I lunged forward and slid into Robby’s room, slamming the door shut and locking it with a hand soaked in blood.
The thing threw itself against the door.
It had moved up the staircase that quickly.
I lifted myself up and clumsily hopped on one foot toward the window.
I collapsed in front of it and fumbled with the latch.
I looked behind me because it was suddenly so quiet.
Beyond my trail of blood the door was bulging forward.
And then the thing started shrieking again.
I opened the window, balancing on my left leg, and crawled onto the ledge, blood splattering everywhere.
I remember not caring as I let myself fall.
It wouldn’t be a long drop. It would be escape. It would be peace.
I landed on the lawn. I didn’t feel anything. All the pain was concentrated in my right leg.
I lifted myself up and I began limping toward the Range Rover.
I slid into the driver’s seat and I started the ignition.
(When asked, I answered that I did not know—nor can I supply a reason now—why I hadn’t gone to a neighbor after the attack.)
Moaning to myself, I put the car in reverse and pressed on the accelerator with my left foot.
Once I had backed out of the driveway and was stationary in the middle of Elsinore Lane, I saw the cream-colored 450 SL.
It had turned the corner of Bedford and was now a block away.
Watching it glide closer I saw someone in the driver’s seat: grim-faced, determined, recognizable.
As if he had been sequenced into my dreams, it was Clayton who was driving the car.
When I saw Clayton’s face I let go of the steering wheel and the Range Rover, still in reverse, spun backward and then halfway around so that it was blocking Elsinore.
I tried to regain control of the car as the 450 SL kept moving forward.
It was speeding up.
I braced myself as it slammed into the passenger side of the Range Rover.
The collision pushed the SUV over a curb and into the oak tree that stood in the middle of the Bishops’ front yard, with such force that the windshield exploded.
Everything started falling away from me.
The 450 SL extracted itself from the wreckage and backed away into the middle of Elsinore Lane. The Mercedes was not damaged.
It was daylight, I noticed as I began losing consciousness.
Clayton stepped out of the car and started walking toward me.
His face was a red and indistinct moon.
He was wearing the same clothes he’d worn when I saw him that Halloween day in my office at the college, including the sweater with the eagle on it. The sweater I had once owned when I was his age.
Steam was curling from the Range Rover’s crumpled hood.
I couldn’t move. My entire body was throbbing with pain. My leg was soaked with blood. It kept gushing through the bite marks in my jeans.
“What do you want?” I started to scream.
The Range Rover kept shuddering because my foot was locked against the accelerator.
The boy was floating closer, moving steadily toward me, relaxed.
Through my tears I began to make out his features more clearly.
“Who are you?” I was screaming as I sobbed. “What do you want?”
Behind him I could see the house melting away.
He was now standing by my window.
He was staring at me so starkly it was as if he were sightless.
I tried positioning myself so I could open the door, but I was trapped.
“Who are you?” I kept screaming.
I stopped asking that question as his hands reached out to me.
That was when I realized there was someone else who was more important.
“Robby,” I started moaning. “Robby . . .”
Because Clayton was—and had always been—someone I had known.
He was somebody who had always known me.
He was somebody who had always known us.
Because Clayton and I were always the same person.
The writer whispered, Go to sleep.
Clayton and the writer whispered, Disappear here.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 10
30. the awakening
I regained consciousness in a hospital room at Midland Memorial the day after the first surgery to save my leg was completed. The operation had lasted five hours. I had been sleeping for more than twenty-four hours.
When I woke up Jayne was standing over me. Her face was swollen.
My first thought: I am alive.
The relief was short-lived when I saw the two police officers in the room.
My second thought: Robby.
I realized that they had been waiting for me to wake up.
I was asked, “Bret . . . do you know where Robby is?”
The room was cold and empty and I felt something humming beneath the fake calm. There was a horrible insistence to the question that was barely restrained.
I whispered something that caused a disturbance. What I whispered was not what they were hoping for.
Jayne’s exhausted face died. I became blinded by it.
When we were told that Robby Dennis was now officially missing I could not describe the sounds Jayne began making, and neither could the writer.
31. the endings
Questions the writer asked me: How long do you hold on to a child? You have to decide if the world is worth returning to, and in the end, what are your options? I know where Robby went, but do you?
For the first few days after Robby’s disappearance I was still recuperating and underwent four more operations—so substantial was the damage to my right leg—and during this time I was lost in the mercy flow of the morphine drip. Ultimately the leg would be saved, and doctors told me I should be grateful, but the only thing I could think about was Robby. There was nothing else to take the place of that. We were conscious of only that one thing. We could only wait and then, as time passed, we began waiting without hope. But Jayne kept coming out of the cave she would hide herself in and emerge newly determined, even after admitting it was all useless. Why? Because I had offered her something to grasp on to with the deposition I gave when I told the Midland authorities I believed our son was a runaway and that he had not been abducted. When asked why I believed this “theory,” I realized very quickly that there was nothing to sell them. I had not seen the e-mails to—or from?—the other missing boys on the afternoon of November fifth because the computer had died (and when the police searched the house after the attack, the computer was no longer in Robby’s room, even though I told them I was positive I had seen it) and the evidence of a conspiracy (a drunken Nadine Allen, the playful whispers of boys in the courtyard of a mall, the two Salvation Army boxes I’d glimpsed in Robby’s room—no one could ascertain if any clothing was missing or not—and the twelve trips we eventually estimated he made to Mail Boxes Etc. in October alone, the point of which we still could not decipher) was too thin to hang anything on. But again: what did it matter if they ran away or if they had been kidnapped? The boys were gone. All that anyone knew was that Robby and Ashton had been dropped off at the Fortinbras Mall by Nadine Allen on the morning of November ninth (according to Nadine, Robby was wearing a backpack) and had bought tickets for a movie that began at noon. Robby, according to an oddly calm and eerily serene Ashton, had whispered that he needed to use the restroom and left the theater. He never returned. No one saw him wandering the mall. No one saw him anywhere else in Midland County. Only the writer saw him disappearing into his new world.
Jayne could not fathom my lack of fear or anger. She called my despair “rehearsed.” Her resentment toward my acceptance caused us—almost immediately—to separate from each other. Our only consolation: nothing worse can come to us. I didn’t want explanations, because in those, my failure would take shape (your love was a mask, the scale of your lies, the irresponsible adult at loose, all the things you hid, the mindless pull of sex, the father who never paid attention). The case received, at first, substantial media coverage, but because Jayne refused to participate in the parade of grief that was demanded of her, the press slowly lost interest. Plus there were so many fresh horrors—the dirty bomb in Florida, the hijackers who killed the air marshals—that the disappearance of a movie star’s son took a back seat to what was becoming this country’s future. Jayne hired a private investigator to stay on the case. (But what case? Boys leave. He was gone. He had orchestrated this absence himself, as had all the others.) Jayne went into seclusion while Sarah just kept asking, “When is Robby coming back?” until the question conspired against her and additional meds were prescribed so that Sarah became as catatonic as her mother. And even though I knew Robby was never coming back, and that Robby had left us and that he had wanted to leave, I still asked, “Why?” The writer whispered answers to me that I half heard before the Ambien took effect: Because his spirit had been broken. Because you never existed for him. Because—in the end, Bret—you were the ghost.