Finding Jake

by Bryan Reardon

  Rachel pauses. I understand now. She is taking Laney and leaving me. I predicted this moment, maybe even before the nightmare began. There is nothing that can stop it, so I remain silent, watching them. I feel no hope or anticipation. I simply feel the numbing cold fingers of loss tracing paths across my body. Rachel’s words vibrate against my skull. I have failed again. I have not found Jake.

  Rachel stares at me. My lack of fight gives her all the ammunition she needs.

  “Laney, we have to go. Your father needs some time to think.”

  “I don’t want to. Why can’t you two just get along?”

  Rachel’s eyes look cold as well. “I need to leave, Laney. I need to get away from the house for a while. I think you should come with me, but I can’t force you.”

  My wife walks away, through the kitchen toward the door to the garage. Laney breaks down, sobbing. She rushes to me and I hug her harder than I ever have before.

  “It’s okay, sweetie. Just go with Mom. It’ll be safer for now. Once everyone outside leaves, I will join you. Okay?”

  “What about Jake?” she pleads.

  I hold her face and look into her tearing eyes. “I’ll find him, peanut. I promise.”

  She looks up at me, wanting to hold me to my word.

  “You promise?”

  I pause, fully understanding this moment. She has spent years with me. She knows if I promise, it will happen.

  “I promise.”

  The tears dry up and she steps back.

  “Bye, Daddy. I love you.”

  I hold back my tears until she disappears into the kitchen. I hear her open the door and enter the garage. I am still her father. I am still Rachel’s husband. I will protect them. Crying, I go to the front door and swing it open. The mob outside sees it is me. They pulse forward. Jeers and microphones assault me but I stand tall, watching the garage door open. No one seems to notice but me. I am the perfect distraction, the ultimate decoy.

  “Mr. Connolly, Mr. Connolly, how did you not see this coming?”

  “Do you think fathers raising children is causing this increase in gun violence?”

  “Did you hear about the shooting in Kansas this morning? Ten more children were shot and the alleged suspect claims he wanted to outdo your son.”

  “Murderer!”

  “Faggot!”

  “This is your fault!”

  I hear it all as I watch my family drive away, unmolested. A smile creeps across my face, no doubt it will fuel more negative reaction in the bloodthirsty media. I do not care anymore about appearances. My last gift, although it will never make up for my sins, will be to shield my family. I decide in that instant to be a lightning rod, to absorb the worst anyone can throw at me, knowing that each word I survive is a word Laney and Rachel will not hear.

  As I remain aloof but present on my front step, a strange thing occurs. The crowd quiets down. The reporters, the first to notice what is going on, retreat to their vans. On deadlines I am sure, they have little time and quickly figure out this venture will get them nowhere.

  Eventually, the others in the crowd, random strangers along with a few familiar faces, vanish one by one. I do not move as almost everyone walks from my lawn and disappears down the street, to God knows where. I think about what might have brought all of those people to my house. They spout hatred and anger, but I think I know the true motivation—fear.

  They do not fear me, although I do not doubt they blame me. No, these people fear the unknown. They fear unpredictability. The specter of randomness pricks them and they react like an exposed nerve ending. They must be able to answer one simple question, How do I keep this from happening?

  I wonder how my reaction on the front step will be interpreted. The crowd will see my lack of response, my smile, as a cold, psychopathic tendency. Genetics, they will say, are to blame. I tainted my son from the dawn of his creation. Luckily, they will think, my family does not have such tendencies. We could not stand up to such a barrage of righteous indignation without reaction. Therefore, our sons and daughters will not grow up to be cold-blooded killers . . . like mine. My Jake. The kindest, gentlest, most pure person I have ever known. But the doubt still lingers. Did I know him at all?

  My eyes focus and I see that one person remains, Mary Moore. Her face has changed. It now drips with judgment and rage.

  “Why my daughter?” she yells at me. “Why couldn’t it have been yours?” This too, I absorb, for now. Once the door closes, my demeanor changes. Good or bad, I’ve done what I can for Rachel and Laney. Now I must keep a promise.

  CHAPTER 21

  JAKE: AGE THIRTEEN

  “You promise?”

  I glanced into the rearview mirror, looking at Laney.

  “I can’t promise. What if there is a lightning storm and it gets canceled? What I can promise is that I’ll do everything I can to do the plunge. And you know Dad. I never break a promise.”

  “Well,” she said. “You’re doing the polar plunge with me, then. Because there is no way they are going to cancel the whole thing. It doesn’t lightning in March. Plus, thousands of people will be there.”

  I merged my wife’s car onto I-95 heading south. It was the Wednesday of spring break, early afternoon. Normally I would avoid the bottleneck of the interstate at the mall exit but I figured our random time of departure should help avoid that traffic. I was right and we sailed onto Route 1 with no problem. One hour and a half more and we would be basking in the briny air of Bethany Beach.

  “Maybe hundreds, sweetie. And it can lightning in March. Just not too often. Are you going to run the five K with me?”

  “No way!”

  “I thought you wanted to run track in middle school?”

  This conversation was retread at least once a week in our house. It got Laney fired up every time, but she really did want me to jump into the ocean with her. Honestly, I did not want to. The ocean temperature in midspring was significantly colder than, say, January, because the months of winter cooled it to a heart-stopping forty degrees.

  Rachel plugged a movie into the portable DVD player we used in the car. The kids quieted down, their voices replaced by Ben Stiller’s in Night at the Museum. A good choice because the dialogue was funny enough even without being able to see the picture. For some time, Rachel and I just listened, laughing occasionally.

  “When is Jake’s meet next week?” Rachel asked.

  I laughed. “If you don’t know, we’re in trouble. I think it is Wednesday. The eight hundred is usually around four-ish.”

  “I think I might make that.”

  “Don’t tell him unless you’re sure.”

  I probably should not have said that. Jake had reacted a few weeks prior when his mom missed a track meet she had planned on attending. I did not want him to be disappointed.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” he said from the backseat.

  “Thanks, buddy.”

  I glanced over and caught the smile on her face. Although Jake contradicted me, I appreciated it. The moment passed and we continued to talk, the mundane of school-age children—schedule, schedule, and more schedule. Our cadence eased into normalcy and I grinned as we sped past flat, open farmland.

  The movie wound down as we entered the beach towns. The first stoplight at Lewes, what Rachel called Five Points when she was a kid, signaled our arrival. I felt the tension slide down my back as if the asphalt had vacuumed it away. When we coasted through the bend into Dewey Beach, I craned my neck, peering down a side street to get my first glimpse of sand.

  “It’s the dogs again,” Rachel moaned.

  My wife did not like greyhounds. Irrational as it seems, the mere sight of their spindly legs and pointed snouts sets her teeth to itching. I laughed, not at her discomfort, but for the ironic fact that our favorite place on the planet also hosted an annual greyhound owners’ convention. They were everywhere, walking by the Starboard and the Rusty Rudder, two staples of the Dewey Beach nightlife. Greyhound heads poked out of car wi
ndows and between guardrails on motel balconies. I counted thirteen as we waited for the light to change.

  Rachel let out a sigh of relief (at which we all laughed) as we left town and drove along the isthmus between the Delaware Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. My kids, even as teens and preteens, loved to see the old watchtowers. Giant cylinders rising from the sandy dunes, acting as sighting points for a little-known, but highly fortified military installation during World War II, Fort Miles. During the war, the place bristled with dozens of guns, some able to launch massive shells almost thirty miles out to sea. Now, the towers stood as silent sentinels with their half-circle vertical slit windows facing out to a calm Atlantic Ocean.

  At times throughout my children’s lives, I have likened myself to those lonely towers. I imagined standing on the outskirts, a daunting figure on the horizon of their existence. I threatened any who dared to harm them, silently hinting at some great consequence. Yet, when life’s pain washed over them like the waves of the ocean, constant and unstoppable, light shined on the truth. My threat, like those towers, was hollow. I manned no arsenal of destruction. Instead, as all parents inevitably do, I stood by powerless to stop the pain that must be a part of my children’s lives.

  I swallowed down that thought like a thick, chalky pill. Rachel glanced in my direction but looked away just as quickly. I think she sensed my doom. My kids chattered in the back, talking about walking to Candy Kitchen when we arrived at the house. I drove, letting the proximity to the ocean clear away the bitter afterthoughts.

  That night, we took the kids to the Grotto in West Bethany. A local chain, I believed their pizza to be the most polarizing food in the mid-Atlantic. People who grew up going to the beach tended to love the strange pie with a swirl of blended cheese on top. Others, introduced to it later in life, despised it. Except for me. For the kids and me, Grotto was a must-have every trip.

  “You don’t sit at the popular table,” I heard Laney say.

  The two kids had been talking for some time while Rachel and I discussed our order. I barely paid attention but my ears picked up her comment.

  “I didn’t say we did, Laney, did I?”

  “That’s what Jesse’s sister told her. She says Max and Ben are annoying.”

  “So what,” Jake said.

  “But they are annoying.”

  “You and Jesse just want the basement all the time. That’s why you say that. I don’t even know her sister.”

  “She sits at the cool table,” Laney proudly announced.

  “There isn’t really a cool table. There’s sort of a weird table . . .”

  “Yeah, yours,” she said.

  “Laney, be nice,” I scolded.

  She crinkled her brow, so like her mother. “I was.”

  To my surprise, Jake laughed. I thought he would be upset or feel insecure but he looked nothing like either emotion crossed his mind. At that instant, I saw just how comfortable he was in his own skin.

  I watched the two, my children, interact. The moment unfolded as if I had never seen it before. They carried themselves with confidence and happiness. I checked and found that Rachel watched them, too. Her expression mirrored what I thought mine must look like. I felt her shoulder touch mine. A second later, hers moved away, as if the contact had been accidental.

  “Why are you always with those guys?” Laney asked Jake.

  “Because we’re friends.”

  “You just like to play that fools-ball game,” she said in one of her accents.

  They laughed. “No. We play Barbies a lot, too.”

  She feigned outrage. “You better not touch my dolls.”

  He smirked and acted as if his fingers were tiny, well-coiffed figurines. “Oh, Ken. Oh, Barbie. Smooch, smooch.”

  “Aren’t you proud?” Rachel whispered, smiling.

  “Actually, I am.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  After dinner, we drove home. Instead of heading inside, we walked the block and a half to the beach, passing the houses with their sailboat motifs and grand, inviting screened-in porches. Fireflies speckled the tree line of an empty lot, blinking their silent story to the night. In the distance, the pounding growl of the ocean teased our ears. The air smelled of the sea and I heard another family on the next street over singing an old song.

  “By the sea

  By the sea

  By the beautiful sea

  You and me

  You and me

  Oh, how happy we’ll be.”

  I stopped, straining to hear. My grandfather sang that song to us during our one visit to the state-owned beach bordering Maryland. He didn’t know the next line, though, so he hummed a few stanzas and ended with a resounding: “by the beautiful sea.”

  My family had gone ahead a few yards and Rachel looked over her shoulder, wondering why I stopped.

  “What’s up?” Rachel asked.

  “Sorry, I was just listening to them singing.”

  I caught up to her and thought about explaining the significance, but my mind turned in a different direction. As some songs can do, the lyrics touched something inside me. When the kids were little, particularly during some of those tough times when I felt they were isolated from everyone else (or maybe that I was), and Rachel and I struggled with our role reversal, we talked about moving to the beach. Rachel would get a job in some retail shop and I’d try to pick up as much writing work as I could. Inland, the cost of living dipped to the absurd compared to the multimillion-dollar beachfront homes. Maybe we could make it work. The beach coursed through both Laney’s and Jake’s veins. It was our happy place. Why not embrace it fully?

  The words in the song surprised me—“Pa is rich, ma is rich, so now what do we care?” They hit home. Every decision in life seemed so important. I thought about how important it had been for me to enroll the kids in the best school possible. We couldn’t do that at the beach.

  I noticed the problem with our theory during Jake’s early parent-teacher conferences. Throughout school, I ranked in the top 10 percent of the class. The bottom quarter consisted of kids who would not go on to any education after high school. Some never graduated. Only about half my grade attended a four-year college. As bad as it sounds, I built a level of confidence in myself by being at or near the top academically.

  For my kids, primarily due to my own decision to find the best school for them, they are smack in the middle of a school in which 80 to 90 percent will continue on to a four-year college, including some schools that my old classmates would not have been able to spell correctly. My kids, therefore, see themselves as average compared to their peers. Rachel and I had discussed this in the past, but decisions were made and were hard to undo.

  The other family walking toward the beach peeled off toward an ice cream stand. Their departure brought my attention back to the present. I caught up with the kids, tapping Laney on the left shoulder but swinging around her right side. Jake lunged at me, grappling like a puppy. I laughed and the three of us, along with Rachel, carried our horseplay all the way to the sand.

  The night proved to be one of the most beautiful I can remember. Long, fingerlike clouds passed in front of an enormous orange full moon. The light reflected off the ocean, painting the surf in a living array of yellows, oranges, reds, and purples. The waves crashed at the perfect rhythm and my heart seemed to change its beat to be in sync with nature. The brisk air reddened my cheeks, and refreshed, I took it in and savored the moment. This, I thought, was what the beach truly meant to us, to my soul. Peace.

  At one point, Rachel and I stopped and the kids went ahead. We talked in hushed tones.

  “Things have been tough,” I said.

  She nodded. “No tougher than for other people. I think it’s just this time in our life.”

  I watched the kids as they played together. For a second, I felt like I was back on the beach that night so long before, when Rachel and I got engaged. I felt the urge to reach for Rachel’s hand, to share that moment. My fingers
even twitched, but they stayed by my side. The barrier between us became, for a moment, a corporeal thing, the manifestation between two people who very well may be growing apart. Yet through it all, two things pulled us back together, and those two things had gotten pretty far ahead.

  Eventually, Rachel and I hurried to catch the children. We walked farther than normal that night, passing the houses crowding the dunes to the immediate south of our beach, on to the state beach beyond. I noticed the silhouette of a pickup backed up to the surf line. Three men sat in chairs, poles jutting out like giant antennae. They spoke softly to one another, their deep whispers accenting the tide. I waved and they all returned it.

  “Should we head back?” I asked.

  “Look. Mermaids,” Laney called out.

  I turned toward the water. As the moonlight reflected off the rolling surface, slashes of light created the mirage of a sparkling form riding atop the waves as they pushed toward shore.

  “I see,” Jake said.

  “You’re right,” Rachel announced. She was the mermaid expert, the person who had introduced their existence to me almost twenty years before.

  A tight knot, we stood together and watched as minutes passed into the night. My arm snaked around Rachel’s shoulder and Laney leaned back against me. Rachel encircled Jake and he nestled in as well. I wrapped Laney up into another family hug as salty air brushed the back of my neck. I felt whole and at peace, sharing this moment with my family. The barrier weekend, fading into the night and becoming a shadow. I wished that would last until the end of time.

  The weekend passed too quickly. The drive home consisted of contented silence and a couple of naps in the backseat. Home by dinnertime, we ordered out, P.F. Chang’s. Laney and Rachel wanted to pick it up (since I drove home from the beach) and Jake and I went into the backyard and threw a baseball as the sun slid below the horizon.

  “Getting too dark,” I said.

  He nodded. Baseball, unlike some other outdoor activities, became significantly more dangerous at twilight. The ball faded into the gloom only to reappear three feet from your face. The first few were exhilarating. After that, we were just asking for trouble.