Finding Jake

by Bryan Reardon

  I tell Jonathan what I know. I can see it does not paint a good picture. He nods and changes the subject.

  “But I agree. We need them to find Jake. Nothing else matters at this point.”

  “How?” I ask.

  “That’s the hard question. We can’t go on television and make a plea. Right now, the public does not think Jake did this.” Jonathan looks me in the eye. “They know he did.”

  “They don’t know him!”

  Jonathan shakes his head. “They know what they’ve seen on the television.”

  The detective reenters the room, halting our conversation. He carries a chair under his arm. Jonathan stands and takes it, placing it beside mine. We are all sitting again, facing off. I am too stunned to speak.

  “What are the charges?” Jonathan asks.

  “Obstruction of justice,” the detective says.

  “So you’ve decided to charge Jake Connolly with a crime?”

  The detective blinks. “Not at this time.”

  “So what justice, exactly, is being obstructed?”

  “The criminal investigation into the school shooting today. The one where thirteen kids were murdered.”

  “And this doll,” Jonathan pokes it with a well-manicured finger, “had something to do with the shooting?”

  “We don’t know yet. That’s what we are trying to find out.”

  “Where did you find this doll?” Jonathan asks.

  “In Mrs. Connolly’s car,” he says. “Your client was driving.”

  “Did he give you probable cause to search it? Was he pulled over? How exactly did this happen?”

  The detective gets up and walks out again. A minute later, he returns.

  “You can go,” he says, handing me my belongings.

  “But you pressed charges,” Jonathan says, arching an eyebrow. “You can’t just let him go.”

  “We never finished the paperwork,” he mutters.

  They ushered us from the station, me holding my envelope of personal belongings, him smiling like a cat, the Cheshire or the one that swallowed the canary, I am not sure.

  “Did you just try to talk them into keeping me in custody?” I ask.

  “Just yanking their chain. What were you thinking, anyway? Where’d you get that doll? The reason you’re out is they have no idea where it came from. You were never going to be officially charged. They just wanted information.”

  “I found it—”

  “Shhh,” he hisses. “I don’t want to know. Not right now. We need to get to work.”

  “Finding Jake?”

  He looks me in the eye. I see a glimmer of sadness there. It surprises me. “That . . . and preparing for the worst, Simon.”

  That makes me angry. “Worst?! How can it get worse? Are you serious?”

  Jonathan touches my shoulder. “We’ll talk about it. Let’s get out of here first.”

  I let my eyes close for a second or two, fighting back the teeth-jarring anxiety that courses through my muscles. I can’t breathe or swallow. I feel like someone whose body is both paralyzed and palsying all at once.

  When my lids rise, I see her. Rachel walks into the station in front of us, frazzled and out of breath. She sees me first and her eyebrows rise. Then she sees Jonathan.

  “What the hell,” she spits out.

  Jonathan extends a hand. “Hello, Rachel.”

  Her entire attention is on me. She ignores his hand, placing hers on her hips. I know that stance.

  “You said he wasn’t here.”

  “He wasn’t,” I say. “He just showed up. I had no idea. But he helped me get out.”

  She shakes her head. “Oh, he helped you, did he? You know, I left our daughter to get over here. Thanks for letting me know everything was under control.”

  “Rach, I . . . I just got released.”

  She seems to accept this, but turns her back and walks away.

  CHAPTER 17

  JAKE: AGE ELEVEN

  Over a span of ten months, I picked up Jake from Doug’s house way too often. Each time, my irritation grew. I had yet to talk to the kid, or his mother, for that matter, all the time they had been friends. To be frank, his father just annoyed me. I tried to ask Jake about it, subtly trying to coax out bits about Doug and his family, but my son gave me little to nothing. Not in an evasive way. I believe that, as a kid, he just didn’t pick up on what I was trying to get at.

  He popped into the car, full of excitement. “Hey, Dad.”

  “Hi, buddy.” I looked over my shoulder at him. “How you doing?”

  “Great,” he began, then the floodgates opened. “Doug had his Airsoft gun and we shot at one of those turkey vultures out by the pond.”

  “Whoa,” I said, my voice rising. “You shot an Airsoft gun. Isn’t that like a BB gun?”

  “No, it just shoots these little balls.”

  “Yeah, like BBs.”

  “No, Dad.”

  I accidentally yelled at him. “Yes, son, they are.”

  Silence followed my outburst. I glanced in the mirror to see Jake staring out the window. My grip on the wheel tightened. I wanted to bring back the excitement he’d shared but the words disappeared before catching hold in my brain. I floundered for something, anything, to say. Unfortunately, the enigma of a preteen boy is legend and I came up with nothing. The silence expanded, filling the void between us.

  When we arrived home, Jake got out of the car and headed inside. I followed him, reading his body language. His confident stride did not change. I listened as he greeted his mother and found his voice sounded normal, as if nothing had happened.

  I sat down on the couch. The moment weighed on me, probably more than it should have. I wondered if Jake would even remember it. To me, it turned his path, ruined his chances at a well-adjusted life. He came to me so happy, and I bashed it to pieces just because I didn’t like his friend. I felt like some junior high bully, or the pretty and mean people in the high school lunchroom. As I tended to do, I likened it to my own childhood. I filled out a mental list of my early friends. Frankie, whose parents divorced, ended up holding a kid at knifepoint at the park for his pocket money and was charged with, of all things, kidnapping. One of the others, Greg, cut me with a razor blade on the bus and ended up surviving a debilitating car accident. The Stewart twins set a fire in the woods behind the neighborhood and are now software guys out West making a boatload of cash and living it up in the sun with their attractive wives and inexplicably athletic children.

  Rachel caught me stewing. She entered the den and shook her head.

  “What’s got you thinking?”

  “I don’t like that Doug kid,” is what I came up with, but the truth was far more than that. “I just feel like we should keep Jake away from him. Jake needs other friends . . . more normal friends.”

  She sat down beside me. “Look, I don’t like that kid, either, to be honest. But what you’re forgetting is that Jake is an amazing kid with one of the best heads on his shoulders I’ve ever seen. I trust him.”

  “Yeah, but he doesn’t even play with Karen’s kid. He refuses to, no matter how much I try to make him. I mean, he’s so shy sometimes. What if he ends up all by himself? I—”

  “Stop,” she commanded.

  I looked at her. She met my eyes without a flinch.

  “I know, I’m worrying again,” I grunted. “I’ll try to act more manly.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “Maybe you should . . .” I stop myself, snorting. When I continue, my voice is soft, probably icy. “I know we have problems. In fact, our problems are more the norm now. It’s like our good times are becoming the outliers.”

  “I don’t disagree,” she said.

  Rachel rose and walked out of the room. She never even looked over her shoulder. Instead, I listened to her footsteps as she went up the stairs. Soon, laughter echoed through the halls, my son’s, my daughter’s, and my wife’s. I remained on the couch.

  I could have walked upst
airs. They would have welcomed me into the fun. At the same time, I could have made less of the discussion with Rachel. I might have even had those thoughts while I sat there. Yet the evening played out, warts and all, like someone else wrote our story, someone I’m not even sure I liked all that much.

  A scattering of parents sat in the elementary school gym, watching the makeshift stage in the back. Jake, with his friend Max, along with about a hundred fourth- and fifth-graders were trying out for the annual talent show. I did not have to be there. A lot of the parents weren’t. But I really wanted to see the boys perform.

  When their turn came and the two walked onto the stage, I slid to the edge of my seat. Both wore black suits, the kind boys their age might have worn for a wedding, and black wide-rimmed sunglasses. They carried the guitars Jake and Laney had gotten for Christmas a couple of years before to the front center of the stage. A track of the theme song from Rawhide began and they mouthed the words, air-strumming on the guitars along to the music. Halfway through, the music screeched to a halt. The two looked at each other, befuddled. Suddenly, Natasha Bedingfield’s “Pocketful of Sunshine” started up. They slid the guitars away and began to do something that looked a little like the Cabbage Patch. To be honest, the act lost focus at that point and the two just went nuts. I could hear the other students in the wings of the stage laughing and calling out. The teachers, however, didn’t appear to get the juxtaposition of the country-western bar scene from The Blues Brothers with today’s pop culture phenom.

  For my part, I tried not to laugh. Although this may sound unbelievable, I had nothing to do with their choice of act. In fact, I had no idea where they got the idea from. Their creativity, however, amazed me. Whether they made the show or not, I was impressed.

  When their act finished, I meandered into the lobby and waited for them to come out. While standing there, staring at an antibullying poster next to a posting of the school’s strict visitors policy, I got to thinking. I glanced out to the parking lot and saw the steady flow of parents coming and going, picking kids up from after-school activities. With the change in parenting style of my generation, organic play had been replaced by hyperorganization. The school had a running club, a chess club, a Lego club, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, rec sports, acting class, and after-school language enrichment.

  Watching the swarm of parents picking up their young from the “hive,” I wondered how this all happened. My mind slipped back to my own elementary years. My mother went back to her teaching job and I went to a neighbor’s house in the mornings to wait for the bus. They plopped me in front of the television but never taught me how to change the channel. Instead of Tom and Jerry or Looney Tunes, I watched the Today show every morning. I vividly recalled the tally of days during the Iran hostage crisis. I watched the hunt for the Atlanta serial killer, Wayne Williams. Most important, the story of Adam Walsh swept the nation, if not the world.

  I remember it being right around my tenth birthday when I first heard the news. Adam Walsh, only a couple of years younger than me at the time, had gone missing. Still summer, I only heard tidbits, but I recall a change in my parents’ demeanor almost immediately. My mom stopped letting me linger behind or wander ahead in stores. My father eyeballed strange men nearby, something the usually docile man would not have considered polite before that. These were small changes, nothing drastic. All the kids still roamed the neighborhood. I walked to the pool with my older sister. After a couple of days, I stopped noticing.

  Then school started back up. Again I found myself plopped before the screen, watching the “news” every morning. The awful details, repeated over and over again, seeped into my soul. The boy’s head had been removed (after death, the anchor assured us). At one point, I remember a reporter talking about cannibalism. A shocking reality, but one seen very differently through ten-year-old eyes.

  Over the course of months, maybe years, the media picked at the story like jackals. Adam had been left to watch some boys play video games at a Sears when his mom continued to shop a couple of aisles away. Total time, they say, away from his mom was six minutes. Although it came out that a security guard dispersed the boys, kicking them out of the store, I believe that six minutes changed the world. The thought of losing a child that quickly became a scar on the minds of all parents. A scar that, unlike a physical wound, did not fade over time. Instead, it gaped.

  Abductions surely occurred before Adam Walsh. There is no doubt about it. But no case had ever been so nationally televised, so morbidly dissected, at least not that I knew of. It set the stage for first monthly, then weekly, then daily stories of abduction, torture, rape, beating, starving, even cannibalism. The dark corner of humanity, the formerly silent minority, changed over time, becoming a vocal majority when it came to hours covered by the media. Previously unfathomable nightmares assaulted parents and kids alike every day. The parents absorbed the horror, but kept on living. The kids, however, grew up to be parents, parents with a pale, jagged scar in their minds that changed their parenting style forever. All it takes is six minutes out of your sight. I believe that this awareness doomed the days of childhood freedom, replacing the dinner bell with the car pool.

  This was what I thought when Jake appeared at the far end of the hallway, head together with Max, both smiling. I watched them, feeling content for the moment. Then my heart jumped. Doug Martin-Klein walked out of a stairway right in front of the two. I watched the scene unfold.

  Jake looked up and saw Doug. My son stutter-stepped and said something, still smiling. Doug responded through thin lips, his eyes trailing toward Max. Max spoke next and the tension became obvious. Jake spun on Max. I saw anger flare in my son’s eyes. Doug walked away, his body language cold. Max shook his head and said something to Jake. The two boys separated and Jake, head bowed, walked toward the lobby. Max followed close behind.

  My short-lived sense of well-being crashed so suddenly that I choked up. Fighting it back, I waited for the boys. The walk out to the car and the ride to Max’s house was silent. When we dropped him off, I hoped Jake would say something, but he did not. Instead, I had to ask.

  “What was that all about?”

  Jake pulled at the strings of his hood. “Nothing.”

  “Just tell me. I won’t get mad.”

  “It was nothing.”

  “Jake, you know it’s better to tell me. I just want to help.”

  He sighed. “Do I have to?”

  “I would.” I laughed.

  Jake did not appreciate the awkward attempt at humor.

  “Max just said something to Doug. Now Doug’s mad at me.”

  “What did Max say?” I asked.

  “He called Doug weird.” Jake paused. Maybe it was just me, but he seemed to be trying to convince himself when he continued. “He’s not weird. He’s just quiet.”

  I had to find the right thing to say. This was one of those watershed moments. I took a second and looked out the window.

  “Did Doug get upset?” I asked.

  “I think so. It’s kinda hard to tell with him.”

  “What did you say to Max?”

  “I told him he wasn’t being very nice. That what he said was impolite.”

  “Impolite” was Jake’s favorite word, at least to describe what he considered misbehavior. A teacher once called him hypercorrect in a conference. I felt proud. Rachel did not. She talked to me afterward, saying maybe we should loosen the reins a little. I tried after that. Probably not hard enough.

  “Did Max get upset?”

  Jake gravely nodded. “He did. But he should not have called Doug weird . . .” He paused. I could tell he thought deeply before continuing. “Even if he thought that.”

  The crack in the door appeared before me. I thrust my foot through without thinking.

  “Do you think that?”

  Jake squirmed. “I don’t know, Dad. He’s quiet, I guess. But everyone says I am, too.”

  “You’re not quiet,” I protested.

  He
did not respond. When I looked at Jake again, he held a book in his lap. I doubted my handling of the situation, but I had no idea what to say to salvage it. I started the engine and pointed the car toward home. After a minute, I added my final say.

  “It’ll be okay. Don’t worry too much about it.”

  We drove the rest of the way home without speaking. The entire time, I found it hard to believe that Jake could take those words seriously considering the source.

  CHAPTER 18

  DAY TWO

  Laney sits in the backseat on the driver’s side, alone. I feel the tentative control I have over my emotions falter. Since the time they were both in car seats, Jake and Laney always sat on their side of the backseat. When Jake reached “front seat” age, he took shotgun, but when we were all together, Laney sat behind the driver, Jake behind the passenger. His seat looks so empty.

  Rachel stares out the window. She has not spoken to me since we left the hotel. Jonathan drove ahead to scout out the house. We are returning home. The police have given us the okay. All three of us have been crying most of the morning. At this point, I have nothing left. I feel empty, numb, and confused. When I look at Laney, I just want to scoop her up and run away from this world, keep her safe, make her whole again. I know that’s not possible. It is simply what I want more than anything I have ever wanted before.

  About a mile away from our neighborhood my cell rings. I glance at the clock on the dashboard display. It is 10:25 AM. The hours lost at the station weigh on me.

  “Hello.”

  “It’s Jonathan. Be prepared.”

  “For what?”

  “Look, these kinds of . . . situations bring out the worst in people. They assume they know just because they heard ‘allegedly’ on the television.”

  “What are you saying, Jonathan?”

  “There are people outside your house. Media, but also people from the community. There are some signs, stuff Laney shouldn’t see. Maybe you should think about going somewhere else.”

  I speak to Rachel. “There are people at the house. Reporters, and maybe others. Jonathan thinks we should go somewhere else.”