In Things Unseen

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  After a ride that was silent and swift, they rolled into Yesler’s parking lot, where Michael’s Acura sat in the dark lot alone. Hope mumbled a faint condolence by way of farewell, and Diane and her husband piled out of the car, too spent to do anything more than nod in return.

  Hope was still sitting there in the lot, watching, as they drove off for home.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THEY WOULDN’T TAKE HIM HOME, so Milton ended up at Janet’s. Her eyes and Alan’s were never off him for a minute. Lisa had joined them for dinner, as if no suicide watch was complete without at least three people on duty at all times.

  The good news was, they weren’t hounding him with questions. They were just studying him closely and attending to his every need, having squirreled away every ounce of wine and liquor in the house.

  He knew what they had planned for him. All the questions they were hesitant to ask now would be posed by doctors later, one after another, until it was decided where he should live the rest of his life and under whose care. Because he certainly couldn’t live in his own place alone anymore.

  He had destroyed his computer because it wouldn’t google results for an event that had never happened. He had become convinced he’d killed a little boy who, until this morning, had been very much alive and, hopefully, remained so. He had talked about God when he’d never before had the slightest interest in His existence, and he’d become involved with people whose own sanity and motives seemed questionable at best. Tonight, he had wandered around Lakeridge Park with the wide-eyed horror of a man who could see things no one else could, and he’d left mumbling about a dream he’d had of a little black girl he had no reason to know, running through a cemetery he almost certainly had never visited.

  And now, he was saying almost nothing at all, offering them no resistance, moving like a sleepwalker who might never wake.

  Of course they were afraid for him. But not nearly as afraid as he was for himself. Because Milton couldn’t help thinking they had to be right, that the only explanation for all he had done and said was the most logical one: he was crazy. Something had happened to him on Tuesday, something he couldn’t recall or lacked the insight to pinpoint, and it had broken his hold on reality.

  And yet. . . .

  He didn’t want to believe it. He preferred to believe in the impossible, the alternate reality that, for a brief moment in time, had given him reason to hope life was not entirely without meaning, that every man, woman, and child ever born was not at the mercy of chance and chance alone. Something was in control, its name didn’t matter, and sometimes it could be moved to make incredible things happen. Beautiful, merciful, inexplicable things.

  Miracles.

  But Milton was tired.

  He had tried so hard to do his part in keeping Diane Edwards’s miracle whole, and it hadn’t been enough. Little by little, in the space of one day, things had come apart at the seams, for reasons Milton still didn’t fully understand, and now there was nothing left but his fading memories of them. Adrian Edwards was back in his grave, and Milton was once more the old fool who had put him there.

  Tomorrow, his daughters and Alan would remember things exactly that way. Milton was sure of it. History would have completed the counterclockwise run it had started tonight, until all was as it had been last week, when neither Janet nor Lisa had looked at him strangely for talking about the little boy he had killed. They would recall the boy, too, and share their father’s shame for having taken his life.

  So Milton let them plot his future, bandying the names of doctors and psychiatric hospitals about. None of it would come to pass, because in hours, they would no longer think him insane. Life for all of them would be back to “normal”: ordinary, predictable, godless.

  All Milton had to do was make it through the night.

  * * *

  They never did take Laura off to jail.

  Someone brought dinner down to her holding cell, and then they all just seemed to disappear, not unlike Adrian had hours earlier. The lights dimmed in the cell and darkness closed in all around it, attended by an eerie quiet that would have been well-suited to a crypt. Laura called out through the bars once or twice, but no one answered her. It was as if the entire police station had been shut down like a shopping mall after hours, its lone prisoner forgotten down in the building’s catacombs.

  The thought occurred to her that someone could be playing a joke, poking her as if with a stick to see if they could get her to scream. She was, after all, a monster to them: a deranged young woman who’d stolen a seven-year-old boy and then killed him. Who wouldn’t derive some pleasure from torturing such an animal? Or maybe this was the detectives’ way of turning the screws, of forcing a confession from her. Even crazy people, she could picture Neely telling Rutherford, laughing, could be made to fear the dark.

  But time kept moving at a crawl, and no one came to see her, and the idea that she might be here all alone began to solidify.

  She needed Elliott desperately. She wanted to know he still loved her, and that Diane and Michael Edwards had received the message she had entrusted to his care. He had said all the right things in the interrogation room, given her every reason to hope he would be there when she got out of this accursed place, but after what she’d told him—that she believed her rebuke of God in Adrian’s presence was the reason he’d disappeared—she wasn’t at all sure her fiancé hadn’t already left her, in spirit if not in the flesh.

  Adrian.

  His mother had brought him back once. Were there any words Laura could say now, humbled and down on her knees, that could bring him back again? If she begged and pleaded, screamed until her throat was raw, would that undo all the damage she had done?

  No, Laura thought. It wouldn’t be enough.

  She went to the bars of the cell and called out one last time. No one answered and no one came.

  She wondered if anyone ever would.

  * * *

  Michael had seen this movie before, and now he was living it himself.

  For weeks after Adrian died, Diane had known no peace. She lay in bed for days at a time, curled up in the tightest ball she could form, opening her eyes only long enough to make her way to the bathroom and back. She ate little and had no use for words; crying was the only activity she had the strength to pursue. Weight fled from her body like water squeezed from a sponge.

  Michael had sought similar solace in sleep, but he couldn’t go on that way forever. His bitterness would not allow it. To stop living and wither away would have been all-out surrender, and he wasn’t ready to bow down that far to whomever or whatever was responsible for the death of his only child.

  It was God he hated, of course, but he couldn’t admit it. It shamed him to do so, and he was loath to counter whatever magic Diane’s fervent prayers might bring to pass. In any case, it was rage that had taken him from the bed and set him on his feet again, and it was rage that had driven him from the marriage when Diane could not find it in herself to feel the same.

  And now the cycle was destined to start anew.

  They had come home, unlocked the front door, and stumbled straight back to the bedroom, neither of them pausing to turn on a single light. Diane crawled onto the bed first and Michael was right behind, both fully clothed, their shoes still on their feet. He was half expecting his wife to object to his company, so little comfort would it purchase for her, but she let him join her on the bed without a word. He put his arms around her and held on tight, trying not to think about the night before, when they had lain here just this way with their son sound asleep beside them.

  Michael didn’t understand what had happened and was certain he never would. Diane believed Laura Carrillo was the reason for it all, that Adrian had been brought back to life strictly to test the teacher’s belief in God’s power to heal, but that was bullshit. None of them was the “reason.” Not Carrillo, not Diane, a
nd certainly not God. The glue holding the world together had simply come undone. They’d all been trapped in the resultant void, and now that the rift had repaired itself, the normal order of things was falling back into place. Time was once again in sync with the universe, and death was as immutable as ever.

  He would never be able to convince Diane of this, but he didn’t care. Having lost Adrian twice, he would need her love now as much as she needed his, and he wasn’t going anywhere. Whatever he had to do to stay right here, in this bed in this house with this woman, he would do it.

  But he would pay no homage to her god.

  * * *

  When Diane’s tears finally came, it was in a torrent that shook them both.

  Her pain was unbearable but her fear was almost worse. Though suicide had entered her mind many times after Adrian’s death, it never held. Between her faith in God and her love for Michael, she’d always found the strength to hang on. But this time would be different. Her faith was shaken and Michael could not be counted on to stay. What else besides death offered relief from this torment?

  Sleep was not the answer, but for now it would do. And so she cried and went on crying, working herself to a point of exhaustion that would force sleep upon her. Her husband soon followed, burying his face in the back of her neck to weep, mumbling things into her hair she could not decipher.

  Eventually, she drifted off, a slow descent into the black. She seemed to grow lighter as she fell, and she realized with some surprise that her memory of the past few days was fading, piece by piece. Laura Carrillo’s fiancé offering her apology at the Bellevue police station. The transformation of Lakeridge Park. Howard Alberts’s call, alerting them to Adrian’s kidnapping. It all melted away. Her pain evaporated. Diane was free.

  By the time sleep took her in full, there was nothing left to remember, and nothing more to mourn.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  WITHIN MINUTES OF RETURNING to her motel room, Allison had begun to write.

  It was the last thing she would have thought herself capable of doing. She had left Yesler Elementary expecting to do nothing all night but cry, thoughts of Adrian Edwards and Flo taking turns tearing her apart. She had even stopped for another bottle on the way, certain she would not be able to sleep without drinking herself into a torpor. Instead, she had walked into the room and gone straight to her laptop, filling the screen with lines of text as fast as her fingers could type them.

  She wasn’t writing as much as disgorging, relieving herself of something she could no longer hold within. She was driven in part by the fear it would all be gone tomorrow, her memories wiped clean like the world of Adrian himself. There was no guarantee a file on her computer would survive the purge, but she didn’t care. For now, just the act of transcription was keeping her sane, and once she started, she couldn’t have stopped herself even if she wanted to.

  She began with the events of the last several hours and worked her way backward, skipping about in time as her muse dictated. The fresh bottle of Pinot Noir was opened and poured, but barely touched. Tears came and went as the minutes turned to hours and the pages piled up. At some point, Adrian’s crayon portrait had come out of her purse and taken a place on the desk beside her laptop, and every now and then she’d catch a glimpse of the little girl with braids and a whisper of a nose staring up at her.

  Unanswered questions accumulated like raindrops in a barrel. Ten became twenty and twenty became a hundred, each more confounding and frightening than the last. In the end, one demanded an answer more than all the others: what did any of it mean?

  What point could there have been to it? Michael Edwards, his faith in God spent, had told her there was none, that his son’s resurrection and disappearance, and all the equally inexplicable things that had occurred in between and after, were just the work of a chaotic universe unbound by order. Anything could happen to anyone at any time, good or bad, beautiful or tragic, and looking for the reasons behind it was futile. It was as viable a theory as any, and yet Allison couldn’t accept it, even now. She could not believe life was so devoid of purpose, that it could be tied to nothing more substantial than the whimsy of fate, which was wont to change the rules of the game, and then change them back again, at any moment.

  But it was no easier for her to accept the view of Edwards’s wife, Diane, which approximated the dictum that “God giveth and God taketh away.” That was only Michael’s stance dressed in pious clothing, and it amounted to something far worse: any cruelty was possible if God chose to make it so. Unspeakable things could happen to you not by chance, but by the conscious design of a supreme being that ruled over all. Religious texts were filled with depictions of God as ruler of heaven and earth, meting out terrible punishments to those who displeased him, but Allison had never subscribed to that characterization and she couldn’t do so now. If God was the author of the heartbreaking theater she had witnessed over the last three days, He hadn’t written it simply to demonstrate his capacity to inflict pain.

  At Lakeridge Park, Diane Edwards had implied that Laura Carrillo had been the object of the exercise all along. It was Carrillo’s faith God had been testing, and her faith that had failed Him, leaving Him no choice but to take back the gift—Adrian’s return—He was offering her. But this, too, was a premise Allison couldn’t accept. Not because she didn’t think God could possibly care that much about a single individual, but because the individual involved had possessed no faith to test. Carrillo was an avowed atheist. What was to be gained by bribing her to acknowledge something she could not abide by of her own free will?

  And yet, Diane Edwards’s words kept coming back to Allison as she wrote: This was never about us. Allison had that sense, too, but she didn’t know what to make of it. For whom, if not the Edwardses or Laura Carrillo, could God have gone to so much effort, to reshape time and space, and reverse the very polarities of life and death? Milton Weisman?

  Allison couldn’t build a case for him, either. The old man had done everything he had been asked to do, demonstrating great courage and self-sacrifice, stretching his own apparent agnosticism to a degree that would have made the punishment of Adrian’s return to the grave unjustifiable.

  That left only Allison herself, the most unlikely candidate of all. She was only an observer to the drama, an outsider who had wormed her way into it out of desperation, and her faith in the Almighty was paper thin. There was no way this was about her. God had not invited her to this dance; Flo had, three nights ago when she’d stumbled upon Betty Marx’s online report of Carrillo’s meltdown at Yesler and brought it to Allison’s attention. Never imagining Allison would latch on to the story and run off with it like a dog with a stolen bone.

  The thought of Flo, and that night in their bedroom, brought Allison’s gaze once more to Adrian’s portrait of the little girl. Weisman had said he recognized her from a dream, in which she’d been fleeing Adrian’s funeral. She tried to picture the scene, the child in pigtails racing away from her classmate’s gravesite, and decided Michael Edwards had to be right: it couldn’t have happened. Weisman was confused. Because Edwards didn’t remember it, and it didn’t seem like the kind of detail he could have forgotten.

  Unless. . . .

  Allison had picked up her glass of wine at some point, but now she put it back down, taking the crayon portrait in hand instead. She studied it for the first time without sentimentality and realized Michael Edwards had been right about something else: the nose was too small.

  But Adrian had gotten the eyes and mouth exactly right.

  * * *

  Allison told Flo the story much as she had written it back at the motel, in an unbroken stream that could not be held back once unleashed.

  She could tell by Flo’s reaction this wasn’t at all what she had been expecting. It was another late night for Flo at the office, and Allison’s ten p.m. call to plead for an immediate meeting had probably foreshadowed a diff
erent kind of discussion. Flo had tried to beg off but Allison wouldn’t take no for an answer, so here they were in Founders Hall at Bothell, practically alone in the dark and silent building, talking about things that had nothing to do with the shattered relationship only one of them felt the need to repair.

  Flo had listened with a tinge of exasperation at first, her patience for the subject of Diane and Michael Edwards’s circus of the absurd exhausted, but as Allison went on, her interest became acute. When Allison was done, Flo seemed almost anxious for the opportunity to interject.

  “It’s incredible,” she said. “Not entirely believable in places—that whole shape-shifting bit in the park, in particular—but I’m sure it’ll make a fascinating piece. Still, you could have waited until morning to tell me about it, Ally. I know this is important to you, but—”

  “I’m not going to write a piece,” Allison said.

  Flo didn’t follow. “You aren’t? Why not? Not because of what’s happened between us, I hope.”

  “No.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “It’s not what I’m meant to do. None of it happened for my benefit. Or the boy’s parents’. It happened for yours.”

  Flo smiled, as if she couldn’t be sure she’d heard Allison correctly. “Excuse me?”

  Allison had left her only evidence for last. She passed it over to Flo. “This was the drawing Adrian made. The one I took from his father’s car.”

  The portrait’s effect on her was more than Flo could disguise. She opened her mouth to speak, only to close it again. Allison imagined there was more in the portrait she found familiar than just the child’s face: the clothing and hair, maybe even the colored bands around her braids.