A Place For Us

by Liza Gyllenhaal

  “Go on, Phoebe,” Mrs. Bostock told her. “It’s okay.”

  “He said he sometimes thought about ending it all. I made him promise me—I actually made him hold up his hand and swear to me—that he wouldn’t hurt himself, that he wouldn’t even think about doing anything like that before calling me first. So I asked him—at that end of our last talk—if that’s why he was calling. If this was maybe that call. And he said no. He said he just needed to hear my voice.”

  The room was silent as the significance of what Phoebe had said sank in. If Liam had felt desperate yesterday—and hadn’t been able to reach Phoebe—what actions might he have already taken?

  “It’s going to be okay, honey,” Fred said, patting her shoulder as he stood up. “We’re going to find him.” He’d been holding the cell phone that Wanda had given him when they first arrived. Now he flipped it open and handed it back to Phoebe.

  “Check your messages,” he said.

  There was only one. It was sent Sunday night at 7:03, almost exactly twenty-four hours before Phoebe was finally able to read it.

  Tried to call u. Hope u get this. So, so sorry. Love u Phebe.

  “Call him for us now, okay?” he told her. “Keep it simple. Just—where are you? Don’t let him know that we’re all here or that anyone’s upset.”

  With everyone standing around watching, Phoebe tried Liam’s number. It rang five times before the automated message clicked on, announcing that the voice mailbox was full. Phoebe shook her head as she looked up at her uncle.

  “Text him, then,” Fred said. “Nobody here needs to see what you say. But make it clear you really want to talk to him.”

  She sat alone on the couch, her fingers trembling as she thumbed her message:

  Love u too! Where are u? Miss u—CALL me!

  Phoebe knew Liam usually kept his phone on vibrate, and that he would usually respond to her right away. But when there was no reply after several minutes, Phoebe’s uncle said gently, “That’s okay. He probably has it turned off to save on the battery. He’s bound to check later. Let me keep the cell for now. If he calls, I’ll give it right back to you, okay?”

  She nodded and handed over the phone. Phoebe’s mom came and sat beside her as Fred and the other police officers discussed the situation. Phoebe tried to follow the conversation:

  “Cell phone tower data wouldn’t be able to pinpoint his location like GPS data does,” said the state police detective who seemed to be in charge, “but it could tell us which side of the tower the signal is coming from and, based on the pings, how strong it is. Enough to get a general idea of where he is.”

  “Phone has to be on, though, right?” Fred asked.

  “Yes, but I assume your son relies a lot on his cell?” the officer asked, turning to Mrs. Bostock. When she nodded, he said, “So I’m guessing it’s what the chief here said before—he has it off right now to conserve power. He’ll turn it back on at some point, and when he does, I want us to be ready to move. So we need to get in touch with his wireless carrier now and get them on board.”

  It was Fred who, with the information Mrs. Bostock supplied, contacted the phone company. It took him several calls to get through to someone who could help, but even then there was some back-and-forth about privacy rights and a waiver that the company claimed had to be signed before they’d release the data. Finally, Phoebe’s uncle lost his temper.

  “Look, I don’t think you understand. This is an emergency situation. A teenage boy has been missing for nearly forty-eight hours. We don’t have time to get you a goddamn warrant! I want to talk to someone who can help me save this boy’s life right now!”

  After a moment of silence, Fred started nodding. “Good,” he said, “great. I appreciate that.”

  • • •

  The night wore on. Liam’s dad arrived back from Moorehouse and huddled in the kitchen with Fred and the state police. Neighbors began to stop by with offers to help. Phoebe lost track of time. At one point, Wanda said to her: “If you want to take a nap, sweetie, that’s fine. I promise to wake you the minute he calls.”

  “That’s okay,” Phoebe replied. “I’m not going to sleep.”

  But after what seemed like only minutes, Phoebe woke to light in her eyes, the smell of coffee, and the sound of her uncle’s voice.

  “We finally got a location!” he was shouting to someone. “But I don’t know. . . .”

  Phoebe jumped up and ran into the kitchen. From the look on her uncle’s face she knew that something was wrong.

  “Did he call me?” she asked, looking around the room. Liam’s mom was holding the cell phone. There were tears in her eyes as she handed it to Phoebe. The text message read:

  Sorry—nothing left to talk about.

  29

  Michael and Brook followed the caravan of police cars through Barnsbury. The road hadn’t been plowed in a couple of hours, and between the drifts and the frigid early-morning temperatures, the driving was treacherous. Phoebe was somewhere up ahead, riding with her mom in the back of her uncle’s cruiser. A half dozen cars full of volunteers followed behind Michael’s truck in carefully spaced intervals.

  Though they’d since lost contact, the initial signal that the wireless tower had picked up from Liam’s cell was coming from somewhere inside the state forest that spanned nearly one hundred square miles southwest of Barnsbury. Trying to locate Liam in the heavily wooded, rocky terrain wasn’t going to be easy, but no one had hesitated when Chief Henderson suggested that the family and friends who’d gathered at the Bostocks’ form a search party. They’d agreed to park at the base of Deer Mountain, across from the high school, and access the park from the trail that led up to one of the summits.

  Liam’s last text message had filled Michael with an awful sense of foreboding, but Lynn had taken him and Brook aside as the group was getting ready to leave.

  “I know you two must be worried sick, but don’t forget that teenagers can be incredibly dramatic, okay? I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Liam walked through the door any minute. I could stay here with Tilly if you like, and keep an eye on things.”

  “Thanks,” Michael said, hugging his sister. When it really mattered, Lynn had come through. He’d watched the way she had stood by Brook through the bleak early-morning hours, keeping the coffee supply going, making phone calls, stepping in whenever his wife needed a hand. The misunderstandings and resentments that had divided them seemed unimportant now.

  “Look around,” Lynn said, nodding at the volunteers who crowded the kitchen. “Word travels fast in a small town—which can be a blessing at times, don’t you think? A lot of people have come out for you guys this morning.”

  But even this unexpected show of support could do little to ease Michael’s fears. And the news that they’d been able to trace Liam to the state forest had done nothing to lift his spirits. He knew the dangers of the area probably better than anyone. He could think of dozens of frightening possibilities including Liam’s cell phone signal coming from the bottom of one of the park’s many steep ravines.

  • • •

  “I need to tell you something,” Brook said as Michael eased the pickup onto Route 31. The cruiser in front of them was going a little more than twenty miles an hour, so Michael was forced to do the same, though he would have given anything to be able to floor the gas. He’d been so much in his own private hell that he hadn’t really noticed that Brook had been nearly silent until now. He glanced over at her. She was looking straight ahead.

  “Okay.”

  “I made a terrible mistake forcing Liam to go to Moorehouse.”

  “We made that decision together.”

  “No, not really. You didn’t want him to go. I talked you into it. Even though I wasn’t sure how I felt, I convinced myself Janice and Peg would know the right thing to do. I let them decide for me—and I’m sorry. I’ve never been more sorry about anything in my life.”

  He reached over and squeezed her hand. He’d been waiting fo
r the right moment to tell her the truth about himself. But he realized now that it was never going to come. Even if it meant destroying her faith in him, he knew he had no choice. He couldn’t let her go on blaming herself for what had happened. At this frustrating speed at which they were crawling along, it would likely take them at least another twenty minutes to reach the turnoff for Deer Mountain—more than enough time to explain to her why their lives had veered so far from the course they had hoped to travel.

  “Listen, Brook—you were right about Troy,” he began. “The lawsuit is payback time for him. I’m sure he’d deny it. He may not even realize it himself. But he’s hated me for so long that I just know he was waiting for an opportunity to get even. And the thing is—he has every reason to hate me.”

  “Oh, Michael, I don’t believe that. We all know he’s—”

  “No, he has every reason to hate me,” Michael said. He was gripping the wheel so hard his knuckles were white. “I want you to know what happened. . . .”

  • • •

  As simply as he could, he told her about his dad. Not the happy-go-lucky man that his mom liked to recall and that he’d let Brook believe in, but the angry drunk he’d grown into by the time Michael was a teenager.

  “I understand him better now. Looking back, I can accept that it wasn’t him but the booze talking. But, when he drank, he turned into another person. No, he turned into a monster. And I despised him for it.”

  He told her that Troy had been his best friend then. That they used to go up to the cabin in the woods, where the two boys could be alone, smoke cigarettes, and hang out.

  “In a lot of ways, we were still just kids, really. But the summer I was fifteen, I started drinking—and I couldn’t stop. It’s hard to explain how wonderful that first gulp of whiskey tasted. How totally great it made me feel. Almost immediately, it seemed like the perfect solution to all my problems.”

  “Michael?”

  “No, please, let me finish,” he said. “I need you to hear me out.” He refused to look over at her. He had to keep going. She deserved to know everything.

  “That summer we went camping a couple of times up by this isolated lake on the Lansings’ land. It felt great to get away—do whatever we wanted. We both really needed to let off steam. Troy had a younger sister. Her name was Sylvia.”

  “Yes, I know,” Brook said. “Lynn told me about her.”

  “What did she say?” Michael asked, glancing over at his wife.

  “Just that she—she drowned,” Brook said softly. “And that you and Troy found her. It must have been—”

  “It was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” Michael said. “It changed everything. And Lynn was wrong about us ‘finding’ Sylvia after she drowned. We were right there.”

  He told her everything. How they had to take Sylvia with them that weekend. How he started drinking when Troy left to go fishing. How Sylvia had told him that she loved him—and that he’d pushed her away.

  “So she had a crush on you,” Brook said. “It’s not your fault if you didn’t feel the same.”

  “No, but I was cruel,” Michael said. “Sylvia wasn’t a regular kid. She was slow. Something went wrong during her birth. I don’t know what exactly, but she was never mentally older than maybe a seven-year-old. That’s why Troy’s mom left, I think. She just couldn’t handle it. So Sylvia ended up being Troy’s responsibility a lot of the time. I know he felt saddled with her, but he tried to be kind. People made fun of her. They called her ‘Silly.’ She hated that. She hated any mention of her not being normal. And then I had to go and call her ‘stupid.’ That’s why she ran into the lake. That’s why she died.”

  Not knowing how to swim, weighed down by her wet clothes, increasingly panicked, Sylvia had drowned within a few feet of her brother, while Michael stumbled through the water, too drunk to help.

  “He blamed me. He screamed and screamed at me. Told me I was a fucking no-good alcoholic just like my dad. But after we finally pulled Sylvia’s body out of the water, he never said another word about it. To me—or to anyone else about what really happened. I think he must have blamed himself, too.”

  They were less than a mile from the turnoff, but Michael knew that there would never be enough time to explain to his wife why he’d kept this from her until now. How he’d had to use every ounce of willpower he possessed to change his life after Sylvia died. To stop drinking. Remake himself from the ground up. He’d walked away from his fifteen-year-old self, and he’d never looked back. No, he’d been afraid to look back. He knew that a part of him always hoped that if he just kept walking, kept moving, he’d finally be able to leave that boy behind him forever.

  “I should have told you this before,” Michael said as they pulled off the road behind the police cars. Brook’s silence frightened him. Was it possible for her to understand what it had been like for him? Would she be able to see that he’d believed then it was the only way he could turn his life around? Or would she just see what he realized now: that what he’d done wasn’t just futile—but wrong? By refusing to acknowledge his past, he’d made it possible for their son to repeat his mistakes.

  He shut off the engine—and turned to her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I am, too,” she said, looking up at the mountain. Cars were pulling in around them, doors slamming as people emerged into the cold morning. There was such a sadness in her voice that he couldn’t help but believe it was all over. Their marriage—his life. Something inside him began to collapse and he could feel himself plunging downward. Then Brook said:

  “I can’t bear the thought of you having to carry this inside you all this time.”

  • • •

  Snow had transformed the heavily wooded mountainside, bowing the branches of the evergreens, softening the contours of rock and fallen tree limbs, muffling sound.

  “Liam!”

  “Liam!”

  The voices that floated down from the trail ahead of Michael didn’t carry far. He followed behind Brook, reaching out to steady her from time to time as she stumbled up the steep incline. Blazed trees marked the route, but the path itself was sometimes knee-deep in drifts. They’d been climbing for almost an hour and were just now reaching the first summit. Michael and Brook approached the group gathered by a lean-to that gave out on a panoramic view of the snow-shrouded wilderness. One of the officers was scanning the area with high-powered binoculars. Fred and a state police detective were studying a contour map, comparing it with the glassed-in trail map posted inside the lean-to.

  “Okay, we’re going to divide up here,” Fred said when everyone in the party had assembled. “Try to stick to the trail as marked. If you think you see Liam—or anything that might lead us to him—send one of your party back here where we have radio contact and we’ll send a rescue team. We’re working on getting helicopter support, but that’s going to take another hour or two. Whatever you do, be careful and stay together. We don’t need anyone getting hurt on top of everything else.”

  Michael and Brook joined the group that took the trail leading north into the highest elevations. The path wound for over fifteen miles through stands of maples and birches and limestone outcroppings with views in places that took in three different states. Michael had often come up here as a boy. When the Bostocks had first moved back to Barnsbury, Michael took Liam camping somewhere along this ridge. It had been at the height of summer then, the world a lush, hazy green. Now the snow cover and leafless trees made the mountaintop seem barren and forbidding.

  Once again bringing up the rear, Michael found himself thinking back on those early camping trips with his son, especially the summer they’d first moved into the house—when Liam had still been so excited about his new life in his father’s hometown. He recalled sitting by the campfire one night and telling Liam the story of the Indian maiden who, rumor had it, jumped to her death from the very ridge on which they were camping. As he watched Liam’s rapt expression across t
he fire, his heart had ached at his innocence and the thought of what life had in store for him. How little he could do really to help his inward, solitary son find his place in the world.

  The sky had cleared to a glacial blue and sunlight dazzled across the snow. Michael hadn’t slept and exhaustion weighed on him. And something else. Something that made him slow his pace. He began to fall behind.

  He stopped and turned around. Several hundred yards back along the trail he saw a stand of towering spruces, forming a kind of gateway to a long wooded landmass that jutted out over the valley. He recognized it now as the turnoff to the area where he and Liam had spent that memorable summer night.

  He stared out across the promontory, wondering.

  “Brook!” he called to his wife, who was now several dozen yards ahead of him. “Brook, hold on!”

  She turned, waiting for him.

  “I think I know where he is,” Michael said, breathing hard as he approached. “Back there—you see that ridge? Liam and I used to hike up here—and I just have this feeling—”

  With growing excitement, he grabbed her arm and said:

  “Run on ahead, and tell the others to wait. If I’m wrong, this won’t take more than ten minutes. If I’m right—you’ll hear me call you. From the end of that ledge—an echo carries across the valley for miles.”

  • • •

  He was sure of it now. Liam had come back to a place that had once made him happy. What Michael didn’t know—and filled him with dread—was in what kind of shape he would find him. Michael didn’t want to think what three days of exposure and loneliness, on top of Liam’s other problems, might have done to his son, or forced him to do to himself.

  The path out to the end of the ridge wasn’t marked and had become overgrown. Michael kept having to backtrack around fallen trees and densely matted brambles. But he reached the clearing at last—and what he saw before him on the ground made his heart beat with excitement. A backpack, food wrappings, and empty soup cans were scattered around the burned-out remains of a small fire. He squatted down and touched the ashes. They were still warm. Footprints dotted the area—leading back and forth into the woods, around the fire, and, finally, out to the end of the promontory, where, Michael remembered, the drop was sheer and straight down. Following the prints, he came to the very edge of the outlook. Dizzy with fear, he forced himself to lean over and look.