Set You Free

by Jeff Ross

  Tweeted, Facebooked, texted to an inner circle. No picture, though, so POINH, Amanda something. My word against yours.

  “Which park did you take Benjamin to?” Detective Evans says.

  “The one off Helpern.” We’re back on the street and moving swiftly around the few early-Sunday vehicles.

  “Tell me about him.”

  “Benny?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, he’s five,” I say, taking a first squishy bite of the egg sandwich. “He’s—”

  “I know that stuff. He’s five, weighs sixty-five pounds. Hair brown, eyes brown, last seen wearing Thomas the Tank Engine pajamas. I got all that. But what is he like?”

  “He’s a good kid. A lot of fun. He’s interested in everything. He’s always asking questions, trying to figure the world out.”

  Detective Evans takes a gulp of her coffee. As she’s putting the cup back in its holder, she says, “You’re seventeen, right?”

  “My birthday was last week.” I think about the party. It wasn’t thrown for me specifically, but some people did bring my favorite drink. And every so often someone would say something like, “Shit, today’s your birthday. That’s awesome.” Stacy got me a giant stuffed penguin named Wobbles. It has these giant, perfectly round eyes, and I carried it around all night, telling everyone how Wobbles was my best friend ever.

  “I don’t mean to be insulting, but I don’t see a lot of seventeen-year-old babysitters.”

  “I don’t sit for anyone else. I’ve been with Benny since he was one, and it’d be too hard to just never see him again.”

  “So you’ve known the family awhile?”

  “Mostly Erin. Jack, well, like I said before, he’s busy.”

  Detective Evans says, “A mayor never has a nine-to-five job. Jack’s been known to attend three events a night. It’s a very difficult career.”

  She sounds impressed. I’ve always thought it is crappy for Ben to not have his dad around. It’s like you enter politics and your life is no longer your own. You belong to the people, unless, of course, those people are your own family.

  “I usually take Benny out,” I say. “If it’s raining, we go to one of the indoor playgrounds or the library or—”

  “What does he like to do?” Detective Evans interrupts.

  “I guess what any five-year-old does? He likes the play structure at the park and the swings. We read a lot of books. The Beyblades thing. He just started biking. I think he could get his training wheels off, but Erin’s waiting until his dad is around to do that.”

  “Training wheels is a dad thing for sure. My dad taught me to ride a bike.”

  “My dad thought it was a better idea to send us out without training wheels and see what happened,” I say, immediately wondering why I’m telling her anything about my life. I decide to shut up and look out the window while testing how much coffee I can keep down. Eventually, we pull to the curb by the park.

  “How long were you here yesterday?” Detective Evans asks.

  “Almost two hours.”

  She gets out of the car and I follow, bringing my coffee with me. I reach back in to grab a piece of bacon. I want to feel better. If not better, at least different.

  “A couple of uniforms have already been here and didn’t see him,” she says, putting her sunglasses on. “Is there anywhere he might hide?”

  “I never let him out of my sight. I go wherever he goes. But he still likes to try and hide on me.”

  “Show me.”

  The park is immense. Three play structures, a soccer field, basketball courts, even a little skate park. All of this is bordered by trees and zigzagging trails.

  We crawl around the play structure, calling Ben’s name. There are plenty of places to hide here. I can remember hiding in them myself when I was a kid. My brother, Tom, and I spent hours here exploring the woods. Neither of us had a lot of friends back then. We just clung to one another. Especially after the divorce.

  “Benny!” I yell. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

  The coffee is not sitting well. It’s sloshing around in my stomach and thickening with the soggy sandwich and bacon. My brain feels as if it has been dropped into a carbonated drink.

  “What about the woods?” Detective Evans asks.

  “We go back there sometimes,” I say, happy for the opportunity to not be crawling around in the sand. “The neighborhood kids build forts by the creek.”

  We take a well-worn path through the trees. At the bottom of the ravine, next to the creek, there are three forts made from broken branches, bits of plywood and old blankets and tarps. There’s a massive tree beside them with boards nailed into its trunk. I climbed to the lowest branch with Benny a week ago. Once we made it there and settled comfortably on the branch, he got freaked out and wanted back down.

  Detective Evans pulls a tarp from one of the rickety structures, and something scoots into the undergrowth. I lift the tarp roof from the next one and come nose to nose with a grisly, dirty face. I scream and jump back as a man emerges with a battered sleeping bag wrapped around his shoulders. He’s coughing into his arm but keeping his eyes on me.

  “Morning,” Detective Evans calls, quickly covering the distance to stand in front of me. The man nods. “You been here all night?”

  He coughs a couple more times and says, “Maybe.”

  “We’re looking for a kid. A little boy.” She takes a step forward and removes the tarp from the entrance to the fort. Detective Evans has a photo of Ben on her cell phone, and she holds it up in front of the man. “Seen him?”

  As he squints at the screen, I look inside the fort. There are a couple of empty bottles and an empty KFC bucket.

  “Nope,” he says, eyeing Detective Evans’s coffee.

  “Would you like this? I’ve only had a sip or two.”

  The man reaches out and takes the cup. He puts it to his lips and closes his eyes. He smiles as he brings the cup away. “I love that feeling of the burning coffee on the lips and tongue. Makes you feel alive.”

  “It does,” Detective Evans says.

  Every time the man moves, I get a fresh waft of his odor.

  “Do you stay here often?” Detective Evans asks.

  “It’s the suburbs, lady. People don’t like people in the suburbs.”

  “Why are you here now?”

  “Took the wrong bus,” the guy says. He laughs, the effort turning into another coughing fit.

  “But you’ve been here before?”

  “Sure. It’s peaceful. Sometimes it’s nice to get away from the crowds, you know. I only come once it’s dark, and I don’t bother no kids. I’m usually gone by first light.”

  Detective Evans looks through the canopy at the sun. “Bit late, then, isn’t it?”

  “Church day,” he says. “All the little ones ’round here are good Christians.” He looks at me, probably trying to figure out what my role is in all of this.

  “Listen, you should go to the shelter downtown,” Detective Evans says. “It’s a better place to stay. A nice bed rather than the cold ground.”

  “They kicked me out of the shelter last month for no goddamn reason.”

  “Here.” She pulls a card and pen from her breast pocket, writes something on the back and hands the card to the man. “Take this to Peter, who runs the shelter. He knows me. Behave yourself and you’ll have a good place to stay.”

  “Huh,” the guy says with absolutely no feeling. “A cop.”

  “And I’d suggest you clear out of here
before any kids are around. Right? You’d have the whole neighborhood up in arms if someone found you sleeping down here. You know how it is.”

  “I’m not hurting no one.”

  “I know it. But still.” Detective Evans turns to me and puts a hand on my elbow. “See anything?”

  The guy looks at me, waiting. I shake my head no.

  “Okay. Let’s head back.” She gives the man a nod, and we clamber up the hill.

  Some kids are on their way to the play structure, screaming and waving their arms, with their zombie parents trailing behind. There’s a rustle of activity from the parents as they watch us clear the rise of the hill.

  “That scare you?” Detective Evans asks once we’re out in the sunlight.

  “Not really,” I lie. My heart is pounding. At least the jolt of adrenaline has momentarily lessened the headache.

  “It’d be good if we could tag these kids,” Detective Evans says as we cross the sand of the playground. The little kids have made it to the structure and are swinging and climbing as all kids do. A great mess of motion on the metal bars and plastic slides. The parents watch us as we close in on the cruiser.

  “Tag?” I say.

  “Yeah, like we do dogs and cats. Put a GPS in them. Then a kid goes missing, no worries—there’s an app for that. Find him with your phone.”

  I don’t respond. I can sense Detective Evans waiting for me to say something.

  “I know,” she says. “Nineteen Eighty-Four. Big Brother. Government spying. Privacy rights and all that. But if Benjamin had been tagged? We wouldn’t be out here right now.”

  FOUR

  Back in the cruiser, Detective Evans calls someone and berates them for their less-than-thorough search of the playground.

  “A homeless guy came out of one of the kids’ forts, Sean,” she says. She listens for a moment while I wish I could put the window down. The engine is off, and with all the windows up, the heat is becoming unbearable. “Someone needs to talk to them. I don’t care if it was the end of their shift. The mayor’s son is missing. They obviously didn’t do their job. How are we to know if they even got out of the cruiser?” There’s a pause before she says, “Fine. Yes,” and drops the phone into the cup holder where her coffee had been.

  She starts the engine. “Where to now?”

  Both windows descend, and blissfully cool air blows onto my skin. “The Dairy Queen.”

  “Which one?”

  “Strondmount,” I say.

  “You went straight from there to here?” she asks.

  “We finished our cones on the picnic table there.”

  She puts the windows back up and shuts the engine down.

  “Let’s walk it,” she says. We watch as the homeless guy comes out of the woods. The zombie parents all sipping coffee from giant insulated mugs pretend he isn’t there as he limps across the fresh grass to the road.

  “What about before that?” Detective Evans asks.

  “We were at the toy store down on Main. I forget the name of it.”

  “Loose Marbles,” she says.

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “Don’t sound so surprised. I know kids. I have two of my own. They go to Leslie Public School, just like I did.” She gets out of the cruiser.

  I set my phone down on the seat and gather up what’s left of the breakfast sandwich and coffee. I have to shuffle the sandwich and the coffee around in order to open the door. As I slip out of the car, my stomach gives me another jolt.

  “Did you take the path or the sidewalk?”

  “The path,” I say, shutting the car door and burping into a fist. “How old are your kids?”

  “Twelve and ten. A boy and a girl.”

  “They at home?”

  “At home with their dad. He pulls solo weekend duty when something like this happens.”

  I sip my coffee, wondering which way this walk is going to push my insides now that the day is becoming warmer. I’ve found that sometimes the fresh air calms my stomach down but other times gets everything rumbling and angry.

  She points to the fork in the trail. “Left or right?”

  “Left,” I say. The right trail cuts close to the street. The left goes through the woods. Benny and I always go through the woods. My stomach heaves. The headache is rearing up again. I’m getting the pasties as well. I close my eyes for a moment against the sun and push at my glasses.

  “How long does this walk normally take?” Detective Evans asks.

  “From the Dairy Queen?” I try to think, but my brain is not functioning as it should. “Maybe fifteen minutes? Ben likes to go into the woods, then come back out and try to scare me.”

  “Fifteen. Okay. What is it, maybe eight, ten minutes otherwise?”

  “I guess.”

  “Anywhere along here he could be hiding? The backyard of a house? Maybe down near the ravine?”

  “No, it’s nothing but forest back there. Honestly, Ben’s a little afraid of the woods when it comes right down to it.”

  Detective Evans pulls out a pack of gum and offers me a piece.

  “Thanks,” I say. Chewing often calms me down. It might even settle my stomach a bit.

  “So tell me, what is Benjamin’s favorite thing in the world?” Detective Evans asks as she cuts over to a garbage can and drops the empty wrappers in.

  I don’t even have to think about it. “His mother.”

  It’s a magical connection. They light up when they see one another. I see other kids at the playground disrespecting their parents. Yelling at them, demanding things and getting angry. But that never happens with Ben and Erin. They disagree now and then, but Ben takes it almost like an adult.

  You can reason with him.

  Take yesterday. Erin had just come from volunteering. Her father died when she was young, and she has no siblings, so when her mom died she was left entirely alone, in the sense that no one else understood the world she grew up in. So as much as she enjoys volunteering, feeling close to her mother again, it also leaves her tired and sad.

  But still, when she came across the park and saw Ben, she lit up. It was as if the rest of the day had simply washed away.

  “Really?” Detective Evans says. “His mom?”

  “Yeah. He’s a kid, so he’s into games and toys and all that. He loves Star Wars and pretends to battle things with imaginary light sabers. But there’s nothing he loves more than his mother.”

  “Really?” Detective Evans says again.

  “Really.”

  “My kids…” she says, trailing off. “Paul is great in his way. Emma is…” She stops speaking, and we walk in silence until we reach the Dairy Queen, which, since it’s Sunday morning, is closed. We go around to the back, and Detective Evans moves some boxes from beside a Dumpster.

  Stale cones.

  Moldy buns.

  Empty drink containers.

  No Ben.

  But the smell! “You don’t really think he’d be here, do you?” I say, staring at the garbage and trying not to breathe.

  “We have to check everywhere,” Detective Evans says. “You’d be surprised where we’ve found kids.” She brushes her hands together. “Where were you before this?”

  I back away from the stench in search of fresh air. “On the playground at the junior school.”

  “And before that?”

  “Like I said, that Loose Marbles place.”

  Detective Evans looks at her phone again, swipes the screen, t
hen puts it away. “Can you think of anywhere he might have gone? Not just from yesterday, but from any of the other days you’ve been with him. Some place he’s talked about?”

  “No, this is our route. Sometimes we go to a movie, but the rest of the time it’s this park, the Dairy Queen, the toy store and the school.”

  Detective Evans looks around as if she might spot Ben sitting on a bench or strolling down the street.

  “How do these things normally turn out?” I ask.

  She doesn’t stop to think. “You have three options. One, the kid ran off. There’s usually a good reason for that. And some warning. And most likely he or she’ll come back on his or her own. But five is pretty young for running away. And from what you’re telling me, Benjamin isn’t the most independent of kids. Plus, with him and his mom being like they are? I don’t see it. Two, one of the parents has taken the kid. There’s some kind of abuse going on in the home, or you’re looking at a divorce and one of the parents feels like they’ll lose the child, so away they go. But I don’t see that either. Do you?”

  “What?” I say. I’m trying to put as much distance between myself and the stink of garbage as possible.

  “Have you seen abuse or anything with Benjamin?”

  “From Jack?”

  “Or Erin.”

  “No. Not at all. They’re like…” I stare at the ground. “They’re perfect.”

  “No family is perfect.”

  “They seem as close as you can get,” I say.

  “Well, they’re both sitting home worried sick. When a parent takes a kid, they’re gone in the middle of the night. Not at home calling the police.”

  “What’s the third option?”

  Detective Evans wrinkles her nose as she puts her sunglasses on. “Abduction. Someone watching the kid who decides, for whatever reason, to take him.” I can see myself in her sunglasses when she turns toward me. “Benjamin’s room is on the ground floor,” she says.

  “You don’t think that’s what happened,” I say.