As the immensity of Michael’s absence settled into Amanda, she began to cry. And as she wept, she managed to say many of the things Olivia and I had been thinking but would not say.
“What if someone takes him?” she said. “What if they kill him?”
“He just needs a little time out,” I said.
“But you must never do this,” added Olivia.
“I know. But what if?”
“What if what, sweetie?” I said. I heard my voice; it sounded so reasonable, that baritonal calm.
“What if someone hurts him? What if he’s crying for help and we can’t even hear him?”
By now, Olivia had walked around the table and scooped Amanda off my lap and held her close. In some way too vague to mention (then) but real enough to sting, I felt she was rescuing her from me.
By noon, I was aching with sleeplessness; my undreamed dreams seemed to have turned to flu. Waiting was intolerable—we had to do something—so we got into the car, this time with Amanda, whom we could not decently leave on her own, no matter how we wanted to shield her from our predicament, and began again to look for Michael. It was hopeless, and we knew it. For every road we turned down, we passed ten without turning. If he was running from us, he would be able to spot our car well before we spotted him, and he might hide. If he had found a place to sleep, then he was hidden from us. If he had left Leyden, gone to New York, or hitchhiked in whatever direction the first driver was heading, then we certainly had no chance of finding him. If he was injured, a hospital might call. If he was dead, we would hear from the police, once the body was recovered.
I did not believe he was dead; but the possibility of it, or, really, the impossibility of completely ruling it out, assaulted me. I felt his absence as a kind of wanton violence against me. I felt what he was doing was unforgivable. Yet I had been a runner, too. Many times, growing up, I had shot out of the house and stayed at a friend’s apartment, or slept on the subway, or just walked the streets, catching catnaps on park benches, or with my head down on the counter of a Chock Full o’ Nuts. (Nabokov was right and Tolstoy wrong: all unhappy families are alike.) I had survived these times on my own and had not even been aware of any particular danger.
“Go on Maple Street,” said Amanda, pointing to a block of modest, stocky frame houses.
“Why? Do you see him?”
“No, just…I don’t know.”
“Does Michael have a friend on this street?” Olivia asked, as I made the turn.
“I just have a feeling,” said Amanda.
My heart swelled with extravagant, idiotic hope. “A feeling?” said Olivia; and though I did not want to see her expression, I could tell from the sound of her voice that she, too, was lending particular credence to our daughter’s pointing us in a direction, any direction. It was our first lead. And even as I went from one end of Maple to the other, and then turned around and patrolled it a second time, though there was nothing we could have failed to see the first time, even then it seemed as if we might actually find him.
“Then how about…whatchamacallit? Where the school is?” said Amanda.
“Livingston?” said Olivia.
“Yeah. Livingston. Let’s go to Livingston and look for him.”
“Are you just saying whatever pops into your mind, or is this based on something?” I asked.
My daughter looked at me, visibly hurt by my tone. Add it to the list: ambivalent, unfaithful, verbally abusive.
When we finally arrived back home, Michael’s voice was waiting for us on our PhoneMate answering machine. “The beep’s a little long. Are you clearing your old messages? Anyhow, it’s me.” (A pause, background sounds of wind, a passing truck—he was obviously calling from a phone booth.) “I’m okay. Sorry for…well, you know. Things aren’t right for me and I’m just going to figure stuff out. I need a little time. I’m okay. I’m completely safe. Okay? So don’t worry. I’ll make up the schoolwork when I get back. I realize I’ll be grounded or punished in some other way, but that’s cool.” (Another truck went by, downshifting. I wondered if some computer analysis of the noise could determine exactly where a road was graded in a way that would cause a truck to downshift in close proximity to a phone booth.) “Maybe I’ll call later so you can realize I’m saying this stuff on my own and there’s no one putting a gun to my head or something.”
We played the message over and over, with Mandy standing to one side, wondering, isolated, afraid. And then, while we played it for the fifth or sixth time, the phone rang and I grabbed it quickly, not wanting to give Michael a chance for second thoughts.
However, it was my agent, Graham Davis, on the line.
“It’s me again,” he announced, like a kid, expecting his voice to be instantly recognized.
“Hello, Graham,” I said, with a roll of the eyes toward Olivia, She sighed, put her arm around Amanda, led her out of the room—as if I were about to embark on something obscene.
“This is an awkward time,” I said. “I’ve got family problems.”
“Oh,” said Graham. “I’m sorry.”
There was a long silence, and finally he waited me out and I asked, “Well, what was it you wanted?”
“It’s not what I want, Sam. It’s what Ezra Pointy-Head Poindexter wants. It’s all this incredible mania about Visitors from Above. They got orders for fifteen thousand copies.”
I sat down on the steps leading to the bedrooms.
“This is just yesterday, Sam. Not grand total—one-day sales.”
Amanda and Olivia emerged from the kitchen and walked around me, mounting the stairs with delicate, almost inaudible steps. Where are you going? I asked with my eyes. “Bath,” Olivia mouthed. I nodded, but something felt wrong. Like anyone with a guilty conscience, I was beginning to refer everything to myself and my shitty little secrets; I could not help thinking that this midday bathing was somehow associated, even if only unconsciously, with a feeling of there being something unclean in me.
“That’s great, Graham,” I said. “That’s a lot of books.”
“Understatement. It’s fucking marvelous, is what it is. May I tell you something in absolute confidence, and please even under pain of death not to repeat it?”
“I may crack before they actually kill me, but I’ll try not to.”
“I’ve never represented a book that’s sold fifteen thousand copies in a single day, not in my entire career.” He said this as if he were a dying man confessing he had never known love.
“It’s not been such a long career, Graham. You’re younger than I am.”
“I mean, fucking hell, even at that somewhat reduced royalty we took—which I think was the right way to go, by the way, and I hope you’re not annoyed, but, you know, given past performances and all that—but even at five percent royalty, we made $14,212.50 yesterday.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“Great, fantastic, wow.”
“I must say, I thought you’d be more pleased. Those family problems must be grim.”
“Yes, I guess so. But I am happy about the money. It’s the stupidest book I’ve ever written, but at least now I’ll be able—”
“Oh, don’t say that. I think it’s extremely professional and much of it is fascinating. I was just looking through it before ringing you.”
Right, I thought, and probably for the first time, too.
I felt something crashing within me, like a chair banging down in the next room. Michael.
“Anyhow,” Graham was saying, “the thing is, Ezra feels we have to respond to this sudden flurry of sales. He says we need a plan, and of course he’s dead right. I’ve been telling him this for weeks.”
“God, Graham,” I said, “maybe this is it. Maybe this book can actually make some money, some real fucking money, and I can put this whole nightmare behind me and do what I meant to do.”
“What you meant to do?” asked Graham, forgetting for the moment that I still considered myself a real writer.
>
“Write novels—write things that are real.”
“Yes,” he said, back on track, “exactly. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? I understand how you feel, I truly do. That’s why I’ve been telling Ezra Pointy-Head Poindexter we need a plan of action. That’s why we need you.”
“Me?”
“In Ezra’s office, eleven tomorrow morning.”
“Do I really need to be there? I don’t think I can.”
“Please, Sam. Don’t give me a nervous breakdown. It would be an unmitigated disaster if you weren’t there. Ezra’s talking about putting tens of thousands of dollars behind your book, and you need to be there.”
“You need John Retcliffe, not me.”
“Listen, Sam, for the next few weeks you are John Retcliffe. Come on, it won’t be so bad.”
“I can’t.”
“You have to. We’ll get you in and out of there quickly. I promise.”
“Graham…”
He knew I was getting ready to say yes, just the way I said his name; it was like “Be gentle with me.”
“Sam,” he said, “if you fail to capitalize on this opportunity, you’ll hate yourself for the rest of your life. How many chances like this are going to come along? If this thing continues to grow, you could be set financially for years, maybe for the rest of your life. Meet me in my office and we’ll walk over together.”
I heard the water thundering into the tub upstairs, thought of my wife and daughter in the bathroom as it slowly filled with steam.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be there, but I have to make it quick.”
I hung up but continued to sit on the steps with the telephone on my lap. I expected Michael to call. Perhaps the planets had just lined up in my favor, as the universe turned in a circle like a vast combination lock. He would call, say he was on his way home; I would be free to go. But the phone remained a silent weight on my legs, and finally I got up, put it back on its spindly little table, and proceeded to my study off the kitchen.
Was it just because I thought I might become rich, or was there some other reason that I chose that moment to finally do what I should have done months before? I gathered Nadia’s letters into a bunch, resisted the impulse to read them a final time, to savor them. Tearing them to shreds as I left the house, I got into my car and drove to town, more or less looking for Michael as I went. Once in town, I deposited bits of Nadia’s letters in various public trash barrels, so it would have taken a genius of paranoia and detection to ever piece them together again.
There, I said to myself, driving back to the old homestead on Red Schoolhouse Road. Done with it. I felt such a surge of happiness and accomplishment that I forgot for a moment that my son was still out there.
CHAPTER
6
MONDAY MORNING OLIVIA DROVE SAM TO THE train station. It was raining and the wind blew; a cold mist joined heaven and earth. The Leyden train station was rudimentary: a little brick warming house where tickets and magazines were sold, and a covered staircase leading down to a wooden platform badly in need of paint, where every two or three hours a train came down from Albany or Niagara Falls on the way to Manhattan.
As Olivia pulled into the little parking lot, Sam rubbed a porthole into the steamy window and looked out.
“Is the train coming?” Olivia asked.
“Not yet. What if he took the train to New York?” Sam asked.
“I know. I called everyone we know there.”
“So now they know, too.” Sam closed his eyes, rubbed his forehead. “Fine. Who gives a shit?”
“Sam. It doesn’t matter.”
“I just wanted everyone to think we moved to the country and everything was great.”
“It’s hard to keep secrets when everything is falling apart.”
“Right. That’s the incentive for keeping your life running neatly. Look, I don’t care what you tell our friends. Just—” He stopped, looked away.
She didn’t really want to know what it was he didn’t want her to say. She was tired of bearing the burden of his feelings. He kept on coming up with new ones anyhow, and they were so various and so strong they didn’t seem altogether real to Olivia, whose character was more stoical. When she read about marriages in the magazines, it seemed she was the man and Sam was the woman: it was he who clamored for more and more communication, constant contact, reassurance, and she who often wanted privacy, silence, just to be left alone. Anyhow, when Sam wanted to say something, there was no need to coax it out of him; in fact, he would say it whether or not she wanted him to.
He turned toward her, his face a mask of utter vulnerability. “Just don’t tell anyone I only have a medium-sized penis.”
She began to laugh, and Sam, pleased to have amused her, laughed, too. He was delighted; he was vindicated. It sometimes seemed to her he would say anything for a reaction. And the more she resisted giving him his reaction, the more thrilled he was to achieve it.
“I wish you weren’t going,” Olivia said, turning off the windshield wipers. Rain sheeted the window like melting silver.
“I’ll be back. Tonight.”
“Just the look on Amanda’s face when we dropped her at school…Too much is going on.”
“I know. But there’s not an awful lot I can do here anyhow. I just keep driving around.”
“He’s out there. Somewhere.”
“At least we know he’s all right.”
“Do we?”
“He’s calling. He’ll call again.”
Sam had the impatience of the one who is leaving and she was stuck with the slightly shaming recalcitrance of the one who stays behind.
The train appeared, waving its plume of smoke, its whistle howling through the early-morning gloom.
Sam reached in the backseat and grabbed his briefcase, a birthday present from Olivia ten years ago. She was so convinced he would sense its extravagant expense and return it that she paid an extra fifty bucks and had his initials burned into the leather. Today, it was filled with a little umbrella, a copy of Cioran’s The Temptation to Exist, which Sam began three years ago and forgot to finish, a copy of Newsweek, in case the existentialism didn’t hold his attention, and a roll of antacid tablets.
“I’ll call you,” he said, kissing her. His breath smelled of toothpaste and coffee.
“You are coming home tonight, aren’t you?”
“Of course. But I’ll tell you which train. Help Amanda with her spelling words, okay? She needs the whole week to get them right.”
With this final gesture toward fatherhood, he bounded out of the Subaru. He wore gray slacks, a slightly linty blazer. Olivia momentarily wished she was one of those women who take good care of people. She watched him go, with his briefcase slapping him like a saddle bag against a pony. It was so strange, so unexpectedly moving to now and again spy the surviving boy within him. When, sixteen years ago, she surprised him with the news of her pregnancy, she told Sam (trying to make it up to him, unfortunately) that now he would always have someone to play with—he had already exhausted her appetite for board games and long walks, his antic jokes were as frightening as they were funny, and his early-morning high spirits were appalling. But it had not worked out like that. The children were not proper playmates for Sam; they were more like her. Victory left them cold, defeat insulted them, and the rules to games seemed arbitrary, exhausting. If she and Sam ever shared an old age, he would certainly add this to his litany of complaints, this failure on her part to give him amusing kids. He had no one to play catch with, no reason to join a gym, no excuse to visit the sporting goods shops for high-tech Frisbees, dart boards, tents. Once, trying to whip the family into enthusiasm for a dog, Sam placed an empty economy-sized mayonnaise jar on the table, asking them to drop their spare change in, with the plan being the adoption of a dog from the Humane Society, paying for its neutering, shots, upkeep. But only Sam dropped his quarters in; the others forgot, weren’t really that keen about a dog in the first place. No: actually, A
manda tried to help, too—with pennies she had painted with red nail polish so Lincoln looked like Lenin. Sam was so discouraged by his family’s lackluster response to his scheme that he emptied the jar into an old Yankees cap and bought himself an atlas. “You used Mandy’s pennies,” Olivia had scolded him, regretting it as she did but holding her shaky ground nonetheless.
She waited in the parking lot until the train pulled away. She listened to the car’s guttural idle. Her hands gripped the steering wheel. Her heart beat in a strange way that was at once annoying and frightening; the beat did not seem to come from its center but from the side.
Olivia steered the car out of the parking lot and headed back toward town. Daffodils pushed their way toward the huge slate sky. One of the town’s few surviving farms had its Holsteins out to pasture; the newborn calves watched their mothers chew fresh shoots of grass. Olivia stared at the cows, the blue enamel silos, the old fences in need of repair, a long giant willow spreading its hazy yellow branches over a pond. Lost in reverie for a moment, she gasped, suddenly realizing she wasn’t looking at the road. She yanked the car to the right as a school bus shot past. It was filled with boys from the Cardinal Morgan School, neurologically impaired welfare kids, with their faces pressed against the smudged windows, calling out to her.
She pulled to the side of the road, suddenly needing to catch her breath. Even in duress, her life was tinged by the miasma of déjà vu. She was one of those people whose life had assumed the qualities, shape, and dimensions she had always more or less expected. There was something endlessly unsurprising about her life. She had once tried to explain this to Sam. “Nothing really surprises me,” she said. “A weather report or a knock-knock joke surprises me more than my own life.” He had looked at her balefully, as if this might mean she did not adore him. He could not understand that this was not about him.
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