So it was left to the Lins to locate the couple, after their daughter called them collect to tell them she was fine although maybe the teeniest bit homesick. She and Denny were holed up in a motel outside Elkton, Maryland, having run into a snag when they tried to apply for a marriage license. By that time they had been missing three days, so the Whitshanks were forced to admit that Dr. Lin must not be bonkers after all, although they still couldn’t quite believe that Denny would do such a thing.
The Lins drove to Elkton to retrieve them, returning directly to the Whitshank house to hold a two-family discussion. It was the first and only time that Red and Abby laid eyes on Amy. They found her bewilderingly unattractive—sallow and unhealthy-looking, and lacking any sign of spirit. Also, as Abby said later, it was a jolt to see how well the Lins seemed to know Denny. Amy’s father, a small man in a powder-blue jogging suit, spoke to him familiarly and even kindly, and her mother patted Denny’s hand in a consoling way after he finally allowed that an abortion might be wiser. “Denny must have been to their house any number of times,” Abby told Red, “while you and I didn’t realize Amy even existed.”
“Well, it’s different with daughters,” Red said. “You know how we generally get to meet Mandy and Jeannie’s young men, but I’m not sure the young men’s parents always meet Mandy and Jeannie.”
“No,” Abby said, “that’s not what I’m talking about. This is more like he didn’t just meet her family; he joined it.”
“Rubbish,” Red told her.
Abby didn’t seem reassured.
They did try to talk with Denny about the elopement once the Lins left, but all he would say was that he’d been looking forward to taking care of a baby. When they said he was too young to take care of a baby, he was silent. And when Stem asked, in his clumsy, puppyish way, “So are you and Amy, like, engaged now?” Denny said, “Huh? I don’t know.”
In fact, the Whitshanks never saw Amy again, and as far as they could tell, Denny didn’t, either. By the end of the next week he was safely installed in a boarding school for problem teenagers up in Pennsylvania, thanks to Dr. Hancock, who made all the arrangements. Denny completed his junior and senior years there, and since he claimed to have no interest in construction work, he spent both summers busing tables in Ocean City. The only times he came home anymore were for major events, like Grandma Dalton’s funeral or Jeannie’s wedding, and then he was gone again in a flash.
It wasn’t right, Abby said. They hadn’t had him long enough. Children were supposed to stick around till eighteen, at the very least. (The girls hadn’t moved away even for college.) “It’s like he’s been stolen from us,” she told Red. “He was taken before his time!”
“You talk like he’s died,” Red told her.
“I feel like he’s died,” she said.
And whenever he did come home, he was a stranger. He had a different smell, no longer the musty-closet smell but something almost chemical, like new carpeting. He wore a Greek sailor’s cap that Abby (a product of the sixties) associated with the young Bob Dylan. And he spoke to his parents politely, but distantly. Did he resent them for shipping him off? But they hadn’t had a choice! No, his grudge must have gone farther back. “It’s because I didn’t shield him properly,” Abby guessed.
“Shield him from what?” Red asked.
“Oh … never mind.”
“Not from me,” Red told her.
“If you say so.”
“I’m not taking the rap for this, Abby.”
“Fine.”
At such moments, they hated each other.
And then Denny was off to St. Eskil—a miracle, in view of his checkered past and his C-minus average. Though you couldn’t say college changed things. He was still the Whitshanks’ mystery child.
Not even that famous phone call changed things, because they never did talk it out with him. They never sat him down and said, “Tell us: gay, or not gay? Just explain yourself, is all we ask.” Other events followed too fast. He didn’t stay long enough in one place. After Christmas he used his return ticket to go back to Minnesota, probably on account of the girlfriend, and worked for a month or two at some kind of plumbers’ supply, or so they gathered when he sent Jeannie a visored cap for her birthday reading THOMPSON PIPES & FITTINGS. But the next they heard, he was in Maine. He got a job rebuilding a boat; he got fired; he said he was going back to school but apparently nothing came of that.
He had this way of talking on the phone that was so intense and animated, his parents could start to believe that he felt some urgent need for connection. For weeks at a time he might call every Sunday until they grew to expect it, almost depend on it, but then he’d fall silent for months and they had no means of reaching him. It seemed perverse that someone so mobile did not own a mobile phone. By now Abby had signed them up for caller ID, but what use was that? Denny was OUT OF AREA. He was UNKNOWN CALLER. There should have been a special display for him: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN.