Your Son Is Alive

by James Scott Bell

  He looked.

  The first one said:

  The guy did it. Doctors always do. Ever see The Fugitive?

  This was followed by a reply:

  The Fugitive was INNOCENT, genius.

  The first commenter replied to the reply:

  It was also a movie, numnutz. This is real life.

  And the comeback:

  Great logic there, Aristotle.

  A lengthier comment followed:

  You can’t read anything into an accused not wanting to talk to the press, Steve. It’s prolly the first thing his lawyer told him, don’t talk. Even the innocent shouldn’t talk, because things can be misconstrued and then used against him in court.

  That comment actually gave Dylan a sense of relief. In the mad swirl of internet and social media, a rough justice could sometimes work its way through the noise.

  Dylan turned to answering some emails—two from clients, one from his freshman-year Davis roommate, and one from his older brother who lived in a rural part of North Carolina. Robert Reeve had “dropped out” of city and professional life after taking acid with his girlfriend the night of Y2K. Robert’s email was the only one that did not reflect any knowledge of Dylan’s legal trouble. Dylan decided to keep it that way. Robert had a happy life with his soybeans, peanuts, hogs, and raised consciousness.

  Two cups of coffee later, with his stomach growling under the acid wash, Dylan made some scrambled eggs and sourdough toast, and listened to the local smooth jazz station via iHeartRadio.

  After breakfast he called Erin and again got voicemail. He didn’t leave a message this time, but a sense of unease began to work its way through his thoughts.

  He called DeForest. Erin usually got to the office early, around 8:15 or so if he remembered correctly. But it was not her voice who answered the main line.

  Dylan said, “Has Erin Reeve come in yet?”

  “No, not yet, can I—”

  “This is Dylan Reeve, her ex-husband.”

  “Hello! I’m her friend, Yumiko. I can take a message for you.”

  “It’s important that I talk to her.”

  “Of course. What number is best to reach you?”

  “Can you at least tell me the last time you talked to her?”

  Silence.

  “Please,” Dylan said “I know about the man she was seeing, that he’s dead. I really need to reach her.”

  “Um, Mr. Reeve, I’m sorry, but can you tell me something to verify who you are?”

  “I’m telling you who I am!”

  He realized how stupid that sounded the moment he said it. This woman was only doing what was right. He gave her his number and once again urged the importance of Erin’s getting in touch with him.

  He said, “Please. I’m sorry. I … just tell her to call Dylan. She has my number.”

  “I’ll tell her the moment she comes in,” Yumiko said.

  83

  She refused to watch the horrid movie. He wanted her to. That was why he had her secured to a stupid theater seat.

  She closed her eyes.

  The guy said they’d been together before.

  Was he a former DeForest student? There had been so many over the years, mostly in passing. A few she’d had one-on-one conferences with. But of those she couldn’t recall anyone giving off a creep vibe.

  Of course, a real, practiced sociopath wouldn’t send out those signals. Quite the opposite.

  Could he have been from further back? Before she married Dylan?

  There’d been a ten-year span between high school and marriage. She’d had only one serious relationship in that time. Tyson Starr was a car salesman and very successful at it. What he really wanted to do was start his own business and he had several ideas. When one of them turned out to be internet porn, Erin immediately ended the relationship. Tyson tried for a week to get her back, sending flowers every day. But the bloom was off that rose.

  She didn’t hear from Tyson Starr for six months. Then one day he showed up at her apartment looking totally different. His head was shaved and he had an earring. He’d pumped himself up with weights and asked if he could come in.

  Erin said no, but he pushed his way inside and told her he just wanted to talk. He told her he was a different guy now. That he’d “found himself.” He was on the ground floor of a new multi-level marketing company, hawking vitamins and herbs, and was starting to bring in the big bucks, so now wouldn’t she like to get back together with him?

  Erin said no, and politely asked him to go, and no, she did not want a free starter pack of Energy-Wham supplements. Before he left he put out his hand and she took it. He pulled her to him and tried to kiss her. She turned her head away.

  The last thing he said was, “I’m a goal-type person. I usually get what I want.”

  “No sale here,” Erin said as firmly as possible.

  She hadn’t heard from him since.

  When at last she looked again at the wall, the movie was heading toward a climax. The Phantom being chased by a mob with torches. They trapped him by the river. The Phantom reached into his coat and came out holding something, threatening the crowd with it. They stop for a moment.

  Then the Phantom laughs! He opens his hand to reveal … nothing.

  The crowd closes in on him, finishes him off, then throws him in the river.

  Finis.

  The lights came on, making Erin squint.

  The projector noise stopped.

  “No one deserves that,” the voice said.

  “How much longer is this going to go on?” Erin said.

  “It’s time for your meal.”

  Turning, she tried to get a look at him.

  She caught a glimpse of someone in a hoodie. A blue hoodie obscuring his face. Like a mask. Like the Phantom.

  “Not just yet,” he said, moving directly behind her. “First, we eat.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  But she was.

  The sound of a door slamming open echoed through the room.

  A voice, not his, shouted, “I want my money!”

  Her captor screamed his answer. “Get out!”

  “Give me all of it!”

  “Get out of here!”

  “Who is that?”

  “Get out!”

  “You didn’t say anything about a woman!”

  She heard a scuffling sound, body against body.

  “Don’t touch me!” the new voice said.

  Her captor cursed at top volume.

  Then the sound of a thump, deep and resonant, and something falling to the floor.

  Then silence, except for heavy breathing.

  A man with a buzz cut and tattoos on his arms came into her line of sight. He had some sort of pistol in his right hand.

  His voice was a low growl. “Who are you?”

  Erin, breathless now, looked at the gun, then at this man’s eyes and then …

  Oh, dear God.

  His nose.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he said.

  With what seemed like her last ounce of strength Erin said, “Your mother!”

  84

  A little after nine, and Dylan still hadn’t heard from Erin. He thought about driving to the DeForest campus.

  He had no place he needed to be.

  He wanted to be with Erin.

  His phone buzzed. Dylan grabbed, hoping it was Erin.

  It was Paige.

  “Boss, I’ve got my little brother with me at the office. Can he talk to you?”

  “Your brother?”

  “About the movies,” she said. “He’s kind of anxious to tell you something.”

  “Put him on,” Dylan said.

  “His name’s Josh.”

  A moment later a high-pitched and speedy voice said, “Hi, Dr. Reeve!”

  “Hi, Josh.”

  “My sister’s told me all about it, and it’s like a mystery, a film noir!”

  “I wish it were only a movie,” Dylan said.

&
nbsp; “We can figure this thing,” Josh said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “About Phroso. I don’t think it has anything to do with Freaks.”

  Dylan said, “No?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “Freaks isn’t the only movie with a Phroso,” Josh said.

  Dylan’s hands started to tingle, the way they did when he was a kid about to get on a roller-coaster.

  Josh said, “There’s another movie with a Phroso in it, and I think that’s the one this jerk is using, because of your son.”

  Now Dylan sat up straight. “What movie?”

  “You know much about Lon Chaney?” Josh said.

  “A little. He was the Phantom of the Opera, right?”

  “Yeah. And The Hunchback of Notre Dame and a whole bunch of others. They called him the man of a thousand faces. He usually played these tragic guys, bodies all mangled, or just him all emotional and dark. Always an outsider. So maybe that’s how this guy thinks of himself.”

  “You said you think there’s a connection to my son.”

  “This is so cool! No, wait, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.”

  “I know,” Dylan said.

  In the background, Dylan heard Paige say, “Calm down, Josh.”

  “I just mean,” Josh said, “when I thought about it, it made sense.”

  “Please tell me.”

  “There’s this movie Chaney made where he played a magician by the name of Phroso. He had a wife who was part of his act. He loved her. But she was messing with another man. Phroso confronts this guy backstage and there’s a fight. The man knocks Phroso over a railing and he falls and breaks his back, and he’s turned into a paraplegic.”

  “You’ve seen this movie?”

  “Yes! Lionel Barrymore plays the other man, by the way.”

  Dylan said nothing.

  “Anyway,” Josh said, “I’ve seen everything Chaney did that’s still around. Most of his stuff is lost. So anyway, here’s what happens. Phroso has to get around on one of those rolly things, you know, moving himself with his hands and rolling down the street. He hears his wife has come back to town and is in a church, waiting for him. He wheels to the church, drags himself in, and finds her dead. It’s not clear why, but right next to her body is a baby girl, who she had with this other guy, see, who is now off in Africa to get ivory. So Phroso plots his revenge. He brings the baby to Africa and put her in a … my sister doesn’t like me to say it.”

  In the background, Paige said, “You can say whorehouse, Josh.”

  “Whorehouse,” Josh said. “In Zanzibar. That’s the name of the movie. West of Zanzibar.”

  “That’s it?” Dylan said.

  “No way! That’s just the opening. We cut to a bunch of years later. For all that time Phroso has been using his old magic tricks to fool the local natives into thinking he’s this powerful guy. And then he starts stealing ivory from this man who he’s followed to Africa.”

  “The man who fathered the child?”

  “Lionel Barrymore.”

  “Okay,” Dylan said, wanting to get to the point.

  “So Lionel Barrymore comes to confront him, and then recognizes him as Phroso. Then Phroso calls for the girl to be brought to them, and she’s grown up now, but since she was raised in a … you know, she is what she is.”

  “Does this movie end?” Dylan said.

  “This is the best part! I mean … sorry, this is what happens. So Phroso makes a big deal out of showing the girl to Lionel Barrymore, and finally says ‘See! This is your daughter! I’ve had my revenge!’ ”

  The inklings of a scenario, so base and bizarre it was almost beyond comprehension, began to form in Dylan’s mind.

  Josh said, “Lionel Barrymore sits and puts his head in his hands, and starts shaking. Phroso has this wicked smile, see, enjoying the moment, the moment he’s been waiting for for eighteen years. But then … Phroso sees that Barrymore is not crying, but laughing! Laughing hysterically. And then he tells Phroso that the girl is not his daughter at all, but Phroso’s! His wife was pregnant when she left Phroso, and she never ran off with Barrymore after all. Phroso has done these evil things to his own daughter!”

  Dylan realized he’d been holding his breath for several seconds. He let it out with a gush.

  “See where I’m going with this?” Josh said.

  Dylan said, “But that’s so … fantastic. That some guy would kidnap my son and raise him to be something bad?”

  “Kind of,” Josh said.

  Pressing his thumb to the middle of his forehead, Dylan said, “Thanks for that run down, Josh.”

  “I hope I didn’t upset you. It’s just that my sister said—”

  “Not at all,” Dylan said. “I just need to think about it.”

  What he needed was to get off the phone and figure out a way not to believe this could have happened.

  85

  Was it him? Or was it her impassioned imagination, desperate to make it so?

  “My mom’s dead,” the tattooed man said.

  “Harry Potter,” Erin said. “You loved Harry Potter, and Legos …”

  “I gotta clean this up. Good luck.”

  He stepped around behind her.

  “Wait!” Erin said.

  She heard a grunting, something being dragged, a door closing.

  “Please!”

  Nothing.

  It was him!

  Wasn’t it?

  But he looked so … what was the word? Hardened. And yet there was something in the way he’d said “Good luck.” Not ice cold.

  Or was it all in her tired mind, awash in stress and about to shut down?

  She wouldn’t let it. She would push past the wall, that part of the marathon that happened to her around the twenty-one mile mark. Every part of her screaming to quit, take sweet rest. That was when it was pure will to keep going, ignore the voice and the beckoning shade of a booth serving cold water and orange slices.

  When Kyle was two she’d noted a fundamental decency in him. They say babies come out with a personality stamped on them. The art of parenting was taking what was there and nurturing it, channeling it toward full and wholesome humanity.

  Her Kyle had been sensitive. Not the weak kind of sensitive. It was an empathetic kind. She’d seen it one day in the park, Kyle playing in the sand, and a little girl had joined him. The mother introduced herself to Erin as they watched their kids in spontaneous play.

  The girl was building something out of sticks and an overturned plastic pail. Kyle was picking up fistfuls of sand and watching it trickle out like an hourglass.

  As Erin listened to the mother talk about the conundrum of child care and the working parent, Erin saw a motion out of the corner of her eye.

  Two boys, maybe seven or eight, one chasing the other, ran past Kyle and his new friend. One of them accidentally kicked the girl’s sculpture. Down came the handiwork. And out came the girl’s tears.

  “Uh-oh,” Erin said.

  The mother looked over and got up to see what the matter was. Erin followed.

  When they got there Kyle was petting the girl’s hair.

  It was the most innocent, honest, sympathetic reaction she’d ever seen in one so young. He wanted to comfort the little girl, but not having the words he had only the action of a toddler who had been born—stamped—with a natural tendency toward compassion.

  Maybe, just maybe, this madman hadn’t been able to carve that out of him.

  But what had he done?

  Time was the enemy now. A tortuous enemy. She had to do something.

  But cuffed to a theater seat, what chance did she have to get out of the restraints?

  None, if you don’t try.

  That’s what her friend Linda had told her when the idea of running marathons first floated across her mind. Actually, put there by Linda herself, a runner of longstanding.

  But a marathon? Twenty-six miles, non-stop?


  “You’ll never know if you don’t try,” Linda had said.

  And at that point in her life, in her grief, in her long twilight of mourning, she decided to try.

  The handcuffs on her wrists were connected to the iron under the arm rests. She didn’t know anything about theater seat construction. Maybe he’d fashioned his own.

  When she pressed on the floor with her feet, there was the slightest amount of give in the three connected seats. Like a clunky and ill-designed rocking chair. The middle joints moved ever so slightly. She didn’t know what you called it, but where the bolt connected a joint of some kind, that was where the seat moved.

  If she had a battering ram and was free of her shackles, and could ram the center seat as hard as she could, she might be able to dislodge or at least loosen the joints.

  And if unicorns lived in lollipop forests, she could have some candy.

  All she had were her legs. They had muscle mass, they had some force. Maybe in a hundred years of constant pressure she could get joints to break.

  She put her feet flat on the ground in front of her and gave one hard push with her heels, at the same time pressing her back against the chair.

  And moved the set one whole inch.

  Clearly, the unicorns were a more realistic option than this.

  But the effort had produced a shot of endorphins.

  She thrust again, only this time rammed her back against the seat. And again.

  And again.

  Eight times.

  Then, spent, like she’d sprinted to a finish, she stopped to catch her breath.

  Was it her imagination, fueled by wishful thinking, that told her she’d moved the chairs a little further than before?

  Who cared? She was going to keep on doing it until physically unable. And then somehow she was going to figure out how to do more of it even then.

  Erin Reeve, human battering ram.

  86

  It only took ten minutes after he got off the phone with Josh for Dylan to realize he’d go nuts thinking about this alone.

  He called Gadge Garner’s number and left a message.