Boy Still Missing

by John Searles

  “Did she say anything else?” I asked, unsure of what I was hoping to hear.

  “Sorry, angel. Just got in the car with some dude and left.”

  If he called me “angel” one more time, I was going to head straight back to Holedo and pummel him. I didn’t care if he was twice my strength. “There was a guy in the car?”

  “Yeah. A black guy.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Flip Wilson. How the fuck should I know, Pindle? You’re really annoying the shit out of me. See if I ever open your mail again.”

  “Dominick,” Rosaleen called from the living room. “I finished cleaning.”

  “I gotta go,” I said. “I’ll see you when I get home.”

  I hung up the phone while Leon was still in the middle of another crack. When I returned to the living room, Rosaleen was fussing with her coat, a way-out green cape that she tied around her neck. The place seemed as if the storm had moved inside, dust floating in the air like snowflakes from Rosaleen’s cleaning frenzy. Other than that, the apartment looked the same as when I had arrived. Fingerprints still smudged the windows. Papers still unfiled.

  “I suppose I could let you stay until Donald gets home,” Rosaleen said, pushing her arms through two slits in the cape. “But I have no idea what time that could be.”

  A week from Tuesday, I wanted to say. “He’s expecting me, so he should be here soon.” Silently I thanked God that she was leaving, that she hadn’t asked who I was talking to in the bedroom.

  “It was nice to meet you,” she said at the door. “Try to keep things neat.”

  Good thing I wasn’t in a better mood, because I would have busted out laughing. “I’ll do my best,” I told her.

  The moment she was gone, I bolted the door and came up with a new plan: one last look around for signs of Truman, then head home to Holedo on the three o’clock bus before the storm shut down service. I would pedal my ass straight to Edie’s and find out what she meant by “what happens next.” I would demand my money back, then go home and nail my mother down about my brother’s whereabouts once and for all.

  I walked back to the bedroom and got down on my hands and knees to look under Donald’s bed. Torn blanket. Old shoes. New shoes. More textbooks. I opened his nightstand drawer and dug around. Nasal spray. Antacid. Tissues. Take-out menus. I went to his desk again and pulled open those drawers. Scraps of scribbled notes—Pick up samples before noon. Mail grant material by September 1. Prepare lecture on cell duplication. A checkless checkbook with a balance of $10,422.89.

  A lot of good that did me.

  Just as I was about to give up, I hit pay dirt in a shoe box in the back of my uncle’s closet. Nothing about Truman, but I found some cold hard cash instead. Fifteen hundred to be exact. Either it was a family thing or most of America was hiding their money in the same place and I could get pretty damn rich robbing houses. I hadn’t planned on getting the money this way, and it wasn’t enough to replace what I had stolen from my mother, but I would take what I could get. Donald could blame his batty cleaning lady when he found it missing—if he found it missing in this dump.

  Inside the shoe box with the money was a Bible. It threw me for a loop, since Donald didn’t seem like the type who would own anything religious, never mind keeping the good book in a special hiding place. I flipped the thin pages, hoping he had crammed more money inside. No green stuff, but a scrap of newspaper fell to the floor, fluttering like a fat gray moth.

  DAY 3: BOY STILL MISSING

  It didn’t make any sense that he would save a headline but not the article, yet that’s all there was. The words gave me the same nervous feelings I got from all those headlines I’d read with Edie about murder, cyclones, and fucked-up things in the world. I had enough to think about at the moment, though, so I shoved the slip of paper back into the Bible, tossed it in the box, and headed for the living room.

  Before walking out the door, I picked up that picture of the man beneath my mother’s bed. Carefully I slid out the frame, looking for a name or date on the reverse side. There was nothing. I shoved the photo back behind the glass, put on my dad’s hunting coat, and stuffed the money into the duffel bag. I walked to the kitchen window to check on the weather. Outside it had grown dark.

  Wind still whipping.

  Nobody on the sidewalk.

  Rosaleen had left the picture of me at the beach with Donald on the stove. Clearly not where it belonged. I carried it back to the living room and was about to put it with all the others when something made me stop. I flipped back the frame and slid the photo out like I had the other. I guess I was wondering about the date, since I really couldn’t remember a single beach excursion with Donald. On the back of the photo my mother’s even, careful script made me hold my breath.

  Donald and Truman, Laguna del Perro, 1955

  It wasn’t me in the picture after all.

  It was my brother.

  I turned the photo around and looked at Truman’s face. After all this time, there he was smiling back at me, erecting a bucket-shaped castle with the rocky sand. Even with different fathers, he looked so much like me that it was scary. Same stringy hair. Same wide eyes. Same wimpy white skin that would be burned at the end of a too-sunny day like that one. He was my brother for sure. A part of me.

  I could have stood there staring at the picture for hours. But the thought of getting back to Holedo, where I would sort out this shit for good, instead of playing my lifelong guessing game, made me carefully place the picture in my duffel bag and head toward the door. Before leaving, I took a set of spare keys off a nail by the coatrack, tried them in the dead bolt to be sure they worked in case I ever needed to get back in the place and didn’t want to deal with Rosaleen, then headed downstairs.

  Even with the storm, my uptown trip was easier than downtown.

  An available taxi. An odorless driver who moved swiftly through the slippery streets.

  Five bucks later I was back at Port Authority. This time I didn’t have that lost look on my face and nobody bugged me as I rushed through the station, careful not to slip on the wet floor, down the escalator to my bus. I climbed on board, and instead of Claude, my driver was a sloppy-looking, red-faced man who tore my ticket without even looking me in the eye. The bus was mobbed, and I found the only empty seat near the back, next to a sleeping nun.

  The driver made an announcement that because of the weather, we would be traveling slowly and the trip would be longer than usual. More good news. I settled in as best I could without getting too comfy with the nun, since the last thing I wanted was to wake her. As the bus chugged out of the station and moved through the snow and rain onto the highway, I caught my breath, tried to clear my mind.

  Across the aisle a porky girl with a freckle overdose was chowing down on Good & Plenty. Smack. Smack. Gulp. “Please don’t eat me! I don’t want to be dead,” her older brother said in the squeaky voice kids use to animate almost everything. Once he got his sister to feel guilty, she set a few of her pink or white beans on the armrest and stroked them with her pudgy fingers like pets. Then her brother said, “I waited my whole life for someone to eat me, and now I’m just going to waste away on this dumb bus.” After that the girl happily mashed the candy to bits in her mouth, only to find it calling to her from the depths of her stomach. “Why did you kill me? Why? Why? Why? I hate being dead.” When the girl was near tears because of her brother’s brain fuck, their mother cranked her fat neck around from the seat in front of them and told them to knock it off. They shut up for a few minutes, but then the routine started all over again.

  The whole game made my head pound. While they carried on, I kept staring at the picture of my brother. I flipped the photo over and read my mother’s handwriting, then flipped it back and looked in Truman’s brown eyes. I wondered what he was thinking that day at the beach. I wondered what he was thinking now. Most of all I wondered how my mother was going to explain all this. I must have flipped that picture back and forth a hundre
d times and asked those questions about a thousand more as the bus moved north toward Holedo.

  The Good & Plenty gang got off in Hartford. The girl left a row of candies stashed on her seat like the colorful eggs of a bug waiting to hatch. “I saved their lives,” she said quietly to me so her brother couldn’t hear. He was too glad to be getting off the bus to notice anyway. “Take care of them,” she whispered.

  The second she stepped off the bus, I brushed the candies to the floor and stretched out on the empty seats. Across the aisle the nun stirred and let her mouth drop open like a ghoul in a black cape, but she kept sleeping. In her hands she clutched a Bible. In mine I clutched Truman. In between staring at his picture and piecing together all I had or hadn’t learned today, I poked my head up to check on the bus’s progress through the storm. Over the even domino row of seats I could see the driver’s dark, shadowy figure like death at the wheel, the green road signs slipping by, one after another. Other than the occasional dull murmur of people’s conversations, the only sounds were the ratchety squeak of the seats, the hum of the tires beneath us, the wind blowing through the rubber of the folding bus door. We were moving pretty fast, considering. I decided to give some shut-eye a shot, and by the time we got to Holedo, my neck and shoulders were stiff from sleeping in my cramped and twisted position.

  “It’s eight P.M. local time here in sunny Holedo,” the driver announced over the loudspeaker when we finally pulled into the station after what felt like a decade on the road. “Our flight is landing only one hour behind schedule.”

  Everyone on board was too dead from the trip to react to his joke. The nun, in particular, was still out cold, and I was beginning to wonder if she had missed her stop. But I decided to let God take care of her.

  I put the picture of my brother back in my duffel bag and hopped off the bus. The air had that muffled hush of a winter storm. The snow falling full throttle. A plow rumbling in the distance. I could see its yellow flashing lights reflected on the weighed-down white branches of the trees. Buried in a thick layer of slushy snow, my bike looked like a crooked skeleton behind the fence where I had dumped it that morning. I picked it up, wiped the seat with the sleeve of my father’s hunting coat, and started pedaling. I may as well have been pedaling on the moon, as desolate, dark, and cold as everything was. I usually did a decent job of maneuvering my bike in snow. But the stiffness in my neck and the duffel bag over my shoulder made steering near impossible. Twice I lost my balance and fell against the curb. After the second fall I stayed off the bike and walked it toward Edie’s instead.

  The colder I got and the heavier my feet felt, the more I wanted to abort the mission. But Edie’s letter kept ringing in my ears.

  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.

  When I wasn’t thinking about the letter, I found myself thinking of my mother’s handwriting on the back of that picture, wondering about the disconnected phone at our apartment. At the corner where I would have to turn either toward home or toward Edie’s, I stopped in the middle of the empty, snow-covered street. Breathless and cold, I thought about simply going home. My direction depended on whose answers I wanted more. My mother’s or Edie’s. I knew that the truth about Truman mattered to me the most, but when my feet started to move, I was walking toward Edie’s.

  At the top of the hill I could see that her house was completely dark, not even the porch light lit. Near the end of her driveway a sign had been pitched by the mailbox. FOR SALE. MOOREHEAD REAL ESTATE. CONTACT AGENT: VICKI SPRING. The sight of it made my face wrinkle and wince as if I had been slapped. So that’s what she had meant by what happens next. Edie was moving. Selling off her old furniture and now the house. Skipping town with my mother’s money.

  Not if I stopped her first.

  I dumped my bike and trudged through the snow to the front porch. The door was locked, so I started banging. “Edie!” I yelled in a white fog of air. “Edie! Open up now!”

  I waited for her to answer, pacing the porch and punching the door when I walked by. The wind let out a lonely-sounding whistle, like someone far away calling for help. In the distance I could hear another plow scraping and moaning. No noise came from inside the house.

  Finally I peeked in a window.

  The living room was empty.

  I walked around to the back of the house and looked in the kitchen window.

  Empty as well.

  The seashell wind chime still hung by the back door; I ripped it down and hurled the piece of shit at the picture window. It clanked against the glass and fell to the snow in a soft, silent hush. Nothing broke. In my throb of anger I found myself digging around for a rock or a brick. I got my hands on an empty planter, lifted it up out of the snow, and hurled that, too. This time the glass shattered in an explosion of noise. It looked like a million stars or icicles coming undone. The second the shattering was over, the air seemed even quieter than before. Just the patter of snow and rain hitting the ground. I made my way up the stairs, stretched my arms to the window, and climbed inside.

  What was I looking for? Clearly, if Edie had been home, she would have come running by now. I suppose I wanted proof that she had taken everything, left nothing behind, and was gone for good. And that’s exactly what I got. All that remained was the ivy and flowered wallpapers, the matted brown carpet in the hallway, scattered dust balls blowing through the place like tiny tumbleweeds. The house felt like a giant clammy mouth that had finally been stretched open and forced to breathe with the breaking of the window. Air blew in through the rooms and seemed to snake around every corner, wiping out even the faintest smell that might have been left of Edie’s perfume.

  I walked through the echoing, hollow hallway to her bedroom and stood in the doorway. She had left the ceiling fan going, and the blades kept moving above the empty space where her bed used to be, as menacing and evil-looking as ever, circulating the air the way she liked even though she was gone. I remembered the first time I saw my father in this room, bare-chested and sleeping in Edie’s bed. I remembered the last time I woke here in my underwear and went to find her.

  I should have known that between that starting point and now, something was seriously wrong. A woman like Edie didn’t go after a kid like me unless she wanted something. She had used me. No matter how she tried to soften things in her letter, that was the only truth about our relationship. And even if I missed her as much as I hated her, even if I worried about her out there somewhere with that baby in her belly, with that man who I never met behind the wheel of her car, I had to swallow that truth and move on. She was gone, and I needed to walk out of this place and stop thinking about her forever, no matter how hard that would be.

  I decided that I would go home and tell my mother everything. Then I would make her tell me everything, too, beginning with the truth about my brother. After that, we would start fresh with our lives.

  I walked outside and found my bike, blown over by the wind and twisted in the driveway. I climbed on and pedaled away from Edie’s house, listening to the gravel crunch beneath the snow and my bicycle tires one last time, feeling the wind from the top of the hill blow against my forehead and muss my hair. I coasted down the hill faster than I should have considering the trouble I had steering. I wanted to make a plan for my mother and me, to stop thinking about Edie like I promised myself when I walked out her door. But she was still with me. As I rounded the corner toward the Holedo Motel, I heard her words in my head.

  We’ll check in to the room together.

  When I looked up, there were dozens of cop cars in front of the motel. No sirens. Just the buzz and murmur of a police radio. I heard the words “Body. APB. Pregnant female.” I heard the numbness of radio static, then the same words repeated: “Body. APB. Pregnant female.” I wheeled my bike through the snow-covered parkin
g lot, which had been flattened into a slick white rug by so many tire tracks, and got off between two empty cop cars. I spotted Marnie’s yellow Dart parked in the far corner of the lot. Roget was nowhere.

  We’ll leave in the morning. Then check in to the room together.

  Edie had to be here. But something was wrong.

  I’m sorry if what’s about to happen will hurt you.

  I left my bike and made my way up the cement stairs to the crowd of policemen on the second floor, outside room 5B.

  “Hey, kid,” someone called from the parking lot. “You can’t go up there.”

  “Who’s in there?” I asked when I got closer to the mob of policemen.

  Two of the cops turned and looked at me. Marnie was standing behind them, and they opened up to her like two double doors. She screamed at the sight of me. Not a word, but a sound. “Ooopllejjjj! Ooopllejjjj!” One of the officers held her by the arm. She looked ancient. Broken. Black, inky tears smeared down her cheeks.

  “Marnie. Who’s in there?” I said, but it was no use. She just kept screaming.

  “Is Officer Roget here?” I asked.

  Both policemen eyed each other. “We’re looking for him,” one said finally.

  “Is Edie Kramer in that room?” I asked, loud and trembling.

  With that, Marnie let out a yelp louder than all the others and fell to her knees. And I knew that it was true. Edie was in there, and something was very wrong.

  If something should happen to me, she whispered.

  I broke past both cops who tried to hold me back. They got tangled up in Marnie’s flailing arms instead. I busted by an ambulance man in a white uniform, shoved myself into the motel room, and slammed the door behind me. Locked it. Closed my eyes. “When I turn around, Edie will be here and she will be okay,” I said.

  Slowly I turned.

  I felt my body lift from the ground.