Finding Jake (2 page)

“What were you thinking?”

“About day care.” Then that little guy in my brain charged with digging up the hard-to-find stuff earned his room and board. “Like your nephew and niece. I mean, those kids are awesome. I think we should just cheat off them.”

My wife’s reaction calmed my nerves. I’d hit dead center in the sweet spot of marital communications, I could tell. I was so proud, until she continued.

“And my brother . . .”

Honestly, I didn’t hear anything she said after that. Rachel’s brother, soon-to-be Uncle Marky, was legend. A college football standout with shoulders wider than my, well, anything of mine, represented everything right about men of the new millennium. A successful midmanager in the corporate world with an MBA from Duke, he surprised everyone when he decided to stay home with his kids. His wife, a college associate professor, worked full-time. Mark went on to raise impeccably perfect little angels, a boy and a girl, while starting his own successful consulting firm.

“He’s amazing,” I said when I noticed the expectant silence. “Really.”

“Financially,” she said, which didn’t make sense to me, probably because I missed something. “That’s what I’m saying. What do you think?”

“About what?”

She frowned. “About staying home with the kids.”

“Huh?”

I’m not a dull person. By dull, I mean I am not slow witted. I knew where she was going. Nor was my obfuscation meant to be humorous or disrespectful. Nor was I utterly surprised. My response represented a deep-rooted defense mechanism. In other words, I was scared out of my Dockers.

DAY ONE: FIVE MINUTES AFTER THE SHOOTING

Jake’s room is a mess. I asked him to clean it Sunday but he insisted it would have to wait. He ran off to a buddy’s house and did not return until after dinner. I forgot to nag him; ergo, his room is still a mess.

Without thinking about it, I start to clean. My schedule is light today. Checking my phone for messages, I halfheartedly pluck dirty clothes off the floor. No new messages means a fade-away jumper from the top of the key. Swish, Jake’s Lax shorts disappear inside the blue nylon hamper by the door. I lean down, grabbing hold of a textbook, and shake my head. Jake is always forgetting stuff, leaving homework or books at home, not taking his phone with him, leaving the cap off the toothpaste. All part of what makes him Jake.

Turning to place the book on his desk, I notice the cover:
Psychology 101
. Having been a psych major, nostalgia urges me, an otherwise nonsnoopy parent, to open the hardbound cover and leaf through the pages. I move toward the window for light and notice a torn-out spiral notebook page full of Jake’s handwritten notes folded
up inside. I pull it out but do not unfold the sheet. I face the age-old parental dilemma—to look or not. Giving myself a second to consider, I look out the window.

Although we own two acres, our house sits fairly close to the street. Two large, dark-leafed maples engulf the front yard, obscuring the view for most of the year. Opening the shades, which Jake always closes, I glance outside, my fingertip toying with the frayed edge of the paper.

The day is warm for November, making it easy to forget that Thanksgiving is only two and a half weeks away. Half of the maples’ leaves have turned a steely brown and fallen. Half of that half I raked and dumped in the woods out back the week before last. A fresh layer of the dead foliage blankets the yard. I add that to my mental to-do list.

Maybe I should have noticed something amiss. I feel no ominous dread hanging over me or the house, or even Jake’s messy room. That’s what everyone always says, that they wake up the day of some tragedy and feel it coming. Not me. I am blindsided.

The first hint shows itself while I look out the window. The neighbor across the street and down two houses is the resident stay-at-home-mom-extraordinaire. I have referred to her as the mayor since Jake was about two years old, mostly because next to her, I felt like I raised my kids like we lived in a den in the woods somewhere. Standing at Jake’s window, I see her car careen down the long driveway. She takes the ninety-degree turn onto the street without slowing, her maroon van with its bike rack on the roof literally tipping up on two wheels. The tires scream and she is gone, jetting out of sight down the tree-lined way.

At that instant, my cell phone dings, announcing a text. I startle, half tossing the psychology text onto Jake’s desk and racing to our bedroom. I’m not sure why I react the way I do. I certainly have no idea what the message says, but something about the way the neighbor raced down the street fuels my pace as I rush out of the room.

My phone rests on the nightstand beside our bed. Putting the notebook page down, I scoop the phone up and read:

I’m moving before I process what I read. The terse statement gives direction: report to St. Michael’s. In times of utter chaos, the human mind responds to orders. It provides an avenue for action while our thoughts flash like a lightning storm.

At a run, I swipe my keys off the counter in the kitchen and I am out the back door. Crossing through the tight space between the front of my Ford pickup and the wall of the garage, my shin slams into our old bike rack. I don’t feel it, nor does it slow me down. I am in the front seat, driving out of the neighborhood, careening through a stop sign, before I’ve processed anything but this direction.

It is not until I see other cars, driving as recklessly as my own, that I begin to understand. There has been a shooting at my kids’ school. My kids, Laney and Jake, are at the school. My kids are in danger. I am not afraid. I am not worried. I am protective, animalistic in my instincts. I will do anything to keep my children out of danger. I will die to protect them. This is not bravado. It is simple fact.

JAKE: AGE SEVENTEEN MONTHS, FIVE DAYS

I was a male lion. Scratching at my neck, I expected to run my hands through a silken mane, long and luxurious. When I yawned, I imagined the world could see my impressive canines. I would roar, call out across the Serengeti, exclaim my dominance, but it might wake Jake up.

That was how I felt being a stay-at-home dad of a seventeen-month-old. From the day at Blue Coast when I agreed to shift my career and take care of a baby, my baby, that is, I lost myself. At first, I reveled in the idea of never having to wear a suit again. That joy, however, was surprisingly fleeting. I never realized how much I’d miss seeing the cast of characters that make up an office. I also did not realize how much I identified with my job, or how much my job identified me. I had started to pick up small writing assignments, but it was not the same. That may sound dramatic, but a stay-at-home dad can trend toward sounding that way.

At the same time, I had missed nothing of my son’s life. I sat on the floor with him when he first sat up. I remembered that day so
well, watching his little muscles tense and that now-familiar expression of stubborn intent cross his perfect little face. Even better, that bright smile of accomplishment that radiated once he made it up. When Rachel came home, I never told her about it. Instead, when he sat up an hour later, she got so excited.

“Simon,” she had squealed. “Jakey just sat up for the first time.”

I entered the room and made a big show of it.

“Oh my God,” I had said. “Are you sure? Did you help him? That’s amazing.”

I did, technically speaking, lie to my wife, but it made her so happy thinking she’d been there for the big moment. Plus, it wasn’t like Jake was old enough to catch me yet.

Shaking the memory out of my head, I decided to check on Jake. He slept in his car seat in the living room. Shoeless, I padded across the kitchen and onto the hardwood of the foyer. A hand on the wall, I peeked around the corner. He was exactly where I’d left him, still snugly buckled in after our short drive. He fell asleep only in the car. At least that is what I had decided. So I drove him for about five minutes at nap time. Once asleep, I headed home, easing the seat out of its frame and gingerly carrying him inside. He had been asleep for about half an hour, although those minutes passed like seconds.

He stirred, his little hands jolting up like a maestro conducting an orchestra. That used to freak me out so I asked the doctor about it. He said it was some kind of startle reflex all kids have. That was good enough for me.

I stared for a moment longer. Although each minute Jake slept floated like a little island oasis, I lingered, smiling. He had his mom’s hair, straight, wispy, and streaked with subtle auburns and haystack yellows. Luckily, he had her eyes, too. When awake and open, they shined with such a unique blue that I found myself locked on to them at times, lost in their tiny perfection. His coloring, though, was all his dad’s. I liked to call it black Irish.

The moment passed and I backed out of the foyer. In the den, I
left the television on but muted.
Big Cat Diary
was on. I’d seen the episode at least four times but I settled down, Indian style, on the earth-tone shag carpet and watched.

The sound of Jake waking up, a soft warble usually accompanied by the most adorable scrunched-up expression, lifted me off the carpet. I have no idea how long I sat there transfixed by the screen. If nap time translated into pure gold, I would have wondered why I squandered it just sitting there, but I was too tired to really think about it. Instead, I answered to Jake’s soft call and freed him from his seat. He clung to my neck as I walked him back out to the den. I placed him down. He immediately toddled to the corner by the ragged olive green couch my wife and I had owned since our first apartment.

“Ball,” he said.

Jake picked up a tiny, soft football. He threw it at my head and squealed. When I picked it up, he raced (maybe “raced” is a bit strong, more like stumbled) at me, launching his tiny body, a perfect shoulder tackle. I fell back, exaggerating, and he screamed, then we laughed together until he got the hiccups. That never stopped Jake. He launched himself again and again, screaming and laughing and hiccupping louder each time. At one point, I swept him up in a huge hug. He squirmed out and went back to the game.

This went on for about twenty minutes, each successive tackle less exaggerated. By the end, I’ll admit that I barely flinched when he landed in my lap. My eyes went up to the screen. Another episode of
Big Cat Diary
had started. I watched it, still muted, while Jake crawled all over me. Rolling onto my side, I felt exhausted, a yawn letting loose as I scratched my neck. Let the women hunt. Right?

“What time will you be home?” I asked Rachel later that evening.

I could hear her shuffling paper on the other end of the line. I reminisced. Shuffling paper had been so great. I missed it horribly.

“Regular time,” she answered.

It was about four o’clock. Slipping a light jacket on my son, I held his hand as we walked out into the garage. I stowed the stroller in the truck when not in use. As I fished it out, Jake wandered onto the wide area of the driveway. He toddled back and pulled a small basketball out of a bin in the corner while I yanked at the lever that supposedly opened the confounding stroller.

“Don’t pick that up,” I called out when I saw that the ball had been replaced by a small rock. “Not in the mouth.”

Jake smiled, as if my words gave him an excellent idea. He brought the pudgy little hand holding the rock up to his lips. His mouth stayed closed as he looked me in the eye.

“No,” I said.

Someone laughed, startling me. All of a sudden the woman from across the street and down two houses, Karen Brown, appeared in my driveway.

“Jakey, that is going to taste awful, sweetie.”

Jake lowered the rock. I glanced at him and then at the neighbor. I never would have dreamed of phrasing it that artfully. “Oh, hey.”

“Hi,” she said.

Karen Brown had sharp, birdlike features and wore her black, straight hair pulled back in a bedazzled hairband. Her clothes clashed with my running attire. She wore an expensive pair of perfectly fitting jeans and a warm-looking, tailored blue blazer. Her socks were thick and woolly. This was obvious because she wore Birkenstock sandals over them.

“That’s a good boy.” I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or Jake.

Jake turned his attention to Bo, Karen’s boy, her first and what she openly admitted to being her last child. He was a year older than Jake. Regardless, when Jake stomped toward him, Bo backed away. Karen, ignoring her son’s obvious discomfort, walked over to me. I didn’t say anything as Jake chased Bo into the yard, but I didn’t take my eyes off my son, either.

“How are you and Rachel settling in?” she asked.

We had moved into the house about a month before, leaving behind our modernized twin in downtown Wilmington, the starter home we bought a year after getting married. With its exposed brick walls and impossibly narrow kitchen, it remained a beacon of our pre-kids life. I had to look away from Karen because my mind took me back to that time. I could almost see
Rachel and I fixing a post-party-in-Philly snack, the mundane act of food preparation transforming into a sensuous dance, our bodies swaying smoothly in the tight space, the food left half finished and clothes left in a haphazard trail leading to wherever we felt like culminating the night.

The spontaneity of such moments seemed so distant, replaced by the reality of child rearing. Although Rachel had thought it was an awful idea to move with a sixteen-month-old, I pushed it, unable to fathom raising kids in the city. We needed to live in a better school district. She had protested, saying something about Jake not starting public school for three years, but I locked on and would not let go. Jake had to go to a good school in a safe community. My tenacity somehow led to that moment, me standing in the driveway reminiscing about the torrid days of old while returning my gaze to the slightly confused eyes of a stay-at-home mom.

“Pretty well,” I answered.

“Great. Don’t you just love the neighborhood? Sue, who used to live in your house, did you meet her? Well, she misses it terribly.”