“I didn’t know.”
“What do you mean you didn’t know? Of course you knew.”
I shook my head, the only thing my body would do.
“Oh, well, that’s great,” she said. “That helps a lot. You didn’t know and look what happened.”
She started crying again and I felt my mouth open. My cheeks tightened, but nothing fell. I stared at my mother, knowing I could offer nothing.
A car horn gave a quick honk from behind. I turned and saw it was a police cruiser. My dad’s. He got out and walked the few steps to the driver’s side, like we’d violated some rule of the road and he was finally ready to take us in.
“We’re still looking,” he said. “But we’re stretched thin because of the storm.” I could hear the tired in his voice. From being in the woods all night. Calling out my brother’s name, again and again with no reply.
“So what are you doing here?” my mother said.
“I saw you driving around. This street’s closed, you know.”
“No, I mean what are you doing here? Why aren’t you out there? What the hell are you waiting for?”
“C’mon,” my dad said, touching my mom’s shoulder, “let’s get you home.”
She jerked away from him. “No! That’s not what I need. I need you to be out there. I need you to find him.”
“We will. Just—”
“Then do it! For God’s sake, do something right for once in your life.”
My dad’s hand dropped. He backed away. For a moment, he looked like he’d been shot. The color left his face and his breathing stopped.
“Aggie,” he said.
My mother sighed. She looked down at her hands, shaking the wheel. “I know,” she said. “I know.”
She started the van and we drove away.
* * *
I didn’t know my mother snored until the first night we shared a bed. Not until I woke up, kicking her legs and calling my brother’s name. Stop, I said. Would you stop.
I thought she would leave after that first night, after I made her remind me that my brother wasn’t the one snoring. That my brother, her son, was gone. I thought she would go upstairs and sleep on the couch, not stay down in the dark with the spiders. Though maybe that was the point. In the basement, it was always dark. There was no window well like at our old house, no light to leak in. My mother could pretend night lasted forever and stay in bed entire days, which she did.
My dad, he had no idea what to do. Those first few days he tried to coax my mother out, like she was some wild animal, scared but dangerous. But instead of biting or snapping her teeth, my mother did nothing. She said nothing. Only, I’m fine. Only, Please leave me alone.
My dad was the one who handled all the disappearance stuff. While my mother slept or didn’t sleep, he did all the things I could never imagine doing. He talked to the KBI and the bordering counties’ sheriff departments. Put up posters in the appropriate places. He went out into the woods every day and every night and came back with nothing. He found the silo and we talked about its tree, but that was it. There were no footprints showing him where to go. No broken limbs bent by a fleeing body. The storm, he said, washed everything away.
What about the smoking lady? I asked him. I had seen her talking to Chris, hadn’t I? Whatever happened to her?
No sign, my dad said. Not since the tornado. We know she has no son listed, but we’re tracking down her relatives. Nothing yet.
When my dad couldn’t look anymore, he would come home. His eyes strained, his body tired and thinned with grief. If he was home at dinnertime, he grilled out. He stood alone on the porch and watched the open flame. He didn’t move when the wind changed and the smoke drifted across his face, already burned from hours spent wading through the woods. The last wave of the summer sun scorched him a sad brown, then a bright red, and each day he dried up and shrank a little. When the food was ready, my dad took a plate down to my mother, knowing she would eat next to nothing, if anything at all. He would murmur a few words to her, and slowly climb the stairs and return to the kitchen, where for the first time since we were all a family, he ate at the table. After the first week I stopped asking if he had found anything, if he’d picked up on any leads or discovered new clues. In those long hours we lingered in the living room, I learned to read my dad’s face too.
* * *
When I was alone, my mind wanted comparisons. It wanted to make sense of the overwhelming emptiness I woke up to every morning, and carried with me through the day. It’s like when Baron died, my mind told me. Remember? How strange and terrible it was to wander room to room and not be followed, to realize you would never hear the soft pant of his spent breath, the jingle of his collar clinking behind you. This is like that, don’t you think? In some way? Doesn’t that make it better?
The truth was it didn’t. The truth was I knew that when I went downstairs each night and climbed into bed, my mother would be crying, and that I would clench my fists and flex my body as tight as I could in the stupid hope that I would not cry too. That will only make your mother sadder, I told myself, and haven’t you done enough? The truth was I had dreams of the lake, only this time I was the one in the boat, and my brother was the one left in the water, with nothing to keep him afloat.
* * *
The city recovered. Or kept moving. So we would have something to talk about besides what we were avoiding, my dad kept up-to-date on the cleanup. Within a week the grocery store reopened. The car the tornado crashed through the front was removed, the windows replaced. Work crews cleared the streets of debris, filled dump trucks to their beds’ rims. What they couldn’t haul away they piled in yards, little hills of wrecked lives.
Still, the tornado wasn’t a big one, according to the newspaper. Not when compared with others that had struck our state the same summer. Unlike those storms, which flattened entire towns off the map, ours had inflicted what the state labeled “manageable damage.” Though many had been injured, though homes had been leveled or made unlivable, there were no known deaths.
“We’ll get past this,” my dad said one evening, his face hidden behind the paper.
I stared at the article on the back page of what he was reading, a blurb about another escape, this time from the women’s prison. From what I could read, the article didn’t mention anything about the Stranger. It was like the world had moved on and everything I cared about was forgiven or forgotten.
“How?” I finally said. How were things going to get better?
“Just give it some time, son. We don’t know if things are the worst.”
He put the paper down and tried to smile at me, then went downstairs to talk to my mother. I followed him to the door and listened to him plead with her. Tell her how he needed her to be strong, to guide me through this while he was gone. Won’t you come upstairs? my dad asked. If not for me, for him?
There was a lull. Until I heard my mother’s voice. Soft, matter-of-fact. I heard her ask my dad if he’d found anything, if he knew who took her boy. When my dad said no, my mother said, Then you have my answer.
* * *
When my dad was gone, I hung out on his front step. There, I could think about whatever I wanted, or I could think about nothing. I could stay or I could go. I could sneak off and hurl a rock at a neighbor’s door or I could be good. I could behave. I could sit and wonder why my brother chose not to, why he snuck out all the time, why he went into the woods with the man we thought was Chris. What was he after? I could ask myself. Where did he want to go?
All this because I couldn’t watch TV anymore. I refused. I couldn’t watch another fake family laugh their way through their fake problems. I couldn’t watch the news and risk seeing a story about my brother. Only once did my dad suggest we go to the video store. No, I told him, but I didn’t give him the reason why. I didn’t tell him that, lately, there was only one tape I’d thought about watching. The one my dad kept upstairs, hidden in his closet. I didn’t tell him that part of me still thought Chris and the Stranger were the same, and that if I could just make myself watch that tape one more time, at least some of my questions might be answered. I didn’t tell him this because I was afraid. Because I couldn’t imagine watching something so horrible again, and this time, without my brother.