Though it might ring a lot, it doesn’t ring long before it is picked up, and I can learn nothing from the single syllable used to answer the phone.
“Mary Atwater?” I begin.
“Yes.” This time I can hear caution, or think I can. It doesn’t surprise me. People have likely been calling her all day every day for weeks. Or more.
“I am calling about your son, William Atwater.”
“Yes.” And this time, there it is; for a second, I hear hope.
“I am writing a book about his life, Mary.”
“Ah.”
“If you could just answer a few questions …”
“Everyone is writing a goddamned book,” she says mildly.
“Right. Well. Okay.” I stammer a bit with it, not quite sure where to begin. “I’m trying to find him.”
She laughs at that. A dry, unpleasant sound. “You and every goddamned one else,” she informs me. There is a smokiness to her voice. Something illicit. I can’t pin it down.
“Right,” I say, “okay,” wanting to keep the slim dialogue going and not sure how to do it. I feel like I’m holding a balloon by the most delicate of silken strings: I have a decent hold on it now, but it could drive upwards on a current, and the string could snap while I try to bring it home. “There is something in his face in the photos I’ve seen.” I hesitate, grappling for the right words. The words that will keep her talking. “Something … innocent. I don’t know if that’s quite right. But something that doesn’t represent the things I’ve heard.”
This is his mom, that’s what I’m thinking. The person who gave him life. And I am pushing for the kindest version of the truth. That’s all any of us can ever aspire to. There are worse goals.
“The boy …” she begins. Stops. Settles herself. Starts again. That smoky voice. “… the boy I knew would not have been capable of what he is accused of.”
“He was not a mean child.” I make sure it’s not a question.
“No, no. That’s just it. He was very kind. Very respectful.” A pause between us. I let it be. And then, her voice drops. I can’t hear the smokiness as I strain to listen. “But it’s just that there was something on him.” It’s barely a whisper.
“Something.”
“I don’t know.”
I’m straining to hear now, truly.
“Was he cruel?” I ask it as gently as I can.
“I … I don’t think so.” I let it ride. And then, “Maybe. Sometimes to me. There was something … other about him. He had big thoughts, I think.” This last has been said with a kind of tragic hopefulness. Like you know what the outcome is, but you’re still wishing. I have been a mother. I don’t begrudge her the sentiment.
“How can I find him?” The words are there between us. They have no weight on their own. I can almost hear her ponder the question: decide how to answer.
“I don’t know for sure,” she says after a while. “I know he always loved Morning Bay. And the road there. Especially the golden road.”
“I don’t understand. The golden road—” But then I stop talking because I hear the click that means a landline has terminated connection.
The abrupt end of the call doesn’t sit well with me at first. I think about it and ascribe meaning to the act. Then I realize it is probably just some self-protection. How often must that phone ring right now? How many times every day. And what if you have no answers? And what if your heart breaks every time the phone rings? Or lifts in fear. After a while, you hang up. And before very long, you probably stop picking it up at all.
I ponder the words she gave me, then check things out. Morning Bay is a beach community at the southernmost end of the county. I can’t connect it to anything else I know about Atwater. It’s just another place. I file it away.
I try to find the half-siblings; but they have all flown. Certainly, if there were any landlines there, they’ve all gotten rid of them by now.
I speak with former teachers. All of the ones I manage to reach feel there had been something wrong at home. However, considering the tenor of the news for the last weeks, it is difficult to tell if at least some of what they feel hasn’t been tempered by seeing their former student’s face plastered all over CNN. One thing comes through though: the causes are difficult to pin down. He’d always been one of many in an overburdened system, plus some sort of genetic boat had sailed, and maybe he’d been left too far behind.
Everybody knows that a William Atwater doesn’t happen in isolation. I am shocked to find that, as I research, most of what I discover is cliché. It’s like I’m reading about a Movie of the Week. And not a very good one, at that.
Paint a picture of a serial killer. The most popular of those paintings looks like this: born into poverty and abuse, predestined—or so it seems—for the life he ends up living. One can fill in the blanks without trouble. Neglect, pain, lack of love: the perfect recipe; the perfect storm. And self-esteem never existed, having been snubbed out like a snail close to the time of his birth. Snubbed out with alacrity and intent.
One imagines a little flower, reaching up for the sun; the cloud of his reality blocking the light for year after year. I think of my own plants, now dead. Without the right care, they wither. Maybe eventually die. But not before they become twisted in their efforts to survive. I saw that, in my garden.
And so here we are.
It is in the course of these telephone interviews with teachers, friends, and even a few distant relatives that I come to have a sort of dark sympathy for William Atwater. I can feel the painful paths that have led to wherever he is now. The things that have created the monster we all now see night after night and hour after hour on television. The sympathy is tainted, of course. And imperfect. Empathy twisted. But beyond all the hype the media machine is pushing, and even beyond the atrocious acts he has committed, there is a human. He is flawed beyond the usual and even broken and misshapen, but he is more like me than I would have at first thought. We have more in common than we do not. This thought could shock me to self-evaluation, but fortunately, I’m on a mission so I don’t dwell on it.
On a practical level, the interviews help me to hone, not just Atwater’s personality, but the way he thinks and the way he processes information. As I research, I start sticking electronic pins into a map on my computer. For every location mentioned by a former friend or classmate or teacher, I pop in another pin. I add a few for the ones I find on social media. After a while, a couple of areas are as thick with pins as the back end of a hedgehog.
“He is out there.” This time the talking head is a forensic-psychologist-turned-mystery-novelist, and the expert du jour. He is over sixty, yet his face is weirdly unlined, and his thick dark hair is shorn close to his head. So close, you get the occasional flash of pink scalp. “He is hiding,” he adds, exposing perfect white teeth while spreading his hands wide. An eloquent gesture. “But he will be found.”
The statement is so fabulously obvious that the interviewer seems stunned. She has nothing to say to this. Then she recovers.
“Dr. Uxbridge, what can you tell us about the methods being used to locate William Atwater? Is there anything that, in your opinion, could be done that is not now being done? Are the powers that be really pulling all the stops?” The clichés emerge easily. They feel comfortable on the ear. They are effortless for her; for us.
“I don’t think being critical of law enforcement agencies is at all the correct path at this point.”
“That wasn’t my intent …”
“The local police in that area are a particularly overburdened agency. I have it from very good sources that they are doing everything in their power.”
“Dr. Uxbridge, you’re on retainer with the San Pasado Police Department, are you not?” says the interviewer.
“Boom!” say I to the screen with a fist pump. Boom, indeed.
“That isn’t really the point,” says Uxbridge.
And I turn the television off.
For me, th
e time for data collection has passed. I know I’ve found everything I can by these methods and from a distance. Anything more will just be more words. It’s time for motion.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE EARTH IS always moving. Quickly. I know it’s childish, but that’s a fact that’s never really sat comfortably in my mind. Because of this discomfort, I’ve read a lot about it over the years: trying to comprehend what it all means. And what it all means to me.
For one thing, it’s super hard to calculate how fast we’re actually going. Taking into account the distance from the Earth’s center, speed of rotation in every full day, and other things like that, some calculations indicate that, at the equator, the Earth is moving at about a thousand miles per hour. A thousand. That’s L.A.–New York in two hours. I mean, we’re really just hurtling along.
That’s the part where we’re spinning. The Earth is also hurtling around in orbit at the same time, this at an estimated 67,000 miles an hour. But things get even worse: apparently—because I haven’t observed this with my own eyes—our galaxy whirls around the solar system at about 490,000 miles per hour. I can’t even come up with comparisons for that one. It would mean, countrywide, that you’d arrive almost before you left.
So, think about it: you get out of bed in the middle of the night to pee. You walk a few feet to your bathroom. You come back to your still-warm bed, half asleep, and plunge back down into slumber. Meanwhile, all this high-speed racing is going on. If you stop to think about it—which I don’t advise—it can make you nauseous.
But it’s motion; that’s the point. Do you see? Even with all of this going on, we still get up. Put one foot behind the other. Move forward.
Motion. It’s what I will need to track William Atwater down. Even dropping through space at high speeds won’t bring me closer. I have to get out and get on with it.
I look at the results of my research critically. It seems to me that the pins bristle most thickly out of a few spots in the Oro Valley, in the northeasternmost part of the county, nearly the opposite side from where Atwater had been born and where he grew up. It does not escape me that, in Spanish, Oro translates to “gold.” That’s not a lead, but it seems too strong a connection to be full coincidence. I start to move.
Before I do, I look over the system I have devised, realizing that it is imperfect and possibly even fatally flawed. Based on my system, there is no strong reason to think my method will yield results. It doesn’t matter. At this stage, I have nothing left other than a dead garden and rage. When I decide to head out, I’m not even aware that I’ve made a decision. What, after all, is there to lose? And it isn’t as though anyone will even care that I am gone.
I try not to feel pathetic with this thought.
Getting in motion means another shuttle, another flight out, another rental car when I arrive. None of that bothers me, even though this is not a paying gig.
Pro bono, I laugh to myself. A dark laugh. Pro bono like a lawyer who takes someone on for free, just because they need representation. Only in this case, it is society that will be better off, not the client. That’s what I tell myself. That’s what I need to feel in this hour. I decide to ignore the voice that questions the correctness of my saddling up as both judge and jury.
In the last few years, San Pasado has been labeled one of the happiest places in America. It isn’t happy now, though. Now it’s a small city pushed to the edge of its seat in mortification and worry. A hamlet that seems about to consume itself with concern over a product of its loins. A son no one would ever want to claim. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
Even as the small commuter jet circles into the rural airport, I see flags flying at half mast, something I see more of when I pick up my rental car and drive the short distance to town. San Pasado is mourning and uncertain. Rocks and hard places. The small city scuttles on the edge. Used to being peaceful and beautiful, it doesn’t know what to do with the pall of sadness and silence that floats over it or the armada of newsies winging in from all over the world. It doesn’t know what to do with the feeling of being imperfect. Fatally flawed. You can see it even in the townsfolk, or so I imagine. The perfect streets. The carefully wrought civic architecture. This is a town not used to dealing with imperfection. And now here we are. No small imperfection: a mark so large it is beyond blight. A mark so intense it blemishes the spirit.
San Pasado is a hamlet, everything charming. Easy. Even the city streets seem half in the country. It is the sort of place where you imagine people smile a lot, and some of them even go to church on Sundays. They have barbecues and go to high school football games. They lean against fences and talk amicably with neighbors. Life is easy and sweet. There is a mall, but there is also a well-manicured town square with a bandstand and a lot of stores that don’t belong to franchises. People walk around the town and visit quaint shops featuring signs admonishing visitors to “shop local” in enough windows that you understand it’s some kind of cheerful conspiracy.
In short, San Pasado is the kind of place people in big cities all over America dream of moving to; raising their families. And some of them do. But mostly they do not. Mostly they dream and wish they could be here or someplace like here. And now the dream is tainted, a rotten core at the gooey center. At the moment, it feels like nothing will ever be the same.
I park my rented car, intending to walk around town, assessing before I settle in somewhere, now not sure what will be available. The level of media circus is a variable I hadn’t counted on before my arrival. At noon, it looks like rush hour in a town that usually has no reason to be anything but sleepy. But now, everything is jammed with media types and their various gear and entourages. I fear there will be no room at the inn.
Despite the emotional calamity currently in San Pasado, the weather is untouched. It is a perfect Central Coast day. Just sweet sun in a clear blue sky and you swim through it like Eve in the garden or a fish in the sea.
It is difficult, with the sun touching your shoulder, to imagine a town like this producing a William Atwater. This is small town America with a Central California kiss. You can’t see the ocean from town, and yet you know the sea is only a half hour run from that bandstand. The little hamlet looks like a place where nothing bad could ever happen. And yet. Here we are.
With no other starting point in mind, I begin at what feels like the beginning and drive my rental to Atwater’s last known address. It is maybe fifteen minutes east of the charming downtown core. And it is light-years away.
My first impression is of gray. Gray house, shutters sagging, paint weeping. A gray cracked driveway, valiant weeds trying to push up between the cracks; reclaiming the ground. A gray chain-link fence, sagging in places. A mangy-looking gray dog, patches of brown. The dog is chained to a sun-damaged Honda. Red. The car is the one spot of color in the scene, and taken all together, what it really looks like is squalor. You can taste the hopelessness and desperation on your tongue. It’s worse than expected somehow. It is worse than should be allowed.
I debate going to the front door, knocking. Questioning whoever answers. Sticking to my authorial cover story. Beyond having already been hung up on by the mother, what stops me are the other watchers. A couple of media trucks, associated with local affiliates of large networks, are encamped not far from the driveway and a small horde of various media types lounge around in front of the house, just out of reach of the dog. They make me feel oddly self-conscious. Like they’ll be able to tell things about me I don’t want to share. I avoid looking directly at them.
The trucks look like maybe they’ve been sent from other planets; high-tech gear perched on roofs, ready to send and receive signals. It’s as though we are in a war zone. As though we are at the front.
I sit for a while and assess. I don’t recall now what I’d been imagining, ensconced and planning from the safety of my house at the edge of a forest. But whatever I was thinking then, it wasn’t this. And now I understand how naive I’ve been. I am surroun
ded here by expert hunters, attending now in their full stalking regalia, satellite dishes and all. They are bloodhounds. And me? I’m the pampered house pet spaniel who has lost her forever home. We have all the same equipment, those bloodhounds and I, but their tools have been honed with hard use. I feel like a child among them. I feel distressingly ill-prepared.
Still. I bolster myself. I’ve come all this way. There is nothing to deter me from the broad stroke plan I’d come up with back at my cottage and then on the flight out. It might be a naive plan, and half-baked, I concede that. But it’s really all I’ve got and I’m here now, after all. I try to remember the rage; hold it, fan it. I know it will sustain me.
When I leave the car and walk to the front door of what I know to be one of Atwater’s childhood homes, I am aware of my pulse. I don’t know if this is an elevated heart rate or an excessively brisk rushing of my blood. All I know for sure is I feel a little lightheaded. I hunch my shoulders; press on.
As I make my way to the door, I am lightly afraid that the dog will rush out and attack me and I can’t tell who is more scared: me or him. We both keep our distance, eyeing each other warily. He doesn’t take his eyes off me while he backs off his chain, and he doesn’t growl or meet my eyes.
The walk is cracked, and plants grow up through them, stunted weed babies, stretching for light. So much all around me is cliché.
A curtain is drawn over the dirty front window I walk past to reach the door. The doorbell is broken, so I don’t bother pressing it, opting instead to knock, picking up a splinter when I do.
I feel rather than see motion on the other side of the door and, for a heartbeat, I feel like it will open. I brace myself for what I might see then. It doesn’t happen though. Instead, the curtain pulls back, so quickly that later I will ask myself if it was real. I have the impression of a thin, pale face, and wide, alarmed eyes. Then the curtain drops and nothing happens and I question my impression.
I hover there foolishly for a few long minutes then retrace my steps because I can’t think what else to do. I’m still cautious when I pass the dog, but we’re both a little less skittish this time.
Endings Page 9
