by Nic Joseph
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Copyright © 2016 by Nic Joseph
Cover and internal design © 2016 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover design by Adrienne Krogh/Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover image © Victoria Penafiel/Getty Images
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
Fax: (630) 961-2168
www.sourcebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Joseph, Nic, author.
Title: Boy, 9, missing / Nic Joseph.
Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Landmark, [2016]
Identifiers: LCCN 2015046815 | (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Brothers--Fiction. | Family secrets--Fiction. | Suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3610.O66896 B69 2016 | DDC 813/.6--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015046815
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Reading Group Guide
A Conversation with the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
For my sister, Gui.
Chapter One
My brother drowned in a bathtub that was less than one foot longer than he was tall. It was a typical vintage, roll-rim, claw-foot tub with chipped paint, slippery sides, and an air of undeserved elegance.
Morbidly enough, it was also a key factor in my parents’ decision to purchase our home a decade earlier.
“But there’s no shower,” my father had said as we stood shoulder to shoulder with the real estate agent in the bathroom.
My mother was pregnant with Lucas at the time, and she placed one hand on her bulging stomach while she held on to me with the other.
“I know, Alex, but think about the baths.” She made the face she sometimes made when she bit into something sweet, like a piece of chocolate, and I could see my father’s shoulders sag. The decision had been made.
That my little brother would drown in that very tub just nine years later seemed, at best, a terrible coincidence and, at worst, an inevitable twist of fate that was sealed the day we all locked eyes on that porcelain, showerless beast.
Lucas was small for his age, and still, the accident was, in almost every respect, impossible. “Freakishly contorted” was the not-quite-clinical-enough phrase I heard Dr. R. Rudolph Smith III, the medical examiner from two suburbs over, use to describe the body when he arrived at our home that night in the brutal winter of 1992.
I remember Rudy’s face, round and reddened as he stood in my parents’ tiled master bathroom, the tips of his boxy, black shoes disappearing beneath the tub. He was still wearing his thick down coat, which made sense, given the single-digit temps outside, but he glowed from a thin layer of sweat inside the hot, stuffy bathroom.
The room smelled of staleness and death, like an old, damp sneeze, and I struggled to fill my lungs with air while trying to remain as quiet as possible. Rudy held a swab in his gloved hand, and his eyes were glued to my brother’s body below him, the very sight that would wholly define my life moving forward.
“My God…” he breathed, mostly to himself, and he seemed at a loss for what to do with the tiny, pristine, white cotton swab. I remember thinking that for a man who made his living attending to dead bodies, Rudy didn’t seem to be holding up very well. He stared at my brother’s body, and I couldn’t tell if he was going to cry or throw up. I’d done both only a few minutes earlier. The surprisingly few adults around at that point in the night kept saying they needed to get me out of there, away from the chaos and the death and the heartbreak that had stolen our night. But no one left. I was thirteen at the time. Deep down, I think both of my parents knew I would come out on the other end of it all much better than they would, so we stayed. We stayed, and they sobbed separately in different rooms of our two-story home in sleepy Lansing, Illinois, while I hid behind the bathroom door, alone, covered in my own vomit, watching the medical examiner as he struggled to do his work.
I stood like that for a long time, peering out at the shiny tears as they wormed their way into Rudy’s white, feathery beard. I had no way of knowing it back then, but he’d been a medical examiner for thirty-three years, mostly in the Chicago suburbs, and he’d never once cried on the job. But then, Lucas’s death wasn’t the type you logged away in any rote fashion, checking boxes on a form, measuring splash, and noting the position of the head. His was a painful and soul-crushing death that took with it the lives of many others that night.
In the twenty-three years since, I’ve said—with varying degrees of certainty and sobriety—that the claustrophobia and panic attacks started right then, as I crouched behind that bathroom door. It was the first time I ever encountered the painfully helpless sensation of feeling trapped inside my own body. I remember standing there, shaking, chest heaving, as the small, confining space between the door and the wall seemed to shrink and grab on to me the way cling wrap sticks to vegetables. I was suffocating. And yet, I was too
terrified to move, afraid I’d see even a hint of Lucas’s tie-dye T-shirt as it billowed around him in the tub.
Many years later, while on a date, I said something about that being the moment my panic attacks made a serious splash into my life. It had gone over the way most things do when you try, painfully, to lead with humor.
“Francis, you really shouldn’t joke about something like that,” my date had said, and I’ll be honest about my fogginess surrounding her name. “The fact that you would say something like that tells me there are a lot of unresolved issues there.”
There was a detective there the night Lucas died too. He was a large man, and he seemed to swallow up too much of the air in our home as he poked around, touching things, asking questions. Like Rudy, he still wore his knee-length wool coat, and he tugged mercilessly at the red-and-black-checkered scarf around his neck.
I think he and Rudy knew each other, because they didn’t say anything for a long time after the detective—tall, broad shouldered, and turtle faced—walked into the bathroom and peered into the tub.
“What do you think?” he finally asked.
“Death almost certainly due to asphyxiation following head trauma.”
“So he fell and hit his head, then drowned?” The detective stepped forward and peered into the tub. “It doesn’t seem right, a child that size.”
“That’s what it looks like, but I’ll need a little time.” Rudy’s voice cracked on that last word. “Nothing from the other child?”
“Nothing. Weird kid. Think he’s mute or something.”
“He might be.”
The men weren’t talking about me. They were talking about Sam Farr, the boy who had been playing upstairs with Lucas when it all happened. Sam was a year older than Lucas, a quiet, anxious kid, but he did speak—though I could understand why the detective thought he didn’t. The son of my parents’ church friends, Brian and Elizabeth Farr, Sam didn’t talk much on an ordinary basis. But since the moment he’d run downstairs, his face blanched with terror, his clothing completely drenched and clinging to his small frame, he hadn’t said a single word.
A fact that had caused my mother to lose every single shred of her dignity.
“Say something, you weird little fuck!” she’d screamed at Sam through the tears and the snot when he wouldn’t respond to her the first couple of times. She stood at the edge of Lucas’s bedroom door, the front of her burgundy, patterned dress soaked from where she’d reached into the tub moments earlier to lift her youngest son from the water before pumping furiously on his chest. “What happened? What happened to my baby?”
Sam hadn’t said a word, pausing momentarily to stare at her before turning around and quietly putting his things away. We watched as he packed up his toys before grabbing his mother’s hand and pulling her toward the door. This had only infuriated my mother even more.
“Where’s he going? Why won’t he say something?” she’d asked, spinning wildly toward Sam’s father, who was trembling where he stood, unable to respond or defend his son. “Brian, why won’t he say anything?”
“Because he’s terrified!” Elizabeth had cut in angrily, blocking her son from my mother’s valid but batshit response. “Kate, you have to calm down. I’m so, so sorry, but you have to stop.”
“But he won’t tell me what happened!”
• • •
Those words would echo throughout the rest of the night.
And then for days after that.
And then for months, and years.
I think if Sam had said something that night—anything at all—we might have spared ourselves the many years of shit that followed. If he’d said, for example, “Lucas and I were trying to see who could hold their breath longer, and he slipped and hit his head” or “I stepped out for a second and came back and found him that way” or anything else that could give my parents something to grasp on to, something to believe, maybe they would have retreated into grief the way most people do. With booze, some prayers. Maybe a touch of belligerence.
Instead, my parents went to court.
They dressed up, grasped hands, and went to war with a ten-year-old boy.
My father, handsome and tearful in his Lansing Police Department uniform, set out to prove that there was no way Lucas’s death could have been an accident.
That Sam Farr had, for any number of well-crafted reasons, killed my little brother.
That childhood is not synonymous with innocence, and that inside the mind of this ten-year-old was something vindictive, troubling, disgusting, and terrifying.
Alex and Kate Scroll hired lawyers, the best our money could afford, and they went horrifically, and desperately, all in.
I think their motivations changed along the way. But one thing remained the same: my parents figured that, at some point, Sam Farr would reach his breaking point and say something—absolutely anything—about what happened to my brother that night.
That’s all they wanted.
An admission of guilt, or even a denial. A plea for forgiveness.
Anything.
It never happened.
Sam Farr has never once, in twenty-three years, said a single word to a single soul about what happened that night upstairs in my parents’ bathroom.
Not to his lawyers, his family, the judge, or a screaming, angry, relentless press. Not even on the day, almost six years after Lucas drowned, when he walked out of court for the final time at the age of sixteen. Not even then did Sam Farr utter a word about what happened to my brother on that awful, frigid night.
He simply looked at us, turned, and walked away.
Someone behind us, in my parents’ sea of supporters, called out, egging on the crowd of friends, neighbors, and Lansing police officers.
“He’s smiling! Can you believe it? That monster is smiling!”
I didn’t see it.
Chapter Two
For eight long years, I kept my name.
“Francis, you’re from Chicago, right?” my freshman-year newswriting professor at Madison asked me one day after class. Professor Cal Oakton was tall, thin, and almost unbearably “tufty”—tufts of thick, wiry, salt-and-pepper hair streamed out of nearly every opening on his face, making prolonged eye contact difficult.
“Yeah,” I answered, my hand on the classroom door, my gaze landing everywhere but on the fluttering hairs. “Right outside of it.”
I’d been waiting for this very conversation since the first day of class, when Cal pushed his glasses up on his nose and breezed through the list of twenty-three students before stopping abruptly on my name. He’d seemed fascinated as he rolled it over his tongue, but he hadn’t said anything, not right away. They never said anything right away.
“Wait, not Lansing, Illinois?” he asked as I stood in the doorway. The nose tufts, in particular, liked to dance when he got excited.
“Yes.”
“Wow. You’re Francis Scroll of that whole…”
I nodded.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“So that was your brother.” Flutter. “Such a sad story. I was in Chicago back then, you know.”
“Is that right?”
“Yep, at Northwestern. Hey, what ever happened to that other boy? The one—”
“Nothing. My parents lost their case against him.”
“Well, I wouldn’t call that nothing…”
He actually trailed off like that, shoulders raised, eyebrows scattering to different corners of his forehead as he urged me to give him just a little bit more. One more nugget to take home to discuss with his wife over mashed potatoes and under-seasoned beef.
By the time I started seeing therapists, I was Francis Clarke. A handful of signatures on the afternoon after my college graduation, and my paternal grandmother’s maiden name erased it all. That was
the plan, at least. But the therapy didn’t last long. At first, I went mostly to talk about the claustrophobia—in my early twenties, I stopped riding trains because of the sudden, inexplicable urge I’d have to get off in between stops. In my late twenties, I cut out elevators altogether. The dirt phobia started somewhere in the middle of all of that—I’d be walking outside, and suddenly every wet leaf, wad of gum, or stain on the concrete would make me gag. I’d run home and jump in the shower, practically clawing my skin off.
My visits with therapists always inevitably ended up in a conversation about Lucas, since that’s where I thought it all started, but then, they were the therapists, and they should have been able to tell me. Once we got to Lucas, we stayed there, talking about guilt and responsibility and all of this other shit that had nothing to do with the fact that I walked up seven flights of stairs every morning to get to my office because the sight of an elevator made bile rise in the back of my throat.
On the afternoon before everything started, that’s where I was, pulling myself up those 152 steps to get to the offices of the Lansing News. I’d gone out for lunch, something I rarely did, given the effort it took to get in and out of the office. As I stepped onto the seventh floor from the stairwell, breathing hard, my editor, Cam, strolled out of her office.
“Got a minute?”
I nodded. I’d been a writer at the paper for the past year and a half, and I had to admit I enjoyed the reactions I got when I told people I still worked at a real, crinkle-back-the-corners-and-sit-on-your-patio newspaper. I was on the local beat, which meant I ended up covering everything from library closings to car accidents. My job was fairly straightforward, and I liked that. Gather the facts, report them accurately. Simple.
I’d learned about the job after I’d bumped into Cam on a subway in New York two years ago. She had been in town for a media conference. I’d been living there at the time and was both married and out of work—two things that go together like having the shits and being at an outdoor festival. I didn’t recognize Cam at first. She’d been standing right in front of me for a few stops, holding the bar above my head, and I’d deliberately been staring past her crotch out the window on the other side of the train car.