The pizza was tasty and Dean ate more than he thought he would. At the end of the meal the phone rang and Dean jumped to get it. But it wasn’t the police. It was See-See.
“Hi, Coach. I’m sorry to bother you. I know you’re dealing with a lot.”
“It’s okay, I was actually going to call you. Is everything okay?”
“I’m just wondering about tomorrow. We’re still competing, right?”
“Of course. I’m sending over a teacher from the middle school to help out — Ms. Lanning.”
“I know Ms. Lanning. I had her for English last year.”
“Okay, good, good.”
There was a silence, and Dean realized he had to say something coachlike. He felt depleted of advice, of the kind of optimistic and borderline-delusional things a coach had to say to get an athlete ready for a big event. And he felt self-conscious because his family was listening.
“Do you think I’m going to qualify for States?” See-See asked, finally. “Sorry, I know that’s the last thing you’re thinking of.”
“See-See, I am always thinking about you girls,” Dean said. And as he spoke, he realized it was true, that the girls had been running through his mind, pulling him along all these weeks.
“I’m nervous,” See-See said.
“You should be. It’s a big race. But you have the training for it.” Dean struggled to find something else to say. A few words of encouragement were all that she needed. But they couldn’t be generic.
“Maybe some other girl has more physical strength,” Dean said, “but you have more mental strength. What I said the other day about you bringing this team together — I meant it. The team wouldn’t exist without you, it really wouldn’t. So when you get tired tomorrow, when you’re in the last mile and you have to start passing people, ask yourself if the runner in front of you is as powerful as you are. If she’s a catalyst, the way you are.”
“I take it the answer is no, they aren’t,” See-See said drily — but sincerely, too.
“Exactly. Put a target on their back and reel them in. You’re the leader, they’re the followers.”
“What should I tell the others?”
Dean heard a long beep, followed by two short ones, the call-waiting signal.
“See-See, I have to go, I’m sorry. Tell them to remember that it doesn’t matter how fast they can run—”
“—what matters is how fast they can run when they’re tired.”
“Right.”
Dean switched to the other call. It was the police lieutenant from Hagerstown. They’d gotten two new leads, one from the owner of a small toy store in town who’d seen Robbie’s photo on the evening news and realized that it was the same boy who had come into his shop late in the afternoon. The boy had been alone but friendly. He had bought a gift for his mother.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Dean said.
“Yeah, that’s what we thought,” the officer said. “And it kind of contradicts the other call we got.”
The other lead was from a woman who had seen a boy who looked like Robbie on her bus. He had been traveling alone when she saw him. She’d thought it was odd for someone so young to be by himself, but she hadn’t given it another thought until she returned home and heard something on the radio about a missing boy.
“The woman was on a five o’clock to Pittsburgh, so it’s possible that your son went to the toy store and then boarded that bus shortly after. But that seems unlikely because we had sent officers to the station.”
“You said the bus was going to Pittsburgh?” Dean asked. “What’s the route?”
“It goes west through Allegany County and then into Pennsylvania.”
“What are the stops?”
“Berkeley Springs, Cumberland, Frostburg, Meyersdale, Rockwood—”
“I know where he’s going,” Dean said. “I know exactly where he’s going.”
THE LANDSCAPE WAS hidden, the fields like dark quilts, with farmhouses set far back from the road. You traveled back in time when you headed west in Maryland and now, Pennsylvania. Old farms, old industries. They’d just crossed the Mason-Dixon line. There were very few lights; the road was illuminated only by passing cars and the occasional streetlight when they reached a significant intersection. Above, the sky was black as soot, with a wash of stars, some of them as fine as dust.
The radio was playing, tuned to an oldies station. People were sending out lovelorn dedications on Friday night. In the backseat, Bryan was quiet but awake. Stephanie’s father had barely managed a sentence since they’d left. There was nothing to say now that they knew Robbie was safe. Still, it wouldn’t seem real until they saw him.
Someone requested a live recording of the John Denver song “Sunshine on My Shoulders.” It was one of the songs her mother liked best, and Stephanie remembered telling her that it was easily one of the cheesiest songs ever written. Stephanie didn’t know why she’d needed to curdle such a sweet melody. It was as if she’d resented the song’s simplicity. Listening to it now, at night, with her mother dead and her brother at the end of some secret journey, she wondered what the song had meant to her mother. She felt a twinge of guilt, the pinch of all the questions she’d been too angry to ask, and then she let the guilt go, just let it fly out through the windshield, let it rush past like the trees and the flat fields and the black road. She thought of riding in the passenger seat next to her mother when she was a little girl, of her mother’s shoulders bare and freckled in a summer dress she used to wear that had string straps that tied in a bow around her neck. .
The memory began to break into pieces, getting mixed up with the song lyrics, and before Stephanie realized it, she was falling asleep.
DEAN CAME TO a quiet stop at the end of his father’s lane and opened his door carefully, so as not to wake Stephanie and Bryan. The distinct smell of his father’s farm drifted in, the smell of horses, dirt, hay, moss, mulch, and some other metallic, starry scent that Dean could never quite identify. This was where his wife had chosen to die.
His father came outside to meet him, wearing a heavyweight plaid shirt over his pajamas. His father was shorter than he was, with a narrower build, and Dean had to lean over, slightly, to embrace him. With his head bent, prayerfully, and with his father’s broad hands on his back, he remembered how Nicole always described his father as having “a warm soul.” And he realized how much he’d missed him.
“I’m so glad Robbie came to you,” Dean said.
“When he knocked on my door, I thought I was dreaming. He walked here from the bus station.”
“I have to see him,” Dean said. “Let me wake Stephanie and Bryan.”
“Go on inside,” his father said. “I’ll get them.”
Dean’s father lived in a different house from the one Dean had grown up in. It was smaller but newly renovated, a four-room, two-story cabin that was close to the barn and that had once been a servant’s quarters to the farmhouse. Nicole thought it was adorable, and when they visited, she would always make a point of cooking dinner in her father-in-law’s kitchen and eating it outside, on his little lawn. Now, as Dean passed the wooden picnic table, he thought of their last dinner there. She had been in such a good mood, she had made a pound cake for dessert, had put edible flowers in the salad. He couldn’t make sense of what she did just two days later. He wasn’t going to try to anymore.
As soon as Dean saw Robbie, his body covered by one of his father’s old blankets, he felt his knees buckle and he had to grab hold of the door frame.