Boy Still Missing

by John Searles

  We reached the apartment, and Marnie stopped the car. It had grown dark, and we both stared up at the dim blue light of the television flickering in the living room window. My father was home again.

  “Do you want me to come in with you?” she asked.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I can handle him.”

  “I want you to take this.” Marnie handed me a yellow pill smaller than a baby aspirin, lighter than Styrofoam. “My doctor gave them to me. Just take it tonight if your mind is racing. It will help you sleep. And if things get ugly, you can always stay at my place. Just give a holler.” She reached over to hug me, and this time I let her. She felt smaller than I remembered, but I probably hadn’t hugged her in years. I didn’t know why, but I felt like I wasn’t going to see Marnie again for a long time. Maybe what had happened with my mother would always make me feel that way when I said good-bye. I would never know when I left someone if it would be forever, because who knew what the world could deliver? Charlie Manson’s gang could walk in and butcher Sharon Tate when she never expected a thing. My mother’s first husband could drown in a boating accident and change her life for good. I could leave one morning for New York City and find my mother dead when I returned that night.

  “Thanks for your help,” I told Marnie as I got out of her car.

  “No need to thank me,” she said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  I knew she was trying to be nice, but the thought of Marnie calling me seemed strange. She was my mother’s friend, after all. I nodded and smiled anyway, closed the door, and headed up the stairs to my apartment. Welcome to your new life with your father, I thought as I stood at the door.

  I found him at the kitchen sink when I stepped inside. A soldier’s line of Schlitz cans and a bottle of vodka on the counter. Great, I thought. Now it’s time to get drunk.

  “Hi, son. I was waiting for you.”

  I didn’t say a word.

  “I want you to witness something.” He took each and every can, snapped off the top, and dumped the shit down the sink the way my mother used to do. The vodka, too.

  I watched him without saying a thing.

  “Aren’t you going to ask why I’m doing this?”

  My voice had shut down again. I nodded. Shrugged.

  “That’s it,” he said. “No more. I swore to your mother today when I stood at her grave that I would take care of you. No more drinking. No more disappearing. I quit my job, too. I’ll find something close to home. I’ll be here every night.”

  I stood there staring at him, felt that icy tingle in my veins. He could have just tossed the cans and bottle in the trash. I didn’t need the circus act, watching it wash away like liquid gold down the drain.

  Big. Fucking. Deal.

  “Well, don’t you have anything to say?” he asked when he was done.

  I took a breath. Tried to find my voice, but it was still gone. I shook my head no. Buried my feelings. Gave him that bug-eyed expression. The new me.

  For a moment he actually looked disappointed.

  Good. He should be hurt. Like I needed his big-deal promises. He should have sworn off booze and other women while my mother was still alive. Then none of this would have ever happened.

  You stole the money, a voice in my head said.

  “That’s okay. You don’t have to say a thing,” my father said. “So do you want to watch TV or something?”

  “No thanks,” I told him, finding my voice again. With that I turned and went to my room. Left him standing with all those empty beer cans and the vodka bottle.

  I waited a moment to see if he would follow me, but he didn’t. I closed my door and popped Marnie’s pill without any water to slug it down. All day I had wanted to be by myself, and I was finally able to stretch out on my bed and let my mind wander. I thought about my mother, dredged up all kinds of memories. Christmas morning when I unwrapped the boots she had given me. The sad look on her face as the two of us sat by our tree with its blur of blinking lights like a traffic accident. Our final Christmas together, and that was the image that stuck with me. One memory I kept replaying happened when I was younger and my father was working at a machine shop. She let me stay home from school to keep her company, and when he came home for lunch unexpectedly, she hid me in their closet. I remembered being terrified as I stood in the dark pressed between his flannels and her blouses. I remembered her hysterical laughter when he left and she came to my rescue. “It’s our little secret,” she had said, hugging me.

  I fell asleep.

  When I woke, it was just after midnight. My father was at the foot of my bed. “That baby wasn’t mine,” he was saying. “I did the math, and it couldn’t have been mine.”

  I rolled over and looked at him, his bulky shoulders silhouetted in the moonlight from my window. I could tell by his smell and by his slurred words that he had been drinking. So much for his promises. What did he do, stick a straw down the drain and suck all his booze back up through the pipes?

  “I thought you were through with that stuff,” I said, shifting the pillow under my head and letting my eyes adjust to the dim light. He had his shirt off, and I could make out my mother’s name tattooed in small letters on his chest. When I was younger, I used to wonder what he would do about that tattoo if they ever split up for good. I guess I would find out soon enough.

  “I am through with it. But I came across a flask in my truck when I went for cigarettes. I thought I’d have one last farewell toast to your mother. You know, I kept wondering why she would do such a thing. I mean, we were on the skids, but to do that to our baby. Then I realized it wasn’t our baby. Couldn’t have been.”

  I kept quiet. It wasn’t my job to help him piece his pathetic life together.

  “I still love that woman, though. Even if she did get herself in trouble with some other guy, I still love her.”

  Maybe it was Marnie’s pill, or maybe I had finally had enough, because I felt a hard pellet of anger taking shape in the back of my mouth, and out it came. “If you loved her so much, then why were you such a shitty husband? You want to know what she was like when you weren’t here? She cried all the time. We drove around looking for you constantly. Maybe if she wasn’t married to such an asshole, she wouldn’t have found someone else to fuck.”

  My father dropped his chin and gave me a stunned look. He clocked his hand back to hit me, but his fist froze in the air.

  You don’t understand the way he gets, Edie said. You haven’t seen it.

  His eyes ballooned. His jaw locked itself in a snarl. He growled, then punched the wall instead. Put a good-size hole in it, too. He lifted his fist again and jackhammered three more craters in the wall. Then he grabbed the chair by my desk and hurled it at my closet door, knocking over my record player in the process.

  Well, now I had seen the way he gets. And I didn’t give a shit. Let him tear up the whole apartment if it made him feel better.

  “Fuck you!” he shouted. “Don’t you dare judge me. Who do you think you’re talking to?”

  He raged on and on, first yelling, then talking to himself, then finally blubbering away. Good. He deserved his misery. When he finally got the hint that I wasn’t going to feed into his psycho scene anymore, he left the room. I could hear him bawling in their bedroom. I listened until his cries became whimpers and then the whimpers became snores.

  That’s when I got out of bed. Something made me go to my window and look outside. Leon was out there in the parking lot. I watched him in the bright moonlight as he climbed into a red Thunderbird with a bunch of guys. They were all laughing and smoking. Special Ed was there, too. I stared down at them until they drove off to who-knew-where, and then I picked up that picture of Truman and my uncle at Laguna del Perro.

  You are dealing with a lot right now, I heard my uncle say. When I get back next month, we’ll figure things out together.

  I didn’t think I could wait that long. I put the picture down and stood in my dark bedroom, looking at the damage
my father had done. The holes in my smooth blue bedroom wall looked like craters on the moon. I reached into the pocket of my pants and pulled out my mother’s silver wrapper of Juicy Fruit. I don’t know why I did what I did next, but I unwrapped the gum and held it in my hand. It looked like a miniature clump of Silly Putty, wrinkled and gray as an old woman’s skin. I lifted it to my mouth, slipped it between my lips. The flavor was gone, but I kept it there anyway, let it rest on my tongue, then moved it around my mouth.

  I walked to the kitchen and grabbed a garbage bag to pack some things. But when I looked around, there didn’t seem to be anything in this place I really wanted. The picture of my brother. The money from my uncle. Other than that, my mother had been the only important thing here, and she was gone. She was never coming back. I found a scrap of paper. This is what I wrote:

  Dad—

  I don’t want to live here anymore.

  Dominick

  I dropped the note onto the kitchen table and put on my coat. Opened the front door, closed it behind me. And just like that, I left home.

  SIX

  If you tilt your head back and look up at the ceiling in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, you’ll see a line of round red hats floating above the altar, suspended in the air by strings as invisible and strong as fishing wire. These are the ceremonial hats of all the cardinals who have passed on. Galeros, they’re called. The church has an old joke that when a hat finally disintegrates and falls to the floor of the cathedral, the cardinal is released into heaven. Until then he waits in purgatory.

  Not very funny, but like I said, it’s a church joke.

  I learned about the hats during one of my twenty-nine days in New York City before I found Edie. Since the idea of shacking up with Marnie didn’t exactly appeal to me, I made my way to Manhattan on a bus the night I left home. After helping myself to my uncle’s vacant apartment with the keys I took on my last visit, I bought a map and spent my days wandering the streets, getting the lay of the land, and figuring out what to do next. The Village. Murray Hill. Hell’s Kitchen. Wall Street. I walked so much my feet ached and my mind took on an aimless, empty quality that might have resembled the alleyways I passed.

  This time around I came face-to-face with New York’s nastier side, the reasons Claude and Rosaleen seemed to dislike the place. Piles of black and green garbage bags cluttered the sidewalks. The subway rumbled, restless and angry, beneath my feet, blowing hot stinky air up through the grates on the sidewalk. Sirens howled endlessly. Sometimes I stopped to study the graffiti that covered so many of the buildings and seemed to contain secret messages—Taki 183 and Marto 125. Letters and numbers that were like a foreign language to me. Other days I wandered along the murky gray river, where men kissed each other out on the dilapidated piers. In my daze I walked down dangerous, deserted streets all alone. Twice I was followed by a pack of kids who couldn’t have been much older than me but seemed deadlier and more evil than anyone in Holedo. The worst had already happened, I figured as I ducked around a corner to shake them, so what did it matter?

  I buried my fear and loneliness, the same way I did my sadness.

  And I kept walking.

  It was during one of my many wandering days that I stepped into St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Not to pray or confess, though I probably should have done both, but simply to rest my feet. When an old woman with lipstick on her teeth and a black net over her church-lady face saw me staring up at the red things above the altar, she explained what they were, told me that old church joke.

  “Farley, McCloskey, Spellman, and Hayes,” she said, pointing her wrinkled finger at each hat and rattling off the names of the dead cardinals they once belonged to, like some sort of ancient prayer. “From here they remind me of balloons let loose into the air, don’t you think?”

  I just nodded, because for the most part I never really talked to anyone during my wandering days. When homeless people stalked after me for change, I just plowed on by. When businessmen bumped into me on the crowded streets, I kept going without so much as an “Excuse me.” Besides, those galeros made me think of my mother, not balloons. I pictured her soul as something red and tender as a heart, suspended between this world and the next. Waiting for someone—something—to set her free.

  That someone was me.

  That something had to do with finding Edie.

  And there was something else I needed to do for her, but I still wasn’t sure what that was yet, so it remained just a feeling that pawed eternally at my insides. A mangy dog at a thick white door.

  At night I sat in my uncle’s filthy apartment—chain link on the door in case Rosaleen showed—wasting away in the armchair I had pushed right up in front of the Colorvision. Amazing how much death figured into every program on the air. If an anchorman wasn’t blathering on about somebody who had been stabbed or gunned down or left for dead, then someone on Laugh-In was joking about inheriting her dying grandmother’s pet anteater.

  The end was all around us, and no one seemed to care.

  Whenever I came across a reference to death on TV, I wound up staring right through the screen, retracing the steps that had led to my mother’s last night in that motel. I replayed the moments, wishing I could have done something to stop what had happened. I longed for even the smallest note from her, like the ones in Leon’s term paper, telling me good-bye. When it became too much to think about, I reached up and turned the channel, tried to lose myself in another show. Sooner or later there it was: a strung-out prostitute on Hawaii Five-O holding a roomful of men at gunpoint and threatening to blow their heads off; an ABC Movie of the Week about a man who murdered his wife and buried her in the backyard.

  That was all it took for me to start thinking about the end again.

  You need a plan, I told myself when I woke up to day twenty-nine in the apartment. Down on the street I heard a car honking, a truck banging and rattling. A pigeon perched on the windowsill and let out a muffled wheezing sound that made me think of a chest cold. Your uncle will be home any day, and you need to figure out what to do. I knew I should hunt for Edie the way McGarrett would on Hawaii Five-O. Search for clues. Track her down. Every night I called the patient-information line at each of the city hospitals to see if a woman named Edie Kramer had checked into the maternity ward. I even dialed 411 on a daily basis to check for a new listing. For McGarrett those schemes would have worked; for me they didn’t turn up a single lead. And the more I tried to come up with my next move, the more helpless I felt. I kept holding out for some sign from my mother, like the one that told me to go to Vicki Spring. But after so many aimless days without the slightest hint about what to do, I was beginning to believe that my mother had given up leading me anywhere. My life seemed to have frozen up on me like the icy face of a steep mountain, until after so much cold and quiet, the wind hits the snow just so and everything shifts and slides, causing an avalanche.

  That’s the way it was for me.

  Almost a whole month of nothing. Then a wind blew and something shifted, causing another thing to shift, then another. A rumbling began and gained so much momentum that it couldn’t be stopped. And in a few short hours my life was in motion again. Faster and more dangerous than ever.

  I got out of bed and dressed in the stiff blue jeans and hooded gray sweatshirt I picked up when I stumbled upon an army-navy on MacDougal Street during my first week in the city. Between the fifteen hundred dollars I’d found in my uncle’s closet on my last visit and the couple hundred he’d given me the day of my mother’ service, I had plenty of cash, and I’d barely spent any of it so far. In the kitchen I filled a pot with water and struck a match to get the burner going on the gas stove. As I stood there waiting for the water to boil, wondering how many brain cells I knocked off smelling that gas each morning, I looked around at the dusty tile floor, the windowsill cluttered with weary cactus plants, the worn Oriental carpet in the living room. When I had arrived at the apartment, I ransacked the place again, searching for some sign of my brot
her I might have overlooked the first time around. I came up empty-handed and decided that it was time for me to give up thinking about Truman, since it had led to so much trouble in the first place. Whatever it was about my brother that no one wanted me to know was fine, because I was forcing myself to forget about him.

  As far as I was concerned, I was an only child.

  My brother was a thing of the past.

  I poured oatmeal from my uncle’s military-size container into the bubbling water and mixed it for a minute. Outside the window a woman in a long blue coat led a duck line of elementary-school kids down the block. I dumped my breakfast into a bowl and watched them turn the corner on West Eleventh Street as I ate. Since something wouldn’t let me take my mother’s gum out of my mouth, I had gotten into the habit of tucking it up behind my back molar when I ate, slept, and brushed my teeth ever since I’d left home. Mornings always felt a little funny in my new life away from Holedo. I supposed I was missing the place despite myself. The odd thing was that I didn’t long for the recent times. What I found myself missing was the old days with my mother, and even my father. When I was as little as one of those kids in that duck line, standing at the bus stop with Leon and both our moms or collecting baseball cards and wrestling with my dad. I imagined someone telling that childhood me what was to come in only a handful of years. A loudspeaker voice announcing, Your mother will die, and you will leave home. I pictured my childhood face twisting in terror at the sound of those words.

  If I listened, I wondered, could I hear my mother’s voice warning me of what would come next? One of the signs she told me to watch for. I tried. I actually closed my eyes and listened. The kitchen was silent except for the hum of the refrigerator and the chest-cold sound of pigeons outside. Nothing came to me.