Boy Still Missing

by John Searles

  When I gazed up at the building again, I thought about my uncle and brother inside, living their lives. Making lunch. Watching television. Reading books. Whatever an abandoned brother and a kooky uncle do on a cold Saturday afternoon in January.

  “It’s just one little visit,” I said out loud, trying to unjumble my insides, to stop the somersaulting feeling. I unfolded the address one final time and checked the apartment number. Before I lifted my finger to the buzzer, I thought about turning around, getting back on the bus to Holedo. But what was waiting for me there?

  My sad, angry mother who thought my father had ripped her off.

  Edie, who had fucked me over.

  I couldn’t go back now. And it seemed too late anyway.

  My hand was reaching up.

  My finger was pressing the button.

  My shoulders were tightening against the cold as I waited for Uncle Donald’s thick voice to answer. Or Truman’s.

  “Who is it?” a woman asked instead.

  So my uncle had a girlfriend after all. The sound of her singsong voice made me feel better. Maybe she would take a liking to me and help Donald understand my need for the money. Maybe she would understand how nervous I was about meeting Truman. “I’m looking for Donald Biadogiano,” I told her, trying my best to sound calm, mature. “I’m his nephew, Dominick.”

  The intercom went shhhhhhh, then chirped. “Dominick?” She said my name like a question. Obviously my uncle had never mentioned his dear old nephew from Massachusetts before. “Sorry. Donald’s not at home.”

  “Will he be back soon?” I asked, praying for a yes. What had I been thinking? Just because he answered the phone at the crack of dawn did not mean he would be here in the middle of the day.

  “I don’t know when he’ll be home. Try back later.”

  “Wait,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  I took a deep breath. My throat tightened. “Is Truman here?”

  This is it, a voice said. You are going to find out about your brother.

  Shhhhh. Chirp. “Truman?” the woman said after what felt like forever. “Truman who?”

  I had never really thought about my brother’s last name before. It certainly wasn’t Pindle. But did he use Biadogiano? Or the last name of the man in the photo beneath my mother’s bed? “I don’t know his last name exactly, but he lives here with Donald.”

  “Donald lives alone,” the woman said. “And that’s more information than I should be giving out over the intercom. Like I said, you’ll have to stop back later.”

  The speaker went lifeless, and I stood on the street staring at the playground. The man and his poodle were gone. The noose was swaying in the breeze. The New York sky was the same dismal gray as the feathers of the pigeons on the sidewalk. A shitload of wet winter snow was bound to drop sometime soon. The thought of wandering the streets, waiting, hoping for Donald to show, made me lay my finger on the buzzer again.

  “Who is it?” the woman asked as if she really expected it to be someone else.

  This time her singsong had a little less song to it. The wishful image of her as my accomplice went splat in my brain. “Me again. Listen. I came all the way from Massachusetts to see my uncle. Can you at least let me up so I can leave him a note?”

  A long pause that I took as a no. Then the door buzzed. Before she could change her mind, I pushed myself into the cramped lobby. The place had the flat, chalky smell of chemicals. Rife with powdery poison, like our apartment back in Holedo after the exterminator sprayed for roaches and set traps for mice and rats. For the third time that day I found myself rationing breaths. I was becoming an expert at barely breathing. I treaded up the ancient wooden staircase in the winter work boots my mother had given me Christmas morning. I hadn’t worn them before today, and they were heavier than my sneakers, heavier than Edie’s black shoes. I hated all that weight on my feet. It made walking work, especially upstairs.

  Before I could knock, the woman called from inside the apartment, “Leave your message on the landing and I’ll get it later.”

  She had an Irish accent, a squeaky leprechaun sort of deal that I had thought was merely singsonginess through the intercom. I wondered if my uncle had met her on one of his trips overseas.

  “I don’t have a pen and paper,” I told her. “Besides, I’m his nephew. Can’t I at least come inside? Who are you anyway?”

  “I clean for Mr. B,” she said.

  The friggin’ cleaning lady. No wonder she didn’t know anything about me or my brother. “Well, I’m sure Mr. B told you to expect me,” I said.

  “He told me nothing.”

  Plan A: You open the fucking door. Plan B: I trick you into opening it. “Could you slide a piece of paper and a pen under the door?” I asked, staring down at the fluffy hallway carpet, flush against the door. I knew it would never fit and she’d have to open up. After that, I wasn’t sure what I had in mind.

  My Irish enemy shuffled around on the other side of the door. After a couple of tries she actually managed to slide out a piece of paper, crinkled and torn. Lucky for me, the pen wouldn’t fit. Right on schedule, two locks twisted and clicked. The door creaked open. The woman behind the voice was too tall, with a white, papery face and white hair pulled back in a kerchief. A ghost with big ears, a ringed neck, and a billboard forehead.

  “Thanks for opening up,” I said, trying to put her at ease. “I really appreciate it.”

  She smiled—her teeth yellow against the rest of her backdrop—and handed me the pen. She kept guarding the door, though, like I was going to make a break for it. “Sorry I can’t let you inside. But this is New York.”

  “I understand,” I told her, still waiting for step two of my plan to come to me.

  “I’ll clean while you write,” she said. “Knock when you’re ready.”

  Before I could stop her, the door was closed again. I stood in the hallway a moment, clenching the pen and paper. Part of me wanted to slam my fists against the door until she let me in. But I doubted that would work, and not knowing what else to do, I wrote:

  Uncle Donald,

  Surprise! I’m in the city! But don’t tell my mother. I’ll walk around your neighborhood for a while, then stop back. If you come home, please stay put. I really need to see you. Remember, please don’t tell my mother I’m here.

  Love, Dominick

  If I’d had another piece of paper, I would have written the thing again, getting rid of those overly cheerful exclamation marks and making myself sound a little less worried about him blabbing to my mom. Erasable ink. That was another invention Donald could make billions on. People like me would pay big bucks to fix their mistakes. I was just about to fold the paper and knock when the door opened. The white lady was holding a framed picture. “It’s you, right?” she said.

  In the photo I was a kid—only about two or three years old—with a bowl haircut at a lake beach with Uncle Donald. Must have been taken before my memory kicked in, because I couldn’t remember a single day like that with Donald. Still, I knew where this was leading.

  “That’s me all right. Donald and I go to the lake every summer.”

  “I’m Rosaleen. I dust your face whenever I’m here. I didn’t recognize you because you’re so big now.” The door opened all the way, and Rosaleen ushered me inside. Finally.

  The apartment had red-painted walls that made the place feel closed in, slippery, and bloody. The inside of a clot. The clutter of dusty furniture made me think of those overpriced tag sales that Marnie loved to raid, filling her trunk with junk, junk, and more junk. Donald had piles of paper and boxes everywhere, like he was either moving in or moving out. Black-inked labels read DO NOT THROW AWAY! IMPORTANT! RESEARCH MATERIALS!

  “Sorry again,” Rosaleen said. “But it’s New York. Killers are everywhere. Nobody’s safe. Do you want some tea?”

  I wondered if she was reading from the same script as the bus driver Claude. After all, there was a playground practically across the street.
How dangerous could this place really be? “Tea would be great,” I told her, figuring a drink would guarantee me at least ten minutes in the apartment.

  When she disappeared into the kitchen, I scoped around for clues about my brother. Good thing Donald hired a housecleaner, because the place was filthy. A disaster area, my mother would say, like she sometimes did about my bedroom. The wooden floors scuffed with skid marks from someone’s boots. The frosty windows smudged and fingerprinted with swirling lines. Shelves crammed with books—Discoveries in Turbo Physics, Nuclear Cooling Systems, Biomedical Engineering in the Twentieth Century. A regular Fun with Dick and Jane collection.

  I wandered over to a three-legged table next to a rocker with a frayed, woven seat. The tabletop was covered with framed pictures. Donald and a group of smart-looking guys in glasses and tuxes. Donald and another man with a beard and mustache, both in lab coats, holding up certificates with sunny golden seals. Donald wearing a dark sweater with a molten blue sky behind him and a smoldering sun.

  None of anyone who could have been my brother.

  On the mantel above the fireplace there were more photos. Still none of Truman, but I spotted one of my mother—a black-and-white shot I had seen before at home. It was taken when she was pregnant, and her stomach jutted out in front of her. Bigger than Edie’s and impossible to hide. She wore a loose patterned shirt that made me think of Indians and powwows. Around her neck hung a string of beads. Her hair was longer than I’d ever seen it and looked windblown. Her smile was nothing like the lips-together one I knew. She was actually grinning, showing her two overlapped teeth.

  I’m just so tired, I heard her say. Things have got to get easier for me.

  At least the heat was working now. She wouldn’t have to keep warm in that awful black coat. And I was going to replace the money somehow. I put down the picture and spotted one of Donald with the man from the photo under my mother’s bed.

  Same bushy hair. Same tight mummy skin.

  Bingo.

  When Rosaleen came back into the room with my cup of tea and a plateful of miniature sandwiches, I showed her the photo. “Do you know who this is?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest. But I dust him, too.”

  She was a regular information bank. At the very least I hoped she could give me an estimate—give or take an hour or two—of when my uncle would return. But when I asked again, she shrugged her shoulders, whipped out a dirty dust rag, and started cleaning. Defeated, I put down the picture and took a sip of tea. The taste was a flower petal on my tongue, not at all like my mother’s Lipton’s. The tea bag bobbed up and down inside my mug, a tadpole in a murky pond. I was dying to press her about Truman some more, but I didn’t want to seem so unknowledgeable about my family that Rosaleen became suspicious and hurled me back out onto the street. I held in my questions and rode the wave of her mindless chatter as she moved around the apartment swiping random objects with her rag.

  She talked about her cousin’s hip surgery.

  She talked about her part-time job as a nurses’ aide.

  She talked about the killer snowstorm that was headed our way.

  She talked and talked and talked about everything, except my uncle and my brother. I wolfed down her eggy sandwiches and let my tea grow cold. When I couldn’t take one more second of her babbling, I asked, “Are you sure nobody lives here with Donald?”

  Rosaleen put her hands on her hips and shook her head. A loose white curl of hair bounced against her huge brow, and she blew it out of the way. “I told you, your uncle lives alone.”

  “Then where does Truman live?”

  “I’ve never even heard of Truman,” she said. “Whoever he is, he doesn’t live here. I would charge more money if there was another mess-maker in this place.”

  I thought of all those mornings my father and I drove my mother to the bus station so she could travel to New York. All those carefully wrapped presents in her dainty hands that I used to wish were for me.

  I decided Rosaleen-the-cleaning-machine had to be wrong. Maybe my uncle lied to her about Truman for the exact reason she had said: He didn’t want her to charge more money for her services, which, judging from the looks of the place, weren’t very good anyway. But that scenario smacked of bullshit. While Rosaleen straightened up the apartment—or at least went through the motions—I ducked out of the living room and poked around some more.

  In the bathroom: a single, worn red toothbrush, one flannel robe complete with crusty tissues in the pockets, and one comb with dandruff in the teeth. In the first bedroom: a queen-size bed made up like one in a motel with two pillows tucked under the top sheet, a baby-chopper fan above the bed just like Edie’s, which made my heart sink, a dresser filled with balled gray socks like dozens of dead mice, a closet filled with XL suits as somber and dark as an undertaker’s. In the second bedroom: no bed, just a desk bigger than a casket and cluttered with crap, doodles of something that looked like a car without wheels or a piece of complicated hospital equipment, formulas and equations with numbers and letters and symbols that looked like an algebra nightmare.

  All of it Donald’s.

  I was beginning to realize that Rosaleen was right, and the thought made me clench my teeth, squeeze my fists. There was no Truman. At least not in this apartment. Of all the scenarios I had imagined, it never occurred to me that Truman would simply not be here. First Edie had fucked me over. Now my own mother had lied to me. Not for days or weeks or months but for years.

  My whole fucking life. She had lied to me.

  Without planning it, I picked up the phone on Donald’s desk. As I spun the rotary, my mind raced with all the things I would say to her.

  It’s time you told me about Truman.

  Where the hell is my brother?

  Why have you been lying?

  Tell me. Tell me. Tell me.

  The phone clicked through, and my heart felt like it might explode in my chest, the red chunks of it splattering against the wall for Rosaleen to clean like the flesh of that baby sliced to bits by the ceiling fan in my mother’s story. A recorded voice crackled, “I’m sorry, the number you have reached is temporarily out of service. Please check the number and try your call again.” I hung up, dialed again, slower this time. “I’m sorry, the number you have reached—” Again I hung up and redialed. Same recording.

  What the hell was going on?

  Outside the window, snow had started to fall. Wind pressed the flakes against the glass, where they melted and drooled down the pane. I glanced at the pile of papers on Donald’s desk. Between the doodles and nightmare formulas was a desk calendar. Under January 23, 1972, I recognized my uncle’s handwriting from the envelopes he addressed to my mother. It read: Pan Am Flight 237 to Cleveland, 1:00 P.M.

  He wasn’t coming back in a few hours.

  He was halfway to goddamned Ohio.

  I wasn’t sure what to do next.

  No Truman. No Donald. No money. The entire trip had been one big bust.

  Down the hall Rosaleen was humming something hopelessly happy, and I closed the door to block out the sound of her. I picked up the phone and dialed Leon’s number. Maybe he could clue me in on my mother’s whereabouts, the reason for her disconnected phone. He answered on the first ring. “Man, you are just the person I wanted to see,” he said. “Where the hell are you?”

  “New York. But don’t tell anyone.”

  “What the hell are you doing there?”

  “It’s a long story. I’ll explain later. Have you seen my mother around today?”

  “Nope. But your imaginary friend Edie was upstairs banging on your door.”

  I felt punctured at the sound of her name. Edie was at my apartment, and I could have been there to make her pay me back. I could have been there to listen to what she had to say. Only I had come up with a brilliant plan to go to New York, which so far was a complete and total waste. “Tell me what happened.”

  “Not much to tell. Edie Kramer was knocking away. When no o
ne answered, she just stood there. Then she turned to me at the bottom of the stairs and said, ‘Are you Leon?’”

  Shit. I never should have mentioned Leon to her those nights at her house. Who knew what was coming next? “What happened?”

  “I told her it was me in the flesh, and she handed me a letter in an envelope. Said to give it to you.”

  “Do you have the letter?”

  “Yeah. Do you want me to read it?”

  “No. I’ll wait until I get home tonight.”

  “Too late,” Leon said. “I ripped it open the second she waddled off.”

  “You fucker. That’s my private letter.”

  “What are you, the postmaster general? Do you want me to read it to you or what?”

  I huffed. “Fine.”

  Leo crinkled the paper a moment, then cleared his throat. “Are you ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Read it!” I yelled, not caring if Rosaleen heard me.

  “Okay, okay. It says, ‘Dominick, I don’t know why you left without saying good-bye last night. But I want you to know that I’m sorry if what’s about to happen will hurt you. I needed a friend during this lonely time, and you were an angel. Someday I hope you’ll forgive me. Someday I hope you’ll understand. Love, Edie.’”

  I walked to the bedroom window, stretching the phone cord as tight as it could go. Up close I could see that the snow was mixed with rain. Wind whipped the flakes and drops around into a blur of white and gray. Down the street the swing had twisted itself out of the noose and was moving back and forth. I imagined a child out there, swinging. “That’s it?” I asked.

  “The end,” Leon said. “What the hell is all that about? Man, you weren’t shitting me about knowing her. Did you get the bitch pregnant, angel?”

  I wished I could have bragged about Edie like I did after that first night. Back then if this had happened, I would have gone on and on about it to Leon, flaunting that letter like it was some kind of trophy. But what Edie had done to me was nothing to brag about. And even though the Dominick who would have carried on like that was inside me somewhere, he seemed invisible. There but not there, like the child I imagined on the swing in the storm.