If I'm Found

by Terri Blackstock

  I find three more and drive to each of them. No luck.

  I try driving through the motel parking lot where I was staying when I found the Bible, since I know he’s stayed there before. His car isn’t there. I drive to other motels, looking through every parking lot, searching.

  Finally, I go to Miss Naomi’s, feeling like a failure. Exhausted, I fall into a light sleep until Lydia and Caden come home, and the toddler’s voice rises above the household. I check my makeup again, cake on more eyeliner. Then, while they’re in the kitchen, I grab my purse and leave.

  I get something to eat, then as it grows dark, I drive to the biggest bridge again, just to check one more time. Then I see.

  His car is parked at the end of the bridge, but he’s not in it. My stomach turns. I pull in behind his car and get out. There’s a walkway the length of the bridge, so I start up it, hoping it’s not too late, praying he’s still there. I walk slowly at first, then faster and faster, jogging toward the center.

  And there he is, sitting on the edge, leaning on the lower bar of the guardrail, his feet hanging off.

  “Cole,” I say, and he jerks his head up at me.

  “Cole, don’t do it.”

  “Miranda! Go away!”

  “No.” I walk toward him and reach out my hand. “Get up. Come on. Everybody’s looking for you.”

  He doesn’t take my hand. I finally drop it and look over the bridge railing. The water is a long way down. I wonder what would happen if he hit it from this distance. Would he break his neck? Plunge so far down that he knocks himself out? Would his lungs fill with water even before he’s unconscious?

  I feel powerless, but I’m not going to leave. Light-headed, I sit down beside him. “Cole, it’s not hopeless. Your wife needs you. Your children need you.”

  “They won’t give them back,” he bites out. “That little girl lied, or she didn’t even lie, but her parents made up a lie, and now I’ve lost my job and my children are terrified, in the hands of strangers. The parents accused me to get even. I told them that things Ava had said made me think she’d been abused. They got defensive instead of concerned. Next thing I knew, they’d accused me. I didn’t even see it coming.”

  “What did Ava tell you?”

  “She said a man did bad things to her and hurt her. She called him Fred. Her parents said they didn’t know anybody named Fred.”

  Cars whiz behind us, and the wind whips our hair. “I know it’s bad. It is. There’s no denying that. But what if you do this and the next day the family admits they lied and the judge comes home and they return the kids . . . and it would all be over . . . except they have a funeral?”

  He sniffs hard and looks to the side, and I know he hears me. “Miranda, I know you mean well. But this is none of your business.”

  I know I’m making him mad, and it’s risky, but I’m not getting anywhere with him. He already intends to jump. I have to try. “I’m not leaving you here,” I say. “So you’re gonna have to listen to me ramble.”

  He closes his hands around the rails. I know he could simply slip his body under the horizontal bar and he’d be gone.

  “Most people don’t know this,” I say, “but I found my dad’s dead body when I was twelve.”

  He lifts his head and looks at me. “Is this a story you’re making up to distract me?”

  “No, it’s true. He was hanging from the fan at the center of our . . .” My voice cracks and I swallow hard. “Our living room. The police ruled it suicide. So that’s what it was, officially. We had to take phone calls where people tried to comfort us. We had to go to the funeral and stand there in a line, shaking hands, and people tried to tell us happy stories about him, but there was no joy in those stories. There was only such heavy, heavy . . . sadness.”

  I don’t tell him how I tried to talk to police and convince them it was foul play, because that would only confuse the issue. Or make it too clear.

  “From then on, we were that family. My mother got a terrible case of OCD, so bad that she hoards everything in sight, and my sister developed this inferiority complex, sure that people were whispering about her and asking what kind of horrible children we must be, what kind of dysfunctional family, to have driven our father to do such a thing. But no one knew the truth. They only knew what they’d heard. That he committed suicide, and that it came out of nowhere, with no clue, with no time to get ready.”

  He lets go of the bar and is looking fully at me. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “That’s awful.”

  “Your children can overcome this if you’re alive,” I say. “If you’re alive to tell them, then they’ll know the truth, no matter what anyone else ever thinks. But if you’re gone, it’ll be years before they find their way through the darkness, and there will always be that black fog that descends when they don’t expect it. Is that the legacy you want to leave?”

  He’s quiet as he stares out at the water. “I’m marked as a child molester, an abuser. I’ve never even spanked my kids. They’ll never let me be around them again. Supervised visitation, maybe, in some government worker’s office.” Tears come to his eyes, and he wipes them on his sleeve.

  I have to think fast, because he’s getting to that point where he could just slip under and fall. “Your wife,” I say. “What’s her name?”

  “Daphne,” he says.

  “How do you think the funeral will be for her? Is she the kind who tries to comfort everyone even when she’s suffering? Or will every word from mourners be like a knife in her?”

  “Miranda, please.”

  “Do you think she’ll need to be sedated? Will she be angry at you? Or will she understand?”

  He’s seething, and I hope he’ll get up and storm back to his car, but he just sits there. On the off chance that he’s listening to me, I go on. “The night of my father’s funeral, I could hear my mother in her room, screaming into her pillow. She thought we couldn’t hear. My sister and I sat on my bed hugging each other.”

  “This isn’t helping me.” Moonlight illuminates the tears on his face.

  “Do you think the kids will go to the funeral? Will they stand with your wife as people come by? Will they have an open casket? Will they have to look at you?”

  He’s silent now, biting his lip. I realize I’m crying too.

  “Children have to learn about death sometime. Usually it’s a hamster or a goldfish, but your kids will learn when they never see their dad again.”

  “Stop it!” he cries.

  “No!” I wipe the tears off my face. “I won’t, because I’ve been where they’re going to be. I saw you in church. If you’re a man of faith, don’t you think God knows the truth about you?”

  “Then why hasn’t he vindicated me?” he demands. “Why am I here?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, because I don’t have a clue. “All I know is, what kind of faith will they think you have if you give up this easily?”

  “Faith that’s not big enough to save my kids.”

  I hear a helicopter overhead, and I wonder if it’s looking down at us, but there’s no beacon light, and it’s too far away.

  “Your faith is big enough. I don’t know a lot about God, but I know that he’s working on this. Maybe you’ll all be stronger for it. Maybe—”

  “That’s garbage and you know it. I don’t want to be stronger. I want to have peace. I want my kids to have happy childhoods and not have to deal with this.”

  “Then don’t make them deal with a suicide,” I say. “Imagine that you suffer through this and stand strong and fight. When your kids grow up, they can look back and know that you had the world against you, but you fought for them. Whatever the outcome, they’ll know you were a man of incredible strength. Not that you checked out and left them to deal with it all by themselves.”

  He seems to wilt, his face in his hands. He sobs for a moment, and I want to touch his shoulder, but somehow it seems inappropriate. I’m not the one who can comfort him. I’m just the one to talk him do
wn.

  He finally scoots back and pulls his feet up. “You’re right.”

  I wait . . . hoping he means it. He gets to his feet, holds out a hand and helps me to mine.

  “You’re sure? You won’t come back after I leave?”

  “No,” he says. “I have to man up, push through this. I have to be stronger than I expect them to be.”

  I wipe the tears on my face, hoping all my makeup isn’t washed off. “I’m so glad.”

  We walk quietly back toward our cars, and as he gets into his, he looks at me over the roof. “Thank you, Miranda.”

  I nod. “Where will you go now?”

  “To my mother’s,” he says. “I don’t want to go home to Daphne because they may never return the children if I’m there.”

  I look at my feet.

  “I’ll just go to my mom’s.”

  “Good. She’s really, really worried about you.”

  He gets into his car, and I pull out after him. I can’t help following him all the way to his mom’s house, just to make sure he doesn’t make a U-turn and jump off the bridge. I’m not satisfied until he goes in. He turns back and waves at me as he walks into the house.

  30

  DYLAN

  I’ve just gone by the house to eat something when the UPS man comes to my door. He’s got a box that I assume is the infamous patch for the clinical study. I sign for it and quickly tear into the box. I take out the patch. Will I really be able to fall asleep with this thing stuck to my forehead?

  I toss it aside for now and get on my computer to finish what I’ve been working on. Time flies by as I dig through my databases, getting information about all those on my lists. But my body aches from lack of sleep, and my eyes begin to blur. I really do need sleep.

  I dig around in the box the patch came in and find the instructions. It’s not that complicated. You just put it on your head, turn the switch on, and let yourself fall asleep. If you can.

  The patch is sticky, and I know it’s going to make me sweat. But I dutifully put it on, route the wires off to the side, and put the device on the pillow next to me. When I turn it on, I don’t really feel anything. I won’t be able to sleep with this. It’s going to bother me all night.

  But my body is so tired that I can’t fight sleep, and I don’t try this time. I’ll give this thing a shot.

  I leave the TV on, turned down low, so the sounds of the voices will distract me from my thoughts. Sleep finally comes.

  When I wake up, it’s six a.m. and I haven’t had a nightmare. I sit up and stare down at the device. I turn it off and peel the patch off my forehead.

  Did it work? I don’t really know yet. Maybe I wouldn’t have had nightmares anyway. Maybe I was so tired that I slept too deeply. The thing could also be a placebo. As long as it works, I don’t really care.

  My brain feels clearer; my body feels rested. I feel like I can face Casey’s situation with more zeal today. The device is worth it so far. I’ll try it again tonight.

  31

  CASEY

  Now that Cole is off the bridge, I spend the night worrying about his children.

  It’s a sickness, almost, this need I have to focus on other people’s problems. I wonder if this is how my mother feels when she’s doing the things she does. It makes me feel better, more in control, so I spend the night typing up a list of lawsuits and accusations the Trendalls have been behind, along with my observations about them giving Ava to a man she clearly fears. I write that I don’t have his name, but I give them his car tag number and mention he may work at the Cumberland Auto Parts Junkyard. I also write that Ava has mentioned to a friend that a man named Fred has been hurting her.

  I get up Saturday morning and take special care with my looks, rounding my eyes with my eyeliner, shadowing them more carefully than usual, even contouring my nose a little so that it looks longer and narrower, and marking shadowed slashes under my cheekbones to make me look more hollow-faced. I tease my hair and leave it messy.

  Then I find a Kinkos where I print out two copies of the list. When I get to the local TV station, I sit in my car and study myself in the rearview mirror again. I don’t see myself through all the makeup and the darker hair and sunglasses, so I hope they won’t either.

  My stomach feels full of butterflies with flapping wings, and my hands are shaking. A voice in my head tells me this is crazy, to turn around and drive away. But I think of Cole sitting on that bridge, his children crying for their mother in a DHS shelter, his wife in agony and wondering how their family got here. And I think of little Ava’s fear as she hunkered in a bathroom stall with her feet pulled up.

  I grab the envelope where I’ve put the list and go inside. There’s a little waiting area with a TV playing what the station is broadcasting right now. There’s a woman at a desk behind a counter, and she glances up and pushes a notebook across the counter toward me. “Sign in, please.”

  I wonder who she thinks I am. “Um . . . I don’t have an appointment or anything. I just—”

  “Everyone here for Midday Dallas has to wait over there and the producer will come get you,” she says.

  I look at the others in the waiting room. A girl in an evening gown with a tiara and a sash that says “Junior Miss Dallas” is fidgeting next to a woman who looks like an older version of her, and there’s a portly man with an index card in his hand. His foot is tapping with a staccato rhythm that tells me he hasn’t gone on TV many times before. A couple of seats down is a woman who seems calm and is watching the TV screen.

  I turn back to the receptionist. “Is it possible for me to see someone in the newsroom? Like a reporter or someone?”

  “They’re on the air,” she says impatiently, pointing to the screen. “You can see them when they come for you.”

  I look at the TV and see that the anchor is on, and then they cut to the weather girl. “No . . . I mean someone who actually writes the news. Is there someone . . . ?”

  A girl who looks like she’s in high school, carrying a clipboard, comes to the doorway. “Miss Dallas?”

  The beauty pageant girl looks up. “Junior Miss.”

  “Okay. Mr. Salahay?”

  The man nods and stands.

  “And Beth. Everybody come on back.”

  As they file out behind her, I leave the receptionist desk and fall into step, like I’m with one of the guests. When we get to the studio, she says, “Mr. Salahay, you’re up first, then Junior Miss, and Beth, you’ll go last. We might have to cut you or add depending on how the first ones go, like usual. Cute dress. Where’d you get it?”

  “T.J. Maxx,” the woman named Beth says. “Got it for forty bucks. Check out these shoes.”

  I look around for a newsroom, but I don’t see one. There’s a room next to us with computers and TV monitors on the wall, but only one guy in there.

  The producer opens a door to a small green room and asks them to wait in there until they’re called, then she takes Mr. Salahay with her. I go into the waiting room, but I don’t sit with the rest of them. I stand at the glass door and watch the man following the producer into the lit-up area across the hall.

  Then I slip out and walk up the hall, looking for a reporter. I finally find a room with people in it, sitting at computers. I recognize one of them as one of the field reporters who comes on at night.

  I make a beeline to her. “Excuse me.”

  She doesn’t stop typing as she looks up at me. “Midday Dallas is up the hall.”

  “No, I need to talk to a reporter. It’s about a news story.”

  She stops typing and looks around, then calls, “Harris!”

  A man leans out a door from another room. “Yeah?”

  “Talk to him,” she says, and goes back to her keyboard.

  I step over to him. “Hi,” I say. “I’m Miranda. I have some information on a story you guys are reporting on . . . the Cole Whittington story?”

  He looks past me to another guy. “Run in there and tell them to adjust th
e lighting on Kay. She looks like death warmed over.”

  The guy goes, and the man turns back to me. “I’m sorry, which story?”

  “Cole Whittington. The vice-principal accused of child abuse?”

  He looks at me fully now. “Yeah. What about it?”

  “I have some information you need to know about the family who’s accusing him.” I open my envelope and pull out the sheets I’ve typed up. “They’re professional litigators,” I say.

  “Lawyers?”

  “No, I mean they live off money from settlements from lawsuits they initiate. They’ve got a long history of accusing people and suing them.”

  I have his attention now, and he takes my sheets and looks at them. “That doesn’t mean their child wasn’t abused.”

  “No, it doesn’t. But there’s someone else who may have done it.”

  “What are you, a neighbor?”

  I draw in a breath before I lie. “Yes.”

  He looks at the information again. “You could have emailed this in, you know.”

  “I know,” I say, “but I didn’t want you to overlook it. I wanted to make sure you understood. A good man . . . an entire family . . . is being horribly impacted by this. He’s lost his job. His children are suffering for it. If there’s a chance that this accusation could be false, that these people are just using it as a reason to sue the school system for damages, and if you could keep a child from being abused, wouldn’t you want to know? Wouldn’t that be a story?”

  He glances at the monitor, where the weather girl is wrapping up. “That’s better,” he says to the guy who went to see about the lighting. “But why did that guy wear that tie? You should’ve given him another one.”

  I look at the monitor. Mr. Salahay is fidgeting at a table, off-camera, as the anchor fixes her collar. On the monitor next to them is the screen with the news they’re playing. It’s national news from the network. They’re covering a train accident in Portland. Suddenly the clip ends and I see my own face fill the screen.

  “Police officials in Shreveport are still searching for Casey Cox, the woman who allegedly stabbed her friend to death . . .”