“Look at you, so organized. Did I mention the calming effect you seem to have on me?”
“I’m serious. What do we do? Call the police?”
I lean my head back and sigh. “I don’t know. I don’t want to get the police involved now. He’s almost eighteen—”
“But he’s not eighteen yet. Think about it this way. If one of your students was missing, and his parents called you for help, what would you tell them to do?”
“Call the cops,” I sigh. My head is still back and my eyes are closed, and I hear Lauren’s pencil scritching on her notepad.
“Okay. What’s our cutoff time to call?”
“Are you always this precise about things?”
“Yes, actually, I am. What time do we call if he’s not back?”
“If he’s not back by three tomorrow afternoon,” I say, picking a number out of thin air, “then let’s call.”
“If he’s gone away somewhere, what are some of the places he might go?”
“Well…” I start, and I sit up and pause. “I should call Michael. Jesus Christ, I should have called Michael.”
I dial my brother as fast as I can; thankfully he answers right away.
“What do you guys want?” he says testily. “I’m kind of in the middle of Saturday night service, here. Why the fuck do you guys keep calling?”
“Has Chris called you?”
“He’s tried like three fucking times! What the hell, you guys, can this wait?”
“You’ve talked to him?”
“No, Neil, I haven’t! Maybe because I’m like, running my restaurant on the busiest night of the week?”
“Chris is missing. He didn’t go to his basketball camp today and he hasn’t come home.”
“You’re kidding me.” It’s suddenly silent in the background.
“I’m not. If he calls you, Michael, please talk to him.” I’m holding the phone to my ear with both of my hands. “Answer when he calls you the next time. Talk to him. Find out where he is, tell him to stay put, and call me right away, okay?”
“What the hell? What is going on?”
I take a breath. To my side, Lauren is leaning into me as she listens.
“You know I told you about how I’ve kind of been hanging out with one of Carol’s nurses, right? Lauren.”
“I recall you told me about this Lauren.”
“I’ve never told Chris. But I told him last night.”
“And he freaked out?”
“Well, Lauren’s pregnant, and I told him that too.”
“Dude. She’s what?”
“Don’t worry about that now. We’re talking about Chris. I need you to help me with Chris. Just talk to him when he calls, okay? Talk to him and—”
“Calm down, Neil. I’ll talk to him. I’ll call you back.”
We wait for nearly two hours, Lauren with her textbook and me with my phone in my lap. When it rings I nearly jump. It’s Michael.
“No call,” he tells me. “He didn’t leave me any messages when he called before, either. I tried him back, but nothing.” I don’t respond. I can’t. “You okay?” Mike asks.
“Not really. Not at all.”
“You want me to come up? I can leave first thing in the morning.”
“No,” I say quickly. “Stay put. I think he might…just stay there, okay?”
We end the call, and I sit, staring at nothing. Where could he be?
Christopher, where are you?
Lauren touches my arm and it jolts me back into the room.
“Let’s go to bed, Neil,” she says softly. “Let’s get some sleep and be ready for tomorrow.”
I wave my hand toward the hall. “You go,” I say. “I’m going to wait here on the couch a little while more.”
“Okay,” Lauren whispers, leaning close and kissing my cheek. “He’ll be all right.”
I nod, and ask Lauren to turn out the light as she goes. There is no more whiskey, no more sedative; I must face this darkness on my own.
In the unlit room, I sit and listen and wait.
Sometime in the middle of the night I wake from my half-sleep on the couch to check my phone for missed calls or texts. I open the mobile browser to check my email, draw in my breath and say “Holy shit” out loud when I see what’s there.
My last email to Wendy, subject “Chris, and Other,” has a reply.
From: [email protected]
To:[email protected]
Sent: September 15, 3:01 am
Subject:RE: Chris, and Other
__________________________________
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
[email protected]
Technical details of permanent failure:
The email account that you tried to reach does not exist.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
When I blink my eyes open I’m assaulted by a bright blue glow; the full moon is setting over the dunes, and the light of it shines through the living room window and onto my face. I’m still on the couch, I realize, and the clock on the cable box under the TV says four forty-four. I roll to my back and rub my eyes, and remember the email I got in the middle of the night.
Wendy’s account has expired, I realize; no more emails to Wendy.
No more.
Then I remember my son has been missing, and I push myself upright. Did he come back home sometime in the night? I jump to my feet and run to his room, the door is closed but unlocked—it’s unlocked!—and I go in.
The bed is made, he’s not there, and the memory of checking in there last night returns to me.
“Neil?” Wendy calls.
“He’s not here,” I say.
“Come to bed,” the voice says, and I blink and realize I cannot be speaking with Wendy.
“Hold on.” I go into the bathroom, relieve my night-filled bladder, and shuffle through the darkness to my room to climb into my bed with Lauren’s voice, with Lauren, for real. She’s so warm, the real Lauren, it’s perfectly warm under the covers with her, and I curl in behind her, tucking my knees against the backs of her legs and sliding my arm up under her shirt and around her waist.
“Is he home?”
“No.” I press my lips to her shoulder and neck.
“Did you sleep at all?”
“A little.” I say.
Curled together, we rest. Daylight fills the room when I wake again; Lauren remains in heavy slumber. I take my arm from her slowly, slip out from under the covers, and get myself dressed.
There are no messages on my phone. It’s ten after seven, and I dial Chris. Nothing. I check my email, and there’s nothing there either. I check to see if I can get into my school email account and sure enough I can; maybe a student knows something about Christopher’s location and will have sent me something, anything to give me a hint of where he could be. The inbox is empty except for one email from the network administrator, Cory, with a subject of: VERY IMPORTANT!! Could he know something? I open it and read:
I DO NOT THINK THIS FLOATS SO VERY WELL NEIL!!
Below the line of text I see the beginning of a photograph. I can only see the top: blue sky, white clouds. I scroll down. Tops of trees, summertime green. Scroll some more, and there’s damp concrete. White tile. NO DIVING in stenciled letters. Chlorinated blue water. And I know I shouldn’t, I know I should not do this, I scroll down to the bottom of the page.
There’s a body at the bottom of the pool. A woman’s body, lifeless.
I stare at it, and stare; my teeth are clenched, the world goes white, in a rage, a rage, my phone is in my hand, the name in my contacts is tapped and I’m rising to my feet in fury.
“You little fuck!” I nearly scream when the call is accepted. “You weak little piece of shit!”
“No, Mr. K.—”
The world is white with rage, and all I can see is a body at the bottom of a pool.
“You thought this was funny, right? Right? You think this is funny!”
/>
“No, stop, please,” Cory says, begging. He sounds pathetic to me. “We were—”
“I want to hurt you right now,” I spit. “And it wouldn’t be funny. So help me, I want to take my own hands and—”
“—We were hacked! Someone got in, they took over the whole network. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, the police have been here. We got hacked, it wasn’t me, I swear.”
“Jesus Christ,” I say, feeling sick. Lauren is at the door.
“Neil, what’s going on?” she whispers.
“They got in five days ago,” Cory goes on, pleading. “They locked me out of my account, out of everything, I don’t know how they got in. I tried to call you, I kept trying to call you, I’m sorry, I left messages on your machine—”
My phone shakes in my hand so violently I can barely operate it, but I hang up on Cory and dial Chris again immediately. To my amazement, I get a ring, and to my even greater amazement, the call connects with the sound of fumbling.
“Chris!” I say, “Christopher, where—” Immediately, he hangs up. “Goddammit!” I shout, and I try to call him back. Nothing.
I feel myself beginning to come apart.
“Neil?” Lauren says, her eyes wide. “What’s happening?”
I grab a jacket and dash out of the house, and the emptiness of the space to the side of the garage where Christopher parks his car seems like a taunt. “Damn it!” I shout. “Damn it, Chris!” I set off in a run, down the drive and to the path by the highway all the way to Alan’s house. I burst in the door, startling Alan in his kitchen. He’s wearing a robe and holding a coffee mug, and he spins his body toward me in surprise as I come in.
“Hey, what’s going—”
“You told me to tell him!” I shout. “You told me it would be okay!”
“I did tell you to tell him.”
“None of this is okay! You said it would be okay!”
“I never said—”
“You’re supposed to know everything! How the fuck could you be so wrong!”
“Neil, you need to calm down if we’re going to deal with this in a reasonable way.”
I shake my head and leave his house, starting out fast but settling into a jog halfway home. I feel like an idiot. I feel better, maybe, for the outburst, but I still feel like an idiot.
I’m nearly calm when I get back home, but I see Leland’s truck parked in front of my driveway, which gets me agitated all over again. I run in through the front door and Lauren jumps up from the couch.
“Is he in here?” I bark. Lauren puts her hand to her chest.
“No, Chris isn’t—”
“Not Chris, Leland!” I go back outside, and Leland steps from around the side of my house, staring at an unrolled surveyor’s map.
“Hey,” he says, glancing up as he notices me. “Just the man I wanted to—”
“Get out of here!” I yell.
“Excuse me?”
“I said get the fuck off my property!”
“Whoa, Neil, what is going on?”
“Get…out…of here!” I pick up a fist-sized limestone cobble from the landscape border by my garage, and hurl it at his truck. It bounces off the rear quarter panel with a tunk! I pick up another rock.
“Settle down, I’m leaving! I’m leaving!” I throw the second rock and miss widely just as Leland jumps into his truck. The wheels spin out and throw gravel as he drives away.
My breath comes heavily as I watch him go, and the inside of my head seems close to crumbling. I do not want to break. I go to the barn slab, pick up a basketball, and squeeze it between my hands. Instead of taking a shot, I rear back and throw the ball off into the brush.
It was two months after Wendy’s accident when I finally brought myself to go into the barn again. Everything was there, just as we’d left it: a case of beer in the refrigerator, a last few boxes of Dick’s things to be classified on the workbench. A push broom rested against an open stepladder, right where Wendy had placed it, waiting for her return from a weekend trip to Wisconsin. The broom seemed especially hard to take. I held it, thinking how Wendy’s hands had gripped it last, how, through the simple act of her using it, it ceased to be inanimate and became an extension of her. A broom! A stupid, fucking broom. I assigned sentimental value to all sorts of things back then, but the broom was, for a while, the most significant.
Being in the barn was not troubling for me. It provided an unusual comfort; it was quiet, it kept me out of the rain, it kept things cold for me to drink. A bottle of gin joined the beer in the fridge, and a bigger bottle joined after that. A pill bottle filled with anti-anxiety drugs stayed in the cabinet where Dick had kept fishing lures.
With this pharmacopeia, I kept myself numbed.
Chris went back to school, and I spent more time in the barn. I started accumulating things there, Wendy’s things, my own morbid museum dedicated to my almost-late wife. I set a length of rusty salvaged conduit across the peaks of a pair of stepladders, and from it hung every article of Wendy’s clothing that had been in our closet. Her toiletries were spread over the workbench. Toothpaste, hairbrushes, facial scrubs. Could I really ever bring myself to throw these things away? Every one of them had been, at some point, an extension of her.
I kept a padlock on the door. I kept it on the outside when I wasn’t there, or on the inside when I was; I didn’t want anyone to see her things in there, and I certainly didn’t want anyone to see me in there with them.
I didn’t want anyone to see me falling apart.
Chris spent a lot of time with Carol then. For a period of time after he’d lost his mother, he lost his father as well.
After Leland has gone, back inside my house, Lauren grabs me as I dash through the living room.
“Neil,” she says firmly, pressing her hands to the sides of my head as she stares me in the eyes. “You need to calm down.”
I try to twist away from her. “But I’m—”
“You are starting to panic. Breathe. Now.”
I take a shaking breath, and another, and the whole time she holds my face and looks at me.
“Okay?” she asks. She doesn’t blink. “Breathe. Keep breathing for me. Don’t break.”
I draw air deeply into me, hold it, and exhale. The tremor through my body begins to slow.
“Okay,” I say through clenched teeth.
“Good,” she says. “I mean it. Don’t break. What happened? What set you off?”
“There was a picture in my email,” I say.
“What was it?”
I shake my head. I can’t bring myself to say. “Then I called Chris. He picked up, but he disconnected as soon as he knew it was me.”
“You probably woke him up,” Lauren says.
“He’s mad at me.”
“I can leave if you need me to. If you don’t think I should be here.”
“Don’t leave.” My phone rings. It’s a local number on my display, not one that I know, and I answer it eagerly. “Hello?”
“Neil.” It’s Leland. “I need to—”
“You don’t need shit right now,” I say, feeling myself wind up again. Lauren puts her hand on my arm and whispers, “Easy.”
“I need to apologize. I just heard about Christopher.”
“What?”
“I just stopped by Massie’s place. He filled me in.”
“Christ. I’m sorry, Leland.” I take a deep, slow breath. “I’m sorry I flipped out on you.”
“It’s all right. Let me know when he’s back, okay?”
“I will,” I say. “Hey, wait, will you….” Breathe. “Will you do something for me? Ask Steve if he knows anything.”
“I’ll give you a call if I come up with any news.”
I drop to the living room chair and let my shoulders sag. Lauren sits across from me on the couch with her hands on her knees.
“I’m an asshole,” I say to the floor.
“You’re not. You’re worried. It’s okay to be worried. Just breathe.”
/>
I press my own hands to my face to rub my eyes. “Where the hell is he?”
We sit, and wait. Time passes and passes; Lauren puts some music on, but I ask her to turn it off. Nothing seems right; there’s no appropriate soundtrack for the situation. I stay calm, mostly, but from time to time, I stand up and begin to pace around and Lauren has to tell me to relax.
“Easy,” she tells me. “Don’t break.”
I try to call Christopher, again and again, but he doesn’t answer.
Lauren gets up to make some tea, and Alan stops by while she’s in the kitchen.
“I’m really sorry about this morning,” I say as he joins me in the living room.
“Don’t even,” Alan says. “I understand. Really. I probably never told you about the time Angela stayed out all night.” Angela is the younger of the two Massie daughters. “It wasn’t the year she had you for AP, no, it must have been the year before. She was a junior. All night she was out, no call, no nothing. Kristin was the calm one. I was just like you! Maybe even worse. Didn’t sleep, tore my hair out. She got home the next morning, man, I didn’t know whether to get on my knees and thank God, or ground Angie for the next year for giving me a scare like that. And when I found out she was with a boy, whew, I was ready to go wring his neck. But Kristin calmed me down.”
“Wait up,” I say. Alan’s story has reminded me of the possible appeal of old relationships. “Hold on a second.” I go to the spare room and find, in my old planner, Jill Swart’s family’s number. I get her father and explain what’s going on, and he in turn gives me my son’s ex-girlfriend’s cell number. Alan watches from the doorway. She doesn’t answer when I call, so I leave a message.
“Hey Jill, it’s Christopher’s dad, Saturday morning, hope you’re doing well in Ithaca, can you give me a call?”
Maybe he’s talked to her. Or maybe not. Anything’s worth a try at this point.
“Boot up your computer,” Alan directs me after I hang up. “Bring up your video. I have something to show you.” I go to the page, and I’m not thrilled at all to see it’s up to nearly half a million views.
The Banks of Certain Rivers Page 26
