Finding Jake (11 page)

Darkness lifts me out of darkness. The sun sets behind the skeletal tree trunks. Icy pain radiates from my knees, whether from the age-related pain of kneeling for too long or the frigid wetness seeping up from the ground into my bones, I am not sure. All I realize is that I have knelt in the remains of the old church for too long. Time I could have spent looking for Jake is now lost. I must get hold of myself. What kind of father am I? Yet the doll haunts me. At first, I cannot touch it. What it hints at cripples me. The fact that it hints at anything makes me feel the betrayer. Worse, it makes me feel like a stranger.

I have to support myself as I stand, the circulation grudgingly returning to my jellylike legs. The doll, with its insane eyes and tattered and mildewed clothes that look more like melting skin, overwhelms my vision. It is all I see, but I can’t let anyone else see this abomination. Staggering, I lunge for it, trying to tear it from the rusted support rod to which it is tied. The weathered twine catches and I notice the intricate knot securing it to the rod. I tug again but it does not budge.

I have a small Swiss Army knife attached to my key chain. Rachel, who travels all the time, tells me this is crazy, that I’ll never get through airport security. I never travel, so I have left it there for years. Now, I fish it from my pocket and pry open the thin, small blade. Reaching up close to the rod, I slice through the twine. The doll tumbles to the decaying leaves below. Snatching it up and tucking
the rancid thing under my arm, I head to the car.

“It’s Doug’s.” I laugh to myself. “Jake would never touch a doll.”

Once the last word leaves my lips, I convince myself. I look around, afraid someone might hear me. I press the doll deeper under my arm, blocking it from view. It dawns on me that I am breaking a law, a very serious law. Rachel would say I am obstructing justice. It might be the second time that day.

When I reach the car, a warning flag waves in my head, telling me I should rethink taking the doll from the scene. At the same time, I think about the other evidence I have removed, the note. I pull it out and reread it. Could this doll be what Jake was talking about? If so . . .

“A
crime
scene,” I say, shaking my head.

I know what I am doing is wrong, but what would the police think if they found that thing hanging there? It would be bad enough if they found out Jake liked to hang out at some old cemetery. It would paint a false picture of him, one they would use to accuse him of this shooting. I can’t let that happen. It would ruin his life.

Taking a deep breath, I open the door to my wife’s car, throwing the doll into the backseat. I almost toss the note there as well, but stuff it back in my pocket instead. Getting in, I try to think, to decide where else Jake might be. The batting cages? He went there sometimes. I decide to head to the open space where Jake and his friends play football every Sunday afternoon. Maybe he’s there. Or maybe Max is. I could ask him. He would know where to find Jake.

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.

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.

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.