Missing Chldren

by Gerald Lynch

  “Nothing! I told you, nothing like you mean! No bad stuff! You are not ruining this for me!”

  She turned and ran. She’d outgrown those shorts too. But ruining what? I jogged after, through the thick stink of skunk, powerfully concentrated, more suffocating than I’d ever experienced. I called, “Shawn, please, I just want to know what’s happening.”

  Her reply came faintly on my echo as she rounded out of sight: “Don’t be dumb-dumb …”

  Approaching home, I saw her dash from our house and head to the Kilborns’. Inside there was no woofer thumping from above and no sign of Veronica. I fetched my bottle of Macallan single malt. I sat on the couch in the family room, poured myself a good two fingers and drank it straight off. It was instant ballast of hotter coals to a hot belly. I poured another and sat back. I wished Kevin were there. Men work their best over such…facilitating lubricant. I could make up for the fool I’d made of myself in the park.

  The woofer started up. I heaved to my feet and bounded upstairs, opened Owen’s door and shook a fist at him. His eyes widened and he twisted to turn down the volume.

  From my room I phoned next door and, prepared for a nasty Jack, was taken aback when Veronica answered like she lived there.

  “Order a pizza,” she said. “You and Owen can manage that without me, can’t you? Jack’s still a mess. I’m needed here. Shawn’s helping calm a pretty wild Jake.”

  “You’re needed over here, dear.”

  “I have to go.”

  “Come home. Uh, I think Shawn’s hiding something serious from us. We need to talk.”

  There was a shorter pause. “I can’t handle that right now. Jake’s all wound up about something and ready to have a seizure and Jack’s verging on a total breakdown himself. I don’t suppose you’d come over here and have a look at Jake?”

  “Did you not hear what I said? You think Jack and his retarded son are more important than our family!”

  She hung up.

  Back downstairs, I phoned the private number Kevin had given me. “Any developments?”

  “No, but then I only just saw you.”

  He sounded different. “Are you having a celebratory drink now too, Kevin?” I snickered.

  I heard him smack his lips. “A hitherto hidden vice.”

  I carried the landline phone to the couch and picked up my glass: “You should come back here, I’ve been drinking alone too.”

  Yet another long pause.

  He said, “No thanks, Lorne. Booze is a really bad vice of mine. I need to get some sleep, just a nap, then I’ll be fine. Then I won’t sleep again till I’ve solved this. You, too, big guy. Cap the bottle, get some sleep. We still need to apprehend the prick who did this, which is why you’re doing something for me first thing in the morning, right?… And I need you clear-headed.”

  “Hey, I never drink, or very rarely, because I never know when I’ll be called in on an emergency. It’s this business with the prick has sent me to the bottle. But c’mon, we’ve both earned an exceptional drink. Take a cab.” I hurried with what I hoped was an enticement: “By the way, I’ve just been talking to Shawn like you said I should and I think she’s up to something with some of her friends.”

  I heard dry noises from his end. “Keep talking with her, Lorne. And here’s why — I didn’t want to say, but I believe this is still headed somewhere. Shawn and the other kids are hiding something from us, something they’ve surely been deceived about.”

  I felt the alcohol air go out of me. “Yes?”

  “That’s all. I have no proof, just a hunch that it all — the abductions and returns — points to something bigger that hasn’t happened yet.”

  I was feeling bereft. “But it’s only a hunch?”

  “Logically, none of what’s happened makes sense on its own, or not yet. But taken together, it has the feel of preparing for something else. Even Foster’s arrest may be an attempt to distract attention from the perpetrator, or perps, to you. Your colleague, your Caddy, your daughter, Troutstream kids gone missing? And somebody up there, or down there, must really like our perp, because the arrest of the Market Slasher was a godsend…well, okay, not that. But what a lovely coincidence to thicken the shitty stew, eh? By the way, the Slasher is now Dr. Foster’s cellmate, if not literally. It’s a circus over at the regional detention centre.”

  “I don’t like the sound of any of that. I mean, some distraction! You’ve been over to see Art? But come for a drink, Kevin, please. We need to talk this through.”

  The breath went out of him. “I have a drinking problem, Lorne. Binge drinker, which is another excuse they’ve used to keep me from Homicide. I now recognize the signs, though. One more drink and I’d be off to the races for days and this case could go to the devil for all I’d care. I’ve had just enough to test my resolve. You have one more on me, okay? You’ve earned it, but one more’s the limit. Where’s Veronica? Kids home?”

  My pride kicked in. “Keep me informed, please, Detective?”

  “Don’t go off in a huff, Lorne. Remember, you’re to visit Art Foster first thing tomorrow. And I want you sharp, as in not hung over. We need Foster’s connection to Bob Browne. I’ll meet you at the detention centre.”

  I drank half a tumbler of Scotch straight and lay back. Men drink and talk their best. Drink more and more, and forget what they talked about. Men…

  I’m twelve years old. It’s a steamy spring day and getting hotter by the minute. I’m working with my father at his father’s house, spreading topsoil for Granddad’s huge vegetable garden. Dad chuckles to himself as he piles the dirt higher and higher in the wheelbarrow each trip, so that gripping the bulky wooden arms and balancing the load is an incremental test. I’ll die before I tip it. Granddad comes out onto the back porch and, shading his eyes with his hand, remarks what a worker I am. And my father snaps, Go back inside. Granddad looks around and says to the vague sky, Inside where? He’s confused again since Granny died. Soon he will die too. I know when and why, I could tell him, from loneliness. As she dresses the broken blisters on my palms my mother scolds me for my bull-headed foolishness. I don’t care. Then she just holds me for the longest time, in a place of regret we can do nothing about but share its suffocating futile misery. Since, only Veronica has held me so breathlessly close, say when I’d lost a child I’d let myself love. With just a tch-tch my father could leave me feeling afraid of everything, not knowing who I am anymore. Hollowed out. The wheelbarrow is empty, then overflowing with treats — Golden Crunchie bars, big bags of barbecue Fritos — I can feel it tipping, I can’t hold it, my palms are tearing off —

  I snapped to, poured a glass and drank my fill. My special bottle two-thirds empty. My Caddy.

  I was going upstairs to talk to Owen when the woofer began thumping like a giant trying to pound our home to smithereens and the rapper commenced his Uzi rounds of brag and complaint. I turned back to the bottle, suddenly a chilled and shaking mess. The doctor in me knew it was still part of the delayed PTS response. My head was being pulped.

  I found the smoky Valium vial where I’d hidden it and took one. Only one more, that would be it, no more. Careful, people died in their sleep. I took another. I collapsed on the small family-room couch.

  I am walking along a raised road in the middle of nowhere, then running head-down and the road is sunken and endless, its diesel-smelling tarmac softening in the relentless sun. I’m parched and the flat gravel road just keeps coming at me, school buses pass me again and again or the same bus never completely passes. On its back is the sign DIESEL. At the side of the sunken sandy road a man dressed like a desert dweller in Jesus garb crouches on his haunches. I realize I’ve been passing him for days and there is no road, only desert. I’ve been running in Jake-like circles on a black cinder track. It is Jesus. He holds out a glass of iced tea as I stumble by again and again, but I’ve not earned it yet, not worked
hard enough, and the glass is dirty, take it away. The glass is cracked badly too, the glass is dangerously cracked and coming apart and diesel is running out, large shards pierce Jesus’s hand and the baby he holds is crying now and there’s a big bang of light —

  I awoke, or came to, raving in darkness, certain that there were strangely familiar people in the room with me. “Veronica? Shawn? Owen? …”

  It took minutes to settle down and recognize where I was and that I was alone. I found the fridge and drank iced tea straight from the jug, washing down two Advil and a prophylactic Gravol. I climbed to bed, expecting to find comforting Veronica there. But she’d not come home yet. I checked. Neither had Shawn. Owen was snoring softly, his earphones in place. It was one in the morning, Wednesday morning.

  Chapter 14

  I’d not been aware of Veronica’s coming to bed. I awakened facing her, our knees drawn up and touching. My right hand and her left, whose fingers had entangled in sleep, were resting on her hip. Our noses were nearly touching. Her eyes were closed.

  So far, so good.

  I did a systems check and was pleasantly surprised to realize I’d slept like a baby and didn’t feel hungover at all. Morning in a master bedroom full of magic-sword sunlight, another indulgent day off work. The kids were still off school, with Owen asleep, as he would be till made to get up around noon. I could hear Shawn already at the TV downstairs, the sweetest sound in all the world. I felt a powerful presence in that master bedroom.

  I considered: What a full and fortunate life have I made here. Why on earth am I always chasing after more happiness? Is this life of sleeping, dreaming and waking in the lap of family love not enough? How can I justify wanting more? The healthy, the comfortable, the well off, we so seldom acknowledge how lucky we are. And we should always be minding our good fortune, daily, like a prayer to that heathen god, Fortuna. We shouldn’t be so stingy with our gratitude as to need the contrast of catastrophe to know how blessed we are in our life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. On this part of the globe anyway, this narrowest wedge of the pie where all the choice fruit is packed. I’d just dodged the bullet of family tragedy. The media storm was being weathered well, with the Market Slasher its new eye. The luckiest man alive am I!

  Veronica frowned and whispered like a hiss, “Glasses.” Her eyes popped open.

  We were still nose-to-nose. I squeezed her hand and said, “It’s okay, dear, you were having a nightmare. Don’t go near the Kilborns today.”

  She made a face but talked normally (her breath was foul): “It felt like it went on all night, the dream, or the nightmare. I was trapped in it. Just the one scene, a pair of plastic sunglasses sitting on a glass table in an empty room. It sounds like nothing, but it was unnerving, like all the glass was about to shatter or something. I couldn’t look away or change the scene and I was in a panic that somebody had lost his glasses. Then I recognized them — Jake’s prescription sunglasses. Remember them?”

  I did. Jake had sported them proudly and forgotten them everywhere for about two weeks, and every day at our house, then never worn them again. It turned out his vision was fine, just more of Trixie’s Munchausen’s madness.

  I said, “I wonder why you dreamt about that retard’s so-called prescription sunglasses?”

  I made it difficult for her to untangle her fingers, giving her hand one last squeeze and hurrying, “Things are back to normal now, dear. Or will be soon as Art Foster helps us out and Bob Browne’s caught or somebody.”

  She snaked the freed hand round the back of my head and held me there eyeball-to-eyeball: “I’m leaving you.” She let go.

  I was starving. “Are you making a big breakfast? I saw some leftover potatoes in the fridge you could fry. Hmm, home fries.” My Homer Simpson. “What time did you and Shawn come home last night anyway?”

  She hoisted out of bed and with her back to me said, “I want a divorce.”

  “What new horse? Are you sleepwalking or something?”

  “Stop joking for once in your fucking life! A divorce. I’m leaving you. This fucking marriage, this fucking house!” She was spitting mad. “I’ve had it! None of it — none of this — means anything anymore!”

  I clued in. She was having a massive delayed-stress reaction, rampant PTSD. I could handle this.

  “You’re upset, Veronica. So am I. What with Shawn and hearing about Foster and the Market Slasher and teenage hookers, and what with asshole Jack making all these demands on you. But we’re gonna be all right now. Lie back down and I’ll make the big breakfast!”

  She still looked pretty good in her underwear, a bit fleshy, but awfully sexy still in that strangely familiar way. She wasn’t lying back down, though.

  “What is it, honey?… Okay, I shouldn’t say retard, I know, I apologize.”

  She spoke as she pulled on her baby-blue sweats: “Honey, my ass. You lied to me about lending your car to Art Foster. Now the police have the Cadillac and we have only my little Golf. What if we’d been planning to go somewhere all together today and had to take Jake with us?”

  Uh-oh, hysteria. “Veronica, you are not making sense. Today would have been a regular work and school day. Besides, we haven’t done anything like that in a long time. Try to hear yourself, what you’re saying.”

  She flashed round on me: “That’s right, Jack and Trixie and Jake did more together as a family than we ever do! And I don’t want to listen to myself! You listen to me. Or try listening to yourself for once!”

  “This old argument again? I’ve explained about work. It’s still crazy there, like there’s suddenly an epidemic of lymphocytic leukemias. And now all this shit with Foster, and me taking time off, I’ll have to take a few catch-up shifts for a little while. That’s all. Then we’ll be back to normal, promise. Come on, be reasonable, dear.”

  She was near giddy suddenly. “Really, do listen to yourself, you’re already making future excuses!”

  “Be reasonable, Veronica. That’s all I ever ask.”

  She snatched the matching sweatsuit top off the dresser. “Reasonable? But I am not a reasonable woman. I’m not very smart, either, as you keep reminding me and the children.”

  “What? But I haven’t done that for a long time.”

  “Always, every day, every time I open my mouth. You have zero respect for me and you don’t even try to hide it any more, not from the kids, not from me. Even Jack has noticed it.”

  “Good neighbour Jack? Oh, please. Jack and Trixie? Look at them, always publicly gushing with respect for each other and big displays of affection, and for that obnoxious re — son of theirs. Look where they are today. She’s respectfully fucked off with her lawyer and respectful Jack doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going!”

  She looked at me then, unemotionally at last. “Listen to yourself, Lorne. You make me sick, sick of us, sick of all…all this.”

  “Me? I make you sick? I do not get you this morning, dear.”

  “And don’t dear me. You have no idea what the Kilborns have been through with Jake, every day, for years and years and years, every school, every teacher, every thing kids do that Jake wanted to do but couldn’t. Sometimes I think you’re incapable of empathy. You’re like one of those functioning psychopaths. How can you say that about Jack?” She’d grown sad and quiet, as if she might cry.

  “Jack again? What’d I say about Jack? I’m talking about Trixie and the monster she’s made of poor, uh, mentally challenged Jake. Who gives a fuck about Jack?”

  She paused, rethought something. “Okay then, why did you loan your car to Art Foster?”

  “What is this, non-sequitur day? I mean —”

  “I know what a non sequitur is. You wouldn’t lend Foster your stethoscope to check your own heart. Why suddenly your precious Cadillac?”

  I had to think. “Like I said, it was the only way he’d put me in touch with Bob Browne,
so the Troutstream Community Association could get the playground equipment removed and replaced. So?”

  “Oh,” she laughed falsely. “You suddenly care so much about the TCA and its troubles, whose members you’re always making fun of? What was the sudden fascination with Bob Browne that you were willing to risk your darling Caddy? You’ve never even let me drive it! And I’ve asked!” Worked up again, she snatched her white sweat socks and, putting one on, hopped ungracefully towards the door.

  “You’re blowing this all out of proportion, Veronica.”

  Again she looked for a moment like she might cry — good — but changed her mind again. Bad. That put the point of an icicle on my heart. Normally she’d cry at the drop of a sparrow.

  “Yes, I am. I have no sense of proportion to go with my little intellect. So let me stupidly answer my own question. You were attracted to Bob Browne. You —”

  “Oh, please. Not some two-bit psychologizing of my paradoxical latently gay homophobia.”

  She smiled small. “Stupid me.”

  “Well, you are if you’re suggesting that I secretly lust after Bob Browne’s dwarf bum! You’ve never even met him!”

  She smirked, not at all humorously. “That’s right, but I’ve heard, a lot… I’m not saying you’re in love with that freak of arrested development, but you were strongly attracted to him all right and you couldn’t have cared less about the danger signals.”

  “Bob is not like that.”

  She just stared at me for a while.

  “Lorne, how many times have you been attracted to oddball men I couldn’t stand? Big-talking phonies you think possess some wisdom you’ve been deprived of? It’s your biggest blind spot. It’s what your brute of a father did to you. Oh, but that would be more two-bit psychology, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is.” I may have squirmed a bit down into the bedclothes. Or two bits’ worth.

  “Sit still for it. And these daddy-dearests always disappoint you…almost like it’s part of a bargain you’ve made with yourself. Even Detective Beldon, your new best buddy, right? Except that I like him too. Of course, that dooms him in your eyes. But it always ends badly anyway, like this has ended, in the biggest disaster of all, if it is over, which I doubt, given Art Foster’s arrest. You never listen to me, you never will. Because you’ve never had any respect for me and you never will. If you’d paid attention when I told you to watch Shawn closely — which meant paying attention to her — none of this would have happened. I’m leaving you. That’s final.”