Finding Jake (22 page)

“You don’t sit at the popular table,” I heard Laney say.

The two kids had been talking for some time while Rachel and I discussed our order. I barely paid attention but my ears picked up her comment.

“I didn’t say we did, Laney, did I?”

“That’s what Jesse’s sister told her. She says Max and Ben are annoying.”

“So what,” Jake said.

“But they
are
annoying.”

“You and Jesse just want the basement all the time. That’s why you say that. I don’t even know her sister.”

“She sits at the cool table,” Laney proudly announced.

“There isn’t really a
cool
table. There’s sort of a weird table . . .”

“Yeah, yours,” she said.

“Laney, be nice,” I scolded.

She crinkled her brow, so like her mother. “I was.”

To my surprise, Jake laughed. I thought he would be upset or feel insecure but he looked nothing like either emotion crossed his mind. At that instant, I saw just how comfortable he was in his own skin.

I watched the two, my children, interact. The moment unfolded as if I had never seen it before. They carried themselves with confidence and happiness. I checked and found that Rachel watched
them, too. Her expression mirrored what I thought mine must look like. I felt her shoulder touch mine. A second later, hers moved away, as if the contact had been accidental.

“Why are you always with those guys?” Laney asked Jake.

“Because we’re friends.”

“You just like to play that fools-ball game,” she said in one of her accents.

They laughed. “No. We play Barbies a lot, too.”

She feigned outrage. “You better not touch my dolls.”

He smirked and acted as if his fingers were tiny, well-coiffed figurines. “Oh, Ken. Oh, Barbie. Smooch, smooch.”

“Aren’t you proud?” Rachel whispered, smiling.

“Actually, I am.”

“Yeah, me too.”

After dinner, we drove home. Instead of heading inside, we walked the block and a half to the beach, passing the houses with their sailboat motifs and grand, inviting screened-in porches. Fireflies speckled the tree line of an empty lot, blinking their silent story to the night. In the distance, the pounding growl of the ocean teased our ears. The air smelled of the sea and I heard another family on the next street over singing an old song.

I stopped, straining to hear. My grandfather sang that song to us during our one visit to the state-owned beach bordering Maryland.
He didn’t know the next line, though, so he hummed a few stanzas and ended with a resounding: “by the beautiful sea.”

My family had gone ahead a few yards and Rachel looked over her shoulder, wondering why I stopped.

“What’s up?” Rachel asked.

“Sorry, I was just listening to them singing.”

I caught up to her and thought about explaining the significance, but my mind turned in a different direction. As some songs can do, the lyrics touched something inside me. When the kids were little, particularly during some of those tough times when I felt they were isolated from everyone else (or maybe that I was), and Rachel and I struggled with our role reversal, we talked about moving to the beach. Rachel would get a job in some retail shop and I’d try to pick up as much writing work as I could. Inland, the cost of living dipped to the absurd compared to the multimillion-dollar beachfront homes. Maybe we could make it work. The beach coursed through both Laney’s and Jake’s veins. It was our happy place. Why not embrace it fully?

The words in the song surprised me—“Pa is rich, ma is rich, so now what do we care?” They hit home. Every decision in life seemed so important. I thought about how important it had been for me to enroll the kids in the best school possible. We couldn’t do that at the beach.

I noticed the problem with our theory during Jake’s early parent-teacher conferences. Throughout school, I ranked in the top 10 percent of the class. The bottom quarter consisted of kids who would not go on to any education after high school. Some never graduated. Only about half my grade attended a four-year college. As bad as it sounds, I built a level of confidence in myself by being at or near the top academically.

For my kids, primarily due to my own decision to find the
best
school for them, they are smack in the middle of a school in which 80 to 90 percent will continue on to a four-year college, including
some schools that my old classmates would not have been able to spell correctly. My kids, therefore, see themselves as average compared to their peers. Rachel and I had discussed this in the past, but decisions were made and were hard to undo.

The other family walking toward the beach peeled off toward an ice cream stand. Their departure brought my attention back to the present. I caught up with the kids, tapping Laney on the left shoulder but swinging around her right side. Jake lunged at me, grappling like a puppy. I laughed and the three of us, along with Rachel, carried our horseplay all the way to the sand.

The night proved to be one of the most beautiful I can remember. Long, fingerlike clouds passed in front of an enormous orange full moon. The light reflected off the ocean, painting the surf in a living array of yellows, oranges, reds, and purples. The waves crashed at the perfect rhythm and my heart seemed to change its beat to be in sync with nature. The brisk air reddened my cheeks, and refreshed, I took it in and savored the moment. This, I thought, was what the beach truly meant to us, to my soul. Peace.

At one point, Rachel and I stopped and the kids went ahead. We talked in hushed tones.

“Things have been tough,” I said.

She nodded. “No tougher than for other people. I think it’s just this time in our life.”

I watched the kids as they played together. For a second, I felt like I was back on the beach that night so long before, when Rachel and I got engaged. I felt the urge to reach for Rachel’s hand, to share that moment. My fingers even twitched, but they stayed by my side. The barrier between us became, for a moment, a corporeal thing, the manifestation between two people who very well may be growing apart. Yet through it all, two things pulled us back together, and those two things had gotten pretty far ahead.

Eventually, Rachel and I hurried to catch the children. We walked farther than normal that night, passing the houses crowding the
dunes to the immediate south of our beach, on to the state beach beyond. I noticed the silhouette of a pickup backed up to the surf line. Three men sat in chairs, poles jutting out like giant antennae. They spoke softly to one another, their deep whispers accenting the tide. I waved and they all returned it.

“Should we head back?” I asked.

“Look. Mermaids,” Laney called out.

I turned toward the water. As the moonlight reflected off the rolling surface, slashes of light created the mirage of a sparkling form riding atop the waves as they pushed toward shore.

“I see,” Jake said.

“You’re right,” Rachel announced. She was the mermaid expert, the person who had introduced their existence to me almost twenty years before.

A tight knot, we stood together and watched as minutes passed into the night. My arm snaked around Rachel’s shoulder and Laney leaned back against me. Rachel encircled Jake and he nestled in as well. I wrapped Laney up into another family hug as salty air brushed the back of my neck. I felt whole and at peace, sharing this moment with my family. The barrier weekend, fading into the night and becoming a shadow. I wished that would last until the end of time.

The weekend passed too quickly. The drive home consisted of contented silence and a couple of naps in the backseat. Home by dinnertime, we ordered out, P.F. Chang’s. Laney and Rachel wanted to pick it up (since I drove home from the beach) and Jake and I went into the backyard and threw a baseball as the sun slid below the horizon.

“Getting too dark,” I said.

He nodded. Baseball, unlike some other outdoor activities, became significantly more dangerous at twilight. The ball faded into the gloom only to reappear three feet from your face. The first few were exhilarating. After that, we were just asking for trouble.

“I’m hungry,” Jake said.

“Let’s get everything ready for when the girls get back.”

We trooped inside and prepared for dinner. Jake fished aged chopsticks out of the utensil drawer, his favorite and Laney’s. I grabbed some napkins and retrieved a beer for Rachel from the fridge in the garage, and a bottle of Pellegrino for myself. By the time I reentered the kitchen, I heard my wife’s car pull up. At the same instant, the home line rang.

“That’s probably Max,” Jake called from the kitchen.

I expected him to pick it up but the phone continued to ring. It sounded three times before I made it to the kitchen. Creasing my eyebrows, I moved to answer it.

“Don’t . . . please,” Jake said.

“Why? Who is it?”

I could tell Jake did not want to tell me, but he rarely left a direct question unanswered.

“It’s Doug.”

I lifted one eyebrow.

“I just don’t want to talk to him right now.”

DAY TWO

First, I call Jen. She answers and I hear sadness before she even speaks.

“Is Max okay?”

“Yes.” She breaks down. “I am so sorry.”

Strangely, I do not feel emotion in this moment. Nothing at all. “Can I speak with him?”

Jen pauses. It is a lot I ask, considering what has happened. Yet, considering what has happened, there is no way she can say no. When Max gets on the line, I can tell he’s ready.

“Max? Are you okay?”

“I thought you’d call me,” he says.

His voice breaks and tears roll from my eyes again. I set them free, allowing the droplets to course down my cheeks and drip from my face without wiping them away. I do not sob or heave, though. The tears are peaceful but more real than any I have shed so far.

I stay quiet. Part of me needs to know what Max knows. Another part has absolutely no idea what to say. Like the parents outside our
house, he might lash out, blame me, or worse, blame Jake. Maybe he will tell me all of the signs that I missed. I don’t think I can handle that, but I have to know.

My voice goes steely. “Talk to me, Max?”

“He didn’t do it, Mr. Connolly. I know he didn’t.”

I take a deep breath. My heart—already broken for my son, my family, the victims, and myself—breaks again for Max.

“I know it’s hard to understand. I don’t know what to tell you, Max. I’m sorry.”

“No, I mean it. I know he didn’t do anything.”

My brain feels numb as I comprehend what he said. I still believe this is simply adolescent denial. His young brain cannot comprehend the horrific facts so it has to change them. I understand that; I thought I saw it in Laney as well. But there is something about his tone, the way he makes that announcement, that sends currents tingling across my body. There is a very real possibility that Max knows my son better than I do.

“How do you know that?” I whisper.

Before he can answer, I dread what he might say because, for this split second, I can believe that my son had not taken part in this horrible tragedy. I can release a torrent of emotions that I did not even understand yet. Max let in a tiny, inconceivable hope that had vanished those first few hours after this ordeal started. Maybe Jake will come home to me, to us.

“Because I know. I know that kid Doug. He’s crazy. Jake was just nice to him, the only one, really. He always tried to protect him. I never understood why . . . Maybe I do, now. I don’t know.”

I hear Max crying. I imagine how difficult it must be for a seventeen-year-old male to cry on the phone with another male. I realize, though, that Max cannot be thinking that way.

“It’s okay, Max. None of this is your fault.”

He settles down. I hear him swallow and clear his throat.

“Thank you,” he says.

“Do you have any idea where Jake might be? Where I can find him?”

“I saw Jake that morning, Mr. Connolly. I talked to him. He said he was going to walk over to Doug’s house. I had to tell the police the truth. But they just didn’t care about the rest.”

“What
rest
?”

Max cleared his throat again. “He looked scared. Jake did. I’ve never seen him like that before. He’s a tough kid. He never really got upset about stuff.”

In a different circumstance, hearing my child’s friend speak candidly about his character would be utterly compelling, a spiritual treat. Under this circumstance, I hang on his words for a very different reason. I hunger to hear what makes Max so sure.

“He told me to stay away from Doug. He said something wasn’t right, that he was freaking out. Jake felt he had to go over there to make sure Doug wasn’t going to hurt himself.”

Max’s words became a chisel, chipping away at what I feared to be true.

“Did he say anything about hurting other people?”

“No.” Max’s reply sounds adamant. “Jake would never hurt anyone. You know that.”

I did. Yet, possibly, I had forgotten.

“Did he say anything else?”

Max does not respond right away. When he speaks, his voice sounds guilty and unsure. “He told me to tell you that he was sorry.”

My eyes burn and I have to swallow, but I cannot. I fall back into a chair, my legs giving out from under me.

He was sorry. For what? I do not understand. What did I do? What could I have missed? I failed my son. I failed on my most basic charge, protecting my own child. Nothing made sense any longer.

“What did he mean?” I whisper. To myself or to Max, I am not sure.

“I don’t know,” Max replies, breaking down again.

For a time we cry on the phone together, all pretense shattered. Finally, I can take it no longer.

“I have to go.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Connolly . . .” Max sobs.

“You are a great friend.”

I hang up the phone and bury my head in my hands. The weight of my body presses into the chair. I cannot feel my fingers or my feet any longer. This cannot be happening. It has to be a joke, some sinister test.