Evidence of Things Not Seen

by Lindsey Lane

  She wants to go tell Alex. She wants to see his face looking down at her.

  Maybe this is what he was talking about. Maybe his kiss had tipped her upside down. Just a little.

  MAY 24 . TWENTY DAYS MISSING

  RACHEL

  I don’t have anything different to tell you since Tommy first disappeared. He walked out of physics class almost three weeks ago. As soon as the bell rang. It wasn’t unusual. Even if he had no place to go, he always got up and left when the bell rang. It was like the end of a book. You close it. You go. That’s the way Tommy was. I mean, is.

  Yes, of course, I think he’s still out there. I have to believe that. Don’t you? Isn’t that why you’re interviewing me again?

  I usually asked Tommy where he was going, but that day he was already out the door before I could. I didn’t always get a straight answer even when I asked. I mean, sometimes if I asked Tommy what he was doing, he’d say, “Talking to you.” He’d say exactly what he was doing right then. I had to be specific because he was very literal. Like I had to ask “Where are you going?” or “What are you going to do?”

  Yes, of course it could be frustrating. It’s frustrating I didn’t ask. It’s frustrating he never said. It’s really frustrating that you’re asking me questions I’ve already answered.

  Wait a minute. Are you trying out some sort of theory that I was somehow mad at Tommy and I knew where he was going and I followed him like a jealous girlfriend and something happened? That’s unbelievable. I need to go.

  I’ve come out to the pull-out every day since we first knew Tommy was gone. I keep expecting he’ll be here. That he’ll show up like the way he walked into class with his head down, like he was late. Only he never was.

  James is an egomaniacal idiot who only wanted good grades and a good lab partner. I wasn’t trying to improve Tommy’s manners. Or be his surrogate mother. Or be his girlfriend. I mean, I liked him. And yeah, I was thinking about asking him to the prom, but it probably would have been a really bad idea.

  Tommy was, I mean is, really different. He’s this really smart but really innocent guy. Izzy and I had a theory that maybe he had Asperger’s. Ever since I knew him, the beginning of high school, he was always fixated on something. You couldn’t shake him loose. When he was like that, he’d barge into any conversation with whatever he was thinking about. He didn’t know when to say “excuse me.” He wasn’t aware of normal stuff. So I started helping him, you know, with social cues. I cared about how people treated him.

  It wasn’t manners. James is the one who needs manners. Tommy needed help knowing how to be in the world. I guess I feel protective of him. He was really smart but it’s like he needed help crossing the street.

  Of course I’m mad at James. He sat next to Tommy for three years. He made sure Tommy was his partner on every project. He could have asked Tommy where he was going. Or something. If James said one little thing to Tommy at the end of class that day, maybe I could have gotten over to Tommy before he left and asked him where he was going. Maybe I would have gone with him.

  He got the bike sometime last fall. One day I asked him for a ride home. I remember how he looked behind at the seat. I could almost see the thought bubble over his head, “Oh that’s why the seat is longer than a regular bike seat.” That was one of things I loved about Tommy. The simplest things stumped him.

  I didn’t “love” love him.

  Wait. Izzy told you I was his girlfriend? Figures. Izzy’s obsessed. A total mad scientist compared to Tommy. Tommy would wait and watch before he tested a theory. Not Izzy. She’d fling theories all over the place to see what stuck.

  That whole boy-girl thing—pretty much the way high school is set up—it doesn’t compute that way for Tommy. I don’t even know if I was his friend. Like his brain is so different, I don’t know where I lived in it. Or if I did. No, that’s wrong. I was his friend. He always smiled when I went up to him and said hello. I just couldn’t expect him to come up to me and say hello.

  I don’t think his awkwardness made him depressed. He didn’t know he was awkward. He was Tommy. We’re the ones that thought he was awkward.

  No, no one bullied him. I would have seen it.

  Wait, if you’re thinking he committed suicide, you’re crazy. He was way too curious. Quantum was blowing his mind. It’s pretty deep stuff. I hung in there with him but he was off the map about it.

  All of it. Superposition theory. Alternate dimension. Time travel. Black holes. He was—well, this might sound strange—he acted like someone who was in love. You know that first crush? When all you can do is think about that person and write poetry to them? That’s where Tommy was with particle physics. It’s all he could think about.

  That’s what is scary to me. When he was like that, he was so wrapped in what he was thinking that he wouldn’t pay attention to what was going on around him. Like he might have been standing in this stupid pull-out staring at something or thinking something and someone drove in and grabbed him. You know, like a random act. And then because that person didn’t know Tommy and how he answered questions in the most annoying ways, that person might get mad. And Tommy wouldn’t understand why that person was mad and he’d say something which would frustrate that person even more and—

  I’m sorry, Sheriff. I get scared for Tommy. Most of the time, I’m hopeful but sometimes I’m scared.

  He believed anything he could think was possible. If it wasn’t proved but he could think it, then it was just a matter of time before someone proved it was real. He believed that simultaneous realities were possible. He believed that everything had energy and you could communicate with that energy. That was why I liked being with him. He didn’t think in confined, “normal” ways. Being with Tommy was like a free fall.

  I rode on the back of Ruby maybe a half dozen times. Maybe more. It was like being inside his brain. He’d go crazy fast and then he’d stop practically in the middle of the road and watch these flocks of birds dip and turn through the air currents. They looked like smoke to me. I don’t know what they looked like to Tommy. I mean, we never said stuff like, “Oh, that’s beautiful.” Or “Oh, that looks like smoke.” Looking at the birds together in the same moment was the conversation. I mean, if you’re with a guy who is thinking that each person, each thing contains waves of possibilities and those possibilities might exist in alternate dimensions, then you can kind of see how being together seeing the same thing at the same time is a pretty big deal. That’s how Tommy thinks.

  Yeah, he figured out he was adopted in middle school. It’s kind of weird his parents didn’t tell him. I mean, they have this genius living under their roof. How long did they think it would take for him to figure out that he’s got a few recessive traits that aren’t in their gene pool?

  I know he was curious about meeting his bio family. But it’s not like it was new information and he was all hot to find them right now. If he had to wait until he was eighteen or twenty-one, it didn’t matter. He wasn’t really interested in meeting his bio parents. He was more interested in meeting up with a former self. I remember he said something like, “I wonder if I’ll also meet the part of me that stayed with them.” Like when his parents adopted him, a part of Tommy kept living on with his bio family. That’s how he sees stuff. Like we’re all waves of possibility and whenever we make a choice, part of us energetically continues going in the path not taken.

  I don’t know if I believe it. It’s kind of cool. But it’s almost a little too much. Too theoretical. I like more concrete science stuff. Biology. Chemistry. Physics is too unreal. It has too many possibilities. It makes me kind of crazy. Like I said before, it feels like a free fall, and sometimes that gets a little scary.

  Tommy was fearless. I mean, is.

  It’s what made him Tommy. He was never afraid of any of the possibilities he thought up. If time could fold in such a way that he could go backwards, that was okay. Exciting, even. He wasn’t scared that something bad could happen. Being afraid
was as weird to him as saying “excuse me” or “goodbye.” I don’t know if he felt afraid ever. I mean, he probably did because that’s normal, right? But he was so observational that understanding a feeling made more sense to him than feeling it.

  When he left class really fast and didn’t say goodbye, I told him it made me sad. He didn’t get it. I showed him a definition of sad in the dictionary. Then I made the mistake of giving him an example of people being sad at funerals. Metaphors were lost on him. I remember he said something about the probability of his coming back to school the next day is a hundred percent because he’s never missed a day of school. Do you see what I mean? He didn’t feel feelings the way we do. Sometimes I wished he did because then he’d know how the rest of us felt. But at the same time, that’s why I wanted to protect him, because I didn’t want anything bad to ever happen to him. So he would keep being innocent. And fearless.

  Yeah, I know I freaked out that first day of searches at the Stillwell Ranch. It was too much for me. I kept feeling like Tommy was there. Like he was right next to me. Only I couldn’t see him. And then when we got to that ravine with all the trash, it looked like this graveyard where all the possibilities in life had come to die. Like the minute before we saw all those refrigerators and tires and old suitcases, they were still out there, existing the way they always had been. But because we saw them in that dead, decomposing state, all the possibilities collapsed. It freaked me out. That’s why I didn’t go back on the second or third day. It was too hard to walk and hope and walk and hope. The whole time I was dreading what we might find. I know we didn’t find Tommy or his body, so he could still be out there, but hope will make you as crazy as particle physics. I want to stop hoping. I want to stop looking. But I also want to keep hoping and looking because that means Tommy’s still out there.

  That’s why I come here. It’s my way of looking. Sometimes I sit in my car. Sometimes I get out and sit on one of those logs and listen. Sometimes I walk around in the field.

  I see Mrs. Smythe out there. She looks like she hasn’t slept in three weeks. Tommy wouldn’t want to be driving her crazy with fear and hope. He might even understand it by looking at her face.

  You know if Tommy were here right now, I’d have to explain to him about hope. He wouldn’t understand. There’s observation and possibility. But hope? I could try and explain it like when you have a hypothesis and you want it to turn out a certain way, that desire would be hope. But it wouldn’t compute for Tommy. I can hear him asking me, “Why would you want something to turn out a certain way?”

  Do you see what I mean? It’s like all the normal emotions—hope, fear, sadness anger … Tommy doesn’t really get them the way we do, on an experiential level. If he did, he would come back. He’d know how we were feeling and he’d come back from wherever he is. At the same time, it would be awful if he were in a situation so terrifying it short-circuited his brain. Like completely fried his wiring.

  I’m sorry, Sheriff. I really care about Tommy.

  He’s out there. I know it. He’s missing. It’s like this bright, really bright, pure spot of light is missing. And I want it to come back.

  Maybe that’s how I could tell him about sadness. I could tell him about a beautiful light that he’d seen every day. Every day he woke up and it was there. He expected it. Looked forward to it. And then one day it was gone. He might be able to understand being sad if I explained it like that.

  MAY 29 . TWENTY-FIVE DAYS MISSING

  MR. MCCLOUD

  Tommy was the brightest student I’ve ever had. I have to say teaching physics to the junior nerd squad was the highlight of my year. Kids like that make teaching a little harder. Better but harder.

  Because you want to spend all your time with them and you can’t. You have to help everyone. I teach almost three hundred students a year here. From freshmen to seniors. As much as I would have liked to spend all my time doing special projects with the nerd squad, this is high school and I have to teach to the middle. That means you leave the smart kids and slow kids in the margin.

  It’s tragic. It’s also why I stay. Because I love public education. It doesn’t always work right. And certainly all these standards and tests do not serve the kids, but this job is still the best way for me to reach the greatest number of kids and maybe make a difference, maybe help them see that their minds could make a difference.

  I’m sorry, Sheriff. You didn’t come here to listen to my soapbox on teaching. You want to talk about Tommy.

  First of all, don’t believe any of the bull crap the kids are saying about Tommy going into another dimension. Not possible. Yeah, Tommy was a freak about quantum. No question. But as for the space-time continuum folding over in some specific way so that Tommy was able to cross over to another time, no way. It’s fun to think about and I love conjecturing about all the possibilities with these kids, but we are not living in the panels of Marvel comics.

  Yeah, I took a week in January to talk about modern physics. You know, particle physics. Just concepts; no math. It was outside the curriculum. I like doing it because it gives students an idea of what’s possible in college. Not all of them liked it or understood it. Tommy did. I’ve never had a kid get as switched on about it as Tommy. I gave him a bibliography of books and secondary resources to check out from the library. If he wanted to learn about particle physics, there’s plenty out there. He could have spent an entire semester doing an independent study on particle physics, but I had to go back to the curriculum.

  One of the ideas that Tommy loved in quantum is that all possibilities exist. Nothing is certain unless you include all possibilities. Believe me, we had a lot of fun with that one. I gave them a quiz and Tommy turned his in blank. Not one answer and it wasn’t because he didn’t know the answers. When I asked him why, he said if I hadn’t observed him not doing it, then the possibility existed that he did do it. I hated to give him a zero, but the blank test was the only reality I observed.

  Black holes? Time travel? We never talked about those aspects in class but I’m sure he read about it. I know he wrote about them in his journal. He was always writing in it. Or looking for it so he could write in it. That’s why I gave him a bibliography instead of books. He had trouble hanging on to things.

  I read bits of it. Mostly he was wrestling with the big ideas in physics and conjecturing about our origins. Writers love the ideas touched upon in physics. And I don’t mean science-fiction or TV writers. Academics explore these topics as much as novelists. You don’t have to go far to have your mind effectively blown by quantum theory. It’s rocket fuel for the brain and the imagination and some high school kids like Tommy are ready for it.

  Dangerous? Hell, no. Not any more so than that motorbike, if you ask me. A kid like Tommy, highly distractible and driving, now that’s dangerous. I was glad that they found the bike in the pull-out. If Tommy was still out there driving around, we’d probably be looking at a traffic fatality.

  I wouldn’t be surprised if Tommy was somewhere on the spectrum. But he functioned pretty well. He was socially awkward but the kids seem to accept him the way he was. I don’t think it would it have made a difference if he were diagnosed. I think that leads to stigmatizing. When it’s all said and done, spectrum kids still have to function in this world. We can’t create separate little paradigms for each quirky kid.

  Especially in high school. This is the time when these kids start making choices that define them. Like the nerd squad probably won’t be the nerd squad next year. Their science interests are starting to diverge. Like Tommy’s friend Rachel will probably go towards anatomy and physiology or AP bio; Izzy has more talent in math and equations than science, so I’ll probably see her in AP physics C, and James is on the pre-med track. I just hope he stays on the lab side. I can’t see him tending to patients.

  Tommy? Who knows? He was one of those kids who had to endure high school to get to the good stuff. For some, high school is the highlight of their lives. That wasn’t Tommy
. I could see him in a university with professors who appreciate really smart kids. Some kids take longer to come to a boil. You know, flourish. Go places. That was Tommy. I was glad he took to quantum. If anything, it gave a kid like him something exciting to think about.

  Well, let’s face it, Sheriff. Tommy was sort of an outlier in the Fred Johnson High social test-tube experiment. He didn’t exactly fit in the categories of farmer, football player, or family man. These kids come in and out of our classes day after day and you know who’s going to get pregnant. Or who’s going to go to college. Or who’s going to stay on the farm. Some of ’em surprise you, but not many. I think we’re genetically predetermined. Like each of these kids is an element with certain properties and they’ll only go so far because that element reacts in predetermined ways.

  Hell no, I’m not being dismal. It’s the way it is. I mean, some of these kids may find themselves in unusual circumstances. They may get torqued in such a way that their properties change. Experiments can turn strange corners, you know. Some kids break out of their predetermined fate. But not many. Not many of us change our destinies or step out of our well-worn paths. If people accepted this idea, they might be a whole lot happier. I mean, someone has to wait on you at the Home Depot. Why can’t it be someone who’s happy about it? Why can’t it be someone who’s accepted the fact that that’s who they are, that’s as high as they’ll go?

  No way. I did not preach this idea to my students. James came up with that line of thinking all by himself. What’s more, I don’t agree with it. James is very smart, but his whole elitism ethic is a way for him to camouflage himself. Well, let’s just say that this neck of the high desert is a little conservative and it’s easier for James to come off like an IQ Nazi than what he is. That’s all I can say. Sorry.

  As a teacher, you’re outside the day-to-day drama. If you’re paying attention, you know your kids better than they know themselves. You know when someone has a crush and if they are going to act on it. You know who is getting beat at home. You can see turf wars. You see flirtations. You see kids hiding their true feelings. I used to get worried about all the things I saw. I may not be a parent but I still feel protective of these kids. I thought I had to do something about it. You know, intervene. Tell the counselors. But it took me one four-year cycle to see that everyone survives. Everyone. There are ups and downs, crises and triumphs. But everyone survives in one way or another. Maybe you want more for these kids than survival. But after you’ve been doing this for twenty years, survival is not so bad.