But then the teacher announced there would be an orienteering test on Thursday afternoon, and he realized that was the better time to go. He was disappointed to miss the Halloween campfire, but maybe they wouldn’t have one, anyway, because of what had happened at last night’s campfire. The school director was pissed with them because they had laughed when he tried to teach them “Blowin’ in the Wind.” They had laughed because the questions were like something from a kid’s book—How many seas must a white dove sail?—and because the face the director made while he was singing was so hilarious, like he was constipated. And they had laughed because they wanted to laugh, because they were making s’mores and the moon was out and for a whole week they didn’t have to go to school. But the director wanted the campfire to be more like school.
He chided them: “This is protest music! I guess you’re not mature enough for this.” Robbie wanted to raise his hand and say, I am, I love music, I know about Bob Dylan. But instead he had turned to his best friend, Kyle, and said, “I liked that song,” a sentiment Kyle had then conveyed to everyone sitting nearby, and everybody cracked up as if he’d confessed to liking Barney the purple dinosaur.
And then the school director thought it was Robbie’s fault that everyone was laughing at him, that Robbie had been the one to say something sarcastic. And Robbie hadn’t even bothered to defend himself, because he knew there was no point.
His legs were getting tired. He sat down on a rock and gazed up at the trees. The branches at the top were so spindly, they tapered sharply, like pencil tips. He imagined the trees writing letters on the air—to whom? This was the kind of question he would share with his mother, to amuse her, to make her smile. He knew the kinds of questions she liked best, the ones that would get her talking. She would ask him for a word for tree letters. Leaflets, maybe—except that was a real word. Maybe Leaflins. Or should he start from tree? Treescrolls. A girl at school was named Sylvia, and she said her name meant “woods.” It was from Latin, she said. He liked talking to Sylvia; she had a round, calm face, and when she walked through the hallways, it was like she was floating gently down a river and everyone else was hiking uphill. But she was only in school in the mornings, because she was studying ballet. She left every day at lunch to go to a studio in Frederick. She had to get special permission from the school board. Robbie wished he had some special reason to leave early. He’d seen her going a few times, climbing into a car with her duffel bag over her shoulder. Her mother picked her up.
Once, Ms. Lanning had asked him what he liked about sneaking out of school. He said, “Sneaking out of school.” And she had laughed.
He didn’t tell her about the way his mind could drift in the direction of fear, the sense he would get of a storm coming, darkening all his thoughts. He would get a cold panicky feeling in his bones and he would have to escape. He would concentrate on planning his escape if he couldn’t leave right away. Once he got out, he would instantly feel better.
The only time he didn’t worry about that feeling coming on was during play practice, when he stood under the lights or in the wings looking onto the stage, that flat empty space that every afternoon became full of life, a little pocket world within itself.
His favorite person—after Sylvia—was Seth. Seth played the Cowardly Lion and everyone liked him. He had shoulder-length hair that he wore in a ponytail and he played the guitar. There was always a group of people around him between scenes, and he would let Robbie listen in on his conversations. Afterward, he would explain anything Robbie didn’t understand. Robbie kept the new words filed away for future use: weed, hottie, forty, douchebag, blow job, Deadhead, shrooms. There were bands to learn, too. Seth made him a mix for Outdoor School called Happy Camper Tunes. Robbie listened to a few songs every night before he fell asleep, sneaking his Walkman into his bunk. Then he switched tapes and listened to Les Mis. He had to hear “Castle on a Cloud” before he fell asleep. He loved the sweet way the little girl sang it.
The first time Robbie saw Bryan standing on the altar at church, chin tipped up, tears streaming, he thought Bryan was an actor, too. Someone who needed a stage. He told Seth about it, one day after school, and then Seth told him his theory of religion, how it was a made-up world for people to pretend in, and how if you were going to live in an imaginary world, you might as well pick one that didn’t make you feel guilty all the time. Seth was going to be an actor when he finished school. If he didn’t get into his first-choice college, he was going to cut his hair and move to California. He liked to say that when something annoying happened: Fuck it, I’ll just cut my hair and move to California! Sometimes Robbie said it, too. It always made Seth laugh.
Robbie wanted to be an actor, too. His plan was to call Seth when he graduated. Seth would be famous by then and would help him get his start. It wouldn’t matter that he and Seth were six years apart, because when you grew up, you were allowed to hang out with people who were older than you and it wasn’t strange.
Robbie’s hands were getting cold, even with his gloves on. He put them in his pockets and retrieved one of the two Snickers bars he had secreted there. Aunt Joelle had sent them to him, along with some raisins, gum, and a word find from some lame Christian kids’ magazine. He didn’t even do word finds anymore. He had moved on to cryptograms. Still, he was grateful for the package. His dad hadn’t even sent him a letter.
He bit into the candy bar, trying to savor each layer. It was close to four thirty. His classmates had probably already made it back to the school. He wondered how long until they began to search for him.
THE GIRL DRESSED as Glinda—her name was Lacey, Stephanie was pretty sure—had an illegal pet bunny who everyone agreed could serve as Toto. Stephanie coaxed the large, sleepy black rabbit into the small wicker basket she had found at Goodwill.
“He’s a very chill bunny, don’t worry,” Lacey said. She adjusted the puffed sleeves of her straight-from-the-eighties Laura Ashley gown. “I think I need more glitter.”
“You all need more glitter!” someone yelled from the hallway. Stephanie invited her inside to join the preparty. She was uncostumed, save for a pencil-thin mustache, drawn with eyeliner. “I’m John Waters,” she said. “From Baltimore?”
“I’m from Baltimore—sort of!” Theresa called from the corner, where she was applying her Tin Man makeup. Her ensemble was a cleverly constructed mix of tinfoil and spray-painted cardboard. Nearby, Gabe was the Cowardly Lion, his golden curls perfectly playing the part.
“Come on, everyone, let’s get a photo,” Stephanie said. “We have to take one to show my little brother.”
John Waters took the photo, taking turns with everyone’s cameras. Stephanie enjoyed the moment self-consciously. It was like she had to keep checking in with herself to see if she was actually having fun. She was, she was. And if she wasn’t happy—she wasn’t quite—she felt the possibility of happiness shimmering at the edges of her life. She felt pretty and feminine in her blue dress. On her feet were her red cloth Mary Janes, decorated with red sequins. They were the reason she got to be Dorothy—that and her dark hair. She’d dyed it again, for the night, a deep, semipermanent brown.
People started coming into their room, helping themselves to red Jell-O shots quivering in Dixie cups. It was Halloween and there were parties all over campus, culminating in a dance at the campus center. Stephanie and her roommates were hoping to win best group costume. The prize was a month’s supply of cookies from Sugar Rush, a local bakery. The wholesomeness of the prize pleased Stephanie. It was the kind of thing Raquel would never want to win. She had run into her old friend earlier in the day, at the library. When she asked Raquel what costume she was planning, Raquel said she wasn’t going to bother, that costumes were for people who needed an excuse to dress up. Stephanie walked away from the conversation thinking that Raquel really had no sense of fun.
She and Gabe had invented drinks for each of the characters. The “Cowardly Lion” was ginger ale and whiskey; the “Tin Man” w
as any kind of canned beer; the “Scarecrow” was Boone’s Farm; the “Glinda” was champagne; and the “Dorothy” a.k.a. “There’s No Place Like Home” was a red Jell-O shot.
Stephanie stuck to the “Tin Man,” hoping her natural aversion to beer would help her to follow her grandmother’s advice about drinking: one drink per hour and no more than three drinks in one night.
“Stephanie!” Theresa called to her. “You have a phone call!”
Stephanie hadn’t even heard any ringing, that was how noisy their room was getting. “Who is it?”
“I don’t know. A kid.”
Stephanie’s first thought was that it was Robbie. She’d gotten an unremarkable letter from him that morning, postmarked from the Outdoor School. Maybe he was getting lonely. She remembered calling her mother from the Outdoor School pay phone. You had to sign up for it and then you only had five minutes to talk. Some kids would start crying as soon as they heard their mother’s voice. But most kids were like Stephanie, calling only because their mothers had insisted on it.
“Stephanie? It’s Megan.”
“Megan?”
Before Stephanie could say anything else, Megan started talking. “Your dad told me to call you. We were at practice, and one of Robbie’s teachers came running over from the middle school to say that Robbie is missing. And then Uncle Dean said I should call you from his office. He’s driving to the Outdoor School right now with Bryan. He didn’t want to wait. He said he’ll call you when he gets to the Outdoor School.”
“Wait, what do you mean Robbie is missing?”
“I don’t know much,” Megan said. “The lady from the middle school said he got lost on some hike? Or something? I don’t know. But now it’s dark, and they’re getting worried about him being all alone out there.”
The rabbit started moving in Stephanie’s basket, reacting to the way her body was shaking. She had to put the basket down and as she did, the rabbit hopped out.
“Hey, watch out!” Lacey hurried over to her, her Glinda skirts swishing. “You can’t let him jump out, he’ll run off—hey, what’s the matter?”
“My brother’s missing,” Stephanie said. She began to cry, and everyone turned toward her. Just when life was getting better, she was plunged back into loss.
THE MOON ILLUMINATED the bare branches and the pale undersides of newly fallen leaves. The soft blue light made the woods less frightening, but also more cinematic, adding to Dean’s sense that what was happening was not really happening. A half mile away, Robbie’s classmates were gathered around a campfire, toasting marshmallows and telling ghost stories; Dean could smell the smoke on the breeze. They all knew about Robbie; they all knew and had been instructed not to worry, their teachers accomplices in this fiction, handing out chocolate bars and graham crackers. Why weren’t they all out here with flashlights, an army of children to find his son?
“Goddamn,” Dean said, running his hand over his face. He kept walking through spiderwebs. The feeling of the sticky threads on his nose and mouth was like being lightly suffocated.
“I can take the lead,” said Ian, the Outdoor School’s director.
“I’m fine,” Dean said. He was furious. He didn’t want to walk behind this bearded, high-strung hippie who spent his days in the woods teaching children how to use compasses and bows and arrows, as if preparing them for the apocalypse. Ian had a whiff of paranoia about him. He’d told Dean at least four times that they’d used this orienteering test for years, that it was age-appropriate and well supervised, and that no one had ever gotten lost, at least not for this length of time. Dean wanted to tell him to relax, he wasn’t going to sue the school, but at the same time he was annoyed that this man he’d just met was basically asking to be let off the hook. As if that was what mattered. Who cared how any of this had happened? He wanted his son back.
They’d been walking for almost two hours, starting from the school and retracing Robbie’s steps as best they could. Ian showed Dean where the test began, at a large limestone rock that was nicknamed “Pirate Rock” for its shiplike shape. It was one of dozens of boulders scattered throughout the woods, the remnants of some long-departed glacier. Dean used them as landmarks, something to keep him going; he would trick himself into believing that Robbie might be curled up behind one and he would stride toward it eagerly, some part of him actually expecting to find his son. He felt prone to delusions, his body pumped up on stress hormones. He tried to be rational, tried to talk himself down: You’re high on adrenaline and cortisol; take it easy, Dean, take it easy.
He was disturbed to notice that there was an edge of giddiness to all these feelings. He felt just as he had the week after Nicole’s death, when there was so much to do, immediately, and he was cast in the role of leader. His strongest memory of that time was not of the funeral, or of the burial, or of all the visitors who came by the house, but of eating alone, late at night, filling a plate with cold fried chicken and macaroni and cheese and coleslaw and soft rolls, his appetite so huge it was as if he were back in college, recovering from a hard practice, his body ruling him, demanding attention, his mind placid. Nicole’s absence wasn’t yet real to him, although it had been during the hours immediately following her death, when he had been allowed to view her body. He’d braced himself for something grotesque—her face bloated, her tongue hanging, her neck broken—but instead her eyes were shut and she looked placid, her skin pale and faintly gray, as if she’d been lightly erased. She was wearing a sleeveless button-down shirt, the collar partially obscuring the rope burn that crept up past her ears. Dean pulled the collar away from her neck to see the full extent of the damage. Something in him had to know. As he gazed at the dark red bruising, he had an out-of-sync thought: Somebody strangled her. For the briefest of moments, he had a fantasy of revenge. He was going to get whoever had done this awful thing to his wife. But then he realized he was looking at the murderer.
“She didn’t suffer,” the coroner said, watching him. “She would have lost consciousness immediately.”
Dean had straightened Nicole’s shirt, embarrassed.
“Make sure your kids know she didn’t suffer,” the coroner said. “Especially your son, the one who saw her. He’s probably going to have some questions.”
“Okay,” Dean promised. But as soon as he got back outside, some survival gene kicked in and sent a message to his body to disregard those strange, protracted minutes with a complete stranger and his wife’s dead body, to keep them separate from his daily mind.
“There’s the fire road.” Ian pointed ahead, where a break in the trees was barely visible. “There’s a good chance Robbie hit this same spot. The question is, would he have walked on the road or gone back into the woods?”
“I don’t know,” Dean said. And he really didn’t. Of his three children, Robbie was the one he knew the least.
“If you take this road north, it dead-ends, but obviously it hits the main drive if you go in the other direction. Hard to believe he could have walked on the main drive undetected.”
Not that hard to believe, Dean thought. How and when the school lost track of Robbie was unclear to Dean and, it seemed, also to the teacher who had been supervising him at that time. She had not been able to stop crying when Dean questioned her. Dean’s conversation with Kyle, Robbie’s orienteering partner, had not gone much better. Dean knew Kyle well—the boy had stayed overnight several times, although it occurred to Dean that it had been a long time since Robbie had hosted a sleepover or been invited to one. When he spoke to Kyle, he sensed that something had been lost in the boys’ friendship, something that neither Kyle nor Robbie was even aware of. All Kyle would say was that Robbie had been walking slowly, and that he had gotten tired of waiting for him.
“You’re supposed to stay with your buddy,” Dean said. “That’s what the buddy system is.”
“He didn’t stay with me!” Kyle said, his freckled face going red. And then Ian had intervened, with soft words for Kyle, and even softer wo
rds for Dean, assuring him that the children knew and understood the concept of the buddy system. This was before the police had been called, when Ian probably thought the whole thing was going to blow over, that Robbie would show up for dinner, like a dog. But then he didn’t. And then after dinner, another boy—one Dean didn’t know—volunteered that he had seen Robbie removing money and candy and a flashlight from his bunk drawer right before they gathered for orienteering class. This corroborated something Bryan had said, which was that Robbie had emptied his shoebox bank when he was packing.
So he had planned it. Dean remembered Robbie’s insistence on a new flashlight, extra batteries, new gloves, new boots. He didn’t know his son could live with that level of deception.
They had reached the fire road, and without the trees overhead it seemed almost bright. Dean remembered Nicole telling the boys that the moon was a nightlight for the animals.
“I think we should take this back to the main road and check in with the others,” Ian said.
“Can’t you check in with that?” Dean pointed to his walkie-talkie.
“I still think we should get back. What if there’s news? It’s better for you to be in a more centralized place.”
“Okay,” Dean said, barely mustering a shrug. It felt stupid to head back, but it was probably even stupider to walk aimlessly in the woods, hoping to find your child by trial and error.
“We’re going to find him,” Ian said. “He’s a smart kid, and I’m sure he’s taking care of himself. There’s nothing dangerous in these woods. Just deer and squirrels.”
The school director kept talking. He told Dean about Native American traditions in which boys Robbie’s age were sent on weeks-long treks into the woods as a coming-of-age ritual. Then he told Dean about a quarry he used to go swimming in when he was a boy, a treacherous place where he and his friends could easily have drowned or knocked themselves dead with one false dive. Both anecdotes seemed meant as lessons of the dangers children naturally encountered in adolescence. And beneath them, Dean sensed a kind of romanticism, a lefty, back-to-the-land longing for a simpler life when children were free, more in touch with nature, and slightly wild. Never mind that quarries were manmade. Never mind that Native Americans had been decimated by disease, greed, and pure unadulterated aggression. Dean wanted to tell Ian that he’d watched kids burn their youth for him, tearing muscle and banging helmets. He didn’t need examples of the dangers boys needlessly courted.
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