Authors: Benway,Robin
Emmy & Oliver
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[dedication TK]
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“Now the cities we live in could be distant stars
And I search for you in every passing car . . .”
âArcade Fire, “Suburban War”
             Â
“And the feeling coming from my bones says, âFind a home.'”
âThe White Stripes, “Seven Nation Army”
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HE
N
OTE
The last time Emmy sees Oliver is on their forty-third day of second grade.
Oliver is her next-door neighbor and her friend. They were born in the same hospital on the same day: July 7â7/7. She thinks she's pretty lucky to have a friend who lives next door and shares a birthday with her. She can just visit him any old time she wants, but not all the time because sometimes Oliver goes to his dad's house on the weekends. They do fun things, Oliver says, pizza and ice cream and things like that. Sometimes movies. Emmy thinks that maybe having divorced parents isn't so bad, not if it means you get extra ice cream, but then at night, when it's dark in her room and she hears weird noises in the closet that may or may not be monsters, she's glad her mom and dad are still together in their bedroom down the hall.
On that forty-third afternoon of second grade, her other friend, Caroline, passes
Oliver a note when their teacher's back is turned. Emmy watches as the paper slips past her and onto their friend Drew's desk, who gives Caro a sneaky smile and then passes the note to Oliver. Emmy looks over at Caroline, who's grinning wildly. They are seven years old and this is the first of many, many notes that Caro will pass in class, but this is the first and most special note Caro will ever give to someone.
Oliver is in front of Emmy now, his head down while he carefully does the addition problems in his math workbook. She can see the tag sticking up out of the back of his shirt, and what she doesn't know now is that she'll remember that tag for years, that she will dream about going up to him and smoothing the tag back into his shirt before she wakes up, her hand poised in midair, a gossamer dream melting between her fingers.
Instead, Emmy just glares at Caro and watches as Oliver unfolds the note and reads it. They could get in so much trouble for passing notes! Emmy glares at Caro, who just frowns and sticks her tongue out at Emmy, but Emmy knows she's not really mad. If Caro's really mad, she ignores you. That's way worse.
Oliver writes something down on the note and passes it back to Caro while their teacher is explaining how to borrow from the tens, and Emmy feels her skin start to prickle, like the time she got sunburned at the beach. Caro just grins at her, and Emmy puts her head back down and carries the one.
After school, Caro runs up to Emmy and hands her the note. “Look!” she cries. The paper's been folded so many times that it feels as soft as cotton, and Emmy opens it up. It says,
DO YOU LIKE EMMY, YES NO???
And the word
yes
has been circled three times.
Emmy holds the paper and looks around for Oliver, but their moms and dads are waiting to pick them up, Oliver is already running toward his dad. His dad drives a sports car now. It's sooo cool. That's what Oliver says.
“Oliver!” Emmy yells. “I have to ask you something!”
He's already ahead of her, though, running toward the cool sports car and his dad.
“Oliver!” she cries. “Oliver, wait!”
But it's too late. Oliver is already in his dad's car.
And he's gone.
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O
liver disappeared after school on a Friday afternoon, way back when we were in second grade, and small things seemed really important and important things seemed too small. That afternoon, it wasn't weird to see him get in his dad's car, a red convertible whose screeching tires rang out in my mind for years afterward.
Oliver and I had been best friends since the day we were born up until the day his dad picked him up from school and never brought him home. We even lived next door, our bedroom windows reflecting each other.
His window's been empty for ten years, but sometimes I can still see into his room and it's exactly how it was when he disappeared. Oliver's mom, Maureen, she never moved anything. In the past ten years, she remarried and even had two little girls, but Oliver's bedroom never changed. It's become a makeshift shrine, dusty and childish, but I get it. If you clean it out, it means he might never come back.
Sometimes I think that all superstitionsâcrossing your fingers, not stepping on cracks, shrines like the one in Oliver's roomâcome from wanting something too much.
Oliver's dad was pretty smart about the way he took him. It was a three-day weekend and he was supposed to bring Oliver to school on Tuesday morning. By ten a.m., they hadn't shown up. By eleven, Oliver's mother was in the school office. By three o'clock that afternoon, there were news cameras scattered across the school parking lot and on Oliver's lawn at home. They bore down on us like electronic versions of Cyclops, wanting to know how we were holding up, what we children were doing now that our friend was missing.
Caro cried and my mom made us sit at the table and eat a snackâDouble Stuf Oreos. That's how I knew it was really bad.
We all thought Oliver and his dad would come back that night. And then the next day. And then surely by that weekend. But they never did. Oliver and his dad were gone, drifted into nothingness, like clouds in the sky and even more difficult to chase.
They could be
anywhere
and it was that thought that made the world seem so large, so vast. How could people just disappear? Oliver's mom, in her more lucid moments when she wasn't crying or taking tiny white pills that just made her look sad, said that she would go to the ends of the earth to find him, but it seemed like Oliver had already reached the end of the world and had fallen off into the abyss. At seven years old, that was the only explanation that made sense to me. The world was round and spun too
fast and Oliver was gone, spinning away from us forever.
Before Oliver was kidnapped, my dad used to say, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder!” and give me smacking kisses on both cheeks when I ran to greet him after work. After, he stopped saying it (even though his hugs were tighter than ever before) and I realized that it wasn't true. It wasn't true at all. Oliver's absence split us wide open, dividing our neighborhood along a fault line strong enough to cause an earthquake.
An earthquake would have been better. At least during an earthquake, you understand why you're shaking.
The neighbors formed search parties, holding hands as they walked through wooded areas behind the school. They took up collections, bought officers cups of coffee, and told Caro and Drew and me to go play. Even our playtime had been altered. We didn't play house anymore. We played “Kidnapping.”
“Okay, I'll be Oliver's mom and you be Oliver and, Drew, you be Oliver's dad,” Caro would instruct us, but we weren't sure what to do after Drew dragged me away. Caro would pretend to cry and say, “My baby!” which was what Maureen had been screaming that first day before the tranquilizers kicked in, but Drew and I just stood there, holding hands. We didn't know how to end the game. No one had shown us how and, anyway, my mom told us to stop playing that, that we would upset Oliver's mom. “But she's always upset,” I said, and neither of my parents said anything after that.
Sometimes I think that if we had been older, it would have been easier. A lot of conversations stopped when I came near and I learned how to creep down the stairs so I could hear the grown-ups talking. I discovered that if I sat on the ninth step I could see past the kitchen and into the living room, where Maureen spent nights sobbing into her hands, my mom sitting next to her and holding her, rocking her the way she rocked me whenever I woke up dreaming about Oliver, dreaming about the tag on the back of his shirt, my pajamas damp with nightmare sweat. There were always wineglasses on the table, lined with dark resin than looked more like blood than Cabernet. And Maureen's crying made my skin feel weird, like someone had turned it inside out. I couldn't always hear what they were saying, but it didn't matter. I already knew. Maureen was sad because she wanted to hold Oliver the way my mom was holding her.
