I had worried most that he would never feel safe and, now, that I’d made him feel too safe. I had protected him so well he had no idea what it was to be afraid. I was the only one on notice, so I got to be the warden. I got to be the bad guy.
Which was life’s little joke on me.
But lately—the recoil when I tried to touch him, the appraising look he gave me when he thought I couldn’t see, as though we were strangers. That’s how it felt: the boy in this apartment wasn’t the boy I’d raised, the playful one, the artist, the one who could be tickled into hiccups, the boy he had been not that long ago.
This boy—the closed doors, the slammed doors, the constant video games, the wary looks—this boy was a ghost boy, a haunted boy, and my son had vanished. Joshua was missing, just as gone as the little boy Sheriff Keller was looking for. Why was no one looking for Joshua? Who was getting my boy back to me?
I closed the refrigerator and wandered out of the kitchen, gathering some magazines, a sweatshirt, a few other loose items of clutter, then, no plan for them, stacked them on the nearest flat surface. I sat heavily on the couch and gazed around. Here. A two-bedroom rental with too-thin white walls and no yard or balcony. The same not-much we’d grown accustomed to. But I’d lived in worse, in places other people would abandon, in places that stank of decay and neglect. Decay. Neglect. These were crisp, precise words on the page that stood in for a reality most people didn’t truly understand.
Tennessee, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Ohio. Small towns, big towns one after the other, false starts, lost deposits. Mice in the walls and backed-up sinks. Old wallpaper with black freckles of mold.
Then Chicago, where I’d let us get too comfortable. A handful of miles to the Wisconsin border, and I’d started to entertain ideas of settling down, maybe buying a condo. And then—
Small towns were better. Towns with forgettable names, apartments with two locks on the door. Indiana. You could clean the dirty ovens. You could put out traps. There were more important things than having your slice of the pie, of putting down some roots, but it didn’t stop me from wondering. Maybe this was the place. Except it wasn’t because there was only one place, and we couldn’t go back there.
I went to the kitchen and put some water on to boil, then grabbed the mail from the counter and went to the window in the living room to sort it in the fading light. Across the street, the houses lined up like a hand of solitaire. Down below, people walking their dogs stopped to chat.
I glanced up and down the block. From the second floor, you could see pretty far, a precaution. But I would never get used to the scrubbed look of this place. The whole town, harvested. How long had it been since I had been among the stillness of trees, encircled by a stand of pines like a bunch of protective brothers? The only trees nearby were scrawny, scrub or planted, with no better reason to be here than I had.
I added noodles to the boiling water and then took myself to the table and dropped into a chair. I was tired. Not just exhausted from a day of playing upright citizen for the sheriff, but forever tired, in my bones, in my skin. Tired of days, tired of nights. From the table I watched the window darken, the outside world folding away.
In a minute I would go to the window and close the blinds. Another precaution. But did it matter? Here, in Plain Sight, Indiana, who was I hiding from anymore? I was afraid of thinking it through too fully.
I got up and grabbed the straps of Joshua’s backpack to move it off the table but instead pulled it to me.
The guidance counselor had called yesterday, twice. So actually yesterday I’d been asked to do three things I didn’t want to do—but I supposed it wasn’t volunteering when it was your own kid in trouble.
Down the hall, Joshua’s door was still closed.
A tangle of papers caught in the backpack’s zipper. I fought it open, pulled out the papers, and checked the spines on the books at the bottom. Language arts, Our World and Its People, a ragged copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which he’d finished a book report for weeks ago. Maybe it was a test, to see if I’d take it out. The math text, of course. I’d offered to help. I’d even learned the new alien way they did math in order to help, but he preferred to do it himself, badly.
From the wad of papers, I picked out a math worksheet. Proof. He’d received a well-deserved D in red pen.
I tried not to spend much time on the pinched belly of that red letter. So what if the teacher had a tendency toward small-mindedness? That didn’t change the facts.
I flipped through a few more sheets, then dug deeper, flattening a few pages to take stock. More math, a report. They were just figures, or typed.
At last I found a short-answer workbook page at the bottom of the pack. It was incomplete—empty, actually, except for the large round zero in red at the top and a few meager pencil markings in a corner. His name, JOSH, all capital letters.
I stared at the name for a long moment, then stowed all the backpack’s contents as best I could and closed it up, leaving it on the table.
In the kitchen, I stirred the noodles and wished I’d never looked. But I had, and now I knew. His handwriting—once so playfully dismissive of the horizon, so youthful and alive—was gone. His name, even written by his own hand, was false. It was built of sticks, each letter strategically rendered and apart, lonely and stripped. I’d never seen anything so desolate, so perfectly engineered to give away nothing at all.
Joshua was hiding in plain sight, too. And I was pretty sure he was hiding from me.
Chapter Three
The call, when it came, was from Kent.
“What did you get me into?” I said before he’d had a chance to say hello.
“You’re up to the challenge,” he said. I could hear the smile. Sometimes I thought I might be in love with Kent, even though I hadn’t seen him in person in twelve years. What that said about me—well, it said everything about me that anyone could ever want to know. I’d been in love just the one time, a disaster. I’d had a few dates, if that was even the word. An awkward setup, once, and then the guy, the client, I’d met for a few weeks in a series of beige chain-name hotel rooms—but that was just sex. What I missed was the other person’s hip against mine on the couch. The thoughtless moments of life spent together. When I started thinking like this, I wished Kent weren’t twenty years older and completely in love with his wife.