Your Son Is Alive

by James Scott Bell

  She cocked her head and gave him a half smile. “Not just yet.”

  “Because for all I know he’s dead and I’m not willing to be played anymore.”

  “Dylan, can I say something, with all sincerity?”

  “Sincerity?” he said. “Are you kidding?”

  “That hurts.”

  Dylan almost laughed in her face. His mouth formed an open smile, the kind that communicates unbelievable.

  Tabitha Mullaney certainly could pool earnestness in her eyes. “You are not being played. I know it seems like it, because I’m being coy.”

  “You call all this coy?”

  “A woman’s charm, then?”

  “I’m not calling it that.”

  “Listen,” she said, “I’m being totally open with you. I want you to be reunited with your son, and for the three of us to be happy.”

  “The three of us?”

  She nodded.

  “I want photographic proof,” Dylan said. “I want something solid. You and whoever wrote those notes.”

  “Notes again? I told you—”

  “You’re working with someone. A man. You’re trying to shake me down for some reason, and my wife.”

  “Your ex-wife,” Tabitha said.

  “Who is he?” Dylan said.

  She came to him and put her hand softly on his chest. The move repulsed him, but he let it stay in order to keep her talking.

  “Can I be truthful with you?” she said. “Oops, there I go again, huh?”

  Dylan said nothing. Her hand pressed harder.

  “It’s true there was a man involved in this,” she said. “But not anymore. I want you to know everything. But I need you to know it on my terms. I’ve waited a long time for this.”

  “Just tell me now.”

  “You won’t believe me,” she said. “But tonight, you will.”

  “Tonight?”

  “I want you to come to my house.”

  “Not a chance,” Dylan said.

  “Even if it means seeing Kyle?”

  He grabbed her wrist.

  “You’re hurting me,” she said.

  Dylan said, “You’re a liar.”

  “Let go.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  And then, shocking him more than if she had produced a live dove from her sleeve, Tabitha began to cry. Softly at first, and yanking her arm away, turning on him, going back to the fence. She put her hands on the fence and lowered her head. Her shoulders shaking.

  Just an act, Dylan told himself.

  But it was a good one. He was tempted to say something evenhanded, then reminded himself that she was pathological when it came to anything resembling truth.

  He waited.

  Finally, Tabitha turned around, wiping her eyes. “There’s so much I want to tell you. So much that will heal you. Won’t you give me one last chance?”

  “After all this?”

  She nodded. “I live in a house in a very quaint residential neighborhood.”

  “Where you could kill me,” Dylan said.

  “I’m not the one who wants you …”

  “Wants me what?”

  “He, the man, he is the one who wants you dead. Not me. I can make this right. If you don’t come … it’s dangerous for you.”

  “This is all so crazy.”

  “Look at me now,” she said. “He is alive. Your son is alive. And you can see him. Tonight.”

  32

  “Well, this could get interesting,” Yumiko said, smiling at Erin as she looked up from her keyboard.

  Yumiko cradled a long, gold-colored box in her arms.

  “Are you kidding?” Erin said.

  “I take it your lunch the other day went swimmingly?”

  “It was just lunch,” Erin said.

  Yumiko lifted the box. “Oh really?”

  “Hand them over.”

  “Did you lip lock?”

  “No! Now gimme.”

  “Okay,” Yumiko said, handing Erin the box. “But I’m going to want details.”

  “Nothing juicy happened.”

  “Well that’s a major letdown.”

  The second wave of afternoon students were on their way to classes. Erin knew Andy’s schedule—had checked it when she’d first come in to work—and he didn’t have a class on Mondays.

  “It’s still highly romantic,” Yumiko said.

  Erin used her fingernail to slice the tape on either side of the box, then lifted off the top.

  Revealing a dozen long-stemmed red roses.

  Yumiko sighed. “This definitely looks like love.”

  “Will you stop?” Erin said, reaching for the small envelope on top of the stems.

  “What’s it say, what’s it say?” Yumiko curled around behind Erin’s chair.

  Erin pulled the envelope to her chest. “Will you let me, please?”

  “Come on, this is so rom-com. I’m the best friend character.”

  “It’s private,” Erin said.

  “No way! In the script, I snatch the note and read it.” Yumiko made a half-hearted move to take the envelope.

  Erin pulled it away. “This is not a movie.”

  “How do you know?” Yumiko said. “Maybe everything we do is being filmed.”

  “That’s a comforting thought. Now step back and I’ll read it and let you know.”

  Yumiko returned to her previous spot, saying, “There goes my best supporting actress nod.”

  Erin opened the envelope, took out the card. It had a floral pattern on the edges, with a blank middle for a message. In blue, felt-tip marker was written, It’s you I can’t replace.

  No signature.

  “So what’s it say?” Yumiko’s chin rested on the edge of Erin’s cubicle partition.

  Erin gave her the card.

  “It’s you I can’t replace,” Yumiko said. “Wow. That is some serious romancing.”

  Erin felt an odd friction inside her. Part of it was as Yumiko described—the spark of romance. She wanted it to be that spark. But offsetting the desire was a streak of disquiet. It ran through her like a discordant note in an otherwise pleasant musical piece.

  “What’s wrong?” Yumiko said.

  “I don’t know,” Erin said. “It’s kind of a strange message, don’t you think?”

  “It’s poetic.”

  “Replace?”

  “He must be referring to something you said at lunch. Did you talk about replacing anything?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Tires? Dishwashing liquid?”

  “No,” Erin said. “We didn’t talk about replacing anything.”

  “Maybe it’s a line from a poem or something,” Yumiko said. “Google it.”

  Erin reached for her trackball mouse.

  “Don’t forget to put quotes around it,” Yumiko said.

  “What are you, my teenage daughter?”

  “Your quirky and fun-loving coworker.”

  Erin typed “It’s you I can’t replace” into the search box and hit return. The top hit had a video thumbnail.

  “The Police,” Erin said. “ ‘Every Breath You Take.’ ”

  She looked at Yumiko, the unease inside her now a full-on chill.

  “Oh, no,” Yumiko said. “Is that …”

  Erin nodded. “The stalker song.”

  “That’s kind of creepy,” Yumiko said.

  “Ya think?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t know it’s a stalker song.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t Andy,” Erin said.

  “What? Who else?”

  Erin heard the voice in her head.

  I am going to look out for you. Both of you.

  33

  “He is alive. Your son is alive. And you can see him. Tonight.”

  Dylan, tired from the long drive home, couldn’t get the words out of his head. They could be one giant lie, one huge come-on for some other sort of plan. Yet he knew he’d give her this chance.

  He got
a root beer from the refrigerator. No alcohol tonight. He would need to be sharp. Especially since he’d have a gun.

  Sitting in the front room, Dylan couldn’t help a wondering what Kyle would be like now, if indeed he was really alive. Would he be an extension of the boy he had known and loved with all the fervor that’s possible to know and love another person?

  Or would he be a complete stranger? Some other being, from another life, as separated from Dylan as a random box boy in St. Paul or an honor student at Princeton?

  He’d be the smarter one, right?

  Dylan recalled the first time they’d gone to Disneyland, the three of them. Kyle was three, his eyes full of kid wonder at the Magic Kingdom, but also inquiring eyes, and full of questions.

  As they walked toward the carousel, Dylan paused to show Kyle the window above the Snow White ride. The curtains opened and the Wicked Queen peered out for a moment before the curtains closed. Kyle wanted to know who she was. Dylan told him she was a mean lady who didn’t like Snow White.

  Kyle wanted to know why.

  Dylan started to go over the story, how the queen wanted to be the fairest one of all. Then he had to explain what fairest meant. But how do you explain jealousy and vanity to a three-year-old at Disneyland?

  But Kyle got it. He seemed to, at least. His little brow furrowed as he looked up and saw the queen’s appearance once more.

  “She needs help,” Kyle said.

  What an answer from a three-year-old child. Not She needs to be hit by lightning. No, he saw she had … issues. And he wanted to get her help.

  Dylan and Erin had talked about Kyle’s heart, how innocent and sensitive it was.

  Would he have that same heart now?

  Or was it ripped out of him forever the moment he was taken?

  Did that tear his soul so completely that he would cut off all wonder, all joy?

  Well, one thing was sure now. Dylan’s own heart, pounded by grief over fifteen years, was perfectly capable of revenge. Yes, Tabitha needed help, just like the Wicked Queen. But if it came down to it, Dylan would be the source of the lightning bolt.

  It would come from a gun.

  He owned a Beretta M9, a semi-auto pistol he bought several years ago from a retired Ventura County police officer at a gun show in Oxnard.

  Dylan had never been into guns. But with home invasions on the rise in Los Angeles, he’d finally decided to get something that would be a last resort but a winning hand.

  He took the requisite training and got his Handgun Safety Certificate from the California Department of Justice. He remembered the day he got it, how he laughed and said to himself, in the Dirty Harry voice, “I got your justice, right here.”

  Two years later, he got a Derringer with the thought of getting a conceal-and-carry permit. A late night in downtown L.A. was not the proverbial walk in the park. Or even parking lot.

  But he never pursued it. Instead, he’d installed a wall safe for both guns, and they hadn’t been out for exercise at the range in over a year.

  Dylan opened the safe and took out the Beretta. The magazine was next to a box of Winchester 9mm bullets. Fat lot of good all this would have done him in an emergency. He’d have to load the magazine, shove it into the gun, and chamber a round. Enough time for the invader to take his laptop and have a cup of coffee, too.

  Maybe he should take the Derringer. But that was a weapon for emergencies and close quarters, and of course he had no idea what the setup would be.

  Was he really thinking of doing this? Holding the Beretta, testing the heft, Dylan was hoping he’d feel like Bruce Willis.

  Instead, he felt like a mall cop in a mediocre comedy.

  Who was he kidding? He wasn’t a gun-toting hero.

  Not yet, anyway. But he was morphing into someone not entirely himself. If not a hero, at least a father who did something for his son, long lost, maybe dead. But something.

  Dylan placed the Beretta on top of the safe and began to load the magazine.

  34

  The night lights of the Valley always looked so benign from Erin’s balcony. In the past she would take comfort from the sight, the way most people do at a cityscape under the stars.

  Now Erin was fighting her thoughts, thinking about what was happening under those lights. Was somebody breaking into a car in the parking structure at Universal? Was there a killing taking place in that nice little apartment building on Ventura? A rape behind a liquor store on Lankershim?

  She hated thoughts like that. They came from what she called the shadow corner of her mind.

  When she was six she accidentally killed a rabbit. She was visiting her grandparents in Acton, California, a place of desert and dust and sun. Nana and Papa were old-school Californians, with a home and a big backyard with a rabbit pen. Nana raised the rabbits, she said, because their droppings were the best kind of fertilizer for her garden. She called it composting. She even put the pellets in jars and sold them at open markets!

  Erin took one bunny to heart. One of the small ones. She named it Happy. She got to hold it sometimes when Nana was there. But Erin liked it best when Nana wasn’t there. Because then it was just her and Happy and she could talk to it and pretend they were having a conversation.

  One afternoon when Nana was working on her quilt in the living room, Erin told Happy that she was going to get the rabbit something to eat, to help it grow bigger. To keep up with the other rabbits.

  There was a magic food, Erin told Happy, that her grandmother told her about. Nana called it “the perfect food.”

  It was the avocado. You could eat it with some salt and pepper, or you could smash it all up and make something called guacamole.

  Erin got an avocado from Nana’s refrigerator and fed some to Happy.

  That night Happy died.

  Erin was inconsolable. Nana held her and rocked her and between her sobs softly asked Erin if she had done anything to Happy.

  Erin said no, only fed her some good avocado.

  Which was when Nana stopped rocking her. And told her that avocados are toxic to rabbits.

  Erin didn’t know what toxic meant.

  “Poison,” Nana said. “Something that causes death.”

  Erin wailed at the horror of it. She was Happy’s killer. She was bad inside. And if she was bad so was everybody else, except maybe Nana.

  Though she never spoke about it to anyone, ever after Erin’s imagination would take off of its own volition, wondering about all the bad things being done by people when no one was looking. In the shadows.

  Those thoughts became little pictures, and the pictures took up rent-free space in a corner of her mind.

  By the time she married Dylan she’d become self-aware enough to be able to assert a little control. When a shadow thought materialized, unbidden, to her she’d pause and try to imagine the coastline of Big Sur, which she found overpoweringly beautiful. She’d hear the waves crashing on the rocks and smell the salt air, and usually that would do the trick. The shadows would diminish, go and crouch somewhere in her mind waiting for another opportunity.

  Their big moment came when Kyle was kidnapped. No fleeting pictures of beach or ocean or sky could fight the strength of the dark shadows that seemed to have voice, that seemed to whisper a mocking phrase. We told you so …

  It had taken years of counseling to get them under control once more. She’d gone to a counselor trained in Neural Linguistic Programming and found out her Big Sur replacement practice was one of the tools of NLP. She learned to catch the shadows as they were emerging and reduce them to the size of a pea in her mind, then explode the pea into a million minuscule particles—the Pea Big Bang she laughingly called it—and immediately replace it with a full color picture of Big Sur.

  Later she added the Grand Canyon and Akaka Falls on the Big Island of Hawaii.

  Gradually, oh so gradually, the shadow side of her mind retreated. Running helped, too, as gobs of oxygen worked like a magnificent air hose in her brain.
/>   But now the shadows were back.

  We told you so …

  She was startled by a knock at her door.

  35

  Dylan went over the safety rules he’d learned from his cop friend. They came out a little fuzzy, but he heard them in his friend’s voice.

  The gun is always loaded.

  Don’t ever point that gun at anything or anybody you’re not willing to shoot.

  Keep your finger off the trigger until you intend to shoot.

  Keep guns away from children.

  I mean it, make sure you have a gun safe.

  Aim for the center body mass.

  His friend also taught him the proper way to prep and insert the magazine, insisting that Dylan do it right, like a piano teacher drilling a pupil in the scales—you held the gun with your dominant hand and placed the magazine in the magazine well with your non-dominant hand.

  He did that now, holding the gun in his right and the mag in his left. He shoved the magazine firmly with his left palm. Then he used his left hand to rack the slide and chamber a round.

  He made sure the safety was on.

  Now all he needed was something to shoot at.

  Or someone.

  Could he really do that? Actually shoot to kill?

  Guns.

  Killing.

  He remembered in a flash a moment when Kyle was three. Dylan was watching the news about the war heating up in Afghanistan, and footage from a dusty brown village with soldiers firing furious rounds at an unseen enemy.

  Kyle had wandered into the family room and was behind him looking at the set, Dylan alerted to his presence only when Kyle said, “What they doing?”

  A simple yet profound question from a preschooler. And Dylan realized at once this was a pivot, a full turn from the innocence of childhood toward a dark window giving a blurry glimpse of a real world to come. How much should he tell his son? This precocious boy who had a way of looking at you when he felt a question was being dodged. He would accept whatever Dylan said because he trusted him, but there was sometimes a squinted eye or furrowed brow before an implicit shrug of shoulders as if to say, Oh, so that’s the way it is. Got it, Dad.