Finding Jake (25 page)

FOUND

My mind tears through the millions of memories, trying to find any detail that may guide my step. At the same time, I run, faster than I ever have before, racing through the side yard, leaving everything and everyone behind.

“Jake!” I shout.

At full stride, I break through the tree line behind the Martin-Klein house. Dry, late-fall brush shatters as I crash into the forest.

“Jake!”

I don’t know why I am calling out. I just want Jake back. I need to find my son. And I am so angry. Why had I not looked there before? I had almost forgotten that’s what the boys did all those years back. What started as such an enormous worry had petered out over time, replaced by the day-to-day stresses of two teenagers. But how could I have forgotten?

I have no idea how to find the fort, the setting for Jake’s pretend battles as a child. I consider turning back, going to ask Mary Martin-Klein, but I don’t even slow my pace. I also realize that I no longer
have my phone. I must have dropped it in front of the house. Everything is happening so quickly now that I can’t know for sure.

The brittle leaves snap under my shoes as I weave among the tall, straight oaks. The occasional evergreen breaks the stark grays of the forest’s annual death. My voice echoes through the emptiness, stirring a blood red cardinal from a bush. It darts amid the trunks, quickly disappearing from my view.

“Jake! Where are you?”

I hear footsteps. The sound jumbles my mind. For a second I imagine my son will appear, smiling, laughing, racing toward me through the woods, a green hoodie tied around his waist. I grab him. Hold him. Press him so tightly that he cannot breathe. Torrents of relief and amazement storm out in streaming tears.

But this is a dream. The reality is that the footsteps come from behind me, not in front. I hear sirens approaching, more than one, and their call melds into a baleful moan. I push forward as if we are racing. I will find him first. No one else.

My eyes never look back. I scan the woods, looking for a path or a dark shadowy mass that might be a fort.

“Help me find you, Jake,” I whisper.

I want a sign; I deserve a sign. I love my son with everything I have ever had. I know, I have always known, that I would die for him in an instant if need be. But nothing is that romantic, that dramatic. I was never given the chance to sacrifice for Jake. And now, when I plead for something to show me the way, a stag in the mist to guide me, the call of a red-tailed hawk, Jake’s favorite bird, to bring me to my son, there is only silence and dread.

I stop, my head tilting back. I look up at the sky, cracked by the skeletal limbs grasping above me. A cloud floats lazily toward the late-autumn sun, softening the long shadows that streak across the landscape like the mythological remnants of some great lightning storm.

“I’m sorry,” I bellow. “I’m so sorry.”

When I look ahead again, through tear-clouded eyes, I see the
pond. A snippet of the past comes clear. I remember Jake telling me about the pond behind the Martin-Klein house.

My walk turns to a run when I see the fort appear from behind a patch of massive fern. I trip over a thick fallen branch, dropping to a knee. My hand skids across a patch of exposed rock and pain sears up the length of my arm. I stagger back to my feet and keep moving.

The fort rests low to the ground. A lean-to, two large sheets of weather-stained plywood tilt upward, supported by three gnarled black limbs. Dirt, moss, and dried leaves form a thatchlike roof atop the sheets of wood.

Above, the sun thrusts through the blanketing cloud and the world around me brightens like a new beginning. Something sparkles by my foot. I bend down to pick it up. My fingertips touch cool metal and I lift the object off the ground. It is an intact round of ammunition.

My heart races. I look down and see more bullets. They scatter across the forest floor like pebbles in a streambed. For some reason, I begin to count them. It lasts only a fraction of a minute but I see more than fifty. My mind cannot focus. I still do not understand.

Then I see my son’s shoe. It is a simple swatch of neon yellow but I know it immediately. The shoe is almost covered by fallen leaves as it rests undisturbed beside the large fern. I stare at it, frozen in place, unable to move, unable to see that it is not just a shoe, that it is my son alone in these woods, somehow forgotten until this very instant, lost and gone forever. All those thoughts are so unfathomable. They are the stuff of paralyzing nightmares, the reality of a life I never considered, even during my darkest parental neurosis.

I cannot move. I need to go to him, but I cannot accept that he is not there anymore. He’s left us already. He’s gone off alone. I can’t bring him back. I can’t talk to him anymore. We can’t joke. We can’t wrestle. We can’t go out for dinner or eat pulled pork at home with Laney and Mom. I can’t drive him. I can’t pick him up. I can’t wait for him. He’ll never walk toward me, smile at me, be there.

Jake can only be inside me now. He can only speak through memories and impossible imagination. What ifs. If onlys. I wishes.

Dogs bark. Someone is close behind me. I think he’s been there all along. It is the dogs, however, that awaken me again. I take a step and then two. I fall to my knees. I embrace what was Jake, what will never be Jake again. I hold him but it is not him. I cry and rage. And I never see the empty box of ammunition in his cold hand.

AFTER

I am alone with Jake, the two of us now lost together behind the Martin-Kleins’ house. Time must pass, birds must call out from the trees above the fort, but I am not there. Then I realize I am no longer alone. An enormous police dog, a German shepherd, tilts its head. I look into its deep brown eyes, my hand resting on my son’s still chest. Someone once told me that I should never look into the eyes of a dog, that it is a challenge. That is not how I feel. Instead, this grand animal looks into my soul. I feel it tugging at some semblance of life and realize it must be mine. It is trying to bring me back. I am sure of it.

The dog does not move. I hear people approaching but our connection remains firm. In my head, we speak to each other, two animals in the forest contemplating the most basic fact of life.

He is dead.

Yes.

I can’t live.

You can.

Why?

Because.

Is that good enough?

Yes.

I don’t understand.

You do.

I want more than anything to die. I do not want to get up or walk out of the woods. I do not want to live a life of meaningless moments. I want to lie down and never leave my son’s side. If there is a will to live, I think I lose mine.

Or do I? What is it that keeps me breathing? I would like to say it is Rachel and Laney. That is the correct answer, the human answer you expect to hear from me. If that is not the answer, then I am unlikable.

The honest reason I breathe is because I am scared. I fear death. I fear living. I fear loss. I fear change. I fear everything and nothing at the same time. Instinct, some leftover synapses from before the Ice Age, tortures me. It keeps me from turning off. It rewires my brain. I no longer think years ahead or days ahead or moments ahead. I don’t even think one breath ahead. I simply take in air and let air out. I become an automaton of survival.

I let them take me away but I look back over a shoulder at Jake. I want to cry but I might be out of tears. Instead, I feel an icy chill radiate out from my torso.

“I can’t leave him,” I say, but it comes out as a whisper.

“It’s okay, Mr. Connolly,” an officer says. “We’ll take care of him. I need to get you some help.”

“I’m fine.”

He leans into me as we walk down the barren, shaded path.

Something strange happens. I do not remember walking past the Martin-Klein house. I am not even sure where I am, except I know I sit inside the back of an ambulance. A paramedic holds a mask over my face. I breathe in the cooled air, unafraid. In fact, I feel utterly numb.

Rolling my eyes around, I see silver instruments, an IV drip, and
a blood pressure cuff around my bicep. Three blankets lie atop me but I do not really feel their weight.

“Just relax, Mr. Connolly. Your blood pressure dropped. We’re giving you fluids and a sedative. You’ll be fine.”

No, I won’t, but he doesn’t know that. Nor do I tell him. Instead, I close my eyes.

When I sit up, Rachel is there. She reaches out a hand and, together with the paramedic, helps me out of the ambulance. We hug. She has tears and they flow freely. She shakes in my arms. I hold her but I am still devoid of feeling.

I should be reacting differently. I look around, sure people are staring at me, wondering how I could be so normal, so nonchalant about my son.

“You feel cold,” she says.

At some point she stops crying.

“I’m fine.”

The scene around me clarifies.

I startle. “Where’s Laney? She shouldn’t . . .”

“It’s okay. She’s with my mom.”

I did not know Rachel’s mom came up from the beach. In fact, I never even thought of her parents during this entire thing. I never called my parents. I didn’t call my siblings. I feel guilty about that, which seems absurd in the moment.

An engine starts. Another ambulance rolls slowly up the driveway. I want to climb in, as if Jake has simply suffered a concussion at a flag football game. But there is nothing else left for me to do, just take air in and let it out again.

DAY FOUR

More than twenty-four hours have passed since I found my son, a series of empty moments at once agonizingly slow and blurrily fast. We were taken home, together. We cried, together. All three of us slept in the family room; the rest of the house remains as it was after the police search. At some point, the doorbell begins to ring. Then it never seems to stop. Covered dishes march into the kitchen as well-meaning neighbors, many of the same who blamed Jake a day before, return to our door bearing food, eyes empathetic, mouths wordless. A silence descends. Rachel takes Laney to her mother’s condo. I am left to clean up the mess, which I do with numbing regularity.

That night, I learn that the footsteps I heard behind me when I searched for Jake belonged to a cameraman from the local NBC affiliate. He filmed the entire thing with a handheld. At four
PM
that afternoon, the police issued a report of their findings. Together, the story and the report play out on the television set.

There was a note, too, found in Jake’s pocket. Thankfully, the police returned it to me without it leaking to the press. I read it once and I can’t read it again. Not yet. It read: