Your Son Is Alive

by James Scott Bell

  “Don’t want one,” Jimmy said.

  “I got no problem with that,” Petrie said. “How about a movie tonight? I’m running a couple of Preston Sturges screwball comedies. The Palm Beach Story and The Lady Eve. What do you say?”

  “So who is it?” Jimmy said.

  “What?”

  “Who!”

  Petrie laughed. “What are we doing here, Abbott and Costello? Reminds me, I want to run Buck Privates.”

  “Tell me who I’m supposed to do!” Jimmy said. “A guy or a chick?”

  “A guy, of course,” Petrie said.

  “How come?” Jimmy said.

  “How come what?” Petrie said.

  “How come you want him gone?”

  “You don’t have to know how come,” Petrie said. “You just have to get it done. Hey, that rhymes!”

  “Maybe I wanna know how come,” Jimmy said.

  Jimmy picked up a soggy napkin and made it soggier by scraping it across his mouth.

  Jimmy licked his fingers and took a sip of his Coke. The Coke cup had barbecue sauce stains on it.

  “Have we got a deal?” Petrie said.

  “Ten large?”

  Petrie nodded.

  “Paid how?” Jimmy said.

  “Two up front. The rest after.”

  “Half up front,” Jimmy said.

  Petrie wanted to shove a bone in Jimmy’s pie hole and make him swallow. Maybe Petrie could’ve done it when he was younger. He had wiry strength once. But now the skin under his biceps was beginning to sag. Jimmy’s skin was tight over his muscles.

  “I’ll give you half,” Petrie said. “Which is generous.”

  Jimmy smiled. “Okay, Captain America. We got a deal. Who is it?”

  “All you have to know now is, he’s a chiropractor. I fill you in on the whole thing later.”

  “When do you want it done?”

  “No more talk now,” Petrie said. He was starting to wonder if there was a microphone planted in the coleslaw. He was getting too nervous, he told himself. But it was good nervous because he was closing in.

  The whole thing was going to come together just right.

  13

  “Dear, I’ve just given you some good news,” Tabitha said.

  “Good?”

  “You son is alive, and you are going to see him again.”

  Dylan forced himself to speak. Each word was a brick pushed through mud. “How can I believe you?”

  “Why should I want to lie?” she said. “I like you. We like each other, obviously. Didn’t you enjoy dinner?”

  “Where is my son?”

  “He’s a handsome young man,” she said.

  Dylan pounded his fist on the table. A fork bounced up, hit the table’s edge, tumbled to the floor.

  “Please, dear,” Tabitha said.

  “Don’t call me that,” Dylan said.

  “But I want to,” she said. “This is how love begins.”

  “How can you”—he lowered his voice—“talk about love?”

  “You were going to kiss me tonight, weren’t you?”

  “Why are you talking this way?”

  “Why should this change anything?”

  She was cold and crazy! “Tell me about my son. Prove to me he’s alive!”

  “Why won’t you take my word for it?”

  “Did you leave those notes?”

  “Notes?”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  She shook her head. In the dim lighting, Dylan tried to read her face. Then knew it was fruitless. She was only going to let him see what she wanted him to see.

  “Honest, honey, I don’t,” Tabitha said.

  The waitress appeared with the check. She placed it on the table in front of Tabitha and said, “No hurry, take your time.”

  Tabitha smiled and said, “Thank you.”

  Dylan stared at the salt shaker. That was him, reduced to granules, shaken and under glass, held and controlled by this woman.

  Control. That was the issue. He had to take it back.

  “Listen,” Dylan said, “you can’t expect me to swallow all this. Right now I think it’s a sick game you’re part of, and I am just blown away. You have got to be one of the coldest con artists … ever.”

  It sounded lame, but at least it was something.

  “Calling me names isn’t going to help anyone,” Tabitha said, without a flicker of change in her frozen-nice expression. “Especially not Kyle.”

  “I refuse to believe you without proof,” Dylan said.

  Smiling, Tabitha said, “You know what let’s do? Let’s have an after dinner drink. I’ll signal the waitress.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. Then I can give you some of what you ask for.”

  “Give it to me now,” Dylan said.

  “Oh no,” Tabitha said. “I really feel like a drink. And then, as we sip together, I’ll tell you what Kyle was wearing the day he was taken from the baseball field.”

  14

  Monica went inside to call Sean. Erin poured more wine, liking the easy, cool chardonnay buzz she was feeling. She knew she had to tread carefully. She’d come very close to developing a drinking problem in the second year after Kyle’s kidnapping. She’d learned from a counselor that it was the second year, not the first, that was the hardest. You spent the first year doing what you could to cauterize the wound. And then just when you thought it was getting closed up, the anniversary comes and the whole thing is ripped open again. He was right. That ripping was more painful than the original gash to the soul.

  Early into that second year, Erin noticed Dylan growing impatient with her tears and unabated anguish. For the first time in their marriage, she felt him drifting, staying away from home longer, not talking to her as much.

  She knew full well the stats on divorce for couples going through the trauma they were experiencing. But she’d never, ever thought they could be one of those stats.

  They’d met in high school, in Stockton. Dylan was a senior, Erin a sophomore. He was a defensive back for the football team and wanted to do something sports related, maybe coach. She was shy and studious and wanted to be a writer. They didn’t seem like a match, but one day Dylan walked by her locker and said, “I’m your density.”

  She laughed. It was a line from Back to the Future, which everyone had seen that year. And it worked. They went on their first date that Friday. Date! Erin had never been on one. She could hardly believe she was starting at the top, with one of the popular guys. But she was a little wary. She hoped he wouldn’t go for a touchdown.

  He was a complete gentleman. Plus, there was a surprise. They saw Witness, the Harrison Ford movie, and afterward over burgers and fries Dylan mentioned that the movie’s style reminded him of The Grapes of Wrath and she said, “The movie?” and he said, “And the book.”

  A football player who read books!

  Speaking of which, it was a storybook romance after that, including a knight-in-shining-armor moment. For a few ugly weeks a boy everybody called Weezer was bothering her, chattering at her that she had to go out with him just once, not leaving her alone. He followed her into the girls’ bathroom once after school and pushed her against the wall and put his hand under her blouse. Dylan had seen them go in—even the timing was out of a book—and when Weezer tried to get away, Dylan caught him and knocked him out with one punch.

  For which Dylan was suspended, but at least Weezer was forced to leave the school. And for the rest of the semester she and Dylan were treated like Robin Hood and Marian.

  Yes, storybook, through prom and graduation and a summer of sweet promises.

  But then Dylan was off to U. C. Davis, an hour’s drive away. The weekend visits grew scarcer. So did the phone calls.

  Erin knew what was coming. It started with the old “Let’s feel free to see other people” from Dylan. Erin did not want other people.

  She cried for a week.

  And then it was over, replaced by that
uncomfortable silence that pretends you are still friends but will never be filled by the sound of real conversation again.

  After graduation, Erin went to UCLA as an English major, and then to Long Beach State for an MFA. Which naturally led to a job at Burger King.

  A year later she was a receptionist at a law firm. At least the firm was in Beverly Hills where she could pretend she was doing research for a novel on the rich and famous.

  There were some other men in her life. Like the sensitive hipster poet whose free verse ended up costing her $600. That’s how much she loaned him that he never paid back.

  Then at the firm there was the associate who wanted their affair to be both legal and brief. Erin objected. The associate’s wife sustained the objection.

  Erin quit the firm and got a job teaching fourth grade at a private school. She began dating a single dad who worked for a music company in Los Angeles. It lasted a year. Then the dad got back together with the mom, and Erin decided to forget men for a while and finish her novel.

  Which she did. And began the arduous process of finding an agent.

  Seventeen of them turned her down. She got a little bit of encouragement, and one major suggestion: Can you Danielle Steel this up a bit?

  She was in the process of figuring out what that meant when she took her manuscript and pen to try out the new coffee place everyone was raving about. Yeesh! One small cup of drip coffee cost a dollar twenty-five!

  Who drank here? Bankers? Lawyers? Trust-fund babies?

  Erin coughed up the dough and settled into a soft chair and began looking over her manuscript.

  She was at page ten when she heard someone say, “Small world.”

  She looked up.

  Dylan Reeve said, “Or a big Starbucks.”

  Erin almost did a spit take.

  The chair next to her was open.

  They talked for two hours. At the end of which he asked her to dinner.

  At the end of dinner, he said, “I was right the first time.”

  Erin said, “About what?”

  Dylan said, “You and me. It’s our density.”

  Six months later they were married.

  A year and a half after that, Kyle was born.

  What Erin noticed first was the nose. Kyle had the Reeve nose all right, like Dylan and Dylan’s father, Rick. And even his grandfather, as family photographs showed. It was what some would call a Roman nose. But Erin liked to call it imperial. As in authoritative and confident. That would be her boy.

  “The nose knows,” she told Dylan as she breastfed Kyle for the first time.

  And in those first years, when Kyle went from baby to toddler to little boy, at odd moments Erin found herself kissing that nose.

  Like at bedtime, when Kyle would want her to sing to him. He always wanted “The Star Carol,” which Erin sang low and slow.

  Long years ago, on a deep winter night,

  High in the heavens, a star shone bright …

  Often, at the end, he would be asleep and she would kiss his nose again and imagine it fully mature, on an honor student’s face, a handsome face ready to take on any challenge, including which girl to choose from among the many who flocked to him—

  Erin, on the balcony, felt her chest constrict. The pictures were coming too fast now—from birth to kindergarten, to tee-ball, to that day, that day …

  “You okay?”

  Monica was beside her.

  “Hm?”

  “You moaned,” Monica said.

  “I did?”

  “A little.”

  “I guess I’m woozy,” Erin said.

  “Is that all?”

  Needing to get out of the onslaught of images, Erin put up a picture of Anderson Bolt in her mind.

  “A younger man has asked me out,” Erin said.

  “Exsqueeze me?”

  “Yeah. At the school.”

  “How young is younger?”

  “Thirty-five.”

  “Looks?”

  “Very nice.”

  “Define very.”

  “Perfect soap opera doctor,” Erin said.

  Monica touched Erin’s shoulder. “Go for it!”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What don’t you know? What else do you have going?”

  “Do I have to have something going?”

  “Of course! Without something going you’re just stalled on the side of the road. Plus, you’re giving me incredible vicarious pleasure. I want this to play out.”

  “Maybe you should go out with him,” Erin said.

  “You do the groundwork,” Monica said. “We’ll talk about handoffs later.”

  15

  “It was a Cubs baseball uniform, of course,” Tabitha said. Then she took a sip of her cognac.

  Dylan’s cognac sat untouched in front of him. Tabitha had placed the order for both of them.

  “You were there?” Dylan said.

  “Now, dear, let’s get a few things out here on the table.” She smoothed her hand across the table’s surface. “No questions. I will give you the information you need. I know what will make you happy.”

  How could she be talking like this? “Why are you—”

  “Now that’s a question.” She sipped between smiling lips.

  “Well then what … how am I supposed …”

  “I know it’s difficult,” she said. “And I’m not being mean, really I’m not. You’ve been hit with a pretty big shock. I’m well aware of it. But you’ve been dealing with your loss for fifteen years. A few more weeks won’t seem that much.”

  Dear God, weeks? After some credible evidence that Kyle might be alive, just as she said?

  He would explode in days, not weeks. What she was asking was impossible.

  “I can read your eyes,” Tabitha said. “They are lovely eyes, you know. Even in this light. Troubled, but still lovely. I want to take the trouble away, Dylan. I want you to see that.”

  She was crazy. But she didn’t talk crazy. She spoke with the cool assurance of someone at home, as his grandmother used to say, in her own skin.

  “Go on,” Tabitha said, nodding at his cognac. “Have a drink.”

  He shook his head.

  “I insist,” she said, the smile disappearing for a moment, then returning like a cautious snake peeking out of a hole.

  Dylan reached for the glass. His hand was shaking. He couldn’t stop it. He put his other hand on the glass and forced some cognac down his throat. It burned.

  “That’s better,” Tabitha said. “Now, I want you to know some things. First of all, Kyle has been well taken care of. He’s healthy. He’s happy. He’s working. He has a girlfriend. He’s planning on going to college in the fall.”

  Dylan said, “Please, let me see him.”

  “Now, dear, let’s—”

  “Don’t call me dear!”

  “What would you prefer?”

  “I prefer you not call me anything, just—”

  “That’s not the way love works,” Tabitha said.

  “Don’t you dare talk about love,” he said.

  “Don’t you dare tell me what I can and cannot talk about.”

  A cold, steely silence walled between them for a long moment.

  Tabitha broke it with a warm voice. “Let me lay things out, dear. I know you’re suffering. I do. And I don’t want that. I want you to feel hope. Something you haven’t felt for a long time, I’m guessing. You’ve lived with terrible uncertainty, I know. I’m going to help you get over it.”

  A counselor from hell, Dylan thought.

  She said, “Now, some things up front. I am going to assume that you’ll want to go to the police or the FBI or some desperate move like that. Should you do so, you will never see Kyle again. Nothing will happen to me. I will have all the evidence I need to convince anyone that you snapped and started accusing me of laying out an unbelievable story. I have the waitress here, who saw that you were acting strange. I have a record of our emails and texts, demon
strating my sweet spirit. I will be able to convince them that you hit me, because we both know the climate in this country gives women all the leverage with such an accusation. Understand?”

  Hell wasn’t low enough for this woman.

  “Further,” she said, “I am going to assume that you will try to get a recording of my voice when we speak. So when we’re together I’ll not say a single thing to implicate me until I’m sure you’re not wired or activating your phone. If I suspect at any time that you have told anyone, including your ex-wife, about any of this, I will disappear and you will never see Kyle. You see, I want you to see him. I want you to know him.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Again with the question. But I will answer it, so you know my motives are pure. I do want you to be happy.”

  “Why?”

  ‘That’s one question too many,” Tabitha said. “And we have had a very heavy meal. Both the food and the conversation, right?”

  She finished her cognac, closing her eyes and savoring it.

  “Now I will pay the check,” she said. “Then I’ll walk you to your car. I will kiss you on the cheek and tell you that I can’t wait to do this again.”

  “You can’t leave it like that.”

  “Why not, dear?”

  He had no answer. Of course she could leave it like that, or any way she wanted to. At this point, she had a death grip on his subclavian artery. She could squeeze and squeeze. Sure, he could break away, but that would mean never seeing Kyle.

  If she was telling the truth.

  He had to know.

  In the parking lot she did just as she said she would. Kissed him on the cheek. Quickly, so he couldn’t pull away. It was more like her lips were a dart and his cheek the dartboard.

  “Now don’t you worry,” she said. “And don’t do anything impulsive, like try to follow me. Just trust me. Everything is going to be all right.”

  16

  Driving home was like hurtling through a dark tube in one of those water parks. Nothing visual registered around him, nothing but the strip of asphalt illuminated by his headlights.