The Banks of Certain Rivers (36 page)

“We’ll call the bus line,” Alan says as we turn
onto my drive. Possibly he’s reading my mind. “We’ll
see if he got a ticket somewhere.”

“They don’t just tell people that stuff. They only tell
those things to the police.”

“We’ll call the police then.”

Inside, I go to the kitchen, and drop into my normal seat. Chris
should be here; he should be
right here
, talking to me, joking
with me, home from basketball camp with stories from the night
before.

But he’s not, and the weight of his absence is oppressive.

I’m glad Alan’s here. It would be too much for me to be
alone right now. He works about the kitchen, tidying things up,
continually moving around.

“You want some coffee?” he asks me.

“I’m wound up enough already.”

“How about some tea, then? Herbal tea.”

“Sure. Fine.” I accept his offer because it’s
easier than not accepting. Alan takes the kettle from the stove,
fills it, and returns it to a lit burner.

“Where do you keep your tea?”

“It’s in the pantry.” Alan opens the door and looks
around. “On the middle shelf,” I add. “Waist high.”

“Not seeing it, Neil.”

I sigh, and get to my feet. I tell Alan to look out, and peer inside
the pantry door. And what I see, or rather, what I fail to see, makes
my skin feel cold and my stomach drop. Christopher’s milk
crate, usually there on the shelf, usually filled with bottles and
jars of Asian spices, is gone. A great empty space is in the middle
of our pantry. I see this space, and it’s too much: my son is
gone, I fall apart.

In seeing this void, I break.

My knees buckle, and tears begin to roll down my face. I ease down to
my knees, bring my hands to my face, and sob.

“Christopher,” I say through choking breaths. “Chris!”

This has happened to
me. Once before.

In the months after Wendy’s accident, as the winter months
crawled by, I retreated more and more into the old barn. I had a
chair in there now, and glasses for my drinks; tonic had been
abandoned for nothing but Xanax and gin. Hours were spent in thought.
I’d bring a bound journal along with me, and when Carol gently
asked me what I spent so much time doing in the barn, when my brother
Mike came up and asked me not so gently what the fuck I was doing in
there all the time, I replied that I was gathering my thoughts and
writing them down. It was therapeutic, I told them. This was for my
own good.

I was not really writing down my thoughts.

Sometimes Chris would knock at the door. “Dad?” he’d
say through the metal door. “Grandma’s got dinner ready.”

Dad? Are you coming out soon?

Sometimes I’d come out. Eventually. A lot of times I wouldn’t.
My brother, when in town, would bang on the door, on the corrugated
metal sides of the building. I was too numb to be startled by it, too
numb to really care.

“Get out of there,” Michael would shout, when Christopher
wasn’t there with him. “I swear to fucking God, Neil, you
need help! You’re going to wither up and die if you don’t
come out of there!”

I did have help, though. I was seeing someone, weekly; I told her
things were great and she gave me refills for Xanax. I was coping, I
thought, in my own way.

At night, when everyone was sleeping, I’d bring Wendy’s
things over to the barn. Entire drawers from our shared dresser.
Files from her desk. Pay stubs, cancelled checks, tee shirts from a
10k charity race, splattered recipes scrawled in her hand and stuffed
inside a cookbook. All of these things had some connection to her;
all of them had been an extension.

I curated these things. I catalogued them in my journal; I jotted
down each memory associated with them.

I found, one day, a shoebox in the house. It had been under the bed;
I must have missed it the first time I’d searched under there.
Chris was reading in his room when I discovered it, and when I peeked
inside I found it to be stuffed with photos Wendy had been intending
to file into albums. A treasure trove! I scurried over to the barn
through melting spring slush, and eagerly spilled it out over the
workbench and began to look through the pictures. They were random,
insignificant: pictures of the field, an apple tree, some holiday
party at her office. Many pictures of our cat. I ducked out the door
to scoop snow into my glass and came back inside to pour gin over it,
and I drank and tried to assign some chronological order to the
images.

I came to an envelope fat with processed pictures and I turned up the
flap and spilled them into my hand to shuffle through them. Again,
nothing of significance.

Until the end of the stack.

The last seven pictures were from the night we’d found Otto.
Chris was in bed with the cat, I was next to him in some, Wendy by
the bed in others. And the last one, the very last one—I
remember us trying to take it—we’d used the timer on the
camera so we could get a picture of all of us. Chris held the cat,
and my wife and I leaned in close. We all smiled.

Click.

We were complete. In my hands, I held evidence, photographic proof,
that we had once been complete.

And at that moment I broke down.

I fell to the floor, sobbing, holding the picture to my chest,
pressing it to my face. It was the time I thought things couldn’t
get any worse. I don’t know how long I was like that, maybe an
hour, maybe less; I stayed that way until I was interrupted by the
squeak of the door. I’d forgotten to padlock it from the
inside, and my son stood there, staring at his lost and inconsolable
father.

“Dad?” he said. “What are you doing, Dad?”

I froze. The picture was on the concrete floor.

“Dad, it’s okay,” he said. He came and put his arms
around me. “Come inside. It’s not good for you to be out
here.”

“I miss her, Chris,” I said, tears spilling down my face.
“I miss her so much.”

“I do too, Dad. Please come back to the house.”

I left the picture on the floor, and followed my son back home.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Here I am, kneeling before my
pantry, staring
at a void on the shelf that represents most
accurately the void in my life.

“Neil,” Alan says, touching his hand to my shoulder.
“Come on, stand up.”

“Damn it,” I say, rising and wiping my eyes with my
sleeve. “I’m sorry.”

“This is understandable, the way you feel.”

“He ran away with a box of condiments, for fuck’s sake.”
I can’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it. I wipe my eyes
again. “He’s the only thing I’ve got.”

“You love him,” Alan says. “And that’s
important. But you’re not alone. Not at all.”

I nod, because he’s right.

Alan calls Lauren, who was already on her way, and he calls Kristin
after that. I wait on the couch and get myself back together. In an
odd way, though I shouldn’t be surprised, falling apart has
made me feel much calmer.

“Oh, Neil,” Lauren says as she comes in and sits next to
me. “Are you okay? Alan told me.”

“I’m fine,” I say. “Really. I do feel
better.”

“Good,” she says. My phone rings with a call from
Michael.

“Anything?” I ask.

“Haven’t seen him or heard from him. I stationed one of
my prep cooks at my apartment in case he shows up there.”

“You’re awesome,” I say. “Keep me posted.”

Kristin arrives, and she joins us in the living room as the light
begins to fade outside. Someone turns on a lamp and for what feels
like a long time no one in the room can speak.

My phone rings, and they all turn toward me expectantly. It’s
only Peggy Mackie, not Chris; I look at them and shake my head.

“What’s up?” I ask.

“Neil,” she says urgently in a low voice. “Neil,
Jesus Christ, all bets are off, they’re going to charge you
with assault!”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I’m not. I’m not! I didn’t tell you this,
okay? You did
not
talk to me, you understand? The family’s
been pushing, they’re connected, you are going to be screwed.
They’re going to have you arrested.”

“Do…do you know when?”

“I have no idea. Maybe tomorrow? Sometime before the board
meeting, I would guess.”

“Okay,” I say. “Thanks for letting me know.”
I hang up and nod to my friends in the room. “I’m going
to be charged with assault,” I tell them calmly. “I guess
I’m going to be arrested.”

They stare at me, stunned. Lauren puts her hand over her mouth.

I have been broken
before. I have fallen apart. But out of this, I learned that, in
spite of the damage I’d sustained, I was able to put myself
back together.

Even with entropy entering the system, some order was restored. I
didn’t know it the first time I was broken, but I can
understand it now.

After Chris found me that night, I didn’t go back to the barn
for a long time. I did, at Michael’s urging, find a new
therapist. And I started running again.

We opened up the barn and cleaned it out once more. Wendy’s
clothes were donated away, her friends picked over her leftover
nothings, and I kept a few items for myself and brought them back
home. A few mementos, I knew, would be okay.

I had the building knocked down. There was a guy I knew, the guy who
had dug out the foundation of my home, good old Karl from Karl’s
Excavation & Hauling. I asked him if he knew anyone who could
demolish a structure. He said he could do it himself, for cheap, and
he showed up one day in the late spring with his big yellow excavator
and a dump truck. I watched while he smashed the barn apart, bashing
his shovel against the sides to knock the walls in, then scooping the
splintered and torn remains into the bed of the truck. A cigarette
dangled from the corner of his mouth the entire time.

After watching for an hour or so, I called up to Karl in the cab of
his machine. “Hey! Can you show me how to do that? I want to
take a couple swings at it.”

“Get your ass up here!” he growled. He showed me how the
hand controls worked, and let me give it a try. I only needed to take
a couple shots at it. That was satisfying enough for me.

“You done okay!” Karl shouted over the rumble of the
machine as I stepped down. “A natural!” He slapped me on
the back hard enough to make me cough. “You ever hard up for
work, you give me a call! Ha ha!”

It only took two and a half days to cart the place entirely away,
leaving behind a perfectly flat concrete slab. Perfectly flat and, as
we discovered a few weeks later with a long measuring tape, only
three feet shorter than a regulation basketball court.

I have been here
before.

“Neil,” Alan says. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” I say. I have been broken before, and I
ended up okay. I came out of it okay.

“What are you going to do?” Lauren asks.

“If they’re going to arrest me, I won’t be able to
look for Chris. So here’s what we’re going to do.
Together. If it’s okay with you guys”—I look at
Alan and Kris—“we’re going to go over to your
house. Lauren and I will spend the night. Alan, you can call
Greyhound and see if you can get anything out of them. We can make
dinner. We missed dinner last night.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Alan asks. His eyes,
unblinking, convey a seriousness I don’t often see in him.

“I’m fine. We’ll leave my truck here and take
Lauren’s car—”

“I need to check in on Carol,” she says.

“Okay. You do that, I’ll just run over. Can you guys pick
up some stuff for us to cook? I’ll give you some money to
pick—”

“We’ll get it,” Kristin says.

I go to my room to get some things together to spend the night. Alan
sticks his head in as I’m stuffing clothes into my pack.

“You’re sure you’re okay?” he asks. “You
know….” He cocks an eyebrow. “You’re kind of
going on the lam here.”

“I’m not going on the lam,” I say. “I just
want to get Chris home. After that, you know, whatever. Whatever.
They can fire me, they can arrest me. But right now I want him back
home.”

“This is the Neil I’m used to,” Alan says.

“That’s right. I’ll see you over at your place.”
He and Kristen leave, and I give Lauren a quick kiss.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and she tilts her head. “For
losing it earlier.”

“I understand,” she says. “I do.”

“Go do your thing with Carol,” I say. “I’ll
see you over at Kris and Al’s.”

Lauren gathers up her things to go. As she does so, I leave a message
for my son on the whiteboard in the kitchen:

Gone to Alan’s house Sun. Eve. CALL ME WHEN YOU GET HOME.

I underline the word HOME, and leave.

When Lauren returns to
Al and Kristin’s an hour later, she wears a bemused expression.

“Carol!” she says. “She asked me how far along I
was. It came out of nowhere!”

“My mother knew both times we were pregnant well before I told
her,” Kristin says from the kitchen. “It’s a
generational thing, I think.”

Lauren leans close to me. “You didn’t say anything, did
you?” I shake my head no and she adds, “You swear?”

Alan has been on the phone with Greyhound at the dining room table,
and he rises to his feet with an exasperated look on his face upon
finishing a call.

“Nothing,” he says. “I thought I was getting
somewhere when I called the depot in Chicago and said I needed to
know when Chris was getting in so I could come pick him up. They said
they had no record of him. I asked if maybe he was arriving at a
different terminal, and she checked the whole system, but nothing. At
least I got the impression she checked the system.”

“Could he have given them a fake name?” Kristin asks.

“I think even busses need identification now to get a ticket,”
Alan says. “He doesn’t have a fake ID, does he?”

It just doesn’t seem like something my son would do. “I
don’t think so,” I say. “I really don’t.”