We Now Return to Regular Life

by Martin Wilson

He hadn’t said a word at the news conference—he hadn’t been allowed to. Mom did most of the talking, with Earl chiming in here and there, and then the sheriff and prosecutor and other people answering questions from the press.

  I just sat there, silent. I kept stealing looks at Sam. But I couldn’t look at him too long. I don’t know why, but it made me uncomfortable, like he might catch me and see something on my face that would upset him.

  “Come,” Mom says now, grabbing Sam’s hand. She leads him through the den, down the hallway.

  “Here’s your room,” she says, as if Sam has never lived here.

  Sam lets go of her hand and sits on his bed and looks around. Mom hasn’t changed a thing in here since he vanished. The same baby blue paint on the walls, the same checkered bedspread on the bed. A stuffed elephant wearing a “Bama” T-shirt perched on his pillow. A few soccer trophies stacked on a shelf over his bed. Some framed photos—me and Sam, Sam and Mom, Sam standing in a field in his soccer uniform, a soccer ball perched under his foot—sit atop the dresser, along with a mason jar full of dusty coins.

  Sometimes she would ignore the rest of the house, but every week, Mom would go in and vacuum and dust this room, even change the sheets, as if someone actually lived there. But I rarely set foot in here. It felt like a sacred space that shouldn’t be disturbed.

  Sam lies down on the bed, in a tucked position. “It’s good to be home,” he says, as if he’s only been away for a few weeks. Then he closes his eyes. He hasn’t said much, but I can still tell there is something different about the way he speaks. Of course he has a deeper voice now, but that’s not what I mean. It’s like everything he says is practiced and careful.

  Earl calls for Mom from the kitchen. She turns and looks down the hall, but then back at Sam. She rubs her eyes, like she’s worried she’s hallucinating. Earl shouts again.

  Mom sighs. “Will you stay with him?” she asks me. “I need to see what he wants. Can you do that for me?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  She pauses, glances over at Sam one more time. I can tell she probably doesn’t ever want him out of her sight again. But she walks out of the room, leaving the door cracked a smidge. I sit on the floor by the door and lean against the wall, tucking my knees under my arms. Sam’s eyes are still closed, but I know he isn’t asleep. I scrutinize him, like maybe if I stare hard enough I can start to see the boy he was three years ago.

  This boy—he’s different. But not just his appearance. That bratty kid is nowhere to be seen. The boy in front of me is quiet, shy. Maybe a little afraid. The Sam I knew loved horror movies. He wasn’t afraid of the dark. I feel a lump in my throat and I swallow.

  I know some man had Sam. In Anniston. I don’t know much more than that. Everyone was very deliberate at the conference, and didn’t talk about anything that specific. It was all happiness and excitement and God answering our prayers and miracles.

  Finally, Sam opens his eyes. “Beth?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m really here. It’s not a dream?”

  He sounds so afraid, so unsure of things. That lump in my throat, I feel like it might choke me, so I swallow again, and another time, before I am ready to respond. “It’s not a dream,” I say. “You’re really home.”

  He smiles, just a slight smirk. My heart leaps. There is Sam. There he is! But then he closes his eyes, and the old Sam is gone.

  I can hear Mom and Earl down the hall, their voices on the phone. I know my friends are probably trying to reach me. Other classmates, too. And Donal. Donal who kissed me earlier, which now feels like a hundred years ago. My phone is likely clogging up with texts, my Facebook wall exploding with messages from friends and even strangers. But I just sit there, watching Sam, hoping we can hold everyone and everything off for a little bit longer. I want to live in this quiet bubble.

  A little later, Mom comes back to Sam’s room. She whispers, “Is he asleep?”

  Sam opens his eyes and looks right at her. “No,” he says. She goes to the bed and crawls behind him and clutches him, and he closes his eyes and leans back into her. I keep waiting for Mom to cry, but she just strokes his hair, her eyes closed, that contented smile on her face. Mom smiling is such an odd sight that she looks weird, almost crazy.

  I leave them and go to my room and shut the door. It’s only eight or so, not bedtime, but I feel so tired from everything that has happened. Like I could sleep for days.

  ===

  I wake with a start, not sure how long I’ve been out. I look at my clock and see that it’s a little after midnight. But I’m not sleepy at all now. I have a feeling I’ve missed something important.

  I get off my bed and open my bedroom door. I look down the hall and see light coming from the kitchen. In the other direction, Sam’s bedroom door is shut, but a strip of light still glows under the door. I think about knocking, but then I hear Mom’s voice. I creep closer but I can’t really make out what she’s saying. Then I smell cigarette smoke from the other direction. I walk to the kitchen and there’s Earl sitting at the table. He’s got a cigarette lit and has a glass of brown liquid in front of him. Mom had said no smoking in the house, especially since she’d quit last year. Normally, the smell of smoke bothers me. But Earl deserves whatever he wants.

  I sit down and he smiles at me. He looks so tired, his normally thick reddish-blond hair limp, little bags under his eyes, his usually well-trimmed beard a little scruffy. He’s always looked so robust to me, but tonight he seems flattened.

  “You should be in bed,” he says.

  “I fell asleep for a bit. But now I’m not tired.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “Mom’s still in there with him,” I say.

  Earl nods, takes a drag from his cigarette, exhales. “He can’t sleep. He didn’t want her to leave him.”

  On TV, people always say “I need a drink” after a rough day, so I reach and take a sip of Earl’s and he doesn’t stop me. It burns going down, but I like it. I look at him and he shakes his head. I crack a slight smile. We sit there in silence for a bit, enjoying the peace. I guess the news vans are long gone, or else shut down for the night.

  “Your father called,” Earl says.

  I try not to look surprised, but I am. I’d almost forgotten about him. After the divorce, when I was nine, he’d moved all the way to Ohio, where my grandparents—his parents—lived. He visited once each summer, for three years running, but that stopped—he always had an excuse. He called at Christmas and sent birthday cards with measly checks inside and swore he wanted us to visit him in Columbus, but no real invitation ever came.

  “He wanted to speak to Sam, but your mother wouldn’t let him. Not yet.”

  “Oh,” I say, not wanting to ask the question that comes next, but asking anyway: “Did he ask to speak to me?”

  Earl looks down at his drink. “I don’t know.” He looks like he’s about to say something else, but he knows I don’t want to hear any crap.

  “Whatever. I don’t care,” I say.

  I do care about Earl, though. He’s been in my life for seven years now. And for the last three years, more of a dad than my supposed real father. When he fell in love with my mom, she came with two kids he had to deal with. Then one kid vanished, and his wife turned into a different sort of woman than the one he married—distraught, bitter, sad, obsessed.

  That left me.

  That’s why Earl and I got so close, I guess. Before Sam disappeared, we didn’t get along that well. But with Sam gone, when Mom kind of shut down, it was me and Earl, working together, trying to keep everything from falling apart. Mom worked all day, and then she’d come home and glue herself to the computer, or else make phone calls, and so Earl and I would cook dinner sometimes—nothing fancy, nothing like Mom could cook, but it got food on the table. When the house got messy, Earl and I would pick up the slack and v
acuum, mop the kitchen, change sheets, scrub the bathrooms, do the laundry, all the stuff Mom used to do on autopilot. When she had one of her crying spells, we’d both sit next to her and just hold her till she calmed down. When she had one of her bad patches, where all she could do was lie in bed, either crying or half-sleeping, Earl and I would just sit and watch the TV on low volume, ready to go to her if she called out. Or I’d do my homework at the kitchen table while he read a book in his recliner till he started snoring and I’d tap his feet with my pencil and he’d wake.

  I take another sip of the drink and, again, he doesn’t stop me. He’s staring at his cigarette now. What must he be thinking? Is he happy, or scared? Is he thinking about what our lives will be like now? Sam is back. And maybe Mom is back—back to who she was before Sam went away. What does that mean for us? As if reading my thoughts, Earl reaches his hand across the table. I take it in mine. He doesn’t answer the questions in my head. He doesn’t speak. And neither do I. The silence is nice, so we just sit there, safe in the present moment.

  ===

  During the first few weeks after Sam had vanished, I had to sit at home and wait for any important phone calls while neighbors hovered about—Mrs. Sykes, the Kellers, others, depending on the day. Aunt Shelley came for a week, too, before she had to get back to Nashville, feeling helpless. Mom and Earl, went out driving, looking around. The police were looking, too, of course. But Mom took matters into her own hands. “I have to do something,” she told me. “I can’t just sit and wait.” She organized a search of the woods, even though that’s not where Sam was last seen, and other places, too. Mr. and Mrs. Keller, everyone in the neighborhood, Mom’s boss and other coworkers, the guys on Earl’s construction crew—everyone tried to help. They scoured any snatches of forest along Skyland. They knocked on doors and posted signs. They went on the news, making appeals for anyone to come forward if they’d seen Sam. Surely, on that busy road, someone had seen something. Sam’s picture—his fifth-grade school portrait, where he’s wearing a blue-and-red-striped polo and his impish, winning grin—was published in the newspaper each day for weeks. Mom and Earl were on the phone constantly—with the police, sheriffs, FBI. I never could understand who was in charge of what. There were leads, tons of them, but they all proved to be false. It seems that people thought that every eleven-year-old kid in the state of Alabama might just be Sam. In those first weeks, looking for Sam consumed every waking moment of our lives.

  A lot of the time I was at home alone, waiting, sitting around. I felt bad if I read a book, or watched TV. Any mental space not devoted to Sam felt like a betrayal. Like I was a bad sister. A bad daughter. Just a bad person all around.

  I thought back to that day and wondered what I could have done differently. I should have put my foot down—No, Sam, you can’t go. Or I should have gone with him and Josh. Maybe I should have tattled on him as soon as Mom got home. No, I should have called her the minute he left the house. Over and over in my mind, there was always something I could have done—one little thing—and Sam would still be with us. And sometimes I got angry. I wanted to run over to Josh’s house and grab him and slap him, ask him why he left my brother like that. And then I’d get mad at Sam, for being so dumb. You brat, I would think, you always had to get your way. If you’d just have obeyed the rules for once, we’d all be fine. You’d be here still. Sometimes, I’d cry myself to sleep, hating Josh and hating Sam and then hating myself most of all.

  At the end of August, our despair about Sam reached a fever pitch. The blistering heat didn’t help. Going outside, it felt like God was mocking us. Oh, your brother’s missing? How about some sunburn and heatstroke to go along with that? I started taking long cold showers, and that way the sound of the water could stifle my sobs.

  One night, I heard Mom on the phone, speaking loudly like she was upset, or more upset than usual. I cracked my door open so I could hear. For a terrifying moment I thought she had some news about Sam.

  “No, don’t come,” I heard her say. “I told you a million times these past few weeks, it wouldn’t do any good.”

  I knew then that she was talking to my dad. Not just by what she said, but from the contempt in her voice.

  “Don’t take that tone with me. I know you blame me, but—no, but . . .” I hadn’t seen him in two years. I hadn’t wanted to. Part of me hated him. He’d left us. He’d chosen to be away from us. Why should I miss him? But right then, for some reason, it hit me: I did miss him. I was desperate for him. I crept down the hall. Mom paced about on the cordless, her back to me.

  “It would just be a distraction. . . . No, she doesn’t need you, you’d just—”

  “Mom!”

  She spun around. She cupped the mouthpiece and said, “Go back to bed.”

  “I wanna speak to Dad.”

  “It’s late. You can speak with him tomorrow.”

  “Dad!” I shouted, something inside me erupting. “Daddy, come home!” Daddy—had I ever called him that? I ran up to Mom and tried to snatch the phone away, but she dodged me.

  “Beth, stop it!”

  I kept shouting “Daddy!” I clawed for the phone, and she looked at me like I was crazy. And I guess I was crazy. We all were by then. Tears on my cheeks, my eyes cloudy, I started hyperventilating. And suddenly Earl was there and had his arms around me and was walking me back to my room. “I want my daddy,” I said through my sobs, like a pathetic little girl.

  “Shhh,” Earl said.

  Earl told me to focus on breathing. In and out, in and out. And I don’t know why, but I think that’s when it really and truly hit me that Sam was gone forever. But more than that: That’s when I first thought that he was probably dead. I couldn’t fool myself any longer. Something horrible had happened to him and he was never coming back.

  Suddenly, the ache I felt was almost too much to bear. It was hard to breathe and I felt the hysterics creeping back like a sneeze you can’t stop. All I had left was a mother who blamed and hated me, and a father who hadn’t bothered to see me in years, and a stepfather who wasn’t even related to me so why should he care either, even though right then he was holding me in his arms, trying to calm me.

  Eventually Earl left me to sleep, and I did, for more hours than I had in weeks. When I woke up the next day—how can I describe it? I felt different. Like I’d had a bad fever that broke and I’d sweated out all the sickness. Somehow, I knew I had no use for drama and tears anymore. None of it would do any good. None of it would bring Sam back. It was time to face a life without him. I was sick of being sad, sick of crying, sick of feeling guilty. Sick of wondering where he was.

  He was dead. I knew it.

  I felt armored then. The worst had already happened, hadn’t it? I could handle anything. Nothing, nobody could hurt me now.

  ===

  Someone is shaking me. “Wake up, honey.” I’m groggy and confused but I open my eyes and of course it’s Mom. I see her smiling face, and then I remember that Sam is home. Warm relief floods through my body, and I can’t help but smile back up at her.

  “It’s a lovely morning, isn’t it?” Mom says. I look toward the window and see the sun pushing on the closed blinds. “I mean, it’s lovely because Sam’s here.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “I know we didn’t have much time to take it all in yesterday.”

  That’s an understatement. I say, “I still can’t believe it.”

  “Believe it,” she says, brushing my hair aside, gazing at me like I’m still her little girl. She hasn’t acted this way in years, even when Sam was here. It’s like I’ve woken up to an entirely different life.

  “I want to talk to you about a few things. About what happened to Sam.”

  My stomach lurches. With just a few words, all that good feeling floats away, and I feel a chill go up my back. “Okay.”

  “We don’t know everything yet. And we’re not
going to ask Sam about it.”

  At the news conference, I’d listened but didn’t take everything in. I guess I was still in shock, and the words in the air just sounded like white noise. But I do remember that Sam had been found at some man’s apartment, just about two or three hours away.

  Mom continues: “He’ll tell us everything in due time, when he’s ready. The thing—the important thing for now is to not push it. We need to give him time to readjust. Dr. Rao said that—”

  “Do I have to go back to see her?” I ask. Dr. Rao is this psychologist they sent me to a few months after Sam disappeared. I didn’t see the point of it, so I stopped going after a few months.

  “No. I mean, not right now. But you can if you want to.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “That’s okay. But I called her—I just, I needed to talk to someone we knew, not some social worker who doesn’t really know us or Sam. She said that it’s going to take Sam time to open up. That he’s probably experiencing post-traumatic stress, or shock, or something like that. So we can’t push him too hard or too fast, okay? And we can’t let him see us upset. We need to be strong for Sam.”

  “Okay.”

  “Good. I just wanted to make sure we’re all on the same page.”

  I hear the phone ringing, and then the doorbell.

  “I better get out there. Get up and eat some breakfast.”

  I nod, but before she leaves the room, I ask, “What did happen to him?”

  Her face kind of tenses and her smile falls off, but then she pastes it back on again. “The important thing is he’s home, safe and sound. Let’s focus on that for now. Okay?” Mom stands there, watching me with a weird smile, waiting for me to agree. All I can do is nod, because I know she doesn’t want me to ask any more questions.

  After she leaves I lock my door and then turn on my laptop and go online. Mom knows something, or a lot of things, and she’s not telling me any of it. But it’s easy to find a ton of articles—on the Tuscaloosa News site, but also in all the national news websites, too.