Disappearance at Devil's Rock (6 page)

She giggles despite herself. It's as though he's been out running around with his friends all summer afternoon and came home with slightly sunburned, pink cheeks and his brown hair gone black with sweat. His smell is a sharp, not wholly unpleasant tang of the inside of wet sneakers, that same smell that the day before would've had her asking him if he'd remembered to put on deodorant or if he'd showered that day, and he'd be embarrassed but smile that frustrating but handsome I-know-something-you-only-say-you-know smile, too, like that body of his was some newfound power that he didn't fully know how to use or control. Elizabeth breathes in more, laughing and
crying, and that new, more adult Tommy smell is still there, and she's inhaling so fast and so deeply her head goes dizzy and white stars pinprick her vision and she tries to blink them away. The smell changes, gradually, and becomes less recognizably Tommy and more earthy; like grass and soil that has been run on all afternoon, then wet pine needles and moss. And then there isn't any smell at all.

Elizabeth steps between the chair and end table and crouches down, careful not to disturb anything. She sits like he was sitting, with her back against the wall and her arms around her knees. The two phones in her pockets press up against her thighs, and Tommy's smell has faded, already becoming a memory, an imperfect one, one that she'll never be able to fully describe. She leans her head against the chair and cries great, wracking sobs that disappear into a gaping, interior void, a void into which her bones and whatever flagging spirit that filled them collapses, because she truly believes Tommy has somehow visited her, and that means her son is not lost or a runaway or is anything else but dead.

K
ate sits at the kitchen table with earbuds in her ears but with no music playing. Her friends have been texting her all morning with messages like
news?
and
u ok girl
and
I'm part of the Mountain Rd. search party, will keep u posted
and
stay strong!!!
and
they'll find him
.

Her friend Carly has started a Twitter hashtag: #FindTommy. Carly sends her screencaps of tweets from people all over Ames. Kate clicks on the hashtag and there are other tweets that Carly didn't send her. There's a bunch of high schoolers (she has no idea who most of them are, might as well be members of an unknowable and unfathomable secret society) tweeting that people who live near or on the edges of the park saw a dark shape walking through their yards and into Borderland last night.

Kate's classmate Sarah has an older sister (she forgets her name, and it's not in her annoying Twitter handle) in ninth grade who tweeted that she woke up in the middle of the night and someone or something was looking in her bedroom window. In response a bunch of Ames kids tweeted a picture of Bigfoot at her, and of course there
were boys claiming it was them and asking her what she was wearing and some raging asshole (with a profile pic of his so-awesome flexed bicep) made a joke about a peeping Tommy. Kate wonders if any of these tweets about weird/random late-night sightings are legit, and if so are the police looking into it. She wants to ask Mom about it but is afraid to do or say anything to upset her and send her deeper into the scary shutdown mode she's been in for the previous two days.

Kate continues to monitor the live feed, and another guy tweets about a party at Split Rock tonight. Kate responds to that tweet and asks if she can go too and if they would help her search the park for her brother. He doesn't respond, and he takes down the tweet a few minutes later.

It's 2:30
P.M.
and their neighbors, Frank and Mary Gaudet, have been in the living room since lunch. The morning was a steady stream of family friends and well-wishers at their doorstep, most dropping off premade meals and awkward hugs and promises to post fliers and continue to help searching the areas and neighborhoods surrounding the state park. Kate's best friend, Sam, and her mom came, and they were so nice. Sam, looking like she hadn't slept at all last night with her hair all matted and knotted up, stood as tall, thin, and still as a flagpole, and her not knowing what do with her eyes, that was okay by Kate. Sam and her mom being there was all it had to be, even though it made everyone cry and made Kate's chest hurt.

But unlike everyone else, the Gaudets have stayed. Nana Janice is totally ducking them, and like Kate, she sequestered herself in the kitchen. Nana is reorganizing the food in cabinets that don't need to be reorganized.

Mom would rather be out helping the search parties again, so why can't the Gaudets see that having to entertain them, to abide by their clinginess and rubbernecking, is sucking out what little energy they have left? Kate wants anyone and everyone to go away unless they've found Tommy.

Kate Sanderson will be twelve years old in two months. She's two years younger than Tommy. She's only a few weeks away from being a middle school student. She recently gave up gymnastics after four years of semienthusiastic participation and now plays lacrosse. She's aware that she isn't very good; she's not exactly fast when running, and catching and throwing the ball is kind of an issue. She not-so-secretly makes fun of the girls in her grade who are cheerleaders for Pop Warner football, but knows that worm will turn sooner rather than later. She hates pop music, really hates pop-country, and mostly listens to 1990s alt rock and hip-hop like Mom does. Kate has purple streaks in her brown hair, but she'll make sure to wash out all the color before school starts. It's easier to be herself in the summer. Kate is short and cherubic to Tommy's long and lanky court jester. Nana often referred to the two of them as Mutt and Jeff. Kate has no idea what that means, what the reference is from, and whether Mutt or Jeff is the short one. Kate hates having to literally look up to everyone and envies Tommy's wiry length. She has cultivated extensive and elaborate daydreams about being built like Tommy, but at the same time she knows it's easier to go into survival stealth mode and not be seen or noticed at her current size. Despite their obvious physical differences, and even with his features in the process of being distorted and exaggerated by puberty, one look at their faces and you can tell she and Tommy are brother and sister. They are fair-skinned, have the same walnut-shaped brown eyes and thin eyebrows, and each has a long nose that isn't exactly big, but always seems heavy enough to point their gaze away from other people.

Nana shuts the cabinets and says “Okay. I think we've all had enough of this” under her breath, but loud enough for Kate to hear it. Nana winks. Kate smiles and covers her mouth, even though there's no real danger of any kind of laugh escaping.

Then Nana walks out into the living room like an action hero before
the epic ass kicking and says, “I'm sorry to be the mother hen here, but it's been a long morning after a long night after a long day . . .” and yes, she is stepping in and stepping up to ask the Gaudets to leave, finally.

Kate pumps a fist from her seat in the kitchen and whispers, “Go, Nana.” She is sure that Mom will make her come out from the kitchen to join in on the rounds of
we're there for you
s and
thank you
s and
hang in there
s and then the uncomfortable hugs, but she doesn't. Kate listens to the Gaudets finally leave from the relative safety of the kitchen.

As soon as the front door is closed Mom says, “Oh, thank Christ. That was nice of them but—Jesus. How long were they here?”

Kate laughs to herself, and it almost morphs into a crying fit. She's actually relieved. This Mom sounds like her real mom, not the scary broken one from the last day plus. Kate doesn't know why or how Mom has rallied, but it gives her more hope for Tommy.

Nana says, “Too long. Let me answer the door from now on.”

“Maybe. Let's set up a velvet rope and I'll give you an approved guest list.” It's supposed to be a joke, but it sounds like Mom is serious.

Nana says, “I can be a bouncer if you need me to. Come on. Come sit down on the couch.”

“I'm fine. I've been sitting and doing nothing all day.” Mom sits on the couch anyway.

“Do you want a drink or anything to eat?”

“No. Actually, yeah. Just some water. And couple of ibuprofen. My head is pounding.”

Nana comes back into the kitchen and fills Mom's order. Nana stops in front of Kate, waves a come-with-me hand, and motions toward the living room with her head.

Kate shrugs, shakes her head no, and doesn't get up. She'd rather stay and listen to them talk from here in the kitchen.

Mom and Nana fall into a quick, just-the-facts conversation about the updates, or lack of updates. The latest being the police have pulled
the family cellphone records for calls and texts but have yet to find anything out of the norm.

Kate's stomach fills with mutant butterflies at the thought of the detective or anyone else reading the texts she sent out last night. She spent most of yesterday dropping sporadic messages to Tommy's phone like
I miss you, I hope ur ok, please come home
, like her texts were a trail of breadcrumbs he could follow. Then last night, as Nana talked Mom into finally going to bed, Kate was in her brother's room, in his bed, his blanket pulled up and over her head. Her phone phosphorescent white in the darkness, she typed, very carefully,
Tommy? Hi. Did you run away? Did someone make you run away? Is it my fault? Did I do something? I'm sorry for whatever it is.
And then she started crying and got so mad at herself and everything in the world and she fired off:
Are you trying to be like Dad? If you really ran away from us then you're a asshole like him and I hate you.
After she hit Send she cried harder and ran back to her room. She then sent him about one thousand
I'm sorry
s and
we miss you tommy
s, and she texted those messages until her thumbs ached, and Nana came in and gently took her phone away.

Nana is in the middle of a rant about the police and how she doesn't think they're doing a good job, and she punctuates with “I'm sorry,” as though she's apologizing to Mom on the police's behalf. “But your friend, there, Detective Allison, and the rest of them, are treating this like some everyday ho-hum procedural thing when it isn't. This isn't an everyday thing.”

Mom says, “She's not my friend. I mean, we're friendly—whatever.” Mom grunts like she's frustrated with her own words. She adds, “She's working hard, Mom. They're all working hard.” In a lower voice, not quite a whisper, she says, “Is Kate still in the kitchen? Is she listening to her music?”

Kate can't see her mother from where she is sitting.

Nana says, “What? Yes, I think so. Her earphones are in.”

Kate loves that Nana calls the buds
earphones
. She takes them out of her ears and rolls them between her fingers.

Mom asks, “Can she hear me?” Then she calls out “Kate? Kate!”

Kate doesn't answer. She hangs the buds over her shoulders, close enough to her head that she can stuff them back in her ears or pretend they fell out should either one walk into the kitchen. Kate calls up her
Beautiful Noise
playlist that begins with the only Sonic Youth song she likes. It's the one with Chuck D in the middle.

Nana says, “Do you want me to get her?”

“No. No, I—I don't want her to hear the rest of this.”

“All right. Should I send her to her room?”

“Um. No, it's fine.” She pauses to yell Kate's name twice more. “I don't want her to think I'm keeping anything from her. No matter what happens, I want her to trust me.”

“What's this about?”

Everyone is quiet for a few beats. The tinny screech of guitars and a steady drumbeat pulse out of Kate's earbud speakers. Mom starts talking. She tells Nana she saw something in her bedroom late last night. She says there was a shadow or something between her chair and end table, like a ghost, but it was a dark shape, something made of more dark. Mom stops talking, and Kate turns that odd phrase around in her head, inspecting it for imperfections, like a jeweler, but finding none. It makes perfect sense to Kate. What else would a ghost be made of but more dark? Kate quickly calls up the tweets about the dark shape running through yards and looking into windows, and she wants to say something to Mom, show her what other people are saying about dark shapes, but she also doesn't want to be caught eavesdropping.

Nana says, “Okay, wait. What are you saying?”

Mom then says that what she saw was Tommy, all huddled up, and then at the very end, something was wrong with his face, and she
knows that means Tommy is dead and that he's never coming back home. She says it so plainly, Kate almost drops her phone. It doesn't sound like Mom at all, but a narrator to one of those boring documentaries she watches sometimes.

Nana clucks her tongue, and although she doesn't raise the volume of her voice, she uses an argument-in-a-restaurant tone that's downright poisonous. Kate sinks deeper into the hard, wooden chair, having never heard Nana sound this cold and angry; it's terrifying. Nana asks how she could even think of saying such a thing about Tommy, and she says that Mom has to be stronger than this, that she thought she raised a tougher daughter, one that wouldn't give up so easily.

Kate says “Stop it,” out loud to Nana, but she says it too weakly to be heard. Nana should let Mom talk. Mom needs to talk, no matter what it is she says.

Mom says she isn't giving up and won't ever give up, but she saw what she saw. She says, “I saw him, Mom. I saw Tommy. It was him. It wasn't—it wasn't anything else and I wasn't dreaming and it wasn't a breakdown or a hallucination and I wasn't seeing things. I saw Tommy. I've never been so sure of anything in my life, Mom. Tommy was there in my room last night.”

Nana says, “What we're going through, what you're going through, it's impossible, Elizabeth. It is. But you didn't see Tommy. You—”

“Mom. He was there. It wasn't just seeing him. I—I smelled him. His smell was there. I swear to God I could smell him, too.”

And that's too much for Kate. She stands up, loudly knocking the kitchen chair back into the wall. She stuffs her earbuds back in, as deep as they can go so that the drone of Ministry's “N.W.O.” jackhammers inside her head. She walks out of the kitchen and into the living room on the way to her bedroom. The living room really isn't on the way. Kate feels Mom and Nana call out to her, their words bouncing off
her back. She doesn't stop. She doesn't end up going to her bedroom, either. She goes into Tommy's room.