Evidence of Things Not Seen (9 page)

Izzy can’t see Alex. She listens for his footsteps in the pasture beyond. She wants to go after him. She wants to explain her theory again. She wants it to make sense to him the way it does to her. She wants him to say, “Oh, that’s what you meant. Now I get it.” But it doesn’t feel like that’s going to happen.

The wind sifts through the branches. At first, Izzy only smells the mesquite’s tangy sweet smell. Then she smells peppermint. She looks around. “Alex?” But she’s alone.

Again, the smell of peppermint. It must be on her skin. From Alex kissing her. Izzy can feel the way his lips press against her and pull her into him at the same time. She feels herself wanting to drift into the feeling of the kiss, but then she wonders how it’s possible to push against someone and pull him into you at the same time.

She feels the fizz of a new idea bubble inside her.

Maybe she’s stumbled upon a mathematical equation that no one has ever thought of. Or some energy force that hasn’t been calibrated.

She wants to go tell Alex. She wants to see his face looking down at her.

Maybe this is what he was talking about. Maybe his kiss had tipped her upside down. Just a little.

MAY 24 . TWENTY DAYS MISSING

RACHEL

I don’t have anything different to tell you since Tommy first disappeared. He walked out of physics class almost three weeks ago. As soon as the bell rang. It wasn’t unusual. Even if he had no place to go, he always got up and left when the bell rang. It was like the end of a book. You close it. You go. That’s the way Tommy was. I mean, is.

Yes, of course, I think he’s still out there. I have to believe that. Don’t you? Isn’t that why you’re interviewing me again?

I usually asked Tommy where he was going, but that day he was already out the door before I could. I didn’t always get a straight answer even when I asked. I mean, sometimes if I asked Tommy what he was doing, he’d say, “Talking to you.” He’d say exactly what he was doing right then. I had to be specific because he was very literal. Like I had to ask “Where are you
going
?” or “What are you
going
to do?”

Yes, of course it could be frustrating. It’s frustrating I didn’t ask. It’s frustrating he never said. It’s really frustrating that you’re asking me questions I’ve already answered.

Wait a minute. Are you trying out some sort of theory that I was somehow mad at Tommy and I knew where he was going and I followed him like a jealous girlfriend and something happened? That’s unbelievable. I need to go.

I’ve come out to the pull-out every day since we first knew Tommy was gone. I keep expecting he’ll be here. That he’ll show up like the way he walked into class with his head down, like he was late. Only he never was.

James is an egomaniacal idiot who only wanted good grades and a good lab partner. I wasn’t trying to improve Tommy’s manners. Or be his surrogate mother. Or be his girlfriend. I mean, I liked him. And yeah, I was thinking about asking him to the prom, but it probably would have been a really bad idea.

Tommy was, I mean is, really different. He’s this really smart but really innocent guy. Izzy and I had a theory that maybe he had Asperger’s. Ever since I knew him, the beginning of high school, he was always fixated on something. You couldn’t shake him loose. When he was like that, he’d barge into any conversation with whatever he was thinking about. He didn’t know when to say “excuse me.” He wasn’t aware of normal stuff. So I started helping him, you know, with social cues. I cared about how people treated him.

It wasn’t manners. James is the one who needs manners. Tommy needed help knowing how to be in the world. I guess I feel protective of him. He was really smart but it’s like he needed help crossing the street.

Of course I’m mad at James. He sat next to Tommy for three years. He made sure Tommy was his partner on every project. He could have asked Tommy where he was going. Or something. If James said one little thing to Tommy at the end of class that day, maybe I could have gotten over to Tommy before he left and asked him where he was going. Maybe I would have gone with him.

He got the bike sometime last fall. One day I asked him for a ride home. I remember how he looked behind at the seat. I could almost see the thought bubble over his head, “Oh that’s why the seat is longer than a regular bike seat.” That was one of things I loved about Tommy. The simplest things stumped him.

I didn’t “love” love him.

Wait. Izzy told you I was his girlfriend? Figures. Izzy’s obsessed. A total mad scientist compared to Tommy. Tommy would wait and watch before he tested a theory. Not Izzy. She’d fling theories all over the place to see what stuck.

That whole boy-girl thing—pretty much the way high school is set up—it doesn’t compute that way for Tommy. I don’t even know if I was his friend. Like his brain is so different, I don’t know where I lived in it. Or if I did. No, that’s wrong. I
was
his friend. He always smiled when I went up to him and said hello. I just couldn’t expect him to come up to me and say hello.

I don’t think his awkwardness made him depressed. He didn’t know he was awkward. He was Tommy. We’re the ones that thought he was awkward.

No, no one bullied him. I would have seen it.

Wait, if you’re thinking he committed suicide, you’re crazy. He was way too curious. Quantum was blowing his mind. It’s pretty deep stuff. I hung in there with him but he was off the map about it.

All of it. Superposition theory. Alternate dimension. Time travel. Black holes. He was—well, this might sound strange—he acted like someone who was in love. You know that first crush? When all you can do is think about that person and write poetry to them? That’s where Tommy was with particle physics. It’s all he could think about.

That’s what is scary to me. When he was like that, he was so wrapped in what he was thinking that he wouldn’t pay attention to what was going on around him. Like he might have been standing in this stupid pull-out staring at something or thinking something and someone drove in and grabbed him. You know, like a random act. And then because that person didn’t know Tommy and how he answered questions in the most annoying ways, that person might get mad. And Tommy wouldn’t understand why that person was mad and he’d say something which would frustrate that person even more and—

I’m sorry, Sheriff. I get scared for Tommy. Most of the time, I’m hopeful but sometimes I’m scared.

He believed anything he could think was possible. If it wasn’t proved but he could think it, then it was just a matter of time before someone proved it was real. He believed that simultaneous realities were possible. He believed that everything had energy and you could communicate with that energy. That was why I liked being with him. He didn’t think in confined, “normal” ways. Being with Tommy was like a free fall.

I rode on the back of Ruby maybe a half dozen times. Maybe more. It was like being inside his brain. He’d go crazy fast and then he’d stop practically in the middle of the road and watch these flocks of birds dip and turn through the air currents. They looked like smoke to me. I don’t know what they looked like to Tommy. I mean, we never said stuff like, “Oh, that’s beautiful.” Or “Oh, that looks like smoke.” Looking at the birds together in the same moment was the conversation. I mean, if you’re with a guy who is thinking that each person, each thing contains waves of possibilities and those possibilities might exist in alternate dimensions, then you can kind of see how being together seeing the same thing at the same time is a pretty big deal. That’s how Tommy thinks.

Yeah, he figured out he was adopted in middle school. It’s kind of weird his parents didn’t tell him. I mean, they have this genius living under their roof. How long did they think it would take for him to figure out that he’s got a few recessive traits that aren’t in their gene pool?

I know he was curious about meeting his bio family. But it’s not like it was new information and he was all hot to find them right now. If he had to wait until he was eighteen or twenty-one, it didn’t matter. He wasn’t really interested in meeting his bio parents. He was more interested in meeting up with a former self. I remember he said something like, “I wonder if I’ll also meet the part of me that stayed with them.” Like when his parents adopted him, a part of Tommy kept living on with his bio family. That’s how he sees stuff. Like we’re all waves of possibility and whenever we make a choice, part of us energetically continues going in the path not taken.

I don’t know if I believe it. It’s kind of cool. But it’s almost a little too much. Too theoretical. I like more concrete science stuff. Biology. Chemistry. Physics is too unreal. It has too many possibilities. It makes me kind of crazy. Like I said before, it feels like a free fall, and sometimes that gets a little scary.

Tommy was fearless. I mean, is.

It’s what made him Tommy. He was never afraid of any of the possibilities he thought up. If time could fold in such a way that he could go backwards, that was okay. Exciting, even. He wasn’t scared that something bad could happen. Being afraid was as weird to him as saying “excuse me” or “goodbye.” I don’t know if he felt afraid ever. I mean, he probably did because that’s normal, right? But he was so observational that understanding a feeling made more sense to him than feeling it.

When he left class really fast and didn’t say goodbye, I told him it made me sad. He didn’t get it. I showed him a definition of
sad
in the dictionary. Then I made the mistake of giving him an example of people being sad at funerals. Metaphors were lost on him. I remember he said something about the probability of his coming back to school the next day is a hundred percent because he’s never missed a day of school. Do you see what I mean? He didn’t feel feelings the way we do. Sometimes I wished he did because then he’d know how the rest of us felt. But at the same time, that’s why I wanted to protect him, because I didn’t want anything bad to ever happen to him. So he would keep being innocent. And fearless.

Yeah, I know I freaked out that first day of searches at the Stillwell Ranch. It was too much for me. I kept feeling like Tommy was there. Like he was right next to me. Only I couldn’t see him. And then when we got to that ravine with all the trash, it looked like this graveyard where all the possibilities in life had come to die. Like the minute before we saw all those refrigerators and tires and old suitcases, they were still out there, existing the way they always had been. But because we saw them in that dead, decomposing state, all the possibilities collapsed. It freaked me out. That’s why I didn’t go back on the second or third day. It was too hard to walk and hope and walk and hope. The whole time I was dreading what we might find. I know we didn’t find Tommy or his body, so he could still be out there, but hope will make you as crazy as particle physics. I want to stop hoping. I want to stop looking. But I also want to keep hoping and looking because that means Tommy’s still out there.

That’s why I come here. It’s my way of looking. Sometimes I sit in my car. Sometimes I get out and sit on one of those logs and listen. Sometimes I walk around in the field.

I see Mrs. Smythe out there. She looks like she hasn’t slept in three weeks. Tommy wouldn’t want to be driving her crazy with fear and hope. He might even understand it by looking at her face.

You know if Tommy were here right now, I’d have to explain to him about hope. He wouldn’t understand. There’s observation and possibility. But hope? I could try and explain it like when you have a hypothesis and you want it to turn out a certain way, that desire would be hope. But it wouldn’t compute for Tommy. I can hear him asking me, “Why would you want something to turn out a certain way?”

Do you see what I mean? It’s like all the normal emotions—hope, fear, sadness anger … Tommy doesn’t really get them the way we do, on an experiential level. If he did, he would come back. He’d know how we were feeling and he’d come back from wherever he is. At the same time, it would be awful if he were in a situation so terrifying it short-circuited his brain. Like completely fried his wiring.

I’m sorry, Sheriff. I really care about Tommy.

He’s out there. I know it. He’s missing. It’s like this bright, really bright, pure spot of light is missing. And I want it to come back.

Maybe that’s how I could tell him about sadness. I could tell him about a beautiful light that he’d seen every day. Every day he woke up and it was there. He expected it. Looked forward to it. And then one day it was gone. He might be able to understand being sad if I explained it like that.