The Road to You (25 page)

I rolled my eyes. “C’mon, that’s not big
or
important. Doesn’t count. Tell me the other one.”

There was a funny twist to his lips and, for a second, I thought he was going to give in. Allow me to take a few steps deeper into his carefully guarded private world.

But, instead, he shook his head. “Nope. Not yet.” Then, “When did you say you were gonna turn eighteen?”

“July first.” I calculated what was left of the month. “In thirteen days.”

He shot me a speculative look. “Well, maybe I’ll tell you then.”

Normal, Illinois

D
ONOVAN SURVEYED
the tree-filled Quad in the heart of the Illinois State University campus with the careful scrutiny of an Army lieutenant before ripping an old flyer off of a nearby bulletin board. “This is not the ‘Promised Land,’” he muttered, regarding the flimsy sheet of paper with his typical skepticism.

“No,” I said in a disgruntled voice. Hey, I could do disenchantment as well as anyone. “But it is Bloomington-Normal. The
other
Twin Cities.”

He waved the yellow flyer at me. “This thing says the Grateful Dead actually played a concert here, on this campus, at the Horton Field House back in April.” He motioned toward the lush lawn and pretty foliage and raised his eyebrows at the absurdity. “Yeah, sure. Welcome to Deadhead Central.”

I glanced around the Quad myself, taking in the laidback summer-school students weaving between the buildings or lounging idly under one of the trees. Donovan’s “promised land” song reference made sense now, and I had to admit that, pleasant as ISU was, this wasn’t a place that screamed out “musical hotspot full of generational trendsetters.” People looked to the coasts for that kind of thing, not a cornfield college in Middle America.

“Think Jerry Garcia might still be hiding out somewhere in town?” I said, getting the snicker out of Donovan that I’d hoped.

“Not unless he’s having a secret psychedelic party with a bong and a side dish of acid at a local frat house.” He pointed at the journal. “What did Gideon say about this place again?”

“It was the entry with the step-by-step directions for draining coolant.” I grimaced. I wasn’t going to read it all to him a second time.

“Oh, yeah,” Donovan said, folding up the Grateful Dead flyer and pocketing it. “The one where the date in the journal said May eighteenth, but it was really July sixth.”

“Exactly.”

He nodded. “So we know the dates were added later and that they were fake. That the equations are the key to figuring out when the guys were really in these places. But what about the stuff that was written above it on most of the pages? The chemicals and procedures at the top? A lot of that information had to already be in there, right?”

“I guess so,” I said.

“Do you remember your brother writing in the book during high school? Did he keep it with him out in the garage or somewhere private?”

I thought about this. I had no idea where Gideon had kept it, but I could remember a number of times when I’d caught him jotting down some notes inside of it. He didn’t seem worried about me watching him in the midst of his journaling, though. If anything, he struck me as amused, particularly when I insinuated that the journal was some kind of tawdry record of his encounters with girls. He dared me with his sly smiles to ask him about it for real, no teasing involved. But I didn’t. Not even once.

I’d never regretted my lack of curiosity on any subject more than this.

“He seemed pretty open about it, if that’s what you’re asking,” I told Donovan. “No evidence of him keeping any serious secrets. Honestly, I don’t even think he even hid it.”

Not like I did with my diary.

Which, I recalled with a cavernous ache in the center of my chest, Gideon had found one summer in the tool shed, in that cedar box. But, for once, he didn’t laugh at me. Didn’t read through what I thought then was an interesting personal life. He just put the key back in my desk drawer and told me to hang onto it. That the box was a good hiding place for my diary, as long as I was the only one with the key…

Although, a few weeks later, after writing in my diary one evening, I realized I couldn’t put it back in the box. I’d somehow misplaced the key again, and it was forever lost—or so I’d thought.

Donovan shrugged. “I don’t know then. Still think it’s strange that he’d write down so many easy procedures in that journal. Unless he was losing his memory and wanted to make sure he wouldn’t forget them.”

This struck me as an odd theory and one I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around. “Do you really think that could happen? Is there any reason someone might fear getting amnesia at age eighteen?”

He paused and stomped on a discarded cigarette butt at the edge of the Quad. “No, not really. Not unless he was a war vet. Sometimes the shock and terror of battle can make an otherwise healthy man lose his memory, but Gideon wasn’t a soldier. In fact, if anyone was anti-establishment…”

He shook his head. “I have no idea what the hell was going on in your brother’s brain, Aurora. Or in my brother’s, for that matter. But I do wonder if…
if
…they’re really alive, where they are now and how we might find them.”

We walked around the ISU campus for an hour more—reading signs, watching people, trying to make connections that weren’t there or that we simply couldn’t see.

“Well, we now know that ISU was Illinois’s
first public university
,” I said, parroting the words on a plaque we’d read, which commemorated this. “I don’t know much else about it that’s relevant to our search, though.”

“Look on the bright side,” Donovan said. “At least you won’t have to make up details about college campuses when you talk to you dad tonight. You can tell him all about this one.” He waved his palm at the, admittedly, eye-catching university tennis-court building—a place that looked like royalty might live there. It was, in fact, called Ewing Castle.

For a moment, my vision—clouded by the past—cleared, and I saw ISU for what it was: A large, well-respected university in the heart of the heartland. College students, warmed inside and out by the summer sun, were engrossed in their studies, their sports and their social lives.

They weren’t trying to parse out bits of meaning from a grease-stained document.

They weren’t obsessed with their family’s recent tragic history.

They were daydreaming of their futures and brimming with the excitement and hopefulness of youth.

I felt a powerful stab of envy. But, when I glanced at Donovan again, none of my longing for a normal life seemed to register on his face. He either didn’t want it…or he’d forgotten what it felt like to have it.

“Did you ever check out any colleges?” I asked him as we meandered back toward the Trans Am.

He made a show of hunting for his keys and unlocking the car door for me. But I recognized the motion for what it was—stalling—and looked at him, expectant, until he couldn’t ignore me any longer.

“I didn’t really think about it after Jeremy and Gideon disappeared,” he said finally.

“But what about before that? You had to know when you first enlisted that you’d eventually qualify for the GI Bill,” I said. “Knowing you were eligible for several years of free tuition had to make the idea of college at least a little tempting, right?”

“Just because you have the opportunity to do something, it doesn’t always mean it’s the right thing to do. Besides, when I enlisted, it was a long time ago. Everything was different back then.”

I slid into the car and watched him mess with a couple of old receipts on the dash, but I wasn’t going to let him off the hook that easily.

“No kidding,” I said. It wasn’t like I didn’t
know
just how different it was between the Before and the After. “But c’mon, Donovan. You had to have had
some
idea of what you wanted to do with your life. If our brothers hadn’t gone missing were you planning on being career military? Was there a subject you were hoping to study—if not at a university then at a technical college? A dream job? A rock band? A fantasy wife and kids?”

He snapped his head to glare at me then started the car engine. “Man, you’re nosy.”

I pursed my lips together, not feeling the slightest remorse for my inquisitiveness. I’d already spent five days traveling with the guy, if you counted our visit to Crescent Cove…and I did. For most of it, he’d treated me like a pesky little sister. Was it any wonder I was starting to act like one?

I crossed my arms and waited.

“Where are we headed?” he asked, driving a few blocks.

“On a one-way street to the Truth.” He groaned and squirmed. “Be serious. If there’s nothing else to do in Normal, I’m putting in some miles toward St. Louis. We need to get there, see if we see anything and then get home. We can’t spend a month on the road.”

“I
am
being serious,” I said.

I didn’t know what it was about that moment—maybe because we seemed to be at some kind of unmarked crossroads, or maybe just because I’d been so lonely for so long—but it was vitally important to me that he answer my question. I had to know something
real
about this guy who’d been sharing my strange journey. Something
true
about the person he’d been before our lives were forever changed. I
needed
that.

And I didn’t want us to drive even one more mile in any direction until I could grasp some genuine fragment of his character…and see a little more of the unguarded man. It was usually almost too easy for me to read a novel’s worth of emotions, frustrations and dreams on someone’s face. But with Donovan? He wasn’t as quick to let me do this with him.

“You had to have had a plan for your life,” I whispered. “Once upon a time.”

He let out a long, slow breath, and I could feel him, as well as see him, visibly try to relax. In no way was this working, but I appreciated even this small gesture. He was trying hard to wrestle with some demon from his past and, perhaps, the only thing that seemed clear was that it was a very old demon. I suspected it predated the summer of ’76. It may well have predated nearly everything.

Donovan pulled into a parking space near the edge of the campus and let the engine idle.

“Once upon a time,” he began, “I used to think it would be fun to be a car designer or an architect. When adults would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, that’s what I’d tell them. Mostly, they’d just humor me. Nod at me. Say something insincere but nice. ‘Sounds great, kid. You can do it.’ Stuff like that.”

I honed my perception onto his every movement, like someone trying to tune into a hard-to-reach radio frequency. He was telling me the truth—I knew from the steadiness of his gaze, the depth of his breathing, the mild tension of his grasp—but the twitches of pain at the corners of his eyes and mouth also told me this wasn’t the whole story.

“Mostly?” I asked as gently as I could. “You mean there were some people who weren’t as encouraging? People who told you that you couldn’t do it?”

The stiffness in his fingers increased as he gripped the steering wheel more firmly, and the cord at the side of his neck jumped once or twice before he shrugged and said, “Yeah.”

He glanced out the front windshield then over at me again. “Look, Aurora, my life was never much of a fairy tale, even before July two years ago. You know my dad left us. He was gone by the time I was six and Jeremy was three. My stepfather moved in when I was thirteen, and I’ve known warmer, sweeter drill sergeants. Can’t say I was sad when he left, but I wish he hadn’t chosen Jeremy’s disappearance as the reason. Almost killed my mom to lose them both within a year.”

“So you came back and stayed in their place.” It wasn’t a question. I knew this was what had happened.

He nodded.

“It’s why I’m still in Chameleon Lake, too,” I confessed, though that wasn’t much of a secret either. Donovan had known years ago that I had aspirations of college. Heck, I’d told him my plans to escape our little town at our brothers’ graduation party. He knew then that I was just biding my time.