Disappearance at Devil's Rock (10 page)

“I'm sorry we snuck out and took those beers with us. I don't know what we were thinking exactly. We're not drinkers, really we're not. We were trying them out, and we didn't drink that much. And I know that's not the important part, but I'm sorry we were so stupid. About every
thing. And then he left and we should've followed him right away, and I don't know why we didn't, and I'm sorry. I'm sorry we don't know where Tommy went and I'm sorry I don't know what happened. I wish I could take it all back. That's all I wish. Just take that night back.”

Mom pulls Luis into a hug and she is crying, but it's an under-control crying. She says, “Thank you, Luis. Thank you. It's okay.”

It's not okay, but that's not what she means, can't be what she means. Luis looks so small and Mom has him totally enveloped in her arms, squeezing his head against her chest, her long hair falling over him. Luis hesitantly puts his arms around her waist.

Kate turns on her music, the languid opening guitar notes lurch before the hesitant bass and drums keep the odd time loudly, and it looks like Mom and Luis are slow dancing. They break the hug as the chorus is shouted over the fuzzed-out guitar, and Luis goes back to his side of the room with the other parents. Mom quickly hugs Josh, too, rubs the top of his head as he shuffles away from her, and then Mom is alone on her side of the living room again. Kate should probably go over and stand with her, but she doesn't.

Mom starts speaking and gesticulating with her hands. The hand gestures are indecipherable without the words. The other parents stare down at their sons, and Josh and Luis shake their heads no in sync, and they occasionally shrug and say something brief. Kate doesn't shut off the music, and she turns it up louder to ensure she doesn't hear anything they say. She focuses on the secret choreography of their collective nonmovement.

The two families eventually float toward the open door like lost balloons. They wave sheepishly at Kate and they squeeze Mom's hands and arms as though testing out how strong or durable she is. Mom watches them trek across the lawn from the open door. After their two cars drive away, she turns to Kate and pantomimes taking out the earbuds. Kate takes one out.

Mom says, “I'll be back later with lunch.”

“Where are you going?”

“Out. Text if you want anything.” Mom waves bye with her car keys cupped in her hand and she shuts the door behind her.

They're all gone before the last song of the album, “All Apologies,” finishes.

Luis's parents decide they're not going into work for another day, and Team Griffin-Fernandez reconvenes at Luis's house. The adults sit at the kitchen table like weary delegates while his dad makes coffee and puts out a box of little powdered donuts. Josh takes a handful. Mrs. Griffin's look of you-don't-need-to-eat-all-those is as loud as a scream. Luis takes one donut to make his mom happy. He is not hungry anymore and the stomach pains from earlier have short-circuited out.

Mr. Griffin says, “I'm glad we went. I mean, we had to go, and we wanted to go. But that was hard. Nothing compared to what poor Elizabeth is going though, I know, but I'm just saying, that wasn't easy.”

Luis wants to say something smart, something that stings and horrifies, something to make him stop talking.

Mr. Griffin ends with “Proud of you boys for stepping up.”

Josh, the kid who always has something to say, doesn't say anything. Just like he didn't really say anything at the Sandersons. Josh stuffs two donuts in his mouth, and the white powder clumps on his lips. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and little clouds of sugar float down to the table.

Luis's dad says, “Creamer, anyone?” and puts a bottle of Bailey's next to the donuts, like a dare. “You two can go down into the basement and watch a movie if you want.”

Josh doesn't move from his spot. He likes hanging out with
adults and listening to them talk. Even now, Luis knows Josh can't help himself and would prefer to stay. Luis can't leave this room fast enough.

Mrs. Griffin says, “Go ahead, Josh. We'll go home when you're done with the movie.”

The boys leave the kitchen and walk down into the partially finished basement. Luis's dad did all the work himself, sacrificing almost a year's worth of weekends and a handful of off days. In the early stages, while framing the space, he kept trying to get Luis to help him. Luis didn't want any part of it. He wasn't handy, and to his shame didn't have that family DIY knack. Dad's false mantra of “You're doing great” and his manic see-how-patient-I'm-being-with-you vibe sent Luis retreating to his room and the computer.

The carpeted basement stairs curl around to the left and into the finished space, a common room. The drop ceilings are low, the walls a bright white, and the floor covered with a spongy, beige rug. A bar is on the far wall; a couch in the middle faces a long, rectangular entertainment center, its lower shelves spilling over with DVDs and video games. There's an Xbox, DVD player, too, and squatting on top like a large, black bird is the TV. All the random tennis balls, knee hockey equipment, and Nerf hoop stuff has been picked up and put away in crates pushed underneath the foosball table no one ever uses anymore. It smells musty down here, and Luis wonders if there's a leak near the window over by the bar again.

Luis asks, “What do you want to watch?”

Josh says, “Whatever. It doesn't matter to me.”

Luis sifts through the DVD library that he's ordered according to preference; his action and horror movies are in the front and faced out. The movies his sisters didn't take to college with them (
Bring It On
,
Grease
,
Pitch Perfect
; he would never admit that he liked
Pitch Perfect
and had even watched it twice on his own) are stuffed way in the
back of the shelving along with all the Disney and Pixar movies with which he used to be obsessed.

Luis says, “Come on, pick something. You know what I got.” If Josh doesn't pick anything then he'll put in
Dead Snow
or maybe
Dawn of the Dead
, the original, the one with the insanely bright colors, that radioactive red of all the blood and guts, and in a weird way that makes the movie seem more real to him than all the CGI and dark shadows of the remake. His parents would be pissed if he put on a zombie/horror movie even though they didn't say not to. They don't understand how those movies are a comfort to him. In his favorite horror movies, he knows the rules by heart and the consequences of the rules being broken.

Luis pulls out
Dawn of the Dead
and shakes the movie at Josh. The loose DVD inside rattles in the plastic.

Josh, sitting on the couch behind him, says, “No zombies.”

“Hey, you said whatever.”

“Superhero or something funny. Seriously, no zombies.”

Luis wants to be mean right now. He wants to call Josh a pussy and put the movie in anyway and then see what Josh does to stop him. But then Luis flashes on one of the iconic scenes in
Dawn
and it features the zombie who looks like Tommy. That Tommy zombie gets a machete stuck in his head and his brown eyes are huge and there's a diminishing intelligence leaking out that's utterly horrifying, but what's worse is his lower jaw drops like a trap door and it hangs open and there's all that darkness inside. Remembering that zombie, his favorite zombie, looks so much like Tommy makes his stomach hurt again.

“Fine.” Luis throws the
Dawn of the Dead
DVD to the back of the shelf with the other banished movies. He pulls out
The Avengers
and pops it in.

They don't talk during the opening scene with Loki kicking S.H.I.E.L.D.'s collective ass. Luis can't watch his favorite zombie movie
anymore, and he doesn't want to watch this, either. This won't shut his brain off.

Josh finds the TV remote on the couch cushion between them and mutes the movie. He says, “My parents search through my phone now, every night. Looking for, I don't know, something.”

Luis's parents have always checked his phone periodically, so nothing new there. Luis unmutes the TV and the music and explosions are loud. He scoots closer to Josh so he can be heard without having to raise his voice, and asks, “Did you know anything about Tommy keeping a diary?”

After Luis's long hug with Ms. Sanderson, she asked the boys if Tommy had been acting depressed or preoccupied or strange in any way before that night in Borderland. They both shook their heads no. Then she told them she found a few pages from his diary and how Tommy wrote about zombies and other random stuff, and how he wrote about his dad. She asked them if they knew anything about that at all. Luis and Josh spliced two mumbling, sputtering sentences together into one answer. They weren't lying. At least, Luis wasn't. He honestly knows nothing of a diary.

Josh: “No. I mean, I know he has all kinds of drawing notebooks, but like, a diary, no. He never showed me anything like that.”

Luis: “She made it sound like she only found, like what, pieces of it? A few pages and not the whole thing? I don't get that.”

Josh: “Yeah, I don't know.”

Luis: “What do you think is in it?”

Josh: “In what?”

Luis: “The diary.”

Josh: “I have no idea.”

An underground base collapses and explodes on the TV screen, and the bad guy, that agent of chaos, is free.

Luis: “Do you think Tommy wrote about . . . ?” He stops, afraid to say anything more.

Josh: “I—I don't know.”

Luis is irrationally angry with Josh, sick of him saying
I don't know
to everything. He thinks about asking Josh if he knows how it felt when Tommy's mother was hugging him and holding him like that, like he was the one who needed to be comforted, not her. When he told her he was sorry he meant it like he's never meant anything in his life. The
sorry
saturated him down to the mitochondria, and there's no way Josh knows how close Luis came to telling her that he felt like the biggest fraud and phony in the history of the world and that he wished it was him instead of Tommy that was gone.

Josh says, “I saw him standing outside my window again last night.”

Luis doesn't say anything. Doesn't look at his friend.

“That's three nights in a row.”

Luis asks, “What are we going to do?”

Josh says again, “I don't know.”

E
lizabeth hasn't been back to Borderland since the morning after Tommy disappeared, four days ago. The police presence there this morning seems to be minimal, with one cruiser parked in the nearly empty main lot. There are two news vans, but the doors are shut and its occupants are nowhere in sight. With the hours and now days ticking away on Tommy like a doomsday clock, no media coverage is bad coverage, and she will knock on the van doors before returning to her car, but what she's planning on doing now she wants to do alone and without distraction if at all possible. Elizabeth parks a few rows over from the vans and puts on one of Tommy's baseball hats, one he stopped wearing and she found hanging by itself on the coat rack next to the back door like a dead leaf that hasn't yet fallen. The hat is blue with some sort of blocky, video game symbol on the front panel, a broad-winged bird of prey with its thorax as a pyramid of triangles. A Legend of Zelda symbol maybe?

Between the rugged terrain and her having not jogged in weeks, she gets painful shin splints on the Pond Walk trail. She stops once,
leaning on a tree, and tries to stretch them out. It doesn't help. She's so tight she can't grab her toes without having to bend her knees. She jog-walks the rest of the way, the shin splints still barking, and she's a little light-headed and overheated. She regrets not bringing a bottle of water.

It takes her more than forty minutes to get to Split Rock. Elizabeth is alone. She expects police tape around the giant boulder, or maybe across the path leading to it, and a reporter or two circling the area—there was one reporting live from the rock on TV yesterday afternoon, or a policeman stationed at the rock to, what, guard it? To keep vigil at the one place they know for sure Tommy isn't? Elizabeth spent the last half of the walk in her head rehearsing what she might say to that oafish Officer Stanton, because he'd be the one to pull that kind of duty. Whenever he comes to the DPW office (which is way too often), he takes half the chocolate kisses from the bowls on their desks and he flirts with the women in an ugly and obnoxious you're-so-lucky-I'm-even-looking-at-you way.

The park's S
PLIT
R
OCK
sign has been vandalized, with
Devils
gouged roughly into the wood above the slashed and scratched-out S
PLIT
. She can't help but notice the improper punctuation, the lack of the possessive apostrophe-
s
, unless the vandal meant plural or multiple devils. No ownership implied but a place of congregation. The weed-/alcohol-fueled teen likely didn't think that deeply about
devils
.

Did Detective Murtagh tell her about the sign and she forgot or was it mentioned on the news report she watched yesterday? So many of the details of the preceding days are jumbled and mixed, an oral history suffering from too many or two few retellings. Is Devil's Rock what the kids in the area call the place or something Tommy and the boys called it? She still doesn't know.

Elizabeth limps around the rock's perimeter twice before entering the actual split, which is plenty wide enough to walk into. She runs
her hands along the rough granite walls that stretch high above her head. The pine needles beneath her feet are matted into the hard packed dirt. Where the split ends in the middle of the calved boulder is a small collection of notes and trinkets mixed with dead leaves that have somehow managed to survive through the previous winter, spring, and now summer. Elizabeth kneels down (there isn't room to sit with her legs crossed), and tries to sit back on her feet, but with the shin splints still aching she's not flexible enough to do so.

There are two flowers on the top, laid so that their stems cross and make a prohibitive
X
. There are two small teddy bears. One is black. The other is brown and has a broken heart stitched onto its chest. There's someone's beat-up Ames baseball hat, its black sun-bleached into light purple. There are candles with hardened tentacles of wax clinging to notes and cards that read “We miss you, Tommy,” “We believe you'll come home,” and promises that God and Jesus will look out for him. Elizabeth sifts through the loose notes and a coin slides out, bounces off her thighs. It's a penny, weathered and stained almost black, making it difficult to read its minting year, but it's not a wheat back; there doesn't appear to be anything special about it. Elizabeth flashes to Tommy's coins Kate had shown her. The thought of bringing the penny home and adding it to Tommy's collection feels like a false step or a step too far, and hopelessly cabalistic. She drops the penny into her shell's front pouch pocket anyway. She picks through the rest of the notes, some of which are inside plastic bags. Other notes have gotten wet and then dried, the ink dissolving into clouds. She had a feeling this morning, a hunch, that she'd find another note from Tommy here at the rock. It's why she came.

She pulls out two
MISSING: HAVE YOU SEEN
fliers she and Janice made. Janice suggested using his school picture, which was a retake of an equally awkward photo because Tommy never smiled for
real in a posed picture and was always uncomfortable in those staged surroundings, so
Why are you looking at me?
She chose a picture of him from earlier in the summer. In it, he stands over his bike just back from one of his friends' houses, the lazy sun going down somewhere behind the trees, and he's caught in the middle of taking off his helmet, his hair all over the place, a thick-lined and joyous scribble, and his smile is a real one, as uncontrollable as the gasp right after jumping into cold water on a summer day. Janice didn't think the picture was a clear enough shot of him, but this picture is Tommy and Elizabeth is convinced that anyone would recognize him from this photo. She can't even look at the picture now, though, with that
MISSING
headline screaming on the paper below him. She places the fliers on either side of the pile of tokens and trinkets; it's what the bottom of a dried-up wishing well might look like.

Elizabeth climbs back to her feet unsteadily and with the help of the boulder. She pauses at the edge of the split, waiting to hear someone walking down the path. If she listens hard enough, maybe she can hear the reverberations of the mysterious steps Tommy took away from Split Rock that night, and she could follow them. She would, too, even if it meant her own disappearance.

Elizabeth doesn't come home for lunch. She spends the rest of the afternoon driving through neighboring towns. She moves mainly north and west of Ames, first going into neighboring Stoughton, then Canton, Norwood, Westwood, and Needham. She uses her Facebook page, which is drowning in well-wishes and messages, to check in with a picture of Tommy and update her geographic progress. She tags the local newspapers (if the town has one) or the town's Patch page. She stops in their downtowns and squares, and if there are people walking by, she hands them a flier. When there are no more people to give
fliers to, she staples fliers to walls and telephone poles and posts pictures of the hanging fliers to her and Tommy's Facebook pages.

Her last stop is the big-box technology store on Route 1. It's as cavernous as an airplane hangar, and there couldn't possibly be enough buyers for all the shiny, hungry-for-electricity gadgets housed inside. She buys a wireless high-definition security camera that she'll be able to control and monitor with her smartphone. The young woman at the register offers her a 15 percent discount if she signs up for a new credit card with them. Elizabeth gets the card even though she has too many already, never mind spending this money she doesn't have on the camera.

When Elizabeth pulls back into her driveway it's after 5
P.M
. She stays in her car to read and answer texts and e-mails. There are a slew of Facebook comment notification e-mails, most of the in-our-prayers / stay-positive variety, but there's one from some guy with a bald eagle head as his avatar. His message:
Maybe you shouldve watched him better then you did then he would'nt have sneaked out drinkin and doing whatever else he should'nt be doing.

Elizabeth grunts, drops the phone, and yells, “Fuck you!” repeatedly, and pounds on the steering wheel with an open palm. She scrambles to pick up the phone down at her feet and writes responses in her head that threaten this jackass's life in great and terrible detail, to say in no uncertain terms that he deserves a humiliating, limb-ripping, skin-rending death. Her left palm is red and throbs, and the instant she stops indulging in her righteous wrath fantasy, she deflates. Knowing she can't risk any public backlash, Elizabeth writes back:
I don't care what you think of me, but please keep your ears and eyes out for Tommy. He's just a boy and he needs everyone's help.
She types, erases, types, erases, but finally leaves what amounts to a paper cut compared to his assault.
Oh, and nice grammar.

Elizabeth reads the rest of her e-mails. She agrees to participate in
a phone interview with a midmorning AM radio talk show, one she's never listened to before. The exchange with the show's producer is as matter-of-fact as the confirmation of a dentist appointment. There's an e-mail from a lawyer who wants to represent her family's “best interests.” She has been getting those e-mails for days now. She laughed at the first ones. Now she wonders if there's any way she could afford one, or if she could find one to work pro bono. Lastly, Detective Murtagh has nothing new to report. Elizabeth sends Allison a link to the jackass's Facebook thread/comment and she asks how are the Devil's Rock and the-boys-were-out-drinking details getting out to the public. Her
What's going on here? Are you telling me all I need to know?
at the end of the e-mail nicely summarizes everything.

Elizabeth turns her almost dead phone off and leaves the car. Once inside the house she announces, “Hi, guys,” aware of the crinkling sound the plastic bag makes as the camera sways and bounces off her leg.

Janice and Kate are in the kitchen, sitting on opposite sides of the table. Janice cooked one of the premade meals left by well-wishers. Chicken marsala. Kate hates mushrooms. Maybe that's why she sits before an untouched plate with her head down and arms folded across her chest. Janice looks upset, too, or maybe she's pissed off. Something happened. Did they see the Facebook comment, too? Kate made herself a coadministrator of Tommy's page.

Elizabeth says, “That smells good,” and drops the bag on the counter.

Janice: “It is good. Delicious.”

“Great. I'm starvin' like Marvin.” Elizabeth sits next to Kate and rubs her back and kisses the top of her head. That she has walked into the house like
Hey Mom is home and life is good
dizzies her head. She's trying. She's trying even if none of it is working.

By the looks of her almost empty plate, Janice is done eating. She says, “What did you buy?”

“It's a surveillance camera. I'm going to set it up tonight and monitor the living room and maybe, I don't know, the front door, too. Just in case.”

“Yay.” Kate says it like the
fuck you
s Elizabeth spewed in her car. “Then Nana will finally see that it's not me leaving the notes.” She gets up and stomps out of the kitchen.

Elizabeth calls out after her. “Kate, you need to eat something, sweetie. How about I make you some eggs and toast? Breakfast for dinner? Your favorite, right? I'll make it as soon as I'm done eating, okay?” Elizabeth takes Kate's untouched plate and gives her mother a good stare.

Janice says, “Just in case what?”

“What?”

“You said you'll monitor the front door, too, just in case. Just in case what?”

“You know, on the off chance there's someone—” Elizabeth pauses, as though to allow both of them to fill the blank with names or faces “—I don't know who, sneaking in the house at night, leaving the notes, as a message, as a what, an elaborate, cruel fucking prank. I don't know, Mom. I'm trying—trying to cover the bases.” She doesn't add that she's desperate to see what she saw in her room two nights ago. It's really why she bought the camera.