by Kevin Wilson
They looked at each other, nodded, and then looked at the baby one last time before they finally decided.
While Meggy fed the baby and rocked it to sleep, Paul sat downstairs with the Shibayamas. Mindy had brought a huge basket of yarn and was already knitting. Jameson was looking at the list of instructions and numbers and tips that, single-spaced, filled up two pages. Their dinner reservations were in twenty minutes and the restaurant was twenty minutes away. Jameson placed the instructions on the coffee table and then smiled at Paul. “You know,” he said, “we never thought you’d actually use the coupon.” Paul blushed; he could not tell if Jameson was mad about this or simply surprised.
“We trust you guys,” Paul said. “And we really appreciate it.”
“It’s necessary,” Mindy said, not looking up from her knitting. “You put too much of yourselves into raising a kid, you have nothing left over for each other.”
“It’s true,” Jameson offered.
“Oh, do you two have children?” Paul asked, and instantly regretted it.
“One,” Jameson said. “She died when she was seven. Cancer.” Mindy didn’t look up from her knitting, didn’t seem to have even heard. Jameson gave him the weakest of smiles.
“Oh, God,” Paul said. “I’m sorr—”
“He’s finally asleep,” Meggy said over Paul’s apology; she was softly walking down the stairs, putting on her coat.
“We’ll take good care of him,” Mindy said, still knitting. Whatever she was making, Paul believed, did not require this much concentration.
“You have our number?” Meggy asked.
Jameson held up the sheets of paper. “We have all the numbers,” he said.
“Have fun,” Mindy said as Paul and Meggy walked out of the house.
“We will,” Meggy called back, but it sounded, to Paul, like a question.
They immediately ordered a drink when they arrived at the restaurant. Paul gave his order to the hostess as they were being led to the table, who merely smiled and said, “Your waitress will get that for you.”
Meggy ordered a whiskey, neat, a drink that she had never ordered before; she wanted something brown that tasted of wood and caramel. She wanted it to work quickly. When she ordered, Paul smiled at her, but she knew that he was trying to remember what the rules were for a breastfeeding mother. He knew it was okay, but he could never remember how okay, and she already understood that there would be awkwardness when she ordered her second.
Still, they were happy to be together, though they both felt so sleepy, like they had stepped into an egg-shaped space filled with warm blue light. They were without the baby. They never knew quite how this would happen. They both ordered steaks.
“I love you,” Paul said, smiling.
“Duh,” Meggy said. “I love you, too.”
“We’re doing okay,” he then said, and she wanted him to stop talking. He was trying to construct a narrative for her, to show her that he could write a story where they were happy. She didn’t care about stories, not the way that he did. She liked a single line, perfectly rendered, one that echoed and did not immediately satisfy. She felt the lingering guilt of having left the baby. She was used to being apart from him, but she was not used to the fact that, if the baby needed her, he would not be at arm’s length.
Paul sipped his Paloma and wondered which of the Shibayamas would attend to the baby if it awakened. He imagined that Mindy would have finished her knitting by then and simply draped the finished blanket over the crying baby. But the baby wouldn’t wake up. That was not his style. He slept like a rock until midnight, and only then were all bets off.
One of his students had turned in a story for workshop that week, and he told Meggy about it. In it, a woman finds a box on her doorstep. There are three kittens in the box, just born. The woman does not want the kittens and walks two houses down to leave the box on her neighbor’s doorstep. But the neighbor sees her doing this. She takes the kittens back to her house and she feeds them milk with a dropper and lets them sleep on her bed.
“Do you like the story?” she asked him.
“I think so. I don’t know. I have to read it again. I might be missing something.”
“I thought for sure that she was going to kill the kittens,” Meggy admitted.
“Why?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I just thought that was where it was going.”
“You think most stories end up in violence,” he said, smiling, but Meggy was annoyed by this. She finished her whiskey and ordered another, but with Coke in it this time. She needed sweetness now, just a little, to cut the sharpness.
The steaks came to their table, and there was a huge dollop of butter atop the ribeyes, already melting and pooling around the steak. Meggy felt slightly queasy, but she cut into the steak and it was amazing. Then the phone rang, their own home phone showing up on the caller ID. Her knife and fork clattered against the plate and she answered.
“What’s wrong?” Paul asked, but Meggy shushed him.
He watched her face blush so deeply red, burning her cheeks. “What the fuck is wrong?” Paul asked, and the couple at the adjacent table turned to look at them.
“We need to go,” Meggy said, putting the phone in her purse. Her hands were shaking.
“What’s wrong,” Paul asked again, but Meggy was already up, pushing away from the table.
“The baby is gone,” she finally said, her voice rising.
They ran out of the restaurant. They left without paying, but it would be weeks before either of them remembered this fact.
3.
There were three police officers in the house when Paul and Meggy returned home. The Shibayamas were nowhere to be found. The initial officer, who seemed to be in charge of things, asked them to sit on the couch, but Meggy was getting hysterical. “Where is my baby?” she shouted.
The police officer looked somber. He was squat and round, with a bristly mustache. Paul remembered that one time he was speeding and this particular officer simply gestured for Paul to slow down instead of pulling him over. The officer’s son was the star running back on the high school football team. It was a tiny town. It was easy to know these things, whether you wanted to or not.
“Ma’am,” the officer said, “your child is missing.”
“Where the fuck is he?” Meggy said.
“She’s had a drink,” Paul said, apologizing, though he knew instantly that this was a mistake.
“Fuck you,” Meggy said to him, her voice so deep, not even looking at Paul. Months from now, when he looked back on this night, it was hard for Paul not to imagine that this was the exact moment that their marriage fell apart.
“I need to ask you some questions,” the officer said.
“Is he dead?” Paul asked.
“Where are Jameson and Mindy?” Meggy asked. “What did they do?”
“Just sit down here on the sofa,” the officer said. He had a sorry little pen and a notepad. Paul felt, in that moment, that his son was dead and nothing that this officer wrote down would change that. He sank into the sofa, so tired he could barely keep his eyes open. He felt as Meggy reached for his hand and squeezed it so hard that he almost told her to ease up. Instead, he held on to her hand, as if the intensity of their anxiety would be lessened the longer they touched. As the officer talked to them, asked them questions, it was hard not to imagine that their son was simply upstairs in his crib, sound asleep. If Meggy or Paul simply stood up and ran to their son’s room, he would be there. But they could not move. They held on to each other and told the officer what he wanted to know, information that would not bring their son back to them.
4.
Paul slept, and Meggy was amazed (and angered and, yes, envious) at how quickly he could shut his body and mind down. They were in a hotel room in the next town over, had checked in at four in the morning. The police were still going over the house. Meggy had wanted to check every door, look under every piece of furniture, but they wouldn’t
let her search. It was forty-five degrees outside. There were a group of people, some of them their neighbors (though not the Shibayamas) who had been walking around the woods near their house, sweeping the beams of their flashlights across the ground, listening for the sound of their crying baby. There wasn’t much else to do. The town was so small. There was barely a police force. There was no mobile command unit or elite squad. There was no ice-queen special agent who had experienced her own tragedy years before but who used complicated methods of deduction to find missing people. There was nothing but the expansive nature of the universe and her son, her baby, lost in it.
Her throat ached from crying; her muscles felt shredded, little raggedy bits of herself floating around in her body. She took a pen and some hotel stationery and tried to organize the facts as she knew them. She wrote and she wrote. She imagined that when she was done writing, she could give the list to every person she had ever known and they would not have to ask her a single question. They could immediately join the search and they could help her find her baby.
Her breasts ached and her nipples were leaking milk. She had forgotten the pump; what an odd thing if she had remembered, to leave her house, her baby missing, toting the pump, which she hated so fucking much. She imagined the looks on the faces of the police officers, all of them men, as they watched her carry the pump to the car.
She put down her pen in frustration and walked into the bathroom and washed her hands. She undid her dress and her bra and then cupped her right breast and squeezed until a few drops appeared. She applied more pressure, ignoring the discomfort, and the milk started to dribble onto her hands, dripping into the sink. She wondered if she should store the milk, pull the stopper on the sink and let it collect, but she was too tired to do anything about it. She expressed as much milk as she could from both breasts. She looked at the milk as it ran down the bowl of the sink, where it had dribbled on the counter. She didn’t clean it. She put her bra back on, pulled up her dress, and went back to the desk.
Paul roused and sat up in bed, still in his clothes. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“I’m working.”
“The baby . . .” he said, and started crying.
“I know,” she said. She knew that she should get into the bed with him, hold him, but this was more important. The baby was missing. They would comfort each other later.
“How long have I been asleep?” he asked.
“I have no idea, really,” she replied.
“What can I do?” he asked, and she was relieved to have an answer for him.
“Nothing,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”
And he did.
5.
The list looked like this:
Paul and I left the baby in his crib at 7:15. Mindy and Jameson Shibayama were in the living room when we left.
Jameson said he checked on the baby around 8:00 and it was asleep. Mindy was knitting.
At 8:30, Mindy and Jameson both went to check on the baby and discovered that he was not in his crib. They turned on the lights, checked the entire room, but found no sign of the baby. They checked the hallway and the adjacent rooms. They went back to the baby’s bedroom and checked the windows, which were latched shut.
There had been no sound save for the white noise of the machine. They heard no crying or sounds of disturbance over the baby monitor.
They called me and Paul and then called 911.
The police questioned Jameson and Mindy and then searched the entire house. They called in an Amber Alert and asked for assistance from the neighboring town to set up checkpoints.
The police searched the area around the house and then searched the Shibayamas’ home and yard.
Two police dogs from the neighboring town searched the woods around the house.
I was questioned for forty-five minutes about the baby and the circumstances of our last interaction. Paul was taken into another room and questioned.
No signs of a struggle or any blood was found in or near the house.
A command post was set up at the Shibayamas’ house next door. Police from the entire county are now working in unison. The Shibayamas have not spoken to us since the initial phone call. I do not know where they are.
Our baby is still missing.
When it was finished, she woke up Paul and asked him to read it. She watched his face as he silently read the list. He nodded several times. “This is good,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said. Now that the list was complete, she could sleep, felt exhaustion take over her entire body. She curled against Paul, pulled the sheets around her body.
Even though she was tired, even though she felt shattered in ways that she knew, no matter what happened, she would never recover from, if Paul had tried to have sex with her in that moment, she would have let him. She would have let him slide himself into her and she would have asked him to go real slow at first and then harder once she’d gotten used to him. She would have done this because sex, when it was good, felt so obliterating. The world was entirely vaporized around you and it took so long afterward for the mist to coalesce into reality again. She eased herself against him, pressing against his dick, which began to harden. He rubbed her ass, and then she fell asleep before anything else could happen. She did not dream about the baby and, in the morning, she was so angry that she had not conjured the image of her child in those moments when everything was quiet.
6.
The baby had vanished. There were no signs of him, not a single clue that offered any explanation for where the baby had gone. Paul and Meggy had purchased jogging suits from Walmart, toiletries. They could not go back to their house yet. They received hourly updates from the police, but they were told not to watch the news, not to check the Internet, and not to talk to any reporters. Paul checked his e-mail and there were nearly fifty e-mails waiting for him. He realized that he had a class that afternoon, but he had no energy for dealing with this fact. Someone else would take care of it.
The Shibayamas, they learned, were staying at a hotel in the town beyond the town where Paul and Meggy were staying.
The police called and said that they needed Paul and Meggy to come to the station, that there was no news, but they had some questions that might help them in their search. Paul drove and Meggy stared out the window. “Where do you think he is?” she asked him as they drove the twenty minutes to the police station.
“I don’t know,” he replied, because he truly had no idea.
“I guess I mean . . . do you think he’s dead?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“I think he is,” she finally replied.
“He’s not,” he corrected her.
“You just said that you didn’t know.”
“Well, I guess now I do. He’s not dead,” he said, stumbling over his words, trying to sound certain.
“What would be worse,” she then asked, “if he’s dead or if he’s disappeared and we’ll never find him?”
“Both are really bad,” he admitted; he was starting to cry again.
“Maybe we never had a baby,” she said, her voice empty of emotion. “Maybe this is all a dream.”
“I don’t think so,” he said, and they drove the rest of the way in silence.
The police took them into separate rooms. They weren’t interrogation rooms, just offices. Paul wasn’t even sure if the local police had interrogation rooms. Were there even jail cells here? What did the police do besides give tickets to students who were speeding around town?
The police chief, a woman in her sixties, walked into the room. She had short, nearly buzzed gray hair and dark brown eyes set deeply in her face. She looked like she had been at the first Woodstock, had the air of a faded hippie, even in her police uniform. He knew little about her. She was kind of a legend in the town; in the only violence that anyone could remember in the last twenty years, she shot and killed a local man who was trying to abduct a young woman. Now she sat opposite Paul and smi
led.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Lincoln,” she said.
“Me, too,” he said. He wasn’t yet used to this sentiment, did not know how to respond to it. He would, eventually. He would get it right.
“This is unlike anything I’ve ever encountered,” she admitted. “I will not say that I am ill-equipped to handle this, because I honestly don’t know anyone, man or woman, young or old, who would know what to do with this case. It’s utterly confounding, which I’m sure you don’t want to hear, seeing as how we’re trying to find your baby.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” Paul said, as if the very next thing that the police chief said would make sense.
“I have one question that I want to ask you, Mr. Lincoln, and I know this is difficult. When your wife left the house with you that night, after she had put the baby down, what was her mood?”
“She was tired,” Paul said. He was certain of this.
“Agitated?” the police chief asked. “Depressed?”
“No,” Paul said. “Just tired. But excited for the night out.”
“And let me ask you this. When the two of you left the house, do you remember what your wife was carrying with her?”
“Her purse?” Paul asked, like he was on a game show.
“Are you certain?” she asked.
“She needed her ID to get a drink, so she had her purse with her,” he said, this time with more certainty, though he honestly could not remember. He was working with the clues that he had.
“How big was the purse?” she asked.
“Normal size, I guess,” he responded, shrugging.
“I’m going to ask you this and I want you to try your best not to get upset. Did you two stop anywhere on the way to the restaurant? A gas station? The drugstore?”