“Maybe it was the meds.” Jack sighed. “The Risperdol, Elavil, Zoloft, Thorazine. And those are only the ones I remember.”
After that scotch-filled weekend, Jack emerges as if from a dreamless sleep. He stays sober, is up and out of bed before I open my eyes most mornings, already downstairs planning where to search next.
Jack stops cooking. We eat store-bought sandwiches, and sometimes a miserable-tasting mac and cheese I’ve tried to fix. If he sits down, it’s not to eat, but to study a torn map of San Francisco, or phone and check with the police. Something will surface, I tell him. It has to.
Jack takes days off work to search, visits Ben’s favorite bookstore in the Haight, talks to men in line at Saint Anthony’s soup kitchen. When I ask if he wants company—carefully, because a single word can catapult him away—Jack nods, then leaves the house without me.
The phone rings and rings. At first I run for it, breath caught in my throat, thinking it must be Ben, or at the very least news. But it’s Jack’s mother Rosie, who talks to me only for a moment before she wants Jack. They spend hours debating where Ben is.
Or it’s Tom, who asks if anything’s turned up. When I tell him no, he’s still cheerful. “That boy’s coming back,” he says. “I’m sure of it.”
My mother calls occasionally. My parents divorced long ago and we don’t talk all that much. “Oh honey,” she says. “Think positive.”
I take on a couple of summer school classes, grade student papers, reread them, revise my comments. Alone, I unpack the last of the boxes, find a place for the potholders.
A month after Ben disappeared, Jack remembers Dan Moore, a law school classmate who, instead of taking the bar, opened a private investigation firm in Potrero Hill. Jack calls his parents and they decide to hire the man.
Moore energizes the search, spreading it in concentric circles from Ben and Tom’s apartment on Broderick Street. He tacks up flyers with color photos—Ben sitting on the plaid couch drinking a beer, petting his cat Boris, the headshot from San Francisco State—on telephone poles and bulletin boards all over San Francisco. He and Jack visit more police stations and talk to precinct captains, making sure every investigation procedure is followed.
The police haven’t shown much interest in Ben’s disappearance. Hundreds of people go missing in San Francisco every year, they say. Most come back on their own. They haven’t searched Ben’s apartment or conducted interviews. On their own Moore and Jack check inpatient psychiatric units and jail holding facilities. Ben hasn’t touched his bank account in five weeks, but Moore remains optimistic.
“Just a matter of time,” he says.
Leads start coming in. A woman on Ashbury Street is sure she saw Ben at her Saturday garage sale. The groundskeeper at St. Mary’s reports a man fitting Ben’s description. Jack and Moore check John Does at the county morgue. None of this information goes anywhere, but they’re sure something soon will.
In mid-July, the phone rings after dinner. I’m upstairs planning lessons and let Jack answer. I hear the familiar greetings, and silence. Then Jack’s voice rises with excitement.
“Really? You’re certain?”
After he hangs up, Jack sits down close to me.
“Looks like Moore’s located him,” he says. “Some guy living in Golden Gate Park described Ben to a T. Same height and build. Same black hair.”
Jack’s eyes hold mine for the first time in weeks. “Will you come?” he asks. “I want you there.” For the first time in weeks, Jack is excited, smiling.
I smile back. “Of course.”
Early the next morning, Moore meets us in the Panhandle. The three of us walk through the eucalyptus trees to Golden Gate Park. Moore glides ahead in his hiking boots, blonde hair flying around his head. Jack walks next to him, matching Moore’s pace. I hang back, feeling a strange mix of happiness and dread. I want to find Ben. I’m also afraid of what we might discover. Ben could be incoherent. Or want to stay missing. Run off. I push away these thoughts and catch up with Jack. I reach for his hand.
The entrance to Golden Gate Park off Stanyon Street is full of bright green trees. Teenagers with safety-pinned eyebrows sit in a circle on the lush grass. Nearby, a man wrapped in a ragged blanket spins, singing loudly to himself. As we get closer, he eyes us warily. Moore bends downs and shows a woman in black the photo of Ben with his cat. She shakes her head. A man with a grizzled beard next to her leans over and points to a dirt trail through the pine trees.
“He says he saw Ben last night in an encampment. Back here,” Moore says.
“Let’s go.” Jack walks quickly in that direction.
We cross mounds of fog-damp earth and flattened pine needles, see an overturned shopping cart half covered with a sleeping bag. A tongueless shoe. Flies swarm around a lump of shit.
Jack’s shoulder touches mine as we follow Moore down the path. We come upon a Styrofoam cooler spilling its contents: a hypodermic needle, two metal spoons, a coffee cup filled with mud. Moore pushes ahead through the tall weeds, leaving us there.
“Hard to believe Ben could be living like this,” Jack says. “What about his meds?”
“Maybe he wants to try life without.” A blurry picture rises in my mind, Ben walking purposefully, unhampered by regimens and side effects. It’s a picture I hardly believe myself.
“Jack! Lucy!” Moore shouts.
He’s motioning to a circle of people in a clearing. A few dirty faces turn toward us. A woman with open sores on her cheeks stands and runs off. A man with thick black hair keeps his back to us. It’s Ben’s hair. We cautiously make our way toward him.
Don’t bolt, Ben, I think, both nervous and exhilarated. All these weeks of worry, of not knowing, are over.
The man looks over his shoulder. His hair is hacked back to dark fuzz, a mustache merges with a beard. But his red-veined eyes are dark green instead of Ben’s blue. When he suddenly comes to his feet, I see he’s shorter, by at least half a foot. A slice of white belly hangs over his pants. Ben is big, but not fat.
“What is it?” the man says, fear in his voice.
“We thought you were—” Jack pauses. “Someone we know.”
“Here.” Moore pulls out a five-dollar bill. “For your trouble.” Faces look up. He hands the man a flyer with Ben grinning at its center.
“Thanks, man,” the man says, stuffing it into his pocket. “Who is this guy?”
Moore explains. “So call me if you see him,” he says. “There’s something in it for you.” He looks around the circle. “Any of you.”
When we walk back to the Panhandle, Jack lags behind. Every time I stop and wait, he looks farther away.
A battered truck roars past, spewing a cloud of gray-brown exhaust. My eyes sting. For the first time, I let doubt enter my brain. Maybe we will never find Ben. But what happened? He has to be somewhere.
Jack’s face narrows with worry. The story about that distant cousin of mine comes into my head. I remember my mother saying it was as if he dropped off the face of the earth. Nine years, nothing. Then out of the blue, he reappeared. Just like that. Hope trickles back in my brain.
“It’s a good sign,” I say, turning to Jack. “Finding that guy. Means we’ll get other leads. Means we’re close.”
Moore nods.
Jack stares at the sidewalk.
The last time I saw Ben—three days before he disappeared—he walked as though the air itself was too heavy to push through. We’d invited Ben over, along with Rosie and Sid, who’d flown in from New Jersey, to see our new house. A celebration, of sorts. I was standing at the window when Ben walked up from the bus stop. Instead of forty-three, he looked seventy. His hair ran in gray streaks from his forehead, his shoulders were hunched. He’d buttoned his plaid shirt wrong and only half tucked it in, giving his body a lopsided look.
> I opened the door. Ben smiled faintly and hurried toward the chair by the window as if he couldn’t sit down fast enough.
“The doctor has me on a new medication,” he said when he caught me staring. He spoke openly, unashamed. “We’re hoping it’ll settle me down enough to drive. I’d really like to learn how to drive.” He wiped away the sweat that had gathered in the lines of his forehead, though the afternoon had turned cold. The fog that had swallowed San Francisco was now streaming across the bay.
We’d planned a barbeque before the weather changed, so now we huddled in the backyard. Sid sat in a lawn chair away from our picnic table. Jack concentrated on grilling the chicken. Rosie, a short woman with champagne-blonde hair, smiled and sat down next to me. Ben hung back, finally placing himself across from his mother. Rosie and I began chatting about the haircut she got yesterday near Union Square, Nordstrom’s shoe sale, the trip to Sausalito she and Sid had planned for tomorrow. Before long the conversation dwindled.
“Need any help?” I called to Jack, hoping he would. He shook his head.
When I turned back to Rosie, she was whispering. Ben stared down at his hand splayed on the table as if it might do something menacing if he looked away. Sweat slid down his neck.
“Sweetheart,” Rosie whispered, “How are your classes going?” And when Ben didn’t answer: “What about volunteering at the museum like we talked about?” and “Ben, let me send you some new clothes, shirts and Dockers. Macy’s new fall shipment is coming. What colors do you want? Blue might be nice, or green. You always liked green.”
Ben glanced occasionally at Rosie, nodding or shaking his head, not eating the chicken on the table, just sipping water and staring. Sid watched him, shifting in the flimsy chair, his black glasses dark against the skin of his temples.
Finally to no one in particular, Sid said in a loud voice, “Look at him, would you. Just sits there.” He paused. “Like a moron.”
There was a stunned silence.
Rosie said, “Sid, please—”
“Back off, Dad,” Jack interrupted. “Ben’s trying.”
“A complete moron,” Sid said firmly. He was staring, too, but unlike Ben, his eyes were sharply focused, the muscles in his jaw clenching as if he had more to say.
Ben kept his head down, didn’t say a word. When he looked up, his face seemed blank. Then I noticed a slight smile, as if he were saying, You see. You see what he does. He continued to look out at us with that calm, strange smile.
I wanted to yell at Sid for being cruel, make him apologize. Without a word, I looked from face to face to face. In spite of the fog now blowing in clouds across our backyard, I felt warm, Then hot. I drew in a long cool breath of detachment, felt it slide down my throat. This is not your family, I told myself. Stay out of it.
In September, Rosie calls Moore from New Jersey and fires him after nine weeks’ work.
“For Christ’s sake,” she says. “He wanted to charge us for two ten-foot phone cords, a staple gun, an hour’s worth of time for walking to the copy shop. Five thousand four hundred and sixty-two dollars all told. You tell me. Where are the results?”
So now it’s just us.
Though us would be the wrong word. Fewer and fewer weekends Jack drags himself out of bed and makes the drive alone to San Francisco to search. Ben’s been missing three months. Jack goes to bed early, sleeps ten, eleven hours at a stretch, and still looks exhausted. This worries me, but when I ask how he’s doing, Jack simply shrugs.
Jack’s asked for and been given a lighter assignment at work, though nothing’s really light in the public defender’s office. The date for the promotional exam has come and gone without Jack signing up. I find scraps of crumpled notes lying on the kitchen counter or bathroom floor in Jack’s tilted cursive: Call Officer— Get high school— Map to— None of them is finished.
Days go by. We pass each other in the kitchen and bedroom, make small talk. At school, I find myself irritated by kids who never would have bothered me before. At night, I cook, or try to—easy stuff like tacos and pasta—scour the pots till they shimmer, take out the garbage. Half-eaten containers of yogurt and blackening banana peels reappear on the kitchen counter. I clean up, again.
Then—that’s it. I leave the full-to-the-brim trashcan in the sink, just to see how long it’ll take for Jack to notice the odor. Three days go by. Fruit flies circle the kitchen.
Finally I hand him the bin. “Be my guest.”
Jack looks confused. “What? I just took it out.”
“Are you kidding me?” I say loudly. “You haven’t done a thing in three months!”
Then I’m yelling—how I’ve been holding everything together, cleaning, paying the bills, cooking even. Jack yells back he is helping. Helping. Working. Trying to find Ben—“Get off my back, would you!” Our voices spiral louder and louder, weeks of frustration spilling out.
“All right!” Jack shouts. “Go ahead. Take over!”
I stop and stare at him. “What?”
“Take over the search. You think it’s so easy.”
I almost say he’s not my brother. “But I have no idea where Ben likes to go. Or do.”
Jack smiles, a faint smile, but the first I’ve seen in weeks. “You want to help? So help. I’m tired.” He turns around and takes the garbage out.
I’m full of ideas. We’ll expand the search, put ads in different papers, contact outlying police stations. I’m more energized than I have been in months. Then it dawns on me. Ben could be anywhere. Moore focused our search in San Francisco, a city we know well. But maybe Ben’s taken off for Tijuana with a new buddy, except no one can locate that man either. Maybe Ben hitchhiked to DC, or is living in a New York City subway, or panhandling in Venice Beach to throw off anyone checking his bank account, which he still hasn’t used. The possibilities are endless.
I don’t know where to start. When I admit this, Jack nods like Yeah. We sit down and, in the longest conversation we’ve had in months, decide to cover the places Moore gave low priority: residential stretches in the Sunset, Marina and Inner Richmond. We spend a long afternoon stapling flyers to tarry telephone poles, talking with people mowing front lawns and getting out of Subarus. We leave flyers in espresso bars up and down Fulton Street.
Rosie continues to call three or four times a week. Now she wants to talk with me. “Anything yet?” she asks.
“Not yet.”
“Have you thought about LA?” she asks. “Ben visited last summer, he loved the palm trees. Maybe he decided to see San Diego. Beautiful this time of year, I’ve heard. What do you think—you, Jack, a nice trip south. Our treat?” We laugh.
“Lucy.” Rosie’s voice is suddenly serious. “How are you doing?”
“I—” No one has asked me that question in months. Colleagues at school no longer bring up Ben’s absence, assuming, I suppose, if there’s news, I’ll share it. When my mother calls, I tell her what I tell Rosie now. “I’m okay.”
“This isn’t what you bargained for.”
“Oh, I’m holding up. It’s harder on Jack.”
“I’m glad Jack has you. Sid and I both are. Family’s important at a time like this.”
“Thanks,” I say, and mean it.
Sid never comes to the phone. Sometimes I hear muffled voices in the background. “Rosie. Please. I can’t.”
In November, a woman from the Omni Service Center in the Sunset leaves a message on our machine. She’s seen someone like Ben and wants to meet in person. Jack and I rush off in the car but traffic on the bridge slows our pace to a crawl. It begins to drizzle, then the skies open up. Water pours in sheets down the windshield, hits the car in sharp blasts. Jack’s breath comes in heavy exhalations and soon the windows cloud. When we finally reach the center, the woman has left for the day.
“Ben might show
up,” Jack says in an emotionless voice. “We should post flyers.” He hands me several.
“Where?”
“Think I know? Ask.”
The front-desk clerk behind the glass partition barely glances up. “Over there,” he says, tilting his head toward a yellowing hall.
Over there takes me to a wall-size bulletin board without an inch of space left. Dozens of missing people stare out. Some of the flyers are curled and faded. Others boast color photos so new they glare. A father sits smiling with a baby in his lap. His shirt is bright green, matching the little girl’s one-button sweater. A photo of a black-haired man with ’60s sideburns and thick glasses is tacked up next to them. Below is a teenager posing in a glittery prom dress, his hair swept in an updo, one hip playfully stuck out. Danny was last seen two weeks ago, Lloyd, six years. Bill would be twenty-seven now.
I suck in a breath. It’s not just Ben. None of these people stand in the doorway, sit down to dinner, take the bus home. A whole wall of blank space left behind. I realize there are bulletin boards like this all over the country. Hundreds of thousands of people go missing every year, I’ve heard—enough to fill cities. I’d always ignored the gap-toothed kids pictured on milk cartoons, the blurry photographs at the bottom of circulars. Now I stare. Where is Ben? Where could his spiraling thoughts have taken him?
Jack walks over. “It’s so crowded,” I say. “I can’t find room.”
“Come on, Lucy.” He grabs a flyer out of my hand and in one brusque motion tacks it up. The corner covers the pink cheek of a woman last seen in 1990, seven years ago. Jack looks down the hall toward the front door.
“Why don’t we check Stern Grove?” I say. “Didn’t you say Ben sometimes went there? Maybe we’ll find some sign of him.”
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