Disappearance at Devil's Rock Read online

  “You can’t talk like this. I know what you’re going through is—is impossible but—”

  “You weren’t there in my room the other night to see what I saw. You weren’t there. I was.”

  “But you can’t be like this, Elizabeth. You can’t. It’s not right and it’s not true—”

  “It was him, Mom. And last night Tommy came back and left those notes for us to find, to send us a message or something.”

  Janice is crying again and says, “Stop it, Elizabeth. We don’t know. Nobody knows what happened to Tommy.”

  Elizabeth: “I hate myself for having to say it and I hate myself for believing it, but Tommy’s gone. He’s—”

  “Stop it! You can’t say that. We don’t know that. And your son is not a goddamn ghost.”

  Elizabeth says, “I saw what I saw and I felt what I felt, and I’ve never been so sure—”

  Janice shouts, “You didn’t see or feel anything!”

  No one else speaks. No one gets up to go to the other. They stay at their three points on a triangle. The kitchen is all quiet tears and quick breathing.

  Kate drops her hands away from her face long enough to pull her gray sleeves up and over her hands, and then she hides her face behind her hidden hands. Elizabeth uncoils and walks over to Kate and pulls her into a hug. Kate allows herself to be hugged but doesn’t lean into it like she usually does. She holds her ground.

  Elizabeth believes what she believes but doesn’t know what to say or what to do anymore, if she ever did. She’s empty of hope and couldn’t be more disappointed in herself that it simply isn’t there inside her and seemingly can’t be willed back. She’s lost and broken and tired, and so terrified of the future: terrified of the yawning void of a life without Tommy, but also terrified of the microfuture, of the horrors of the truth about what happened to Tommy surely there waiting for them tomorrow, or in the next hour, or the next minute.

  Elizabeth lets go of Kate, who loosens into a shaky orbital path toward the refrigerator. Elizabeth says, “What did you say was in that bag, again, Kate?”

  Elizabeth, Out of the Corners of Her Eyes, and More Notes

  Elizabeth calls the detective at 8 A.M. and tells her that she found pages from Tommy’s diary. She doesn’t specify how or where she found them and doesn’t know what to say if Allison presses her on those details. She reads some of the passages over the phone, fills in the last names of students Tommy mentioned, and she e-mails her pictures of the pages. Allison doesn’t ask where they were found and only asks if there are more. Elizabeth tells her she isn’t sure, but Tommy kept a lot of notebooks, mostly for his sketches, so she will keep looking.

  Allison details the itinerary for the day, including an expanded search of areas that stretch into Sharon and West Brockton. She again tells Elizabeth that multiple residents have reported seeing a person or persons at the edges of their properties sneaking into the state park late at night. The police have increased night surveillance, and thus far they’ve only come across that group of high schoolers at Split Rock. Otherwise, there are no new leads or information, or there’s nothing new that Allison is willing to share. Perhaps it isn’t fair to be mad at Allison for doing something that she hasn’t necessarily done yet (keep information from her), but when Elizabeth hangs up she wishes irrationally that she kept Tommy’s pages to herself and is nervous that she’s breaking an unspoken promise to keep their secrets.

  Elizabeth, Kate, and Janice spend the rest of the morning and afternoon dealing with more visits to the house. One of the visitors is Tommy’s and Kate’s second-grade teacher, Ms. Lothrop. Even though school hasn’t started yet, she managed to collect a box full of letters of hope (that’s what she calls them) from her incoming second graders.

  Phone calls and texts and tweets of support continue, many of which are flooding in from people they don’t know. Elizabeth and Kate get separate invitations to join the Find Tommy Sanderson Facebook page. His picture and a plea for anyone with information to come forward are liked and passed around cyberspace, his face to be forgotten by most, like yesterday’s cat meme. A local church is holding a vigil tonight to pray for Tommy’s safe return, and Elizabeth politely declines their invitation to attend. She spends over an hour on the phone with her dad, who insists that he’s flying up there at the end of the week if Tommy isn’t found. She tells him that’s so nice and he doesn’t have to, but if he does, she could set him up at a local bed-and-breakfast. Dad says that he doesn’t care and that he can sleep on the couch or in the basement or in his car and he promises that he won’t get in anyone’s hair (which is one of his favorite sayings, and a nod to the still-strained relationship between him and Janice) and he wants to be there to help and support.

  During the lulls between visitors, Elizabeth, Janice, and Kate stay in their own separate corners of the house. What rooms they individually occupy changes throughout the afternoon, but no matter the room-swap permutations, the result is the three of them remain isolated from one another.

  The afternoon fades into early evening, and with Kate in her room and Janice watching TV in the living room, Elizabeth announces from the kitchen, “We should probably think about dinner.” She stands indecisively in front of the open fridge and freezer, each overstocked with premade meals from friends and neighbors. She can’t bear the thought of eating one of those meals tonight, not tonight, and almost cries tears of relief when Janice appears over her shoulder to suggest that she go out and pick up some Chinese food. Janice brings back two large brown bags full of fried rice and appetizers and a big plastic container of hot and sour soup, and the three of them sit together and eat at the kitchen table. They don’t talk. Their silence isn’t the awkward eggshell of a group afraid to say the wrong thing. Their silence is commiserative, as though they are factory workers having earned each other’s company after completing their most recent, endless shift. The small hot mustard packs and fortune cookies go untouched, and Elizabeth throws them away.

  They wordlessly relocate to the living room couch and watch a minimarathon of home improvement shows. Kate falls asleep on the couch, leaning up against her grandmother. Janice eventually wakes her and says, “I wish I could still carry you to bed, honey, but I can’t.” She leads a groggy Kate to the bathroom with one arm hooked through hers. Elizabeth is a few steps behind, making sure they get to where they’re supposed to go, and in a way, eager to start the rest of her night. Janice waits in the hallway for Kate to pee and brush her teeth. She tells Elizabeth to try to get some real sleep, as though she knows what Elizabeth has planned. The bathroom door opens before Elizabeth says an unconvincing “I will,” and Janice follows Kate into her bedroom.

  Elizabeth plans to spend the overnight awake, in her room, and with the door open. A one-woman vigil, she will watch and listen to the sleeping house, dream its dreams, while simultaneously hoping for and dreading a reoccurrence of the experience she had the other night. She lifts the comforter from her bed and pushes the plush green chair deeper into the corner. She sits and pulls her feet up off the floor, wedging them against the cushion and armrest. But instead of being more in tune, more open, more ready for such a reoccurrence, as she planned, her mind sprints in the opposite direction.

  Her memory of seeing and sensing Tommy’s presence only two nights ago is already receding, becoming hazy and incomplete, as is the clarity, the surety, of what she thought she saw. Despite everything she said earlier to Janice, she’s newly hesitant to call what she saw a ghost, superstitious that doing so would somehow guarantee she’d never see or hear from Tommy again. Now that the buzz of finding the notes and the rest of the day is over and she’s here and alone in her own head, so alone that she may as well be the last person on earth, she worries at the details of Tommy’s sighting. And she keeps coming back to what exactly did she smell. She hasn’t been in Tommy’s room since the night he went missing, which means she hasn’t collected his dirty laundry piled in his closet, and if she were to go into his room no
w and grab a T-shirt and hold it to her face, would it be his smell? What if that was gone, too? What if the details she still does remember (his crouch between the chair and end table, knees clutched to his chest, the tilt of his head, the quick image of a swollen face, of dots for eyes) are enhancements, embellishments to whatever it was she experienced? What is it exactly she believes happened that night? What does she believe happened to Tommy? Can someone forget how to believe?

  Yes, she’s sitting in the chair and waiting to find Tommy here again, but she also has an ear cocked toward the hallway, listening for the creak of the front door, or the back door, or Kate’s door, or for something else entirely, and then a rustle of falling pages. The pages. She read them so many times she has memorized what Tommy said about how he felt like he was disappearing already. Is it some terrible coincidence? (Is there any other kind of coincidence?) Did he really run away like his dad? Because of his dad? Did she really believe a ghost-Tommy left those pages out on the floor?

  And now Elizabeth thinks about waking up her mother and apologizing. Maybe tell her that she’s right, tell her that she doesn’t know what she saw or what’s happening and she didn’t mean to give up on Tommy still being alive. Tell her she hates herself for doing nothing, for not having left the house since the first day at Borderland and coordinating the search parties. Tomorrow morning, if he hasn’t been found by tomorrow morning, she’ll do something. Tomorrow might be her last chance. She’ll leave the house and go door to door. She’ll help search other neighborhoods, other towns. She has to do something, right? Fuck tomorrow. Why not start now? Elizabeth visualizes herself firing up the computer and scouring the Internet for clues and creating an overnight social media frenzy that can’t be ignored. Or why not get up and leave the house right now and walk into the woods, paint every single tree and rock with that flashlight, and call his name and call his name and call his name. Then she imagines finally finding him at Split Rock, he’s huddled deep inside in the crack between the boulders, and she has to go inside because the flashlight doesn’t go that far, and she shimmies into the split, which seems to go on forever, into the core of a lost world, and there at the end, his shadowy shape, the shadow within the shadow, and he looks exactly as he looked when she saw him pinned between this chair and the end table, and he doesn’t say anything to her and what she wouldn’t sacrifice to hear him say something to her again, even if it is goodbye, and she goes cold and she smells the wet, damp earth, and when she finally remembers her flashlight and focuses the beam on him, Tommy’s gone, he’s gone and there’s nothing there but the skinny trunk and twisted and gnarled gray roots of a dead tree, the leg and talons of a great bird as it calves the rock in two.

  It’s a little after 3 A.M. and Elizabeth twitches awake, legs falling off the chair and dragging the comforter down to the floor. She’s freezing and the room feels different now, not quite dangerous, but that doesn’t mean she can’t get hurt. Elizabeth looks straight ahead at her bed and wall and closet. She focuses on the darkness in the periphery, the outer edges of her vision, the corners of her eyes, and Tommy is there, standing next to the bathroom, and he’s there again near the shaded window on the other side of her bed, and he’s there, too, in front of the dresser, but whenever she snaps her head around to look directly at him, she sees nothing. She says his name and hears nothing. Tonight isn’t about more dark, it’s about more nothing.

  She wipes her eyes and cannot see Tommy anymore. She climbs out of her chair. The muscles in her lower back groan and her knees are cranky at having been folded and scrunched up for so long. She stumbles into the hallway, stops, and stares down its length toward the front of the house. She opens Kate’s door. Janice and Kate are both in the double bed, under the covers, sleeping on their sides and back-to-back. The covers are pulled up so high Elizabeth can’t tell who is who. She watches them sleep, and even in here, she keeps thinking she sees Tommy out of the corner of her eyes (over there, but don’t look over there, next to Kate’s shelves, he’s standing there, right there!), and maybe that’s a comfort, because if she doesn’t ever look perfectly straight ahead again, he’ll always be there, in the periphery.

  Elizabeth leaves the bedroom and walks down the hallway and to the living room, afraid of what she might find and afraid of what she might not find. There are two pieces of paper on the floor, grouped in the same area of the rug. The living room feels like her bedroom felt when she saw Tommy the other night. Already Elizabeth builds an argument against the idea of Kate getting out of bed, pulling these pages from a secret hiding place, sneaking out to the living room, and then back to her bed without her or Janice hearing any of it; arguing the possible is impossible and the impossible is what is true.

  She picks up the pages, the torn edges make crinkling sounds at her touch, and she nearly sprints down the hallway. She is going to spend the rest of the night back in the chair and with the pages, but first she detours into Tommy’s room. She throws open his closet, as though she’d lose her nerve if she didn’t do this quickly, recklessly, and she plucks a T-shirt from the top of his laundry pile.

  Back in her plush chair she turns on the reading lamp on the end table. Tommy’s T-shirt is draped over her left shoulder, and she periodically holds the shirt’s collar over her nose and mouth as she breathes in, once, twice. Whether it was the same as what she smelled the other night doesn’t matter. Trapped in the fabric, Tommy’s smell is there and it’s real. She fears she’s absorbing it with each inhalation, and it’ll have to be rationed out through the rest of the night.

  Elizabeth hunches over the two pages; Ebenezer Scrooge pouring through his ledgers, the Scrooge from before the ghosts. She reads and rereads the diary entry, retracing every loop and crossed T, searching for hidden meanings beyond the obvious: there are more notes.

  Luis Goes to the Sandersons, Kate and All the Apologies, Luis Asks Questions

  Luis doesn’t want to do this. Sure it sounds weak, cowardly, particularly given what happened to his friend, but he’s not sure he’ll make it through. The odds of his throwing up in the backseat during the short ride over to the Sandersons are much greater than, say, an asteroid cratering into their car. He’d rather the asteroid.

  It was only a half an hour ago that Mom shook him awake, yanked the bed covers off of him like an angry magician, and told him to take the world’s fastest shower. Luis bolted upright, in a total panic thinking about the police, more police, and more and more interviews, and maybe this time they wanted to bring him into the station. Would Mom make him shower before they threw him into a cell? Or was she waking him because his parents gave in to a media request? When Luis asked, “Why?” Mom said they were visiting the Sandersons and yes they were doing it right now because Elizabeth was going to be out for most of the day. Luis’s parents were in such a rush they didn’t even get on him, like they usually did, when he turned down offers of cereal, Pop Tarts, and blueberry muffins, saying he didn’t want any breakfast and he wasn’t hungry.

  Luis’s short black hair is still damp from the rushed shower. Even though it’s already humid and the temperature is pushing into the eighties, Luis wears a blue, logo-less hoodie sweatshirt at least one size too big. Most of his clothes (including his baggy camo shorts) fit like hand-me-downs from ogre-sized older brothers. Luis has no older brothers, but two older sisters who tower over him literally and figuratively. He does love them and he enjoys their company when they’re around, which isn’t often anymore. His sisters already left for school two weeks ago; they both attend colleges in the southwest. They called last night to ask him how he was doing and to say they were sorry his friend (they didn’t say Tommy’s name) was missing and hoped and prayed that he’d be found soon. His older sisters are smart, cool, and fun in their own way, but they have always seemed like adults to Luis; like younger, newer versions of his parents with motivations and decision-making processes alien and unknowable.

  Luis has had no time to prepare for the impending visit to the Sander
sons, and that’s probably for the better. Luis would’ve been more of a basket case than he is already. Of course, now that they’re minutes away, Luis is actually hungry. His stomach stings in little starbursts of pain that radiate throughout his midsection and up into his esophagus. He considers asking Mom if she has something to eat with her. When Luis was younger, she used to keep small sandwich bags of dried plantains and other fruits in her bag and offer them to him as surreptitiously as a drug dealer. More annoying than the OCD frequency with which she asked if he wanted a snack was her exaggerated look of pouty defeat when he invariably said no.

  Luis’s fingers twitch for his phone, and he wishes he could escape to its digital hideouts and numb himself with Minecraft or Madden football. On the way out the door his dad made him put his phone in his mother’s purse. That they still treated him like a small child was an argument for another time, when or if this nightmare with Tommy ever ended. Tommy. Even thinking about where Tommy was and what might’ve happened to him stirs that hive of angry wasps in his stomach.

  Tommy’s house appears as they round the final corner, and it looks exactly the same, looking like it always has, which is a surprise to Luis. How in the world could it be the same place without Tommy around to be in it?

  Josh and his parents beat them to the house. Their black, freshly washed SUV is parked next to the mailbox, and they are already standing on the front stoop and standing so that they face the closed front door.

  Dad says, “They said they were going to wait for us.” He sounds pissed. The Fernandezes and Griffins have done many of their official statements and interviews as a group. They’ve also been eating lunch and dinner together, spending the recent long summer afternoons and shrinking nights at each other’s houses; the parents watching the boys while drinking all the wine, the boys quietly watching the same movies they’ve watched countless times before. They have become a reluctant team, a team Luis didn’t think anyone rooted for.