My Soul to Keep (6 page)

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“I’m positive. I’ve watched every minute of the interviews. They’re not hiding anything.”

“Then how do you explain the van?” Maria’s eyes began to tear up again. You could just see the hope leaking out of her.

“Coincidence,” Martinez said. “They must have pulled away at about the same time Nicholas was abducted.” He hugged her.
“Mija
, Nicholas was never in that van.”

Maria drew away from him and crossed her arms. She walked to the other end of the porch, staring into the street.

“What now?” Liz asked.

“We start interviewing the witnesses again. See if anyone remembers anything.”

“Like what?” Maria said. “It happened so fast.”

“Like another car,” Martinez said. “He got away from that park somehow.”

“With a kicking, squirming kid who didn’t want to go with him.” I nodded in agreement. “He must have had a car. How else could he have—”

Maria whirled around. “Dylan, we saw another car.”

“What car? When?” I said.

“When we were in the street. A car honked at us.”

“All I saw was the van.”

She gestured at Martinez. “I can’t believe I forgot. It wasn’t a van. It was …” She paced around in a circle, then stopped and looked at me. “What was it, Dylan? What kind of car was it?”

I shook my head. “Maria, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t remember another car.”

“Yes, you do! It was after you caught up to me and I was losing it in the street. Remember—a car came up behind us and honked for us to get out of the way? What was it? Don’t you remember?”

I thought for a minute. “I really don’t. I’m sorry.”

“Are you sure you saw another car, Maria?” Martinez asked. “Sometimes people inject details in hindsight.”

I stood and headed inside for my bag and keys. “Let’s go over there. Right now. Maybe it’ll jog my memory.”

L
IZ STAYED WITH
C
HRISTINE
while the rest of us headed back to the park. We hadn’t been there since Nicholas disappeared. It had an eerie, abandoned feel to it. The swings were still. A deflated soccer ball sat beside a backstop. The fountain had been turned off. The pond emitted a putrid, brackish stench. Even the katydids were silent—strange for a summer evening.

At first, Maria couldn’t get out of the car. We backed away and let her take her time. She eventually took a few breaths and stepped out like she was stepping off a boat into a deep body of water. She walked slowly, her arms crossed tightly, one hand at her mouth, biting her thumbnail, the other twirling the St. Christopher medal she wore around her neck.

We started at the park bench. The special-needs donkey was still stapled to the tree, looking more forlorn than ever. I pulled it down and followed Martinez to the trash bin. The trash had been confiscated by the DPD two days before. A piece of yellow crime-scene tape formed a cross over the bin opening. Martinez broke it, and I shoved the donkey inside.

We retraced our steps, walking past the benches, the swings, the water fountains, the tramped-down grass where the petting zoo had been. We circled the tennis courts and stopped. Beside the tennis courts, a bronze statue of children playing had been made into a shrine of sorts. Flowers and notes and teddy bears were piled up at the children’s feet, looking almost like an impediment to their gleeful play. Maria reached down and picked up a few of the notes. She read them silently, then tucked one into her pocket and crossed herself.

As she stood there, a couple pushing a stroller walked up the street
behind us. Their big yellow dog tugged at its leash, pulling them all forward. They put their heads down, graciously declining to stare. Maria waited until they had passed and began to cry. She crossed herself again, kissed her St. Christopher, and turned to walk into the street. We followed her around the block to the center of the street, one block over. Maria and I stopped there and looked around.

“Let’s try something,” I said. “Maria, kneel down like you were the other day.”

She knelt and looked up at me.

I nodded. “Okay now, Maria, look the other way, in the direction the van was moving.” I knelt down beside her and held her shoulders like I had before. I stared into the distance, summoning my memory, picking through the fog for the visual. In my mind I could hear the honk, but I couldn’t see the car.

“The horn was a medium horn,” I said finally. “Not a little beepy one. Not a loud foghorn one. Just medium.” I looked up at Martinez. “Could have been a sedan.”

Martinez was watching me intently. “Okay, that’s good. Anything else? Can you see the hood? Is there an emblem or anything?”

I let go of Maria and walked around, looking up and down at the cars parked in front of houses. The streets in this part of Highland Park are narrow. When two cars are parked on opposite sides of the street, there’s room for only one car in the middle. I walked over and stood between two cars, closed my eyes, and then turned my head over my shoulder, putting myself in the exact position I’d been in the moment I’d seen the car.

“White,” I said. “I think it was white.”

“Are you sure?” Martinez asked.

“Nope. But it’s the best I can do.”

“I think that’s right,” Maria said. “I think it was white. I remember now.”

Martinez looked at her without saying anything. Maria wanted to believe it so badly.

“It seems like the hood had some gray patches,” I said.

Martinez pulled a notebook from his back pocket and began scribbling. “Sanded down, maybe? Like someone was repairing the finish?”

I nodded. “Could be. That’s what I’m seeing in my mind. A ratty sedan with white, patchy paint.”

“Driver?” Martinez asked.

“White guy.”

“Age?”

“Maybe forties? Not old. And definitely not a kid.”

“Anyone else in the car with him?” Martinez looked up from his writing.

“Nope.”

“Headrests?”

I raised my eyebrows. “Good question. That would narrow the model year down a bit, wouldn’t it? I don’t think there were any headrests. Could have been a bench seat.”

“An old car, then,” Martinez said. “Engine noise?”

“I heard it come up behind us, so it must have been a little loud. Not a nice, new, whirry sound. Old and clunky is closer, I think. Kind of like my truck, come to think of it.”

“But a car, not a truck,” Maria said. “It was definitely a car.”

“Don’t you think someone would have noticed a car like that in this neighborhood?” I asked. “Especially on a Saturday when none of the work crews are around.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Maria asked.

“No one living in this neighborhood would drive a car like that,” Martinez said. “Construction workers, yard men—you’d see them on weekdays. Everywhere. But not on a weekend. A car like that would stand out.”

“Like a chicken in a duck pond,” I said.

“We’ll recanvass with the description,” Martinez said. “Someone should have seen it. Anything else about the driver? You said he honked?”

“Yeah, and I turned around and glared at him.” I pointed at Martinez as I remembered. “He had a hat on. He ducked behind it when I turned around.”

“What kind?”

“Baseball cap.”

“Anything on it? Emblem or anything?”

“No idea.”

“What color?”

“Dark, maybe black.”

“Like the guy in the park.”

“Maybe. That’s a long shot, though, Enrique. I can’t say for sure.”

“Everything’s a long shot,” Martinez said. “It’s a lead. Let’s go.”

We checked in with Liz and Christine, then headed down to the station to look at photos of cars. I studied books of sedans and narrowed it down to a white, early- to midsixties Ford or Chevy. Red or brown interior.

Martinez put it on the wire, and we called it a night.

He dropped me back at my house, then left to take Maria home. I stood on the porch for a minute before I went inside, looking into my house from the outside. I could see straight into my living room. The light was yellow and warm, streaming through the bamboo shades I’d bought for thirty dollars apiece at Home Depot. It looked homey in there, inviting. Liz and Christine were sitting on the floor, playing with the bunnies.

I rarely allow myself to think about how alone I am in the world. It’s an indulgence I cannot afford. But standing there, looking at that little bit of family in my living room, I blew every cent of serenity I’d saved up. I had never felt so alone in my life.

My mother had died several years ago, not long after she and my dad split up. My father and brother and I were all that was left of our shoddy little family, and we were fractured and fragmented, separated from one another by unforgiving miles and profound disinterest.

My brother, who lived in Seattle, had recently gone through a bruising divorce. He’d wound up stuck in a town that gets three hundred
days of rain a year, living alone in a house he can’t afford with two cats he can’t stand.

My dad had taken up with his ding-a-ling scrub nurse, Kellee with two
e
’s, about fifteen seconds after he and my mother divorced. The two of them had married and were about to produce their first, and I hoped only, offspring—a little girl I wanted to love but with whom I felt no connection whatever. They’d already named her Kellee Shawn—Sean is my father’s middle name—and were busy planning to transform her into a tiny extension of themselves.

I was prepared to jump through the requisite big-sister hoops—though I had managed to schedule myself a speaking gig at an academic conference the weekend of the Big Baby Shower. I intended to purchase flowers for Kellee when the baby was born, buy savings bonds, send the kid a tiny SMU cheerleader outfit. Rah, rah, rah. But the hard truth is, my heart wasn’t in it. Every time I imagined that sweet, untarnished face, I felt a wave of resentment knock into me like a hot, dusty wind. When I looked at my father looking at Kellee and imagined Kellee’s little replica lying there on her Oilily blankie, wearing her pressed Lilly Pulitzer prints, I felt subordinated. Tossed aside. Replaced.

Now, I admit that these are childish sentiments. They are especially childish given the fact that I recently passed into the latter half of my thirties. I’m not the baby of the family whining because I’ve lost my mommy’s rapt attention. My mother wasn’t the rapt-attention type. The sad truth is, I’m the baby of the family whining because I never had my father’s attention at all.

Neither will little Kellee Shawn, of course. She’s just a prop on the stage of Kellee’s paper-doll fantasy life. She’s got the heart-surgeon husband, the cruise wear, the implants, the French tips, the “natural blond” highlights. And now she’s working on the tow-headed, bow-haired daughter to match. She’ll have Kellee Shawn in French tips in no time.

And as for my dad, he’d just about finished assembling his little picture-perfect family kit. Which we had never been. My brother and I were childhood reprobates, running around barefoot with dirty ankles and ripped jeans and T-shirts with inappropriate messages on them,
shoplifting cigarettes from the local convenience store. And my mother was earthy and cerebral and interesting and refused to wear pantyhose or color her auburn hair when it began to gray.

When my dad was young and idealistic, a hippie medical student headed for the Peace Corps, our scruffy little family had fit the bill. But once he grew the horns of ambition, we’d become a sour disappointment to him. I’ve never forgiven him for that.

I periodically summon weak resolve to stop flattening tires on this particular pothole in my otherwise orderly life. I bulldoze in a load of gravel and tar, dump it in the hole, tamp down the asphalt, and smile with satisfaction at my newfound mental health. But then Father’s Day comes around. Or I hear a John Lennon song on the radio. And suddenly I feel like Cynthia’s kid Julian—heir to nothing when the legacy is rightfully mine. And I sink back into self-pity, and I fantasize about retribution.

Not my finest quality, admittedly. It’s easily one of my Top Ten Terrible Traits.

As I stood there in the warm evening, looking inside the windows of my house, I marveled at my astonishing lack of progress on this issue and resolved once again to patch the hole, wondering how much gravel there was available in the world. Then I walked inside and locked the door behind me, settling myself on the floor with the rest of the group. We played pin the tail on the bunny using Scotch tape and the donkey tails I’d made for the birthday party and chased the bunnies around the room. We liked the game better than the rabbits did, of course. It was a silly, witless distraction that could probably get us into trouble with the PETA crowd. But it served its purpose and popped the bubble on the tension. In the end, the bunnies seemed none the worse for the wear and were rewarded for their trouble with an extra helping of purple carrots from Whole Foods.

I’d just about shaken off my funk when my doorbell rang. I checked my watch. Who would knock on my door at ten thirty? I looked through the peephole, gasped, and felt the asphalt rumble and crack as a brand-new hole gaped open under my feet.