The Glittering World (16 page)

After he hung up the phone, Jason brooded over their past conversations, searching for a clue as to what the police believed had actually happened. Did they really think that Elisa and Blue had skipped town? He suspected from the start of the whole ordeal that they would be stonewalled, seen as outsiders by the authorities. But now that he grew to understand the cove and the dynamics of its population—mystics and philosophers and draft dodgers, sweat lodgers and marijuana growers and meth cookers—the entire community’s reticence made more sense. How do you go missing from a place people go specifically to get lost?

“That didn’t sound good.” Gabe fed the woodstove before returning to the cracked leather club chair in front of the fire.
In his lap were the faded copies of
The Starling Cove Believer
, which he read and reread with the focus of a code breaker attempting to crack an encrypted cable.

“They already knew about Blue disappearing as a child,” Jason said. “Makes you wonder what else they’re keeping from us.”

Or who else. It was bad enough trying to get in touch with Elisa’s mother, but he had even less success reaching Blue’s. The woman didn’t pick up her phone. The only time Jason had managed to speak with her was the day after the disappearance. Jason was well aware of her deteriorated physical state and tried his best not to alarm her, but she despaired at the news nevertheless, and in spectacular fashion. “I told him!” she cried in a mournful wail that fast dissolved into a tubercular cough. “I told him. I told him . . .”

“I wouldn’t worry just yet,” Jason had said by way of reassurance. “I only thought you might have some idea where they might have headed. They probably, you know, went on an adventure,” he added, parroting the line the police had used on him.

“Not the first time,” she muttered, and not much else.

Not the first time
. Now Jason knew what she had meant.

He picked up the phone again and called the
Cape Breton Post
reporter who had interviewed him in the days following the disappearance. The woman essentially confirmed Detective Jessed’s account, saying she had been asked not to report on the prior vanishing. When Jason asked her what she thought might have happened, the reporter pleaded ignorance and suggested he take it up with the police. This fresh angle, like all the others, was going nowhere.

He tried to clear his mind by returning calls to his clients,
the ones he hadn’t already referred to a colleague with whom he shared offices.
At this rate
, he thought,
I might not have a practice to go back to
. “We can pick up right where we left off,” he promised Walt Kerner, a sixty-something phobic with a debilitating case of OCD who refused to be treated by anyone else; it was enough work getting him to his scheduled appointments. “One more week and I’ll be back.”

Jason cursed himself for lying. How could he ever go back to New York, when Elisa was still out there somewhere? But he felt a queasy thrill at the thought that he could hit the road and put the Cape Breton Highlands in the rearview, disappear himself and let someone else clean up the mess for once. Gabe, for example, who would probably stay forever, in his own rudderless way. How terribly unexpected it would be for Jason to up and leave! How very out of character!

Which was why he knew he could never do it. Jason was far too adept at his role, the One Who Makes Everything Better. Even if that phone call from the doctor’s office had meant what he feared (and he was intermittently able to convince himself that in fact it did not), he could never leave. Not unless he was forced.

It was well past dark when Jason finally ended his last phone session. Gabe sat before the woodstove, scribbling furiously as usual in his sketch pad amid an increasing array of reference materials: Fred Cronin’s newsletters, maps and local histories, apocryphal lore culled from the local library and the shelves of the MacLeod House, a growing collection of scrawled-upon pages scattered all around. Jason studied him. They’d gotten along quite well these past few days, the shared activity of the canvass having brought them closer. Though the twenty-year-old was technically a man, Jason couldn’t help but see Gabe as
a child, one mixed up in something he had neither the depth for, nor the constitution. Jason had lost his wife, but at times it was Gabe who was distraught to the point of seeming widowed, when he had only lost, what, his boss? A friend? Or more?

In truth, Jason actually didn’t know Gabe terribly well; the boy seemed to have no friends or family to speak of, as if he’d sprung fully formed out of the ether, having just kind of shown up in their lives one day. The day, Jason supposed, that Blue had decided he needed someone else besides Elisa.

It was a subject of gossip—unclear, even to Elisa—if the connection between Blue and Gabe was romantic or not. Blue had drawn more than his fair share of admirers, but their relationship appeared rooted in something greater than base attraction, at least on Gabe’s end. It was obvious the kid adored him, the same way Elisa had. Now here Jason was, stuck in this deceptively bucolic purgatory with no one to lean on but a virtual—and exceedingly young—stranger.

“What?” Gabe caught him staring, and snapped his sketch pad shut.
Is he drawing me?
Jason wondered. “What is it?”

“Just thinking.” Jason shook his head. “You hungry?”

“Nope.” Gabe raised his beer bottle. “Thanks, though.”

Jason reheated some grilled chicken from the previous evening, food he had set aside for Gabe. Gabe, who never so much as considered eating it, who didn’t seem to eat much of anything anymore, save a handful of sugar cubes or a candy bar here and there. Jason microwaved the plastic-wrapped plate and sat down to eat at the dining room table, mere feet from Gabe and the woodstove. He took his time tasting each bite, allowing the food and a freshly opened bottle of Pinot Noir to rouse him from thoughts of bad endings.

People, after all, had a tendency to vanish on him. His father
had cut out on his mom soon after she’d given birth to Jason, having simultaneously knocked up another woman. Even years later, Jason’s mother would drive up to Harlem to deposit him and his older sister, Deirdre, on the doorstep of their father’s apartment as a kind of passive-aggressive reminder of his former family. One night, their mother brought a rusty-handled revolver as well, and blasted a hole in the door, nearly killing their father in the process. Seven-year-old Jason could hear the neighbors laughing at his mother—“Check out this crazy little Oriental bitch!”—as his father’s second wife cursed them down the hall and into the elevator.

They returned the very next day. Their mother waited for a neighbor to exit the building before she slipped inside and marched them upstairs to their father’s hastily repaired door. She stood them behind her and banged on the dinted metal until her knuckles welted red. “What in goddamn hell do you want from me?” their father shouted, yanking the door open. His expression shifted from anger to fear when she pulled the revolver from her handbag, then shifted again to shock as she raised the gun and put the barrel to her temple. “I told you!” she shouted. “You did this! You did this!”

Jason went for the gun, but it was too late. In an explosion of sound and dust, his mother’s brains were spattered across the sickly green walls, along his outstretched arm, his face, bits of meat in his sister’s hair and against the wall, everywhere. Their father dropped to his knees over her body, pant legs soaking up the blood that pooled on the dirty-white linoleum. Though it was their mother who had died, they never saw or spoke to their father again.

They moved in with their mother’s mother in Bay Ridge, where they lived with her for the next fifteen years. It wasn’t
long after their grandmother passed away that Jason’s sister—never the most reality-based soul—finally lost it altogether. Deirdre was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and admitted to Clearside Hospital in Queens, less than six miles from their mother’s gravesite in Flushing Cemetery. Jason had faithfully made his weekly pilgrimage to his sister’s ward for two decades now, another responsibility he’d shirked in the past three weeks. Did Deirdre, in her Trifluoperazine-induced haze, even grasp that he had failed to show, had in fact failed
her
, as he was now failing to find his wife?

The closest he ever came to seeing their father one last time was in high school, when he was on the Brooklyn Tech track team and had a meet with Thurgood Marshall High in Harlem. “Hey, Howard,” his teammate Brian had said while scanning the draw on the coach’s clipboard, “I think you’re supposed to race yourself.” At first he thought the duplicate name was an error, but sure enough, there was a boy on the Thurgood Marshall team named Jason Howard.

He scoped out the competition, and there was no mistaking him; it was like looking into some kind of distorted mirror. The moment he laid eyes on the sixteen-year-old—his same height and build with his father’s same eyes, an all-black version of himself, as if the Korean half had been bled out of him—he knew what had happened, and who the kid was. His father’s other son, the very same age and also named Jason, after his father’s father.

Jason had begun to shake. He eavesdropped on the boy and his teammates, on this other imposter Jason who could talk cool; not like Jason, who prided himself on his locution. It was easy for him to brush off the ribbing he got from some of his reverse ’round-the-way friends for sounding white, since he knew
he was going places, but seeing this other Jason rattled him to the core, made him feel he was lesser, half a man. This other Jason, he was what their father had always wanted; he was the son good enough to keep. And then the thought hit him like a punch to the stomach:
What if my dad is actually here?

His heart racing, Jason turned toward the stands. He scanned the half dozen rows of bleachers, his watering eyes straining as he searched for angry or bewildered stares, the only expressions he could remember ever seeing on his father’s face. But everyone looked so pleased. A wall of beaming parents, cheering students, younger siblings jockeying for a better view of the field. All so happy and proud.

And then he found him. Second row from the top and grinning like a big old fool in a Thurgood Marshall baseball cap:
Dad!
Jason was about to call out when he saw the man seated beside his father had the exact same features: the square jaw, the pronounced, leonine cheekbones, his big brown eyes. Not only him, but the woman right below them, and also the toddler she had balanced on her knee. They were all him now, every single person in the stands was him, each wearing the same shit-eating grin.
Dad and Dad and Dad and Dad
. A sea of his father’s faces, and now they were all laughing as well. And just like that, the bright sky above went midnight dark and Jason swooned, taking a knee as he dry heaved beside the dusty green track.

“Howard?” Brian appeared beside him and placed a hand on Jason’s back. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” he said, and shrugged him off. But as he tried to get up he listed, then keeled over and passed out. When he awoke he was being loaded into an ambulance behind the sports facility, an EMT adjusting an oxygen mask upon his face and exhorting him to breathe, just breathe.

Even then Jason craned his neck out the back of the ambulance, a vain attempt to try to catch a glimpse of his father, who probably wasn’t there in the first place.

He never ran track again.

“Jason?”

He looked up from the table to find Gabe watching him. “You okay?”

“What’s that?”

“You’re trembling.”

Jason raised his hand. Sure enough, his fingers were shaking, a hummingbird blur of motion.

“Are you cold?” Gabe asked. “Do you want to sit by the fire?” He started to get up, but Jason gestured for him to sit.

“I’m fine,” Jason said, and clamped his hand to his knee. “I feel hot, actually.” He wiped a glaze of sweat from his brow. “Wow. This is . . . unexpected.”

“You want to get some fresh air?”

Jason lowered himself onto the porch swing. Gabe was in silhouette against the railing, the nearly full moon bright in a cloudless sky. They sat in silence, listened to the sounds of birds and insects flitting about the cove, the low breeze in the grass, the trees. The wine warmed Jason’s skin, and he settled a bit; he’d had a few panic attacks before, and knew the symptoms both personally and professionally.
That’s what you get for dwelling on the past
. No wonder he preferred peering inside other people’s heads instead.

Gabe stared off into the woods beyond the house, and soon Jason found himself following suit, accompanied by a nagging sensation that something was staring back. This place was getting to him.

“Feeling any better?” Gabe said after a while.

“Yes, actually. Thank you. I’m just tense.”

“I know what you mean.” Gabe sipped from his beer, then spat over the railing. “Ever since Blue—ever since they both went missing—I’ve felt . . . different. Emptier. Like a part of me is missing too.”

Jason tried not to look at the trees.

“So what next?” Gabe said. “More canvassing?”

“Couldn’t hurt. I also want to find out more about Blue’s grandmother, and what happened when he went missing. The first time.”

“Shouldn’t we ask Maureen and Donald about it?”

“Absolutely. It would be nice to have some light shed on all this. We should also track down the one who went missing along with Blue, the little girl.”

“That’s going to be tough, unless you’ve got a Ouija board. According to the newsletters, she drowned a few months after they walked out of the woods.”

“Jesus. Her poor family . . . Can you imagine, after going through all that? Well, maybe her folks are still around. I’ll ask Maureen when they come back from Halifax.”

“What about Fred Cronin?” Gabe said. “I’m sure he has plenty left to tell us.”

“No doubt. But that’s not the kind of path I want to travel down.”

“Why not? I know he sounds kind of crazy, but still. If we want the police to pursue all leads, shouldn’t we be doing the same?”