The Good Boy (17 page)

“Here,” Molly says, handing him the notebook. “Keep this. If you think of anything else tonight, write it down. You never know what could help.”

“I will.”

“It’s
your
story, okay? Be brave and tell it.” She gets up and drapes the gown back over the dressing chair, straightening the beaded bodice and arranging the long skirt’s gentle pleats. She is businesslike about it, but she’s also distracted.

“Are you okay?” he asks. He gets up.

“Where will you go?” she asks, instead of answering. “Tomorrow?”

“I don’t know.” But Joel does know. It’s the only way to save Butchie.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Molly says. She turns her dad’s watch around to look at the face. She says, “It’s eleven thirty. I’m going upstairs. Does that silly watch of yours still tell time?”

Joel checks. It reads 23:33. “It works fine.”

“Good. On Saturday mornings, my grandma gets up for Mass. You’ll hear her—the bath running, and her teapot. A lot of times, she sings.”

Butchie sits up and watches as she climbs onto the back of the couch and reaches up to unlock the window latches.

“She’ll be gone by seven fifteen, and she never ever comes down here, but just in case, this is your escape route, up and out the well.” She pushes open the window a crack and jumps off the couch. “Once she’s gone, you can come upstairs. I’ll make cereal, and Butchie can have some of my grandma’s summer sausage. We can turn on the TV and see if you two are on the news. Then we’ll figure out a plan. Like, which direction you should run.”

Joel didn’t have to tell her; she already guessed.

“Seven fifteen,” he says, “I’ll be ready.”

“Here.” She finds a wool blanket in one of the garbage bags. “Try not to get dog hair all over it.”

“Yeah, right,” Joel says, and hands it back to her.

“If you’re cold,” she says, and puts the blanket aside.

She takes Butchie’s face in her hands, kisses the top of his head, and whispers something in his ear; then she faces Joel and salutes. “Sleep tight.”

Joel returns the salute and Molly crosses the room. She turns out the lights, leaving the brass-footed lamp to cast long shadows. Instead of pit-patting up the stairs, though, she lingers, and Joel wonders if she’s looking at her mom’s stuff, thinking about her.

“Molly, are you okay?”

“Lisa told Jenny Trask that my grandma’s crazy. Jenny told everybody at school today.”

“Your grandma isn’t crazy.”

“Yes she is. But a friend doesn’t tell your secrets. Crazy or not.”

“So you won’t tell mine.”

“Crazy or not. Good night, Joel.”

When the door clicks shut at the top of the steps, Joel tries to get comfortable on the couch, but then Butchie sits back on his haunches and begins to pant, watching Joel steadily.

“What is it, boy?”

The dog gets on his feet and sits back down again like he’s the one who asked first.

Joel looks at Molly’s mom’s boa over the mirror, catches his reflection. “I don’t know, puppy,” he says. “I think she ran away, too.”

Butchie’s wet nose twitches, his eyes like glass.

“Maybe that’s what Molly told you about just now,” Joel says, sitting down with him on the carpet. He can smell her perfume on him, same as what he smelled on the old gray sweater. “Does Molly tell secrets?”

Butchie isn’t talking.

Joel lifts the dog’s front feet to get him to lie down, head on his lap. Then Joel leans back, his head on the couch, and tries to close his eyes; he should rest a little bit.

But he can’t shake the feeling that resting is the exact same thing as waiting to get caught.

He gets up. “Come on, Butchie. We’ve got to go.”

Butchie looks up, tilts his head.

Joel gets his pack. “Those boys know we’re on the run, but what they don’t know is we’ve got a
place
to run. A place to tell what happened.”

Butchie yawns, unimpressed.

“The judge, Butch!” He leans over and thumbs sleep from the inside corners of the dog’s eyes. “That Redbone boy shot someone and he shot at us, too.
He’s
the one in trouble.
You
were protecting me. We don’t have to run away—we just have to get to the courthouse. I know Judge Crawford will take our case.”

Butchie looks up, grumbles,
“Hurmm.”

Joel puts the notebook in his bag. Then he climbs up onto the back of the couch, pushes the window all the way open, throws his pack up onto the lawn, and says, “Butch:
Hier
!”

11

“Joel!” Sarah is wide awake now and a good half block ahead of Pete as they canvass the neighborhood.

“Butch,” Pete calls, though he knows both the dog and the boy would obey if they were anywhere in earshot. He wishes they’d appear—from a stranger’s yard or up the street or down the alley or, fuck, out of the blue. From anywhere.

“Joel!” Sarah calls again, her voice scratched-through.

Without discussion, they left McKenna, and Pete followed Sarah out of the house on a crisscrossed, double-backed search for Joel with stops at every known hideout and every possible hangout. Though Sarah isn’t aware of the tendency for people to err right—that is, to subconsciously choose the right side or right turn whether wandering, fleeing, or discarding evidence—Pete is programmed for it, so in the past hour they’ve covered four square blocks. Still, no sign of boy or dog.

And though Pete might have been able to find a complete stranger, he was ashamed he didn’t know the first place to look for his son.

Sarah turns around, a shiver, her face flushed. “They’re not here. They’re not anywhere around here.”

Pete takes off his coat so she can wear it. “Let’s go home and regroup.”

She shrugs off the coat. “I want to go through the neighborhood again.”

“You just said they aren’t here. Covering the same ground isn’t logical.”

“Our son is not logical. We have to keep looking.”

Pete supposes there is no strategy here; someone who’s run off either winds up lost or doesn’t want to be found, and there’s no right way to search for either.

“We can work toward home and go out again,” Pete says. “That way we can stop in and get you a coat.”

“If we go home, I’m going to call the police.” She has announced this, a threat, once every block.

“Sarah, I told you, I would’ve called in if I thought they’d help. I’m sorry, but as far as the police are concerned, Joel’s just another kid who hasn’t come home yet.”

“He was
already
home. He ran away. Why won’t you call? Can’t you pull some strings? Can’t they put out an APB?”

“They won’t issue a bulletin unless they believe he was stolen.”

“Oh my god—” She covers her mouth.

“There’s no way Joel was stolen. Not with Butch there.”

“What about a missing persons report? Won’t they have to search for him then?”

“Yes, but we have to
file
a missing persons report. That means at least one of us has to go to the station and fill out the paperwork. After that, they’ll assign a detective, and in a day or two, the detective will start here—right here, where we are. It’s senseless. It takes too much time.”

“I don’t see why you can’t call in a favor. After everything.”

“I told you. If we don’t find them soon, I’ll make some calls.”

She starts down the street, furious. “You’re embarrassed,” she says over her shoulder.

“Me? This is about me now?”

“Of course! Because your son is missing and your dog got away, and if anybody finds out, you’ll definitely be right back on the front page.” She rounds the corner, a left turn. “I don’t care. I’m calling 911.”

“Sarah,” he says as he tries to take her by the elbow, slow her down.

She shakes him off. “Save it for the press.”

If that was meant to hurt him, it worked. So: “I’m not taking the blame this time. I wasn’t
here.
”

“Fuck you, Pete.”

“What are you going to tell them when you call? That tonight while you were jabbering on the phone, plowing through a bottle of wine, your son just happened to disappear? You might’ve noticed, of course, but you were
exhausted
.”

“You’re cruel.”

“No, actually, you were right before: I am embarrassed. Because of you.”

He wants to tell her about McKenna, too; make her feel like shit. Like he feels. But then she stops walking and doubles over and begins to sob. “Joel—”

Pete takes her in his arms, finally; a cathartic release. Her arms are crossed between them, her heart’s only shield now that her anxiety has materialized—turned what if to what is, her worries to worse.

She does feel like shit. And he is cruel.

He stands, holding her, and he wants to say
It’ll be okay
or
We’ll get through this
or hell,
I’m sorry,
but it all seems so selfish. Maybe he
is
worried this will wind up in the news. This, with everything else.

“He had another headache,” Sarah says, when she can manage. “I put him to bed. I put Butch in his cage. I was in the front room the rest of the night. I was reading. I don’t know how he got past me.”

“He didn’t have to get past you,” Pete says, hoping to make up for himself. “If he took Butch with him, he slipped out the back door.”

“But where would he go?” she asks. “Why would he leave?”

“I don’t know.” Pete thinks back to the talk he and Joel had earlier; the way he took things so literally. He was worried about kids doing wrong. And he was worried about someone in particular—someone he wouldn’t say. “If we figure out why he left, maybe we’ll know where he went. Let’s go home and put our heads together.”

Sarah doesn’t say anything, but she does look at him, eyes wide and wet.

“Come on,” he says. “McKenna’s probably climbing the walls.”

She lets him lead the way.

*   *   *

“McKenna!” Sarah calls as she blazes through the back door.

McKenna isn’t waiting for them, and she doesn’t come downstairs, but suddenly she’s not the problem; she’s the predictable one.

“I’ll get her,” Pete says. “How about you make some coffee?” He doesn’t need coffee, but Sarah needs something to do, even if it’s mindless.

“Coffee,” she says; Pete waits the moment it takes her to register the word. When she dumps the grounds from this morning’s pot and runs water at the sink, Pete climbs the stairs and knocks his way into McKenna’s room.

She’s at her computer, dressed in too-big pajama bottoms covered with half-smiling monkey faces and a tiny white tank barely covering anything. Her eyes are still blacked.

“McKenna, what are you doing?”

“What should I be doing?” The slightest bit of apprehension in her voice keeps her from sounding bratty. But still.

“Put on a shirt.”

“What for?”

“Because you’re not a little girl, and I need you to be a grown-up. Your brother is missing.”

“My friend Aaron Northcutt, who got shot?”

“Has what to do with Joel?”

“Nothing. But I just found out, they had to put him in intensive care.”

“Then he’ll be cared for intensively. Get dressed and come downstairs.”

She bites her lip, and here come the tears. “You said to stay here.”

Pete doesn’t know exactly what he said before they left; he might’ve said
here
and she might’ve thought right there, at her desk. Or else she knew exactly what he meant and she’s using what he said to make a bullshit argument so she can stay and tweet at her friends or whatever.

“Now I’m telling you to come downstairs.”

“You’re awful.”

“I’m waiting.”

Tears spill when she rolls her eyes, the teenage signal for
okay,
and she gets up, arms crossed over what he shouldn’t see through her see-through tank. Why the hell does anybody sell a kid something like that? She’s at a vulnerable age, and she’s already got too many curves as it is.

He turns around so he doesn’t have to watch her wardrobe change. He would leave, meet her downstairs, but he’d rather she come with him, a buffer. Besides, leaving McKenna on her own time puts her ETA at whenever.

While he waits, he gets a load of the poster tacked to the wall where some half-pint pop star with a crappy haircut and a pouty mouth points right at him, his fake-handwritten caption declaring, You’re My One Love!! The kid is effeminate—pretty, even—and maybe thirteen, tops, which means he’s working with either a choirboy’s pitch or a lip-syncing track. There’s just no accounting for mass-produced taste. Or, apparently, his daughter’s.

“I don’t know what you want me to do,” McKenna says. “I have no idea where Joely is. He has no friends, and he’s never had a plan. He’s a space cadet. Maybe he got caught up in one of his made-up games and chased an invisible criminal too far. Maybe he took Butch to the park and Butch chased a squirrel too far. They’ll be back. Joel has nowhere else to go.”

“I didn’t ask your opinion,” Pete says. He turns around. “How about telling me something you know? Something you
noticed.
Something you remember.”

“Like what?” she asks. Her T-shirt says
TRY ME
.

“Did you talk to your brother today?”

“I guess. I mean, he came in here to bug me when I was getting ready.”

“Did he say anything to you about wanting to leave?”

“He said he was grounded. I thought that meant he wasn’t going anywhere.”

“Did he say anything that seemed extreme, or out of character?”

“He said he peed in some kid’s locker—that’s pretty extreme. And awesome.”

“Come on. You think that’s awesome?”

“I think it’s about time he stood up for himself.”

“Did you notice—did he seem upset?”

“I don’t know, Dad. I wasn’t really paying attention.”

“Maybe that’s part of the problem.”

“Seriously?” She pulls on a pair of socks meant to look mismatched. “I talk to him more than you or mom do, and I’m the one who’s supposed to ignore him.”

“That’s good, McKenna. That’s real helpful.”

“What do you want me to say? I mean, he doesn’t really talk. He just invites himself in here and acts like I’m the encyclopedia for dummies, wanting to know weird stuff nobody else cares about. Or else he’s being a snoop. Wanting to know what I care about.”