Boy Still Missing (34 page)

Where was Jeanny?

I turned my head and could see her in the corner of the room, an officer pulling Sophie from her arms. She was screaming, “Save him! Save the baby!”

More blackness. I was laid out in that dark forest again. Safely sealed inside a box of gleaming glass. I could sleep forever. It would be so easy. Waking just once a year in the heat of summer, like a weed sprouted from the earth, growing wild for a few short days before shriveling and dying again. A ghost who boarded a bus to visit this motel, to haunt my
father who owned the place. We would be together but not really together at all. He would be a ghost of his former self, too—only living, breathing. And I would be the same as those cardinals chained to the church because of their religion. The things they believed in, acted on, when they were alive.

Then I saw another future.

Someone somewhere was asking Jeanny and me how we met. City lights twinkled behind us out a wide window. Ice clinked in glasses. Smart laughter rose and fell in the next room.
On the bus in high school,
we said at the same time. It was true. But it was also our own inside joke, and we made knowing eyes at each other, because that answer conjured up images of a football player and a cheerleader, or maybe the class clown and the class flirt. High school sweethearts with a simple past. Not us. And then I saw a baby, too, only she wasn’t Sophie. I pressed my nose to her skin and smelled powder. Sugary and sweet, just like her. We didn’t have to give her back, because she was ours. We created her. We were meant to be.

It’s your choice,
I heard my mother say from someplace else. Someplace dark and distant. Farther away than even that fairy-tale forest.
Which do you want?

Plan B,
I told her.

Door number two,
I told her.

I’ll stay,
I told her.

But she wasn’t listening.

I heard a scream calling me back to the motel. A siren outside. The first ambulance taking Sophie away to save her. She would be okay. I knew. And my body was being lifted. I tried to open my eyes but couldn’t. It was as if I no longer had eyes. Just an expanse of skin where they were supposed to be, like something born deformed, wrong. Just this darkness to look into. Pictures in my mind. I could feel those butcher men raising me up and carrying me out on a stretcher. My body rocked from side to side as they stepped down the stairs. When we reached the parking lot, I could sense the crowd watching me.

My father.

I knew what he was thinking. He was making a single, resolute promise to himself over and over in his mind. A bargain with God. A deal with the devil. One he intended to keep either way this time.

If he pulls out of this alive, I will change.

No more drinking. No more disappearing.

Please let him pull out of this alive.

Those men carried me across the lot, and I heard an engine start. A voice said, “IV.” Then another said, “Blood loss.” My eyes still would not open, and I thought, It’s too late. Give up.

Only when I stopped trying could I see again.

From above this time.

Jeanny’s mother was down there clinging to her, holding her. And Jeanny was watching my body on the stretcher until something captured her attention at the top of the stairs. She turned to look at the door of my mother’s room. I looked, too. But no one else noticed what we saw. Those balloons that had sunk down during the night had been picked up by the wind, or something greater, and were moving out the door. Instead of drifting up, though, they descended the stairs my mother had climbed so many weeks ago.

They moved in a soldier’s line. Or snakelike.

Something supernatural with a purpose, a mission.

The way the wind blew them, they seemed as alive as anyone in the parking lot. More alive than me. And at the bottom of the stairs one balloon broke away as the others lingered behind. A red one with a smaller red balloon inside drifted first to my body. Then to my father. Then to Roget, where it burst, and the tiny heart of a balloon beneath sailed upward as the others followed.

I felt myself floating farther, too, slipping away with them.

But I tried to will myself down.

Struggled a final time to push myself back into the world.

To open my eyes.

And when I did, when I opened them, this is what I saw: I saw not
those balloons but my mother stepping from that room where she had died. Behind her a line of women followed. No one needed to tell me who they were and why they were there. I knew. They were women who had died the way she did. And they had come to claim her tortured soul. When they reached the bottom of the stairs, they waited as my mother walked toward me. She didn’t look ghostly anymore. She just looked like my mother on an ordinary day. She could have been on her way to the grocery store or to pick me up from school. Only her face wore a different expression. More peaceful than she had been in life. And when she reached the stretcher where I lay soaked in my own blood, finding my breath, she held out her hands to me, kissed my forehead.

“I love you,” she whispered.

I wanted to ask her so many questions but couldn’t. She squeezed my hand and let go. Went to my father, stood before him without speaking, taking him in one last time. Then she moved to Roget. She didn’t say or do anything but stare at him, a man who would get away with what he’d done despite all my efforts. My mother held first her stomach and then her heart as she stood in front of him. And then I heard a loud pop, and I was seeing not my mother and those women but the balloons again, the way I had before.

One by one, the wind carried them up and out into the blue. I kept watching that tiny red embryo of a balloon as it drifted away from Roget. As innocent as a carnival balloon slipped from a child’s hand. Instead of a soul, a lost dream, a little life inside a larger one, a voice, a sign that told me my mother understood what I had tried to do for her, and we were both free.

Those men pushed me into the back of the ambulance, and I caught a glimpse of a black sedan pulling into the lot. As they were about to close the doors, I saw my uncle step from the car, and then someone familiar but not familiar at all. A tall, broad-shouldered college student. A Columbia sweatshirt and khaki pants. Thin lips. Stubble on his square chin. Wire-rimmed glasses and hair the same brown as mine.

Randolph Burdan.

My uncle had somehow managed to bring him to me. Ever since the day I’d been told who he was, I pictured him as one of those flawless, blue-blazered kids I’d seen streaming from that school on the Upper East Side. But when our eyes met, I felt as if I was looking at a version of myself; or rather the young man I might have become had none of this happened. Ordinary. Innocent enough. And all at once I saw that there was some sort of magic in that ordinariness. A magic I no longer had.

I watched him look up at the motel, then brush his fingers through his hair as he squinted toward the heavenly brightness above him. A breeze was picking up, and the ambulance was moving. He was growing smaller in the distance. And he couldn’t even see me wave to him as I was carried away, just like those balloons in the sky.

A
fter all of the unraveling at the Holedo Motel, it seems unfitting that my father’s the one chained to this place. Not me. I open myself up to it only on these summer visits so I can tuck it back away the rest of the year, live the most unblemished life a man like me can lead. Sometimes when I’m far from here, in the middle of my day I’m filled with a fast shudder brought on by a stirred memory, a glimpse of what happened so many years ago.

But mostly I’ve learned to push it aside. Move on.

During the time that I stay here, I tell my father about the good things I know now. I share stories about his daughter-in-law and grandchild, the loves of my life. I show him postcards that Marnie has sent me from the senior group tours she takes around the country. The most recent one from Vegas, her swirly writing on the back says, “Dominick, I haven’t won yet, but I’m still trying! Kisses—Marnie!” We talk of Sophie, who set out to
meet the father she never knew when she was in art school on the East Coast years back. And I tell my father what little I know about Rand, which I gauge from notes scratched on cards sent at Christmastime, our relationship having petered out long ago.

Some days my father and I walk to the pond behind the motel, where he keeps goldfish stocked just like Old Man Fowler used to do. We watch them darting around, and I stare down at my reflection. With those bright fish shimmering beneath and the clear water rippling, I look almost young again in the marbled surface of that pond. Every year my father tells me how he cares for the fish, and I listen as if for the first time. Feed them regularly. Keep the water clean. Let enough algae grow so they’ll have something to nourish them when the cold weather hits. I listen, too, as he talks about the early days with my mother.

Riding around on his motorcycle together.

Picnicking in the park.

How happy she was when they had me.

Only when I’m up in that room alone do I think about the rest. The way the world pinballed me that year. And the way events aligned like stars, forever reshaping the pattern of my life. Back then, I looked to those events as signs or beacons the way my mother told me to do, and I wound up in a place I never expected to be. Why? I guess Jeanny had it right our first night together when she told me, “Some things are meant to be. Fate. And other stuff is just up to chance. Who knows the reasons behind it?”

It took me a long time to give up trying to answer that question, even longer to stitch my life back together. There is no fairy-tale ending for me. If you were to see me today—say you were a guest checking into this roadside motel in a small Massachusetts town—you might spot me behind the counter during one of my yearly visits. I’d be helping my father with the guest register or handing him the keys to your room, and you might think: “There’s a son giving his aging father a hand.” You would never guess the history between us or the buried past of this place. You might look at me and I’d smile as you picked up your suitcase and headed out the door. You might think I was a happy man, though somewhat weathered. And you’d
see in my eyes no small part of a love I learned from a girl who stayed with me long after that troubled year, a father who I learned to forgive, a mother who forgave, and two children who were lost, then found. And a part of me who will always be a boy still missing the childhood he left too quickly behind.

I moved to New York City about ten years ago with all of my belongings in the back of my father’s tractor trailer. My younger sister had died not long before, and sometime during the shock of it all, I had made up my mind to follow my dreams in her honor since she would never get the chance to fulfill her own. Little did I know how many setbacks there would be, how many tables I’d have to wait on, and that I’d end up becoming a books editor at a women’s magazine in the process. Thankfully, there were people along the way who acted as angels in my life and helped to make my dream come true.

Joanna Pulcini is the most faithful and hardworking agent any writer could ask for. Not only did Joanna believe in this book when the only thing she knew was the title, but she also brought me to St. Patrick’s Cathedral one spring afternoon and told me to look up.

I am deeply grateful to my wise and nurturing editor, Betty Kelly, who offered me unending enthusiasm during the years I spent writing
this story. She also provided me with a home away from home to work on my fiction.

Patricia Burke from Paramount Pictures always seemed to call at the right moment. At first I thought she had tapped my phone, then I thought she was psychic, finally it dawned on me that she was simply an angel.

I was blessed to have Ann Hood as my writing teacher. She gave me abundant guidance early on and taught me so much about life.

The Vermont Studio Center granted me two generous fellowships where portions of this book were written on the second and third floors of Mason House.

Kate White, editor-in-chief of
Cosmopolitan,
is every writer’s dream boss. She gives me constant support and even lets me sneak away from the job to focus on my fiction.

I also had the honor of working with two former editor-in-chiefs of
Cosmopolitan
while writing this novel—the legendary Helen Gurley Brown and the one and only Bonnie Fuller both offered me invaluable encouragement.

Liz Smith took an interest in me and my work, and made people pay attention in a way they hadn’t before. I thank her for helping an unknown writer.

Wally Lamb was kind to me when I drove to Rhode Island from New York City to hear him read back in 1993. He offered to take a look at my writing and referred me to his agency. I am eternally grateful to Wally for his willingness to lend a hand to a newcomer.

My grandmother Dorothy believed I could be a writer ever since I showed her my first book entitled
Stories and Stories and Stories
when I was in the second grade. She never stopped believing even when other people did.

My readers: Alysa Wakin spent many late hours talking on the phone with me about this story and these characters even when she had to work the next morning. Alison Brower and Deirdre Heekin helped me immeasurably with their careful editing of this book. And Stacy Sheehan has always been an enthusiastic and gentle early reader.

I also need to give credit to Brother Dennis Sennett of the Archives and Records Department at St. Patrick’s Cathedral as well as the makers of the documentary
Leona’s Sister Gerri
. The family who spoke in that film about their experience, which was similar to my subject, added to my inspiration.

There are dozens of other people I would like to get mushy with but if I keep going these acknowledgments are going to turn into another book, so I’ll list their names here with a huge thank-you from the heart: John Sargent, Jan Bronson, Dawn Raffel, Abigail Greene, Jen Leonard, Shira Lyons, Jenny Benjamin, Susan Seagrest, all my
Cosmo
and Breakaway friends, Sam Hood Adrain, Carol Story, Amy Ziff, Vivian Shipley, Leo Connellan, Matthew Ballast, Patrick Miller, the Gallatin School at NYU, Amy Schiffman at the Gersh Agency, Renee Bombard at Presses de la Cite, Georg Reuchlin at Verlagsgruppe Bertelsmann, Linda Michaels and Teresa Cavanaugh at the Linda Michaels Agency. Also, Linda Chester, Laurie Fox, Julie Rubenstein, Gary Jaffe, and Kelly Smith at Linda Chester and Associates. And all the great people at William Morrow: Rome Quezada, Sharyn Rosenblum, Maureen Sugden, Rich Acquan, Michele Corallo, and April Benavides.

Finally, I’m more grateful than I can articulate to Thomas Caruso, who is a soothing, loyal, and loving presence in my life every single day.