by Jamie Mason
Reid had gone out with an itinerary: stop by his work for a bar-staff training meeting; hit the music store for guitar strings; Home Depot for an extension cord and lightbulbs; and bring back a late lunch. He had made his meeting and the trip to the music store. Four days later, the police identified the burned-out shell of his car on a gravel road nearly sixty miles away.
• • •
The day he disappeared dragged on forever: annoyance first at the inconvenience, suspicion next, culminating in a shouting match with Dean, his brother, when Leah accused him of knowing “exactly where he is and covering for him just like you did the last time.” Dean’s insistence that they phone the police, once the sun had set and Reid’s voice mail registered full, had sent the mistrust cresting over into fear. Dean was never without a joint or two in his pocket, and he was well-known by the authorities for his petty association with the fraternity of usual suspects. He avoided the local police as much as they kept their eyes peeled for him, and nothing short of disaster would have him inviting the cops into his life.
There was no real sleep with Reid missing. Not for the initial few days. Somewhere in the first forty-eight hours, the lights went out at someone else’s say-so and Leah’s eyelids closed in spite of themselves. She’d lie down, achingly alone, at everyone’s insistence, and without her consent her brain would unhook itself from consciousness. But if there was a footfall on the stairs, or a ringing telephone, or headlights sweeping across the bedroom walls, the crashing, pounding awareness of all that was wrong with the world burned away the blankness in an instant.
Leah’s waking hours cycled through minutes of fretting; of frantic doing, and the marshaling of the troops—friends, relatives, and volunteers—to do also; of praying and discovering that she alternately believed in God and loved Him, believed in God and hated Him, and that she was kidding herself and there was no God. Then there were the seconds she forgot that anything was wrong at all.
When she’d gone looking for a recent photo for the flyer, she’d found Reid’s AWOL sunglasses in the desk drawer and picked them up with a laugh, turning around to tease him for his forgetfulness. Through the dining room she saw Sheila, Reid’s mother, nodding soberly to a police detective at the kitchen counter. For three seconds and one clear, deep breath, Leah had been free of the day. Reality seeped back through her in a slow, sad flood. A rising, cold dread was what spoiled these moments, not the hot collision of panic and urgency that hurled her from sleep. Her brain continued to trick her like this, running for refuge measured in a few calm heartbeats. It happened more and more as the exhaustion set in.
The first three days were a series of battles with the experts over whether there was any real problem at all. By the end of the evening on the first day, Reid’s family and closest friends were convinced there had been some sort of an accident. Dean went driving the most likely routes Reid would have taken, and Sheila dialed the closest hospitals with shaking fingers. Leah spoke to the manager of Neptune, the club where Reid tended bar and played most of his gigs. She called the other band members, who dropped everything and came running, as she knew they would. The gravity of phoning the police, with its implied admission of catastrophe, smothered a quiet down over the group as they waited for the patrol cruiser.
The police confirmed that he’d not been arrested and they took a preliminary report, all the while trying to disguise boredom as reassurance. Reid was a young man with a car and a wallet full of credit, and the obvious implication was left to hang in the air. They grilled Leah as to whether they’d argued, which she denied. The next morning dawned, impossibly surreal, as the first day since the eighth grade that Leah didn’t know where Reid was.
Of course, plenty of hours had been unaccounted for in the previous sixteen years, lost hours that had always been a point of contention. Reid loved Leah, there was no doubt. And she loved him. They had been a couple since Mrs. Doyle’s homeroom class. But his head had, on occasion, been turned. When she had known or suspected, Leah would fume and rant for a few hours, then withdraw into the threat of unending silence. Eventually she would give in to the barrage of honest remorse. Reid was always hugely sorry in proportion to how much he loved her.
Leah was neither weak nor stupid; she was practical. In her mind, relationship was compromise, and compromise was a simple contract. Everyone offers up something as a loss in order to gain a list of must-haves. Constant fidelity was the sacrifice in this transaction, but Reid was affectionate, talented, and celebrated as the life of the party. In all of his faults, what was good was real. He had held her hand on the science-class field trip through the old-growth forest and never let her go. As angry as she ever got with him, she always felt him there in her left hand, a warmth that tingled in her palm and held her back from the uncharted wildness that could (and surely would if given half the chance) gobble her up and erase her as if she’d never existed at all.
Reid on his own, though, was only part of the arrangement he secured for Leah. It was family, and the years of warm belonging she’d felt, that kept her at his side. Ideas and ideals were fine enough, but Reid, with his smile and off-brand devotion, delivered a clan, solidly there, that loved Leah more than her blood ties ever had: an amusing puppy of a brother in Dean and a mother, with all the sweet connotations the word can hold, in Sheila. Sheila, in her terribly fragile health, owned Leah’s loyalty and heart more than her son ever had.
And it was Sheila, with her gentle manipulations, who had brought them all to the very threshold of a wedding to keep them together. The police officers had made much of how Reid had vanished thirteen days before he was due to walk down the aisle. Cold feet made such easy work of a missing person’s investigation. And indeed, a set of cold feet figured prominently in the goings-on, but they weren’t missing. They carried Leah from room to room, trying to stride off the nervous energy of guilt.
She’d walked with Reid into one very real and tangly wood when they were children, and little by little over the years they’d walked right out into another one, a metaphorical snarl of need and obligation. She knew very well the long, swooping drop between playing along with a situation and being legally bound to it. She’d come to the very edge of that bridge and peered between the slats, hesitating at the choice to cross or jump.
With Reid gone, Leah’s manic pacing wore flattened tracks into the carpet, the edgy, useless circles run to purge regret from a bride who had been praying for a way out. But the house, she found, was a treadmill, and she couldn’t outrun the secret, little thrills of what her life might yet be. She didn’t have to back out. She didn’t have to crush Sheila. She didn’t have to break Reid’s heart. These notions sparked without permission between the fits of crying and the pangs of wanting his hand back in hers, and on their heels, she wrestled the knowledge of how awful these thoughts made her.
His mother’s pale face shook with rage at the slow track of official involvement in those first few days. The phone never stopped ringing, and the parade of well-wishers and do-gooders kept up an industrious buzz that felt nothing like progress.
When they came with news of Reid’s car, the mood shifted. The civilians retreated in discomfort with hollow offers of “anything we can do,” and the police presence increased threefold. No one said it for days, but everyone knew that Reid was dead. The investigation flowered in false leads, then collapsed under the ponderous weight of nothing to go on.
The milestones of time accumulated—a week, and the crying was still rampant, as were the kind prompts not to lose hope; a month, and the phone rang much less, but still occasionally with callers who didn’t realize that he was gone; a year, and a picture of Reid went into the casket with Sheila and rested in a marked grave in a churchyard. His smiling likeness was tucked away in the crook of a dead woman’s arm, and also at some point into the back of the telephone book, then finally into a cupboard drawer in the kitchen, while his body lay under hastily strewn and unconsecrated ground, tapped into place with a garden sho
vel on a moonlit night by a man that none of the rest of them knew.
3
They say God gives us no more than we can handle. That is either an horrendous lie or the loosest possible definition of the word handle. Looking down the length of himself, Jason couldn’t understand how everything still appeared attached. His mind had jittered his fingers off his hands and his hands off his wrists a dozen times since he’d stalled over making the call, the undialed phone going warm and heavy in his palm. He did it anyway, of course. A few extra minutes of anonymity wasn’t worth the stage fright, trembling there under Calvin’s mournful encouragement to involve the authorities. “Call the police, Mr. Getty. They’ll know what to do.”
So he sat alone at the table, watching through the dining-room window for the unavoidable squad car to turn down the street and ruin his life.
The fever flush that had seeped all the way into his collar still burned in his cheeks. Jason hated blushing; hated that he couldn’t keep from doing it; and, most of all, hated that it made him five years old again—every time—for just an instant.
The first blush he could ever remember had lit him up in the lobby of his parents’ bank. His feet had dangled well above the floor as he sat in a row of waiting chairs, watching through the glass panels in the door opposite him. His mother’s stiff back and the manager’s bald head, nodding, then shaking, held him transfixed like the TV westerns he watched with his father, but didn’t understand.
“Hey there.” The pretty teller with the biggest, palest blue eyes he’d ever seen crouched to meet his level. “You’re being so good, little guy, waiting out here this long. Want a sucker?” She fanned a rainbow of candy in front of his face. “What color do you like?”
“Red.”
“What’s your name?” Her eyelids flashed pearlescent blue to match the irises as she blinked.
“Jason Bradford Getty.”
“Well, there’s a mouthful. Can I just call you ‘JB’?” Jason nodded, dumbstruck in the grip of peppermint breath and sparkling arctic eyes. “Swell,” she said, and plucked the red one from the bouquet, but offered the rest in her other hand as well. “Hey JB, want to take the rest of these home? Maybe share them with your brothers and sisters when they get home from school?”
“Don’t have any.”
“Oh yeah? Same here. We match, JB, you and me. I’m an only child, too.”
Looking into her smiling eyes, a feeling welled in his chest, a feeling that Jason would remember at intervals for the rest of his life, like a weighted balloon rising up through him and pulling back down all at the same time. A hope on a doubt. A reach and a recoil. Yes, but maybe no.
“Uh-huh.” His eyes stung from not blinking out of her spell. His voice went tiny. “Very only.”
“Very only? You mean, very lonely?”
“I don’t—” He almost understood what he’d got wrong and “almost” itched like the dickens. It blazed in his cheeks and heated up the back of his neck. He buried his face in his mother’s coat, which lay draped over the arm of the chair.
“Awwww, you sweet thing.” She laughed softly and ruffled his hair.
He felt her there, waiting for him to look up, but he outlasted her. “Okay,” she whispered. “Bye, bye, little Mr. Very Only. You take care, now.”
The bank teller had left him all the suckers. Jason left them all under the seat cushion.
Now, he blushed when he counted out exact change. He blushed trying to untangle himself from telemarketers. He blushed at the urinal, which was completely stupid. And then sometimes, he wouldn’t. There had been times he would have guessed his face would have flat-out ignited that it simply hadn’t. The first time he asked Patty for a ride home. The time he’d talked off a speeding ticket after having had three beers and more devotion to the beat of the song on the radio than to the numbers on the road sign.
Sometimes that climbing sense of promise didn’t feel lousy. Sometimes it straightened his spine. In those moments, Jason almost understood the mechanism; almost knew what it would take to cut the anchor and rise with the hope.
“Almost,” as always, itched like the dickens.
• • •
Authorities. Even in the midst of his lava-faced personal earthquake, a kernel of anger glowed at the presumption of the word authority. What did some smug, barely-able-to-grow-a-mustache infant know about getting pushed and pushed and then pushed just a little too far? Nothing, that’s what. They all ducked behind a tin badge and a gun belt as fast as the academy could churn them out. No one harassed them. No one stalked and taunted. No one found their weakest link and nudged and twisted and—
And there it was. The blue-and-white sedan pulled into view with its boxy band of roof lights dormant. Jason was surprised at the lack of fanfare, but then again, no amount of whooping, flashing urgency was going to do the guy in the garden a lick of good. Who was that guy anyway? The only reason Jason’s anxious mind hadn’t churned itself to butter and his tremors hadn’t tipped him right out of his chair was the distraction of the skeleton in the mulch bed.
He rode the slithering waves of horror at the thought of the dead guy—God, what if it was a woman?—rotting away under his bedroom window. He felt tainted and violated, angry that someone would have the audacity to put a body in a place like that, so close to a house, to a guy’s bedroom, for God’s sake. He’d been sleeping eight feet from a corpse the whole time. Offended in the extreme, his mind skittered around the elephant in the middle of his psyche. Comparing his own attention to detail in these sorts of matters was a bit more than Jason could face at the moment.
The implied insult of Calvin’s declining Jason’s invitation to wait in the house annoyed him, too. Jason felt abandoned and miffed at the workers’ avoidance as they snatched their tools from the lawn and scurried back to the truck to huddle and smoke and flick their eyes in his direction. They had no reason to be suspicious of him. For heaven’s sake, the skull they’d found was bare bones. That takes time. A lot of time. He’d only been here . . .
• • •
“Almost two years,” Jason answered.
“I see.” The officer made a makeshift desk of the trunk lid of the cruiser and scribbled the tidbit alongside the rest of the see-Spot-run basics. He straightened up and stretched, then hooked his thumbs over his belt, fingers just brushing his sidearm to the right and his Taser to the left. Jason assumed this stance was taught at the academy to draw attention to the belt of authority. The cop sucked his teeth and nodded. “I went ahead and put in a call. All we need is a detective and a crime-scene team since those are human remains you’ve got there and I’m satisfied that this isn’t”—the cop’s eyes slid appraisingly over the yard and its owner—“a fresh crime scene.”
“Well, I already told them that when I called and they sent you.” Jason stifled the bristling indignation at being presumed an idiot.
The responding chuckle was good-natured with an undercurrent of exasperation. The officer nodded to the back of the house, where Mrs. Truesdell’s mutt snuffled along the tree line. “With the calls we get? You’d think we ought to send out a SWAT team every time some hound kicks up a bone.”
The both of them watched the dog, one of them casually, and the other one not nearly so. Jason’s legs doubled in weight and threatened to buckle as his guts twisted into a leaden lump. The cop didn’t seem to notice. He opened the trunk and rummaged through a black nylon bag. “Yeah, last fall there was a little kid that went missing and we got a call from some guy in North County just swearin’ up and down that he’d found what was left of him. One look and I seen it was a broke fox skull, just as plain as day. I mean, that kid was nine years old, for cripes’ sake, and he’d only been gone a week. You’d think anyone could tell the difference between a weathered, old fox skull and a . . . well, anyway . . . it was nothin’. Just a custody thing.” Yellow barricade tape in hand, the cop turned back to Jason. “I’m just gonna go seal this off while we wait, okay?”
“Sure.” Jason’s head bobbled up and down. “Fine. Right.” His stride was uneven as he adjusted his speed to keep a reasonable distance from the cop’s backside and still maintain the security of having him close, of being able to distract him from any roving curiosity.
At the edge of the mulch bed, the officer stopped in a jangle of keys and creak of leather. Jason stopped, too—about ten inches off the policeman’s elbow, practically close enough to kiss. Jason lurched a quick step backward after having been scanned head to toe under a set of raised eyebrows.
“You don’t have to stay out here, you know,” the officer said with more recommendation than sympathy in his voice. “I’d understand if it’s uncomfortable for you.” The cop looked down at the skull with its blanket of dirt pulled up to its nose like someone afraid of the dark.
Jason followed his gaze and shuddered. “That’s not making me uncomfortable.” Mrs. Truesdell’s dog trotted through their peripheral vision. Jason shifted his position in front of the taller man and willed himself a wall between the cop and his backyard.
The policeman set to the task of roping off a perimeter with the blaring yellow plastic strip wound and tied to the odd branch and gutter. Jason watched over him with unseeing eyes as the cop pinched off loop after garish loop of banner tape. Jason’s focus had turned inward, viewing in the theater of his mind the scenes that would play out between now and the time that the damned authorities would take away these bones and leave him be—or drag him, cuffed and weeping, from his quiet life tarnished with one incident of madness.
