by Dan Chaon
“No,” Patricia said. “I understand what you’re saying.” But her eyes were puzzled. “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
But we did talk about it—much more frequently than I’d expected. After our first son was born, she’d had a long period of postpartum depression during which she spoke of them obsessively: “I know how they feel, the Ormsons. Oh, God, it must be so horrible for them. I’m just so scared for us. I mean, you can’t protect your children from the world forever. There is so much danger,” she said. “It’s terrifying.”
“Yes,” I said. But I didn’t say any more. I couldn’t explain it, but something in her attitude was infuriating—her depression, her terror, seemed willfully childish, like someone who flirted by using baby talk. I could feel an angry scoff rising in my chest, a shameful sarcasm twisting its way through my thoughts. When I went outside, I threw down the cup I was holding and it bounced once against the cement before it shattered against the edge of the sidewalk. That calmed me, and I bent, reasonably, and began to pick up the shards.
The sound of Sharon Ormson’s voice always had the same effect on me. It was a round voice, round as her dumpling-cheeked, high-colored face, echoing with sorrowful vowels. “Hello, Tom?” she said, and the os had a sad well underneath them. “How are you?” and I could picture her immediately, her golden hair permed into some kind of glowing shape, the careful, neat suburban woman’s suit, the sensibly short high heels. She was a realtor, and there was always the sense that she wanted to quietly sell you something. In my case, she wanted to sell her earnest, endless grief. She walked me through its many rooms with an air of eager respect, but at the same time it was clear that she felt that the house was probably beyond my means.
“It’s good to hear your voice,” she said. “How long are you in town for?”
“A while,” I said vaguely. “I don’t know for sure how long we’ll be able to stay.”
“Well, I sure do hope that we’ll have time to get together. It’s been quite a while!”
“Yes, it certainly has!” I said.
“How are the children?”
“Oh, fine.”
“Growing every day, I’ll bet!”
“Yes, indeed.”
“And Patty?”
“She’s fine, too.”
“That’s good.”
“Yes.”
In the deadly pause, I looked across at my mother, who sat at the kitchen table peeling potatoes for supper. She stared back at me grimly.
“Well, anyway,” Sharon Ormson said. “I certainly hope we’ll get the chance to visit with you while you’re home!”
“Yes,” I said, and watched as my mother stripped an excruciatingly long piece of skin from a potato with her peeler. She was pretending not to listen. “Let’s plan on it,” I said, and my mother plunked another naked potato into the colander.
This was the second Christmas after my father’s death, and, if anything, the place seemed even sadder and more foreign than it had last year. The last traces of my father had vanished: The mail had stopped coming in his name and there were no more stacks of unread Outdoor Life and National Geographic sitting next to his chair; his ashtrays were gone, too, since my mother had quit smoking; the little shelf of the refrigerator that once held his brand of beer was now simply another storage place for leftovers.
I experienced all of this as an almost visible absence. It was as if I could feel the things that weren’t there when I walked into a room. I had a similar feeling when I drove through town. Every new building, every changed storefront, every repainted house seemed like a blot, an attack on the town I held in my memory.
I had been away for over ten years by that point. My two younger brothers had somehow escaped the teenage selves I most associated them with. Matt was twenty-seven, a truck driver with the thick torso of a regular beer drinker; Bryce, a sullen outlaw when I left home, was a twenty-four-year-old policeman and had managed to marry and divorce a pale blond woman whom I’d met only once, whose face I couldn’t remember. Even my mother didn’t much resemble the mother I had in my mind. She was an aged and hardened version of the person I’d known—an understudy who would be portraying my mother for the duration of my stay.
It was strange, because only the Ormsons remained as I remembered them. They had grown older, of course, but they still looked like themselves. Mrs. Ormson retained the smooth, heavily made-up expression of a person who has undergone several face-lifts (though I don’t think she had, really); Mr. Ormson, though grayer, remained permanently boyish and dazed, still stumbling around in the tweed jackets that Ricky and I used to mock. Ricky used to call him “the Nutty Professor,” though actually he was, and continued to be, the county judge.
The park had changed quite a bit. It was a few blocks from my house, but I don’t think I’d been there in years—maybe not since Ricky had disappeared. I suppose that I’d unconsciously avoided the place.
We’d decided to walk down there at Patricia’s urging. My sons had been bored at my mother’s house, and Patricia didn’t feel like it was good for them to just sit around watching TV.
It was an unusually warm afternoon in mid-December. There was no snow, and it wasn’t even below freezing. It felt like late autumn weather, like the October day Ricky had disappeared. There was the same chill, muddy feel to the world, the same taunting sunshine that never managed to feel warm. The boys scampered ahead of us as we walked, picking up stones that interested them. Patricia called out, unusually tense: “Don’t go too far!”
I expected some kind of shock of recognition, the stunning blow of a landscape that you dream about, but what presented itself to us as we rounded the third block had little resemblance to the park Ricky and I had crossed on our way home from school. Ricky and I had entered from the far end, near the pond, passing the proplike smattering of ducks and swans, then crossed the bridge to the playground. We were fourteen, ninth graders, and when we walked across the playground the little kids watched us with a sort of eager awe: Big kids! Teenagers! They pushed themselves in circles on the merry-go-round, took flying leaps from swings, cast themselves belly down, headfirst, into the tornado slide, as in a kind of basic training for the lives we were leading, full of (they imagined) secrets and adventures.
That old playground had been replaced, naturally. It was now a framed area, and cushioning wood chips had been brought in to cover the hard, bare earth. A complex wooden and plastic jungle gym, a sort of maze, had replaced the merry-go-rounds and the metal, coil-spring horsies. The tornado slide was still there, but it was haggard looking, set apart and incongruous, like the old outhouses that still sat behind some of the country houses.
Sharon Ormson had been behind the changes in the playground, as she was often, in the years after Ricky’s disappearance, behind community projects. The Park Beautification Committee was one that she had chaired, and I assume that people must have been creeped out by her solemn cheerful determination to raze the old park, the one into which her son vanished. She went door to door, collecting for the beautification project, and people gave and gave.
“You seem tense,” Patricia said. We were sitting in the park, on one of the new memorial benches. “You get so stiff whenever you come back here.”
“It’s just the usual,” I said. I watched as our younger son disappeared into a plastic tube-tunnel and then emerged on the other side. “I don’t know,” I said. “It seems like every time I’m home, I have to go through this. It drives me crazy.”
“You don’t seem like yourself.”
“I’m not myself,” I said. “That’s the thing. You know, I get back here and then first it’s my mother and then it’s the Ormsons. It’s like … I don’t know—like they want me to be the person I would have been if I’d just stayed around here and never left. It gets uncomfortable.”
“Yes, well,” Patricia said. “But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there?” She paused for a moment, craning her neck until both
the boys were clearly in her sight.
I shrugged. I felt awkward and uncertain. I was usually pretty happy, pretty stable in my moods—a good husband, a good father, a man of steady routine. Most of the time I was, or tried to be, kind. “I don’t know,” I said at last. “Do you ever get the feeling that there’s more than one of you? That’s what I feel like when I’m here.” I looked at her. “I’m not making any sense.”
“No, no,” my wife said, and gave me a sympathetic look, but one that was still creased with bewilderment. “I think I see what you’re saying. I just don’t know what caused it.”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess I don’t really know what caused it, either. It’s just a mood.”
I shrugged again, smiling a little. I was looking out toward where the old creek used to be. Some years ago, the Corps of Engineers had decided that there needed to be a floodplain around it, so now this little trickle of a brook was in the center of a wide ditch with high sloped walls on either side. They had tried to decorate it with grass and flower beds and small shrubs, but it was still a ditch. I could remember how it used to look when I was a kid. The banks, as they ran into and out of the pond, were lined with foliage—thick bunches of willow saplings, cattails, high water weeds. There was a jungle to get through before you could reach the water, where children sometimes caught minnows and crawdads and leeches. Wading down the creek was like following a secret, hidden path. The echoes of voices on the playground, of cars on the streets, seemed to come from far away.
And so, naturally, I had to think of it, to recall the day Ricky had disappeared. We had walked, Ricky and I, along the edge of the creek, toward a copse of lilac bushes, where the man parked his car.
I don’t know where Ricky heard about the man by the creek. Maybe he’d heard rumors through other boys at school. Probably he’d somehow encountered the man in the park one day. I never did find out the exact facts of the matter.
What I did know was that, during second-period study hall, Ricky Ormson had opened his math book and displayed a fifty-dollar bill tucked in between the pages.
“Hey,” I said, admiringly. “Where’d you get that?”
Ricky just shrugged. He had this sleepy way of smiling, which suggested that he knew a lot more than you did, but he didn’t hold it against you. That was one of the things that made him popular. “Actually, I know a lot of guys who have come by fifty lately,” he said, in his slow, relaxed voice. “It’s kind of sick, if you want to know the truth.”
He gave me that half-smile again, as if to say, “You don’t want to know.” I realized later that we had a strange friendship. He thought that he was better than me, and so did I. We had been grade school buddies—we lived near one another. But the fact that we’d played cops and robbers and sat together in a tree house, watching people with his dad’s binoculars, that fact was holding us together less and less as we moved toward high school. It was funny that later I was always portrayed as “the best friend,” because I always knew, deep down, that in a few years I wouldn’t have been as cool as Ricky was and we’d have ceased to be close. If he had lived, we’d have long forgotten all about one another.
But right then, we were still friends, still “best friends,” in a way. We walked home from school together every day, probably more because of our old connections than what we had in common. And, probably, it was because of our old connections that he felt compelled to let me in on his big secret. A lot of guys, he said—people I’d be surprised to hear about—had been making money in the park. Fifty bucks here and there, he said. It was sort of sick, he said again, with emphasis, and with the same sly, knowing, condescending smile. “Do you know what I mean?”
I guess I did. That is to say, by the time we walked along the edge of the park to the place where the man was sitting, I had a pretty good idea of what we were going to do.
The man did not look like the typical pervert. He wasn’t nervous and sweaty, or overweight, or pocked with pimples, or arch and effeminate. He seemed like our dads, though he was probably a little younger—there was something youthful and hearty about his features. He had a look of a friendly adult, one who might casually talk to you like a grown-up.
Looking back, I can say to myself that it really wasn’t that big a deal. I’ve heard other stories, other such men, and it’s probably not that out of the ordinary. It’s certainly much tamer than most of the stuff we read about now in the paper. And perhaps, growing up in a small Midwestern town, I was much more innocent than might seem normal these days.
All of which is to explain that I thought I was doing something really shocking. I was stunned, and also—I have to admit—honored that Ricky believed I was sophisticated enough for him to confide in me. I didn’t want to let him down. And wasn’t it true that lots of guys—“guys I would be surprised to hear about”—had done it?
Later, I would realize that my big secret, the thing I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone, was actually rather mundane: I sat in the bucket seat of the man’s car with my pants down. The man crouched between my spread legs and gave me a blow job.
Afterward, the man pressed a crisp, folded fifty-dollar bill into my hand. Our eyes met for a minute, and he ran a finger across his lips. “Here’s a little something to remember me by,” he said softly.
There was something in his eyes that must have scared me. Or I was scared by what had happened, and embarrassed. Ricky was standing at the edge of the lilac bushes, and I must have looked pale and frightened, because his face grew cautious. We stared at each other, and his eyes said, “You aren’t going to tell, are you?” He looked at me hard for what seemed like a long time. Then he waved his hand at me. “See you tomorrow, I guess,” he said.
When Patricia and I got back to the house, I saw my brother’s policeman’s uniform before I saw his face, and my adrenaline leapt. But then he turned and it was just Bryce. Just Bryce. “Hey, Tommy,” he said, and he came over and gave me a hug. “Rrrr,” he said, squeezing. “You get shorter every time I see you, big brother.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “But at least I’ve got a tan. You’re as pale as fish, kiddo.”
We bantered like this for a while, insulting each other, and my wife stood back and watched until Bryce noticed her, and whirled her around in an exaggerated display of affection. The kids watched, wide eyed, until Bryce called them over to see his badge and handcuffs. He had already put his gun away.
We used to be close, Bryce and I. He was six years younger than I, and had gone in for a fairly pure version of hero worship where I was concerned. We used to go fishing together on Saturday afternoons after the television cartoons were over. We would ride our bikes down to the park and sit on the banks of the pond, occasionally reeling in a bluegill or a small catfish. And he would listen to whatever I told him.
There was a time—a moment, maybe—when I almost told him about what had happened to Ricky and me in the park. I could feel it creeping into my mind as we sat there at the pond, watching our bobbers floating on the still surface of the water. We had been talking about Ricky. “Do you think he ran away?” Bryce had asked. “Or do you think some bad guy snatched him?”
“I think it was a bad guy,” I said. “I think Ricky’s probably dead.” I hesitated, and for a moment I almost—almost—said more.
But then again—what would I have said? Imagine telling this to an eight-year-old kid. Or telling it to two policemen, men your father’s age, who sat on folding chairs while you faced them. Imagine your parents hearing about it, having to tell them about the way you’d willingly sat there as the man ran his mouth over your privates. Imagine the look on your father’s face: his shame and disgust. “You let this man touch you like that?” his eyes would say. “What kind of a person are you?” And what if it got into the newspapers, what if the other kids in school heard about it? It would be easy to concoct a story, to say that Ricky had moved into that huddled cave of lilacs without you, and that you’d wandered around for a time before going home.
And then, later, could you change your story? After days, weeks, months, could you change your story? After you’d lied and the trail of the murderer or kidnapper had grown cold, what would it be like to admit that you hadn’t told the full truth? What would they think of you then? Or what if years passed? What good would it do, at that point, to admit your cowardice, your steadfast willingness to lie for well over a decade? Imagine the look on your wife’s face, your mother, the Ormsons staring at you. How could you withhold such important information, they’d wonder, stunned with horror and hatred. “Maybe our son could have been saved, if you’d only spoken up!” they’d cry. “Maybe his killer could have been brought to justice!” Under such circumstances, would it ever be possible to confess? Under such circumstances, didn’t it seem reasonable to continue to say nothing?
I was thinking of this as Bryce and I walked into the living room, my own self-justification blooming again in my head. Then I saw the Ormsons sitting there and my heart went blank.
There was a time in college when I used to think about committing suicide. I would plan it pretty carefully in my mind, but I was always too afraid to carry it out. Once, I even took a handful of over-the-counter sleeping pills. But by the time I got up enough nerve to put a razor blade to my wrists, I was so sleepy and clumsy I wasn’t able to follow through. I ended up nodding off instead. When I woke up, almost twenty-four hours later, I was so grateful to be alive that I thought I was cured.
Nevertheless, as Mrs. Ormson rose from the couch to give me a hug, the old feeling roosted heavily onto my shoulders. I wished I were dead. She kissed my cheek.
“It’s so good to see you,” she whispered against my bare ear. I felt her cool hands against my neck as she pulled me closer, tighter against herself. “It’s been a long time,” she said. And when she released me, Mr. Ormson was standing there with his hand extended.
