by Charles Bock
The driveway was the length and width of a football field, and seemed alive, its own complex organism, a teeming digestive tract. One long line of cars was pulling up, another waiting to leave, with valets running to and fro, sweating through their color-coordinated shirts and shorts. Just to be safe, Kenny started away from them all, away from any possible suspicions, acting nonchalant, his breath coming easier now, even as he looked back and over his shoulder. . . .
Newell hadn't been that far behind him, he was sure, and was proven correct, for here was the boy now, popping from around the side of a man who wore his golf visor backward and upside down. Newell was huffing and puffing; when he saw Kenny, his face went exaggerated.
“Dude. We were fine until you spazzed.”
Heat burned Kenny's cheeks. He didn't know if Newell was being serious, ironic, or sarcastic. “Me? You were the one who took off.”
“Damn right. If I'da been like you and just sat there, we'd be caught right now.” Newell snorted a laugh through his nose. He elbowed Kenny once more, and nodded toward the upside-down visor guy, who was passing them now, his finger knuckle deep inside his schnozz. “Pick a winner, buddy.”
“Newell.”
“He don't care. He's digging for gold.”
“Give it a break.”
“What, you telling me that wouldn't be a nice little sketch. Oh—that would be classic. Maybe we can get him to pose. You have your pencil on you, right?”
Newell's next elbow landed deep in the soft part of Kenny's side and pain exploded in a bolt down through his legs and into his knees. He winced and found himself cursing; and more than that, he found himself stunned, betrayed, needing distance. Separating from the boy, he took off. Moving past the taxi stand and its thick bunch of yellow cars, Newell's squawks from behind—Hey, come on, just joking, geez—propelled him, and Kenny stared at the taxis with a feverish intensity, willfully concentrating on the fact that most of their hoods were popped, that the cabbies kept the hoods loose not only while the cars idled, but also when they pulled away from the curb.
It took a second for Kenny to figure out the air was supposed to calm the overheated motors, and for another few seconds he thought about trying the cab hood trick on his Plymouth, but decided that his hood would probably smack up into the windshield. With Kenny's luck, he'd be on the freeway and cause one of those giant pileups that back up traffic and get covered by the eye-in-the-sky news copters. It occurred to him he had never actually put his car in valet parking. He'd never been in a helicopter. Not even a plane.
“Wait up,” Newell said. “Hey, what's wrong with you?”
Out from underneath the canopy of steel and cement and lights, Kenny headed onto a walkway the width of a city street, and moved alongside a row of shallow pools. Life-size marble elephants were spurting tight streams of water through their trunks and into the air. Chiseled stone acrobats were balanced precariously over wishing pools. Kenny merged amid the procession of bodies, tourists moseying at different speeds: a bacon-tan lady with dark roots jabbering agreeably with a brunette who legally should not have been allowed out in public in a sports bra and biking shorts; a retiree with a panama hat checking the time on his chunky gold watch; anorexic women toting around important-lookings hopping bags, dull large men in paraphernalia that reflected a passion for auto racing; blossoming mall flirts in lovely yellow sundresses and snazzy black numbers. Different voices were talking on cellular phones, narrating each step to loved ones back home, reporting what they saw in the casino they'd just emerged from, which casino they were heading to next.
Kenny felt himself disappearing in their mass, being carried along by their collective pace. He watched a gang of Asian teenagers, all of them trapped inside shiny basketball jerseys, moving along the sidewalk as a collective group, slow and slouched, their hands in the pockets of their oversize shorts. Two of them were busy, pinching at their friends’ ears, then pretending to have done nothing.
Kenny's sneaker landed on someone's toe. He was shoved in return, told Watch it, faggot.
From not that far behind, a voice was familiar, reaching, almost angry:
“Heads up. . . . Outta my way. . . . I SAID GANGWAY.”
3.9
Lorraine's hostess refilled her glass, and told her to finish her margarita. “Drinking alone makes me self-conscious.”
Gail Deevers laughed. Her eyes darted. She was a generation or so older than Lorraine, of that age where her body, though well tanned and fit, had gone noticeably soft. Her perfect dye job was pulled back in a tight bun; her pin of red, white, and blue gleamed from its position over the heart of her polo shirt.
They sat on the patio in her backyard. In the distance behind them, motorized carts puttered across long, manicured greens.
Gail took a sip and started telling Lorraine about the last letter from Jimmy.
As if embarrassed by her thoughts, she leaned in and admitted that sometimes she wondered if it really was a war for oil. She conceded that she'd never wanted Jimmy to go into the reserves. He didn't need the money for college. He did it to satisfy family honor and legacy, whatever that was worth. The fourth generation of Deevers men to serve in the armed forces.
At this, Gail's laugh might have been rooted in pride, but it just as easily could have been contempt.
The mechanical squid brought ripples and bubbles from the pool's depths.
Gail was so pleased Lorraine had agreed to come over. It was good to talk to someone who understood.
This time it was Lorraine who smiled tightly.
They were casual acquaintances, people who were polite to each other whenever their loose web of common associates tightened, joining together for an afternoon of tennis. Lorraine's impression of Gail had always been as something of a battleship, and she remained unsure why she'd agreed to come here for lunch. But by the time their salads were ready, she understood that Gail's intentions were noble. Woman to woman, mother to mother, she sensed that Gail was truly open to what Lorraine was going through, eager to listen to anything she might have to say.
But how could Lorraine possibly respond?
Gail's son was not all that much older than Newell, and this young man, Jimmy Deevers, he'd been sent to a desert on the other side of the world. Jimmy was in the muck and hell of that godforsaken quagmire, risking his life to establish democracy, he was fighting terrorism and helping oppressed people and in all ways promoting truth, justice, and the American way, and this was entirely different from Lorraine's child, who had taken flight from these very things. So maybe it would have felt good for Lorraine to unburden herself. People you barely knew were supposed to be great for spilling your guts, cathartic and healing and no risk and all that. Maybe so. But there was no way Lorraine could share her burden with Gail Deevers. No way she could finish her drink. Rather, without making any sort of fuss or hurting Gail's feelings, she extracted herself from the situation.
Similarly, other well-meaning friends checked in on how Lorraine was doing, showed themselves to be concerned, more than ready to meet her in a restaurant if she needed to vent. They overflowed with empathetic looks and commiserative words, and Lorraine didn't hurry in getting back to them, either. She knew how they really felt, could sense their lingering discomfort, the deeper doubts that lay behind kind pretenses. In her better moments Lorraine could see her friends were trying, they wanted to help, were as sympathetic as they were capable of being. But they were human, after all. And Newell's was not the much-publicized case of a previous year, in which two preteen sisters had been strolling together, on their way back home from an afternoon of babysitting, and had never been seen again. Newell's was not the case, now commonly known throughout the valley, of a previous decade, wherein an overweight man with a dark black beard had taken a second-grader from a religious school during lunch recess.
The disappearance of a child strikes at the core of any community; innocence shattered will and must always be met with outrage and horror. But after almost
five months, the police had officially categorized Newell's case as one of voluntary flight. This was subject to change, obviously. Yet a logical mind could not help but think there must have been reasons. Reasons for the classification. Reasons why he left. Unhappy adolescents have untold ways of expressing unhappiness without leaving home, after all. Millions of them do it every day. There had to be something more here. And no matter how well meaning her friends may have been, Lorraine knew precisely where their fingers were pointed.
The outgoing message remained the same: Hi. You have reached the Ewing home. We're not home right now but please leave a message and we'll get right back to you. Newell, honey, if this is you, we want you to come home. PLEASE leave a number where we can contact you. Please call back as soon as you can. PLEASE come home. We love you.
She thought the whole thing would get easier and was afraid it would get easier and, no matter how much time passed, no matter how much information she gathered, it never got easier. She read advisory notices about how common it was for a friend or relative to sympathize with a boy on the lam; but Lorraine's network of contacts had been set up for so long that she no longer gained anything by checking in. The parents of her son's friends and classmates had their root canals, their bake sales, their family therapy sessions. Contacting them meant little more than coming face-to-face with the fact that her need to find her son had nothing to do with anyone else's life, a lesson that hurt no matter how many times she learned it.
If people outside the office of the Nevada Child Search could not understand what she was going through, if with each passing day, a tourniquet tightened, cutting off just a little more of the connection between Lorraine's ordeal and the world at large, then, inside that crappy storefront office, relief came in the simplest ways: wetting the backs of envelopes with a sponge, hanging out in the break room, picking the brains of other volunteers and listening in on support groups, just parking herself at an uneven table and poring through the various three-ring binders. Here, only here, did Lorraine begin to grasp the true scope of what she was up against.
The government estimated five hundred thousand to 1.5 million adolescents left or were forced out of their homes each year. At its highest end, this translated to half of 1 percent of the population, which wasn't significant enough to make teen runaways a problem worth addressing. At least, this was what other volunteers at the Nevada Child Search believed. They had long ago noticed that there were no concrete numbers, just the same estimates, rolled over, year after year. The lives of missing and runaway children didn't matter enough to the federal and local governments for it to be worth the effort to find out the difference in figures from one year to the next. This outraged Lorraine, and broke her heart.
She discovered lots of explanations, but few answers. Police reports on runaways often were incomplete or out of date. Statistics from major urban areas were often projected onto other cities. Lorraine found out that rural areas routinely got undercounted. Untold gay and lesbian teens left home and never were reported. What about the gray, small but consistent number of teenagers whose families were displaced and living in shelters, and who had struck out on their own in an effort to make a better life; did you include them? How about the inner-city and minority teenagers who never got a shred of attention for anything besides being incarcerated? How about the college students and college-aged adolescents who became enamored with Kerouac and Burroughs, and were aided by fashion and cynicism and run-of-the-mill discontent, and fell in love with the sky and wind—how many of them were grouped into this statistic? What about stoners living out of their cars, parked by some beach? What about the subculture of twentysomethings who dropped entirely from the grid of adult society and wandered the nation as what sociologists referred to as “urban nomads”?
Despite a national database and improved information-gathering networks, Lorraine learned that no small part of the problem remained the same: the impossible nature of the problem itself. The often quoted figure was that one out of every seven teenagers left his or her place of residence before the age of eighteen. But studies also showed that between 90 and 95 percent of these runaways were on temporary flights. Treks long and/or far enough to feel as if some point had been proven. They crossed some sort of private landmark: a movie theater a few miles from home, or a hangout park in a nearby city; they spent a few nights at the homes of friends with “cool” parents, drifted from the couch of one friend to another. Within a week or three, the road's mystique wore off, there were no more couches, no new crash pads. The romance ended and the reality of being out and alone in the world proved larger than whatever grudges were being nursed. Abouts got faced. Tails turned between legs. Whatever troubles that person would henceforth encounter, a life on the streets would not be one of them.
Which would have been encouraging, were it not for the stories.
This one was independently reported from five different cities. Presented as an as-told-to happening in each city, it involved a single father who worked as an airline pilot and lived with his daughter, who in most versions was sixteen. The pilot was formerly in the air force, a disciplinarian. Though he tried not to book any overnight flights (lest he be away from his daughter), he also trusted his daughter enough to know that if he had to go, she would behave herself. He never failed to call at precisely nine o'clock from the road, though these calls were made more out of love than distrust. The pilot was saving up so his daughter could spend that summer studying in Europe and this meant working lots of extra flights in order to accumulate the employee flight vouchers that would take care of the plane trip (he hoped overtime hours would pay for her hostels, Eurail, trips to the Eiffel Tower and Versailles). His daughter was an honors student, and involved in all sorts of extracurricular activities at school; she went to church and worked at soup kitchens and was a friend to geeks and jocks alike, in all ways the daughter was considered the best of eggs, and the father wanted only a golden life for her. But the pilot's daughter had a best friend, a girl she'd known from childhood. And this best friend was also sixteen, and she too lived in a single-parent household. There were issues in the best friend's home—violence and depression and the like. Well, the story got moving when some sort of terrible event happened between the best friend and her single parent, and in the best friend's mind this event cemented her need to cross the nation and visit the boy from summer camp whom she'd fallen in love with. The pilot's daughter was outraged by the incident and felt deeply for her best friend, and felt the idea of going across the country to visit the boy you loved was about the most romantic thing of all time. So the pilot's daughter went into her father's bedroom and took the flight voucher tickets from his bureau. She called the airline's reservation hotline and booked herself on a cross-country flight for that very night. Then she gave her driver's license to her best friend and helped dress her best friend in the clothes she'd worn for the license picture, and just for good measure she did her friend's hair and makeup in such a way that allowed the best friend to pass for her, the pilot's daughter. Everything went off without a hitch: the best friend made it past security, used the employee flight vouchers, no problem. Only, as it happened, a few hours later the pilot returned from a two-day trip of his own. When he went to add more vouchers to his growing collection, he made a fateful discovery. He summoned his daughter and she sat adjacent to him at their kitchen table. The pilot's daughter gave her father the director's-cut version of her poor abused friend and her horrible situation and the supreme healing power of true love. The pilot's daughter confessed everything and said that she knew stealing was wrong and knew her dad would be pissed, but she had decided it was okay to use the vouchers because her father always said you had to do the right thing not the easy thing. The pilot's daughter admitted her guilt yet again but said she hoped her dad would be proud of her, and she looked at him with genuine regret, but also with hopefulness, batting her long, beautiful lashes in a manner that she knew to be pleasing, and that she hoped would furt
her help her cause by maybe breaking the ice. Her dad picked up the phone. He called in to work. He identified himself and said there was a problem, a runaway minor was posing as his daughter and illegally using his voucher tickets. His daughter pulled at his arm and tried to take the phone from him but the pilot was much larger and held her off. He said this runaway minor was on flight such and such heading across the nation to point X. Federal marshals were waiting when the passengers deplaned. The marshals put the sixteen-year-old best friend in cuffs. Three weeks later the pilot's daughter took off. She ended up whoring for smack. Her dad never heard from her again and killed himself in some gruesome gesture of sorrow that, in two versions of the tale, included a plea for forgiveness, spelled out in his blood on the tile of the bathroom floor.
As urban legends went, it wasn't particularly illuminating, out of the ordinary, harrowing, or even gory. When you got down to it, the story wasn't even about running away. But it cast a different pallor on traits that any parent recognized as defining the teen years—self-absorption, feelings of being unjustly persecuted when you did not get what you wanted, the twisted logic, the self-serving conclusions, the love of melodrama. Lorraine saw these traits in other stories, too, echoing and reappearing often enough to vaguely affect what sense she had of not only her child's mind-set, but also the mind-set of the reality in which he had placed himself.
And nobody could even say how many kids were out there.
So how were they going to find Newell?
3.10