Disappearance at Devil's Rock (5 page)

Janice gets up slowly and walks over to Elizabeth and puts an arm around her shoulders. “Honey, this isn't your fault. She's not blaming you. No one's blaming you. She's trying to help. Like everyone else who was at the park today, trying to help find Tommy, right?”

Mom is her hero and thank God she's here, because Elizabeth would be a total puddle without her, but Elizabeth doesn't want Mom to be so damn reasonable and logical, not right now. Elizabeth wants her to be emotional, irrational, to tear through walls and run the streets like a town crier screaming at everyone to
fucking do something to find our Tommy!

Elizabeth rests her head on Mom's shoulder. Tears come again and have been as autonomic as blinking since Josh's late-night call. “I
know. But—I don't understand any of it. Why haven't they found him yet? Why hasn't anyone seen him? Where did he go? Why would he run away from—from home? Why is any of this happening?”

Tell him to come home, William. Tell him he won't be in trouble. No one will be mad. I won't be mad.

She's so worn out and tired and panicked that her thoughts are like water cupped in her hands and leaking out between her fingers. The fact of the matter is that his being a runaway is statistically likely. And his being a runaway is certainly preferable to many other possible scenarios, the ones that end with his being seriously injured, kidnapped, taken away, dead.

Janice says, “Elizabeth, listen to me, I want you to stay off the computer and phone and try to get some sleep.”

“I can't—”

“Just a couple of hours.” Janice gently grabs her arm and leads her out of the kitchen and into the hallway.

“Fine. Stop pulling me. What about—”

“Quit your fussing.”

“I should really go talk to Kate. I haven't been able to talk to her. I've been barely able to look at her without falling apart, you know, when I should be telling her to think positive, to hope. I should be doing better, Kate needs me, but I can't. I can't—”

“You're doing amazing, really, Elizabeth. I couldn't be more proud. But if you don't get some sleep soon you'll be no good for Kate or anybody else. Least of all yourself. I'll sit up with Kate. You go.”

“You sure? She's in Tommy's room. I think she fell asleep. In his bed.”

“I won't wake her. I'll just check on her.”

“Okay. Okay. I'm going. But I need my phone.” Elizabeth pulls her arm away and shimmies past her mother in the narrow hallway of the 1960s-style ranch that she can't afford to update. She has always
wanted to knock out a wall, make everything more
open concept
like they do in those home-renovation TV shows she watches. They always make that kind of change look so easy and pain free with the bright colors on the walls and golden sunlight shining on everything like the renovations won't ever go out of style or become obsolete again.

Elizabeth ducks back into the kitchen, fills a glass with tap water, and then fills her shorts pockets with the cell phone and house phone. She walks into the dark, cave-like hallway, the one that Tommy filled just yesterday with his cute and awkward lankiness.

Tell him to call home, William. I need to know he's okay.

Elizabeth doesn't hear the muffled voice of Janice talking to Kate anymore. Maybe they both fell asleep together. She should get up and go to them. She shouldn't be alone. Being alone is a mistake.

Elizabeth's glass of water is empty on her nightstand. The light is off. She sits at the edge of her bed in the dark. Her conversations with William are one-sided. He doesn't answer back.

You make a lousy ghost, William.

After William was eventually found dead, Elizabeth imagined his ghost haunting their house in Ames. She was self-aware enough to realize that she wanted to believe in ghosts, which wasn't the same as actual believing. To her shame, she even once told Kate when she was struggling in third grade (and being bullied by some piece-of-shit boy who no longer lived in Ames) that her ghost-dad was there, watching and secretly loving and caring for her, which was more than the live one ever did.

You have to find Tommy. You have to.

Elizabeth and William divorced when Kate and Tommy were two and four years old. Elizabeth knows there were serious trust and compatibility issues they ignored from the onset, and she was far from
blameless when it came to the end of their marriage, but William radically changed after the kids were born. The one man who could always make her laugh became distant, cold, and he acted like their new family was the biggest mistake of his life, one he'd bear with stoic grit and a stiff upper lip. When he came home from work he disappeared to the little office nook to check his e-mail and do whatever else he was doing on the computer. She was working full time, too, and having to pick up their kids and cook dinner and get them in the tub and get them ready for bed. He came home from work an hour or so before the kids' bedtime, and all they'd get was a lame and perfunctory
Hi
, like his being with them was an unpleasant but necessary task to be performed, like taking out the garbage on Monday morning. Elizabeth and William argued often about his daily reentry into the house. It got to the point where he'd be with the kids, pouting and looking at his watch, counting down some predetermined amount of time (fifteen minutes? twenty?) that was reasonable before ditching honey-I'm-home-family-fun time.

Elizabeth takes out her cell phone and stares at the string of messages she's sent Tommy since last night. Her thumbs hover over the digital keyboard, but even if he could answer his phone now, he'd likely have no battery life left. After getting back from the park this afternoon she'd quickly checked his room and the rest of the house for signs of his having packed up or prepared to run away. There wasn't anything out of the ordinary missing from the house besides him. At Josh's house, he left behind the overnight bag he'd packed for the sleepover. It was an
Adventure Time
cartoon backpack he'd bought at the grocery store for two bucks. Tommy had thought the very idea of him carrying around the cheap, plastic cartoon pack was the funniest thing ever. Inside that backpack: his cell phone charger; black Minecraft T-shirt and shorts (no underwear); toothbrush and deodorant inside a plastic ziplock bag, gooey on the inside with toothpaste that
had leaked from an uncapped and smooshed tube; his wallet with twenty five dollars in cash and a GameStop gift card he hadn't used yet. At home they weren't missing any phone chargers, and he still had a wad of money on top of his disaster of a bureau. Would Tommy have run away without taking all his money or taking anything of his with him?

No. She thinks Tommy is hurt and lost and they just haven't found him yet but he'll be okay. She's then shouted down by a mob of worst-case scenarios, the ones that more and more have the terrible ring of probability.

Jesus, what are we going to do? I can't lose Tommy. I can't.

Elizabeth is rocking in place without realizing it. In an attempt to distract herself, she gets up and goes to the bathroom to brush her teeth for a second time. She squints in the bright light, and her left eye, the one with the lid that hangs a little lower than the right, is shut all the way. She tilts her face up toward the vanity bulbs to let the light bleach clean everything in her head.

William disappeared four months after their divorce. It was a Thursday. Before going to some new sports bar with his coworkers, William emptied out his checking and savings accounts and managed significant cash advances from two credit cards. His coworkers said they didn't notice him acting strangely or drinking more heavily than usual. He left alone, and there was no sign or trace of him until he turned up dead eight months later. The details of how the onetime software designer accomplished his off-the-grid existence for as long as he did were still a little sketchy, but he spent the bulk of that time living out of a motel and busing tables at a dive pub on the outskirts of Worcester, only an hour or so away from where the Sanderson family lived. The night he died he was drunk and drove his shitty pickup truck back toward Canton; the town he'd lived in before pulling his disappearing act. No one knows why or where he was ultimately going.
His truck rocketed down Neponset Street, and when he attempted to make the tight left curl underneath one of the arches of the massive, over-150-year-old Canton Viaduct, he skidded through the turn, ran over a cement traffic island, and smashed headfirst into the thick and unforgiving granite of the viaduct. He was airlifted to Mass General Hospital. His brain had swelled to three times its size before his body gave out. By the time Elizabeth got the phone call a little after 3
A.M.
, William had already been dead for three hours. Her contempt for William was something she had cultivated with the passion of someone starting a new hobby, so she felt an odd mix of told-you-so vindication and utter devastation now that he was permanently, irrevocably gone. The kids handled William's disappearance and death as well as could be expected. They were too young, especially Kate, to understand what had happened. With the divorce and limited visitation, William was already being phased out of their lives, and when he was gone and then gone-gone, it seemed a natural part of some sort of horrible progression; the disappearing father.

During the first few months of his absence Kate would occasionally trot from room to room and call out, “Daddy?” Tommy refused to talk about his father and would avoid his sister when she called to him or asked questions about where he was. But that phase of their grief passed in a blink. The days spent in the company of their father were soon outnumbered by their days without him. When Tommy turned ten he took up coin collecting like his father had, and he was obsessed with it initially, but he eventually gave it up for video games and general pre-teenager-dom. As the kids got older, the idea that they once knew their father became less a real thing and more like a folktale; he was this guy they barely remembered and only heard about in stories, saw in pictures. The kids never had that full sense of grief and loss, as they didn't really understand what they were missing. So it was Elizabeth and Elizabeth alone who still quietly grieved for the failure of
their marriage, the disappearance, and the sudden death of a man she had once loved madly.

Elizabeth gargles and spits twice, then shuts off the light with the water still running. The darkness in the bathroom is complete. She leans on the sink, her palms flush against the cold granite, drops her head, chin into her chest, and listens to the trickle of running water in the sink until it sounds like murmuring voices; no voices in particular, certainly not her own. Maybe the water could talk her into sleeping if she left it running, running long enough to carve out a canyon in her sink. She turns the faucet off and darts quickly to her left and out of the bathroom, her hands and mouth still dripping wet.

Weak streetlight filters through the partially shaded windows, giving the larger shapes in her bedroom outlines to be filled in. She trips on her flip-flops and clothes she left in the middle of the floor. Earlier, when sloughing off the skin of the day, she didn't make it to the green plush chair that dots the far corner of the room, her usual dumping ground.

Elizabeth swears, bends over, Brailles her hands along the floor and gathers the flip-flops, a pair of sneakers, and a small pile of clothes. From her knees, she twists to her right, aiming to throw everything on or at the green chair, and throw it as hard and as dangerously as she can, like she's throwing rocks at a hornet's nest. If she misses and the sneakers crash into the window or her shorts fly behind the chair to never be seen again, then fuck it, that's fine by her.

As she twists and tosses her armload of stuff at the dark lump of the chair in the corner, she sees something further to the right, on the floor between the chair and the little white end table on which Kate painted purple flowers. That something is up against the wall, taking up that dark space and filling it with more dark. The shape of a person crouched, or sitting, tightly wrapped into a ball, knees folded into his chest and arms wrapped around those knees, sitting there waiting pa
tiently to be seen or to be found, or he's so cold and is trying to keep warm, or he's hiding from something terrible.

And it's Tommy. It's him. It's Tommy sitting there folded up in that suddenly expansive space between the chair and her TV and the wall, and it's him because of the way, even only as a shape in the dark, he tilts his head while looking at her as if to say,
Don't you see me, Mom?
Then something happens to his face, and it happens in a flash, in less than a blink, it becomes visible, or part of it does, and it looks lumpy, misshapen, and where the eyes are, there are two dots.

The vision ends as her sneakers wildly tumble into the plush chair and a white T-shirt flutters on top of the end table and then slides lifelessly to the floor. The noise that comes out of her throat is some ancient and awful involuntary precursor to language and then she says, “Tommy,” repeatedly, and as desperately as an incantation. She scrambles on her hands and knees toward where she saw him a moment ago. She reaches her hand into the space, still saying his name. There's nothing there. She stands and looks behind the chair and all around the room, saying his name attached to a question mark. She runs her hands along the chair and the end table, and his smell is there. She gasps and greedily inhales, reprise breaths after drowning. She smells Tommy; he's still there, and he is sweaty.