by Anne Tyler
When an hour had passed, she phoned the school. Mr. Lanham’s secretary answered and told her in a grave, sympathetic voice that yes, Donny Coble had most definitely gone home. Daisy called her husband. He was out of the office. She went back to the window and thought awhile, and then she called Donny’s tutor.
“Donny’s been expelled from school,” she said, “and now I don’t know where he’s gone. I wonder if you’ve heard from him?”
There was a long silence. “Donny’s with me, Mrs. Coble,” he finally said.
“With you? How’d he get there?”
“He hailed a cab, and I paid the driver.”
“Could I speak to him, please?”
There was another silence. “Maybe it’d be better if we had a conference,” Cal said.
“I don’t want a conference. I’ve been standing at the window picturing him dead or kidnapped or something, and now you tell me you want a—”
“Donny is very, very upset. Understandably so,” said Cal. “Believe me, Mrs. Coble, this is not what it seems. Have you asked Donny’s side of the story?”
“Well, of course not, how could I? He went running off to you instead.”
“Because he didn’t feel he’d be listened to.”
“But I haven’t even—”
“Why don’t you come out and talk? The three of us,” said Cal, “will try to get this thing in perspective.”
“Well, all right,” Daisy said. But she wasn’t as reluctant as she sounded. Already, she felt soothed by the calm way Cal was taking this.
Cal answered the doorbell at once. He said, “Hi, there,” and led her into the dining room. Donny sat slumped in a chair, chewing the knuckle of one thumb. “Hello, Donny,” Daisy said. He flicked his eyes in her direction.
“Sit here, Mrs. Coble,” said Cal, placing her opposite Donny. He himself remained standing, restlessly pacing. “So,” he said.
Daisy stole a look at Donny. His lips were swollen, as if he’d been crying.
“You know,” Cal told Daisy, “I kind of expected something like this. That’s a very punitive school you’ve got him in—you realize that. And any half-decent lawyer will tell you they’ve violated his civil rights. Locker checks! Where’s their search warrant?”
“But if the rule is—” Daisy said.
“Well, anyhow, let him tell you his side.”
She looked at Donny. He said, “It wasn’t my fault. I promise.”
“They said your locker was full of beer.”
“It was a put-up job! See, there’s this guy that doesn’t like me. He put all these beers in my locker and started a rumor going, so Mr. Lanham ordered a locker check.”
“What was the boy’s name?” Daisy asked.
“Huh?”
“Mrs. Coble, take my word, the situation is not so unusual,” Cal said. “You can’t imagine how vindictive kids can be sometimes.”
“What was the boy’s name,” said Daisy, “so that I can ask Mr. Lanham if that’s who suggested he run a locker check.”
“You don’t believe me,” Donny said.
“And how’d this boy get your combination in the first place?”
“Frankly,” said Cal, “I wouldn’t be surprised to learn the school was in on it. Any kid that marches to a different drummer, why, they’d just love an excuse to get rid of him. The school is where I lay the blame.”
“Doesn’t Donny ever get blamed?”
“Now, Mrs. Coble, you heard what he—”
“Forget it,” Donny told Cal. “You can see she doesn’t trust me.”
Daisy drew in a breath to say that of course she trusted him—a reflex. But she knew that bold-faced, wide-eyed look of Donny’s. He had worn that look when he was small, denying some petty misdeed with the evidence plain as day all around him. Still, it was hard for her to accuse him outright. She temporized and said, “The only thing I’m sure of is that they’ve kicked you out of school, and now I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
“We’ll fight it,” said Cal.
“We can’t. Even you must see we can’t.”
“I could apply to Brantly,” Donny said.
Cal stopped his pacing to beam down at him. “Brantly! Yes. They’re really onto where a kid is coming from, at Brantly. Why, I could get you into Brantly. I work with a lot of their students.”
Daisy had never heard of Brantly, but already she didn’t like it. And she didn’t like Cal’s smile, which struck her now as feverish and avid—a smile of hunger.
On the fifteenth of April, they entered Donny in a public school, and they stopped his tutoring sessions. Donny fought both decisions bitterly. Cal, surprisingly enough, did not object. He admitted he’d made no headway with Donny and said it was because Donny was emotionally disturbed.
Donny went to his new school every morning, plodding off alone with his head down. He did his assignments, and he earned average grades, but he gathered no friends, joined no clubs. There was something exhausted and defeated about him.
The first week in June, during final exams, Donny vanished. He simply didn’t come home one afternoon, and no one at school remembered seeing him. The police were reassuring, and for the first few days, they worked hard. They combed Donny’s sad, messy room for clues; they visited Miriam and Cal. But then they started talking about the number of kids who ran away every year. Hundreds, just in this city. “He’ll show up, if he wants to,” they said. “If he doesn’t, he won’t.”
Evidently, Donny didn’t want to.
It’s been three months now and still no word. Matt and Daisy still look for him in every crowd of awkward, heartbreaking teenage boys. Every time the phone rings, they imagine it might be Donny. Both parents have aged. Donny’s sister seems to be staying away from home as much as possible.
At night, Daisy lies awake and goes over Donny’s life. She is trying to figure out what went wrong, where they made their first mistake. Often, she finds herself blaming Cal, although she knows he didn’t begin it. Then at other times she excuses him, for without him, Donny might have left earlier. Who really knows? In the end, she can only sigh and search for a cooler spot on the pillow. As she falls asleep, she occasionally glimpses something in the corner of her vision. It’s something fleet and round, a ball—a basketball. It flies up, it sinks through the hoop, descends, lands in a yard littered with last year’s leaves and striped with bars of sunlight as white as bones, bleached and parched and cleanly picked.
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