We settled the bill and a handful of us went to a bar. People were dancing. Not me, you know I’m not a dancer, but Anne danced, she was having fun, I just stayed back and watched her dance. That was good enough for me. But she kept bugging me, she kept bugging me: “Come on, Neil, come here, come dance with us, it’s fun!” and I had been drinking enough that I thought, sure, I’ll dance, why not. So I did. I danced, and Anne laughed at me for my stiff dancing, but it was fun.
Things were a little foggy by then, but at some point, maybe it was closing time, the few of us who were still standing made our way back to the hotel. I had the highest floor of all our rooms (floor seventeen, how do I remember that?) and everyone got off one by one, and I noticed when Anne didn’t get off at her floor (twelve) but I didn’t say anything about it. She stayed on, and when we got to my floor, just her and me, she got off the elevator and walked with me to my room. I didn’t say anything about that either.
We kissed in the room. We stood there, barely staying up, we were swaying from drinking so much, and we kissed. I had my hands on her hips, and she untucked my shirt. We kissed, and one of us said “we shouldn’t” and the other said “no, we shouldn’t,” but we kept kissing for a while more, and my hands were inside her shirt, kind of, and everywhere else, kind of. Time passed. Then one of us said “God, we really can’t do this,” and the other said “you’re right,” and she left the room and that was it.
The next morning at the hotel breakfast, she sat down at my table, and when no one else was around she said: “Bad, bad, bad, Neil. Never again.” I said, “Never.” And that was all we ever said about it.
So, there it is. Springtime, Christopher in seventh grade.
--Neil
CHAPTER TWENTY
My cell phone buzzes in my pocket just before one; I grab for it hoping it’s Chris, hoping he’ll say we should go out on Tabby, and my spirits lift when I see “TC REC CENTER” on the display.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Neil, it’s Janine.” Janine is one of the coordinators for the basketball program. “Was your kiddo planning to show up today?”
“Pardon me?”
“Chris is on the roster but no one here has seen him.”
I don’t speak.
“Neil?”
“I’m not sure….” I gather my thoughts. “You know, I don’t know if you saw what’s going on with me, the video—”
“I have. I’m really sorry.”
“Thank you. And Chris got some more news last night on top of that.” I wonder, for a moment, if he’s been in an accident, but stop the thought before it spirals into panic. “I’m going to say he’s not going to make it tonight. I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”
“Oh, no worry,” Janine says. “We’ll miss him! The kids are going to miss him. He’s such a great guy.”
“Thank you,” I say. “Do me a favor, okay? If he does show up, will you call and let me know?”
“You got it. Hey, good luck with everything, Neil.”
“Thanks.” I tap to end the call and rub the back of my neck. I consider for a moment calling Pete Tran to ask if he’s heard of any car crashes involving old Volvos, but I don’t. Instead I dial the nursing home, and ask to be put through to Wendy’s wing.
“Long Term Care, this is Linda,”
“Linda, it’s Neil Kazenzakis. Wendy’s husband. Is Shanice there?”
“Sorry, Mr. K., it’s her day off today.”
“Oh. Has my son Christopher been over there?”
“You just missed him. He left maybe ten minutes ago.”
“Really? Did he seem…upset?”
“Not that I could tell. We chatted a little bit. He said he wanted to say hi to his mom.”
“Thank you. If he comes back, will you call me?”
“Is something wrong, Mr. Kazenzakis?”
“Oh, no…we’re fine. I’ll catch up with him soon.”
After I hang up, I dial Chris. The call goes right to his voicemail, and I need to pause for a moment to think what to say.
“Chris, hey. Hey. I know you’re upset. Rec Center just called, Janine said you hadn’t shown up. So don’t worry about that. Just…be safe, okay? Don’t get mad and go driving around all crazy or anything. Just come home when you’re ready, and we can talk.”
I orbit the room, pacing, pacing, and make my way out onto the deck. The air is not as cold as it was earlier, and the sky is a crystalline, cloudless blue. I duck inside to grab a pair of shoes, and head back out and over to the basketball court. Three balls rest at the base of the basket on the end of the court closest to the house. I pick one up and take a few clumsy shots, as if that will somehow conjure my son, or induce him to come home.
Years ago, standing where the basketball court is now, Dick Olsson had a red, metal-sided pole barn. I never ever went in there as a kid when we were visiting, and I still felt odd entering as an adult, even when I was invited. It was Dick’s hideout, filled with several decades’ worth of tools, guns, car parts, disabled tractors, assorted fittings, snowblowers, expired jugs of herbicide and animal trophy mounts hung in the rafters, staring with their dead glass eyes down on all the detritus—along with the beatific gaze of Ronald Reagan from over the workbench. After Dick’s heart attack, it fell on me to clear the space of all his stuff, a job that ultimately took me three and a half years. The roof needed repair, the sliding door didn’t work, and we decided the best thing to do would be to clean out the building and raze it to the ground.
After I’d taken away all of the obviously useful things like tools and good lumber and stowed them in my garage, and his friends had come to pick over everything else, I had an auctioneer come to look over what was left. Drill presses, metal lathes, fifty-five gallon drums and more were all carted away and sold downstate.
Still, this left me with a lot. I had the sanitary department deposit a full-sized industrial dumpster outside in the grass, and I built up my arms and strained my back throwing thirty-year old chrome car bumpers and ripped up draftsman’s chairs in there. Wendy helped too. We spent hours, it seemed, going through his things. Sometimes Chris joined us to search for some new treasure; we just had to be sure to check how potentially lethal any find might be before letting him run off to play with it.
Some things couldn’t be just tossed. Practically, I could not in good conscience discard seven pounds of gunpowder, twenty cases of .45-caliber ammunition, or a three-foot sword. Sentimentally, I certainly wasn’t going to pitch a lock of hair labeled as coming from Dick’s mother, or the box I found of Dick’s medals—including a purple heart—from his time in the Marines. Those things went over to Carol.
I’d never even known Dick had been in the military. I’d spent an awful lot of time with the man, building our house and doing other things, but he just wasn’t the type to talk about his past that way.
As I got the place cleared out, I found myself becoming oddly attached to it. It seemed much larger inside with all the stuff gone; there was a long, solid workbench, and a fridge if I wanted to come have a beer in peace. The roof wouldn’t be too hard to fix, I remember thinking. I started to feel the charms of the space, and began to understand why Dick loved it so.
I was almost done with the job when Wendy had her accident, and I didn’t go back in there for a while. I couldn’t. There were other things to deal with at the time.
Chris is still not home by four in the afternoon. He hasn’t called either, and, despite all efforts to keep myself calm, my worry has hardened into something visceral I feel in the center of my body. It’s not like him to keep me in the dark about where he is and where he’s going, and not having this knowledge is disorienting. I’ve almost run my phone dead from checking it so frequently, and now I have to keep running into the spare bedroom where I have it plugged into the charger cord next to the laptop.
If he’s gone much longer, I’ll move the cord to a more convenient location.
I check the phone again, and no there’s no t
ext waiting, no missed call. I try Chris, and once again I go direct to voicemail. I don’t leave a message, and I call Lauren right after.
“Hey,” she says. “Neil, about earlier, I’m sorry, I was—”
“Stop. Chris is sort of missing. He’s not where he’s supposed to be.”
“What do you mean?” I tell her about the call from the rec center, and Lauren is quick to try to reassure me.
“He’s…he’s got to be just wandering around, thinking it all through,” she says. “He’ll be back, Neil. Let him process it all. This is a big thing we’ve given him.”
“I know. But I feel…I should have told him everything a long time ago.”
“You didn’t want to hurt him. It’s okay.”
“That seems to have worked out really well, doesn’t it? God, this isn’t like him at all.”
“Oh, Neil. Didn’t you ever do something like this when you were younger? Weren’t you ever moody? Or brooding?”
“No, not really.” The only time I caused my parents any real grief was when they’d found out Mike and I had hosted a party at our house when we were seventeen. Compared to this, that situation seems pretty minor.
“I understand if you don’t want me there, but do you want me to come over? I didn’t mean what I said. I want this. I want us. You can say no if you want.”
“I would like it if you were here.”
“Should I bring things to stay the night?”
What would Chris think if he came home and found Lauren here?
“Why don’t you bring your stuff,” I say, “and we’ll see how it goes. I’d like you to stay, but let’s see what happens.”
“I understand. Why don’t I pick up something for us to eat, too?”
“You’re awesome,” I say. Cooking is the last thing I want to deal with right now.
“He’ll be back, Neil. He will.”
One year when Chris was in elementary school, on a summer day when I was supposed to be keeping an eye on him, he went missing. Wendy worked as an office manager for a tour boat company then, and I’d watch Chris some days during the summers. It saved us money on daycare, and I got to spend time with him, so it was a win all around.
I’d been working that summer on building an extension to our back deck. Dick would come sometimes to help me out, but mostly I was solo. Chris played in the yard while I sawed lumber or screwed down deck boards; sometimes I’d give him a hammer and some scraps of wood to nail together in his own little projects. It was a fun summer.
One morning I was preoccupied with hanging deck joists. I’d mismeasured at some point, my alignment was off, and I had to pull out a bunch of my work to start over. I got absorbed by the job for a couple hours. When I finally looked at my watch I realized it was well past noon, and I needed to get Chris inside for some lunch. But he wasn’t in the yard behind me. His hammer was there, his scraps of lumber were there, but no Chris. I unbuckled my tool bags and dropped them to the ground, and started to call his name. I walked out into the field and called for him, but there was no answer.
“Christopher!” I shouted, maybe louder than I’d ever shouted anything before. “Chris!” I ran around the perimeter of the field, trying to shake off an encroaching feeling of dread. “Christopher!”
Dick heard my shouting, and emerged from his workshop in the barn.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I can’t find Chris.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Dick said. “I’ll check up by the river.”
I ran east into the orchard while Dick went north. I searched, calling and calling, and when it wasn’t me hollering Christopher’s name I heard Dick’s far-off shouts echoing through the groves of cherry trees. We met back in the field, and I had a sudden horrifying vision of my son drowning; we’d always had a rule that the beach or the Little Jib River were only places to go with a grown-up, and I worried that made it tempting for him. Panic seized my chest, and I took off, full-bore, for the dunes, running and shouting his name. From the top of the most beachward dune I scanned the shoreline, north and south, and out into the water; there was nothing. My heart felt as if it was going to come out of my chest. Then I heard Dick.
“Neil!” he called. “Come on back. I got him.”
I raced back to the field, and found my father-in-law smiling as he waited for me.
“Where is he?” I asked, trying to catch my breath.
“Come on,” Dick said. “Keep your voice down.”
I followed him into the pines, and to a deer blind Dick had built from an old truck bed and some sheets of plywood for a roof. Inside, curled up and fast asleep in a nest of dusty horse blankets, was Chris.
“Oh,” I said, trying not to cry with relief. “Oh.” Dick smiled, and I smiled too. I didn’t want Dick to see me cry. But when I looked, I saw Dick was crying himself, so I stopped worrying about it.
“Chris,” I whispered. “Hey, wake up, kiddo.”
Chris blinked his eyes open, startled, I’m sure, by the two silently weeping grown men looming over him. He blinked his eyes into focus, took in his surroundings, and gave a sideways smile.
“What happened?” he asked us. “How…how did I get in here?”
Maybe Chris is in the deer blind now, I think. Why not check? I’ve checked everywhere else. I head off through the field and duck under the heavy boughs of our pine woods; Dick planted these trees with his father, I learned, when he was only ten years old.
The deer blind is not as I remember it. The plywood roof is split and sagging, and the camouflage paint of the old truck bed has completely given way to a scab-colored patina of rust. Everything is thick with pine needles; the rotted horse blankets are completely covered with them.
Chris is not there.
I stand for a bit, wishing it would be as simple as finding him here, knees pulled up and mouth hanging open, a placidly breathing, sleeping little boy. But I can’t go back to that. I think of the times I spent in the blind; more of those silent times spent with Dick Olsson. He’d ask me to come and we’d sit for hours, quietly, me with a thermos of coffee and him with a gun across his lap. I remember a time when a massive buck passed not twenty feet in front of us. The creature paused to sniff the air, and I waited, not breathing as Dick raised his gun and sighted down the barrel, bracing myself for the massive report that would send the animal to the ground. Wanting to feel that, but not wanting to at all, I waited for Dick to do something. He didn’t though, and the big deer continued on to wherever he was going. The gun went back to Dick’s lap.
“Anymore,” he said after the deer was gone from our view, “I prefer to just let them wander around.”
Northward now, I move toward the river, through the pines and groves, and west along the bank toward the dunes. The lake is peaceful under the faintest breeze; the beach is calm. Chris is not here. Not far away, the beach house is shuttered and silent, and Art’s truck is gone.
“Chris!” I shout, but there’s no answer.
Lauren waits for me when I return to the house.
“I figured you were out,” she says. “Running or something. I got Thai food. Is that okay?”
It is okay, and I tell her so; she hugs me and apologizes for earlier and we sit on the floor to eat. Sometimes Lauren reaches to rub my knee.
“I haven’t even asked how you’re feeling,” I say. “I suck.”
“I’m great,” she says. “Really. I feel so normal I’m almost having doubts that you knocked me up.” She winks at me and I manage a wan smile in return; I’m feeling too sick to my stomach to offer anything else.
“I scheduled my first OB appointment,” she goes on. “One week from next Wednesday.”
“What time?”
“Eleven thirty. I bet it will run late.”
“I don’t teach that period,” I say. “I’ll get someone to cover me if I’m on lunch duty.”
“You….” Lauren cocks her head. “You think you’ll be back at work?” I almost laugh.
“Go
d. No. I forgot.”
We finish and clean up, and I find a screwdriver to unlock Christopher’s door. Everything seems normal; the bed is made, his homework is on his desk, some clothes are tossed over the back of his chair.
We go outside and walk together down to the highway. I stand and look toward town while Lauren holds my hand and leans into me.
“If he stays away tonight, I think I might really lose it,” I say.
“He’ll be okay. He’s upset. He’s a good kid. You’ve made him a good kid.”
The early dusk glows with a pair of headlights in the distance. They approach, slow as they pass us, and drive on down the road.
Back inside, I find the student directory containing the home numbers of almost all of my son’s good friends, and I spend an hour and a half calling around to see if anyone has seen Chris. Nope, they all say, nope, haven’t seen him. We’ll call you if we do. Lauren is reading a nursing textbook on the couch, a highlighter in her teeth and her legs pulled up to her side.
“You bring an air of calm to the household,” I tell her. “By acting so normal, you make me forget anything’s going on.”
“That’s good, right?”
“Maybe. I feel like I should be panicking a little more.” I almost tell her about the strange phone calls from the robot voice, but I don’t. I don’t want her to worry.
“How would panicking help anything?” she asks.
“It might make me feel like I was doing…” I think I hear a noise, a car approaching maybe, and I twist my head so my ear is toward the door. It’s nothing. “It might make me feel like I was doing something.”
“Okay. Let’s think about this. Come, sit.” Lauren pats the couch next to her and twists to an upright position. She closes her text and flips her notebook open to a clean page. “If he’s not back by tomorrow morning, what’s the next step?”
The Banks of Certain Rivers Page 25
