“No! Pete, wait. I need to know about Nate …”
“I’m sorry. I have to go,” Pete interrupted me mid-sentence. “I’ll tell you everything when you get home, but right now my time is best spent answering the questions the cops have. So they can start looking for Nate.” Pete paused and gulped so much air I could hear it over the phone. I sensed the severity of the situation had really set in for him. “Oh shit, they have to start looking for Nate. The police are going to be looking for our son … how did this happen? After all that we’ve been through, how could I have let him go missing? Again?” The panic that I’d been feeling for so many weeks suddenly entered Pete’s voice. We were finally on the same page.
“They’ll find him, Pete. They have to.”
“Just come home, Ashley. You need to come home. Right now. Okay?”
I nodded, tears streaking down my face. As I clicked off my phone, I hailed a cab and, within seconds, was tearing across the Queensboro Bridge on my way to LaGuardia.
25
Nate
My lungs hurt and I cannot breathe but it doesn’t matter because I need to keep running and I need to run faster even though my ankle sometimes hurts a little bit because I’m running so fast. I cannot stop no matter what anyone says.
Even Noah. I thought about going to his house. But I know he would have told me to stop running. He doesn’t like to run. Only ride bikes. So I decided not to go there. I ran past his blue house that is four doors down from mine to the end of the street. And then I turned right and kept going.
But now I really wish Noah was with me because I need to have him help me find my mommy. We need to find my mommy and I need to find New York because that’s where Daddy says Mommy is and we need to find her before the elephants get us because they are chasing me and I don’t know where Noah is so I don’t know if they have already killed him and the elephants are scaring me and they are growling behind me and are like shadows dancing everywhere and they make fun of me and they say they will hurt me and then kill me and I think they might have already killed Noah and that makes me so scared so that is I why I do not like the elephants but they keep following me anyway so I need to run faster.
Something bad is going to happen.
I just know it.
I know it because the angry elephants have come down. They have come down from the sky. And now they are chasing me. They have come to get me. And Mommy. They are going to chase her too because they want to kill her. They want to kill both of us.
So I need to run faster.
As fast as I can.
I need to find Mommy.
26
Ashley
I barely remembered to message Brad to let him know that I had bailed on our dinner. I thought about letting him know what was going on, but a tiny nagging feeling prevented me from sharing the specific details; I simply mentioned that a family emergency had come up, and asked him to let everyone know that I had to fly back to Toronto right away.
Brad’s response came immediately: “No problem. I’ll let everyone know. Are you going to your hotel to get your stuff first?”
“Oh shit. My stuff. Of course …” I muttered out loud. I hadn’t even considered getting my suitcase from the hotel. I thought about asking the cab driver to turn around, but I didn’t want to waste any more time. Instead, I called the hotel and arranged for my things to be packed and shipped home to me.
When I got to the airport, I rushed to the counter to see if I could switch my flight. I hoped my gold status from flying so frequently would help get me home faster.
“You’re in luck, Ms. Carter.” The airline employee smiled, holding onto my passport. I suspected she had picked up on the panic that was smeared all over my face. “The last flight out is at 9:50 p.m., and since you don’t have to check a bag, I think you’ll make it.”
I thanked her before grabbing my passport and boarding pass. I ran in the direction of security, and got there twenty minutes before my flight boarded. A long line of waiting passengers loomed in front of me.
The security employee standing at the front of the line must have noticed how antsy I was. She got off her stool and walked in my direction. “Where are you going and what time is your flight?” she asked, reaching for my boarding pass without the slightest hint of a smile on her face.
“Toronto. The 9:50 flight.”
The employee’s eyes bored into mine. She hesitated slightly, but then signalled for me to follow her. She led me to the front of the line.
“You can’t leave it this late … you’ll miss your flight,” the employee scolded me. She shook her head as she handed me a bin to put my purse and shoes in.
“I know … it’s my son. It’s an emergency. I just found out that I have to go home …”
The woman shrugged her shoulders and waved me through nonchalantly, as if she’d heard this excuse a million times.
When I got to the gate, I sank into an empty chair far from anyone else. I longed to have someone I knew with me. I was going crazy without an update, but didn’t want to bug Pete while he was talking to the police. And I knew he would call me as soon as he knew something.
I sat in my chair, desperate for Nate to be okay. I put my head in my hands and prayed as hard as I could, begging God over and over to let the police find our little boy. My heart, pounding in my chest as it had never done before, was making it next to impossible to keep my composure.
Three minutes before they called us to board our flight, my phone rang.
It was Pete.
“Please tell me some good news. Have you found him?”
“No news. I’m sorry, Ash. The police just finished ransacking our house. I told them he wasn’t in there, but they wanted to be sure. The two cops that came searched everywhere. All of our closets, the garage, our shed … everywhere. He’s not here.”
“So now what?”
“I filled out a Missing Person Questionnaire.”
I gulped. Sucked in air. “A … a Missing Person Questionnaire? Really? What did you tell them?” My stomach was in knots, and my heart was going so fast I could feel it in my throat.
“I gave them a full description of what Nate looks like, what he was wearing when he left the house, stuff about his dental records. That kind of thing.” Pete’s voice sounded weak on the other end of the phone. Like he was already defeated.
“So what are they going to do now?”
“They’re hitting the streets to start looking for him. I told them all of his favourite places to go … parks, the school, the rinks where he plays hockey. Basically all the places that I’ve already looked, but they want to double check the obvious spots.”
“And do they have a picture of him?”
“Of course. Three.”
“Oh no. This can’t be happening …” My throat became tighter, threatening to take away my ability to breathe. I couldn’t accept the fact that my baby was out on the streets. By himself. That the police were looking for him. That they now considered him to be a missing person. It was too much to take in.
“The cops asked that I stay here in case Nate comes home,” Pete continued. Something in his voice sounded almost apologetic. “Because there’s a good chance he’ll come home. He’s got to …”
“I know.” I inhaled sharply, thinking through my next few words that I needed to ask my husband. I had to know about how Nate was behaving before he left. I tried to be delicate with my questioning. “Pete? What happened tonight? Was he acting strange again?”
On the other end of the phone, there was only silence.
“Pete …? Was Nate acting strange tonight?”
“I guess so … yeah … he was, I guess. He was acting really strange, actually.” Pete’s voice was soft. Barely above a whisper.
Taking a deep breath, Pete relived what had happened earlier that night. How Nat
e had been acting overly hyper and was bouncing off the walls. And how he had continually talked about monsters from the moment he got home from school. Pete said Nate seemed to be obsessed with what he described as big, shadowy elephant monsters that were all around them.
Nate swore up and down that the monsters were going to hurt them. At first, Pete thought it was because Halloween had been a couple of weeks before that, but Nate refused to drop it. He couldn’t seem to get over it, and kept talking about how the monsters were going to kill them. And that they needed to find Mommy because only Mommy could save them.
Hearing that my son needed me so desperately, my heart completely broke. I hadn’t been there to help him. I had abandoned my son in his time of need, just as my father had abandoned me.
I was an awful parent.
“What did you say to Nate? When he was telling you all of this.”
“At first, I thought if I distracted him it might calm him down. So I asked if he wanted to help me make the pasta. He said yes, but when I came out of the pantry with the noodles, he had simply vanished. He was nowhere to be found. I started looking through the house, and noticed the front door was wide open. It’s freezing outside and we didn’t leave the door open, so I knew instantly Nate had left the house.”
I felt like I was collapsing into myself and needed someone to hold me up.
Pete continued, “Grace and I jumped in the car and scoured the neighbourhood. But he was just … well, he was just gone. It was like he vanished into thin air. We looked everywhere.”
“Did you tell all of this to the police officers?” I asked Pete.
“Yes … of course I did.”
“And what did they say about it?”
“About the monsters? They brushed it off as standard nine-year-old stuff. That he was likely still scared from Halloween. They see it a lot, apparently.”
When Pete had finished the tale of what had happened, silence filled the line. And my fear turned to anger. Why hadn’t Pete listened to me when I told him something was wrong with our son? If he had, Nate wouldn’t be missing. And we could have gotten Nate the help he needed.
And why hadn’t I pushed more? I should have insisted that Pete listen to me. I should have taken Nate to see a doctor sooner. I should have booked the appointment, regardless of what anyone else said. I should have listened to the whispers that only I could hear. I had known something wasn’t right. Instead, I’d let Pete convince me Nate was just a kid. That he didn’t need help. And I’d ignored my intuition.
Pete and I, together, had abandoned our son in his time of need.
We were both awful parents. And Nate was missing because of it.
“Last call for Ashley Carter, Flight 1210 to Toronto …” A staccato voice interrupted my thoughts. I could see a short, snarly woman standing behind the check-in desk barking into the microphone, looking in my direction. She must have been calling all passengers to board but I hadn’t heard her during my conversation with Pete. I was the only one still sitting in the chairs at the gate.
I told Pete I had to board my flight, and that I’d call him as soon as I landed.
The woman irritably held her hand out to take my passport and boarding pass, but her face somewhat softened as she saw my tear-streaked cheeks. She smiled at me, as if to imply everything would be okay, and then closed the gates behind me as I started down the jet bridge.
I took my seat and prepared for takeoff, knowing the short flight to Toronto was about to become the longest hour of my life. I barely made it through, and tried to ignore the other passengers whispering about me and nudging their heads in my direction. I hadn’t stopped crying since I got on the plane, and no one knew whether they should ignore me or ask if I needed help.
Lucky for me, everyone chose the former and I was left alone to weep into the hard plastic of my window cover. Telling a stranger my story wasn’t going to help, and I didn’t want to talk about it with anyone except my family.
As soon as we landed, I called Pete from the plane and found out there was no news. On the other end of the phone, his voice sounded hollow and distraught; it was almost like talking to a stranger.
With nothing more to talk about, we hung up the phone, and I stared out the window, watching the crew begin to unload the luggage.
It was dark out. Really dark out. And my baby was out there by himself.
When the plane doors finally opened, the people in front of me cleared a path and let me off first. I suspected they’d heard me speaking to Pete, and knew that my son was missing.
The flight attendants waved goodbye kindly. One nodded her head in a knowing fashion. Their lips were pursed together in awkward smiles that were as identical as their uniforms, and it was clear they all felt uncomfortable but sympathetic.
When I finally made it home, I found Pete sitting at the kitchen table with his forehead resting on top of his crossed arms, which were folded on the table. The house was silent. He was clutching his phone. When he heard me walk through the door, he jumped up out of his chair and raced towards me too quickly, ploughing into me and suffocating me with his grip. He clung on tightly. We both did. Neither of us wanted to let go.
“Ash … I just don’t know … what are we going to do? How could this have happened to us?”
I shook my head in response, unable to answer. Fresh tears stung my swollen eyes. I was convinced I’d left all of my tears on the plane and was surprised to feel them once again nip at my puffy lids.
Pete continued, “I’m sorry, Ash. I’m so sorry. I should have listened to you. You knew something was wrong. And I could see it in him tonight. Finally. But then he was gone. It was too late …”
It was too late … Pete’s words hung in the air like the thick smog of a humid day in July. The enormity of the situation closed in on both of us.
Pete finally felt what I felt. And he knew what I knew: that we were dealing with something far larger than either of us could likely comprehend. And as my husband hugged me closer, the scariest part of everything we were dealing with settled into our bones. It wasn’t what we knew, but what we didn’t know: we had no idea what was going on in Nate’s little brain, or what it might cause him to do. Worst of all, we didn’t know whether or not it was too late to do anything.
Even after Pete’s tight embrace began to relax, the raw fear did not dissipate. We parted, our eyes locking for a few moments before I let my glance go beyond my husband to the fridge at his back. There, hanging by the Golden Gate Bridge magnet my father had given us, almost as if it were staring at us — mocking us, even — was the angry-looking elephant that our son had created.
27
Nate
The elephants are still chasing me and so I need to run even faster than I was running before except I cannot really remember how fast I was running before because I feel like my brain will not slow down.
I am laughing now because I wonder if my brain is working faster than my running legs or if it is the opposite and I think that is really funny for some reason. I do not know why. I laugh for a minute but then I make myself shut up because I am worried the elephant monsters will hear me laughing and my mommy is not there to make them go away.
I need to find Mommy before the elephant monsters get me. I see them flying all around me and they are growling like lions and they have dark grey shadows behind them that look like the dark grey shadows in the movie I watched with Noah right after Halloween. I need to tell my mommy about the shadowy purple growling elephants because she will help me and make me feel better. She always makes me feel better in a way that no one else can.
So I need to find her soon.
I need to find her soon.
Mommy tells me she takes a plane to New York and I know that you get on a plane at an airport so all I need to do is find an airport and then I can go to her. I have no idea how to find an airport but I know I nee
d to find someone who will tell me so I need to look for a teacher because teachers are all very smart and they can tell me how to find an airport. It doesn’t even need to be a geography teacher because I think all teachers will know where New York is.
I stop.
I listen.
The elephant monsters start growling again. Loudly. And they are showing their mean, sharp teeth. They are scaring me so badly. They are flying all around me.
I start running again.
I run and I run and I run and I run and I run.
The streets are dark and covered in leaves. Wet, yellow leaves that have fallen off the trees. It is windy so they are blowing all around me. The houses are all bumped up against each other and some of them have lights that look like warm, melted butter pouring out of them and suddenly I want to go into one of those houses but I will feel bad bringing the elephant monsters with me so I know I cannot go into them.
My lungs still hurt. They are burning. But I cannot stop until I find Mommy and she takes the elephant monsters away from me.
At the end of the street I see a school and I know that it is a school where big kids go. Julia goes there. She’s Auntie Tay’s daughter and Mommy told me she started grade nine this year. Maybe she is in the school and can help me or if she is not maybe I will find a teacher and for sure they will know how I can get to New York and how I can find my mommy.
I run to the school as fast as I can and pull on the door. It is locked. I pull on the other door and it opens. I walk inside and it makes me less scared to be inside because I do not think that monsters go to school so I really hope they are staying outside and leaving me alone until I can find Julia or a teacher and then I can go to New York to find Mommy.
The halls are empty. All I can see are rows and rows and rows of lockers but there are no students in front of them like I see on Glee, which is my favourite TV show because my mommy loves to watch it so that means I love to watch it too.
Elephant in the Sky Page 11