Finding Jake

by Bryan Reardon

  Doubt creeps through my thoughts. If Jake was okay, why wouldn’t he have shown up? He had to have heard all the commotion. Not if he was on the run. I force the thought down, bury it where it cannot breathe life into other, more damaging considerations.

  Absently, I push the key into the ignition. Her engine growls to life. It is a familiar sound. When the kids were younger, it was the sound I could not wait to hear. It harkened Rachel’s return, the instant in every day (at least the days she was not traveling) when I no longer had to be responsible (at least not fully) for our children.

  Jake Connolly.

  My son’s name hangs in the air around me, confusing, frightening, until I realize the radio has turned on. My heart freezes as I listen, expecting Jake has been found.

  Police now believe that Douglas Martin-Klein did not act alone. According to one source inside the department, another senior, Jake Connolly, was with Martin-Klein less than an hour before the shooting. Officers are in the process of searching the boy’s home. As we have reported earlier, unconfirmed reports are that the body of at least one of the shooters, Douglas Martin-Klein, has been recovered at the scene of today’s nightmarish massacre.

  My hand shakes as I reach for the knob. I manage to turn off the radio as cold sweat beads on my face. There is no denial; no outrage; no pain; just utter, numbing shock. I cannot explain how it feels to hear something like that about your son because I have no idea how I feel. Instead, there is a void of feeling, a void of understanding, a void of action. There is nothing. Absolute but not final.

  CHAPTER 11

  JAKE: AGE NINE

  My mother arrived at noon to watch Laney. I had already dressed in a button-down shirt and a pair of black Dockers. Rachel liked to say I was the only person she knew who bought the black ones. I tried to think of someone else but couldn’t. At the same time, the tan ones made me feel like I might attend a college formal.

  “Simon?”

  “I’m upstairs.”

  I heard footsteps as she walked into the kitchen.

  “Laney-poo!”

  Having seen this greeting a hundred times before, I pictured my daughter launching herself into the air, awkwardly engulfing my mother’s torso. The two of them shared a wide, toothy grin, passed on to yet another generation of Connolly women.

  I stood in the closet, debating. Since leaving my old job, I had worn a tie exactly four times. Three of them had been meetings with my growing list of medical-writing clients and one had been Rachel’s brother’s late-in-life re-wedding to her new sister-in-law, a wire artist from Pasadena. As expected, she and Rachel did not have much in common. Mark now shared fifty-fifty custody of the children he had raised so perfectly. I missed him, although after that one night life had too many times gotten in the way of us bonding.

  I decided against the tie. For some reason, I tried not to wear jeans to school, even though I wore them 99 percent of the time. I thought it would reflect poorly on the kids. A button-down and Dockers would do, though, so I headed downstairs.

  My mother sat on one of our counter stools, leaning in and gushing over one of Laney’s drawings.

  “That is the best tree I have ever seen.”

  “It’s blue, Grammy,” Laney said, her head tilted.

  I smiled. “Where’s Jake?”

  My mom rolled her eyes. My skin burned as my blood pressure rose higher than it should.

  “What?”

  “What?” she asked back.

  “What happened?”

  My mother sighed and looked out the window. “What did I do to become the hated grandmother?”

  I looked at Laney, whose little eyes grew wide.

  “Come here,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm.

  She followed me into the den. I shut the two swinging doors so Laney couldn’t hear me. Then I checked the room. Sometimes Jake read his book with a flashlight under the table next to the couch. I didn’t want him to hear the conversation. The coast clear, I turned to her.

  “You can’t say stuff like that in front of her,” I said. “Shit, you shouldn’t say that kind of stuff ever.”

  “Watch your language.”

  I took a deep breath. “Jesus, you always do that. You try to deflect.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Jake!”

  “I just wanted to know what I did to make him mad. When I came in, he didn’t even look up from his book.”

  “I’ve told you a hundred times before, he’s just like that. He does that to everyone. He’s just a little awkward sometimes.”

  “It wasn’t a hundred times,” she said.

  “GOD! Please stop that.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “Just back off him, okay? He’s nine. You’re the adult. Stop taking it so personally.”

  “I just thought things were better. I tried so hard to be nice to him, and now we’re right back where we started from.”

  I covered my face with my hands, pressing into my temples as I slid them down. “Please, Mom. He’s my son. Do you think I don’t talk to him about it?”

  “I just don’t get it,” she said.

  I barked out a laugh. “Are you serious? Where do you think he gets it from? Remember when your friend, Mrs. Masterson next door, offered me candy and I said no because she was a stranger?”

  “That never happened.”

  I turned away from her, attempting to hide my frustration. “I have to go. I don’t want to be late for his conference.”

  Swinging open the doors, I walked into the kitchen and called out, “Jake.”

  “Yeah, Dad,” he responded from the basement.

  I walked down slowly, thinking. I found Jake in one of the bean-bag chairs. He had two football-player figurines in his hands and he was making bone-crushing noises. He did not look up at me when I walked down.

  “You okay?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Did you say hi to your grandmother when she got here?”

  He glanced at me through red-rimmed eyes. “I forgot.”

  “Buddy.”

  “Sorry, Dad.”

  A fat tear pooled and then dripped clear down his face. Another followed.

  “Come on, none of that,” I said.

  “Sorry.”

  I often wondered if Jake’s heart might be a little too big. I knew he cried because he felt he did something wrong, and that maybe he hurt his grandmother. It made making the point all that much harder, but I still had to do it.

  “It’s okay. Just try to be nice to her, okay? She thinks . . .”

  “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing. Just try, okay?”

  He sat up straight. “What were you going to say?”

  “Nothing. I have to go to your conference.”

  “I hope they don’t say anything bad,” he muttered, looking away.

  I laughed. “They never do.”

  I texted Rachel from the parking lot of the school. Waiting a minute for a response, I decided to head in. One of us had to be on time. Although I’m sure the teacher wouldn’t actually yell at us, I wasn’t taking any chances. We had been a few minutes late to Laney’s and I felt awful.

  I waved to the two women working in the front office and turned down Jake’s hallway. Parents of a kid I coached in recreational soccer stood outside the room next door waiting for their conference to begin. I waved.

  “Hey there, Coach,” the dad said. His wife smiled.

  “How’s Marcus? Ready for next season?”

  “You bet.”

  I walked past them and peeked through the window of the door. The meeting before ours was still in progress, so I turned back to the parents in the hall.

  “Tough loss in the play-offs,” he said.

  “That team seemed stacked.”

  “You’re coaching in the spring, right?” Marcus’s mom asked.

  “Definitely. As long as Jake still wants to play.”

  Jake and Marcus weren’
t buddies. They got along fine at soccer but I don’t think they talked to each other at school. I got along well with his parents, though, so we chatted until Jake’s teacher called me into class. I glanced down the hallway hoping to see Rachel, but still no sign.

  Ms. Jenkins smiled as she ushered me into her room. Colorful drawings papered the walls, jaunty lines melding together from picture to picture, creating a motif of nine-year-oldness. A table toward the back of the room held a troop of bottle people, little effigies of history’s finest—Amelia Earhart, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison—made out of empty designer water bottles. Looking at them, I wished our last name began with an E instead of a C. Who’d we have on our team? Bill Clinton and Casanova?

  “Have a seat, Mr. Connolly.” Ms. Jenkins looked over my shoulder, her expression comically troubled. “Is Mrs. Connolly going to join us?”

  “She’s running just a little late,” I said.

  Ms. Jenkins motioned toward a low, round table. One full-size chair rested on her side. An array of three miniaturized versions lined our side. I took a step in the direction of the real chair but Ms. Jenkins landed in it before I could. She looked at the little chair.

  “Should we wait?” she asked.

  I tried to fit my rear on the tiny seat, teetering back and forth until I found a semblance of comfort. When I turned to Ms. Jenkins, I realized I had to look up at her. I instantly felt like a child, folding my hands in my lap and waiting to get in trouble.

  “I guess not,” I said.

  “Are you suuuure?”

  She looked at me as if I might not be allowed to make important decisions, and I wondered if she had figured it out yet. Did she know I stayed home with the kids?

  “Okay.” She shuffled a folder around. “Let me start by saying Jake is a great kid. I really enjoy his perspective on things.”

  What’s that supposed to mean?

  She continued. “Here are his scores. He’s right where he should be.”

  I scanned the paper. One column listed the subjects/skills: math, reading comprehension, social studies (at nine years old? ha), etc. The second column had a number, I assumed from 1 to 100. Jake earned 90s in all but one. On the right corner of the sheet, I noticed a column labeled class average. To my amazement, those scores were in the 90s and high 80s as well. How could the class average be so high? It was the first time I truly realized that we had moved to an area of high achievers and I suddenly felt like a total slacker.

  Already feeling insecure, my eyes returned to Jake’s lowest score, well below the class average. I traced it over to the subject.

  “What is citizenship?” I asked.

  I seemed to remember something from my grade school, maybe a good citizenship award for some girl who sold her stuffed animals and gave the profits to charity. Her mother made her, but no one mentioned that. Jake, it seemed, struggled in this department. He scored a 54.

  “Well, citizenship is the responsibility of all students to understand the best interest of everyone in the class and act accordingly. We strive to teach our children the core values on which to build toward becoming enlightened, contributing members of society.”

  This came out like a rehearsed speech. I paused, making sure she was finished before speaking.

  “How did Jake manage to get a fifty-four?”

  My question, at first, had more to do with such a precise grade given for such an ethereal concept as “citizenship.” That’s not the question Ms. Jenkins answered, however.

  “I wanted to talk to you about this. Jake, sometimes, he doesn’t always fully engage in class.”

  My chest hurt. Up until that moment, no teacher had ever spoken negatively about Jake. In past years we had been told that he always helped other students, that he never said anything negative to anyone, and that he was a general joy to have in class. Once or twice a teacher had mentioned that he shied away from groups, but not in a critical way. More with a smile that said, That’s just our Jake. Ms. Jenkins caught me totally off guard.

  “Wow,” I said. “What do you mean?”

  “For example, last Thursday.” She cleared her throat. “We performed a class play on the plight of Rosa Parks. I assigned roles to each of the students, randomly, mind you. Jake was supposed to be the bus driver. When it came time to read his lines, though, he wouldn’t do it.”

  ”What do you mean ‘he wouldn’t do it’?”

  “Just that. He didn’t read his lines. Even after the appropriate encouragement.”

  I lost track for a second, trying to figure out what she meant by “appropriate encouragement.”

  “Mr. Connolly?”

  “Oh, yeah. Well, I know he doesn’t like a lot of attention.”

  “I see,” she said, nodding gravely. “Jake is a shy kid. I’ve noticed that.”

  The hair on the back of my neck stood up. “He’s not shy. He has lots of friends.”

  Ms. Jenkins leaned back, as if assessing me. I fidgeted, and the door to the classroom opened. Rachel burst in, crisply attired in her business suit. The tension broke, making room for all new tension.

  “Mrs. Connolly, glad you could make it. I’m sure you’re so busy”—she looked my wife’s business suit over—“with work and everything. I just don’t know how you do it all.”

  Rachel and I stood together out in the parking lot. The telltale crinkle in her left brow told me she was pissed. At what, I hadn’t decided yet.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Did you hear her? What the hell was that about?”

  “I know.” I let out a huge breath and the tension left my shoulders. “Can you believe she called Jake shy?”

  Rachel’s head tilted. “He is, Simon.”

  My eyes narrowed. “What?”

  “He’s shy. At least when he’s in groups. But he’s doing great. He has his friends and they have fun. That’s all he needs.”

  My mind spun. She’d never said that before. I did not agree, either. In fact, her comment made me angry. Jake was not shy. Judgmental, maybe, but not shy. When he was uncomfortable, he got quiet. That was it.

  “That’s not at all what I was talking about. You know she’s married, right?” Rachel asked.

  “Huh?”

  “All that crap about Ms. Jenkins. She’s married, for Christ’s sake. And she calls me Mrs. and she has to comment on how I’m too busy.”

  “She did?”

  Rachel scowled. “You are so oblivious sometimes. You know, this isn’t easy, for either of us. You think I don’t know why you get insecure with the guys in the neighborhood, or why you coach everything? It’s hard on me, too. Every day, I feel guilty. Every story I hear about the kids doing something fun, a little part of me aches. But we decided this is what works best for us, right?”

  I nod. “I guess we did.”

  The next day, the kids had a day off. More parent/teacher conferences were scheduled; I was still reeling from ours. Jake and Laney didn’t wake up until after Rachel left for work. They padded into our room together, whispering. Already awake, I lay silently on the bed, my entire body growing warm, a silly grin spreading across my face. I loved to hear them talk to each other when they didn’t know I was listening.

  “Alex said I had a fat face,” Laney said.

  “He’s stupid,” Jake quickly responded.

  “Yeah.”

  “You want me to talk to him?”

  “No.” She sounded incensed. “I told him he was short like a fire hydrant.”

  “Good one. What’s up with that kindergarten kid that keeps licking the window?”

  “He’s not right.”

  Jake laughed. I tried not to. I felt their little eyes on me.

  “Maybe we should just turn on the TV,” Laney whispered.

  Jake spoke nicely to his little sister. “Nah, I’m hungry. Plus, it’s a day off. You want to play swords while Dad makes breakfast?”

  “Sure, yeah.”

  I turned my head, still smiling. “Hi, guys.”
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br />   “Hi, Dad!” they screamed together, jumping up onto the bed. Jake snuggled in on one side and Laney on the other. I did not want to move. I knew that someday this would all end, that it would be uncool to snuggle with Dad. So I absorbed and savored every second like it was my last.

  When they finally grew fidgety, we got up. I started making breakfast and the two took their seats at the counter. The phone ringing startled me and I splashed some of the egg I scrambled out of the bowl. I looked at the clock. It was only 8:30.

  “Hello,” I answered looking at the caller ID.

  “May I please speak to Jake,” a young voice asked.

  “Sure, hold on.”

  I thought it was Max, Jake’s football buddy, but when I checked the ID, it read Unavailable. I handed the phone to Jake and listened in as I continued to make breakfast.

  “Hey. Yeah. Let me ask my dad.”

  Jake did not cover the receiver when he spoke to me. “Can I go to Doug’s?”

  I motioned for him to cover it, but he just shrugged. I took the phone from his hand and did it myself.

  “Doug?”

  “Yeah, I went to his birthday. Remember?”

  Jake liked to think me senile (though he didn’t know the word for it yet).

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Why not, Dad?”

  He did not whine. Jake never whined, but his flat tone caused me to second-guess my decision all the more.

  “Tell him you’ll call him back.”

  I gave Jake back the phone and he did as asked. After the call ended, he asked me again.

  “I think we’ll go to the park today. And Laney will want you there.”

  “I don’t want to go to the park,” Laney chimed in, sitting beside Jake. “I want to go to Becca’s house.”

  “I just think we should hang out together today. That’s all.”

  “But I told Doug that we could finish the fort.”

  Again, Jake’s tone hinted at an absence of emotion behind his plea. He simply stated a fact, like his mother might in the courtroom. Knowing him as I did, I got it. I could see his disappointment.

  “We’ll see. Let me call your mom and then I’ll decide.”

  He appeared fine with that. A terse nod and Jake buried his head back into the football book he’d read about a dozen times. I considered my motives as I scrambled Laney’s eggs. She liked them barely cooked, with a sprinkle of cheese.