by Tim Sandlin
He stared down at the cobbles on the patio, sadly. “No one ever returns a book once they borrow it.”
“Movie?” Lydia hadn’t been paying much attention since she left Hank. Lana Sue was an irritation that normally would have driven Lydia to alert bitchiness, and the girl had said somebody was likely to be killed soon, but today Lydia didn’t have the energy it takes to reach righteous firepower. She didn’t truly snap to until she heard movie. “That book got itself made into a movie? I never heard of a movie called Disappearance.”
“It had a different title,” Loren said. “Floating Away. It showed on Lifetime.” If possible, Loren sank even further into his funk. “I can hardly believe they took my deepest pain and turned it into a Lifetime Network original.”
“What an odd title,” Lydia said.
“It was voted on by a focus group.” Loren sighed. “They wouldn’t tell me the other choices.”
Leroy uncocked his pistol and lowered it back out of sight. “Who played me? In the movie?”
Loren was stumped, but Lana Sue knew. “Your character was cut from the first draft of the screenplay.”
“Ann told me the father’s name was Chuck,” Loren said. “You were the ex-boyfriend who got jacked up on meth and hit her. We decided you weren’t germane to the story.”
Leroy brought the pistol back up. “I’ll show you germane, asswipe.”
Roger jumped in before Loren got shot. Roger had gone to a lot of trouble to track down his stepfather. He didn’t like the idea of losing him ten minutes later. Roger had questions only Loren could answer.
He said, “I have a copy. I remember your character. He was called Freedom, in the book.”
“Where is it?”
“Come again?”
“The damn book. Is it back in Wyoming, or where?”
“It’s in the car. Out front. I hoped maybe Loren would autograph it, especially if I’m the missing boy. It would prove who I am if he puts it in writing.”
Leroy called across to Zelda, who was dog-paddling up and down the pool, “Zelda, drag your bare fanny out of there.”
She stopped churning her arms and treaded water, squinting at Leroy in the light. “I only just started.”
“You’re done now. I want you to walk with my kid to his car. Take the rifle. If he tries to use the phone or run off or anything but go there, get the book, and come back, shoot him.”
Zelda swam to the ladder and pulled herself out. “I forget where I left the rifle.”
“You’d best remember, right quick.”
“I think it’s in the laundry room. I’m washing my panties.”
“Hell, I can’t trust you.” Leroy turned to Roger. “You try anything fancy, and your girlfriend and grandma are dead. You understand?”
Roger said, “I understand.”
From the lawn chairs there rose an indignant voice. “I’m not his grandma.”
***
Zelda led and Roger followed. He didn’t dare glance down at the thong, or the flesh on either side of it, until they were in the house out of Shannon’s sight. In the kitchen, though, he couldn’t help himself.
There were dimples. The right cheek had a rash.
“Is that thing comfortable?” he asked.
She stopped and twirled around. “Do you like it?”
From the front, the thong was wider, but it still didn’t hide all her pubic hairs. “It makes you walk like you’ve got a wedgie.”
Zelda pouted. “You’re no gentleman.”
She left the kitchen, turned right, and went through a door. Her voice floated back from what must have been the laundry room. “Is that your girlfriend out there—the chubby one?”
Roger waited in the hallway, feeling put-upon. He’d never aspired to be a gentleman, not if gentleman meant liar. She’d asked a question, and he answered. She was too young to go snippy on him.
“She’s not so chubby.”
“She’s a hundred years older than you.” Zelda reappeared in the doorway, the .280 Remington they’d taken from Barnett and Rowdy cradled in her arms like a baby. It wasn’t the proper way to handle a firearm. She said, “She’s not good enough for you.”
“You just don’t know her yet. Shannon’s good enough for anybody.”
“She acts like my mom’s friends who make fun of my eyeliner. A bunch of snobs.”
“I’m pretty sure Shannon isn’t a snob.”
Zelda cut back through the living room. “I hope she’s the one Charley decides to shoot.”
Roger took another peek into the library. He wondered how long the nutcase in the hot tub would give them before he turned psycho. “So that guy is planning to shoot someone?”
“He has to now, or you’ll think he’s a wimp.” Zelda stopped at the front door. “I’m not showing myself out there like this. You’ve ruined my confidence.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Too late for sorry now, isn’t it?” She cracked open the door and peered out into the yard and street. “You go to the car alone while I watch from here. Come right back with the book. Charley flies off the handle when people don’t do what he says.”
“Why are you with him?”
Zelda seemed offended by the simplemindedness of the question. “He’s my man.”
“Oh.”
“Go get the book.”
***
Leroy balanced Disappearance in one hand and the pistol in the other. He’d found the gun stuck in a leather holster behind the seat in Barnett’s truck. It was a Taurus .38 Special with a two-inch barrel loaded with five rounds. Leroy hadn’t found any more. If this bunch rushed him, he’d run out of ammunition before he ran out of bodies, and he’d have to switch to the rifle to finish the job. He had felt secure enough, though, to send Zelda on errands with the rifle in hand. This didn’t strike Leroy as a rushing bunch—one guy in a wheelchair and another in pajamas. He felt safe, so long as neither of the two old women got in behind him.
The disc changed from Talking Heads to Willie Nelson. Lydia groaned in a way no one was likely to miss her meaning. “Are you planning to make us sit here like mannequins while you read a novel?”
“That’s right.”
“I’ve got places to be.”
“It took me five hours,” Roger said, “not counting bathroom breaks.”
Leroy studied the title page. It was signed to Marcie VanHorn and said something inane about a Cornish game hen. “I’ll read the parts about me.”
“That’s all of a paragraph. You want me to find it for you,” Roger said.
“Then I’ll skim the other parts. I’d like to know what he wrote about the day I rescued you.”
“The verb is kidnapped,” Loren said.
“Watch your mouth there, writer fella. From my end, it was a rescue. That evil woman was holding Fred against his wishes.”
“She was his mother. He was five and worshipped her. I’ve never seen a child so attached to his mother.”
“You’ve only been on one side of the deal. Every custody disagreement has two sides. I’m hungry.” He searched out Zelda, who was hiding under a towel. “Zelda, take the rifle and that rude woman who lives here.”
Lana Sue fluttered her right hand. “That would be me.”
“Zelda can watch while you whip up lunch. This won’t take long, but there’s no point in murdering on an empty belly.”
Oly said, “I don’t cotton to being murdered hungry either. How about letting the rude woman fix us all some grub.”
Lydia said, “I hate it when he calls food grub.”
Shannon said, “What’s cotton got to do with it?”
Lana Sue advanced on Leroy, until he swung the pistol her way. “Do I look like a servant to you?”
Leroy closed one eye to focus on her. “You look like a rich bitch
with a stick up her tail. Now go and cook up lunch, woman.”
Zelda said, “I can do it, if you’re too good for us. You’ll just have to show me where things are. I make a swell boxed mac and cheese.”
Lana Sue said, “I’d rather cook than have you rooting around my kitchen.”
“That’s the spirit,” Lydia said.
Zelda, still toting the rifle the wrong way, followed Lana Sue back inside. Everyone else settled into the lawn chairs to wait for lunch, while Leroy read the book.
“You want me to show you where Ann first talked about her history with you?” Loren said.
“I’ll find it. You stay put.”
Oly rolled over to the very lip of the pool and sat, staring into the deep-end water as if it held the secrets to the past and future. Sometimes—often—his face took on a sunken-eyed wizard likeness. Roger thought the look conveyed wisdom or the ability to delve into another dimension. Lydia said it wasn’t wisdom, but a self-induced lobotomy.
Oly’s so old he can slip into white noise, she had said. If he’s thinking at all, he’s planning his next bowel movement.
Lydia herself leaned back in her lawn chair, her eyes closed and her arms crossed over her chest. She’d had in the range of three hours sleep since Friday, and the pace was beginning to wear. There’d been too many emotional extremes. All her choices were unacceptable.
Shannon sat next to Roger, across from Loren, clutching Roger’s hand. It felt important not to let him go. She had him and had no intention of losing him.
Roger decided it was question time. There might not be another chance. “So, how true is the book?
Loren knew what Roger was digging for, but he needed time to compose himself. It was vital, he knew, to give this boy truth and nothing but, only in his need to gather his thoughts, his first answer was a lie.
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Is the book true?”
“It’s a novel. I write novels, or at least I did before I started screenwriting. I enjoy the novel form more than scripts, but the pay doesn’t compare.” He nodded, as if confirming something to himself. “I gave up work I love to make money.”
Roger didn’t care about Loren’s soul-searching. He wanted to know where he stood. “Then you made up Disappearance?” Roger nodded toward Leroy, who was reading and keeping them covered at the same time. “Why is he here, if it’s not real?”
“The book is based on a true experience. All books are based on experience, and that book is based on more reality than most. I’ve just never been comfortable with the nonfiction label. It seems so…limiting.”
Shannon squeezed Roger’s hand. He glanced at her, and she smiled encouragement. Roger had a flash of what it would be like to be Shannon’s mate, and a quick qualm as to the worth of quizzing Loren, when he could be back in his cabin in the mountains, making love to Shannon.
“I need to know about my mother,” he said. “Is the mother in the book anything like my mother?”
Loren plunged into telling the truth. It didn’t come naturally. “I was married to a woman with a son. The boy disappeared. My wife committed suicide. I was too much of a coward to die, so I wrote the story. You can release pain by writing about it, at least to some extent. You can make the unbearable bearable.” His eyes seemed to beseech Roger, but Roger couldn’t tell what he was being beseeched to do.
“Did you know he kidnapped the boy?”
Leroy had set the pistol on the hot tub lip and was picking his nose with his free hand. As Roger and Loren watched, he pulled the finger from his nostril, licked it, and used the wet tip to turn the page.
“I still don’t know he kidnapped you. Or whomever he kidnapped. None of this makes sense to me. I don’t understand what led you people to come here.”
“Lydia read your book in prison and decided I might be the boy. Her evidence was pretty weak and based on coincidences, but she talked me into coming to California.” Roger bored in with heavy eye contact. “Do you think I might be Fred?”
Loren studied Roger a long time. He closed his eyes and tried to overlay his mind’s picture of the child Fred onto Roger’s face. His physical remembrance of Fred was fuzzy. There were a couple of photographs that had replaced his real memories, but he and Ann had never been big on photographs. There hadn’t been a need to freeze the moment, at the time.
Loren opened his eyes. “I don’t know. We lost our baby when he was only five. That man’s presence”—meaning Leroy—“leads me to think you must be Fred. He certainly believes it.”
Roger sat back. It was too much for him to absorb. He’d planned on a yes-or-no answer. I don’t know was hard to swallow. But then, Loren was probably right about Leroy’s presence. Why had Leroy shown up when he did? Shannon’s basketball jersey proved Leroy had followed them here from Wyoming. It wasn’t just bizarre timing that brought them both to this house on the same day.
Lydia was right. He was Fred. “What was my mother like?”
Loren sighed. That was the question he feared most. “It was so long ago. I was a different person then.”
Shannon said, “It wasn’t that long ago.”
Loren looked at Shannon, glad for an excuse to break away from Roger. “We lost Fred in 1975. Ann died in ’77.”
Roger asked the question he’d wondered about for ten years: “When was my birthday?”
And Loren knew this one. “February fourteenth. You were a Valentine’s baby.”
Roger made a sigh-like squeak sound. This much alone made the trip worthwhile. “I’ve never had a birthday before.”
“You didn’t choose a day to celebrate?” Loren asked.
“There wasn’t much point.”
“Everyone deserves a birthday.”
Roger automatically started pulling down his bandanna, before he realized it wasn’t there. “That makes me twenty-three. My parents—the people who raised me—guessed I was eleven when I came to them. They think I’m twenty-one.”
Shannon did the math, comparing her age to Roger’s. This was closer to socially acceptable.
Roger said, “I couldn’t talk the first two years that I have memories.”
Loren blinked three times in succession. Guilt rose like gorge. All those years, he’d felt responsible for whatever happened to Fred after they lost him, and his imagination had come up with horrendous scenarios. In spite of that, the true pain had been the idea that reality might be worse than his imagination.
“Why couldn’t you talk?”
“Ask the asshole.”
Leroy cracked the spine and placed Disappearance on the hot tub lip beside the pistol, with his hands braced on either side of the book. He lifted himself into a crouch, obviously passing gas in the hot tub.
“Tell me about my mother,” Roger said.
Loren shrugged and looked down at his hands. Ann left no photos behind. He hadn’t realized that until her face started to fade, a year after her suicide, and he went looking for one. He found a few pictures of Fred in a drawer, but none of Ann. He couldn’t even locate her driver’s license. He suspected she had destroyed every trace of herself before she died.
“She was short, with dark brown hair.”
“In the book, she’s blonde,” Roger said.
“I had to change something.” Loren’s mind drifted back, searching for a memory he knew was true. The real Ann and the fictional Ann were intertwined in his head. He was uncertain where one left off and the other began.
“She had nice eyes. I remember her eyes being soft, but I can’t swear as to what color they were. She was thin, but not anorexic or anything. Just thin.”
Eyes and weight—Roger needed more. “What did she act like?”
Loren sighed again. This wasn’t something he wanted to dwell on. “You were Ann’s life. I don’t know why she married me. She was never interested
in anyone but you. She had a day care when you were a toddler. Started teaching preschool when you went into preschool. Ann couldn’t relax around adults.”
Roger waited quietly while Loren searched the past. Loren hadn’t brooded over what went wrong with Ann in years. Even when he had been with her, he had been writing novels that were more immediate to him than she was. He mostly thought of her when he needed a trait for some character in one of his books.
“Ann was one of those women whose life matters during pregnancy and when the child is a baby. Nothing else felt quite real to her.” Loren twisted the loose ends of his bathrobe belt into a clockwise coil. He wasn’t looking at Roger anymore. “I’ve met men who survived wars who felt the same way, as if only one short period of their lives is relevant, and everything else is going through the motions.”
“Why did she kill herself?” Roger asked. “If she’d lived, I might have come back. I mean, I did, eventually. Wouldn’t it have been better if she’d waited?”
Loren’s attention came back to Roger. The young man reminded him of Fred. So serious. So earnest. Fred had been a five year old who rarely laughed or cried. “She couldn’t face another day without you.”
Roger hadn’t thought Lydia was listening, but she suddenly snapped out of her trance. Her eyes flew open. “What about you? You faced another day.”
“I wrote the book. It got made into a movie.”
“You took the tragedy of your wife and child and turned it into a career move,” Lydia said.
“Writing about Fred was the way I kept going. Ann didn’t have any defense.”
26
“Balls!” Leroy sidearmed Disappearance across the patio, where it bounced once and slid under Oly’s chair, stopped by a wheel before it fell into the pool. “I should break your knees and elbows, you maggot.” He glared at Loren. “Not one sentence of that pile of stink is what really happened.”
“What do you expect?” Loren said. “It’s a novel.”
“That’s an awfully convenient fall-back position,” Lydia said. “The book is true when you want it true, and a novel when you don’t.”
