“Hey,” she took his hands and lowered them, then tilted his face up. “Hey there. Why do you think you wanted him to be dead?”
“I asked Detective O’Connor—no I told him—please. Please tell me you found him. And I wanted him to be one of those eleven little boys. So badly. Jesus. What kind of father asks for his own son to be dead?” He wrenched out of her hands and stood facing an easel leaning against the wall. “I wanted him to be there, to be one of those boys tortured and suffocated. Who wants that?” He turned back to Sylvia, “Who?”
Sylvia sat a moment in silence, turning the bits of box over in her hands before answering. “Someone who is tired, Ben. Someone who needs to find closure. I know you, and I know you do not want Benny to be dead. You just need to know what happened. Some hint of a clue. You’re driving yourself mad; you already drove Jeannie away. Very nearly lost your job this week because of it. That would have been the second job you lost to your search, remember. You need a reason to let go and move on.” She walked up to him, laying her hand on the side of his face. “You are a wonderful father, a wonderful person, and you need to stop torturing yourself. Accept the fact that Benny is gone.” Ben turned away and back to the wall. “Gone, Ben. But that doesn’t mean you’re a bad father.” She watched him a moment as he stared through the easel, her lips pursed and hands on her hips.
“Ben, can I show you something?” When he didn’t respond, she added, “Please?” He nodded slowly and she took him by the hand, leading him into what should have been the dining room of the house.
On each wall there were at least two canvases, sometimes three, with more leaning up against the walls beneath them.
Some were brilliantly colored, others were muted shades of gray and brown, some abstract, some portraits, some with other things on them, such as ribbons, lace, film negatives. But the common theme among them was the fact that each painting or collage was done overtop a layer of letters.
Hundreds and hundreds of letters, painstakingly gathered, Ben realized, as she slowly tipped bins of letters into the shredder. Love letters, letters to Santa, damaged junk mail, formal letters from businesses about overdrawn accounts. Pasted together and used as a canvas for a whole new impact.
Sylvia left his side and uncovered a canvas that was still sitting on the easel in the center of the room. “It was almost done. I was going to show you as soon as I finished, but now seems better.”
This canvas had no letters on it. Instead it was papered in flyers. His flyers of his missing son that she had taken those long weeks ago. It felt more like years. He walked up to it, ran his hand over image after image of his son. They were resized, torn, puzzle-pieced together, finally all glued down with a decoupage finish. His son’s face staring out at him from a hundred different images. And overtop of this collage there was a portrait.
At first he thought it was his son, but he realized the person in the picture was too old. It couldn’t be himself either, it was too young, and the face was the wrong shape.
“Who?”
“It’s Benny.”
Ben traced the outline of the matured jaw. “Benny’s six.”
“It’s what Benny should be. What he could be. When he’s grown.”
He picked up the canvas and sank to the floor with it, bracing himself against a wall. “When he’s grown. If he’s grown. I can’t tell the difference anymore.” Ben’s eyes ached but he couldn’t shed another tear. There wasn’t any left. “Am I a bad father?” He was asking the canvas, willing the specter of his son to answer, but it was Sylvia who responded.
She slid down the wall next to him. “From what I have seen, I would be blessed to have a father like you. I can’t tell you how much I have needed him over the years, needed any parent. What you have done for your son—nobody could do better.”
“But I can’t find him,” Ben whispered, eyes still fixed to the painting.
Sylvia gently took the canvas from him. “It’s time to let him find his own way back.”
Ben thought about that while he looked at the picture. “But Benny is still just a baby. What if he can’t find us? He needs us to find him.”
“And if you kill yourself looking for him, what use are you? Your wife may have the right of it when it comes to trying to build a life for Benny to come back to. If you lose your job at the Recovery Center, how will you have the resources to print the flyers? Or even have the databases you need?” Sylvia stood and replaced the portrait on its easel and covered it again with the cloth. Ben made a protesting noise, but she shook her head. “It’s not quite done. Come sit with me for a moment.” She gently guided Ben back to his seat on the sofa, a wretched floral three-seater that had seen better, paint free days.
Slouching back far enough for his head to rest on the seat-back, Ben threw his arm over his eyes. “I know I’m pushing too hard, I know that. But no one else is looking at all anymore, and I have to make up the difference. I can’t stop looking.”
“I’m not saying you have to, you just have to realize what you’re doing to yourself. You’re destroying yourself one sleepless night after another.” Sylvia curled up on the cushions beside him and started running her hand gently through his hair. “How long has it been since you slept, really slept?”
Ben shrugged. “That cold I got, I guess. That put me out.”
Her hand continued its soothing path. “No, that was drugs and antibodies. When did you actually get a full nights rest and woke up feeling like yourself in the morning?”
“I don’t remember. It has to be more than a year ago now. I can’t sleep because of the nightmares, and the only thing that seems to help those is alcohol of one sort or another. But nobody is looking, not the cops, not the feds, they all gave up and went home. Just like Jeannie gave up. I can’t give up, but I just want to…to rest. Sylvia..”
“Shhh.” Sylvia kept up the soothing rhythm and watched as his breathing evened out and his arm slid slowly back down to his lap. Once she was sure he was actually asleep, she pulled the crocheted throw off the arm of the sofa and gently draped it over him. “Sweet dreams, Ben.”
Return to Sender
A few lucky packages we can turn right back around to the people who sent them, though more often than not they hold us to blame when their package cannot reach the right person, even though it was their fault in the first place. Just be nice to them and things normally turn out for the best.
~ Gertrude Biun, Property Office Manual
Ben woke the next morning to the soft sounds of a brush on canvas. Owney lay under the easel with his son’s portrait on it while Sylvia worked on the texture of Benny’s shirt. Pulling himself upright on the small sofa, he winced at the knots in his back and legs where he had curled up to fit on the tiny antique. His head throbbed and the sunlight was entirely too bright, but he felt more at peace than he had in a long while. Unwilling to disturb Sylvia as she worked on his son’s portrait, he quietly stretched first one leg then the other while watching as she leaned in close, applied a deft stroke and then stepped away from the canvas. This was a different Sylvia than he was used to seeing at the warehouse, on the streets with him, or even last night. She was quiet and steady, her full attention on the work in front of her, and there was a softness to her eyes, a contentment he was loath to spoil.
The rustling blanket drew Sylvia’s attention, and she put down her palette and came to stand in front of him, hands on hips. “And how do we feel this morning?” The painter was gone, and he was confronted with an entirely too perky young woman once again.
He couldn’t help but notice that there was a small smudge of blue on her nose. “Better, I think. I can’t believe I fell asleep here; that was so thoughtless of me.”
“Yes, I’d say you’d stopped thinking about an hour before you got here. But that’s neither here nor there as my grandmother’d say. Come on, I’ll make us some
tea.” She bustled off, and Ben rubbed his hands over his face, trying to bring himself more fully awake. “What would you like?”
Hauling himself off the couch, he stretched a bit more as he made his way into the kitchen. The terrarium with the bearded dragon sat on her counter, and Ben stared absently through the glass. The lizard glared malevolently up at him and started to puff himself up, but decided to hide in a log instead. You and me both, buddy, he thought. Hiding after his behavior last night seemed like a much better idea than confronting it, but he felt like he was done with hiding from the problem. And what was burying yourself under mountains of useless paper if not hiding from the truth of the matter?
“Anything but chamomile.”
Sylvia gave a short bark of laughter, which drew a glimmer of a smile from Ben. “See, a little humor is good for you.” After she filled the electric kettle and set it to heating, Sylvia pulled down a delicate porcelain cup, changed her mind, and exchanged it for two enormous clay mugs. These went on the table along with cream and sugar. “You just needed to take a break, recharge. Or maybe have a break, one of the two.” She came over and pulled out a chair for Ben
He sank into it slowly. “Still, I’m really sorry.”
“Shush.” Leaning against the table, she idly rearranged the tea things. “The only way I’m going to be mad about last night is if it didn’t do anything good for you. Sometimes you just need to let go of everything and let it all out before you can see your way clear. Am I making any sense?”
“Yeah, mostly.” She was right, he did feel empty, but not the same kind of empty that he had for most of the last year. That was a gaping wound, festering and malignant. While it wasn’t entirely gone, it felt like the edges had been cauterized, the poison drained.
“Look at it this way, if you’re this tired, you won’t see something significant even if it reared back and slapped you in the face.”
He needed to believe her. If he tried to go one more day like he had been, he knew he would fall to pieces—well, worse than he already had. Taking a deep breath, he admitted to himself, “I don’t think I know how to take a break anymore.”
The teakettle clicked off and Sylvia went to pour the tea. “I suggest a good starting point is getting rid of the stuff on your living room wall.”
Ben thought back to his rampage and grimaced in pain. All those hundreds of hours of work laying in tatters on his carpet. “Done.”
Sylvia paused after pouring the first mug. “Really? No fight? I was expecting that to be harder.” Once both mugs were full, she put the teakettle back on its station.
“I was so mad, so horrified, I just…I tore them down. I can’t believe I did that, all that work, gone.” He blew hard on the tea and was engulfed in a cloud of lemon and mint.
She sat in the chair next to him. “It’s run your life for a year, I say good riddance.”
Now that, that wasn’t quite right. Yes, he could see now just how much his search had taken a toll on him and on his life, but it wouldn’t be right to just get rid of it. “You know I can’t stop looking. That really would make me a horrible father.” He tried to take a sip and burnt his tongue.
She laughed as he hissed, trying to draw cold air over his tongue and she got him an ice cube from the freezer. “I know you can’t. Frankly, it’s part of your appeal, and if you did stop looking altogether, I would think less of you.” The cube plunked into his mug and they both watched it melt in silence. When he tried again, the tea was cool enough to drink.
Ben frowned suddenly as he realized what she had said and tried to meet Sylvia’s eyes. “My appeal? So that night, it wasn’t just…”
She avoided looking at him and played with her mug. “Just what?”
Ben tried to think of a different way to put it, but couldn’t. “Just a pity fuck.”
“So that’s why you got all weird on me. Why on earth would you think I would screw you out of pity?”
“You like lost causes.” He gestured at the beardie’s cage with his mug and nearly sloshed the hot tea over the edge.
She smiled and shook her head, blowing softly on her tea to cool it. “In animals, yes, it’s endearing. In people it’s annoying and time consuming.”
It had been a long time since Ben had to have this kind of conversation, and he felt awkward and out of practice. “So why did you sleep with me if it wasn’t because you felt sorry for me?”
“Because I like you, Ben. You seem to think that when people look at you and your search, all they see is something sorrowful and bad. I see a loving and devoted father with the strength to keep looking.” She paused, then added. “That and I think you’re super cute.”
“Ha, right, thanks.” The knot in his chest started to fade at her light banter, though it did nothing for the sorrow sweeping over him in waves.
He still couldn’t believe that he’d begged for the detective to tell him his son was dead, but at least now, he somewhat understood why he did. Sylvia was right, he was exhausted, completely drained from trying to do everyone’s job—his, the police’s, the FBI’s. He needed to slow down, as much as that would hurt, as hard as it would be to make the search anything but his first and foremost priority.
Sylvia was watching him quietly from over her tea, her damnably perceptive eyes reading each wave of emotion as it came. He finally got to the point in reliving the previous night where he had driven drunk through the city and crashed through her door a mess and his face burned with embarrassment. “God, Sylvia, I’m sorry I just barged in here like that last night. How are you being so nice about it?”
“We’ve already covered this: I like you and you needed someone to slap you in the face with your real motives since you couldn’t seem to see them for yourself.” She took a long sip of her tea before adding, “Plus I was tired of not talking to you. That was hard.”
“Well, I owe you an apology for thinking terrible things about your sexual motives. And apologies for coming at you with all this terrible baggage.” He paused berating himself over everything that he had dragged her into over the last couple months. “And for dragging you into everything at work.” In the mess of the last 24 hours, he had almost forgotten work.
“Not terrible, just misguided. Though apology accepted for being an ass about the sex.” She reached across the table and squeezed his hand. “But you shouldn’t apologize for having emotions, Ben. They are what make us human. And if you think you got me in trouble at work, look around you, I should have gotten in trouble a long time ago.” Ben smiled, looking more carefully at the canvasses that lined nearly every surface of the house. She must have collected hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of mail, photos, and detritus from the bottoms of the bags over the years. He wondered idly when she had started and how she gotten everything to blend so seamlessly together.
After a moment, he let the mug drop heavily to the table and rounded on Sylvia. “How come when you say this stuff it makes so much more sense than when I was trying to talk to my wife about it?”
Sylvia laughed and used a napkin to wipe up his spilt tea. “Because I’m an outside observer, that’s why. You trust my judgment because I wasn’t involved in the trauma. Or that’s what my shrinks told me. But let’s change the subject for a while, let you calm down some more. What do you plan to do now? How was your review yesterday?”
The image of her running out of the office earlier came back with a snap. “Crap, here I am unloading on you, totally forgetting about what happened to you yesterday. Are you alright?”
“Uh-uh, you first. What are you going to do? With everything?”
He sighed, slouching in his chair. “I’m not sure yet. I think it’s pretty obvious that I need to take a break from the search at least. Not long though. Just long enough to…rest up. I’m so tired I can’t even think anymore. You’re also right, I can’t lose the job, so maybe I’
ll write a note of apology or something, offer to pay for the copies that went out, promise never to do it again. Maybe then they’ll let me stay.”
“Which you will.”
Ben nodded at her. “Of course. I won’t stop looking, nor will I ignore any resources at my fingertips. I think I’ll just need to play things closer to the vest. And lay off for a while till I’m sure the Gestapo have stopped looking over my shoulder.”
“Sounds like a plan. A good one, too.” She dropped a spoonful of sugar into her tea and stirred gently.
“And you?” Ben prompted. “What happened?”
Sylvia waved her hand dismissively. “I’ve had worse. He hit those whole you’re unstable buttons, and, yeah, I was in a snit, but I got over it. These things always blow over. I decided to take advantage of the enforced time off and cash in on a friend’s offer to go participate in a show in New York. I met her in college, and she’s working for this small gallery now and keeps pestering me to bring stuff up. I figure by then the audit will be forgotten, like it always is. If anyone asks, I’ll just say I went on a mental health retreat.”
“A show? In New York City? But that’s huge, isn’t it?”
Sylvia blushed and waved a hand. “Meh, not so big. It’s a fairly small gallery, but it is cool. It’d be my first show ever.”
“I thought you were in trouble for stealing things from the Recovery Center as is, won’t you get in even more trouble if you display those collages?”
Sylvia laughed. “That’s the best part about it. I only take things doomed to the shredder, which haven’t really been read anyway, or cataloged. How could anyone prove they came from work? I’ll just tell people it’s all found material; that’s real big right now.”
Undeliverable Page 24
