sitting outside his house now, watching?

  Think, think! It had to be a disgusting joke. No ransom hunter or kidnapper would have waited fifteen years to connect with him again.

  So keeping calm was the best way to fight him, the unseen figure, the slimeball.

  Slimeball. Of all the words he could have hit on, all the familiar epithets, this was what his mind snapped to. For in his mind it was the worst thing a person could be, because he had decided that when he was ten years old and that bully, Cal Webb, had made Dylan his pet project that year. None of the adult bad words resonated with Dylan. But slime did, because Dylan had fallen in some awful goo on a camping trip once, a poorly covered cesspool, and forever after slime was the worst possible thing to be associated with. Cal Webb was a slimeball, and picturing that had made things more tolerable that horrible year.

  Whoever was leaving these notes was a slimeball.

  He wanted Dylan to suffer. He wanted to make him squirm.

  The envelope was again unsealed. Slimeball didn’t want to leave saliva.
>
  His breath was still short, like his lungs weren’t at full capacity.

  That made him mad.

  And the anger gave him new life.

  It was a game, a slimy game, and Dylan was on the defensive.

  Time to go on offense. To make a move.

  He stood, not dizzy anymore, and walked to the credenza by the window and took out a Sharpie from the miniature-golf-bag pen and pencil holder. He uncapped it and on the envelope wrote, Nice try.

  He capped the Sharpie and put it back in the holder. He went to the front door and opened it wide. He stepped out into the pleasant March evening, took a couple of strides on his twisting cement path.

  Now he didn’t care if the guy was out there. Dylan wanted to be seen. Even in the faint glow of the streetlight.

  Dylan lifted the envelope into the air. He waved it around.

  And then, with a flick of the wrist, he sent it sailing through the air. It helicoptered a few yards and landed on the path.

  Dylan turned and walked back inside his house.

  He felt strangely exhilarated, though the rush was tangled up with intestinal knots of uncertainty. He had no answer to a mystery that gnawed at him—who was doing this? At the same time, he’d given whoever it was a tweak on the nose, a message. I’m not playing your game. You have no power over me.

  Dylan kept telling himself that. No power. But even as he did he acknowledged that the very telling of it proved there was still a hold on him.

  Likewise his attempt to get to sleep.

  There was no way.

  A few minutes after midnight Dylan went to the pantry and took down the bottle of brandy. He carried it to the kitchen, got a juice glass from the cabinet and poured a healthy snort.

  Still with the lights out, he took the drink to the living room and sat in the dark. The faint yellow of the streetlight seeped past the curtains of the front window, giving the room a foggy, moonlight feel.

  He sipped the brandy. It warmed him. He started to relax.

  But he knew it wouldn’t wipe out the thoughts roiling inside his head.

  He knew, too, that he would get up and go to the door, go outside and see if the envelope was still there.

  After another swallow, Dylan put the glass down on the table, stood, and made for the front door—and suddenly wished he had a gun.

  Good God. Kill somebody? Over this?

  He was about to reach for the handle when his eyes, adjusted to the dark, picked up a whiteness near his foot.

  The envelope.

  He picked it up, his body now abuzz with anger and fear, with the swarm of disquiet that comes from the feeling of being violated.

  Not wanting to give the slimeball any indication he was awake, Dylan took the envelope to the pantry, closed the door, and turned on the light in the windowless space.

  There on the envelope, below his notation Nice try was a red crayon response:

  His favorite toy was …

  Dylan opened the envelope. A tri-folded piece of paper. He unfolded it, read the block letters:

  … Lego Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

  7

  Thursday morning, Erin was at her desk trying to thread the needle, as usual. As the head of admin for the valley campus of the nonprofit DeForest University, she was the one who had to juggle the delicate sensibilities of the faculty as she scheduled both class times and classroom space. Since the entire faculty was made up of a mix of working professionals and tradespeople teaching mostly in the evenings, and retired professionals seeking slots that would not interfere with golf outings and spur-of-the-moment vacation opportunities, her job was almost entirely made up of a daily round of herding cats. Or, in some cases, lions.

  Like Alan Sharperson, a retired VP from Northrop Grumman, who was used to ordering around a staff tasked with billion-dollar arms deals. Naturally, he expected every single person at DeForest, up to and including the janitor, to bend to his every wish. Which today involved a total rescheduling of his fall class in Business Management for the Entrepreneur. His latest salvo had been a terse, ten-second phone call to Erin that was made up of seven seconds of tirade ending with a terse “Make it happen” just before he clicked off.

  Hers was not to reason why … and so she stared at the faculty and classroom grid on her computer monitor and tried to concentrate.

  It wasn’t working. Within the swirl of times and class sizes and rooms and connections, she kept seeing, as if in a kaleidoscope, a multiform pattern of disquiet.

  Because of Dylan and the note.

  She pondered wistfully what it would be like to tell Mr. Alan Sharperson to go to hell.

  And knew it would be only a momentary pleasure, a short-lived respite. It would take about fifteen minutes for Sharperson to go over her head and for her to be ordered upstairs to HR for a dressing down or her two-weeks’ notice.

  Reality intruded by way of a tap on her cubicle.

  Yumiko Ota, who handled the front desk, was standing there.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” Yumiko said, “but there’s someone here who’d like to see you.”

  “Not faculty, I hope.”

  “A student,” Yumiko said.

  “See me about what?”

  “I don’t know. He asked for you by name.”

  “What class is he in?”

  “Real Estate.”

  “Jill Kenelly’s class,” Erin said.

  Yumiko nodded.

  “What could he possibly want?” Erin said.

  With a shrug, Yumiko said, “I kind of wished he asked for me.”

  “Huh?”

  “He’s pretty hot, and he’s not wearing a wedding ring.”

  Erin’s laugh was more of a snort. “I’m not in the market.”

  “You should be,” Yumiko said.

  “How old is this hottie?”

  “Probably thirty-five.”

  “Definitely not in the market. You take him.”

  “I’m not sure my boyfriend would approve.”

  Boyfriend. A word from the distant past, from a happier time.

  “All right,” Erin said. “Let’s check this charmer out.”

  He was sitting in the reception area, looking at a Golf Digest. He was dressed in business casual, all of it sharp. His black hair was thick and neatly trimmed, and he had one of those square jaws you found in old westerns. She recognized him. She’d passed him in the halls a couple of times.

  He looked up from the magazine, tossed it back on the table, and stood. Smiling, he came over with extended hand.

  “Anderson Bolt,” he said.

  Really?

  Erin shook his hand.

  “How can I help you?” Erin said.

  “Can we talk somewhere?”

  “Here.”

  Bolt cast a quick glance at Yumiko. “Can we find a place to sit for a moment?”

  “The conference room is open,” Yumiko said. Erin wasn’t sure if Yumiko winked at her or not.

  The conference room was just off the reception area. Erin flicked on the lights. The room had a black, artificial wood table in the middle with six black executive chairs around it. On a whiteboard on the wall, someone had scrawled, Action without motivation is like a squirrel in a wheel.

  Erin pulled one of the chairs out and sat. Anderson Bolt did the same with the chair next to her.

  “Thanks for seeing me,” he said. His voice was smooth and deep, like a morning-drive radio host’s. Which put Erin on edge. What was this guy selling? He was in the real estate class, after all.

  She tried to ignore the blueness of his eyes.

  “I’m in the real estate class,” he said.

  “Everything okay?” She hoped he wasn’t going to complain about the instructor, Jill Kenelly. She liked Jill and thought her the best instructor in the whole school.

  “Oh yeah, fine,” he said. “I’m learning a lot. I hope to get my license in the fall.”

  “Great.”

  He nodded.
>
  Erin waited for him to go on.

  “Anyway,” he said, “Ms. Kenelly had a very intriguing class the other night, on salesmanship. A theory. About rejection. She talked about this guy who did some internet videos, and then wrote a book, about how he went out and tried to get rejected. You heard of that?”

  “Was that the donut guy?”

  “Yes! He went to a Krispy Kreme and asked if he could get five donuts joined together in the shape of the Olympic rings. And they did it for him.”

  “I did see that. I remember Jill … Ms. Kenelly, talking about that.”

  “It’s a pretty amazing theory,” he said.

  “Okay,” Erin said.

  “So, that’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

  “About the class?”

  “About rejecting me.”

  She looked at him. He seemed a bit nervous, but without guile.

  “You want me to reject you?” Erin said.

  “Not really, but I’m ready for it.”

  “You’re going to have to explain.”

  “I want to take you out to dinner,” he said.

  Erin turned her head, as if hard of hearing.

  Quickly, he added, “I know, I know. Out of the blue, right? But honest, I’ve been thinking about this for at least two months, and you probably have no idea why.”

  “That would be an understatement,” Erin said, trying to process her reaction through a heavy gauze of shock.

  Anderson Bolt smiled. “It was more than you realized at the time, I’m sure. See, you were in the lunch room one day, you were eating with the woman out there.”

  “Yumiko?”

  He nodded. “I was getting a Hershey’s from the vending machine and I heard you guys talking about art, and you said, ‘Picasso was a genius, but Jackson Pollock was a fraud.’ Something along those lines.”

  “I may have said something like that. I have a few opinions about art.”

  “I liked it. Because I feel the same way about Pollock.”