by Alon Preiss
Timmy grew into a little boy, almost three years old, with awkward little skinny arms and legs, with his little ears and his impossible little face, smiling up into the sun, a smile with crooked little teeth. They wanted a little pet, small enough for Timmy. They had a big dog that ran in the fields around the Maurow home and trampled the little boy under his paws, and Blake and Harriet each owned a horse that they rode in the summer.
They drove to the pet store in town, and Timmy played with the animals — kittens, and poodles, and even gerbils. He demanded more choices, and they drove another thirty miles, to another little store. And then another. For no very good reason, perhaps just because he was tired, Timmy fell in love with an anxious little guinea pig in a cage in the back. It was a long-haired Abyssinian, with a shiny reddish brown coat, a little tuft of white on the nose. The store owner let him out of his cage, and Timmy chased him around the store. The animal didn’t seem to like the attention, and he wound up trembling in the corner, but he loved it when Timmy rubbed his nose, right on that tuft. It made him purr. Blake hadn’t known that guinea pigs purr just like cats.
In the car riding home, Timmy sat in the back seat, the guinea pig in his lap, purring.
“Does he have a name?” Harriet called back to him.
Timmy looked up, puzzled.
Blake watched his son in the rear view mirror. “He’s your kid. You can name him.”
The boy smiled and looked down at the animal, running his fingers over the fur.
“What do you think?” his mother asked.
“Rabbit,” he laughed.
“Rabbit,” Blake said, and he laughed too. “Why would you name a guinea pig that?”
Timmy smiled. “He’ll be the only guinea pig named ‘Rabbit,’ ” he explained, and in that moment, rumbling and bouncing through the mountains, it seemed to be the wisest choice that one could possibly have made.
“He is unique,” Blake told his son. “You know what that means? The only one. The only one like him in the whole wide world.” Driving along, watching the road, Blake was talking like a little kid, and it felt good.
Blake’s first book was called Timmy and Rabbit Go to the Moon. Four-year-old Timmy falls asleep playing with a model of Merlin the Magician; he wakes up in the middle of the night to find that Merlin has come alive. With Merlin’s magic dust, he and Rabbit fly up and up, above the mountains, through the clouds, to the Moon. They look down at the Earth. Mostly unthreatening adventures ensue involving the King of the Moon and his slightly evil but mostly confused followers. Green cheese jokes. Beautiful, incredibly enchanting illustrations. Everything turns out okay at the end. Not a dream; Maurow hated kids’ books where everything turned out to be a dream. He found a publisher. It actually sold a good number of copies. He finished writing and illustrating the second book in the series: “Timmy and Rabbit Fight Pirates.”
He thought his books would ultimately become successful enough to justify a career. He did not need money, but he needed some sort of success, he thought. So that when he met people, he could tell them what he did, and so that when he died, he could die believing that, after all, he had done something with his life. He imagined that he and Harriet would live the rest of their lives in a big house on some high cliffs looking out over the ocean, someplace green in England, someplace out of a fairy tale book, and he’d be the king of whimsy or some stupid thing like that. He wasn’t famous after one book, but the publisher thought that he would be, someday. “Keep working, keep writing.” Timmy would be ubiquitous. Maurow would spend the days bouncing ideas off Harriet. She’d make him grilled cheese sandwiches, they’d take Timmy on picnics in the dark green valley far below.
One afternoon, Blake and Harriet took the car to pick up Timmy from nursery school. Blake drove the winding mountain road as he had the day before, the week before, and the month before. When he arrived at the red brick schoolhouse, he could see that there was a commotion. Timmy’s teacher, a plump young woman just a few years out of college herself, was counting and recounting her class. Maurow thought nothing of this. He looked for Timmy, but Timmy wasn’t there. So he smiled at his wife, whose eyes were shut, listening to the car radio, and he picked up a book and began reading. It was a children’s book. At that time, Maurow read only children’s books. He was a successful children’s book author, after all. He spent his days soaking up the industry. So he turned his attention to colorful adventures and simple rhymes in 4/4 time.
When he looked up, Timmy’s teacher, Mrs. Harrison, was staring at him across the parking lot. She was a young woman, probably about his age, who could guilelessly mimic the wide eyes and curious smile of a child. Timmy adored her. The school principal, an older, painfully angular woman, was standing next to Mrs. Harrison, and she was also staring at Maurow. She turned away, shot an angry glance at the teacher and said something biting. The teacher grimaced and looked down at her hands. Then she and the principal both looked back at Maurow. The principal painted an expression of sympathetic and reassuring authority on her thin, drawn face, and she slowly approached Maurow across the hot gravel parking lot.
“Timmy was with me,” Mrs. Harrison said, “when the entire class left the room at the end of the day.” They were standing in the school hallway, and the teacher was pointing. The principal stood between the teacher and the two worried parents. She was weary, and she had heard this story before. “We turned left outside the classroom and walked to the exit. I was walking in the rear.” She started drifting along the hallway. “See? There’s no other hallway that intersects between the classroom and the exit. There’s no other classroom. Just walls.”
“So he wasn’t with the group,” Harriet said. She started calling out her son’s name.
“Maybe he’s outside,” Blake said. “He’s probably running outside.”
“He was there,” the teacher said. “One little girl made a joke” — and she repeated the joke, which Maurow didn’t understand, some sort of kid thing, probably — “and I remember Timmy laughing.” She remembered him laughing, she said, and making a comment in response that some would consider sort of ribald for a little kid. Maurow nodded, recognizing his child’s humor and a little bit proud of the joke, which was sophisticated for a kid, and would have been very funny under different circumstances. Mrs. Harrison reddened. “I told him not to say such things,” she added. “I said, ‘Timmy Maurow, watch your mouth.’ ”
Harriet rolled her eyes, impatient with the exposition.
“Let’s just find him,” she said.
Timmy did not turn up that afternoon, and he didn’t appear with an innocent explanation the following day either. Immediate and initial suspicion fell on the teacher, either of malicious intent or grossly negligent behavior. Perhaps she’d been lying, the Maurows surmised. Perhaps Timmy had not been with the crowd, had not laughed with his little classmate, and had not made the surprisingly sophisticated blue joke attributed to him, at least not as the class was moving, as one, toward the exit. But the police interviewed the other kids. They remembered Timmy leaving the classroom with them. They remembered him in the hallway. Under questioning, other kids also quoted Timmy making this comment. Most of the other kids didn’t understand it. When the class was outside, where Blake was waiting for his son, Harriet by his side, Timmy was no longer with the group.
In the years to come, Maurow would run it in his head over and over. Timmy was in the room. The teacher took a head count. He turned left with the crowd. The teacher was walking behind all of the children. Timmy made a dirty joke between the classroom and the exit. Sometime between his dirty joke and the exit, he went away. He and Harriet, in the months to come, talked about it a hundred times. Sometimes when he was lying in bed beside Alice, he still thought about it. Where could he have gone between his comment in the hallway and the exit? Maurow never stopped trying to come up with answers. When he was in Italy with Benedetta, he suddenly felt guilty for writing stories about Timmy getting spirited away to some magical plac
e, and he even had a dream about Timmy being up on the moon, trapped in one of his father’s fanciful stories, eating green cheese all the time and calling out to his mom and dad. Maurow woke up crying, and Benedetta asked him what was wrong, but he couldn’t tell her. Because at that moment, half in and half out of the dream, he truly believed that he had accidentally pulled Timmy from his world, and that he should have known such a thing would happen. Lying there in the dark, he felt utterly guilty. That night would haunt him for years. When he and Alice would lie in bed, and when he would say good night to her, afterwards he would steel himself, give himself a reminder that he could not possibly be to blame, that he should not accuse himself, no matter what might come in the night. He didn’t loose the forces that took his son away. He would try to make himself strong, every night before he slept. Finally, an irrational solution came to him, then got stuck in his frontal lobe, or one of his lobes, anyway, and became the official explanation of his child’s sudden disappearance: little Timmy would have been the best kid who ever lived. He would have done great things in the world. He had to disappear, maybe, because he was just too good. Because, in a world designed by God to be primarily ambiguous, it was just a mistake that Timothy Maurow had ever existed in the first place.
The police were sure the teacher screwed up somehow. They were certain that her story was wrong, that maybe she was lying, except that the kids were also so sure. Without any prompting, they all told the same story. The police hounded them a little, tried to suggest that they were making something up, but they were positive. Mrs. Harrison was devastated. The school fired her, not for losing Timmy — for which she was arguably blameless, the disappearance of the little boy demonstrably either the work of a criminal genius, the result of mass hallucination or an Act of God — but on some other, invented pretext. The loss of her job didn’t upset her much. Her husband could support her. Ultimately she would have her own child, and she didn’t really want to work after that. It wasn’t the loss of the job. Worse for her was that she blamed herself for Timmy’s non-existence. She wrote the Maurows a long anguished letter. They debated writing her a letter back, sort of absolving her, but they really didn’t want to. They kept insisting to each other that they meant to, but they never did. When Maurow thought back on poor Mrs. Harrison in the decades to come, he supposed that in their time of bereavement, he and Harriet didn’t want to comfort anyone else. Selfishness. They wanted someone else to suffer, too. They were kids. Still, every few months, even decades later, he would think about tracking the teacher down, writing her that letter. The idea would come to him randomly. He would hire a private detective, he might think. Then he would forget about it. He would never do it, but he would never stop meaning to.
After a while, the school closed. Timmy’s disappearance was quite the mystery in that part of Colorado, at that time, and for a few years after. The school became associated with the disappearance. Parents in the community fell victim to superstition. The school was the place where your kid could just vanish in the hallway, snatched away by ghosts or monsters or what-have-you. Parents didn’t want to send their kids there anymore. And it just faded out of existence, little by little.
Sitting there in the kitchen, Blake told her all of this. He looked ineffably sad.
“It’s harder to say,” he whispered, “than it is to remember.” He wasn’t looking at her. “And it’s harder to remember, when I can feel your sympathy in the room. Beating down on me, like the sun.”
Alice felt that she should let her husband stop. But she stayed quiet. She felt that she should cry, but the tears remained only in her imagination. More than anything, she wanted to hear Maurow talk. She wanted her husband’s life here in the room, in all its tragedy and ugliness. This is what she wanted. Alice wondered how many years the guinea pig had been dead. The truth of Maurow’s life — as he surely knew as well — was in these little details, the things he hadn’t thought about for years. Alice wanted to know these details, these little stories around the edges of his old world. To see that life, to feel the Colorado breezes, to look down on Blake’s youth from the mountain peaks and to understand him, old and new, she had to know about the little tuft of white hair on Rabbit’s nose.
He went on a little bit. He told her about places he’d taken Timmy; about Timmy’s favorite children’s book, his favorite TV show.
“Just to give you a little sense of what I lost,” he said straightforwardly.
Just so she could know him a little bit, since she seemed to want to know him.
“Yes,” Alice said, weakly.
“I expected to live a life, after all,” Maurow said. “A full, adventurous life. I expected tragedy. I waited for it, wondered what it would be. But I always thought all pain would diminish in time, would be left like a sort of cement holding together the different layers of my rococo existence. I never expected to feel a sadness that would last like this, that would drain me every day decades later.”
Maurow told Alice about his horses, about the green of the grass and the white of the mountains. Then he told her about the river that abutted his property, and about drifting along the river in a canoe.
He didn’t mention the perfect day he and Harriet and Timmy had spent on the penultimate afternoon, on a picnic in the mountains, with his fried chicken and Harriet’s potato salad, and a little bit of white wine for the adults, and OJ for the kid. He didn’t mention how she had reassured him that there would be other perfect days, and that there had not been. He didn’t mention the lustless months that followed. Or half a year after Timmy’s disappearance when Harriet rolled over and looked at Blake in the middle of the night, his young face so innocent and tormented, trapped in the middle of a terrible dream. Quietly tormented, not screaming, not waking himself from his dream, keeping absolutely still and quiet, a look of terror and shame on his face, as though whatever he were suffering were only his due and nothing more. Harriet’s sympathy or last vestiges of love overcame her that night, and they huddled together in a passion that ended in a pool of tears. Afterwards, the room felt too hot for that time of year, and they were both covered in sweat that mixed together on their skin, and on the sheets. Blake tried to look grateful, but he did not know whether that were the appropriate response to her overture, and so he kept all his emotions to himself but reserved gratitude just in case. He saw her get out of bed and dress, pack up some things, and walk out of the house. He had not tried to stop her, because he had not believed, back then, that she would never return. Later, remembering that cold morning, slumped in the kitchen with Alice, he still couldn’t believe that she hadn’t returned.
Alice felt Maurow’s story like a brick in the gut. She tried to express sympathy with her eyes. She could not imagine whether she was succeeding. Blake was speaking gently, little bits of joy slipping through the steady low-key sadness that enveloped him now and that had been a quiet, unnoted part of him since she’d known him. When he smiled at the memory of some little silly thing from decades early, she saw him as a whole person, suddenly; the first time she could imagine him happy, imagine the other life stretching out before him, a life in which he would have been ever content, a wonderful life in seclusion hundreds or thousands of miles from here, a life that would never have included her, not for a single second.
Blake fell completely silent once again, thinking other memories that Alice knew he would never tell her, personal things about Harriet, and about Timmy, and his old life, she supposed. A little boy’s laugh, echoing around in Alice’s mind, filled in the silent void. Alice suddenly saw Timmy, his little smiling face, his outstretched arms, reaching up to his father, his mother; then gone, somewhere, alive, dead, passing Alice in the street a hundred times, or never, or the guy on the subway when she was fifteen, strumming a guitar but just making noise, that guy who couldn’t talk and who had a deep bottomless lake of problems she would never understand or know; or somewhere else, dead, never found, lost somewhere on the Moon, drowning in green cheese; captur
ed by pirates. Alice wanted to cry for days, for months, over little lost Timmy. She wanted to cover the walls of her room with pictures of him, to stare at his young lost face during the day, to go to sleep and wake to the mournfulness of utter loss, she wanted to wallow in Blake’s devastation, she, Alice, wanted to be the one, not Harriet, to share fully the emptiness in his heart and soul, she wanted to be the one with the chance to understand him.
Feeling Timmy’s hand in her hand as she dropped him off for school that morning, feeling his weak little arms around her neck — during the days and months that followed, still feeling his hug, like an amputee who can still feel her legs; still seeing him in the shadows of the house, waking up to the sound of his voice, realizing it’s only a dream. Cleaning out Blake’s work-room, filled with illustrations of Timmy, pictures for his third, never completed children’s book, the name and whimsical idea forgotten in the darkness that had fallen over them. Pictures of little Timmy and his plastic sword and his guinea pig named Rabbit, vanquishing evil, just like that. Wondering every day if he’ll be found alive; each day hope dimming just a little bit more, but, worst of all, the hope always there, never quite gone. She wanted to remember sadly funny little chats she’d had with her little boy, with the golden little boy she gave Blake, chats about what he wanted to be when he grew up. She wanted to remember at the saddest and most unexpected moments little plans she’d had for him, from wild dreams of the great man he would have one day become, to little expectations, like the trip to the zoo that she and Blake and Timmy had been planning for the Saturday after he disappeared. She wanted to collapse in the hallway when these thoughts struck her. She wanted to cry with Blake on the hallway floor, each held in the other’s arms and flooding each other with tears. She longed desperately for the intensity of shared tragedy. She wished that she had been the one beside him when he realized a truth that had left him so terribly sad that nothing ever again could quite move him enough, the terrible truth that made him the impassive man he was today, even now; she wished that she could be the one to share with Blake all that sadness and all that terrible, terrible tearful love. She wanted to rebuild the life that had been crushed when Timmy disappeared, but she could not, because she was never meant to be a part of that life. She wondered if the daughter she shared with Blake and the son he raised with Harriet ever met each other in Heaven, the one that lived to be little, and the one that didn’t make it out of the womb alive. Then she remembered: There is no Heaven. She wondered why she had forgotten something like this, something about which she’d always been so sure.