THE LAST BOY (15 page)

He came, quickly, a series of rigid jolts, his voice calling out in a low and lonely sounding sigh. Then he lay still and Molly could feel the world returning, the painful, cruel, sometimes joyous world. She gripped him tightly, her hands wrapped around his back, so fixedly he couldn’t move. He was sweating and she freed a hand and lovingly wiped his brow.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered finally.

“Shhh,” she shushed him.

“I shouldn’t have done this.”

“Shhh,” she said, pressing her fingers against his lips. “Just stay here. Don’t move. I want you here.”

“Everybody's isolated,” he said, lying in the darkness, his fingers tracing a circle around the crispness of her erect nipple.“Lonely. You see it as a cop all the time. It seems so rare that people touch each other's lives. Maybe it's always been that way. Maybe that's humanity's condition. I don’t know.”

Molly's eyes were closed.

“You sleeping?” he whispered, getting up on an elbow.

“No. Just listening. I like to listen to you talk.” She moved closer, kissed him and then snuggled tightly between his arm and chest.

“What troubles me about life,” he went on,“is that everything is so temporary. Not that I want to live forever, mind you. It's that even love seems to just come and go.”

“Tell me about it,” uttered Molly with a sad little sigh.

“I suppose you’ve got to take the good things when they come, as they come.”

Silence.

“I’m feeling a little like a heel,” he confessed later, sitting up in her bed.“We shouldn’t have—”

“But I wanted to,” she insisted.“You know, for a cop, you’ve got a heavy load of guilt.”

“I’m just worried about the appropriateness of this is all.”

“I don’t think like that.”

“Well, that's one of the things that I admire about you. You seem to do what has to be done or what you want to do, and you don’t agonize about it.”

“It's a waste of energy,” she said.“I don’t believe in spinning my wheels. Right now, the only thing I want to do is find my boy. I’ll do anything I have to do to get him.”

“Is that why you slept with me?” he asked pointedly.

“Don’t be stupid. I slept with you out of pure selfishness. Out of need. And what's more, I like you. It wasn’t just sex, don’t you see that?”

He thought about it, then smiled.“Okay…Yeah.”

When Molly awoke, Tripoli had already gone. It was almost nine and there was a note sitting on the counter.

Sorry, I had to run off.

Didn’t want to wake you.

Trip

A minute later, Rosie called.

“Did you get any sleep?”

Molly was tempted to tell her about Tripoli. After all, they rarely kept secrets from one another. In the end she decided against it— not that Rosie would be judgmental. It was just that she harbored
this inherent distrust of cops and would probably put the wrong spin on it.

In the afternoon the phone stopped ringing and people ceased knocking on her door. Is this what it's going to come down to? she wondered. Me sitting alone, waiting for some word that will never come?

The FBI had been called in because of the proximity to the Pennsylvania border. Danny's picture and description had been shared with law enforcement agencies around the country and posted with the National Center for Missing Children. There was a toll-free number leading to the command center and a reward offered for information. Yet nothing had turned up. Not a solitary trace of the boy. And all the media attention so far hadn’t helped either. The only result was that her mailbox continued to be stuffed with cards and letters of concern. Some of them contained checks, even if mostly small ones, fives and tens. They were from people all over the country. Old, retired folks. School kids. Mostly working people, she surmised from the handwritten notes.

“Look at this,” she said when Tripoli came over one evening. She lifted the stack of checks and let them flutter to the ground.

The police had been screening her mail at the post office and Tripoli was already aware of the contents.

“What are they thinking?” Molly asked.“That I can just go out and buy another kid?”

“I think they don’t know what to do and want to help in some way.”

“Sure,” said Molly.“I understand. I’m just becoming bitter.”

“Don’t, please.”

“You think I can control what I feel? And what am I supposed to do with this money? Should I send it back? Send a thank you note?”

“Why don’t you hang on to it. You may need it.”

“For what?”

Tripoli didn’t want to say. He thought about telling her to keep it for when Danny came home, but he was really thinking about the expense of a funeral.

The beeper on his belt vibrated, and he looked down, trying to decipher the readout.

“I’ll try to be back,” he called over his shoulder as he hurried off to his car.

Molly waited up but, when he didn’t return, she finally went to bed around midnight. First she was too hot and threw off the covers. Then she was too cold. She could hear the neighbor's mufflerless pickup cruising past. A cat in heat mewling. Somebody closing a door. Even her furnace seemed louder than usual. It was as though someone had captured the knob controlling the volume in her brain and just kept ratcheting it higher and higher.

Then, just as the sky was beginning to lighten, she finally lapsed into a deep sleep and began to dream. She was floating in billowing clouds of the most beautiful colors, pinks and purples and golds in profusion, their swirling shapes constantly changing. Everything was in turbulent motion, yet she felt oddly reassured and peaceful. She could hear the beat of a drum, and then the lush warm air became infused with beautiful music. Someone in the distance was singing in a high, reedy voice and, as the sound drew near, she suddenly realized it was Danny—Danny singing to her.

Then she saw animals—a huddled flock of sheep and goats, bleating and baahing. And there again was Danny standing in their midst, smiling at her. The vision was so crisp that she could make out the individual strands of Danny's hair, the fine lines inscribed on the irises of his eyes. Even within the depth of sleep it was apparent to Molly that she had never had a dream of such clarity and precise definition. Danny laughed, lifted his hand to wave to her. Molly called out to him and stretched out her arms as Danny rushed
forward to embrace her. She felt him warm in her arms. She started to cry and he touched her cheek. He smiled at her and, suddenly, a covey of white doves swooped in to enclose them and she could feel the soft beating of wings around her body as she was swept dizzyingly upwards, lifted higher and higher until…

Then Molly awoke. She lay motionless, breathless, eyes wide, her skin still tingling where Danny had touched her. She sat up and looked over at the small bed tucked tight against the adjacent wall. Though its quilt of Disney characters remained as untouched as it did before, the bed no longer felt empty. Warmed by a glow that radiated from within, she knew for certain that Danny was still here on this earth. And that somehow, miraculously, he had been here. With her. In this trailer, this very room.

She got up and showered, dressed, went through the rituals of morning as the early light of day filtered into her home and the neighborhood began to stir. This had been more than just a dream, she thought, staring into the mirror and seeing the lines of worry that had etched themselves into her face.

The vision refused to leave her, lingering with Molly all through the day. She was smiling now, she realized, as she set about cleaning up her home. Confident. Optimistic. Buoyed with a hope that refused to desert her, she vacuumed and polished and tidied up her neglected home. For the first time since Danny had disappeared, she dared to open the photo album. There was Danny holding his first fish. It was a puny little thing dangling from his line, but he looked so proud that it could have been a hundred-pound tuna.

“Danny's okay,” she said when Tripoli came by with sandwiches for the two of them.

“Huh?” he said with a mouth full of egg salad.

“He's okay. I’m sure of it now. He's alive.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I had this dream.”

Tripoli looked at her skeptically.“
Dream?
”

“No, really. Listen to me, Trip. Just hear me out.”

He listened as her words excitedly cascaded into each other, but nothing she said made much sense to him.

“You think I’m looney, don’t you?”

He reasoned that she was getting desperate. He knew that he certainly was.

“I can’t expect you to understand. But it was like no other dream I’ve ever had. Everything was so sharp and clear I could make out every single little pixel. People don’t dream like that. Not with that kind of resolution. Now I know, know now in my heart of hearts, that Danny's safe.” She could feel her face flushing at the mere memory, feel her skin prickling again where Danny had touched her. “It's like I’m in the zone.”

“Zone? What's this got to do with Danny?”

“I know my baby's okay.”

“Well…all right…” He said, but it wasn’t all right. He didn’t have much hope left;by now he was only interested in getting Molly through this in one piece.

“I’m going to keep the checks,” she said resolutely.“For Danny. When he comes home. I’ll be able to buy him all those things he wanted. Or put it toward the farm. Hey, that's why I saw those animals!” she exclaimed, suddenly making the connection.

Tripoli took a sip of his Dr. Pepper and stared blankly at the wall behind Molly, chilled at what he thought might be happening to her.

“I had this dream,” Molly explained when Rosie came by to visit on the weekend.“It was the most real thing in the world.”

“Yeah?”

“I was immersed in these wonderful, fluffy clouds. And they kept changing shape…”

Rosie listened, transfixed.“Go on,” she urged.

“…And I heard this voice singing. A high, little voice. And when I looked I—”

“Saw it was Danny,” said Rosie, finishing her thought.

“Yes! But it was not like any ordinary dream. You know how when you dream you see things kind of vaguely. It's like when you close your eyes and try to imagine someone's face but you can’t really see them. Well, this was different. It was like—”

“Like you were looking at a living photograph.”

“Exactly! And every little detail was perfectly clear.”

Rosie nodded. Her eyes were moist.“About a year ago I had this sharp dream—I guess I never told you about it—about my cousin Carlos. You remember him? He moved to Chicago. I hadn’t talked to him in ages. Anyway, in the dream he wanted to talk to me. When I tried to call him in Chicago, it turned out he wasn’t there any more. So I went to this woman—”

Molly jerked her head.“You mean a
psychic?”

“Wait,” Rosie held up a hand. “Just let me finish. Turns out no one in my family had the faintest idea where he was. So I went to this woman and she told me exactly where I could find him. He was in Houston.”

“Great. She figured it out. You know anybody can go on the Internet and do a search.”

“Okay. Maybe. But it turns out that when I finally got ahold of him, he had actually been trying to get in touch with me. His wife was sick.”

“I don’t get it?”

“When I told that woman my dream, she told me that Carlos's wife was sick. Don’t tell me she got that from the Internet.”

“Look, I appreciate it.” She touched Rosie's shoulder. “But this isn’t for me.

“Okay, but Danny talking to you in your dreams—well, that
makes perfect sense, right?”

“Yes, it does, because we have a connection. I’ve always known what Danny was thinking before he even said it. And he could read my thoughts, too. And in that dream he was talking to me. Reassuring me. Directly.”

“Of course he was! That's the way things work.”

“I told it to Tripoli, and he just avoided my eyes. But I
really
know Danny's safe. And well. And happy.” Molly's face was radiant. “Tripoli thinks I’m just deluding myself—”

“Hey, there are a lot of things people in this world just don’t understand. Especially cops. They only believe in things they can touch and feel and see for themselves.”

“But Tripoli's a good guy. And sensitive,” Molly objected.

“Really?” asked Rosie, no slouch herself at picking up on things. “So, how long you been seeing him?”

A little more than two and a half weeks after Danny's disappearance, Molly surprised everyone by appearing at the office. She just marched in, sat down at her desk, and flipped on her computer. Everybody came over to give her a hug and a smiling welcome back.

After her weeks of seclusion, thrusting herself back into the bustle of work at the
Upstater
was jarring. She had forgotten how hectic the office could get. How the stagnant air, laced with the odor of ozone and fresh ink, vibrated from the copiers and printers running full throttle. File cabinets slammed and phones bleeped as a steady stream of messengers from UPS and FedEx swept in and out. Trays of doughnuts and fresh coffee kept coming through. The noise and activity, once so stimulating, now seemed disconcerting. Well, she thought, at least I’m doing something. Killing time.

Shortly after Larry Pierce had settled into work that day, he stepped out of his office to go to the kitchen and discovered Molly at her desk.

“Look, I can’t sit around staring at the walls. I’ve got to keep busy,” she explained. “Till Danny comes back.” Larry winced and Molly, ignoring the look, went on. “Just tell me where we are and what I need to take care of first.”

In the period of her absence, things had fallen seriously behind. The others in the office had been trying to cover for her, but they
had missed a series of vital deadlines, which meant the magazine was off schedule. The data bank of subscribers hadn’t been updated, the billing records for advertisers had become jumbled, and no one was attending to the Christmas ads, which had begun piling up.

“Listen, it's not the end of the world,” Larry said, doing his best to put a good face on things.“So people will get their
Upstater
a little late. So what?” But this was not the Larry Pierce who sweated deadlines and bills, the Larry who had posted a sign in the office saying, BLINK AND THIS MAGAZINE IS EXTINCT.