As he cradled the receiver the phone rang, startling him. It was Roger.
“Roger, I’m glad you called, I wanted to—”
“Stop.”
The word was cold, final, and Peter did as he was told.
Into the tense silence, Roger said, “I can’t do this anymore.”
“Roger—”
“Please, Peter, hear me out. I’m asking you as a friend to let it go. This whole thing—I can’t be involved in it anymore. It’s as simple as that. And if you don’t mind, it’d be better for me if you found another group. There’s a new one starting Tuesday at the hospital, so it’ll be handy for you. If you insist on going to the Thursday group—and you’re well within your rights to do so—tell me now and I’ll find something else.”
Peter felt a surprising weight of disappointment. “No, I can switch groups. Anything you want. I’m sorry you feel this way, though, Roger. I still think—”
“I don’t want to hear it, okay?”
“Alright.”
There was a pause, then Roger said, “Goodbye, Peter.”
Peter said goodbye and hung up, feeling ill, this new loss compounding his others, threatening to topple him. He leaned against the counter and hung his head, wondering why all of this was happening. His son was dead, wasn’t that enough?
But God, that feeling of him, present in the room, that ethereal touch...it was impossible to ignore. And if it was madness he was slipping into, then he’d embrace it. If his son was in its midst, even in spirit, he’d embrace it.
There was a drawing on the fridge Peter had decided to keep on display, something David had done in the second grade. It showed the Croft family all in a row—Dana, Peter and David—stick hands linked, round Crayola faces smiling, the three of them standing forever joined on the beach in Barbados, a palm tree angling in on one side, the sun beating a yellow path across the breaking surf. It was David’s rendering of their favorite vacation spot, a private beachfront home they’d rented for two weeks every year until Dana died. All three of them had loved the place, and he and Dana had dreamed of one day retiring there.
Peter straightened the drawing under its banana-shaped magnet and studied the careful strokes, David a natural artist even at this early age, blessed with an almost eerie sense of scale and perspective. Peter looked at their joined hands and for a heartbeat felt the sensation from his dream, that delicate brush of wings on his palm, and his hand closed around it, trying to capture it... and it was gone.
He plucked his keys off the counter and went out to the car.
* * *
When Peter told Erika about the extraordinary resemblance between Jason Mullen and Clayton Dolan—and his belief that they were somehow linked—Erika went to her computer and brought up the Child Find site, searching it for Clayton’s image. Then she did the same for Jason Mullen, something Peter admitted he hadn’t actually tried. It turned out to be the same photograph he’d seen on the wall unit in Roger’s living room. Erika made copies of the pictures on a color printer, then returned to the couch.
“My God,” she said, switching her gaze from one smiling face to the other, “this is incredible.”
“I thought so, too, but Roger got really upset,” Peter said, telling her about Roger’s reaction last night and his follow-up phone call this morning. “Now I wish I’d minded my own business.”
“No,” Erika said, meeting eyes with him now. “There’s no way you could have ignored this.” She glanced again at the pictures. “And you had another dream?”
“Yeah,” Peter said, pointing at Jason’s image. “It was about Roger’s son. He was drowning, maybe already drowned. Just... staring up at me from underwater. That’s all I remember. But when I woke up, I got that feeling again, of David’s presence. I didn’t see him this time, but...”
“Butterflies?”
Peter nodded. “Do you think it means Jason’s dead?”
“I don’t get that feeling.”
“What do you mean, feeling? Based on what?”
“Just a gut feeling. Don’t you ever get those?”
Peter nodded, realizing he’d come here looking for easy answers and would have taken at face value almost anything this woman told him. The realization made him feel guarded, renewing the internal conflict that had formed a backbeat to his every waking thought since David first ‘appeared’ to him: Was what he was experiencing merely a product of grief and exhaustion? Or was his son—his dead son—actually trying to tell him something from beyond the grave? For a moment he couldn’t believe he was here, hoping to pluck from the ether answers to impossible questions through this strangely serene woman...and in the same moment understood there was no place else for him. No matter how hokey the realist in him tried to make these things sound, he couldn’t deny what his heart told him was true.
“Alright,” Erika said. “Maybe ‘gut feeling’ isn’t entirely accurate. When I first met Roger, he’d already been through the wringer. He didn’t come to group voluntarily at first.”
Peter said, “Yeah, he told me that story. The guys he beat up.”
“Jason had been missing for several months by this time and Roger’s marriage was already in trouble. He was drinking heavily, disappearing for days at a time, out looking for his son. The official search had long since ended, but Roger was still out there, stapling posters to telephone poles, distributing flyers in the mail, monitoring a website and just wandering the streets, driving himself crazy.
“When he came to group and found out who I was, he dropped by the house one afternoon and asked for my help, which for a man like Roger illustrates how truly desperate he’d become. I told him I wasn’t sure I could help, but there was one thing we could try.”
Peter looked into Erika’s eyes and saw wisdom there, but also a kind of torment. He said, “What was that?”
“When I was a kid, I could sometimes see things other people couldn’t. Scary things, for a kid, anyway.”
“Like what, ghosts?”
“I prefer to think of them as spirits. The doctors thought of them as hallucinations and I spent some time in institutions, learning the joys of anti-psychotics and electro-shock therapy. And that taught me to keep what I saw—and felt—to myself.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. I was eleven. When I was thirteen, my best friend’s dog went missing, a beautiful Samoyed named Booker. Booker had slipped his collar one night and run off. He’d been gone a couple of days, and Terry, my friend, was beside herself, carrying the dog’s collar with her everywhere. We were sitting on the steps at my house one morning and Terry started crying. She dropped the collar, and when I picked it up for her I saw Booker dead in a ditch—just a flash—the same way you might be able to close your eyes and picture it, but my eyes were wide open. The experience terrified me. I dropped that collar like a hot potato and threw up in my mother’s azaleas. I didn’t breath a word about it to Terry—to anyone—just said I had the flu and went to bed. They found Booker a few days later in a roadside ditch about a mile from Terry’s house. He’d been hit by a car.
“Since then I’ve learned to control the ‘ability’, for want of a better term; practitioners call it psychometry. So when Roger asked for my help, I told him to come back with something of his son’s, something the boy had cherished. He brought over the engine from a toy train and we sat right here on this couch.”
Peter said, “I saw the train set in Jason’s room.”
“When I touched the toy, I saw Jason in a dark place. He was afraid, but he was alive and safe. When I told Roger, he was overjoyed, hugging me, dancing around the room. But then he wanted to know where the boy was. When I couldn’t tell him, things got pretty scary in here. He was furious, started calling me a fake and a parasite for taking people’s money and feeding them lies. When I reminded him that I hadn’t asked him for a cent and that we had both lost children, he grabbed the train and stormed out.”
“Roger can be pretty scary when he’s mad.”
Erika gave a nervous chuckle. “Anyway, he didn’t show up at group for a few weeks after that and we all thought he was gone. Then he came in one night and apologized to me in front of everyone. He said he needed hope, but not false hope and we left it at that. He’s stayed pretty cool toward me ever since, though. That’s why I was surprised to learn he’d suggested me to you.
“So to answer your question, my feeling that Jason isn’t dead comes from that, from the fact that my original feeling hasn’t changed. The only way I could be sure would be to go through the process again, but for obvious reasons I’ve never suggested it to Roger.”
“Can’t say I blame you,” Peter said. He felt tired now. Tired and disappointed.
“Which still leaves the question of what your son is trying to tell you,” Erika said. “And that I can’t say. But he is trying to tell you something.” She looked at the pictures of the two boys, their features so much alike. “These kids are linked somehow, Peter. Probably victims of the same kidnapper, I agree with you there. Beyond that, your guess is as good as mine. The only thing I can tell you with any certainty is that your son needs you to bring some sort of resolution to this thing. Exactly how you’re supposed to do that I can’t even begin to imagine. All you can do is wait. Keep doing what you’ve been doing. I’m sorry I can’t offer you more.”
“No,” Peter said, standing, “I appreciate you taking me seriously. This isn’t exactly the kind of thing I could bring to a family member or a friend. I can hardly believe it’s even happening. Sometimes I think I’m losing my marbles.”
“That’s the last thing you’re doing,” Erika said, standing now too. “Right from childhood, people get so caught up in the business of life—keeping up, fitting in, a million pointless distractions—they quickly lose sight of their spiritual side. Often it takes some major dislocation, even something catastrophic, to wake us up to it again. That’s what’s happening to you now. And no matter what you do, it’s going to run its course. If you can keep your mind open to it you’re already more than halfway there.”
She opened her arms to hug him and this time Peter hugged back, the innocent contact an unexpected comfort.
“Thanks, Erika,” he said. “Can I stay in touch?”
Erika smiled. “I’ll be very disappointed if you don’t.” Walking him to the door, she said, “What are you going to do about group?”
“Give it a rest, I think. Maybe check out the new one Roger mentioned. I really don’t know yet.”
“Don’t blame Roger, okay? He’s in a tough spot.”
“I don’t. Of course I don’t. I just wish I’d been more careful. I was starting to depend on our friendship.”
“It’s still there. It just needs time to heal.”
At the door Peter thanked her again and stepped out into another muggy day, the click of the latch behind him one of the most lonesome sounds he’d ever heard. It felt absurdly like abandonment.
He had no idea what to do with himself.
* * *
The weather during the last half of June and the first three weeks of July was some of the most extreme ever recorded in the Sudbury district, day after day of sweltering heat, stifling humidity, and not a single drop of rain. The region was placed under a strict fire ban and severe watering restrictions were imposed, along with daily smog alerts, the effluent from the Inco superstack cloaking the city in a sulphury haze. Lawns died, gardens shriveled, and tempers ran hot. Air conditioners collapsed under the strain, a half dozen seniors were found dead from heat stroke in their apartments, and the emergency room was clogged with bronchitics and asthmatics. The operating suites were ovens, staff members tacky with sweat standing still.
For Peter, each new day at work became an increasing burden, the stress and challenge of the job intensified by escalating dread and growing inattention, his ability to concentrate almost obliterated by the constant ache in his skull. He asked Wendell Smith, the department head, to exclude him from the call schedule until further notice and to avoid attaching residents to his lists. Even then, there were times, sitting at the head of the operating table with a patient under anesthesia, when Peter could barely keep his eyes open.
And while work was bad, home was much worse. His primary source of distraction had shifted from rented videos and favorite sitcoms to a stack of home movies he found in a box in the attic, something his brother Colin had missed in his sweep of the house. Dana had been a maniac for recording family moments—everything from Easter egg hunts and birthday parties to David playing with his friends in the pool or just sleeping peacefully in his bed. Peter watched them constantly now, slipping them into the player at random, sitting in the dark with an empty stomach and a full bladder, alternately laughing and crying. He and Dana had taken turns doing the filming, and when he saw his wife and son together on the screen, alive and happy, he wished he could somehow crawl in there with them, escape the empty shell of his life and just be with them again.
Here was one from the beach house in Barbados, March 14, 2002, David coming up the path with a wriggling sand crab, his lean body rippling with muscle, a miniature man at the age of five in his baggy Homer Simpson trunks, fearlessly gripping the crab. Everyone was always commenting on how much they’d love to have a six-pack like David’s, and David would just grin and look away. Now here came Dana, hurrying up the path behind David in a big floppy sunhat, a breezy shawl hugging her hips, her excited voice crisp and electronic sounding as David swung on her with the crab, making her squeal. Peter could almost feel the tropical air whisking past the microphone.
Hours of the stuff. Like the world’s finest wine laced with strychnine.
And when sleep finally came, it was a fresh breed of torment, fretful and dream-filled, Jason’s submerged face haunting him night after night. The only thing that made these harrowing night sweats even remotely tolerable was the recurring sense Peter got of his son when he awoke from them: sometimes that feathery touch, sometimes a fleeting glimpse of him, and sometimes—and these instances were at once the most wonderful and the most heartbreaking—the same warm rush of love he’d felt every time David hugged him or said, “I love you, Dad,” the sensation arising seemingly at random, Peter sitting at home or at work, driving the car or lying wide-eyed in his bed praying for the refuge of dreamless sleep. There and then gone, the feeling was at times so tangible Peter could close his eyes and imagine David standing right next to him in the room.
One Friday morning late in July, Peter awoke gasping in dawn light from the same maddening dream...except this time a white hand had broken the surface of that dark water from above and settled on top of Jason’s head, holding him under until his weak struggles ceased.
Peter sat bolt upright and knew exactly what he must do.
9
Friday, July 27
PETER SAT IN HIS COROLLA a half block down the street from Roger’s house, tucked behind a camper in the night shadow of a sprawling oak. It was ten thirty-five and Roger’s Suburban was parked in the driveway, the main floor of his house still brightly lit. If he was working the graveyard shift tonight, he’d be leaving in the next few minutes. If not, Peter would try again tomorrow.
At ten to eleven, just as Peter decided it was time to leave, Roger came running down the front steps, buttoning a blue work shirt. Peter hunkered down in his seat and thought, Good. Roger wouldn’t be back for at least twelve hours.
He waited another ten minutes after the Suburban roared away, then found a parking spot closer to the house. He emerged into the sticky night air and checked the street in both directions, finding it peacefully abandoned. Though Roger had left without turning off the lights, the houses on either side of his were dark, save porch lights and a few dim sources inside, a pilot light over a stove, maybe, or the shifting blue glow of a television set. The neighborhood had settled in for the night.
Heart racing, Peter strolled up the walkway as if he belonged there, then veered right at the base of the porch st
eps along a cracked cement path that led to a side door, a rickety fence separating Roger’s property from his neighbor’s. Here, between the houses, it was pitch dark and a few degrees cooler, and Peter realized he was trembling.
He continued past the side door, crouching now, and stepped onto desiccated lawn, dead grass crunching under his feet. The sound startled him and he paused, listening, watching the neighbor’s place for a light or a shifting curtain; but there was nothing, just the distant bark of a dog, a single lone volley and then silence.
Stepping as lightly as he could, he made his way to the small back yard, a low deck back here with a barbeque and some patio furniture, four chairs and a circular table shaded from the moonlight by a striped parasol. The deck creaked when he stepped onto it and Peter froze, thinking, What am I doing here? Thinking, Is this what it’s like to be insane? Is that what I’ve become?
But he crept up to the kitchen window—the one he’d noticed on his first visit here, that damp breeze sifting in through a ten-inch screen, the kind that just stood there, wedged between the window and the sill—and slid the window open, catching the screen before it could fall and make a racket. He rested the screen against the wall and took a last look around.
Nothing had changed.
He stood for a moment with his back pressed to the brick, waiting for the voice of reason to intervene, telling him to replace the screen and go back home, see a shrink and be done with it. Then he slipped into Roger’s kitchen through the open window, his heart a tripping jackhammer in his chest, his clothing sticky with sweat.
His first thought inside was, Motion sensors, and he froze again; but he’d been in Roger’s front hall a couple of times now and hadn’t seen an alarm panel. Still, he looked around for the telltale red glow and saw none. He took a deep breath and kept going, through the kitchen to the main hall and the front entrance, then the staircase to the second floor, trying not to think about what Roger would do to him if he came through that door right now.
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