Evidence of Things Not Seen (7 page)

Mrs. Smythe: Here’s some water for you, Sheriff. Tom’s right. I was the one who was the most sensitive about the adoption. Tommy was curious but not in the usual the way he could be curious about things. He could get a little obsessed.

You know I called the Gladney Center for Adoption and told them what had happened. They said they hadn’t been contacted by Tommy. They were very nice. They always treat adoptive parents like they are the real parents. They said Tommy’s disappearance may not have anything to do with his being adopted.

Tom, the sheriff is here to tell us he has run out of leads and now he wants to look in the margins of books for Tommy.

I understand. Every time I walk outside, I look for Tommy. But instead of finding him, I feel like the world gets bigger. Like the possibilities of where he might be seem to grow and grow until I can’t take another step.

A couple of days ago, I had an idea that maybe he walked out into Hallie’s field and then he got hungry so he went cross-country over to the Whip In. So I did that exact walk. When I didn’t find him, I wanted to turn around and try again but start in a different place and turn in a different place. But I could be one hundred feet off every try.

That’s why we have to keep looking. Because he’s somewhere out there and the world is a very big place. I know he’s there. He’s lost. He’s hurt. But he’s out there. You know when someone you love dies.

When my mother died a few years ago, I could feel it. She was in a nursing home in Fredericksburg. I was home. I was going to go visit her. It was after lunch, I remember, because I got up from the kitchen table and all I wanted to do was lie down. So I sat down in Tom’s chair. I swear I could hardly keep my eyes open. I fell sound asleep for five minutes. When I opened my eyes, I knew she was gone. The phone rang and it was the nursing home, telling me she had died. But I knew before I picked up that phone. I felt it.

I don’t feel the same way about Tommy. He’s still here. Somewhere.

Please tell me you won’t give up, Sheriff. Please tell me we can keep organizing searches on Hallie’s land. He has to be out there. He’d go out there all the time. Even before we bought him that motorbike. He wasn’t trying to run away. He was exploring. Hallie said she saw him out there a lot. Looking at things. Tommy could sit and look at things for a long time. After he got the bike, Hallie said he could still go out there as long as he didn’t ride it into the field and scare the livestock.

He has to be out there. He stopped in that pull-out and went out to look at something. I know it. He took the key to the bike for heaven’s sake. He was coming back. Only something happened. Something happened and he can’t get back to us.

I’m sorry, Sheriff. I know it doesn’t help to cry but sometimes I just can’t—I think I need to go lie down, Tom.

Mr. Smythe: It’s been like this for twelve days. She doesn’t sleep. She drives up and down 281. She was up for hours on Tommy’s computer until you took it. Now she goes to the library and uses the computer there. She says she’s looking for clues but I think she’s lost. Searching and lost at the same time.

She doesn’t want to take any medicine. She doesn’t want to go to sleep. She wants to find her boy. I can’t say I blame her. Sometimes when I fall asleep, I forget it happened. It takes a minute or two to remember that Tommy’s missing. I have to go through the shock and pain and worry all over again. Just to get to where I was before I fell asleep: hoping that we’ll find him, hoping that someone will call, hoping that he’s alive and safe.

I know. I know. Even Mattie knows. Tommy could have left the bike in the pull-out and someone picked him up there. He could be in Canada or Alaska. He could be long gone. But I think we would have gotten a hint about his wanting to run away. A map. Catching him on the phone with someone. E-mails. Heck, if he’d been running away, he would have taken his computer and some clothes. All he had was his school backpack. That’s all. He wasn’t running away. He wasn’t—

But who would kidnap a boy and not call us or ask us for money or something? I can’t think that people are mean enough to take a boy. I can’t believe there’s someone who wouldn’t think he belonged to someone, someone who loved him and cared about him. I can’t.

Mattie and I don’t talk about it. Sometimes I’ll look at her and I’ll see this current between us. It’s white hot and it’s like we’re seeing the worst possible thing that could happen to Tommy at the very same moment. It’s like we’re being electrified with fear. One of us will blink or the phone will ring and the current is broken. I swear I feel limp afterwards. Like I’ve been struck by lightning.

I never told Tommy that bad things could happen to him. I never lied to him. But I never told him about mean or sick people. Maybe I did him a disservice. It didn’t seem like he could process that information.

Yes, I know Tommy’s an unusual kid. The Smythes are simple folk and Tommy was pretty different. But what would a test tell us? If we had him tested and the test gave him a diagnosis like ADHD or autism or something else, what would we do different? He’d still be our really smart boy who didn’t quite know how to hold a normal conversation. Matilde and I felt like every family has an eccentric cousin. Why not accept him the way he is and try to help him to get along in the world? Only I don’t think I did. Sometimes I think about how Tommy annoyed so many people with his questions and literal answers. If someone didn’t know him, they might get really angry with him. They might think he was being rude. I should have told him about the mean things in this world.

I heard Hallie Stillwell says she’s thinking about taking that Mexican girl and her little boy into her home and I wonder if she should be that kind. I used to think that kindness saved the day but she could be inviting a whole cartel of trouble into her home. You don’t know. I should have put more fear into Tommy. He was too trusting. Not cautious or scared enough.

You’re welcome to take all the books in his room. The librarians in Johnson City and Fredericksburg were always getting books sent over from the university. What do you do when your son wants to talk with you about particle physics? Or string theory? One time he asked if I thought it was possible to get to another dimension without dying. I didn’t know what to tell him. I don’t know half the stuff he knows. I mean, I’ve heard of the big bang and black holes. Mostly from science-fiction books I read as a kid. Not from an AP physics class or books I checked out from the library. People around here, well, that kind of thinking is blasphemous.

Mattie and I are big on the truth. If someone asks a question, that means they’re ready to hear the truth. But what do you say when someone asks you about possibilities, about things that aren’t proven, that barely exist?

I told him what I thought was the truth. I told him that if you can imagine something, then it might possibly exist.

Now I wonder what he was imagining. I wonder what he was trying to find out.

MAY 22 . EIGHTEEN DAYS MISSING

HYPOTHESIS

“Ooops, hang on, Alex.” Izzy brakes hard and turns her beat-up Toyota off the highway into the pull-out. The car drops off the lip of the highway and clunks onto the dirt and caliche. Izzy yanks the steering wheel left and right, trying to avoid the potholes, but with each turn the headlamps catch another hole right before the tire rolls into it.

“Whoa, Izzy. Slow down.” Alex grabs the dashboard as the car rocks back and forth.

Izzy careens to a stop in front of a cluster of cedar and mesquite trees. A rusty old trash can stands in the way. She thinks about jumping out and moving it or knocking it over with her fender. Instead, she squeezes the car in between the can and the trees and parks as close as possible to the trees. The cedar branches scrape one side of her car. No biggie. She noses the car under the branches and looks in her rearview mirror. Perfect. Tucked under these trees with the trash can behind them, she hopes no cars passing by will spot them.

She turns to Alex. “Let’s get out.”

Alex doesn’t move. “What the hell are we doing out here, Iz?”

“I want to talk.”

“Why here?”

“Because I don’t want to be in the library or your front porch where we usually talk.”

“About what?”

Alex barely said a word the whole ride out here. Usually he likes hanging out and talking with her. Now he seems irritated.

“Come on, Al, let’s get out of the car.”

Alex doesn’t say anything. He opens his door and stands beside it like he is obeying her order. “Okay. What do you want to talk about?”

“Geez, Alex. What’d I do to piss you off so bad?”

“As usual, you have no clue, do you, Iz?”

“What?” Izzy says, drawling the word into as many syllables as it took for her to toss her hair back and bat her eyes, trying imitate a dimmer version of herself. She is hoping she’d get a laugh but, truth be told, she’s a little mystified about why Alex is mad. It’s not like he was doing anything except obsessing over typeface and font size.

“I’m in the middle of building someone’s website. Yes, I know. Computer science isn’t really science, according to you. But it’s a job, by the way. It’s nine o’clock on a school night during exam week. You come over to my house, stand in front of my computer, and order me to get in the car. You babble on about useless school shit instead of telling me what’s going on. Now you are ordering me out of the car. You’re bossy, Izzy, and it’s pretty effing annoying.”

“Oh.” Izzy ducks under the trees and walks around to the front of the car. The heat from the car’s engine seems to exhale onto her bare legs under her skirt. One of the things she loves about her longtime friendship with Alex is how he doesn’t hold back when something bugs him; he tells her straight out. It makes it easy for her to cop to any mistakes. “You’re totally right, Alex. I’m sorry. I had this idea and I wanted to tell you about it. You know, see what you thought. And I couldn’t explain it while I was driving.”

“Let me guess. Another hypothesis?”

Izzy can’t see Alex’s face very well but it sounds like he’s smiling. “Yeah. Busted.” She jumps onto the hood of the car and slides back toward the windshield. Izzy pats the hood, offering a seat to Alex, but trying not to order him around.

Alex climbs up next to her. “Okay, so what is it this time?”

At least he doesn’t sound mad anymore. Still, she wishes she hadn’t jumped on the hood of the car so quickly. The way she’d pictured the experiment, they’d be sitting in the field on the other side of the pull-out where it was more private. If anyone stops here, which was a huge possibility since Tommy has only been missing two and a half weeks, they could be seen. But if she suggests moving, however unbossy, Alex might get annoyed all over again. She stares up at the twisted branches of the mesquite trees and into the black space beyond them. The sky is clear, with only a sliver of a moon hanging above the tree line. She reaches into her skirt pocket to make sure the small square packet is there. So the experiment won’t be perfect. That’s okay. She can still test her theory. Scientists are nothing if not adaptable.

“You know I went to the prom with Tim, right?”

“Yeah … how’d that work out for you?”

“Umm, well, it was interesting.”

“Really? I thought you’d have to talk sports all night long.”

“We did. I mean, he did.” Izzy sighs. She’d always stayed outside the whole dating drama, but ever since she started tutoring in Darrow’s regular physics class, she got to know all the squealy girls and jocky guys, people she never would never have talked to before. When Tim asked her to the prom, it felt kinda cool and she thought maybe, as a junior, she should give it a try. So she did. Only Alex was right. Once they were outside of physics, where Izzy was the queen of ease and helpful answers, she didn’t have much to say to this jock. And he didn’t have a whole lot to say to her.

“Let me guess,” said Alex. “You talked about the Spurs all night?

“How did you know?”

“Rockets, Mavericks, Spurs. That’s all those ballers talk about. I picked one team is all.”

“Yeah, I learned a lot about the Spurs, all right.”

She also learned a lot about what makes boys tick. All during the prom, Tim looked pretty awkward, like he didn’t know whether to ask Izzy to dance or what to talk about. But if one of his teammates said hello, he smiled. If one of them said anything about the NBA conference play offs, he looked excited. That’s when Izzy figured out to ask him about basketball. As soon as she did, he relaxed. When Izzy didn’t say much back and the conversation died, he started to look uncomfortable. It dawned on Izzy that maybe she was in charge of how the date was going to go. Sure enough, every time she asked a question about basketball, he got all talkative and happy. Izzy checked out her theory three times and every time it was true. As long as Izzy was willing to talk about basketball all night, even while they were dancing, they had a reasonably good time. Or at least they looked like a couple who were conversing and not staring in opposite directions.