by Abby Maslin
“Sean, you have to call your parents,” I urge quietly.
“Now? Already?” he asks, unconvinced.
“Yes, now.”
This is not a call I want to make either. I cringe at the knowledge that we are about to deliver the most devastating of blows to his mother and stepfather. When people talk about the call no parent should ever receive, I’m pretty sure this is what they mean. Your son is missing. He never came home last night.
I pretend not to listen as Sean opens up his cell phone and dials, but here is the truth: I am a coward who can’t bear the thought of talking to them myself. The sound of my mother-in-law’s voice is more than I can manage at a moment in which I am rapidly disintegrating into panic. So I leave Sean to handle the dirty work alone.
As he speaks, I imagine Ruth on the other end, tucking her chin-length hair behind her ear, soft-spoken, trying to make sense of Sean’s strange words. I continue to eavesdrop, fighting the instinct to yell an apology into the phone, even though I know I am not at fault. I pray that TC’s stepfather, Don, is standing nearby, prepared to tell Ruth not to worry, that the whole thing is some type of misunderstanding, even if he himself doesn’t believe it to be true.
After a minute, Sean hangs up, still staring straight ahead. “They’re on their way,” he finally says.
And so are my parents. I called my mom nearly an hour earlier as my stomach began to twist in rising terror. Mom, I don’t know what to do, I chattered nervously. TC is gone. This has never happened before.
Her voice was neither calm nor reassuring. In two unmistakable sentences, she resurrected the sharp, no-nonsense candor of my midwestern, Depression-era grandmother. With urgency, she directed me: This is not normal, Ab. Get on the phone and call the police now.
I close my eyes and lift my fingertips to my temples. Now that everyone is involved, the reality of TC’s absence is inescapable. I can’t force my mind to think of anything, anyone, but my missing husband. Wrangling my fears is hardly within my control anymore. To imagine TC hurt is an agonizing visual, sending pain through every bone in my body.
There is only one way to avoid these thoughts, to collect my breath and ward off paralysis. And that’s to figure out what TC might do. I look over at Jack, his chubby fingers reaching for the stem of a yellow tulip that pokes through freshly laid black soil.
Jack cannot be here, I think to myself, acutely aware of how disturbed TC would be to know his son is witnessing this scene. I have to get him out of this place.
I look at my phone once more, thumbing through my list of contacts, trying to decide what neighbor to call upon and how to briefly summarize the situation. I try a few numbers, but to no avail. A minute later my friend Vanessa, a former teaching colleague, picks up on the first ring.
I hurriedly explain that I am standing outside with a police officer trying to find TC. I don’t need to mention the anxiety that keeps severing the flow of oxygen to my brain. She can hear it in the unsteadiness of my words, the panic that is amplifying the pitch of my voice.
“I’ll be right there,” she promises.
And then a call to my friend Rachel, the mother of the little boy with whom Jack shares a nanny. Rachel and her husband, Mladen, moved to Capitol Hill precisely a year after us, taking over our lease at the yellow row house on Kentucky Avenue we rented before buying the apartment. Mladen is a doctor at nearby Washington Hospital Center. Perhaps there is something he can do, someone he can call.
As soon as I hear Rachel’s voice, the words spill out. “Rachel, I need you to ask Mladen something.”
I relay the situation as quickly as I can and ask her to tell Mladen to call the hospital.
She sucks in her breath, and I can hear her nodding on the other end. “Yeah, OK. I’ll have him call you back in a minute.”
Out on the sidewalk, the activity begins to blur. Sean has risen from his seat beside me and is now standing, talking to John, who has returned from his neighborhood search. The officer has the radio lifted to his ear, and his eyes are soberly narrowed.
I try to make sense of the scene as if each event is its own distinct puzzle piece, a fraction of the solution I am searching for. But something in my brain isn’t working right anymore. I can’t process the picture in its entirety.
“Where are you?” John is asking someone, presumably Ryan, on his cell phone. And then, from the garbled static of the policeman’s walkie-talkie: body found . . . Eastern Market.
CHAPTER 3
The rule book wasn’t complicated. I’d internalized it long before the rules were ever explicitly taught to me.
One, obey your parents. Do as you are told. It is not your place to question authority.
Two, work hard. Get decent grades. Go to college and make something of yourself. You cannot sit around idly.
Three, find someone who loves you, who will give you stability. Be good to that person and do not wreck the thing you have built with him.
I took it upon myself to intuit the outcome, the dangling carrot my compliance to the rules would guarantee me: that I’d be immune to the bad things in the world.
It’s embarrassing to admit how willfully I denied the randomness responsible for organizing the universe. But this is how we humans protect ourselves: by telling ourselves we are safe, in control. By insisting that if we play by the rules, no one can touch us, no grief can befall us, for we are exempt from the suffering in the world.
I was exempt for so many years. A rosy childhood that lasted longer than most. Two married parents, sometimes even happily. A brainy, beautiful sister I actually got along with most of the time. Bethany is two years younger and my opposite in nearly every way. She is the leggy, dark-haired, intellectual counterpart to my petite, tawny-haired, emotionally driven self. While I approached school with a certain flippancy and sense of ambivalence, Bethany was the serious student that law school turned even more serious. For her entire life she’s been thoughtful, contemplative, and slow to judgment. Just like TC.
Yet many of our friends say that we’re exactly the same. And I know precisely what they mean. We are different in every superficial way but identical underneath. We laugh the same, have the same offbeat sense of humor, draw our eyebrows high in response to the same utterances of bullshit and pompousness.
I should have known how easily TC would slide into our sisterly dynamic, how he and Bethany, with their dense ambitions and sharp wits, would find so much to roast me with, a hobby I both love and hate.
It took no time at all for my husband and my sister to develop their brotherly and sisterly rapport. TC is the one Bethany goes to for dating advice. Bethany is the one TC goes to for professional advice. I am the middle man, the glue, or in more generous terms, as my sister put it on my wedding day, “the heartbeat” of the operation.
And it is as a threesome that we tackled the first jarring blow to my perceived immunity in life: my dad’s illness. I was twenty-five when it first took hold—a diagnosis of liver cirrhosis, followed quickly by the confirmation that he’d need a transplant in the not-so-distant future. Often the three of us took turns, trading places at his bedside to relieve my mother, in and out of the hospital every other week, my dad’s life and brain dependent on a steady dose of lactulose to flush the toxins from his brain and body.
A few weeks before my wedding, I was at my mother’s side in the emergency room, my dad curled up in the fetal position waiting to be examined by the doctor. His eyes were open unnaturally wide like a newborn baby’s, but he could not talk or even move. He looked up at me, and there was no flash of recognition. He was trapped inside a frozen body and a cloudy mind, a strange and semiconscious coma called encephalopathy.
If you want to know if your partner’s the type who can stick it out, try this: walk him through the experience of caring for a dying parent and witness his reaction. If he stays patiently at your side, boiling water for the
tea, pouring innumerable glasses of red wine, and fetching the Kleenex to dry your heartsick tears, you can offer an additional challenge: planning a wedding you hope will precede your parent’s inevitable funeral. If still he stays, agrees to a rushed wedding following an even more rushed engagement, then asks for permission to work remotely so you can relocate to D.C. and be even closer to your family, he’s probably a keeper.
I’d make it up to TC one day, I told myself. “Things will calm down,” I promised, after making my post-marital request to let my father live with us so he could be closer to medical care.
“OK, but eventually we need some time for just us,” he insisted.
I nodded in agreement.
We made it through the wedding, through four months of being my father’s primary caregivers, and the liver transplant that followed soon after. But when I peed on a plastic stick and a tiny cross appeared two weeks after my dad’s successful operation, I wasn’t sure how much more I could burden TC.
My pregnancy sent him spinning. “But we’re only twenty-seven!” he kept repeating, a fact that was true but hardly extraordinary. Plenty of twenty-seven-year-olds have babies, just maybe not in Washington.
I kept quiet, gave him a week to process the latest tidal wave. After a few days, the news settled, and slowly his excitement began to bud.
“I’m gonna be a father,” he’d say, and look at me in proud disbelief as I licked the vanilla soft-serve that had become my pregnancy companion.
I tried not to laugh at TC’s wide-eyed expression, the baby dancing in my womb as a response to the sugary ice cream.
* * *
I don’t know what happens next, whether it’s the policeman’s response on his radio or the phone call from Mladen I’ve just received. My mind is too undone to follow anything chronologically. I just know that for a minute, I lose all my senses.
TC is alive. TC is alive. TC is alive.
Mladen’s voice replays in my head. He’s at the hospital. I’m headed there now.
I know nothing more than this. Nothing about TC’s condition or whatever has happened to him. Still, hope surges through my chest as I announce the news to the group. The policeman looks up but maintains his blank expression.
“Come on!” I yell to Sean and John, as I begin walking to the car. “We need to go now.”
“Wait, wait!” the officer shouts, lifting one hand to signal me to stop. With the radio clutched in his opposite hand, he is receiving directions from an unknown voice. “You can’t go anywhere yet. You need to wait.”
This command makes no sense. Mladen has confirmed TC is at the hospital and instructed me to get there right away. What reason is there to hesitate? The officer looks stressed, and my theory is confirmed when he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. I can’t remember seeing a police officer smoke on the job before.
He knows something I don’t. This much I can tell. But even if I summon up the boldness to press him for information, I must ask myself whether I really want to know whatever it is he knows.
“What do you mean I can’t leave?” I hear myself push back. There is an uncharacteristic forcefulness in my tone. A sturdiness I hardly recognize. Under normal circumstances I would never question a police officer. But right now it’s not enough to just be me; I must also be TC. And TC has no qualms about asking for clarification, ever.
Before he can answer, I point to the cigarettes in his hand. “Can I have one of those?” I demand. We are far beyond formalities at this point, and I’m assuming that if an on-duty police officer is smoking in front of me on my own sidewalk, then all the damn rules have gone out the window.
He obliges but doesn’t answer my question.
With Jack scooped up by Vanessa and unable to witness his mother’s moment of weakness, I lift the cigarette to my lips, trying to remember the years since I last smoked one, and my lungs instinctively relax. At various points this morning I’ve been forgetting to breathe. The steady pattern of inhalation and exhalation required by the cigarette allows the momentary return of oxygen to my body. For something so terribly unhealthy, this cigarette may very well be the only thing keeping me alive at this moment.
Two minutes later, the officer is issued an update over the radio. “You can go now.” He dismisses us, offering nothing in terms of an explanation.
I throw the keys to our RAV4 to John and jump in the passenger seat. Sean scrambles into the back. Before I can buckle my seat belt, I am directing John down Massachusetts Avenue, headed for North Capitol Street. He’s at the hospital. I’m headed there now.
I don’t know what this means exactly, but my faith is now wrapped up in the two words he’s at. He. Is. At. The present tense. TC is somewhere, presently. And I can go to him.
He’s at the hospital. I pause for a terrifying second, wondering if I’m somehow wrong about this. He’s at the hospital could also mean his body. Just his body. Zipped inside some cold plastic bag. I try to silence that ugly thought, but the image has already been formed. Just as with the word murder, I’ve brought it into existence. And now I can’t pretend it isn’t a possibility.
In the seat next to me, John’s hands grip the steering wheel. Sean’s burly figure is spread out in the back. My phone lights up with another call from an unknown 202 number, the D.C. area code, and I answer hesitantly.
“Hello,” greets a female voice on the other line. “This is Dr. Sanders from Washington Hospital Center. Is this Mrs. Maslin?”
“Yes,” I answer, terrified anticipation audible in the fringes of my voice. “This is she.”
“Mrs. Maslin, I’m calling to let you know your husband is here at the hospital.”
“Yes, I know,” I respond breathily. “We’re on our way.”
“Are you sitting down?” she asks gently. I tell her we’re already in the car. “Are you driving?” she asks next.
I brace myself, certain as to why she’s asking. Doctors don’t deliver catastrophic news to people at the wheel of a moving vehicle. TC is dead. I feel my chest tighten. “No, I’m not driving. I’m in the car, but I’m not driving.”
“OK,” she continues. “Your husband is here, but he’s in very critical condition. He suffered a massive head injury, and he’s in surgery right now.”
I process her last words. “Wait, what kind of head injury?”
“Well, we don’t know,” she admits. “But it looks to be an assault. Possibly blunt force trauma.”
I’m not sure what blunt force trauma means except that I may have heard it on TV once. I think of the board game Clue and the playing piece shaped like a tiny lead pipe. Mr. Green, in the library, with the lead pipe. It’s ridiculous, but it’s all that comes to mind.
I thank Dr. Sanders for her phone call, and before we hang up, she gives me directions to the trauma waiting room inside the hospital. Blunt force trauma. I don’t know what to make of this information. My mind returns to all the brutal scenarios I’ve imagined this morning: TC, robbed, left for dead in a ditch somewhere outside the city. TC, kidnapped and forced to use his bank card at gas stations and ATMs. TC, shot in the chest, shot in the shoulder, shot in the head. It’s only now that I realize all these scenarios involve guns. The fact that TC hasn’t been shot feels like a mystifying surprise.
The car goes silent as I explain what I’ve heard, and the three of us try to make meaning of the doctor’s phone call. Suddenly, Sean pounds the back of my seat with a tight fist.
“Fuck!” he shouts in a booming voice. “Holy fuck.”
None of us are in control of our emotions anymore, and we are light-years apart in our reactions. Sean is palpably tense, possessed by rage. John, whom I know far less well, is silent, using every bit of self-restraint to drive the car. And I am calm. Terrified, but calm. Taken over by some primal instinct to organize and pray.
I can think only of a science documen
tary, What the Bleep Do We Know!?, TC introduced me to years ago. The movie included this bit about collective thoughts that comes to mind now. One summer back in the 1990s, a group of several thousand people gathered in D.C. for a two-month experiment in meditation. The goal of the group was simple but ambitious: to reduce crime in the country’s most dangerous city by 25 percent. Amazingly, crime rates did substantially decrease following the experiment, an outcome with no explanation aside from the raw collective force of the meditators’ thoughts.
The experiment stuck with me because it reaffirmed something I’ve long believed: that energy and prayers are very much related. That they contain something powerful, perhaps even tangible. Everyone has the experience of staring at the back of someone’s head until finally, he or she turns to look at you. Energy like that can be felt. It can incite change. Maybe it’s not so crazy to believe prayers can do the same.
I think for a moment more and then pick up my phone. Prayers may not save TC, but they certainly won’t hurt. I look down at my phone and quickly type an update on Facebook.
I need every single prayer you can muster. I need a miracle. Please pray for my family right now.
My message is not intended to be cryptic. I’m not trying to worry people unnecessarily or create drama, but I simply can’t think of any other option than to organize and pray. Pray and organize.
We are loved in this world, TC, Jack, and me. I don’t know much more than that, except maybe this: this is the moment we must cash in on every ounce of that goodwill.
I just hope it’s enough to save TC’s life.
CHAPTER 4
There is a shock that is as physical as it is emotional. It’s the kind that reaches past your bones, digs into your nerves, and claws itself around each of your veins. It’s the kind that leaves you panting and incoherent, nauseated and dizzy, begging your brain and your body to find their way back to each other so that your lungs will remember how to breathe again and your legs will remember how to hold you. Shock like that is hard to describe. It is the body’s reaction to a declaration of war.