The road narrows. The building that was once the town’s high school is now a funeral parlor, classrooms turned into viewing rooms. Next door is the Catholic church. Just past the church lies a set of railroad tracks. The railroad stopped coming through town decades before we moved in; by the time I graduate from college, I will have watched the old station turn from a magazine stand into a hair salon, then into a café that serves ten-dollar organic sandwiches and four-dollar coffees. But as a child I know only to hold my breath as the tracks snag the car tires. Then I touch my finger to the hard glass of the window, lest ghosts find a chink in my connection to the physical world, a way to come in.
The tracks release the car, and from there the town changes. A small downtown appears. A lone apartment building, full of single units, out of place in a town so clearly meant for families. One magnolia tree stands on its lawn, the tree’s pale, floppy blossoms beautiful and strange against the oaks and elms of the Northeast. Then lot sizes shrink, only a driveway between houses. A second hill appears, less than half the size of the first. At its top sits our grand Victorian. Past our house the road dips into another town, one with crime ours lacks and school statistics we whisper to each other like warnings.
Three
Louisiana, 1992
The phone line’s busy at her brother’s house, doesn’t stop with the beep beep beep. Lorilei’s tired. She doesn’t want to walk all the way to her brother’s. Richard has put a white fence around his yard, as though to separate himself from all the homes that don’t have the things he does. Homes like the one Lorilei rents, where she can’t even keep the electricity on. The fence, it just gets to her. The gate’s on the far side of the house, and to reach their door she has to walk all the way around it, all the way around the pretty yard and the shiny white posts and the toys and bikes his kids have got. But there’s nothing else to do, Jeremy’s missing, so she thanks the man in the white house for letting her use the phone, zips up her hooded sweatshirt, and walks. By Richard’s there’s a sidewalk, but here the road ripples up against weeds, a slash in the dirt for a gutter. Lorilei—twenty-nine years old, heavyset even without the pregnancy having begun to show—thrusts her hands into the pockets of her jeans for warmth and bends her head low. Thin sneakers that stick in the February mud, no good for walking. This was supposed to be a quiet night at home, just Melissa and the baby.
The sun spills orange and red streaks across the horizon. It’s just before 6:00 p.m. and the street is eerily quiet. House after house she passes has the blinds down, slats pressed together like tight white lips. Behind them, families are sitting down together to dinner. In one yard, a plastic tricycle lies upended, its pedals in the air ready to spin away to nowhere. She taught Jeremy to ride a trike when he was three and the town paper published a photo of the two of them, her hovering over Jeremy, her hands on the hard little moons of his shoulders, both of them grinning into the camera lens. Lorilei Guillory and her son, Jeremy Guillory. Everyone in town knew that last name was hers. That there wasn’t a man.
She remembers, suddenly, herself and Richard when they were kids, pedaling into the bend of the road, the hours stretching before them like the bend of the sun.
The hill he lives on is to the west, and in the distance she sees his ranch house. A tire swing for his boy and girl to play on, strung from an oak tree. Richard’s toolshed. And a car in the driveway—red, which belongs to Mary, Richard’s wife. When she and Mary spoke this morning, Mary said she was going to go grocery shopping this evening and that when Jeremy saw her car pull in he should walk on over and she’d take him. Jeremy had gotten so excited when he heard Lorilei on the phone with her that Lorilei couldn’t say no. Hard for her, that Mary’s the one with the car and the money, the one who gets to take him shopping. Still, she hopes that means he’s there now.
But when Mary answers the door, her lipstick on fresh, Lorilei knows from Mary’s blank face that he isn’t. She asks anyway.
“Haven’t seen him,” Mary says. “And I was just getting ready to head out.”
That’s when Lorilei knows he must be lost.
Ten minutes later she’s borrowed Mary’s car and driven it to the edge of the woods, the headlights pointed in. It’s close to dark now. Jeremy knows to come home before then. When she pulls up, the glint from the car’s beams lights the rusted frame of a four-wheeler. Sometimes Jeremy and the Lawson boy, Joey, will sit out here on the frame and fire their BB guns off into the woods for hours. But it’s empty now, the woods nothing but quiet. She gets out of the car and leans on the four-wheeler frame. “Jeremy!” she calls. “Jeremy, it’s your mama! Can you hear me? Jeremy!”
There’s only silence. Not even a bird.
“Jeremy!”
She hears a car pull in behind her. “You all right, Lori?” Terry Lawson, Joey’s father, is driving, two of the neighbors with him.
“Jeremy’s missing,” Lorilei hears herself say. Her voice sounds ragged.
The men grab flashlights from the trunk and head into the woods.
This is where, later, her memory cuts out.
*
But the tape from the fire department shows that the first call comes in at 6:44 p.m. The caller identifies herself as Lorilei Guillory, the mother of the boy she’s reporting missing. The dispatcher takes down her information and promises to send a cruiser out to Iowa. “Io-way,” Lorilei says into the phone. “Please. Y’all know where that is?”
“Yes, ma’am. Io-way,” the dispatcher replies.
The second call comes in at 6:57 p.m. The caller is a young man, and he says no one’s turned up and when are the police coming? The boy’s mother just called from his house, but he knows this area’s confusing for folks not from around here. “You got two roads out here running right next to each other,” he says. “And this one they call Watson Road but it doesn’t really got a name. That’s the one you want. The house is the white two-story.” They’ll know it, he says, by the washer in the front yard and the staircase in the back that leads out to the woods. “I’ll give y’all the number here,” he says, “in case you get yourselves lost.”
“I need your name, sir,” says the dispatcher.
“Ricky Langley,” the caller replies.
*
That night, Lorilei sits on the front stoop of the white house, and at least one story told of the search for her son includes what happens next. The street is totally dark—no streetlights out this way—but slowly lightens as more and more cruisers arrive. In the distance she can hear the searchers call to one another, a truck engine idle. She knows they’re close by but still the sound feels very far away, muffled.