Boy Still Missing

by John Searles

  The man on the other end was silent a moment. I could hear the dull murmur of what I assumed was a newsroom in the background. People pushing words around all day long. “May I ask who I am speaking with?” he said.

  I took a breath, cupped my hand over the receiver, and said quietly, “This is Terry Pindle’s son, Dominick.”

  “Well,” he said. “Aren’t you supposed to be MIA?”

  “How do you know anything about me?” I asked.

  “You’re news, kid,” he told me. “A lot of people know about you. At least in the state of Massachusetts.”

  My Russian hat felt heavy on my head, and I started sweating in my coat, not knowing what to say next. Finally Joshua Fuller asked, “Would you like to meet? Maybe I could chat with you instead of your uncle.”

  Newsweek wanted to meet. I thought of that headline again, this time twisting it my way—DAY 29: BOY STILL MISSING. What if he told my father where I was living? What if I was forced to go back to Holedo?

  My mind spun with questions until I heard a voice in my head. It was the one I had been listening for that morning in the kitchen. The one I had heard when I saw those pregnant women walking into the hospital, when I found that name on the list. My mother. Stronger now than before, she whispered, Joshua Fuller will tell you everything you want to know. He will lead you to your brother.

  “I’ll meet you,” I said, pushing my mother’s gum around the inside of my mouth with my tongue. “But only if you don’t tell anyone I’m here.”

  Joshua Fuller agreed without taking a moment to debate the deal. We set it all up. Nine the next morning. A diner on University Place, not far from Washington Square Park.

  When I put down the phone, I stood in the silence of my uncle’s apartment listening for that voice to tell me more about what was to come next. But it was quiet again. The refrigerator hummed. Footsteps creaked in the apartment upstairs. I waited a while longer, feeling pressed to the floor in my coat and hat. Sweating. Listening. Finally I gave up and headed out the door, down the stairs, and uptown toward Edie’s.

  The whole way I kept thinking of Joshua Fuller’s words.

  About his sister, who I was sorry to hear recently passed on.

  The Burdan trial.

  A lot of people know about you.

  I could have hailed a cab or grabbed a bus, but the instant replay of that conversation kept me walking straight up Eighth Avenue. I kept trying to connect the dots in my head but came up with only a scribbled mess. Eventually I started thinking about my mother again. The frigid air against my cheeks reminded me of those last weeks with her in our apartment. I wondered if she had any idea when she turned off that radiator how cold it would get for her. I thought of her body waiting in a chilled, dark compartment at the morgue until the ground thawed. No one had told me exactly how her body was being kept, but I had seen a TV movie the other night where a detective hid in the morgue during a chase scene. He slipped right into an empty steel drawer where bodies were stored as simple as socks in a drawer. Human Popsicles. That’s how I imagined my mother: stiff and frozen in the darkness. Something retrievable with a single tug of a handle. Irretrievable, too.

  When I landed in Hell’s Kitchen, I did my best to shake off those thoughts about my mother and my conversation with Joshua Fuller while keeping an eye out for that pack of kids who had followed me the last time I was here. I didn’t see them, but I felt their eyes watching me from those windows with rags for curtains.

  There he is, I imagined them saying. Let’s get him this time.

  A siren blared somewhere in the distance, and I pulled out Edie’s address from my pocket, crossed over a few blocks, and ticked off the numbers: 388, 402, 410, 412. Edie’s building, 416, turned out to be a five-story town house like the ones in the Village. A brick job with a cement slab for a stoop and a wide window on each side. Except this place was more run-down than Village buildings. Random windows were covered with boards. The painted brick was peeling—actually peeling—just like Edie’s place in Holedo. Only here it was the red-pink color of sunburned skin instead of lemonade. The siren had faded, and the neighborhood—if you could call it that—seemed eerily quiet for New York. Down the block a group of old guys in bulky winter coats were standing on the corner shooting the shit despite the cold weather. One of them was pushing the other, and I couldn’t tell if they were horsing around or about to go at it for real. Either way they were too busy to notice me, so I climbed the steps.

  Edie’s name wasn’t on the buzzer. Just a blank space beneath Rodriguez in 2F and Clancy 2B. As I stared at that empty slot, I glimpsed the whiteness of what I wanted from her again. I still couldn’t name what it was, but I knew something was there. I had come this far for a reason, and when I saw her, I would know what that reason was.

  The apartments all had an F or B next to them, which must have meant front and back. Since Edie was a B, I walked down the stairs to the street again and checked out an alleyway to the left of the building. It was jam-packed with trash cans and a stripped Oldsmobile. I stepped into the shadowy darkness and squeezed past the skeleton of a car. A bony tuxedo cat sat in the backseat. Blinking and licking. The car’s trunk was open and full of rusted plumbing pipes, curving this way and that like intestines. I made my way through a tear in the fence and found a spot where I had a perfect view of the windows to the two first-floor apartments.

  One was boarded up, vacant.

  The other had a light on even though it was two o’clock in the afternoon. Thin rusted bars guarded the curtainless window, which was open an inch or two. The glass was smudged like a librarian’s spectacles, or a glass in a sink. I stared through those bars and smudges right into a bedroom. Edie wasn’t inside, but I recognized her peach bed instantly. Although she had ditched the canopy, the pillows and cover were the same ones she’d had in Holedo.

  I guessed I hadn’t quite believed that I’d found her until I laid eyes on that bed. On that cracked-open window, which made me think of her need for fresh air. A surge of emotions swept over me in waves: first a “gotcha” kind of feeling, then anger, then a steady uneasiness that didn’t leave. The list of things I wanted from her took shape in my mind once again.

  An explanation

  The money

  Proof to my mother that I was sorry

  Then those white words at the bottom.

  What were they? I still didn’t know. But I saw that there were three of them. And I knew that whatever they spelled out, that’s what I had really come for.

  Behind me a metal contraption that looked like a giant’s missing shirt button blew out hot air, courtesy of the Puerto Rican bodega on Ninth Avenue. It left the alley smelling of grease. The residue from somebody’s heartburning last meal. I stood in that fusty back lot for over two hours, waiting for some sign of life in Edie’s bedroom. But nothing happened. The only thing that kept me from going crazy or freezing was the thought of that phone call from Newsweek. That voice telling me Joshua Fuller was going to lead me to Truman. I imagined myself as one those Christmas decorations dangling from a wire back in Holedo as the seasons passed. Or one of those galeros, suspended above the cathedral, waiting and waiting and waiting to finally drop. To be released.

  After hanging there for what seemed like forever, my nervousness turned to hunger. That greasy bodega air actually started to smell good to me. My stomach made a loud churning noise that might have sounded like the engine to that Oldsmobile if somebody had managed to turn it over. I left my post and walked to Ninth Avenue, where I grabbed a take-out sandwich—a pork and cheese creation I’d never had before—and a Coke from the bodega. I pushed my mother’s gum to the back of my mouth and wolfed down half the meal right on the street before I even got back to the alley. Once I slipped past the Olds with its resident cat and trunkful of pipes, then through the tear in the fence, I lost my appetite.

  Edie was in the window.

  She looked like a faded version of her former self. A woman washed ashore after a
shipwreck. Shocked and exhausted. Still alive, but not the same. Hair greasy and twisted into a knot behind her head. Gray circles under her eyes. Swollen white cheeks. Not unlike the way my mother looked in the days before her death. Edie was holding her baby in her arms, swaddled in a yellow blanket. I stepped as close to that smudged glass as I could without her seeing me and listened.

  “You are my precious child,” she said in a baby voice that sounded shaky even through the glass. “You are my sweet darling. You are my perfect little angel. You are my life.”

  I dropped the rest of my food on the ground, and that cat wasted no time claiming it. I wanted to hear more of what Edie was saying to her baby—my sister, if she really was my father’s child—but the radiator beneath the window clicked on. It hissed steadily, drowning out her words and blowing puffs of steam into the air, right out the window. Two pink balloons were tied to the radiator and they struggled against the blow of heat, thumping the glass. I tried not to think about my mother’s silent radiator during the last month of her life. But it kept on hissing, taunting me. I watched Edie through that window like a television with the sound off.

  She cradled the baby.

  She made mushy faces at her.

  She looked as spent and troubled as that gun-toting prostitute on Hawaii Five-O last night. The woman who was ready and willing to blow the heads off all those men.

  It didn’t matter that I couldn’t hear her anymore because I knew what she was saying. You are my sweet darling. You are my precious little girl. You are my life. But what kind of life was this for a baby? And if Edie had paid off all her debts with my mother’s money, then why was she living here?

  As I waited for that white want to finally come clear, two men entered the room. One was tall and thin, with skin so smooth and black he looked wet. The other was stockier, with a head as bald and black as the dark lightbulb Leon sometimes screwed into his bedroom lamp. Both wore flared jeans and shiny shirts—one rust-colored, one blue. Gold necklaces poured down their chests and made me think of the flashy drug dealers on TV, the way they tried to fast-talk everybody. I wondered if the apartment belonged to one of them and if that’s why her name wasn’t listed with 411. They fussed over the baby, twiddling their fingers in front of her face, which I couldn’t see because of the blanket. After a moment the tall guy took the baby from Edie. He held Sophie in one arm and hugged Edie with the other. I watched her kiss him the way she used to kiss me at her front door. Not on the cheek exactly, but not on the lips either. Somewhere in between.

  In the back of my throat I tasted an acidy trickle. I made a fist and pushed my knuckles to my mouth. Every one of those kisses she had given me had been a lie. I should have been numb to it, but the sight of her—pressing her lips to that drug dealer or whoever he was—made me sick. I wondered if he was Sophie’s father. If the whole story about my father getting her pregnant had been a lie. No doubt I was looking at one of the men who had been on the other end of the phone the night I’d overheard her. She must have planned to move here all along, not giving a shit that it was no place for a child.

  Edie took the baby back from him and set her sweet darling, her precious little girl, her life, down in the bassinet by the window. It looked like a white wicker boat. Something Edie could set afloat down a river, sending the baby on her way like Moses or Jesus or whatever biblical infant had drifted on water in a basket.

  In that moment I knew I wasn’t going to kill her. I wasn’t going to do anything at all. My anger had transformed into something sad and empty at the sight of her with her baby and those two men. Before I could stop myself, I sank down to the hard cold earth and started to cry, unable to bury my feelings this time around. What did I really expect would happen when I found Edie? I had thought those white words in my head would guide me. But they were still invisible, a nameless something I wanted from her. Edie was living her new life in the shoddy coziness of that bedroom. And I was living mine in the darkness of the alley. Those white words in my head were still just that: an empty blankness, nothing more than my desire to make everything better. But that was impossible. I couldn’t help but think of how simple my life had been before, though I hadn’t realized it at the time. Driving around with my mother and Marnie, dragging my father out of bars.

  It all seemed so harmless now.

  When I finally got hold of myself, I stood up and wiped my eyes with the earflaps of that ridiculous Russian hat. I looked one last time into Edie’s apartment. But she was gone, and so were the men. Sophie, I suspected, was napping in that wicker bassinet. I made my way out of the alley and caught the first taxicab downtown, back to my uncle’s apartment.

  Inside, I clicked on the TV and let myself listen for all the references to death. In four hours I counted twenty of them. Instead of turning the channel or drifting off into thoughts about my mother’s last night, I forced myself to pay attention to the screen. I wanted to get used to people talking about the end without always losing myself in a mess of thoughts about my mother and what I had done to her. Then I came across one of those panel shows on PBS. A bunch of old farts sitting around a table yapping. Normally I would have ripped right by this type of thing, but the subject had everything to do with my life.

  Abortion.

  A woman on the panel had short gray hair and tight lips. She spoke with the certainty of a schoolteacher who knew her subject. “I find that most women are drawn to the movement because of something that’s happened to them,” she said. “They can’t get an abortion or they can’t get the job they wanted.” She went on to say that she believed abortion should be legalized so women could choose whether or not they wanted to give birth in certain situations. But there was a priest on the panel, who—no surprise—disagreed. Abortion was baby-killing, he said. That was that. But the teacher woman didn’t let up. What about rapes that resulted in unwanted pregnancies? she asked. What about the hundreds of unwanted children who are raised without proper parenting? What about all the women who die each year from kitchen-table abortions?

  To each question the priest’s refrain was “It’s God’s will.”

  It’s not that I didn’t believe in God, because I did, but I couldn’t help thinking that he needed to come up with a better argument. I mean, if that was the case, then why didn’t we simply let sick people die without trying to help them? Or throw up our hands when people broke their legs or arms, let their limbs heal bent and wobbly without casts? The more the priest spoke, the more I pictured God as a big silvery eye in the sky among puffs of white clouds, looking down on the women who suffered from His will and refusing to stop it.

  I listened for a while longer, until their discussion looped back in on itself, clearly going nowhere. They both believed what they wanted, and neither of them was budging. Finally I turned off the TV and sprawled on the couch. The streetlight outside cast stretches of square black shadows on the wall. I stared up at those shadows and counted the hours until my meeting with Joshua Fuller the next day. As tired as I felt from all the emotion of the day, sleep never came to me completely. I dozed on and off on the couch for hours. Woke to think of Edie holding her new baby and whispering those words. Woke again to imagine that I was her baby and she was whispering to me.

  You are my life, she cooed in her shaky voice again and again. You are my life.

  When the faint light of dawn made the shadows disappear, I got up and showered. Dressed in the same jeans and sweatshirt I had worn the day before. I waited by the window, watching the street until eight-thirty rolled around. Then I put on my coat and headed out to meet Joshua Fuller.

  The diner he suggested was not really a diner at all, or at least not like the one in Holedo. This place had wood-paneled walls and tables instead of booths. No mini-jukeboxes to play. The waitress who seated me wore jeans instead of a drab uniform. She flipped over the upside-down cup on my table and asked if I wanted coffee. I don’t know why I kept drinking the stuff lately, even though I didn’t like the taste, but I pushed
my mother’s gum to the back of my mouth and gave her the green light to pour. The menu was a mix of regular diner food—burgers, omelets, turkey clubs—and weird Polish dishes, too—pierogi, borscht soup, beet salad. They also had some Chinese and Italian stuff. I scanned all that food as I waited for Joshua Fuller to show. On the phone he had described himself as six feet tall with curly brown hair and glasses. Each time the door opened, I looked up expecting to see someone who fit that description. At exactly nine o’clock he walked through the door. He had described himself accurately enough, minus the fact that his hair was more gray than brown and there was a purple birthmark above his eye. It looked like an eye patch he had lifted to his forehead so he could peek out for a moment. His turtleneck and black blazer made him seem slick and smart to me. Like one of the guys from a Ballantine’s scotch ad, swirling his drink and looking nonchalant.

  This is him, I thought. The man who is going to deliver me to my brother.

  “Dominick?” he said when he got to the table. He carried a smooth leather bag, stuffed and heavy on his lanky arm. “It’s you, right?”

  “It’s me.” I shook his hand when he put it forward, which made me feel older than I was. A scotch-drinking sophisticate, too.

  “Nice to meet you,” he told me, sitting down.

  The waitress came by with the coffeepot. She flipped his cup, poured, refilled mine while she was at it. After she left, we fell into a moment of awkward silence.

  “You know,” he said, breaking it, “I realized after we hung up that I could get in serious trouble for not letting anyone know where you are. I mean, you’re fifteen. A minor.”

  “Are you going back on our deal?” I asked, thinking I’d bolt for the door if that were the case.

  “No,” he told me. “I decided that you’re not really missing if you’re staying at your uncle’s place. All your father has to do is pick up the phone like I did.”