Things We Didn't Say (7 page)

Should I have grilled him?

Whatever bond I have with Dylan is built on respect. He tells me things in his own time, usually when I listen to him practice, between songs as he rearranges his sheet music. He’ll just volunteer something, and I grab it like a coin tossed into the dirt at my feet.

I close my eyes as the smoke loosens the tension in my shoulders, as my head feels lighter. I review our last practice sessions, which were a few weeks ago now. Trying to remember what he might have said.

Something about Jacob? Or that girl flute player he likes? What was it?

The kitchen door bangs open. Through the storm door Michael looks away quickly, like he’s caught me doing something embarrassing. Masturbating, or picking my nose. I throw down the cigarette, though now I really want to finish it.

“Angel’s back,” he says, looking at the ground. “She’s upset.”

“Kids are so dramatic.”

“Hey, her brother has been missing all day.”

“I meant the other kids. The ones spreading rumors.”

I go through the kitchen to find a tight knot of conversation on the living room couch. Angel is in the crook of Michael’s arm, chewing her thumbnail. Sitting on his other side is Mallory, her knees together, pressed close to Michael’s side. His arm is stretched out along the back of the couch.

Both Angel and Mallory have whitish-blond hair, bookending Michael’s darker complexion. They all have those same bright marble-blue eyes, reminding me of their unbreakable bond, which I can never share.

They seem to notice me all at once. Angel folds her arms and looks away. Michael’s eyes flit down to the floor. Only Mallory stares directly at me. “What?” she says.

“Nothing, I’m just . . . Back inside. What can I do to help?”

“Oh, because you’ve been so much help already.”

Michael looks between Mallory and me, his brow wrinkled up, eyes questioning. Angel glares in my direction, jumping the gun on angry.

Mallory continues, never breaking her stare. “Here I am, upset about my missing child, and she picks a fight at the sink and throws a dishcloth at me.” She gestures to her damp shirt. I must have splashed her.

“I didn’t
throw
it.” I know I should be cool about this, not hyper her up, as Michael says, but my anger leaches out in my words. “And not
at
her. I dropped it in the sink.”

Michael pinches the bridge of his nose. “Please. Not now.”

I don’t know which one of us he’s talking to.

Mallory points a long finger at me. “Threw, dropped, whatever. She’s behaving like a pouty kid. When our child’s life is at stake.”

Michael squeezes Angel’s shoulders as she gives a little gasp. “His life is not at stake, we just don’t know his exact location right this minute. Let’s not borrow trouble, here.”

“Yes, we’ve got plenty already,” Mallory says, her voice pitching higher. She aims a long finger at me. “The lady of the house is with Dylan all this time and never bothers to find out what’s going on in his head. She obviously doesn’t understand what it’s like to worry about your own children.”

I retort, “I’m worried, too! But Dylan values his privacy.”

“And so do you,” spits out Angel.

The skin on my neck prickles, but then I remember my journal is stowed at the bottom of my duffle bag, which I threw in the back of the closet.

Michael rubs his temple with his free hand. “Mallory, I’m his father. If anyone should have known, it would be me. And if he trusted us so much, he wouldn’t have disappeared without responding to our calls.”

“Unless he didn’t disappear of his own free will!” Mallory starts to shake in place, visibly. Her hands, in particular, seem like they have been struck by a palsy as she kneads her fingers.

Angel starts in again on her thumbnail. Michael squeezes her hand, then slowly stands up and crosses the room to Mallory. He holds her in his arms, and she falls onto his shoulder.

Trying not to react. I swear I can feel Angel watching me.

Michael says, but his voice sounds effortful, “He’s not a helpless little boy. He can’t be just . . . snatched off the street . . .”

Angel whimpers again, and Michael unwinds himself from Mallory, then pulls her along by the hand to the couch, where he tucks each of them in on either side of him.

“To me it’s clear he went willingly. He shut off his phone. Not to silent mode, like he usually does at school, but completely off. That’s deliberate.”

“Maybe it’s out of power,” I say, struck by this sudden thought. Or he’s not the one who shut it off. This part I’m smart enough to keep to myself.

Michael soldiers on. “It was on this morning, at breakfast, remember? Look, no one dragged an unwilling teenager from a small, crowded school without anyone noticing. So, as I said, he left the school on his own. He’s not old enough to drive, and none of his friends have seen him who might have driven him someplace. So he’s hiding out somewhere, for some reason. That’s bad and upsetting, but it doesn’t mean anything like what those kids have been saying at school, Angel.”

He could have hitchhiked, it occurs to me. If he wanted to leave, he could have stuck out his thumb, and a trucker could have picked him up. With going on seven hours since this morning, he could be two states away by now.

I have a desperate urge to be valuable in this moment, to show Michael that I matter. “I remembered this: he’s been religiously getting the mail every day. Maybe he was waiting for something.”

Mallory leaps to a standing position, fists clenched. “And you didn’t pursue that, did you?” She arranges her face in a parody of an empty-headed ninny. “You just went la-di-da, about your business being the happy homemaker.” Back to sneering now, she advances on me. “I can’t believe you would let this happen to my son!”

She seizes my arms, and her force surprises me so much that I don’t realize for a moment or two that she’s wheeling me backward, my feet scrambling under me.

Michael wrenches her away, yelling her name, yelling to stop. My shoulders sting from the dented impressions of her fingers and ragged nails. From the corner of my eye, Angel is balled up on the couch now, face hidden under a curtain of hair.

“Ouch!” Mallory cries, stroking her forearm where Michael must have grabbed her, but he’s walking with me out of the room now, shouting something at her I don’t quite hear.

Chapter 6
Michael

I
guide Casey into the bedroom and sit her down on the edge of the unmade bed. She’s massaging her right shoulder but seems otherwise intact.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, which seems wholly inadequate for having to pull my ex-wife off of her. I push a strand of hair back from her face, tucking it behind her ear, tracing her jaw with my fingers. “I’m sorry,” I say, a little louder, because I really am sorry for so much.

She shrugs, not looking at me.

For years, married to Mallory, I apologized for her.
So sorry, she had a bit too much eggnog
, or
I know, Mrs. Martin, she didn’t need to scream obscenities at you over the phone because your daughter pulled Jewel’s hair
, and
No, my wife isn’t coming to parent-teacher night, she has a headache.

I thought when I divorced her, I’d get to stop doing that.

Casey is short, and perched on the edge of the bed, her feet don’t quite touch the floor. She swings them slightly, like a kid waiting for a scolding. With her ponytail and blue jeans she looks very small and young indeed.

“It’s not your fault.”

She shrugs. “Small comfort, if . . .”

She doesn’t finish the sentence, but I hear her anyway. If we don’t find him at all.

“I think we should call the police.”

Casey jerks to attention. “What about all those reassuring things you just said out there?”

“I’m trying to keep Angel from panicking. Mallory will panic if she wants to, I can’t stop that, never could. But I’m telling you the truth now. My son has been missing for hours, and . . . I’m about a hair away from calling the police, but before I do that, I want to be able to tell them something useful. Can you get into his e-mail?”

Casey wrinkles her face. “I hate to pry.”

“I know, but Case—”

She nods, cutting me off with a wave. “I’m not a magician, though, okay? I’m just a programmer, not a hacker or a spy.” She rubs her arm where Mallory grabbed her, her gaze on the floor again, unfocused. “He’s going to be mad about the snooping.”

“I’m mad at him! He could get himself hurt doing God knows what with . . . who knows? What if he’s on drugs? What if he’s been . . .”

I trail off, unable to speak it aloud.

It’s hereditary, so I’ve read. Mental illness. Not that Mallory has been officially diagnosed. I couldn’t get her to attend therapy with any regularity. And anyway, she laughed in the face of the first shrink I dragged her to, after milking her for a Valium prescription.

My father once called her “a case study in crazy.”

He said that the day after I found her white and groaning on the bathroom floor, her stomach full of Tylenol, after a particularly vicious fight. For months after that I laid awake debating if it was an attention-getting stunt or a suicide attempt, however halfhearted. Maybe both. Mallory herself likely wouldn’t know.

That was the first time I left, packing the kids off to my parents’ house in East Grand Rapids, just a few miles as the crow flies but a whole other world with its brick and ivy and leather furniture.

Dylan has always seemed to be on an even keel. Old before his time. But he is his mother’s son, too.

Casey has remained silent, but now I can feel her watching me. She puts her hand on my knee and squeezes, her trademark gesture, started as a secret
I love you
under the table when we were still trying to be coy about our feelings in front of the kids.

I put my hand over hers, my secret gesture back.

“So how do we get Mallory out of here?” Casey asks.

I swallow hard at this. “Well . . .”

Casey stands up. “She attacked me just now! If you hadn’t pulled her off me, she’d have yanked out my hair or God knows what! You’re going to let her stay?”

“It’s not that simple. She’s Dylan’s mother, and she’s worried.”

“Oh my God. You’re not going to ask her to leave. What would she have to do, Michael? Break my nose? Send me to the hospital?”

“Don’t you get hysterical, too.”

“Don’t you compare me to her.” Casey’s not shouting. Her voice is even, and cold like the air outside.

“That’s not what I meant,” I rush to say, though this is a lie and I’m sure she knows it. “But think about it. If I try to send her home it will be more fireworks, more drama. She will probably refuse, and then what? Do I physically throw her out and get arrested for assault? Do we really want to waste all that energy?”

Casey wilts from her ramrod angry posture, seeming to resign herself to the bitter reality of managing Mallory. “So, what, she gets to beat me up so we don’t upset her?”

“I’ll talk to her while you look for Dylan’s computer, then we’ll call the police.”

“Fine.” She walks past me without meeting my eyes. I reach out to her, but she doesn’t see me try.

Downstairs, I tell Mallory and Angel that Casey is going to get into the e-mail, adding, “I guess he lost his right to privacy when he pulled this stunt.”

“Assuming he did this himself,” Mallory says, biting her lip and jiggling her knee, perched on the edge of the couch next to Angel.

“For God’s sake. This is not the time for your melodrama. We’ve got quite enough regular drama, thanks.”

“Oh, is it Pile On Mallory Day again? So soon, and I haven’t even put up the decorations.”

“Yeah, Dad,” interjects Angel. “She’s worried. Why aren’t you?”

“I am worried!”

Angel leaps up from the couch. “You’re never worried! You’re always like, ‘It’ll be fine, don’t worry about it.’ It’s like you don’t even care!”

“Someone has to keep it together in this house! Do you want me to start wailing and beating my chest? What good is that going to do?”

Mallory stands up on the other side of the couch. “Stop yelling at her!”

“I’m not yelling!
”

The house rings with the echo of my words. How many times has it been this way? Mallory, me, and a kid in a triangle, shouting, my resolve to stay calm crumbling like a burned-up coal at the slightest touch.

I close my eyes. My heart is still hammering along as I say quietly, “Angel, I’m sorry. Do you believe me now that I’m upset, too? I just don’t show it the same way.”

“Whatever.” Angel flips her hair out of her face.

“Great, now I have a headache,” Mallory growls, rooting around in her purse. “Angel honey, will you get me some water?”

I turn away from them, heading up the stairs two at a time to go check on Casey’s progress in Dylan’s room.

Chapter 7
Casey

R
ummaging in Dylan’s room feels wrong, like I’m some kind of shady criminal ransacking his space.

I poke my head under his bed. No old socks, and no laptop, either.

This makes me think of Angel finding my journal in my desk—why was she even in my desk?—and reading it. While trying to focus on Dylan, all I can think is how far back she read, and what she’s going to tell Michael. I thought I’d be gone by now, the fallout happening in my absence.

She probably read about Tony, and though he’s just a friend, it wouldn’t look good from Michael’s view, since he knows nothing about him. Even worse, in my journal I’ve off-loaded so much that I can’t say out loud. Memories of a life that’s years old and yet a bottle of whiskey away. Memories of my brother, whom Michael doesn’t even know ever existed.

I’ve recorded frustrations about my life now, too, including the issues with the children. Hurtful things I would never say out loud, but if I don’t let it out, I will explode. Explode, then drink.

The weak afternoon light already fades as I crawl under his bed. Jewel will be home from Scouts soon, and I’d give my left arm to be able to solve this mystery before she comes in the door. If only I could do it without invading Dylan’s private spaces.