What I Had Before I Had You (15 page)

We jimmy open the tall wooden gate in the privacy fence and slink around the perimeter of the house until we find a loose lock on a first-floor window in the rear. Inside, the furniture sleeps beneath clear plastic. Gourmet cooking magazines curl in their rack. There are things you wouldn't buy for your real home: white wicker footlockers and dried starfish affixed to Plexiglas and framed. The bookshelves are full of books for show: the complete works of Swift, guides to the flora and fauna of the East Coast. In the bathroom, a model Zen garden has fallen from the top of the toilet tank, sand spilled across the white tile. I step on the tiny sand rake by accident and sit on the ground massaging my heel, and when I get up, I have sand on my butt, and Jake chases me around the house, slapping it off. It feels good to be stupid for a moment.

I scan the tabletops for old mail, something with an address. The drawers of all the end tables and sideboards are locked, which makes me think that these people are a little crazy. I know how to work this kind of lock with a bent fork, but I can't find a fork in the kitchen drawers, so I open the dishwasher, and there the cutlery gleams, all the forks together, tines pointing up, all the knives together, blades down.

Jake comes to the doorway, hefting a wooden statue of a fisherman. “Fucking yuppies.”

I try the sideboard drawer with no luck: coasters, place mats, birch-bark napkin rings no doubt made by my ex-sisters at some long-ago Girl Scout camp. In the top of a bedroom closet, at the feet of two twin beds, I find a red nylon gym bag full of damp, balled-up Speedo swimsuits. I imagine Laura and Courtney swimming on their last morning, balling up their suits thoughtlessly to mildew. These are girls who can afford to replace the things they ruin. Printed on the bag is a leaping dolphin and the words:
THE FLYING DOLPHINS. 92ND
STREET Y.

They are swimmers. No wonder they could vanish beneath the surface of the ocean for so long. And more important, they are from New York City. I search the rest of the house but find no envelopes or letterhead, not even scraps in the garbage that I might tape together. At least now I know where to start.

Jake reclines on a sofa, having peeled back the plastic. I go to him and sit on his chest. He pretends to be crushed to death.

“Jake,” I say. “When do you pick up your next package from Max?”

“I don't know. Whenever I want.”

“Can it be soon?”

“Why?”

“I need to go on a trip.”

“We could go to Philly,” he says. “Let's go eat cheesesteaks and watch the Phillies lose.”

“No. New York.” My heart pumps fast at the thought of it: to end all this. To walk up to these girls, these false sisters, and shake them by the shoulders till they spit out their secrets. To see once and for all if my hand passes through them, to see if they blow away, spiraling up amid the skyscrapers of New York, my mother's city.

 

11

C
ARRIE, KANDY, AND
I retrace our steps. The boardwalk, the beach, the network of alleys behind the boardwalk shops. It is full night now, and sinister. Only the bars are open. Ocean Vista has fallen to the bums and burnouts, drunks weaving their way past the closed-up snack shops, collapsing on benches and giving up on getting up. They gape at me when I approach to ask if they've seen a little boy, their pores yawning dark, the whites of their eyes yellow as old milk. Carrie sticks by Kandy, and they trail behind me as I investigate places where I could hardly expect to find my son: second-story fire escapes, locked-gate backyards. I feel brittle and explosive, the two of them thinking what I know they're thinking.

I turn to see Kandy with her elbows on the boardwalk fence, tucking her head down and sideways to speak to my daughter over the wind, and I see her in that denim jumpsuit, sixteen years old, sticking her ass out, tossing her hair. She asked me once what even
happened
between us that summer
,
exactly
?
Which dumbfounded me. Kandy recalls her adolescence frequently and with a removed fascination, as if she is now another species, as if she is no longer responsible for the decisions she made then.
I was a hellion,
she tells her kids, and they don't believe her. I've heard that each time you remember something, the memory is rewritten by the neurons in your brain; that the memories you summon frequently are molded and smoothed—clay on the potter's wheel of your mind—while memories you leave buried can bubble up with photographic precision. This is what I think of Kandy's ability to blur the events of that summer: She thinks back casually. Whereas my memories of that summer attack only on days like today, when I am too weak to keep them out, and then they come at me with a ruthless precision.

I will never ask her the question about James. I'd rather not know. The last time I saw him was at my mother's funeral. He sat in no special seat, just somewhere in the middle of the block of folding chairs at the funeral parlor, wearing a dingy navy suit and looking like an old man, his hair gone entirely white, his legs showing their spindly shape through his suit pants. I know that toward the end, he checked on her daily, he took her on picnics. I didn't talk to him; I went out the back door to smoke after the service and stayed there until I saw his car pull out of the lot. He knew us too well. I didn't want to hear anything true that day.

AFTER COLLEGE, I
moved to Chicago. Life unfurled, never simply, but fast. Once I dried out in that cold place, I followed a boy to Austin. Though I lost interest in him quickly, I found a new world in Texas, a Martian landscape with customs comfortingly different from my own. I couldn't imagine my mother there, couldn't phrase my guilt. I loved the long drives on parched roads, the endless land, the clouds of grackles in the trees. I hiked into the woods to swim in natural pools, so small that you were never far from shore. People there were hungry, and I admired that, too. Hot meat on butcher paper, pickles, cold beer. Roosters scratching in the road. Time slowed down, people danced steps that didn't exist in other states.

I lived in an apartment on stilts in what was once a carriage house for a rich estate. I kept it very clean and decorated it minimally. I worked in the basement of a library, where I had to wear gloves to file ancient documents written in languages I couldn't read. When I brought Sam home for the first time, he asked me where was all my stuff? I rested my chin on his chest, and he lifted the hair from my eyes. This is it, I told him. This is all of it. This is me.

That was a lie, of course. I was no blank slate. But by letting Sam generate the objects and patterns of my life, I felt, again, transformed. We had such good years. He brought me a glass of water every night before bed. He was fascinated by the natural world and would read passages from
National Geographic
aloud at the breakfast table with an awe that bordered on the religious. He took us camping and knew every tree, could make incredible meals with nothing but tinfoil and matches. In Austin, I liked running into him unexpectedly when we were out on separate errands, this dark, slim, graceful man with his crisp gray pants, his leather watch, his soft, quiet mouth—and thinking,
That one's mine
. I loved to embarrass him, to bite his neck at concerts or slide my toes up his leg beneath the table at brunch and watch him get that half-pleased, admonishing look.

When Carrie was born, Sam gave up his culinary career and took a job in online marketing for a credit union. When he was younger, his parents had insisted that he earn an MBA as backup, they said, in case cooking didn't work out. He said he enjoyed his work, though he didn't talk about it much. At home, he made us four-course meals. It gave him a reason to resent his parents, to call them infrequently, and I should have realized that he would also find reasons to resent me, the bearer of expensive, dream-deferring children, the carrier of the gene that would make his son a burden. Not that I didn't give him other reasons, too.

MY CELL PHONE
rings, and it is the police. “We haven't found him,” the officer says right away. “But we wanted you to know we've got everyone out looking. Are you at your friend's house?”

“Yes,” I lie.

“We're doing our best. We've got everyone out there.”

I tell him that he said that already, and I hang up. I do not miss the look that passes between Carrie and Kandy. I don't care. When my son is found, I will get the police department a gift basket or something. It crosses my mind that I am thinking
when
instead of
if.
I am excluding the possibility of real tragedy. That is probably good for me, to stay positive. Or is it a bad thing, evidence of callousness or delusion?

When all this started, two years ago, Daniel was seven. First they diagnosed him with ADHD, like half the boys in his class, but the Ritalin multiplied everything by ten. He threw a chair at his teacher. During gym class, while pretending to be a fish as directed in some game, he went piranha and bit a little girl's arm hard enough to draw blood. She bore bruises in the shape of his teeth. Temper tantrums were nothing new, but their causes grew stranger. He began to throw hours-long bargaining fits at bedtime; he said that the floor of his bedroom was rising, and if he went to sleep, he would be squished. He lined the hens up in a row and kicked them into the back fence, but later wept and called himself an asshole over and over, and slapped his arm with a metal spoon. I had to physically lift him out of bed in the mornings and put his toothbrush in his hand before he'd move a muscle, but later in the day, he would run around the house in his Batman cape, singing, knocking picture frames off the walls.

Then he started to have the dreams. At first they sounded to me like normal anxiety dreams. We've all dreamed of being chased, tripping, falling, sitting unprepared for tests, teeth crumbling in the mouth. Daniel would appear in our bed, elbow-crawling up the middle beneath the duvet, slipping beneath Sam's heavy arm. His small pale face inches from mine, the whites of his eyes blue in the moonlight, he would incant his night's horrors. He had taken to heart the idea of exorcism—shaking his sillies out, getting things
out of his system
, and so on. It was a hopeful practice, and I miss it; now he dreams and will not tell.

He used to dream of two lions with saddles but no riders that would come tearing around corners at him, slavering. Sometimes he was at school, sometimes in a stony place he called the “castle house,” sometimes in the old red velvet Austin theater where we took him to see classic movies in the summer. The lions would bound toward him, and he would run sticky-slow, and always they would overtake him. But where my dreams always end with this, the terrible sureness of death, his would go on. He felt the teeth closing through the flesh of his arm, the snap of bone, the pop of lung, and the hot let of blood. He felt agony that he had no words to express—that I could only read in his panicked breathing as he recounted the dreams, and in his surprised look—a look of discovering too early and too viscerally what pain is possible. Whenever he dreamed of falling, he hit the ground jaw-first. Whenever he dreamed he was in a car, he knew to dread the crash, the needling shower of glass, the impact, the sight of his leg hinging bloody from the bone. Sometimes he felt a crack along the nape of his neck and curling up over his skull; he put his fingers inside and he could feel his bad thoughts, little veined knobs on his brain that he couldn't snap off without pulling up the whole veiny net, without ruining himself utterly.

Three psychiatrists in, we got the diagnosis that I already knew in my gut. His terrible visions and his spinouts, though out of proportion with my own experience, were damningly familiar. Before we got married, Sam and I had discussed the likelihood that our kids would inherit bipolar disorder. Sam said it could never matter to him. Come what may. In the hypothetical, it flattered him to be broad-minded. Anyway, to worry that our kids would be bipolar would have been to worry that they'd turn out like me, and I never would have married a man who thought of me as a worst-case scenario.

The diagnosis came ten months ago, and since then Daniel has been stuffed with antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, and a parade of complementary drugs. A drug for each side effect, and for each side effect of each side effect. Nothing has worked; what doesn't knock him out winds him up. We have rules and exercises and therapy sessions, which help, but the underlying problem is chemical, and so, too, will be the solution. Always, I hope: the next pill will bring my boy back.

KANDY PUTS HER
arm around me and rubs my shoulders. “I don't think we're going to find him this way,” she says. “Do you think he might have gotten on a bus or a train somehow? Trying to get back to Texas?”

Carrie nods vigorously. “He's done weirder stuff than that.”

“Did he have any money with him?”

I shrug. Not to my knowledge, but who knows what his father gave him in private at their parting? I can't picture Daniel buying a bus ticket, sitting alone on a bus. Even in his wildest rages, he clings to me or pushes against me. But at least it is something to do, somewhere to look.

We drive to the bus depot and wander through the little convenience store, the dark dumpstery corners of the parking lot, the bus shelter strewn with trampled pamphlets for Ocean Vista's beaches and rides. A fat man sleeps on the ground, a briefcase under his head. An announcement blares through the loudspeaker for the incoming twelve-fifteen bus from Philadelphia.

By the street lamp light I can see a pink cast to Carrie's cheeks and nose. I didn't see her apply sunblock; maybe she thinks she got away with something. As a teenager, I believed that burns would always heal, my skin always return to a pale and perfect smoothness. My shoulders now are a dark and crinkly tan, like balled paper stretched flat. That faith in regeneration and return, that childhood blindness—that was the same faith that made me careless of my mother. I thought she would always be there.

And what if Daniel
has
left me? Not secreted himself away to evaluate the length and intensity of my search but simply gotten on a bus? Again my mother looms above the skyline with her marionette crossbar and strings. It's true, I lost patience with Daniel sometimes this year. There were times when I left the house with nowhere to go, just to get clear of him, to not care for a few hours. I screamed at him, I held down his arms and legs, once I shut him in a closet when I didn't know what else to do. I tried my best, but that's not what he is thinking if he is out there somewhere on a southbound bus. He is remembering how it feels to be pinned down, to be poked and prodded and shoveled full of pills, to be told he is not the same boy he was last year but worse. Today, to have built a dragon and seen it slip into the sea—to have experienced a miracle and tried to share it with me—and to have been disbelieved.