Among the Missing (14 page)

“F.D.…” he says. He has been sitting there silent for a while, thinking, mulling things over, and he knows that F.D. wants him to explain things. “You know, the truth is,” he says. “The truth is, I really don’t know what’s going on with your dad. Nobody has told me anything.”

“Where is he?” F.D. says.

Hollis swallows, thinks. “I don’t know,” he says.

F.D. says nothing, and Hollis feels sorry. He would like to be a real uncle, someone who could explain the world to F.D., someone who could make sense of it.

“He ran away from home, didn’t he?” F.D. says.

“Yes,” Hollis says.

“I knew that,” F.D. says. He sighs heavily, and Hollis puts his hand on F.D.’s neck, letting it rest there, warm and—he hopes—comforting.

“I’ll always be here, though,” Hollis says. “I won’t leave you.” He means it. But he is also nervous. What has he done? He hasn’t thought out the consequences clearly, and now a gray uncertainty begins to glide through him. He thinks to say, “Don’t tell your mom you know,” but he knows that it would be wrong. Then he realizes what he should have said in the first place:
Ask your mother
.

“You should talk to your mom about it,” he says. “If you … well, if you don’t mention that I told you, that might be best. I mean, maybe she wouldn’t have wanted me to be the first one to say something.…” He hesitates because he can’t read what’s behind F.D.’s heavy expression. “I’m not saying you should lie or anything. You shouldn’t lie to your mom.”

“Well,” F.D. says, “she lied to me.” He looked at Hollis sharply. “She lies all the time.”

“No, she doesn’t,” Hollis says, but not insistently. He is trying to imagine how Jill will react. He is aware now that he has betrayed her, thoughtlessly, that he has trod into a place where he doesn’t belong at all. He has always tried to think carefully about right and wrong, but often the gray areas other people see are invisible to him. He wonders if she will be angry. He imagines her saying, “How dare you tell F.D. such a thing. How dare you make me look like a liar! What makes you think you know anything about it!” He cringes. And then he thinks, What if Wayne really does come back? Then he will have done a truly awful thing. Then he will have damaged Wayne’s relationship with F.D. No matter what happens, Hollis thinks, he has permanently
altered things between them, and he feels a slow undertow of dread. Everyone is going to be disgusted with him, furious. He can imagine doors closing permanently, his excursions with F.D. ending, becoming unwelcome at Wayne and Jill’s house. He and F.D. look at each other, and he sees that F.D. is quavering on the edge of tears.

“Oh, F.D.,” he says. “Don’t cry. Please don’t cry.”

And F.D. doesn’t. They get up and begin to walk, and he feels humble and clumsy in the wake of F.D.’s churning thoughts. Terrible, terrible, terrible, he thinks. He wants to slap himself.

“F.D.,” he says after a while. “I think I’ve made a terrible mistake. I’m thinking that I shouldn’t have told you what I told you.”

“I know,” F.D. says. He is grim, though they are walking through a row of bright booths, through the hawkers’ promises of prizes and fun. He shakes his head heavily.

“How do you know?”

F.D. shrugs. “I just do. Mom wouldn’t have wanted you to tell me. She’ll be mad, won’t she?”

“She should be mad,” Hollis said. “I did something that was really wrong.”

“Oh,” F.D. says. He seems to consider this for a moment. “Why were you wrong?”

“Because your mom trusted me not to say anything. And I let her down.” He thinks for a moment, trying to explain it clearly. “It’s like that little girl and the snake. She’ll never trust that snake again. You see?”

“Oh,” F.D. says. “Yeah.” And Hollis realizes after a moment that the analogy is unclear; it doesn’t make a lot of sense. He lapses again into thought, looking ahead to a group of people
beginning to gather around where the motorcycle sits on a stage. The stage is festooned with scalloped ribbons and Chinese lanterns; tiny disco balls fracture the light into spangles that glimmer brilliantly on the motorcycle’s chrome, and their faces.

“Uncle Hollis,” F.D. says. “Who do you love more? My mom or me?”

“You,” Hollis says. He doesn’t even have to think. “I love you more than anyone else in the world. That’s why I’m sorry that I did a wrong thing. I didn’t want to make you sad.”

“That’s okay,” F.D. says. And he reaches up and rubs against Hollis’s arm, and Hollis can feel the eagerness of his affection. I have put him in a terrible position, Hollis thinks. But he doesn’t know what he can do about it.

For the last month, Hollis has been trying to remember the last thing Wayne said to him. It was probably something mundane—“Good-bye,” or “So long,” or “See you around”—but of course, given that Wayne would disappear a few days later, even these pleasantries are potentially heavy with meaning. But he can’t recall. It was an ordinary evening, like any other. He and Wayne had been drinking beer in the garage, and Jill had stayed in the house, watching TV. She often did this. “You need your ‘boy time’ together,” she’d always said, ironically, though Hollis always liked it best when she sat with them and joined in the conversation.

But in any case, there was nothing to indicate that Wayne was planning to leave. What did they talk about? Movies, mostly, as Hollis remembered. They talked about a recent plane crash, in Scotland, that had been all over the news; the plane might have been downed by a terrorist bomb planted in the luggage. Hollis remembered this only now. The operator of the Hammerhead
had brought it back to him, and he recalls Wayne mentioning it. “What do you think goes through your mind when you’re going down like that? When you know you’re going to die?”

“I don’t know,” Hollis said. “But you know what I’d be thinking? I’d be thinking, ‘This is going to really, really hurt!’ ”

Wayne had laughed at that, and had told the old joke they both loved in childhood: “Q: What’s the last thing that goes through a mosquito’s mind when he hits your windshield? A: His butt.” And they’d laughed some more, full of beer and dumb camaraderie.

And it strikes him suddenly, a heavy blow. Wayne
knew
he was leaving, even as they sat there laughing and telling stale jokes. But he would never have told Hollis. Hollis can see himself as they see him, even as they are making their secret plans and living their secret lives. He is a distraction to them, an amusement, and he understands Wayne’s occasional flashes of anger, too—he can see himself as Wayne saw him, full of earnest, innocent stupidity, chattering vacantly about the “weird things he’d noticed,” not someone who had ever really mattered. His cheeks grow warm, and he wishes that he’d responded to Wayne’s question more seriously.
What goes through your mind when you know you’re going to die?
He could have finally told Wayne about that kid, that kid whose corpse fell apart when he tried to pick it up. He could have said a lot of things. And maybe then Wayne would have respected him. Maybe Wayne would have told him the truth.

He is so lost in thought that when the man on the stage reads the winner’s name, he begins to applaud with the rest of
the crowd before he realizes that the man has just read his own name.

“Hollis Merchant!” the man says. “Is Hollis Merchant in the audience today? You are the winner!”

F.D. whoops. “That’s us! That’s us!” And Hollis is brought back abruptly from his reverie. The crowd has turned to look at him, their eyes wide and expectant. And miraculously, F.D. is healed, is made whole and happy again. He is jumping up and down. “We won!” he cries, his voice shrill with excitement, and hurls his body against Hollis’s in a rough dance of joy. “You and me, Uncle Hollis! Remember? You and me!”

Hollis lifts F.D. onto his shoulders, and the weight of him settles easily into place. Despite everything, he can’t help feeling proud and happy, just as F.D. does. The crowd applauds as they walk up to the stage, probably thinking that F.D. is his son, and Hollis is willing to borrow this for the time being. Once F.D. is on his shoulders, he can stride to the stage.

And he has a vision, what he should write in his journal:
What if you believed that everything in life was like a prize? What if you thought of the world as a big random drawing, and you were always winning things, the world offering them up with a big grin, like an emcee’s: Here you go, Hollis. Here is a motorcycle. Here is a little boy who loves you. Here is a weird experience, here is something bad that you should mull over because it will make you a better person. What if you could think that life was this free vacation you’d won, and you won just because you happened to be alive?

He is not deluded. He can see clearly that he is foolish, that his life is made up of a series of muddled interpretations and distractions, that he doesn’t know anything about the world he’s moving into. But he can also see the two of them on that motorcycle, in those golden helmets that F.D. dreamed up, going
somewhere. “You and me,” F.D. whispers, and the roads are clear, there are green fields and wildflowers on either side, and the motorcycle seems to be driving itself. He can even close his eyes for a moment, as the wind and velocity sweep over them. They fly down the highway, calmly, headed off to wherever it will take them.

O
n the second floor of an old Victorian house that has been converted into tiny apartments, Dennis dreams that he is holding a baby. The infant in the dream is wrapped in a gray-blue blanket, with only its round face peeking out. Dennis can feel its limbs squirming beneath the swaddling as he smooths his palm lightly over the infant’s cheek. When his hand touches the baby’s skin, he wakes up.

Above him, he hears the woman on the third floor, walking. Her floorboards—his ceiling—sigh as she goes, as if she’s stepping over shifting ice. He is aware, even as he opens his eyes, that the dream is partially hers, a seed she has planted. He doesn’t know her really, but he thinks about her often. She walks across his ceiling at all hours of the night. In certain rooms he will occasionally
hear a radio playing above him, and on some evenings if he sits by the radiator in his bedroom he will hear her stumbling, sweetly awkward monotone as she reads her son a story. Dennis believes that her husband has left her. Perhaps he is dead. Perhaps there never was a husband to begin with.

It is the woman upstairs, or the dream, or maybe simply the fact that it is a new town and he knows no one and he is twenty-five years old and spends far too much time (he thinks) in his own head, too much time lying on his bed in his underwear with a beer growing warm on his chest as he listens. It is a combination of all these things, no doubt. Something makes him decide to call the hospital, which is located in the city that he lived in before he moved to this new one. He is aware that it is foolish to call the hospital. But he just wants to see what they will say.

So he calls one morning from work during his lunch when his coworkers are out, they all seem to have places to go, their days full of purpose, et cetera. He calls and is transferred several times. While he waits, classical music that seems somewhat familiar is played for him through the phone lines.

The lady who finally answers is very professional about the whole thing, very administrative. He has signed a contract that is legally binding, she says, and (hundreds of miles away) he nods earnestly into the receiver. I know that, he says. He explains that he doesn’t want to cause trouble, he’s just sort of curious, and she says, “That’s sweet,” in a condescending voice that suggests that she is probably pretty, probably used to turning men down quickly and cheerfully, a tight fake smile reducing them to a speck. Dennis feels himself shrinking. “You must get
calls like this all the time,” he says apologetically, and she says, “No, frankly, I don’t.”

Well, he thinks when she hangs up the phone. He can feel himself blushing, though of course no one knows whom he has called, and he certainly won’t tell anyone. He feels stupid.

Maybe it is strange to wonder, he thinks: odd. It wasn’t as if there were love involved, not even physical contact, just an easy fifty dollars he’d heard about through a friend who was in the first year of medical school. The friend had been doing it about once a week and he got Dennis in, though Dennis’s vital statistics, his looks and IQ and extracurricular activities were probably not as impressive as those of the medical school boys. So maybe they didn’t even use his. He’d only done it because he really had needed the cash at the time—it was his senior year in college.

When he went in he’d felt very embarrassed. The nurse was not much older than he—a short, stocky girl who wore her hair in a way that made him think maybe she’d had an unhappy childhood. She couldn’t look at him. She just gave him some forms to fill out on one of those clipboards with a pen hanging on a beaded metal chain like the kind that is attached to bathtub drain plugs. He turned in the paperwork and the nurse led him down a hospital-smelling corridor, both of them shy, silence trailing down the long hallway until they came to a halt in front of a little bathroom. She gave him a kind of test tube with a screw-on lid and cleared her throat, shifting her weight in those chunky white shoes, and she opened a door and said that
there were some magazines he could look at if he wished. She might have used the word “peruse.”