“Quit your fussing.”
“I should really go talk to Kate. I haven’t been able to talk to her. I’ve been barely able to look at her without falling apart, you know, when I should be telling her to think positive, to hope. I should be doing better, Kate needs me, but I can’t. I can’t—”
“You’re doing amazing, really, Elizabeth. I couldn’t be more proud. But if you don’t get some sleep soon you’ll be no good for Kate or anybody else. Least of all yourself. I’ll sit up with Kate. You go.”
“You sure? She’s in Tommy’s room. I think she fell asleep. In his bed.”
“I won’t wake her. I’ll just check on her.”
“Okay. Okay. I’m going. But I need my phone.” Elizabeth pulls her arm away and shimmies past her mother in the narrow hallway of the 1960s-style ranch that she can’t afford to update. She has always wanted to knock out a wall, make everything more open concept like they do in those home-renovation TV shows she watches. They always make that kind of change look so easy and pain free with the bright colors on the walls and golden sunlight shining on everything like the renovations won’t ever go out of style or become obsolete again.
Elizabeth ducks back into the kitchen, fills a glass with tap water, and then fills her shorts pockets with the cell phone and house phone. She walks into the dark, cave-like hallway, the one that Tommy filled just yesterday with his cute and awkward lankiness.
Tell him to call home, William. I need to know he’s okay.
Elizabeth doesn’t hear the muffled voice of Janice talking to Kate anymore. Maybe they both fell asleep together. She should get up and go to them. She shouldn’t be alone. Being alone is a mistake.
Elizabeth’s glass of water is empty on her nightstand. The light is off. She sits at the edge of her bed in the dark. Her conversations with William are one-sided. He doesn’t answer back.
You make a lousy ghost, William.
After William was eventually found dead, Elizabeth imagined his ghost haunting their house in Ames. She was self-aware enough to realize that she wanted to believe in ghosts, which wasn’t the same as actual believing. To her shame, she even once told Kate when she was struggling in third grade (and being bullied by some piece-of-shit boy who no longer lived in Ames) that her ghost-dad was there, watching and secretly loving and caring for her, which was more than the live one ever did.
You have to find Tommy. You have to.
Elizabeth and William divorced when Kate and Tommy were two and four years old. Elizabeth knows there were serious trust and compatibility issues they ignored from the onset, and she was far from blameless when it came to the end of their marriage, but William radically changed after the kids were born. The one man who could always make her laugh became distant, cold, and he acted like their new family was the biggest mistake of his life, one he’d bear with stoic grit and a stiff upper lip. When he came home from work he disappeared to the little office nook to check his e-mail and do whatever else he was doing on the computer. She was working full time, too, and having to pick up their kids and cook dinner and get them in the tub and get them ready for bed. He came home from work an hour or so before the kids’ bedtime, and all they’d get was a lame and perfunctory Hi, like his being with them was an unpleasant but necessary task to be performed, like taking out the garbage on Monday morning. Elizabeth and William argued often about his daily reentry into the house. It got to the point where he’d be with the kids, pouting and looking at his watch, counting down some predetermined amount of time (fifteen minutes? twenty?) that was reasonable before ditching honey-I’m-home-family-fun time.
Elizabeth takes out her cell phone and stares at the string of messages she’s sent Tommy since last night. Her thumbs hover over the digital keyboard, but even if he could answer his phone now, he’d likely have no battery life left. After getting back from the park this afternoon she’d quickly checked his room and the rest of the house for signs of his having packed up or prepared to run away. There wasn’t anything out of the ordinary missing from the house besides him. At Josh’s house, he left behind the overnight bag he’d packed for the sleepover. It was an Adventure Time cartoon backpack he’d bought at the grocery store for two bucks. Tommy had thought the very idea of him carrying around the cheap, plastic cartoon pack was the funniest thing ever. Inside that backpack: his cell phone charger; black Minecraft T-shirt and shorts (no underwear); toothbrush and deodorant inside a plastic ziplock bag, gooey on the inside with toothpaste that had leaked from an uncapped and smooshed tube; his wallet with twenty five dollars in cash and a GameStop gift card he hadn’t used yet. At home they weren’t missing any phone chargers, and he still had a wad of money on top of his disaster of a bureau. Would Tommy have run away without taking all his money or taking anything of his with him?
No. She thinks Tommy is hurt and lost and they just haven’t found him yet but he’ll be okay. She’s then shouted down by a mob of worst-case scenarios, the ones that more and more have the terrible ring of probability.
Jesus, what are we going to do? I can’t lose Tommy. I can’t.
Elizabeth is rocking in place without realizing it. In an attempt to distract herself, she gets up and goes to the bathroom to brush her teeth for a second time. She squints in the bright light, and her left eye, the one with the lid that hangs a little lower than the right, is shut all the way. She tilts her face up toward the vanity bulbs to let the light bleach clean everything in her head.
William disappeared four months after their divorce. It was a Thursday. Before going to some new sports bar with his coworkers, William emptied out his checking and savings accounts and managed significant cash advances from two credit cards. His coworkers said they didn’t notice him acting strangely or drinking more heavily than usual. He left alone, and there was no sign or trace of him until he turned up dead eight months later. The details of how the onetime software designer accomplished his off-the-grid existence for as long as he did were still a little sketchy, but he spent the bulk of that time living out of a motel and busing tables at a dive pub on the outskirts of Worcester, only an hour or so away from where the Sanderson family lived. The night he died he was drunk and drove his shitty pickup truck back toward Canton; the town he’d lived in before pulling his disappearing act. No one knows why or where he was ultimately going. His truck rocketed down Neponset Street, and when he attempted to make the tight left curl underneath one of the arches of the massive, over-150-year-old Canton Viaduct, he skidded through the turn, ran over a cement traffic island, and smashed headfirst into the thick and unforgiving granite of the viaduct. He was airlifted to Mass General Hospital. His brain had swelled to three times its size before his body gave out. By the time Elizabeth got the phone call a little after 3 A.M., William had already been dead for three hours. Her contempt for William was something she had cultivated with the passion of someone starting a new hobby, so she felt an odd mix of told-you-so vindication and utter devastation now that he was permanently, irrevocably gone. The kids handled William’s disappearance and death as well as could be expected. They were too young, especially Kate, to understand what had happened. With the divorce and limited visitation, William was already being phased out of their lives, and when he was gone and then gone-gone, it seemed a natural part of some sort of horrible progression; the disappearing father.
During the first few months of his absence Kate would occasionally trot from room to room and call out, “Daddy?” Tommy refused to talk about his father and would avoid his sister when she called to him or asked questions about where he was. But that phase of their grief passed in a blink. The days spent in the company of their father were soon outnumbered by their days without him. When Tommy turned ten he took up coin collecting like his father had, and he was obsessed with it initially, but he eventually gave it up for video games and general pre-teenager-dom. As the kids got older, the idea that they once knew their father became less a real thing and more like a folktale; he was this guy they barely remem
bered and only heard about in stories, saw in pictures. The kids never had that full sense of grief and loss, as they didn’t really understand what they were missing. So it was Elizabeth and Elizabeth alone who still quietly grieved for the failure of their marriage, the disappearance, and the sudden death of a man she had once loved madly.
Elizabeth gargles and spits twice, then shuts off the light with the water still running. The darkness in the bathroom is complete. She leans on the sink, her palms flush against the cold granite, drops her head, chin into her chest, and listens to the trickle of running water in the sink until it sounds like murmuring voices; no voices in particular, certainly not her own. Maybe the water could talk her into sleeping if she left it running, running long enough to carve out a canyon in her sink. She turns the faucet off and darts quickly to her left and out of the bathroom, her hands and mouth still dripping wet.
Weak streetlight filters through the partially shaded windows, giving the larger shapes in her bedroom outlines to be filled in. She trips on her flip-flops and clothes she left in the middle of the floor. Earlier, when sloughing off the skin of the day, she didn’t make it to the green plush chair that dots the far corner of the room, her usual dumping ground.
Elizabeth swears, bends over, Brailles her hands along the floor and gathers the flip-flops, a pair of sneakers, and a small pile of clothes. From her knees, she twists to her right, aiming to throw everything on or at the green chair, and throw it as hard and as dangerously as she can, like she’s throwing rocks at a hornet’s nest. If she misses and the sneakers crash into the window or her shorts fly behind the chair to never be seen again, then fuck it, that’s fine by her.
As she twists and tosses her armload of stuff at the dark lump of the chair in the corner, she sees something further to the right, on the floor between the chair and the little white end table on which Kate painted purple flowers. That something is up against the wall, taking up that dark space and filling it with more dark. The shape of a person crouched, or sitting, tightly wrapped into a ball, knees folded into his chest and arms wrapped around those knees, sitting there waiting patiently to be seen or to be found, or he’s so cold and is trying to keep warm, or he’s hiding from something terrible.
And it’s Tommy. It’s him. It’s Tommy sitting there folded up in that suddenly expansive space between the chair and her TV and the wall, and it’s him because of the way, even only as a shape in the dark, he tilts his head while looking at her as if to say, Don’t you see me, Mom? Then something happens to his face, and it happens in a flash, in less than a blink, it becomes visible, or part of it does, and it looks lumpy, misshapen, and where the eyes are, there are two dots.
The vision ends as her sneakers wildly tumble into the plush chair and a white T-shirt flutters on top of the end table and then slides lifelessly to the floor. The noise that comes out of her throat is some ancient and awful involuntary precursor to language and then she says, “Tommy,” repeatedly, and as desperately as an incantation. She scrambles on her hands and knees toward where she saw him a moment ago. She reaches her hand into the space, still saying his name. There’s nothing there. She stands and looks behind the chair and all around the room, saying his name attached to a question mark. She runs her hands along the chair and the end table, and his smell is there. She gasps and greedily inhales, reprise breaths after drowning. She smells Tommy; he’s still there, and he is sweaty.
She giggles despite herself. It’s as though he’s been out running around with his friends all summer afternoon and came home with slightly sunburned, pink cheeks and his brown hair gone black with sweat. His smell is a sharp, not wholly unpleasant tang of the inside of wet sneakers, that same smell that the day before would’ve had her asking him if he’d remembered to put on deodorant or if he’d showered that day, and he’d be embarrassed but smile that frustrating but handsome I-know-something-you-only-say-you-know smile, too, like that body of his was some newfound power that he didn’t fully know how to use or control. Elizabeth breathes in more, laughing and crying, and that new, more adult Tommy smell is still there, and she’s inhaling so fast and so deeply her head goes dizzy and white stars pinprick her vision and she tries to blink them away. The smell changes, gradually, and becomes less recognizably Tommy and more earthy; like grass and soil that has been run on all afternoon, then wet pine needles and moss. And then there isn’t any smell at all.
Elizabeth steps between the chair and end table and crouches down, careful not to disturb anything. She sits like he was sitting, with her back against the wall and her arms around her knees. The two phones in her pockets press up against her thighs, and Tommy’s smell has faded, already becoming a memory, an imperfect one, one that she’ll never be able to fully describe. She leans her head against the chair and cries great, wracking sobs that disappear into a gaping, interior void, a void into which her bones and whatever flagging spirit that filled them collapses, because she truly believes Tommy has somehow visited her, and that means her son is not lost or a runaway or is anything else but dead.
Kate Eavesdropping and Finding Coins
Kate sits at the kitchen table with earbuds in her ears but with no music playing. Her friends have been texting her all morning with messages like news? and u ok girl and I’m part of the Mountain Rd. search party, will keep u posted and stay strong!!! and they’ll find him.
Her friend Carly has started a Twitter hashtag: #FindTommy. Carly sends her screencaps of tweets from people all over Ames. Kate clicks on the hashtag and there are other tweets that Carly didn’t send her. There’s a bunch of high schoolers (she has no idea who most of them are, might as well be members of an unknowable and unfathomable secret society) tweeting that people who live near or on the edges of the park saw a dark shape walking through their yards and into Borderland last night.
Kate’s classmate Sarah has an older sister (she forgets her name, and it’s not in her annoying Twitter handle) in ninth grade who tweeted that she woke up in the middle of the night and someone or something was looking in her bedroom window. In response a bunch of Ames kids tweeted a picture of Bigfoot at her, and of course there were boys claiming it was them and asking her what she was wearing and some raging asshole (with a profile pic of his so-awesome flexed bicep) made a joke about a peeping Tommy. Kate wonders if any of these tweets about weird/random late-night sightings are legit, and if so are the police looking into it. She wants to ask Mom about it but is afraid to do or say anything to upset her and send her deeper into the scary shutdown mode she’s been in for the previous two days.
Kate continues to monitor the live feed, and another guy tweets about a party at Split Rock tonight. Kate responds to that tweet and asks if she can go too and if they would help her search the park for her brother. He doesn’t respond, and he takes down the tweet a few minutes later.
It’s 2:30 P.M. and their neighbors, Frank and Mary Gaudet, have been in the living room since lunch. The morning was a steady stream of family friends and well-wishers at their doorstep, most dropping off premade meals and awkward hugs and promises to post fliers and continue to help searching the areas and neighborhoods surrounding the state park. Kate’s best friend, Sam, and her mom came, and they were so nice. Sam, looking like she hadn’t slept at all last night with her hair all matted and knotted up, stood as tall, thin, and still as a flagpole, and her not knowing what do with her eyes, that was okay by Kate. Sam and her mom being there was all it had to be, even though it made everyone cry and made Kate’s chest hurt.
But unlike everyone else, the Gaudets have stayed. Nana Janice is totally ducking them, and like Kate, she sequestered herself in the kitchen. Nana is reorganizing the food in cabinets that don’t need to be reorganized.
Mom would rather be out helping the search parties again, so why can’t the Gaudets see that having to entertain them, to abide by their clinginess and rubbernecking, is sucking out what little energy they have left? Kate wants anyone and everyone to go away unless they’ve found Tommy
.
Kate Sanderson will be twelve years old in two months. She’s two years younger than Tommy. She’s only a few weeks away from being a middle school student. She recently gave up gymnastics after four years of semienthusiastic participation and now plays lacrosse. She’s aware that she isn’t very good; she’s not exactly fast when running, and catching and throwing the ball is kind of an issue. She not-so-secretly makes fun of the girls in her grade who are cheerleaders for Pop Warner football, but knows that worm will turn sooner rather than later. She hates pop music, really hates pop-country, and mostly listens to 1990s alt rock and hip-hop like Mom does. Kate has purple streaks in her brown hair, but she’ll make sure to wash out all the color before school starts. It’s easier to be herself in the summer. Kate is short and cherubic to Tommy’s long and lanky court jester. Nana often referred to the two of them as Mutt and Jeff. Kate has no idea what that means, what the reference is from, and whether Mutt or Jeff is the short one. Kate hates having to literally look up to everyone and envies Tommy’s wiry length. She has cultivated extensive and elaborate daydreams about being built like Tommy, but at the same time she knows it’s easier to go into survival stealth mode and not be seen or noticed at her current size. Despite their obvious physical differences, and even with his features in the process of being distorted and exaggerated by puberty, one look at their faces and you can tell she and Tommy are brother and sister. They are fair-skinned, have the same walnut-shaped brown eyes and thin eyebrows, and each has a long nose that isn’t exactly big, but always seems heavy enough to point their gaze away from other people.
Nana shuts the cabinets and says “Okay. I think we’ve all had enough of this” under her breath, but loud enough for Kate to hear it. Nana winks. Kate smiles and covers her mouth, even though there’s no real danger of any kind of laugh escaping.
Then Nana walks out into the living room like an action hero before the epic ass kicking and says, “I’m sorry to be the mother hen here, but it’s been a long morning after a long night after a long day . . .” and yes, she is stepping in and stepping up to ask the Gaudets to leave, finally.
Disappearance at Devil's Rock Page 4