Meanwhile, Diane continued to ask God for one thing and one thing only: that her son be returned to her, by any means necessary. Michael went from being in awe of her resolve to finding it absurd, before finally resenting Diane for it. Her tirelessness made him feel inadequate, like his love for Adrian was inferior to hers. She made him feel guilty for giving up on something only he could see was pointless.
He’d needed to get out before he lost his mind. He had to try to piece what was left of his life back together, even if he had to do it alone.
Diane had let him go with almost no argument. She had shed all the tears she could on his behalf. She claimed to love Michael still, as he did her, but she no longer wanted her invocations diluted by her husband’s increasing lack of faith. The morning he moved out, on an unseasonably cold, gray Saturday in August, she barely graced him with a glance.
They’d become little more than friends since. They spoke on the phone once or twice a month but said little of substance to each other. Sometimes Michael stopped by the house to get some mail that had been delivered there by mistake. They’d gone to dinner together once, in September, but could not bring themselves to do it again, afraid of being drawn back into a relationship that remained untenable. The subject of divorce was never broached, and they avoided the mention of Adrian at all times.
It had come as a surprise to Michael, then, when Diane called him that afternoon to ask for a meeting that night. He would have been alarmed had it not been for the sound of her voice. It rang with something he hadn’t heard from her in a very long time, something he would have taken for happiness had he thought it remotely possible. Whatever it was, it would remain a mystery until they met at the house at ten o’clock.
“Why so late?” he’d asked. He got off work at six, he could be at the house by a quarter to seven. But Diane had ignored the question and hung up without offering him a single clue as to what the hell was going on.
When she opened the door to greet him now, he nearly gasped. Neatly dressed, hair combed, a touch of makeup. And she was smiling. His first thought: She had finally crashed and burned. Reality had set in and her response was to find it funny.
“Michael. Something wonderful has happened,” she said. Not with the wide-eyed stare of a crazy woman, but with the measured delivery of someone overcome by an act of great kindness.
Before he could form a reply, Diane pulled the door all the way open and ushered him inside.
“We have to sit down. Come.” She took him by the hand and led him into the living room, where she lowered herself onto the couch and, patting the cushion beside her, urged him to do the same. He sat on the opposing easy chair instead.
“What is it, Diane?” He was already feeling the itch to cut and run.
“I need you to do something for me. I need you to keep an open mind.” She was keeping her voice down, treating the house like a movie theater that demanded their silence. “To remember the things you used to believe in before Adrian died and try—just try—to believe in them again.”
Their son’s name immediately set him on edge. “I don’t understand.”
Diane inhaled deeply. “He’s back, Michael. Our son.” Her eyes filled with tears. “He’s on our bed right now. Asleep.” She stood and started out of the room. “Come.”
Michael couldn’t move. His tongue was thick in his mouth and he was having trouble swallowing. He had feared this moment would come, certain it was the only possible outcome of his wife’s unshakable resolve to pray their son out of the grave. Now that it was here, he didn’t know how to handle it, what to say or do that wouldn’t push her farther off the edge of sanity than she had already slipped.
“Diane. . . .”
“Come. See for yourself.” She headed to the bedroom without him, leaving him no choice but to flee or obey. He chose to obey.
He found her waiting for him in the hallway at the open bedroom door. As he approached, he could see the room was dimly lit, the way it might’ve been for a child who disliked total darkness, as Adrian had. The thought of what he might find in the room terrified him. He didn’t want to know just how far gone Diane’s mind had drifted off, what kind of props she may have set up in the bed she and Michael once shared to make Adrian feel real to her again. But Michael couldn’t stop himself from going in.
He could see right away that the bed was occupied. Something or someone lay under the covers on the right side, the side that had been Michael’s. The shape wasn’t big enough to be an adult. Michael inched closer, willing himself forward against every instinct to do otherwise. He saw the side of a small face pressed into a pillow. A boy’s face. The hair above it, short and brown but unruly enough to obscure an eye, was something Michael had seen in hundreds of photographs, most of which he had taken himself. His breath caught in his chest. He stopped beside the bed and turned the head of the nightstand lamp to remove all doubt.
The next thing he knew, he was in his car.
Driving somewhere, anywhere, both hands frozen on the wheel. He didn’t know what street he was on until he checked the signs. His apartment was miles away in the opposite direction. He knew he should stop and turn around but couldn’t bring himself to do either, the impulse to run too strong to be denied.
What he’d seen at the house was a trick. An illusion manufactured by a mad woman. It had to be. He couldn’t fathom what exactly Diane had done, or how she had done it, but he wasn’t going back until he could.
His son was dead.
His son was dead.
SEVEN
MILTON TRIED FOR ALMOST two hours before giving up. Tonight, for some reason, no online search within his limited powers as a computer user would turn up a single thing pertaining to his killing of Adrian Edwards.
Stories he had viewed dozens of times, articles and postings he could find with his eyes closed, simply did not appear. It was as if the internet itself had been wiped clean of any mention of the tragedy.
Strange.
Milton went to bed cursing his luck. Tomorrow he would have to start looking for a new laptop, because the problem had to be his ancient computer. One more expense he didn’t need.
He pulled the bed covers up to his chin and fell asleep not only immediately, but more soundly than he had in a very long time. He dreamt, as he sometimes did, though not of the usual things. Tonight, he did not dream about the taste of liquor in his mouth, or the pain in his knee he no longer had. Or the wife of thirty-eight years he had finally come to miss so desperately.
Tonight, he dreamt of something he never had before.
The funeral.
It was odd because he hadn’t been there. He hadn’t dared to even consider going. And yet, here he was in his dream, in a strange Christian cemetery, standing on the wet grass far from the grave site, spying on those in attendance. From his vantage point, through a steady drizzle, he could see neither faces or the casket clearly, but he knew who the people were and whom they had come to see buried. The children left no doubt.
There were half a dozen of them, at least, dressed in black like everyone else, clinging to the skirt or pants leg of one adult or another. All were silent and motionless, until one little girl broke away and ran off, her grief too great to bear standing in one place. No one tried to stop her. She ran past Milton, almost close enough for him to touch, and didn’t stop.
Milton was about to call after her when the dream ground to a halt.
* * *
Diane did not second-guess herself. She had done the right thing.
Michael had reacted to the news of their son’s return exactly as she’d feared he might, but things could have been much worse. Had she called him to the house earlier in the evening, while Adrian was still awake, Michael’s rejection of the boy could have been devastating, for Adrian as well as Diane. Being treated like a ghoul by the man he loved most in the world would have crushed Adrian b
eyond words, and perhaps even. . . .
Diane dared not think about the perhaps.
As it was, she was gravely disappointed. She had hoped Michael would let the evidence speak for itself, encouraged by the power he once possessed to believe the unbelievable. Instead, he had fled, racing past her on his way out of the house without uttering a single word. What she had seen in his eyes, for the brief moment they had flashed in her direction, had spoken volumes. He thought she was crazy and, perhaps even more than that, dangerous.
She had called him three times in the hour since he’d left but he wasn’t answering his phone. The one voicemail message she had left for him had gone unreturned. Diane didn’t know what she would say when she reached him, but she felt compelled to keep trying. Sooner or later, Michael would have to accept what had happened, the incredible gift they’d both been given. The longer Michael lived in denial of it, the less he and Diane would appear to be deserving of it. He had to find his faith again and soon, lest God begin to question the wisdom of His blessing.
Diane finally went to bed, with her son right beside her. She would let Michael come to her.
He would have to eventually, after having laid eyes on a miracle.
EIGHT
“I’M THINKING ABOUT lying on this one,” Allison said.
“What kind of lie?”
“Well, an MFA from NYU sounds better than a BA from Chapman, doesn’t it?”
Flo gave her a look and a thin smile. “You aren’t serious.”
“No. But if I were, could you blame me? People do it all the time and get away with it. Telling the truth on these things is like playing baseball clean. It might be honorable but it’s the juicers who get paid.”
Flo shook her head and turned back to her iPad screen, leaving Allison to return her attention to her laptop. It was like this every night with the two of them now, using the time right before turning in not to talk or make love but to peck away at their individual devices, each on her side of the bed. Allison couldn’t pinpoint when exactly this drift toward indifference had started, but if she had to guess, she’d say it began just over a year ago, on the heels of her losing the last steady job she’d been able to find in ages.
Allison Hope was a journalist, which was a more dignified description than forty-one-year-old unemployed writer who once worked for a number of now-defunct newspapers. Her partner, Florence Davenport, younger by six years, was an assistant professor of environmental sciences at the University of Washington Bothell. To say the two women were on different career paths would have been to understate the obvious. Flo was thriving and Allison was barely treading water, and it had been this way going on half a decade.
When they met nine years earlier, and for the first four years of their partnership, they had been equals. Allison was a regular columnist for the Seattle Weekly, writing for both the physical paper and its online iteration, and she was shopping a first novel to agents that Flo and the only two friends Allison had trusted enough to read it thought would become an instant bestseller. Instead, the book earned her nothing but apologetic rejections from agents and editors alike, and her job at the Weekly went away, never to be replaced by anything as remotely, or consistently, lucrative. She had patched together a decent living for a while, throwing herself into the lion’s den of freelance writing, but little by little that work dried up, too, until she was left with no choice but to accept any form of employment she could get just to pay her share of the mortgage on Flo’s home.
Teaching was the most obvious fit, and she’d tried it for almost two years, working as a tenth-grade substitute for the local school district. The hours were long and the work was grueling, and sometimes she came home convinced that no battlefield in the history of man could have been as dehumanizing as her assigned campus of the moment. But teaching was an honorable profession and the challenges were often intellectually stimulating, and the money paid almost all her bills. If it wasn’t her true calling, it was at least a vocation versus a mere job, and she would have been happy to continue doing it had the state budget not gone into a death spiral last spring, taking the funds for her salary down with it.
Clerical assistant, grocery store cashier, coffee shop barista—she’d done it all since, inching her way through the writing of a second novel as she waited for something momentous to happen that might resuscitate her writing career.
It was a hope Flo had seemed willing to share without complaint in the beginning. She had thrown her lot in with a writer, with her liquid brown eyes wide open, fully aware Allison’s good times could be countered by a stretch of bad at any moment. But a year of career instability was one thing and five was another. The money was a problem, but the more serious issue for Flo lately was the growing disparity between the Allison she had fallen in love with and the one she was committed to now. The former had been vibrant and full of promise while the latter was fragile and unsure. The relationship was an experiment that, if Flo’s history was any indication, would probably not show the results necessary to keep both Flo’s libido and affections alive.
And God knew Flo was all about results. That was one of the many things about her Allison had always found attractive. What Flo wanted or needed to happen, she made and followed a plan to realize. Excuses were for losers and quitters. Allison had initially thought her race—Flo was African American—was at the heart of this killer attitude; black people, it was often said, had to work three times as hard as their white counterparts to achieve the same level of success. But Flo attributed her unremitting work ethic solely to her father, the late Reverend George B. Davenport. She had watched him toil away at the church he built from the ground up—First Glory Baptist in Atlanta, Georgia—fifteen hours a day, every day, until he keeled over and died of liver cancer at the age of sixty-one. Flo had been nine years old.
“’When the Lord wants somethin’ done, the fool asks why while the wise man’s figurin’ out how,’” Flo liked to say, repeating a lesson the reverend had instilled in her as indelibly as his own DNA.
Allison was confident her partner didn’t consider her a fool, at least not yet, but Flo was losing faith fast that Allison could ever again be confused for someone wise.
Such was the sorry state of their love tonight, two people moving toward disparate ends of the universe despite sitting only inches apart. Neither wanted to call it quits, but only one believed they weren’t delaying the inevitable. Allison was still in love, helplessly so, and losing Flo was no more an option for her than walking into the sea. She understood Flo’s unhappiness, her diminishing respect for a partner so prone to failure, but Allison continued to embrace the hope she could turn things around by reclaiming her best self. Land a permanent job, write something she couldn’t help but sell, put some real money into their joint checking account, and give them both reason to expect she could go on doing so for a long time.
It was what Allison prayed for every day.
Her faith in God wasn’t much, just the detritus left behind by a lifetime of spiritual hunting and pecking, but it was more than Flo had. The reverend’s daughter had grown up to be a woman beholden only to science, as proudly closed to the idea of a divine being as it was possible for any atheist to be. Allison knew all of her praying served no purpose other than to give Flo one more reason to question their relationship.
Allison kept on praying anyway.
“Wow. That’s crazy,” Flo said now.
“What’s crazy?”
Her eyes still on her tablet, Flo said, “This Facebook friend of a friend—Betty Marx, she’s apparently a vice principal at some elementary school here in Seattle—just posted about something that happened on campus today.”
“Okay.”
“Well, she says this young second-grade teacher just went nuts in her classroom this morning. Broke down in complete hysterics over this student she claims—get this—has been dead for eight months.”
“I said it was crazy. But Marx says the teacher was insistent. She told everyone the boy died in a car accident last March, she was able to describe where it all happened and how. She even claimed to have attended the child’s funeral with everyone else on the school staff, including Marx herself. Naturally, they all say they have no idea what this poor woman’s talking about.”
“Can I see?”
Allison took the iPad, scanned the Facebook post and most of the comments. It was just as her partner had said.
“Henry Yesler Elementary. Do you believe her?”
“Marx? Well, I don’t know her personally. She’s a friend of a friend, like I said, and she’s a bit of a gossip, to be sure.” Flo took the tablet back, not bothering to ask if Allison was done with it. “But why would anyone make up such an outrageous story if it weren’t true?”
“I don’t know. I just. . .” Allison shrugged. “What could have made this teacher go off like that?”
“In a word?” Flo laughed. “Drugs. Psychotropics. What some kids drive a teacher to do these days just to keep from wringing their necks. What, have you forgotten so soon?”
She was talking about Allison’s four-month stint at Franklin High, when she’d come home from school some nights and smoke half a key in front of something dead-stupid on television lest she go insane.
“Yeah, but those were high school kids,” Allison said. “This lady teaches the second grade. How bad can that be?”
“Bad enough, apparently. Sounds like she scared those poor children to death.”
In Things Unseen Page 4
