In Things Unseen

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  In his rush to leave the house earlier, he’d left his cell phone behind, but in his pocket was the note with Diane Edwards’s phone number that Janet had given him two days ago. Milton had forced it into Janet’s hands tonight until she’d had no choice but to make the call.

  By the time Diane Edwards arrived, accompanied by her husband and, much to Milton’s bewilderment, the reporter Michael Edwards had warned him never to speak to again, the transformation of the park was nearly complete. Only one large piece of the puzzle remained to be fitted into place.

  Milton hurried over to greet the trio as they piled out of the car, and already he could see the astonishment on all their faces.

  * * *

  No, Diane thought. No.

  “This isn’t possible,” Hope said.

  The rain had stopped, but night had come to Lakeridge Park in full. The six of them—Diane, Michael, Hope, Milton Weisman, and a man and woman Diane assumed were Milton’s daughter and her husband—had the playground all to themselves.

  “I thought I might find the boy here,” Weisman said. “That’s why I came. But instead. . . .”

  Diane pushed past him, leaving the others to follow as she closed in on the play structure, walking as if in the quicksand of a dream.

  “No,” Diane said.

  The playground was caught between two worlds: one that included an all-wooden structure and another that held only half of a brightly colored metal one.

  As she looked around, Michael and Hope doing the same, Diane made note of all the other ways the park had changed since yesterday, reverting to what it had been only five days before. The tree Weisman’s car had plowed into after running over her son was once again missing, the new water fountain that had been added in its place was back, and the plaque forged in Adrian’s memory was once more set into the grass in its usual spot, its surface slick with rain.

  Someone began to gag, and Diane turned just in time to see Michael retch into a trash receptacle, body convulsing.

  “My God,” Milton’s daughter said. “Will someone please tell us what the hell is going on?”

  Diane felt no need to answer, but Hope said, “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “No? Try me.”

  Hope shook her head, warning her: This is not the time.

  It had all been for nothing, Diane thought. All the tears, all the prayers, all the days and nights on her knees. The miracle was no more. Her son was gone and this time, he would not be coming back.

  “Why?” Michael bellowed. “What the fuck did we do?”

  Diane turned to face him. She wanted to cry but couldn’t, wondered if she would ever be able to cry again. “We didn’t do anything,” she said.

  “Then why? What was the point? If we didn’t do something to cause this—”

  “This isn’t about us, Michael. It never was.”

  Diane knew it to be true, though she didn’t know how. They all looked at her as if she’d spoken in tongues.

  “What do you mean?” Hope asked.

  “I mean that this was a test of faith, but not ours. We didn’t fail Him. She did.”

  “Laura Carrillo?”

  “The rest of us believed and kept on believing. Even you. We wouldn’t be here otherwise. But not Laura. She may believe now, like her fiancé said, but—”

  “Now it’s too late,” Michael said.

  “No,” Weisman said angrily, stepping to the center of the group. “That’s bullshit! That can’t be what happened. God wouldn’t do such a thing!”

  His daughter came to his side to take his arm. Diane had the feeling she’d never heard him talk about God this way before. “Come on, Daddy. It’s time to go home.” She glared at the others. “I don’t know who these people are or what they’ve done to you, but we’re going home right now.”

  The old man jerked his arm away. “No. Leave me alone!”

  The man Diane took for Milton’s son-in-law moved in to help his wife, but Weisman threw up his arms to ward him off. “Get away from me! Both of you.”

  “It’s over, Milton,” Michael said. “There’s no reason for you to stay. There’s no reason for any of to us stay now.” Diane recognized this voice. It was the one he had used in the months before their separation, when he’d resigned himself to his misery and become contemptuous of Diane for refusing to do the same.

  Weisman said, “I’ll leave when she leaves.” Staring at Diane, he said, “If you tell me to go, I’ll go.”

  Diane didn’t want to be responsible for him, but she understood his need to stay. Addressing his daughter, she said, “I know what this must look like to you. We all must be insane. And maybe we are. But we share something with your father that we could never fully explain to you. He’d like to stay with us here for a little while longer, and we’d like to have him stay.”

  “No. I don’t—”

  “Please. If you could give us just a few more minutes alone, I promise you he’ll be all right. And that we’ll never see or talk to him again.”

  “Why should I believe that?”

  “Because I believe it,” Weisman said.

  His daughter studied him, then glanced at her husband.

  “What about your boy?” the man asked Diane. “Did the teacher really take him like they say, or. . .?”

  “If you’re asking us if we killed our own son,” Michael said, “the answer is no.”

  There were other questions the man could have asked, but Weisman’s son-in-law, either intimidated by Michael’s tone or sympathetic to his possible loss, chose to let the matter drop. He turned to give his wife a small shrug. It was her call.

  “Ten minutes. That’s all,” she said.

  “Fifteen,” Weisman insisted.

  She gave him a hard look before allowing her husband to guide her to his car.

  * * *

  Laura had never been so afraid in her life.

  They had placed her in a holding cell and told her she would spend the night in city jail. The thought chilled her to the bone. Here in the bowels of the police station, she could hear sounds that belonged only in nightmares.

  But this was a nightmare, after all. The living, breathing, interminable kind from which there was no escape. She knew now Diane Edwards was neither crazy nor a con artist; her miracle had been exactly that. But no more. Adrian would never be found and the blame for his disappearance, or worse, would fall squarely on Laura’s shoulders. She had no defense that was credible. She had admitted stealing the child away from Yesler and could not account for his whereabouts since. She would face kidnapping charges to start and, when Adrian never turned up, possible murder charges later. And all she’d be able to say was, this was how God apparently wanted it. She had only done what the master scheme of Diane Edwards’s Heavenly Father had preordained she must.

  There would be little point in attempting to make anyone believe it, aside from receiving whatever sympathy from the court an insanity plea might buy her. Whether she relied on silence or the truth, she would be doomed. And why? What crime in all her twenty-six years on Earth had she committed to deserve the starring role in this sick, extravagant exercise of divine power? Who was she to have been chosen for such humiliation and ignominy?

  She had answered a simple question honestly: she did not believe in God.

  How that made her any different from all the millions of other atheists in the world, Laura could not fathom. She wracked her brain trying to find it, the quality of disbelief that separated her from the rest, the thing that made her uniquely worthy of all she was being made to suffer, and failed. Her only insult to God had been apathy. A quiet comfort in never needing Him to exist in order to survive and prosper.

  So she had denied Him. Why in the hell would He have cared? What difference did one grain of sand make to the caretaker of an endless beach? In the days when she
had entertained the possibility of God, the hurdle of faith she could never get past was the randomness with which He seemed to operate. It was inconceivable that a so-called loving god’s ministrations could be so haphazardly applied, to the guilty and innocent alike. But now she could see this must be precisely how God worked: not to reward those He favored or punish those He condemned, but to toy with both.

  He had given Diane and Michael Edwards their little boy back, only to snatch him away again in a fit of pique because Laura had failed to pay Him proper due. Laura did not deserve to carry that kind of guilt. She loved Adrian, and she loved children, and she loved Elliott most of all. But who could love her now in return? Would she ever be loved again?

  Lying on the hard and fetid cot in her cell, giving no thought to sleep, she closed her eyes and considered the great irony.

  She believed in God now. Oh, yes.

  God was most definitely real.

  * * *

  There was no God, Michael thought.

  He felt like a fool for having ever thought differently. What had happened to all of them—Michael, Diane and Adrian, Milton Weisman and, perhaps most of all, Laura Carrillo—may have been the work of the devil, but not God. God was a dream. God was a false hope. God was what you believed in rather than face the fact life had no meaning beyond what the vagaries of fate provided.

  The transformation of the playground was complete. The fragment of the old play structure that had been there when Michael arrived was gone, replaced in full by the new wooden one, and the only conclusion to be drawn from the exchange was clear: the clock had been turned back five days, taking Lakeridge Park—and Adrian—along with it. Michael knew that if he cared to look for them, there would be other signposts: his son’s grave, returned to its place at Forest Glade Cemetery; Michael’s apartment, no longer cluttered with Adrian’s toys and clothes; Adrian’s room in Diane’s home, once more resembling the pristine memorial to a dead child it had been one week earlier.

  And why? Because one woman had failed to believe in something Michael only barely had himself? Was he supposed to blame poor Laura Carrillo for the way this day—the second longest in his life—had ended, as Diane seemed more than willing to? If so, he didn’t have it in him. Laura Carrillo was not the villain here, and neither was God.

  Because God did not exist.

  Michael could not imagine what life would look like after this night, but he suspected the three people on the playground with him might offer some clue. Diane sat on a motionless swing, feet dragging in the sand, staring into space. Milton Weisman sat on a rain-soaked bench, waiting with the dread of a condemned man for his daughter and son-in-law to take him home.

  And Allison Hope stood alone, off to one side, her head down and eyes fixed on the spot of grass where a bronze plaque bearing Adrian’s name and face had once more taken root.

  * * *

  “I can’t believe it,” Allison said as Michael Edwards, moving like a wraith through a fog, came up beside her. “I can’t believe any of it.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you believe,” Edwards said. “It is what it is.”

  She turned to face him. He was an empty shell.

  “What will you do? How are you and your wife—how the hell are any of us supposed to go on after this?”

  Edwards shook his head. “Maybe we won’t. Maybe we won’t want to. Either way, we’ll have no say in what happens. We’ve got no say now, and we never really did. Or haven’t you figured that out yet?”

  His words stung, but she couldn’t argue with them. In the last twenty-four hours, Allison had seen all the proof she would ever need that reality was an illusion, time was elastic, and the fates of men and women were as much in their control as the stars in the heavens. Whatever power had brought Edwards’s son back to life, only to return him to his grave—the word god seemed too kind for it now—would do to them what it would.

  Edwards and Allison lapsed into silence and her attention turned to his wife, propped on a swing like a mannequin that had been posed there and forgotten. No one’s devastation could be as great as Diane Edwards’s. Her investment in the dream that was Adrian’s resurrection had been all encompassing. For eight months, she had given herself over to the unwavering faith of a disciple. And then, suddenly, God had been moved to respond. He placed her son back in her arms again, as alive as Diane was herself, and brought her husband home to both of them. To have the boy torn from her grasp again only four days later, for no offense of her own commission, had to feel like having her heart cleaved right down the middle. What else could she be thinking now, Allison mused, but that she’d been betrayed, and that no prayer she had ever offered to God had been worth the time it took to utter it?

  It was a thought so disheartening, it brought Allison to the brink of tears, the latest round of many since they’d arrived at the park. She was reminded of the crayon drawing in her purse, the portrait of a little girl Adrian had left in the backseat of his father’s car. Allison had stolen it like a common thief, as if it were something to which she was entitled, and she wondered now how she could have been so arrogant. Consumed by guilt, she reached into her bag, dug down deep to retrieve it.

  “I don’t know why I did it,” she said, handing the rumpled sheet of paper to Michael Edwards, “but I took this from your car this morning. I’m sorry.”

  Edwards took the page with some hesitation, realizing what it was almost at once. Admiring his son’s handiwork, he smiled, eyes alight, and actually laughed. “He always made the noses so small,” he said.

  Allison laughed, too. He was right. The nose on the child’s face was barely a scratch of brown above her oversized mouth.

  “I’ve seen that girl before.”

  They turned, startled. Milton Weisman was standing behind them, peering past Edwards’s right shoulder at Adrian’s drawing. His daughter and son-in-law had returned for him, and on his way to their car, the old man had stopped to see what Allison and Edwards were examining.

  “In a dream,” Weisman added.

  It was the first time Allison had heard him sound this way: ancient and tired. And maybe a little bit deranged.

  “A dream?” she asked.

  But Weisman’s daughter, as aware of the change in her father as Allison was, steered him away with her husband’s help, lest any more damage be done to him by this band of what she could only believe were certifiable lunatics.

  Weisman craned his neck to throw one last glance behind him before he was dragged out of range. “She was at his funeral. She ran away.”

  That was all he said. He was in his daughter’s car, strapped into the passenger seat, before he could add another word. Weisman’s son-in-law raced to his own car and the two vehicles sped out of the lot, approximating a movie chase scene complete with squealing, rain-soaked tires.

  “What did he mean? Were there children at Adrian’s funeral?”

  “A few,” Edwards said. “I really don’t recall. I was barely there myself.”

  “Then why—?”

  “It was a dream. He wasn’t there. After all the poor bastard’s been through, he’s entitled to be a little confused, don’t you think?” Before Allison could answer, Edwards held his son’s drawing out to her and said, “Here. You wanted this, you should have it.”

  “Me?”

  “It would just be one more thing making it impossible to let him go.” He pushed the portrait toward her. “Please.”

  Allison felt unworthy of such a gift, but the last thing Edwards needed was an argument over something trivial. She took the drawing back and willed herself to smile.

  “Thank you.”

  * * *

  Diane stood up from the swing. There was nothing more here for her to see.

  She went to her husband and said, “Let’s go home, Michael.”

  Michael and Hope looked at her with some s
urprise, and Diane thought she knew why: she wasn’t acting like the walking dead anymore. She had been, she knew it, but now she was done. She was still mired in the depths of depression, and maybe would be for the rest of her life, but she had decided to fight it, one minute at a time, to see if she could get to a place she hadn’t been in over seven years. A place where life without Adrian seemed worth living. She owed it to Michael to try.

  As for God, she would never call on Him for anything ever again. She had said her last prayer. What she had learned tonight, more than anything else, was not that He did not exist, nor that He didn’t care who lived or died, but that His will was too impenetrable to place designs upon. Why ask for miracles that were only yours to borrow, not to keep? God’s mercy was too flighty, His compassion too sporadic.

  So Diane was done with prayer. Whatever role God chose to play in her life from this day forward, He would have to do it without any entreaties from her.

  Michael took her hand, his grasp firm. This much, at least, had been salvaged from the wreckage of the last few days, and Diane was determined to hold onto it. Together, they had some chance for survival. Alone, they had none at all.

  “Your husband gave me this to keep,” Hope said, showing Diane the sheet of paper in her hand. It was a drawing that was clearly Adrian’s work, a portrait of a little black girl with pigtails that was not unlike all the other still lifes of children Adrian had loved to draw. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  For a brief moment, Diane thought she might. The impulse to cling to every last reminder of her son was compelling. But then she reconsidered. Hope had come too far on this journey with them for Diane to send her off empty-handed. Adrian had touched her life, too. Diane tendered the gift with a shake of her head.

  Minutes later, the three of them were in the writer’s car again, headed for Yesler. Diane and Michael had decided to have Hope drop them where they’d left Michael’s car that afternoon, rather than go home and leave the trip to Adrian’s school for the next day. They had no fear the police would be waiting for them there. As the absence of media outside the Bellevue police station upon their leaving had foretold, the world’s interest in their son’s disappearance was a thing of the past, just as Adrian was himself. In fact, Diane thought, it was doubtful Laura Carrillo was still being held at the police station, rather than in her bed at home, locked in fitful sleep.