Misplaced

by Murray, Lee

  Adam’s cousins, Brent and Gabe, are already at uni. They couldn't get away fast enough, Aunty Mandy said. So there’s only Adam's Uncle Peri at home and, according to Aunty Mandy, it won’t hurt him to have to fend for himself for a change. It might even teach him to appreciate her, although Adam doubts that. He suspects his Uncle Peri has his feet up on the coffee table right now, sipping his beer and enjoying some delicious peace and quiet.

  Adam’s aunt is still gassing. ‘I expect you’re feeling a bit washed out, Adam? I’m sure it can’t have been easy. But if my sister has run away because she’s a bit depressed, then your message is bound to affect her. You’re her son. And Tiff knows how you try to avoid the limelight, how especially hard it must have been for you, making an impassioned plea on national television. She could hardly not be moved by that. Isn’t that right, Phil?’

  ‘No, no, of course not, Mandy.’

  ‘If you ask me, I’m sure she’s just gone off somewhere for a few days to clear her head and get things in perspective. She won’t have given a second thought to who might be worrying about her at home. It just won’t have occurred to her. I remember even as a girl she could be a teensy bit selfish. One time, I wanted to borrow her yellow silk top to wear to a party...’

  Adam interrupts. ‘Were there any calls? Anything from Detective Pūriri?’

  ‘No, love. Not yet.’ His aunt has the grace to look despondent.

  Dad puts a hand on Adam’s shoulder. ‘Give it a chance, mate. Maybe after the evening news, eh? More people watch that.’

  Shaking off Dad’s gesture, Adam grabs the remote. He flicks through the channels searching for the news updates.

  ‘Your dad’s right, Adam. I’m sure talking about it and making people aware is bound to jog their memories. Someone must have seen Tiff that night. People don’t just disappear into thin air.’

  Adam rounds on her sharply. ‘Well, where is she, then?’

  ‘Adam!’

  ‘No, please, Phil, it’s fine. Honestly. It’s perfectly understandable. He’s had a very emotional day. We all have. Why don’t I pop through to the kitchen and make us a nice cup of tea?’

  ‘That’d be beaut. Thanks, Mandy.’ She bustles away and Dad looks relieved to get rid of her, even for a few minutes.

  ‘Just go easy on her aye, mate? She’s trying to help.’

  ‘I just wish she wouldn’t go on.’

  ‘It’s just her way of coping. She doesn’t mean anything by it.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, but still...’ Adam hunkers down on the couch, still channel surfing. After a moment, he catches his face on the screen. He stops and backs up. It’s the tail end. It’s odd seeing himself on television. Surreal. His lips look pinched and grey. Maybe he should’ve agreed to the lipstick after all.

  ‘Please, Mum, just come home...’

  The picture switches to Mum’s photo: a snap Adam took one evening at the beach the year before last. It’s a close-up and she’s laughing, her eyes crinkled up, a carton of hot chips in one hand, wind whipping her hair behind her. You can’t see it in the photo, but only moments before, a cheeky seagull had swooped down and pinched a chip right out from her fingers. While the image fills the screen, there’s a voice-over:

  ‘Concern is mounting for housewife Tiffany Creighton, who was last seen four days ago in the quiet Ōtūmoetai suburb of Tauranga.’ The photo of Mum is dragged away to the bottom corner of the screen, now dominated by the blonde newsreader who pulls a tragic expression—as tragic as her Botox will allow—while she reads from the teleprompter:

  ‘Leaving on foot to buy a container of milk at her local dairy, the forty-year-old was wearing dark blue jeans, a white t-shirt and a bottle green polar fleece. Police are urging anyone with information concerning her whereabouts to please call the number listed at the bottom of your screen...’

  I lie in the dark.

  It’s quiet, except for the faint churn of the dishwasher downstairs, but I can’t sleep. When I was little, if I woke up from a bad dream, I’d hop into Mum’s side of the bed and snuggle into her.

  ‘Just a bad dream,’ she would murmur, half-asleep, wrapping an arm around me. ‘It’s not real. Go back to sleep.’

  But this dream is real.

  In the darkness, I reach out my mind to Mum, closing my eyes and sending my thoughts swirling into the universe like tendrils of smoke pouring into the farthest corners, searching for her. If I concentrate hard, I feel I can almost reach her. I can hear her breathe, smell the scent of her, feel the pulsing of her heart, the warmth of her skin. Intuitively, I know that breathing will break the connection, tenuous like a spider web weighed down after rain. I take a deep breath and hold it... holding... holding... holding us together for as long as I can so she knows I’m here and I’m thinking about her, missing her. My head pounds from the strain. I screw my eyes up, feel the tension between my eyebrows. Holding. My heart races. My cheeks scream. Chest bursting. Still, I hold on. Eventually, I can’t help it: I have to breathe.

  I lose her in a whoosh.

  Chapter 8

  By Sunday, Mum is a bona fide celebrity. As well as the television coverage, her photo and a lengthy article about the mysterious disappearance of local housewife Tiffany Creighton—a case perplexing police—was splashed across the front page of Saturday’s Bay of Plenty Times. To get the story, the reporter had recorded statements from Detective Pūriri, Dad, and Mr Singh at the dairy. Then she’d gone up and down the street trawling for comments from Adam’s neighbours. Even Mrs Steele had contributed her two cents’ worth to the recitation. When the paper came out, the headline was so corny it made Adam cringe. ‘Mystery of the Missing Mum’ it read, as if the whole incident was a sick parody. It pissed him off, and he said as much to Constable Gordon. This is his life: his, Dad’s, and Mum’s, not the subject of a weekend movie or a tawdry graphic novel. But Wendy Gordon had reassured him. She said it didn’t really matter what angle the press took, the important thing was to let people know that Adam’s mum was missing and to contact the police with any information, since even seemingly innocuous details could turn out to be significant.

  And it had worked.

  After the newspaper had run the story, in print and on their facebook page, Tauranga police were beset with calls from members of the public who suspected they might have seen Adam’s mum on Wednesday night. Not all of the callers had been entirely helpful. Constable Gordon confided that one guy had phoned the station claiming he’d watched as a woman of Tiffany Creighton’s description had stepped into a light beam and was sucked up into the navel of the alien vessel he’d seen hovering over the Matua peninsula. Adam couldn’t help himself snorting when he heard that one. Since there were no other sightings to corroborate the caller’s claim, and since Tauranga’s police fleet comprises mainly Holden Commodores and is not yet equipped with vehicles suitable for space pursuit, there wasn’t much the police could do to investigate that particular lead.

  ‘You know what? If Mum has been abducted by strange otherworld beings, they’ll be the ones getting a beam up the arse when she discovers herself on her way to a far-flung garrison of Ganymede. They really should’ve dispatched a scouting party to scope out their subject. About now, I’m betting those aliens’ll be wishing they’d picked some other specimen to mess with.’

  Wendy Gordon had laughed at that and given Adam a wink.

  ‘Good for you, Adam,’ she replies. That’s when her cell buzzes. She moves away to answer it.

  Going outside, Adam sits on the porch to observe the street, normally quiet and nondescript, today a maelstrom of men and movement as volunteer search parties convene and depart from the search and rescue outpost set up on the small reserve farther along the street. Hunkered down inside a sloppy jumper Mum knitted him two years ago, one that has stretched and grown with him due to the weight of the wool and Mum’s tendency to knit loosely, Adam smiles and waves when Kieran and Corey peel off from the stream of volunteer searchers. Seeing the two of them
makes Adam feel less like he’s under house arrest.

  Adam and Kieran have been mates forever; starting school in Miss Caley’s class for new entrants on the same day, they’d hung their backpacks on a double peg below large-print labels that read: Kieran and Adam.

  Back then, Mum, Dad and Adam had lived in the centre of town in a two-bedroom red brick unit on a half-site an easy walk from the school. It’d suited Dad to be close to the yard too, while he was building up the dealership in the days before he could afford to employ additional staff. It meant he could nip home if he forgot something and he didn’t have a drawn-out commute at the end of a long day. Kieran and the Clarkes lived over the causeway in Ōtūmoetai and were out of zone for Tauranga Primary, but since his mum was a teacher at the school, Kieran had been entitled to priority entry. Not that the boys cared: in those days, they couldn’t even spell priority.

  At first, Adam hadn’t really taken to Kieran. He was too loud, too obvious, a confident man-of-the-world type even at age five. Adam preferred not to draw attention to himself, which was difficult to achieve when Kieran was about. But the Thursday of their third week had been the clincher: at morning tea time, Amy Leong, an over-achiever who could already read, had held Adam’s bag under the outside tap, turning it on and soaking not only his sunhat but also Adam’s paper cut-out of an L-shaped lizard. Adam had worked all morning on it, painstakingly colouring the lizard’s back in brown and green, and now it was ruined.

  Kieran had been outraged. It could just as easily have been his bag, he reasoned. After all, they shared the same peg! Plotting revenge, he convinced Adam that Amy’s Dora the Explorer bag would make an excellent sand bucket. The two boys began filling the pink backpack with lovely wet sand. It would’ve been a masterful plan if Miss Caley hadn’t surprised them by coming back to the classroom early. After a stern lecture about inappropriate behaviour and respect for other people’s property, more words they couldn’t spell, Miss Caley had punished the boys by making them put away all the sandpit toys.

  What’s that saying about the enemy of thine enemy being thy friend? The Amy Leong incident seeded a lasting friendship. From that Thursday onwards, Adam and Kieran became as thick as thieves. They were always the last straggly couplet on the walk to the computer suite. ‘Listen to this,’ Kieran would say, before launching into some joke or another that would have Adam in helpless sniggers, earning him an impatient frown from the teacher aide. In free-time, whoever finished first (usually Kieran) would rush to the choosing table and bags the engineering blocks for the both of them, and one swimming day, when Mum forgot to pack Adam’s towel, Kieran let Adam use his wet one after him.

  Corey they’d met later at high school. Adam can’t recall exactly when the two of them had become three, but it didn’t seem to matter. Quieter, Corey is half-Chinese, a Master Warrior of Morterain’s Curse, captain of the badminton team and a pretty handy pianist. In spite of his accomplishments, Corey is really shy; the perfect foil for Kieran. While Kieran seems to think girls hang on his every word, Corey turns as red as Superman’s undies if a girl so much as looks in his direction. Adam wonders if his friend’s lack of confidence has something to do with English not being his first language; ironic because, of the three of them, Corey’s word-power is extraordinary. He has this weird thing for thirteen-letter words. He’s been collecting them ever since he read the Midnighter series by Scott Westerfeld. Every now and then instead of saying ‘You guys are a bunch of pussies!’ Corey will come out with ‘You guys are so pusillanimous!’ which essentially means the same thing, but sounds a lot ruder.

  ‘Mate,’ Kieran greets Adam, squatting to sit on the porch beside him.

  ‘Thanks for coming over.’

  ‘Hey, what’re mates for?’ Kieran stares out towards the street, avoiding Adam’s eyes. ‘This porch is really cold on my butt!’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We could move somewhere.’ He throws a mournful look towards the door.

  ‘Nah, I like it here.’

  ‘So, how’s it going?’ Corey asks nervously. Hovering off a little to their left, he picks absently at the waxy foliage of Mum’s native hebe bushes, shredding it between slender fingers.

  ‘She still hasn’t called.’

  ‘But they must have some ideas, some leads?’ Kieran says.

  ‘Zilch.’

  Kieran throws his arms in the air. ‘Come on! They must know something.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘But I thought with all the newspaper and TV broadcasts, and all the posts on Facebook, your mother would’ve come forward by now. Or at least someone would’ve seen her.’ Corey nods in agreement.

  ‘Pūriri—he’s the detective in charge—doesn’t believe that Mum upped and went to live another life somewhere.’

  ‘Fail. No one who’s met your mum would think that.’

  ‘Even if she were the type to do that—which she isn’t—Pūriri says none of her bank cards have been used. There have been no withdrawals here or anywhere else. You don’t go anywhere without money. Pūriri insists trailing the money is as true in real life as it is on television.’

  ‘You mean like on Law and Order?’ Corey breathes.

  ‘Da Dong!’ Kieran intones, mimicking the signature scene change from the long-running crime show.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So, if no activity on her cards means it’s unlikely she’s run away, she must be still in town somewhere.’

  ‘That’s the theory.’

  ‘Then they’ll find her.’

  Adam stuffs his hands under his jumper. Kieran’s right: the concrete is glacial. His butt cheeks are freezing together. He shifts a bit to increase the circulation in his bum.

  ‘Pūriri suspects she might’ve had an accident. Maybe she can’t get up, or is disoriented. Maybe a car clipped her, throwing her into a ditch and she crawled somewhere.’ It hurts Adam to pronounce the words. There’s a tightness in his chest, a physical ache, forcing him to breathe deeply.

  If Mum is hurt, time is running out. They need to find her fast.

  Corey frowns, probably imagining Mum unconscious and bleeding.

  ‘But surely there’ve been some sightings?’ Kieran prompts.

  ‘Tons of them. Too many, really. There needed to be a Mardi Gras parade taking place for that many people to spot her in a ten minute walk to the dairy. The police are sifting through the reports, though, following up potential leads.’

  ‘So, that’s good, right? If people saw her, then she can’t have been injured.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘At least, not when they saw her.’

  ‘Makes sense.’

  ‘Which would narrow down her location.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’ Adam tells them about the report of Mum being kidnapped by a UFO.

  ‘You’re kidding!’ Corey says.

  ‘What a kook!’

  ‘Yeah, pretty funny. Except it distracts everyone from the real business of finding Mum.’

  Suddenly, Adam springs up. He steps away from the concrete porch, kicks an imaginary stone off the front path, then swirls to face Kieran and Corey. ‘I can’t stand it! All this endless waiting around doing nothing is doing my head in.’

  Adam’s old swing ball game stands off to one side of the path, the tennis ball so old that it’s lost its fuzz. Adam bats at it impatiently with his hand. The ball swings away wildly.

  ‘Let’s go out and look for her then,’ Kieran says. ‘We’ll all go. This morning Gary drove over to volunteer at the park; said he wanted to help with the search. I heard they’ve been sending out teams of volunteers to comb the area grid by grid, shoulder to shoulder, checking in ditches and fence lines, and looking inside people’s garden sheds. It’s like they’ve got a whole military command centre over there.’

  Adam nods, swatting at the ball again. ‘Dad’s over there now, and Aunty Mandy. She got up early this morning and baked a mountain of ginger gems to take down, that and a couple of Tupperware co
ntainers full of sandwiches.’

  ‘So let’s go!’

  ‘Can’t.’ The ball bangs against the pole and comes to rest. ‘I’ve been told by Dad and Pūriri to stay put here. They’ve even left me a minder.’ Adam tilts his head toward the house where indoors the murmur of Wendy Gordon’s voice can be heard. ‘I think they want to protect me from the worst. If the search parties find my mum, it means she’s in a bad way, right?’ There’s that tightness again, threatening to suffocate him.

  ‘Maybe it’s not that,’ Corey says hurriedly. ‘Maybe the cops want you to stay here so there’s at least one person in the family who can be contacted at any time. They might have specific questions only you or your dad can answer, like urgent medical information. And if your dad’s out searching with a team, there has to be someone handy they can ask.’ The speech over, Corey goes back to tugging at the dark red stem of the hebe, causing the violent purple spikes to sway like the front row of a rock concert.

  Adam’s grateful for Corey’s optimistic spin on the situation. ‘It’s just I feel like I’m going to explode, you know?’

  ‘You so need to get laid,’ Kieran announces bluntly.

  ‘Yeah, right, Kieran,’ Corey says, eyes rolling under his straight black fringe. ‘Let’s keep it real. Adam’s lost his mother, not his virginity.’

  ‘Too true, young Corey,’ Kieran says in the plummy tones of British entertainer Stephen Fry, one of his favourite affectations. ‘And one expects Adam’s mother will turn up well before the arrival of a young lady dense enough to boink him.’

  Adam laughs. Of the three of them, only Kieran has ever done the deed, going out with Felicity Graham for what appeared to be a magical three-month shag-fest before she abruptly dumped him for Mikey. Until circumstances change, the tacit rule of their threesome is that both Adam and Corey will grovel at the feet of Kieran’s greater knowledge concerning the predilections of the fair sex. Still grinning, Adam mimics a cuff in Kieran’s direction. It’s just like his mates to take Adam out of himself, reminding him how small and inconsequential he is.