I’m not looking at her, but I can hear a thread of a crack in her voice. “I know. I thought I’d always know where he was sleeping. That’s silly, I guess, eventually I knew he’d grow up, but . . . And actually for me it’s been over two years since I tucked him in every night. I never would have guessed that at twelve years old he’d be living somewhere else.”
“Not now.”
“No, I know. I made that bed, didn’t I?”
My second shock in the past few minutes. I look up to see if it’s still really Mallory standing there. She’s holding her own arms like she’s cold. She might be; she’s only wearing a thin cotton shirt, and this place is drafty, especially upstairs.
“You look like you’re freezing. Let me grab you a sweater.” I stand up and go to my closet, selecting a navy blue wool sweater my dad bought me for Christmas that I rarely wear. I hand it to Mallory and she slips it over her head, stretching up as she does so, arching her back so that her breasts push against her shirt before pulling down the sweater. I wonder if that was for me, or if it’s just part of her general habit of pulling attention her way, like a planet pulls its moon.
She looks out the window at the dark evening. She bites her lip. She walks over to me and stands close, meeting my eyes. “Why won’t he call?”
Tears well up in her lashes, and I pull her to me. She turns her head to the side and rests her face on my shirt, her nose against my neck. We fit like puzzle pieces this way.
The door is still open, and when I hear a noise I look up to see Casey, holding on to a notebook. Her face is pale except for two dots of pink on her cheeks. She, too, looks cold, because her hands seem to be shaking.
“I found something,” she says.
Chapter 10
Casey
It took time to sort through all the e-mail this house generates: between my job and Michael’s, the older kids, it’s quite a soup.
Until I found a name I didn’t recognize, responding to Dylan. A girl we’ve never heard of.
I’d shut myself down, as soon as Michael shouted at me. I was leaving anyway, as of just this morning. For all I know Dylan ran away because he hates me now.
And I thought it had worked. I thought I’d turned my feelings off like a spigot, and I was something like proud because this was an effect I used to only achieve with the aid of Jack on the rocks, or in desperate times, Jack straight out of the bottle.
But when I walked up the stairs to Michael’s room—what just last night was our room—and saw him embracing Mallory through the open door, saw her wearing his sweater . . .
I won’t be right until I get out of here.
My voice quavers despite my best efforts. “I found something.”
Mallory steps away from Michael, adjusts his sweater, plays with the sleeves. Michael says, “What is it?”
“There are e-mails. Several of them, from a girl named Tiffany Harper. I’ve never heard of her.”
“Me, neither. What did they say?”
“I didn’t read them. But I brought them up on-screen so that you could.”
Mallory brushes past me and is halfway down the stairs before she calls out, “Where is the computer?”
“To the right once you get to the bottom of the basement steps,” I tell her.
Michael starts to walk past, too, but he stops just before me. I study the divots in the old, scarred floorboards.
“Thank you,” he says. “Casey, look at me.”
I turn farther away and notice an open beer sweating on the nightstand and wonder what it’s doing there.
Michael continues. “I’m under stress here. I didn’t mean to shout.”
Swallowing hard, I say, “Go read the e-mails. See what you can find out.”
I feel him standing in front of me for another long moment. Just go! I want to scream. I also want to step into his arms and let him hold me, too, but it’s time to find Dylan.
And anyway, my time has clearly passed.
He finally turns to go, and it’s like something’s been snapped away. I hear his feet hurrying down the stairs.
I walk over to the bed and sit down on the edge. The bottle sweats invitingly just like in a commercial full of mountains and rushing rivers and people having fun. People relaxed and unwinding.
I brush my fingers over the cold glass. It comes back in a rush, how the happy hours always started with beer, that good-time end-of-day drink, a round purchased by someone and then by someone else, until we were all throwing money into a pile at the center and bottles kept coming.
It feels as natural in my hand as a pencil, a toothbrush.
I nearly run down the stairs, stepping lightly as I can in the rickety old house, until I reach the kitchen, where I turn the beer upside down and watch it glug out in explosions of amber foam.
The smell of it nearly does me in and I almost tip the bottle right up again to save some, but the last drips come out and I sigh, shaking it briefly before setting it on the counter where we always put empty pop cans and such.
The girls are still watching TV, numbing themselves to the absence of their brother with insipid shows, but at least this vice won’t kill brain cells. Not literally. Anyway, they’re smart enough, and today is a rough day.
I shrug into my parka and step onto the front porch for a smoke. I sit down in the porch swing and prop my feet up on the railing. The cigarette flickers to life, and I sigh deeply after the first lightly dizzying puff. This causes me to cough.
The homes are close to each other here, with big picture windows in front rooms. The street is narrow, too, so it’s not hard to look across the road into the duplex across the way, with a Middle Eastern family living downstairs and two college guys upstairs. There’s a miniature porch off an upstairs dormer window, where the guys like to sit on balmy nights, drinking beer and smoking. Sometimes one of them plays his acoustic guitar, and we share a wave across the road as renegade smokers, an endangered breed.
Tonight it’s cold and the porch is quiet. Through the downstairs window I can see the flashing of a television program in the darkness of the room. Maybe the kids watching a movie, or maybe they’re in bed already. Just toddlers, they are. I’ve seen them walking as a family with the little ones in a double stroller.
Quitting smoking was next on my list. I wasn’t about to smell like an ashtray in my wedding finery, and besides, soon after that there would be a baby, and I wouldn’t smoke pregnant. Also, in my daily battle to stay away from the liquor store, I’d have a tiny, unwitting ally growing inside. I wouldn’t need to hold on to any vices anymore. At least, that’s how I imagined it.
I consider a call or a text to Tony. I’d like to tell him about my close call just now. He’d be proud, and I’ll admit it, I need the praise, I need someone to tell me I done good because today I’m finding it harder and harder to remember why I ever gave it up.
I close my eyes to try and conjure up my rock-bottom moment. But it seems hazy, like something you only wished were true.
What does come clearly to mind is happy hour.
Chuck led the parade out the door. “Come one, come all!” he shouted. Our productivity had tailed off through the afternoon. It was a sunny spring day, and had been a helluva week. We were coding a major project for a client and had finally made some headway. When Chuck, even as our boss, started an improvised game of charades in the meeting room at two o’clock, we’d all started to wrap up anything serious.
We’d been shouting bar names all afternoon, trying to come up with a consensus. The patio at the Black Rose won the day, and at four o’clock when Chuck grabbed his bag and his jacket, we all filed out behind him like rats behind the pied piper. He bought the first pitcher.
Pitchers were wonderful. Our glasses just kept filling with so little effort. Our laughter got more raucous. We looked out to the sidewalk with pity on the drones trudging to their cars to drive home on packed highways to things like Little League games and excruciating kiddie band concerts whereas we, all
of us, were free as eagles.
There were seven of us at JinxCorp, back before I had to quit, when I threw away my old life to stay home and do contract work. Alone.
We were all single, or at the most coupled. Not a child among the bunch. This was probably by Chuck’s design because no one squawked too loud about overtime, especially when he’d sometimes spring us at four o’clock and buy rounds at the Black Rose.
The sun dropped a little lower and the Michigan April was cool, so we stepped inside to listen to the band belting out classic rock. I danced with my hands in the air, belting out with the band: “Ride, Sally, ride!” And when I came back to the table one of the seats had disappeared, so I sat on Kevin’s lap, and he put his hand on the small of my back, then wrapped it over my hipbone, and I didn’t mind a damn bit.
He drove me home—I’d taken the bus to work—and crushed up against me in the apartment building stairwell, kissing and biting my neck and cupping my breasts until I decided, Oh what the hell, I’m on the Pill, and let him in.
It worked out pretty well, because then I had a ride into work the next day.
Everyone smirked over their computer screens as we walked in at the exact same time, Kevin showered but wearing clothes that stank of the bar.
As with many mornings there, I popped an Advil, drank about a gallon of water alternated with mugs of strong bitter coffee, and by 10:00 A.M. I was right as rain.
Kevin and I never dated. It was a mutually pleasurable arrangement. No one ever frowned at me over it, made me feel guilty, or in any way cared about what I did.
At the time this felt like a good thing.
My cigarette is down to a nub. I grind it out on my shoe and keep the butt in my hand since there’s no can out here and I’m too tired to walk over and flick it into the street.
Now, with the three kids watching every move, and Mallory waiting for me to screw up, and Michael’s disapproving gaze when I so much as smoke a half-pack in a day . . .
“Chuck says fuck it!” was my boss’s favorite saying when he wanted to dismiss something as irrelevant.
If only I could feel that cavalier again. Was being numb really so bad?
My phone rings, and my heart leaps with the hope it might be Dylan before I realize at the same instant I see her number I haven’t talked to my mother in hours.
“Hi, Mom.”
“What’s wrong? You never called back.”
“It’s been crazy here.”
“Are those kids giving you a hard time again?”
If she only knew. “No, Mom. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You know it makes me nervous when you don’t check in.”
“I know.”
“So I heard from Julie, and she says she hopes you come to the baby’s party.”
“Oh, does she now? Interesting turnaround.”
Julie, my dad’s sister, and her husband Rick always had a special connection with Billy, never having had any sons of their own. Rick, Dad, and Billy went hunting every November as soon as Billy could hold a rifle.
At the funeral she managed a limp condolence hug for me, and the rest of the time glared and whispered. Rick couldn’t even look me in the eye.
“They were grieving, too,” Mom says now, as if that makes it all fine. “They know it’s not really your fault.”
“Not really but kind of? Thanks for the ringing endorsement.”
“Edna, honey, that’s not what I meant, of course we don’t blame you.”
They may not have blamed me, but I do remember my mother grilling me for every detail of that night, and how she focused an awful lot on the fact that I talked my brother into coming to the party, and the reason he started fighting in the first place.
“Whatever, they could barely look at me back then, and now they want me to show up? Why, so they can gossip about me some more?”
“Maybe they want to make it right.”
“Sure they do. Well, tell them—”
The front door swings open. It’s Angel.
“If you care, Dad has some clues about Dylan.”
“I gotta run,” I say, and “Love you, Mom” because even when we fight I say it, considering. You just never know what the future brings.
I walk back in, and Jewel wrinkles her nose. I know I’ve come in with waves of stench. I can’t smell it myself, I’m immune, I think, but I see it in other people’s faces.
“Go ahead,” I say, while I dampen my cigarette with water before I drop it in the kitchen trash, hurrying back to the front room.
Michael looks like a schoolteacher, still in his work clothes, standing up in front of the fireplace while everyone else sits. Jewel is cross-legged on the floor. Angel and Mallory sit like double vision on the couch. I take the uncomfortable wooden rocking chair.
“Well. This is what we’ve found. He’s been writing this Tiffany girl for months now. From what I can tell, they met on Facebook. They think they’re in love, and they decided to run away together.”
I sneak a look at Mallory. She’s staring with intensity at Michael, and worrying a thumbnail in her teeth.
Michael goes on: “It would seem they picked today to run away, and they’re trying to get to New York City.”
“And how did they think they were going to get there?” Mallory asks now, prompting, since she must already know the answer herself.
“They’re taking a bus. I think they dealt with specifics over the phone, though, because the messages get more vague as they get more recent.”
“Her number’s disconnected now, though,” Mallory says with a wave of her hand as I open my mouth to ask if they’ve tried to call it.
“So our next step,” Michael says, “is to call the police, because it seems that two minor children are alone somewhere out there on buses trying to get to a huge, dangerous city.”
Mallory leans back on the couch, pulling her knees up to her chest, toying with the sleeves of Michael’s big sweater. “He was smart enough not to hitchhike, I’ll give him that.”
Jewel pipes up. “So he’s okay, then.”
Mallory answers, “You bet, J. The cops will find him at a bus station somewhere, and then we’ll tar his butt as soon as he gets back home.”
Michael swallows hard and then folds the printouts carefully, running over the crease with his fingers again and again. “I hope you feel better now, kids. It’s getting late, Jewel, you should probably get ready for bed.”
“Awwwww, Dad!”
“Mike, you told them they didn’t have to go to school tomorrow. What difference does it really make?”
Michael’s jaw goes tight, and he walks out abruptly. “I’m going upstairs to call the police station.”
“Mom?” Jewel asks. “Can we make popcorn? The old way, on the stove, with butter?”
“Sure, baby! You got it.” Mallory bounces off the couch and takes command in the kitchen. Jewel trails after her, talking to her about dinosaurs and alligators.
Angel remains on the couch, eyes fixed on the floor. She looks washed-out, her face blending into her pale hair.
I sit down on the couch, close enough to be considered next to her, but far enough not to be invasive, so I hope. I’ve never gotten good at this dance with her, this push-pull of too close, too far.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“Fine.” She tries to say it forcefully, but her voice breaks.
“You can tell me.”
“If you can have secrets, so can I.”
The first time we’ve been alone since she read my diary. “It’s not what you think.”
“Oh? You lied in your own diary?”
“I mean, you read things out of context.”
“Yeah. Context makes it all better.”
“Why were you even in my desk?”
At this she flops herself back on the couch, folding her arms tight across her. “None of your fucking business. Now go run along and tattle to my dad about how I read your diary and said ‘fucking.’
”
“I’m not going to tell him.”
“Oh, so he won’t ask me what’s in it?”
“That’s not why.” Because I’m leaving. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I was asking about Dylan, and about you.”
“He’s fine, isn’t he?”
“Probably.”
“Thanks for being so reassuring.”
“It won’t help him if you hide things from us.”
“Hypocrite.”
She stands up and whirls on me, and for a moment I think she might hit me, with her hands balled up into fists, the memory of Mallory grabbing me by the arms so fresh in my mind.
She stomps off to her room and slams the door in such a way that would normally earn at least a mild reproof from Michael, but today nothing is as it should be.
I venture upstairs to Michael’s room again. This time when I crack the door he’s alone.
He’s on the phone, clearly with the police. In one hand he’s clenching the receiver. The other hand is wrapped tightly around a piece of bedsheet, which he keeps unwinding and winding again as he talks.
“Look, I tell you, this isn’t like him. He’s a good kid, he’s hardly ever been in trouble before . . . What good will that do in the morning? Do you know how far away he could be by then? Dammit, he’s fourteen years old! . . . It just doesn’t feel right to me . . . What happens if you’re wrong, then, huh? What happens if—”
Michael’s voice cracks. He lets go of the sheet, cradles his head in that hand.
He nods a few times, and then punches the hang-up button without saying good-bye. He tosses the phone down, and it slides off the edge of the bed, landing with a plunk on the floor.
“All the times as a reporter I’ve spent on the phone with upset, grieving people, trying to be calm and professional. I never realized how much they must have hated me.”
I sit down on the bed and pick up the phone, putting it on the nightstand after checking for serious damage.
“What’s happening?” I prompt, as Michael remains silent, staring at the floor between his feet.
“They’ll put a report in some database. The desk lieutenant said he’d have an officer check the bus station if I e-mail him a picture of Dylan to show around. And if he still hasn’t checked in by morning, they will have a detective check it out. By morning!”
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