Missing Chldren

by Gerald Lynch

  As I told the missing persons detective the story of the man and the dog and Shawn’s determination to relieve its thirst, his pursed silence again raised needles all over my face and scalp. He was a lot taller than I, with a reddish brush cut that made his small head an aloof ginger ball. While I talked, he occasionally winced, as if he were suffering sinus irritation. No good at his job, I decided, especially if you judged by his skill at reassuring the victim, his curbside manner, as it were. I needed somebody else, somebody better, a second opinion or something, the very best detective Ottawa could provide! I would throw my weight around. Do you know who I am? Your life, or your child’s, could be in my hands some day! This is not to be treated as routine!

  Finally he removed his gaze from the green curtain and said, “You last saw your daughter…Shawn, right here, at the hatchery display?” Only then did I realize he’d walked me back to that far corner. “And you’re certain she was still holding the …” He again checked his notes. “White Styrofoam cup?”

  “For fuck’s sake!” I shouted, it echoed, he winced. “Are you not listening to me? It was the man with the dog! Get moving on it!”

  He looked down at me expressionlessly, as do I at the raging parents of unresponsive patients. “You think?”

  “Yes, I do think!”

  He resumed staring impassively. “Usually, Doctor, procedure makes us wait a bit before officially investigating a missing person. But you are Dr. Lorne Thorpe.”

  “Yes?”

  “I too suspect it was the man with the dog, Dr. Thorpe. A man and his dog waiting outside a museum but not lining up? A dog wouldn’t be admitted anyway. Somehow his daughter had bypassed the crushing crowd to use the bathroom?”

  “Well, yes, I suspected as much my …”

  And as he turned and walked away: “Had he come off the main road all the way into the crowded museum just to find a bathroom for his invisible daughter? Or was he leaving already? Waiting for his daughter with a dog, waiting to leave a museum that was just opening for the day? No, it doesn’t look good, Dr. Thorpe.”

  In a panic that almost disabled me with its rising, I followed him back out into the heat to show him the spot where the man and dog had stood. As we neared the spindly tree, he turned and shoved me back and knelt right in the dirt, as careless of his pants as he’d been of me. He called commandingly to the two cops who’d suddenly appeared, signalling widely: “Cordon!”

  Then I was disabled. It was his rude efficiency in pushing me away that did me in, his tunnel vision: my own style when death knocks on the operating room door. Only one thing matters.

  And time was something else again. All the while I was standing there near where the man and dog had waited, the sun was interested only in burning away my thinning hair, melting my scalp and lasering my skull, to see if my dark brain matter could be made to bubble faster. I idly put two fingers on my wrist pulse. I tried to watch my watch. It made no sense, Salvador Dali time. I looked at the lettering on the glass doors of the museum. It may as well have been Cyrillic. I had gone to Russia. There was no law, no order, anywhere.

  Ongoing searches of the vicinity were turning up nothing. At first I’d thought that good news.

  The Museum of Science and Technology was closed for the rest of the day. Everyone was questioned before being dismissed, a procedure that took us into the late afternoon.

  A dog was brought in, to sniff one of Shawn’s unwashed T-shirts brought from home, to sniff about inside the cordon, to tear off into the empty parking lot, to stop and go nuts barking in the parking spot alongside my lonely car’s passenger door — of course, smart dog, Shawn’s sleeping in the car!…which I’d locked. The disobedient dog had to be dragged from the spot where the lone school bus had parked.

  Veronica, careless of her wrinkled baby-blue sweat suit, and Owen, looking dressed from a sack of Rot-10 cast-offs, shuffled back to the car they’d borrowed from our next-door neighbours, holding onto each other like mourners from a grave. They’d hardly spoken a word to me. Veronica had whispered like a prayer: “She might be back home already.”

  The detective finally convinced me to leave. He said, “Go home now, Dr. Thorpe. I’ll call as soon as something turns up. Comfort and give hope to your wife and son — that’s your job for now. Your wife is right: Shawn will turn up.”

  Night was falling, that very worst time of day. Way out, far beyond the two mid-size police cruisers and the unmarked luxury car at the entrance, the little Golf was the only vehicle remaining, isolated in the expanse of dim black lot. Walking off into the growing darkness I was thinking madly. Home? I would drive the streets all night! I would find her. Anything else was impossible! Anything else and I have no home. These things just do not happen to me!

  In the car I stared where Shawn had sat, looked out the passenger window. In the amber light of the parking lot something far off caught my eye. Tiny white tumbling, slow motion, like the simulation of an asteroid snowballing through space.

  I got out and walked through the hot yellowish air, simultaneously dead to the world and alert to the moment, my operating-room consciousness again.

  I picked up the white Styrofoam cup. No ants inside, no dirt, no stain of cola. Nothing but a few drops of clear liquid caught in a crevice at the bottom. Sprite looks like water. I inserted my finger into the crevice and the Styrofoam squeaked like dense snow. Praying for sweetness, I touched my tongue and tasted nothing.

  I pinched the rim of the cup and turned towards the detective, who was already on his way with his hand out, like Veronica confiscating my cell that morning. He had made a note about the cup when I’d told him my story, and later he’d pointedly asked after it. The man might be good at his work after all.

  Chapter 3

  I went to work the next morning because I had to, if in a state of acute dissociation. The solid world looked more solid than ever, but somehow solidly apart from my fading self. I hardly knew which way to turn at familiar cross streets. But I had to go, I had to oversee some procedures that could not easily be rescheduled, and I couldn’t very well delegate to the likes of Art Foster or Otto Fyshe.

  Even at that, I’d been prepared to stay home. But I was compelled to go by Veronica herself. She insisted we follow Detective Beldon’s urging to keep to our routines. Beldon hoped we’d not have to go public till that afternoon, and if I booked off work it could be seen to confirm some fast-flying rumour or other. He’d said there was already media buzz about the events at the Museum of Science and Technology. We’d be surprised, he’d said, how alert the media are to any hint of crime or scandal when a figure of my stature is involved. But we might get lucky and avoid it all. So Veronica, demonstrating a desperate faith in Detective Beldon’s hunches and grasping that hope, had insisted I go to work.

  Beldon had phoned again early that morning. At one point he’d said something that made Veronica smile. I couldn’t imagine what. They seemed to be hitting it off. I always found that odd, when a visitor gravitated to Veronica as our house’s centre of interest. Don’t get me wrong, I know her attractions better than anyone. Veronica is easy to like. I’m not. I just find it odd, the snap judgments people make on first impressions. The great white doctor: He’s stiff, he’s cold, he’s arrogant, etc. etc. I can’t relate to him, I could never warm to a character like that, what can his wife possibly see in him? And those jokes? I just don’t like him, sorry! (This last word with big Oprah-like inflection, that over-the-top way everyone acts all the time on any of Shawn’s Disney Channel shows.) I’ve noticed, though, that people like me well enough when their child’s life is at stake. Dr. Art Foster and his “Placebo Program for Pain” aren’t quite as attractive then.

  Veronica had moaned all night in a half-sleep on the den’s couch (I’d not slept, I’d sat in the dark at the kitchen table, eventually watching the night pale to day like an oozing wound). In the morning she’d fuelled me with black c
offee and, her eyes unfamiliar as a rubbed-raw mask, shoved me out the door, promising to call as soon as she heard from “Kevin,” as she was already calling Detective Beldon. Owen would be staying home till we knew how things stood.

  Things. What things?

  In the hospital’s cementy underground parking lot I checked the spot beside my name where on Friday I’d bumped the wall. I stayed bent over for a while with my hand hovering near the spot, wondering if I’d ever see Shawn again. That was too much to contemplate, as it fed anxiety towards panic attack. I straightened up and hurried off.

  At reception for oncology, I answered Tamara’s bright good-morning with my normal friendly nod, but kept my head bowed over the roster of procedures and consultations. I smelled something more acrid than usual, sniffed — human feces overlaid with disinfectant — and winced at Tamara.

  “Accident,” she said, giving her mouth a wry twist.

  “Accident?”

  “It happens, Doctor.”

  “Shit happens.”

  Tamara regularly played to racial stereotype for my benefit, and now she bugged her eyes like a comic minstrel and whispered, “Daz wad I means, Doctor, sir.”

  Though she was the most proficient receptionist I’ve ever encountered, I nonetheless still found something unreal about Tamara. Maybe it was just the simple fact of her shiny blackness, which I’d encountered regularly only later in my life (Philadelphia, Johns Hopkins). Except for its biggest cities, the Great White North is still pretty white. Tamara and I worked well together, might even consider each other friends. But that day I wasn’t up for her shtick.

  She smiled normally and, as I made to turn away, touched the colourful neckerchief she always wore:

  “We lost Lu-Ping last night.”

  I looked her in the eyes. She probably assumed it was her news that caused whatever was in mine. I’d never lost a child who was routine acute leukemia.

  Without a word I wandered off along the garishly coloured hallway. Under the direction of some lame-brained marketer, we’d turned the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) into something like one of Shawn’s fast-food places. Thick stripes of red and yellow and green and blue on the French-vanilla walls were supposed to make the hallway feel like a playground or something. The floor had matching colour-coded animal paw prints leading to all manner of fun places.

  I had to stop.

  With fingertips alongside my head I propped myself against the pimpled sweaty wall. I couldn’t take it, couldn’t face the day, I was not the pillar I’d always thought I was. All I could think of was Shawn and Veronica and home…and realized only then that I’d not even talked with Owen. I had to go back home. I couldn’t work in this condition, I could be a hazard. Even if I might convincingly continue pretending it was Lu-Ping’s death, I had to get home.

  An echoing clack behind stiffened me and I patted the wall like I’d been doing something sane. I must function normally, for Shawn’s sake. Detective’s orders, wife’s wishes. But again I recognized in myself the symptoms of rising anxiety. Or worse, panic attack.

  I’m dead against doctors self-medicating, but I wanted a mild tranquilizer badly. Diazepam. And I knew where to get a handy vial of Valium.

  I stood in our doctors’ secret dispensary (an unused janitor’s closet) clutching the smoky plastic container in my fist. I brought the other palm to my clammy forehead and tried unmedicated one final time to face up to the possible ruination of my life. Our life as a family. The world as I’d known it.

  I went over my mistakes for the hundredth time already. How was it the man with the dog had a daughter exactly the same age as Shawn? That story about his daughter’s taking the dog into the bathtub, I’d known there was something perverse in that! And what had been my big hurry anyway? What was I hurrying towards on my one day off? Why hadn’t I gone back with Shawn and waited as she watered the dog? It had happened so easily, so normally. At the chick incubator, why hadn’t I stood back and watched with the other parents instead of pushing right up with the kids to view the hatching?

  The simple truth is there was nothing I would have done differently. There was simply no reason why this should have happened to me.

  Yet my daughter, in my care, was missing.

  I took a small blue tab. Another. Swallowing was nothing, but I knew that coffee would speed their effectiveness.

  As I entered the clattering cafeteria I was waylaid by Dr. Otto Fyshe, as though he’d been waiting for me in the corner directly opposite the doorway. Otto was stout as a butcher, balding badly, with bristly tufts growing from his ears. He was a good ten years older than I and should have retired years ago. He was always in a lab coat with a raft of pens clipped to a cheap plastic pocket holder advertising some pharmaceutical company or other. Parents and kids loved Otto as though he were a grandfatherly hobbit, yet he was an incompetent pediatrician. Everybody loved Otto, so his sitting alone tipped me further that something was up.

  He waved me over. As I approached, he dropped his head and pinched his chin in thumb and fingers, either puzzling over a chart or wanting to appear thoughtful. I didn’t sit.

  He looked up and handed me the chart, saying, “What do you make of this, Lorne?”

  Nine-year-old boy, no history of health problems, a routine physical, everything within normal range.

  I made a dismissive mouth: “Nothing. What’s the complaint?”

  He retrieved the chart and slapped it with the back of his right hand. “No complaint, that’s the problem. I was on emergency duty early this morning. The boy was brought in by the police for examination. And he’s perfectly fine, not a scratch, not even a frown. Or traumatized only now from having some old doctor look close up at his asshole.” Otto shook with phoney laughter.

  “Yes?”

  “The thing is, this kid wouldn’t answer questions for anyone about what happened, even for his parents when they arrived in a panic. He went missing from the Silver City movie house last night, where he’d gone with his dad. There’s a huge chunk of time missing.”

  I felt suddenly exposed in the steely bright cafeteria with its wall of windows and surgery lighting, that open-back hospital-gown feeling I always hear complaints about. Now I wanted to sit, but wouldn’t.

  “Where was he found?” I was keeping calm and thought gratefully that the unaided diazepam must already be tamping my receptors.

  “That’s what made me think of you just now, Lorne. He was picked up early this morning walking around those soccer fields near your neck of the woods.”

  “The Sharks Tank? Troutstream?”

  “That’s it.”

  My scalp prickled.

  “Let me take a look at him, Otto. Second opinion.”

  “You can’t. I discharged him. There was no need for further observation. But you ask this kid a question and he calls you a dumb-dumb and tells you to ask again. Every question, every time. I could have given him the back of my hand! And Mom and Dad just stand there grinning! What’s with parents these days?”

  The boy’s routine sounded familiar. “I think that’s from a kids’ TV show, Otto, nothing disrespectful, just a game. My, uh, daughter watches it, too, it’s called Wy Knots. The boy was probably overwrought, even in shock.”

  “No, he wasn’t.” Otto turned back to the chart, spoke testily: “Somebody sure did something. Children don’t just go missing all night. I know kids, three of my own, seven grandkids. That boy is definitely hiding something. And it looks to me like no one gives a red rat’s arsehole.”

  “Let me know if I can do anything.”

  I turned away. He’d meant me not caring. Time for a retirement party, my aged colleague. I must tell Detective Beldon about this. I had a lead. First things first though. I grabbed a coffee on the way out.

  Human waste and disinfectant, the eternal odour war of hospitals, and my senses were
chemically heightened already. Disinfectant may have lost the recent battle at reception but it had triumphed near the seventh-floor room where Lu-Ping had died on me. Absence now radiated from the door opening and drew me in. I needed to hide for a spell.

  I’d last seen Lu-Ping Friday evening when I thought to check up on her before heading home, a thing I seldom do. Her room was one of our family rooms, furnished more like home than hospital. That area of the hallway was also dimly lit in an un-hospital manner. Before I knew I’d done so, I was intruding on an actual family’s privacy. The moment I realized it, I heard the tinkling of tiny bells, which reminded me of something…TV…the show Shawn watched religiously, yes, Wy Knots.

  The father and mother, who appeared exactly the same short height, were standing by the darkening windows. It was that very worst time of day, just before the lights come up everywhere. The mother noticed me first and waved me forward before I could retreat. Both parents were immigrants from Hong Kong and spoke English brokenly. Lu-Ping, twelve, had been wholly educated here.

  She was propped on her cranked bed and smiling a frozen Cheshire-cat smile. She too waved me over, weakly, I thought.

  “Doctor Thorpe,” she called. “Come here, come here.” She was childishly urgent and I knew she was acting. “Dad and Mom just finished the healing prayer I told you about!” When she exhaled there was an undertow of moan, though neither parent appeared to notice.

  At the window ledge her father was packing the small bells into an ornately decorated wooden case like a very old-school pencil case, one of those whose lid slid into place like some coffin’s. He looked ridiculous in a golden track suit and black high-top running shoes. He’d hardly ever spoken to me, though his daughter had been my patient for months. I don’t think it was only the language thing.

  I went and stood by the side of Lu-Ping’s bed. She took my hand tightly in her own, which was unusual, though when alone we did sometimes hold hands and talk easily. I’d never lost a routine acute, but she’d been refusing to respond. I don’t mean to imply that she had any choice in it. That’s Art Foster’s game, call it the spiritual, as he’d lately been telling me: “Lorne, you just don’t pay any attention to these sick kids’ spiritual needs.”