Undeliverable

by Rebecca Demarest

  Ben stared down the hallway. “I’ve never seen her like this before.”

  “Difficult times bring out odd faces in everyone, Mr. Grant.”

  The days after that seemed a blur for Ben. There was a string of no-progress reports from the police, Detective O’Connor always hopeful, but never too much so. Jeannie spent the majority of her time sitting in Benny’s room, making and remaking his bed with the Transformers sheets and reading the picture books on his shelves: Tikki Tikki Tembo; Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel; Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. After a couple days of sitting around the house and waiting for word, Ben insisted on opening up the shop again. He needed to be doing anything other than waiting.

  He straightened up the shop, unlocked the door, and drummed his fingers on the counter. A few customers came in, but it was mainly friends stopping by to ask how they were holding up. He didn’t want to turn on the radio because at every news broadcast they were still asking for information on little Benny Grant, now missing three days. If you know anything, anything at all, please call the tip line.

  All day, every time the door opened, Ben was sure he saw Benny walk into the shop before he noticed the customer or a friend bringing another casserole. Shop business seemed more brisk than usual, or maybe he was just so used to not doing anything that it just seemed noisier and more crowded than before. It was only after the third person he didn’t recognize expressed condolences and pity for his missing son that he realized what was happening. They were gawkers. Vultures. They came because they heard on the news about his store and his son and they had come to feed on his suffering. Ben threw everyone out of the store and locked up early. He decided instead to work on the pieces on the store floor that needed a bit of touching up and brought a banjo to the backroom to clean up. Its metal needed shining and a rust preventative.

  He stopped as soon as he realized his workbench was still taken up by the disassembled box and hinges. The design on the cover was slightly raised under his fingertips. Benny was right, it did look a bit like the symbol for the Republic.

  Benny was out there somewhere and Ben was in here, unable to do anything but wait. That wasn’t in his nature; he wasn’t a patient man, content to let others do the work that he, as Benny’s father, ought to be doing. He clenched his hand tight around the box and hurled it at the reinforced concrete of the back wall. The delicate inlay fractured on impact.

  Ben stalked upstairs and sat down at the computer. Ten minutes later he was printing out a flyer that read, “Have you seen this boy?” above a picture of Benny. The tip line was printed underneath. Jeannie was still in Benny’s room and didn’t even acknowledge Ben when he informed her he was going out for a while.

  He caught the copy center right before it closed its doors, and he made one hundred copies of the flyer. With a roll of duct tape around his wrist, he prowled up and down the streets around his house until he had run out of flyers, posting them at eye height on light poles, postboxes, fences, whatever came to hand. When he was done, he realized he was hungry for the first time since Benny had disappeared.

  Back in the apartment, Ben pulled out a frozen dinner and popped it in the microwave. Jeannie drifted out of the back hallway, clutching Benny’s charcoal-colored teddy bear as the timer chimed. There were fresh tear tracks on her face and Ben wondered, not for the first time, why she would cry in Benny’s room alone, but she refused to cry in front of him.

  “Where were you?”

  “I was out putting up flyers. I couldn’t sit around here and do nothing. I decided I could help this way.” He sat down and dug into the steaming meatloaf and mashed potatoes.

  “Do you really think it’ll help?”

  There was a tentative hope in her eyes, a quiet, desperate need for him to promise that everything was going to be all right. This wasn’t his wife, the fiery, argumentative woman he’d fallen in love with and continued to argue with for years. This was a woman broken and scared, and he couldn’t think of anything to do but try and reassure her. “I’ll find our son, I promise. I won’t stop until I do.”

  She attempted a smile but then pulled away and drifted back down the hall to Benny’s room. Ben watched her go, frowning. He couldn’t remember whether she had eaten that day or not.

  There was still no new information. Weeks had gone by and there was never any new information. It was almost as if Benny had disappeared from the face of the earth. The news agencies had lost interest and the search was now a footnote buried in the middle of the broadcast. Then he wasn’t mentioned at all.

  “Can’t you do something? Find a new lead?”

  Detective O’Connor sat at the kitchen table, spinning his cup of coffee around and around. “We’ve tried just about everything at this point. If there was a lead, we would have miles more than we do now, but we don’t have anything. We’ll just have to wait and see if time turns something up. I know that’s hard to hear, but—”

  “Hard to hear?” Ben shot a look down the hallway to where his wife was still hiding and struggled to modulate his voice. Any raised voices right now made Jeannie scurry for cover. “It’s fucking impossible. A five year old isn’t smoke. He can’t just disappear. What about the tip line?”

  “There’s a lot of chatter, but none of it is useful. Dammit, I’m as frustrated as you are right now.”

  “Could I get a copy of it, maybe try and go over it myself? I know you guys are busy, have other cases…”

  The detective was shaking his head. “I’m sorry, Ben, it’s against regulations. I can’t let you have that record.”

  “Why? You guys aren’t getting anywhere; I should get a crack at it!”

  “I’m sorry, no. And, Ben? You two should be settling in for the long haul on this. It’s not going to be quick and easy. In fact, the odds now are just not good for you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  The coffee tasted foul in his mouth and Ben scowled. “You’re saying you’re giving up hope.” It was their job to be looking; they couldn’t give up, not on his son.

  “No, I’m…trying to be realistic. You should, too.” The detective stood. “If anything comes up, I’ll let you know.”

  Ben didn’t even show the detective out; he knew the way by now. After rinsing the coffee cups at the sink, Ben grabbed a fresh stack of flyers from the counter and headed out to the streets of Savannah. Each night he roamed farther and farther from home to paper the city with his son’s face. It was better than nothing.

  He got home a little after midnight and went into Benny’s room to try and coax his wife out of it once again. He shook her shoulder and when she didn’t respond, he rolled her over onto her back. A pill bottle fell to the floor, empty. It was the tranquilizers the doctor had prescribed for her a couple days after the disappearance.

  He didn’t remember getting the phone or calling 911. All he remembered was the paramedics coming up the back steps and bundling both of them into the back of a wailing ambulance.

  Ben spent the evening pacing in the emergency room. When the doctors came out, they said they had pumped her stomach and given her something to counteract the drugs; she was still unconscious, but they were hopeful. She would need to be watched closely for the next couple weeks and they suggested she stay at the hospital, at least for a few days after she woke up. They told him to go home, to take a shower and get some sleep. Ben nodded, too tired to argue, too tired to even think anymore, and took a cab back to their apartment to curl up alone in bed.

  When she was declared to no longer be a threat to herself or others, Ben helped Jeannie back into their apartment, carrying her bags from the clinic.

  “It’s so good to be home.” Her smile seemed real enough, though it trembled with the effort to sustain it for anything more than a brief flash. It was more life than he’d seen in her in weeks, and it made him happy to see it. As h
appy as he could be, considering.

  Ben kissed her on the forehead. “It’s good to have you home.” He took the duffel bag back to their bedroom and came out to find her flipping through the mound of papers he’d left on the kitchen table.

  “What’s this, Ben?” She paused to read a passage aloud. “It sounds like bad movie dialogue—I seen him, the other day, at the 7-Eleven on Main Street. Saying he’d been raised by wolves and right sure they wanted him back.”

  “It’s the tip line. I got a copy of it, thought I could help look through it a bit, see if I catch anything the police missed.” He started straightening the mess of papers, gently taking the one out of her hand to put it back in its place in the pile. He had developed an order and process while she was still in the hospital and he wanted to make sure the paper was properly sequenced.

  “I’m a little hazy about some things on…that day, but don’t I remember overhearing that you couldn’t have this?”

  “Well, that’s what Detective O’Connor said, but you remember John, in my fraternity at school? The one who became a district attorney. Well, he was kind enough to get me a copy of the tip-line transcripts. I had to lean a little heavy on the whole brotherhood thing, but he finally caved.” Ben moved all of the papers off the table to a single stack on the counter and put his notepad full of notes on top of it. “You wouldn’t believe how many people called in.”

  “Looks like hundreds.”

  “More like thousands. From all over the state and even around the country. I don’t put much stock in those, but there are some interesting patterns in the other stuff. I go out and post flyers every day and spend my time down in the store looking through the tip line. I feel like I’m getting close to something. At least I’m still doing something, unlike the police. They’ve basically given up at this point.”

  “But not you.”

  “No, not me.”

  Over the next few months, Jeannie saw a therapist three times a week, then twice, and finally down to once a week. She seemed more optimistic, though she still slept in Benny’s room every night. She would come home from her sessions talking about carrying on for Benny, making sure he had a life to come back to, making sure she was healthy and whole for him. She was coming back to life a little bit at a time, color returning to her cheeks, and she even laughed at a joke on one of the late night shows.

  But she refused to have anything to do with Ben’s tip-line project or the papering. She needed to focus, her shrink said, on organizing herself instead. She meditated every morning and wrote letters to Benny that she religiously saved in a shoebox under her nightstand.

  Ben wasn’t sure how any of that could help. He was certain that finding Benny was the only real way to make things go back to normal so he continued to go and hand out flyers, posting them wherever he could. He scoured the tip line for any reference to their son, begging for more recent transcripts from his friend.

  One Saturday afternoon, Jeannie came into the shop while he sat at the counter working on the transcripts and declared she was ready to go back to work.

  Ben carefully marked his place before turning to his wife. “Are you sure?” She was still prone to breaking down at every commercial featuring a young blonde boy, and she still wouldn’t let him touch her. What if a customer walked into their store with a young boy? How would she react?

  She took a ragged breath and nodded. “Absolutely. Doc said it was okay if I wanted to, and I want to do this. It’s all part of keeping my life together for Benny. For when he comes home.”

  Ben considered this a moment more, then decided that if her shrink said it was okay, she could probably handle it. “Alright then. Want the till?”

  “Sure.” She settled on the stool behind the cash register and ran her fingers over the buttons. “Been a while.”

  “We’ve been doing okay.” Ben hadn’t told her about the constant stream of sightseers, but the the vultures had been careful to buy things as well so they didn’t feel guilty for gawking. He wasn’t going to complain about the extra money.

  “Sure, we always do well enough. Ben, why don’t you go take a break, go get a coffee, or just go for a walk, something. I got this.” She crossed her arms, hugging her sweater to herself.

  “Ok, if you’re sure. I’ll be right back.” Ben started to head to the front door, happy to get a chance to go paper the city in the daylight, but Jeannie called him back.

  “Ben, wait, can you take these someplace else first? I can’t —it’s hard, looking at it. Thinking about it.”

  “Yeah, of course.” He gathered the papers and took them into the backroom. “Better?”

  “Thanks.”

  Eight months had gone by since Benny had vanished. No leads came in, and nothing Ben offered to Detective O’Connor seemed to be of any use. Jeannie was getting calmer, more put-together, insisting that she was focused on making sure the home for Benny to come back to was whole and healthy—always that phrase, whole and healthy. She ran the front of the store while Ben retreated more and more often into the backroom under the pretext of fixing pieces of furniture.

  In reality, he spent most of his time at a wall that was usually covered by a rolling cabinet. He had taped up a map of Savannah and had started mapping the tip-line calls and their content. He had gathered newspaper articles, radio transcripts, anything at all that he could find that referenced his son. When Jeannie came back, he was quick to cover everything. He was sure that if she didn’t even like looking at the transcript of the tip line, she would really hate what he was doing now. But it was necessary. He was going to find their son; he had promised he would.

  Detective O’Connor was due for his monthly no-progress report. He wanted to have something new to show the detective when he came. He thought that one of the tips sounded good; it had come from two blocks away and the caller had actually given her name and contact information.

  “Detective O’Connor, hello.” His wife’s voice echoed from the front of the store.

  Ben shifted the cabinet back into place and went out to join them. “Detective.”

  “Ben. Jeannie. I’m afraid it’s the same as every other time. There just isn’t anything.” The man had his hands clasped behind his back and his feet planted solidly on the floor in front of the counter.

  “I understand.” Jeannie was staring down at her clasped hands, fighting tears.

  Ben swallowed the tightness out of his throat before asking, “What about that molester you guys found last month?”

  The detective frowned. “The priest?”

  “Yeah, could he have…?”

  “No, I really don’t think so. Those allegations are incredibly weak and they’re coming from one family within the parish who has had an ongoing feud with the man over his sermon material.”

  “Oh. Well.” Everyone was silent a moment.

  Jeannie excused herself and went up to the apartment, probably to brew another of her numerous cups of chamomile tea. It was supposed to be calming. All he knew is he had come to hate the smell of chamomile.

  Ben took advantage of her absence to broach the subject of a new possibility in the tip line. The two men went back to the workshop and Ben shifted the cabinet out of the way.

  “This one, here, from Marjorie Leek. It seems legit. Did you guys check it out? Should I stop by and talk to her?”

  The detective sighed and rubbed a hand over his mouth before replying. “Ben, Marjorie has Alzheimer’s. She calls any tip line that comes up on her television screen and insists she has seen the person they’re looking for. She never has.”

  “Maybe this time she did,” Ben insisted.

  The detective sighed. “She’s called us over a hundred times.”

  Ben tried to control his mounting frustration. “But you didn’t—”

  “Ben, what is this?” Jeannie�
�s voice cut through their argument and Ben winced.

  He turned to face his wife, knowing that the wall of information was scattered and disorganized. Not ready for her yet. Once he found something concrete he was going to show her, prove...well, he wasn’t sure what he was going to prove, but he knew this wasn’t going to sit well with her. “I’ve been thinking, working with the tips and the information…”

  “But, what is all this doing on the wall?”

  Ben started over to her. “I needed to organize the information, see it all laid out.”

  “Get rid of it.” Her hands were wrapped hard around the steaming mug and they trembled hard enough to slosh tea over the edge.

  She couldn’t ask that of him, it would be like him asking her to stop believing Benny was coming back in just a few days. This is how he was going to find their son and she wanted him to just stop? “Jeannie, I’m trying to find our son!” He gestured wildly at the wall, dislodging a pin. Cursing, he stuck it back in its proper place.

  “Get rid of it.” Her voice cracked. “Right now.” She left the workroom and returned to the front portion of the store.

  Ben moved to put the cabinet back in place and started to follow his wife.

  Detective O’Connor stopped him. “Are you going to do as she says?”

  “Why? She’ll get over it. I’m doing the best I can to find our son while she sits there and pretends that nothing is wrong.” Ben’s throat burned again. He cleared it, coughing a few times.

  The other man paused before speaking. “I think she’s right; this isn’t healthy for either of you.”

  “Not healthy for your job you mean, if I find my son before you, with all your special detective training.” Ben regretted it as soon as he said it. But he couldn’t take it back, so he instead glared defiantly at the police officer.

  The other man was silent a moment, his eyes calm. “You need to take a break from this, Ben. It’s wearing you down. Do as your wife says and take that mess down.”

  “Fine. Later.” But he knew he wouldn’t. Both of them did and the detective only let out a slip of a sigh before taking his leave.