THE LAST BOY (5 page)

“Jerry.”

“Jerry,” she repeated.“You got kids?”

“Not yet. Just got married. But my brother has three. Look, I can imagine.”

“Okay, then why haven’t you pulled the State Police in? And the FBI?”

“Because it's in our jurisdiction. Look, we’ve got a top-notch investigative unit. They know what they’re doing. And anyway, the troopers monitor us. They know we’re looking for your boy. They’ve got the full description. Just hang in there. Please. Something will turn up.”

Something will turn up. It sounded like a body surfacing in the lake. Canal. Body. Danny. Oh, Lord!

The phone book lay on the table next to the telephone open to the first page, where all the emergency numbers were listed. She depressed the button on the phone just long enough to get a new dial tone. What the hell, Molly thought, so I step on a few toes. She called the nearby State Police barracks. Molly had never been crazy about them either. With their gray uniforms and tall shiny boots, they reminded her of those storm troopers in old movies.

“State Police.”

“This is Molly Driscoll. My boy's the one that disappeared from the daycare in Ithaca?”

“Yeah?” said the trooper on the other end of the line. His tone did little to reassure her.

“You know about him, right?”

“Let me see, I just got on duty about an hour ago.” He was shuffling papers.

An hour ago and he obviously didn’t know. Molly could feel her anger rising again. “The Ithaca Police told me that they were in direct contact with you. That you monitor their calls.”

“Yeah. We do.” A radio squawked.“One second,” he said. Molly could hear him talking in the background. Then he was back.

“So?” she asked.

“I’m sorry,” he apologized.“We were talking about—?”

“We’re talking about my boy! Danny Driscoll. It looks like he's been kidnapped!”

“And the Ithaca Police are covering it?”

“
Covering
it? I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t know what they’re covering.”

“Happened in the city?”

“Yes, but—”

“Well, that's the agency that has the case. It's their jurisdiction. But we’ll gladly assist them if they need additional help—if they request it.”

Molly took a deep breath and let it out in a noisy, frustrated exhalation.

“Why don’t you fill me in and—Wait! Here it is. Yeah. Blond curly hair. Blue eyes. Five years old. About sixty pounds.

“
No!
Brown eyes. Brown! And he's
almost
five and weighs forty-five—not sixty!”

“Why don’t you just give me the description again, and I’ll call all my units. All right?”

“Sure,” she said, sinking down on the sofa. As a young girl she had had a recurrent dream in which she was standing chest deep in a lake and there was a snake pursuing her. She was always pushing through the water, trying to make it to shore, but knew that the snake could swim faster. Somehow this felt just like that.

Molly began from scratch. Eye color. Height. Clothes. All the salient details. But how could you convey the feel of his body touching hers when he crawled into her bed and slept pressed tight to her. His skin silky smooth. His sleeping face serene, angelic, even his smell, clean and milky. The way his eyebrows wrinkled in dreams as he sucked his thumb.

“I’ll get this right out.”

“How about your getting it out while I stay on the phone—not that I don’t trust you or anything.”

“If it makes you feel better.”

“It does. Please.”

Molly stayed on the line and listened. She picked up bits and pieces. Five-year-old. Last seen in Ithaca…wearing…

“Thanks,” she said when the trooper was finished. “Listen, take my number. You find out anything, call
me
right away.”

“I will.”

“I mean like anything.
Anything.
I don’t care what it is.”

She went to the window and peered out again. It was dark. A light snow had just started falling; she could see the flakes drifting down under the bright arc lamps. The rutted road through the trailer park was wet, but the snow was sticking on the little patch of dirt and grass in front of the Potters’ trailer where their kids used to play—before the parents were arrested for dealing dope and Social Services seized both kids. Potter and his wife were out on bail, she knew from the
Journal
, but the two boys were still in some foster home. Their bicycles and toys lay abandoned in the yard, slowly disappearing under wet snow. It was cold outside, real cold, and Danny didn’t even have his jacket. Just a flimsy flannel shirt.

Molly looked out the window on the opposite wall. In another trailer a big, heavy woman who she didn’t know was washing dishes, a cigarette dangling from her lips. She was wearing a leotard top, and her pendulous breasts swung over the sink as she scrubbed a pot. A motorcycle sat parked in front, the snow building up on the seat. Through the closed window, Molly could hear the dull thud of a stereo, the monotonous beat of hard rock, each beat counting off the seconds. Every minute that Danny was gone seemed to diminish his chance of return.

Molly's thoughts swirled back in time to other crises. Chuck packing his bags just as they were prepping her for her C-section. That irresponsible bastard!

Disasters always seemed to come in clusters. She had developed complications, a post-operative infection. They had cut her open a second time. Two weeks later, Molly had emerged from the hospital
wobbly and weak. They had packed her into a cab she had barely enough money to pay for. Forget the doctor and hospital bills. Forget the truck, too—Chuck had taken that. She came home to discover that he hadn’t paid the mortgage in months—though he said he had—nor the utility bills.

She had strung out the creditors, but three weeks after she was home and before she could get back on her feet or land a job, the bank took their little house. Chuck had forgotten to mention the eviction notice. The sheriff 's people carried her furniture out of the house and plopped it on the front lawn for the entire neighborhood to see. As it sat there swelling in the rain, she picked up Danny, a few clothes, and marched away. Screw the furniture. It was all beaver board from Sears and she had never really liked it anyhow.

That very afternoon, with the help of a storefront lawyer, she started divorce proceedings against Chuck and declared bankruptcy. He was still running up bills—in
their
names! She had married him because she thought he was a romantic. He would unexpectedly bring flowers. Take her nights dancing—and boy could he move, swiveling his tightly muscled body as if he had been given extra joints. In the slow numbers, she would cling to him as he crooned softly in her ear. He knew all the country lyrics about jilted lovers and being a one woman man. By the end of the evening she was so hot and bothered Molly couldn’t wait to get home and lunge into bed with him. Some romantic he turned out to be.

“Look, there's not much we can do about the house,” Alex Greenhut, her young lawyer, had said stroking his wispy beard.“And we can’t worry about that now. First thing we’ve got to do is get a roof over your head. Your heads,” he added, looking at the baby cradled in her lap. Her dripping suitcase was standing in a corner.“You obviously qualify for—”

Molly knew what he was going to suggest. “No way,” she snapped back, looking him fiercely in the eye. “I may be in a bad
way right now, but I’ve got some pride.”

“Sure,” he said quietly, never missing a beat, “but sometimes a person's got to swallow that and deal with the realities.”

Without another word, he picked up the phone and called Social Services. “Hey,” he said afterwards, seeing the look on her face. “If you feel guilty, you can always send them a check when you’re back on your feet. And me, too, while you’re at it,” he added with a compassionate smile. He was a godsend and for a short time Molly thought she was in love with young Alex Greenhut.

They found her a place to live, a trailer in a park north of town. It was rundown and filthy from the previous tenants, but she cleaned it up, grateful to have a warm place for herself and the baby. They put her on Medicaid and gave her food stamps, which she hated and never got used to. Every time she bought groceries and had to pull out that book of stamps, Molly could feel her face flushing and her hands trembling. But, like Alex used to say, you do what you gotta do. But she didn’t do it for herself. She did it for Danny.

She took up the phone.

“Ithaca Police, Officer—” a voice started at the far end of the line.

“Jerry,” she said, cutting him off.

“You? We talked just—”

“Look, I can’t just sit here.”

“But—”

“But nothing. I’m going to see what I can do. If you find him, or find out anything, call me here and leave a message. I’m going to keep checking in with you, too.”

“Listen—”

“Listen nothing. The State Police didn’t know diddly about him.”

“How—”

“I called them. Look, I’m not blaming anyone. I just gotta do what I can. And you guys have got to keep looking. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Molly hung up. She took Danny's picture from the dresser, stripped off the backing, and slipped the photo out of its frame. She snatched up her coat where it lay by the door and headed out into the snowy night. It was wet and heavy and kept coming down. Snow? It was not even November yet! Chrissake, the leaves were still on the trees! What the hell was this world coming to?

Molly hurried back down the hill towards town, driving as fast as she dared on the slick roads. Restaurants, she thought. Or shopping. Of course. It was just a hunch, but if people weren’t home, where else could they be? Either up at the mall or eating—or both. There wasn’t much else to do in town on a weeknight. She had bumped into the Ruzickas a number of times, and they had never struck her as particularly prosperous. The husband had a beer belly and grease under his fingernails. His wife, Molly knew, worked up at the University doing something in maintenance or cleaning—not exactly a professor or anything. People who sent their little ones to Kute Kids were hardly the crème de la crème of Ithaca. Which meant that she could eliminate the fancy eating places with linen table cloths and waiters.

Since the Ruzickas lived downtown, Molly headed first to the shopping strip on Elmira Road. The snow was now coming down in globs, and her worn wipers made a streaky mess of the wind-shield. The outside world took on a surrealistic look, lights and glistening pavement fractured and smeared by the melting snow, the images refracted through her tears. It was hard following the street, but the fast food places were so brightly lit that you’d have to be blind not to see them.

She pulled right into Pizza Hut, abandoning her car with the engine still going, blocking a line of neatly parked cars. Pushing
through the glass door, she dashed among the maze of tables. People looked up in surprise as she skidded on the slippery floor from one end of the restaurant to the other. The teenagers behind the counter looked stunned. She even checked out the bathrooms, both the women's and the men's.

Before anyone could react, she was back in the car, driving down the strip to Wendy's. When it was all over with Danny safely back home, she knew she would laugh about her escapades. She’d tell the story to Rosie about how people had gawked at her with her wet hair plastered to her face, as if she were going to pull out a sawed-off shotgun.

It was a lousy night and Wendy's was nearly empty. So was Burger King and McDonald's and Taco Bell. Arby's was deserted, too. In fact, it was closed: “Bankrupt” said a sign on the door. She checked the supermarkets. Ran up and down the long aisles of Tops and then Wegman's—both upstairs and down. Molly backtracked into town and drove up the steep incline of Buffalo Street towards Collegetown, her car fishtailing in the snow. Not a chance that the Ruzickas would eat there with all those college kids, but Molly had an idea.

College Avenue was crowded with sports cars, stereos thundering, willowy girls with their hats on backward driving chunky utility vehicles. There wasn’t a single parking slot near Kinko's. Molly double-parked, blocking a new BMW.

In the copy shop, a bunch of students waited for service. She skirted them and marched to the head of the line. Pressing herself against the counter, she called out to a pimply kid with glasses who was working three clattering copiers at once.“Hey!”

The students behind her grumbled.

The guy at the machines gave a dismissive toss of his head. “I’ll be there in a—”

“Now!” she shouted.“Now! This is an emergency.”

The kid's head swung around, startled.

“Hurry!” said Molly.

“Geez,” he said coming to the counter.“What's the big—?”

“I need copies of this,” She held out Danny's picture.“And right away.”

The guy took the photo and looked at it. The shop had fallen silent and everyone was watching Molly.“Copies. Lots of them,” she repeated.“My little boy's been kidnapped!”

Behind her she could hear the patrons buzzing as the word “kidnapped” made the rounds of the shop.

“Sure,” he said.“You wan’ color or black and white?”

“Whatever. Black and—no, color. Wait, what do they cost?” She rummaged through her purse. By the time she figured out how much she had, the guy was already at a machine. He hit a button and the thing started spewing out perfect color copies, layer upon layer of smiling Dannys.

“I don’t have that much money with me,” she explained when he rushed back with the pile. There must have been a hundred pictures in his hand. It was at times like this that she wished the bank hadn’t revoked her credit cards.“But I can—”

“Forget it,” he said with a wave, surprising her.“I just hope you find your kid.”

The students were all craning toward the pile in Molly's hand, muttering and shaking their heads.

Molly held up the picture for all to view.“If any of you see this boy, please call the Ithaca police right away. Okay?”

The store turned utterly somber. A young woman nodded. Then everybody followed suit, nodding and mumbling a yeah, yes, sure, of course.

Incredibly, she found the Ruzickas. They were in the mall, up in the food court eating quickie Chinese. Spotting them from across the
central arcade, Molly's heart started pounding. Her eyes swept the immediate vicinity. There sat the parents with their little boy and their school-age daughter, the four of them hunched over their Styrofoam containers, shoveling in some stringy green mess with noodles. Just the four of them. No sign of Danny.