by Kevin Wilson
Paul wasn’t sure why he was expected to be upset about this question. “No. We were trying to get to the restaurant on time.”
“And when you got to the restaurant, did your wife head to the bathroom when you got there?” the police chief asked.
Paul figured it out. He was slow; he had always been slow, but he always got where he was going. “Do you think my wife killed our son?” he asked her.
She held up her hands as if to defend herself. “I’m trying to figure this out.”
“The Shibayamas were the last ones to see the baby, so there’s no way Meggy could have taken the baby with her.”
The police chief paused, thinking this over. “Well, that’s the issue here. As of today, Jameson Shibayama states that he actually did not go into the room to check on the baby. The door was closed. He listened at the door and then went back downstairs. It wasn’t until later that evening that they checked the room, at which point your baby was gone.”
“That seems awfully convenient for him to remember now,” Paul offered.
“He says that he was embarrassed that he hadn’t actually checked, as if you two would judge him for that oversight.”
“Nevertheless,” Paul said.
“Believe me, Mr. Lincoln. No one is under more scrutiny than the Shibayamas. But so far there is nothing to indicate foul play. That leaves us with your wife.”
“She did not get rid of our baby,” Paul said, and he was certain of this. He was not the kind of husband in a bad TV movie who let doubt lead him astray.
“Was your wife unhappy? Was she experiencing postpartum depression?” the police chief then asked, as if this would do anything to Paul.
“You know that’s . . . that’s not really any of your business,” Paul then said, and he stood up, which felt too dramatic and so he sat back down. “Where is Meggy?” he asked.
“She’s being questioned right now. It shouldn’t be much longer.”
“Do we need a lawyer?” he asked her. For whatever reason, he trusted that what she told him would be correct.
The police chief looked away for a brief moment. She seemed, to Paul, like someone who wanted to smoke a cigarette but could not. “I would get one,” she then said, and she let him wait in the reception area until Meggy returned, crying, shaking her head, empty of something important.
7.
Meggy’s sister took over. She was a lawyer, obscenely wealthy, a life so far removed from Meggy that they rarely talked to each other, as if there was no way for the other to understand. Diana was married to a nice-enough, nearly mute man who did something with finance, and they had no plans for children. “Kids freak me out,” Diana had told Meggy immediately after Meggy had told her that she was pregnant. They lived in a mansion in Atlanta, ran marathons, went to galas, and sat on boards. Meggy still had student debt, a book of poems with a small press, and she listened to cloud rap. But Meggy had donated a kidney to Diana when her own kidneys had failed in college, and so Meggy always had the sense that Diana resented the fact that Meggy had something over her older sister. The missing baby seemed Diana’s chance to even things out.
“I have the best lawyer for this kind of thing,” Diana said.
“What kind of person specializes in this kind of thing?” Meggy said, her voice listless and thick from the Xanax.
“I’m paying for all of it,” Diana continued, as if Meggy hadn’t spoken. “And I’ll do all the talking. You guys take care of each other and don’t talk to anyone. You’re traumatized. You don’t need to deal with anything except thinking good thoughts for the baby.”
“Thank you,” Meggy offered.
“And I’ll handle information. I’ll let you know what’s going on, and update you. Do not get on the Internet. Don’t look at all.”
They did check their e-mail, which was now flooded with requests for comments and offerings of grief or accusation. They were easy enough to delete. Paul had stopped responding to e-mails from his students, his colleagues, his dean. He just marked all unread e-mails and deleted them in bulk. It was so disconcerting how easy it was, to have everything vanish without any effort.
One time, Meggy and Paul checked news stories on their baby, each one with the same photo that they had provided to the authorities, the baby almost smiling, probably just gassy, wearing a fuzzy zip-up that made him look like a tiger. The articles offered little of substance, the same information over and over, just the number of days since their baby had disappeared changing. The comments, on the other hand, were a cesspool. Half the people assumed they had killed their own child. The other half assumed that the Shibayamas had killed their child, but that Meggy and Paul were ultimately responsible for putting their child in the care of such people. And the blame was not equal. Paul was rarely mentioned. It was Meggy who was at fault. It was her lack of care, of mothering instincts, that led to this. Or it was her depression (how did they know about her depression?) that had pushed her to such an extreme act.
They closed the browser window and looked at each other. “If he comes back,” Meggy asked, so empty of tears, her voice ragged, not her own, “will they even let us have him?”
8.
Paul’s first and only novel, The Cross, had to go into another printing. It wasn’t enough to get on the bestseller’s list (“Not yet!” offered his agent by e-mail), but there was definitely an uptick in sales that was directly related to the disappearance of their baby. Meggy’s book of poems was already out of print, three years after it came out. A few weeks after the vanishing, someone sent a copy of Meggy’s poetry collection by mail, asking for her to sign it and return it in the SASE that had been provided. Meggy threw the envelope away and spent the morning rereading her poems, which had all been about the natural world and humanity’s insignificant place in it. One poem, about the time that Meggy had spent a month in Iceland, glaciers and volcanic rock, ended with the line “A baby? It means nothing to the ice.” She hiccuped with sobs, and Paul found her holding the book. He took it from her, found a random spot in the bookcase, and slid it safely away from sight.
9.
“I miss him so much,” Meggy said to Paul one night in bed. Her milk had dried up months ago. She kept the door to his room locked. For hours, she would sit on the sofa and watch slideshows of the baby, the hypnotic way each image solidified his presence in her heart.
“I do, too,” Paul replied.
They held each other, and Meggy could feel how hot Paul’s breath was on her face. She reached down for him, stroked him until he was hard. She turned away from him, and he pulled down her panties and, with some effort, slid inside of her. They took turns moving, one letting the other do all the work until they tired and then the other would take over. It felt pleasurable at the same time that it felt like nothing. “I love you,” Paul said, but Meggy pretended that she hadn’t heard, grinded against him.
When it was over, she tried, in the dark, to find her panties, and finally had to turn on the light. She looked over and saw that Paul was watching her.
“What?” she asked.
“I think it would be easier if we just knew. It’d be better if he were dead and we knew for certain. This is worse, don’t you think?”
“It’s bad in a different way,” she admitted.
“How long do you think we can live like this?” he asked.
“Not long,” she said.
He turned away from her and settled himself for sleep. “I wonder,” he said, but she didn’t respond.
10.
“I don’t know how it took this long to find out, honestly,” Diana said to Meggy and Paul over the speakerphone. “As far as optics go, it puts the burden back on them.”
Jameson Shibayama had once been James Fry, son of an esteemed Texas politician. In 1972, he married a woman, Camilla Thursby, the heir to an oil fortune. On their honeymoon, James, an accomplished sailor, had taken his new wife on a voyage to Central America in the sailboat, an Amel Kirk 36, that his wife’s family had purch
ased for them as a wedding gift. Only a few days aboard the boat, James radioed early one morning that his wife had disappeared and was nowhere to be seen. He stated to the authorities that they had gone to sleep that night and, when he awoke, Camilla was gone. Ultimately, he was not charged with any crime. Her death was ruled a suicide. Camilla’s diaries had revealed that she had battled depression for years and had not wanted to marry James, but her family had insisted. The incident produced a true-crime book in 1975, Honeymoon Disappearance: Foul Play on the High Seas, long out of print. Two years later, Fry legally changed his name to Jameson Shibayama.
“Why Shibayama?” Paul asked, and then felt foolish, as if the whole story was undone by this one mystery.
“I don’t know, Paul,” Diana said, annoyed. “It doesn’t matter.”
“So he’s not even Japanese?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” Diana said.
“He didn’t look Japanese,” Meggy said.
“The point is that Jameson Shibayama has been a primary suspect in two mysterious disappearances,” Diana continued. “The police will redouble their efforts, dig deeper into his past. Public opinion is entirely on your side now. We’re getting closer to the truth.”
The Shibayamas had moved out of their house, were living with Mindy’s ancient mother in Nashville, and the house now sat empty. It wasn’t clear if they still owned it or if no one else had bought it. There was no sign in the yard.
“And they had a daughter that died young,” Paul offered. “It was cancer, but maybe that wasn’t actually the case. That’s got to put suspicion on them as well.”
“What?” asked Meggy. “No.”
“That’s not right,” Diana replied. “They’ve never had any kids.”
“No,” Paul said, starting to stammer. “They told me that they had a daughter that died when she was, like, seven or eight or something like that.”
“When did they tell you that?” Meggy asked.
“The night all this happened,” Paul said.
“I think you’re misremembering, maybe,” Diana said.
“No, I’m not,” Paul said. “Ask them about it.”
“They never had any children,” Diana said, as if that settled everything.
“Well . . .” Paul said, but now couldn’t remember with certainty, everything about that night both intensely vivid and yet so far in the past that it was difficult to remember what was a dream and what was real.
“What’s the end result at this point?” Meggy asked.
“What do you mean?” Diana asked. She had appeared on several talk shows. She had set up a foundation in the baby’s name. She was becoming famous.
Meggy and Paul sat in their house and tried to write. The university had given Paul a year’s paid leave. They were stuck in this space where their child was not with them, and they had no idea how to open it back up. They were left with words, and they did nothing, offered nothing.
“I mean, he’s dead. Right? Jameson killed him or he didn’t, but he’s gone,” Meggy said to Diana.
“That’s not true, Meggy,” Diana said. “You can’t give up hope.”
“Then where the fuck is he?” Meggy yelled.
There was a long pause before Diana said, “Jameson could have given him to someone else. He could have sold him.”
“Jesus, Diana,” Paul said, his voice rising.
“I’m sorry,” Diana said immediately. “I’m just saying . . . I’m just saying that you can’t give up hope.”
“But I don’t know why,” Meggy said, so listless and tired that she wanted to go back to sleep except for the fact that she had just woken up.
“You will see your baby again,” Diana finally said. “I know this. Somehow. Someway. In this world or the next—”
Paul reached for the button and turned off the speakerphone. The silence felt crackly, as if Diana at any moment would come back on the phone and keep talking.
Paul and Meggy stared at each other.
“I wrote a poem about him,” Meggy said.
“I started writing a story about him,” Paul admitted.
They were quiet for a long moment. “Would you like me to read your poem?” Paul asked her, and Meggy shook her head.
“No,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to read it.”
11.
A year had passed. Nothing had changed. Or perhaps so much had changed that it was impossible to tell what their new lives were. Meggy and Paul were dumbfounded that no one had been arrested. It was infuriating, the way the police simply seemed to shrug and then wait for something to break. They had stopped calling with updates. There were none.
At times, Meggy wished that the police would charge her with the death of her baby, just so that she could move into a new identity, could move out of this stasis of half mourning. It seemed so obvious to her and Paul. Something had happened to their baby and the Shibayamas, if not directly responsible, knew more than they had admitted. Where was a no-nonsense, old-school detective who would get Jameson Shibayama in a locked room and hit him with a rubber hose until he confessed? How did this person not exist? What if Meggy borrowed a million dollars from Diana and then offered it to Jameson in exchange for the truth? Even if she promised that he would suffer no repercussions, would he tell them?
Paul opened the mail one afternoon and found a letter with no return address. Inside the envelope was a greeting card with an image of a cartoon cat wearing a sailor’s outfit. Bon Voyage! it said. Paul showed it to Meggy, who opened it to read aloud what was in the card, written in the tiniest handwriting, so precise that it seemed like a robot had done it. “You will find your baby buried under the bench at the dog park.” She dropped the card, then picked it back up, then held it by her thumb and index finger. “Should we put this in a plastic bag?” she said. She was shaking. “For evidence?”
“It’s a joke,” Paul said. “It’s a really fucking cruel joke.”
“What if it’s not?” Meggy said.
“Then we’ll give it to the police and they can decide.”
“No,” Meggy said.
“Then what?” Paul said. It seemed, in the past month, unless they were fucking, they could not stand to be in the same room as the other. It wasn’t that they hated each other. It was just that their grief was such that it could not touch against the other’s without turning toxic. In five weeks, Paul would go back to teaching. Diana had invited Meggy to live with her for a few months, to get out of town, but Meggy refused. “I want to be home,” she had told Diana.
“In case he comes back?” Diana guessed, and Meggy didn’t answer.
Now, holding the card, Meggy looked at Paul. “Let us do this. Just you and me.”
That night, they sat in the car across from the dog park. It was two in the morning. They finally walked to the enclosed park, each carrying a trowel. They stopped at the only bench in the dog park and knelt as if they were about to pray.
The ground showed no signs of wear. It looked like the rest of the ground in the dog park.
“There’s nothing here,” Paul said.
“Okay,” Meggy replied.
“God,” Paul said. “There cannot be anything here, please.”
“Let’s just dig,” Meggy said, and she jabbed her trowel into the earth.
Thirty minutes later, the digging harder than they had imagined, Meggy’s shovel hit something metal. She felt her breathing become so rapid that she had to lie on her back. Paul placed his hand on her chest. “It’s okay,” he said. “We can go home right now.”
Meggy sat up and then leaned over the hole. She picked up the trowel and cleared away the dirt. Paul shone the flashlight into the hole, and Meggy pulled out a small tin box. It was rusted.
“I don’t want you to open it,” Paul said.
“I’m going to open it,” Meggy said.
“It’s not him,” he told her.
“I know,” she said. “But I don’t know for sure.”
“Please, Me
ggy,” he said.
She opened the box and there were eight birthday candles, burned halfway down, a clear plastic bracelet, and a tiny plastic baby, the kind that you would find inside a king cake.
Meggy closed the box. She then felt the intense sensation of being watched. She stood up quickly and looked around. There was nothing, nothing that she could see.
“He’s gone,” Paul finally said.
“I know,” Meggy said. “I guess I know that.”
“I love you,” Paul said.
“Not right now,” she replied. “Please.”
They each sat on the ground, leaning against the bench. They looked up at the sky, but there were no stars visible.
“I’m going to go live with Diana,” Meggy said after ten or fifteen minutes of silence.
“Don’t do that,” Paul said.
“Just for a little while,” she said.
“We could try again,” Paul offered.
“Let’s go home,” Meggy said. She knew it was pointless to reply. They both knew that they could not go through this again.
Meggy placed the box back in the hole and covered it with dirt. On the walk back to the car, they held hands.
12.
Three years later, Meggy lived in Decatur, Georgia, near Atlanta, in an apartment that her sister paid for. Diana also gave her a monthly stipend that was generous enough that Meggy didn’t have to work. Instead, she wrote poems. They were about the relationship between a mother and a son, spanning nearly forty years of their lives. She had published most of them in prestigious journals, all under a pen name, so as not to arouse suspicion or to make the poems into something that they weren’t. Of course the poems were exactly that, but she didn’t need anyone else knowing it.
Paul was denied tenure. He had expected this. His teaching had become atrocious, the bare minimum to get through the semester. He hadn’t published anything since his first novel. Also, people wondered if he had murdered his own baby. He waited out his time and then he had to go somewhere else. He found a job teaching composition at a community college in Atlanta. He was eight hundred pages into a novel about a baby who disappears and the husband and wife who never stop searching for the baby. He expected that it would take at least another eight hundred pages before it was finished, and he already knew that there would be no resolution.
