Suburban Renewal (18 page)

His tone was patient, almost tutorial. “Because of the change in our pelvic tilt,” he said. “Women had to
birth their babies at an earlier stage of development. If you look at other mammals, you can see that most newborns can walk within hours.”

I nodded. That was true.

“Our offspring require much more care,” he said. “They could never survive on their own outside the womb.”

“No, of course not,” I agreed.

“The human mother is busy with her offspring for years,” he said. “While she's doing that, she had less ability to feed and protect herself.”

That made sense.

“So the species evolved the necessity for a family unit,” Riv said. “With the father a more constant presence. Modern man simply institutionalized that into a vow of fidelity.”

“You don't think God or values or morality had anything to do with it?” I asked.

He laughed. “No, of course not,” he said. “When that societal modification came about, the human life span was significantly shorter than it is now. I think it's right and reasonable for a couple to commit to an exclusive child-rearing relationship when their children are small. But five to seven years of monogamy is sufficient for that. To expect healthy, intelligent men and women to remain monogamous longer than that, well, that's just silly.”

I sat across the table from him for a long moment. He was so good-looking. He was interesting. He was sophisticated. He was like no one I'd ever met in Lumkee. I would never meet anyone like him there. But what seemed
silly
to Riv, seemed to me a very basic question of honesty.

“I see it differently,” I told him. “What I see is that if
you're married, then you're married. If you don't want to be married, society says that you don't have to be. One of my in-laws would have said ‘either fish or cut bait.' And if this is what you think of the future of our relationship, then it's time for me to cut bait.”

1993

H
aving Nate spend the summer with me out in Bakersfield was one of those things that seems like the best idea at the time and turns out to be a near disaster.

I moved from the motel to a small furnished apartment in a nice working-class neighborhood. There was no cable TV and no computer. I thought, for the summer, he should give his mind a rest. I enrolled him in a summer day camp at St. Jude's Church just down the street. The staff seemed like a reasonable bunch, mostly guys, which seemed like the best idea considering Nate's issues with the opposite gender. The program had a curriculum that included swimming, basketball, wood shop and choir.

We went down there and met everybody. It all seemed fine. Nate was easygoing and appeared happy to meet everybody. I gave the director, Mr. Perez, my cell phone number and asked him to call me if there were any problems. He assured me that he would.

I anticipated that everything wouldn't go smoothly. There are always kinks to be worked out of every new operation. But none materialized. Every evening, I would come home from work and Nate would be there, wearing his camp T-shirt. Sometimes the music
on the radio would be too loud. Or he would have already eaten everything in the refrigerator. But those were normal expectations for a kid his age.

He looked good. He'd shot up in height over the summer and was nearly as tall as I was. He had a healthy-looking summer tan. He ate heartily and was consistently in a better mood than I'd seen back in Oklahoma.

On Monday mornings I would leave a check for his tuition. On Monday afternoon, there would be a receipt from the church. I even got a mid-summer progress report. Mr. Perez had written that Nate was blending in very well, though he felt that he was below average in both his religious-education level and his music skills.

I was so pleased, and because it was Nate's birthday we went out for pizza to celebrate.

So you can imagine how shocked I was when I returned home one Friday afternoon and he wasn't there. I walked through the apartment then around outside. He wasn't anywhere. I knocked on my neighbor's door. They hadn't seen him. There was an old man always sitting on his porch across the street. He said Nate had left in the morning and he hadn't seen him come back.

I went back to the apartment and called the camp director's number. Of course there was no answer. The program had closed an hour earlier. Surely someone was there. I let it ring until the answering machine picked up. Then I hung up and called again to let it ring some more.

Any parent who's ever been separated from their child knows the sense of panic that I felt. I tried to maintain my cool. There was no need to assume that
on his walk home he'd been beaten by muggers and left for dead. I simply needed to retrace his steps.

I walked the seven blocks between the apartment and St. Jude's. I was calm. But I was also aware. I looked in every store window and down every alley.

When I got to the church I went through the gates and into the building. It was empty except for an old woman praying in the front. I walked around outside, through the school-yard area and the back parking lot. I sighed with relief when I spotted a group of kids playing basketball, but Nate wasn't with them.

“I'm looking for my son,” I told them. “Nate Braydon. Have you seen him?”

They all shrugged and shook their heads.

“Don't know him” was the general consensus.

“He goes to the summer camp here,” I said.

“I go to that,” one of the boys said. “But I don't know him. Is he one of the little kids?”

“He's fourteen.”

The boy raised his eyebrows. “Then he'd be in my group, but he ain't,” the guy said definitively.

“About six foot, brown hair, blue eyes?”

The kid shrugged.

“Mr. Perez is in the gym,” one of the other guys said. “Maybe you should ask him.”

“I thought it was locked up,” I said.

“You can get in this back door.”

“Great, thanks.”

I hurried over to the entrance they'd indicated and, sure enough, I found Mr. Perez lifting weights.

“Hey, sorry to barge in on your workout,” I said. “I'm Sam Braydon, Nate's dad.”

He wiped his sweaty palms on a towel and stepped forward to shake my hand.

“Hi, yeah, I remember you, Mr. Braydon. How ya doing?”

“Not as well as I could be. I got home this afternoon and Nate wasn't there,” I explained. “Do you have any idea where he might be?”

The guy's brow furrowed. “Me?”

“Yeah.”

“I haven't seen him since he left here,” Perez said.

“Do you remember what time he left?” I asked. “Or which direction he went? Or if anyone was with him?”

Perez was looking at me very strangely, and when he spoke his words were slow and considered.

“I meant, I haven't seen him since he left the program in June. He transferred over to Peter & Paul about two days after he started here,” he said. “They have that marine biology intro study. We lose boys to that program every year.”

“What? You're the one that sent me the report,” I pointed out. “You said he was fitting in very well. But that he wasn't doing well in music class.”

“We don't send home reports,” he replied. “It's a summer program. The students aren't working for grades.”

“The report was signed by you,” I said.

The puzzled look on Perez's face disappeared completely and he was suddenly very professional, very in-charge.

“I think we'd better go up to my office and start making some phone calls.”

Over the next hour and a half we didn't find Nate, but the truth about his summer activities slowly came out.

He had brought a letter to school from me, informing the staff at St. Jude's that I had decided to move Nate
into the summer program at Peter & Paul. It was a very well-written adult-sounding letter. I'm not sure something I'd actually written would have sounded that good. Perez called the director at Peter & Paul and determined for a certainty that Nate had never attended there.

“The receipts could be just as fake,” I said. “But the checks are cashed.”

“Have you seen the canceled checks?”

“No, those go to my wife in Oklahoma,” I said. “But I know the money was taken out of my account.”

“He may have washed the checks,” Perez told me.

“Washed them?”

“There's a process where you can get the ink off,” he said. “Then you just fill in the payee and the amount and forge the name. I bet if you go to one of the little check-cashing places around your apartment, they'll tell you that Nate's been cashing checks there made out to him.”

“Where would he learn to do something like that?”

“Bad companions, I suppose.”

“He doesn't have any companions,” I said.

Perez nodded. “Does he use the Internet?”

Ultimately, we contacted the police. Officer Reynolds very quickly discovered that Nate did indeed cash checks at the Korean grocery around the corner. And that very morning, he'd cashed one for three hundred dollars.

“Three hundred? I don't know if I even have that much money in my account.”

“The woman thought it was a lot,” the officer told me. “But he's been cashing checks there for a couple of months and they've all been good.”

Officer Reynolds told me that Nate spent most of his
mornings in front of a computer screen at the public library. Several people in the building easily recognized his picture. Beyond that they weren't quite sure what he did with his days. Although he was known to hang out at the mall, flirting with a girl at the pretzel stand named Lisa.

“Lisa thinks he was going up to L.A. today,” the policeman told me. “She says he's been talking about it for a while.”

“L.A? Why would he go to L.A.?”

The policeman looked grave but answered a very official “I wouldn't want to speculate about that.”

I checked Nate's room. He'd taken his backpack and some of his clothes.

“That's a good sign,” Officer Reynolds told me. “If he was planning never to come back, he would have taken everything.”

The words
never come back
went through me like a cold chill.

“We should be able to locate the ticket agent at the bus station to verify if that's how your son is traveling,” he said. “And, of course, we'll notify LAPD to be on the lookout for the boy.”

I sat alone, stunned, in my little apartment. I needed to call Corrie. But I had no idea what I was going to tell her. With a terrible sense of dread, I picked up the phone.

“Oh, hi, Daddy,” Lauren said. “Listen, can we call you back, I've got somebody on the other line.”

“No, honey,” I answered. “Tell your friend goodbye and let me speak to your mother.”

She hesitated, momentarily surprised by the unusual request.

“Sure, Daddy,” she said.

A minute later Corrie was on the phone.

“Sam? What's wrong?”

“Nate's run away.”

Corrie flew into L.A. the next day. I didn't even ask her how much the ticket must have cost. I drove down to pick her up at the airport. I had told her not to come. That there was nothing that she could do, but she couldn't stay away.

We talked to the police, visited drop-in shelters for runaways, but mostly we spent the day aimlessly driving up and down the streets.

We arrived back at the apartment in Bakersfield in the wee hours of the morning. We fell into bed, exhausted, but we couldn't sleep. We lay awake wondering aloud where we had gone wrong, how we had failed.

Corrie told me that Nate had slipped away from her years ago. That my father had stolen him from her.

“I'm sorry, Corrie,” I told her. “I should never have brought that man into our house.”

“He was your father, Sam,” she told me. “Of course you wanted to be close to him. Even Gram understood that.”

“She did?”

“She told me so.”

“Thanks, Corrie,” I said.

“Hold me, Sam,” she answered.

We made love that night. The sweetest, saddest, bittersweet passion that we'd ever shared. Then, exhausted, we fell asleep.

We awakened a little after dawn, groggy and still tired. I went out to get the paper while Corrie was making coffee. The paper wasn't on the step as it usually was, but I shrugged and went back inside. As soon
as I stepped in the door, I saw it on the lamp table. I was puzzled and glanced up at Corrie. She was standing beside a backpack carelessly dropped in the front hall.

Our eyes met for one moment.

I went charging into his room. He was there, a little dirty, a little smelly, but sleeping like an angel.

I immediately started shaking him awake.

Crying with joy and screaming at him with anger at the same time.

“Where have you been?” I demanded. “What have you been doing? Do you know that you scared us half to death?”

He awakened, startled. With no answers to the questions.

“What's Mom doing here?” he finally asked.

“What do you think she's doing here? Her son ran away. He scared his parents to death. 'Cause his parents didn't know that he was lying and stealing and God only knows what else while they were trusting him.”

I let go of Nate and he crumpled into a seated position on the bed. I wanted to slap him so hard, I stepped back all the way to the other side of the room. Corrie was in the doorway, pale and scared and joyous and anxious.

“Everything's cool,” Nate told us. “Don't get like wigged out over this. I went to see a friend in L.A. I thought if I told you, you might not let me go.”

“Why would you do such a thing?”

He gave a little shrug and a smirk. “Because I can,” he answered.