At home, all I heard for the next week was Brandon this or Brandon that. “Brandon thinks the Dodgers suck this year.” “Brandon invited me to go to the drive-in on Saturday.” “Brandon let me borrow the new Call of Duty.” It wasn’t much of a conversation, but at least Miles was talking to us now, he wasn’t shuttered up in his room all the time. He even volunteered to make waffles for breakfast, with strawberries and whipped cream, which he hadn’t done since we’d moved to California. “See?” Ray said as he loaded up the dishwasher afterward. “He just needed a little time to adjust. Like I told you, baby. He’s fine.” But I was still worried about his grades, so after breakfast that Saturday morning, I told Miles that if he planned to go to the drive-in with Brandon, he had to come to the library with me for a couple of hours. I wanted him to get away from his video games and do a set of problems from the new math workbook we’d bought for him. “Fine,” he grumbled, then stared at his phone the whole way to the library. When we got out of the car, he slammed the door so hard I thought it might go off its hinges. “I told you before not to do that,” I said.
“You can’t tell me what to do.”
“Of course, I can. I just did.”
“You’re not my mom.”
This hurt me so much, I could hardly breathe. Miles was an infant when Ray and I met, at a Fourth of July party given by one of my colleagues at Metro, a forensic pathologist who lived in Bethesda, Maryland. I got lost on the way there and by the time I arrived the only seats available in the backyard were next to Sharon from H.R. or next to Ray and the baby. It was an easy choice. The minute I sat down, Miles raised his chubby little arms up for me to hold him—and I did. Like I said, he was a mama’s boy. Later on, I found out that Ray’s ex-wife had decided shortly after giving birth that she had no interest in either marriage or motherhood, and had freed herself of both by filing for divorce and moving to Florida. My marriage to Ray hasn’t always been easy, either—we’ve had our share of tough times, especially after we bought our place in D.C. and money was tight for a while—but I’ve never had any doubt about Miles. He wasn’t my blood, but he was mine all the same. The way he smiled just before he made a winning move on the chessboard, that was me. The persistence he showed whenever he tried to solve a puzzle, that was me, too. I saw myself in him every day. Our bond, woven moment by loving moment for thirteen years, was strong. Yet now, glaring at me on the sidewalk, he was trying to break it. I couldn’t understand what had caused him to disown me, or why he’d chosen this particular moment to do it. “Why are you saying this?” I asked, my voice dropping to a whisper.
“Because it’s true.”
“It’s not true. Why are you talking like this? What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, something’s going on.” I put my hand on his cheek and when he raised his eyes to me, I saw that he was fighting tears. My poor, sweet son. “Tell me, baby. What happened?”
“Brandon says we can’t go to the movies.”
“He said that? When?”
“He just texted me.”
“So maybe his plans changed. Why are you so upset? You can go next week.”
“No, he’s going with Sam.”
“Which one is Sam? The one with the red hair?”
He shrugged and got all quiet again. I wondered if this was about race, the other kids were white, but whenever I had seen Miles with Brandon, the two of them seemed to get along well. It’s a terrible thing to watch your child suffer, a terrible thing. It made me feel helpless. There was nothing I could do to make my son’s pain go away. I couldn’t even comfort him with a hug, because we were standing outside the library and it might embarrass him and make things worse between us. “Tell you what,” I said. “Why don’t you work on your math, and then Dad will take you to the drive-in tonight? You can get popcorn and those Sour Patch Kids you like so much.”
He shrugged.
“Is that a yes? Say yes, it’ll be fun.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
We went inside, found a spot between an old man in a baseball cap reading one of those Left Behind books and a teenage girl leafing through brochures for the community college. Miles started a set of problems in his workbook, and I pulled out my laptop. The $25,000 reward that Nora Guerraoui had offered had been announced in the Hi-Desert Star and on KDGL three days earlier, and I’d put up posters everywhere I could think of, including the bus stop and the grocery stores, but I didn’t have any serious takers yet, just the usual white noise that comes with any announcement of a monetary reward. I wrote another email to Vasco, asking yet again if I could have that recanvass. Someone had to have seen something. I just needed to find them.
By the time we left the library, it was the middle of the afternoon and the air had cooled considerably. The arthritis in my elbow joints flared when the weather changed abruptly like this, and I buttoned my jacket against the wind. I wondered if we might be getting a thunderstorm later, which would mean no movie at the drive-in, and I looked up worriedly at the gray sky. That’s when I spotted the security cameras mounted on the eaves of the library building.
Nora
The call from Detective Coleman came while I was in the grocery aisle of the Stater Brothers. I can still recall every detail of that moment. A special on red seedless grapes was blaring from the loudspeaker, a woman was cradling her infant as she bagged navel oranges, two retirees were arguing over how many bananas they should buy, and I was picking out medjool dates. Sweet, chewy, locally produced. They came from palms a USDA botanist brought to the Coachella Valley in the 1920s from the oasis of Boudenib, in Morocco. The trees took root easily in California, and soon an industry developed around them. Now you could walk into any supermarket in the United States and buy dates that once grew only in the shade of the Atlas Mountains. I’d placed two boxes in my shopping cart and was wheeling it toward the leafy greens when my cell phone rang.
I left the cart where it was. Ten minutes later I pulled into the driveway of my parents’ house, where I picked up my mother. With the glare of the midday sun scrambling the road before me like a Hockney collage, I drove down the 62 toward the police station. A helicopter droned in the sky, heading toward the Marine base. “You’re going too fast,” my mother said, reaching for the handle above her window. Only then did I notice that my knuckles had whitened from gripping the steering wheel. I lifted my foot off the pedal. We passed a string of motels and fast-food joints, a tall crane on which a man in uniform was doing some work, and finally the stretch of trendy boutiques and organic restaurants that made up the town of Joshua Tree. The police station was just a couple of miles past Park Boulevard, in an orange and white building next to the courthouse.
At the station, Detective Coleman walked us through the main office, where deputies, some in uniform and others in plainclothes, sat at their cubicles. From somewhere came the sound of a printer jamming, people talking, a phone ringing—all the ordinary signs of a workplace on a Tuesday morning. And yet I felt my skin break into goose bumps, as though I were someplace alien or dangerous. The room was small, and the window shade hung sideways, casting a slanted light over the furniture. Four chairs were arranged around a table that was covered with round tracks left behind by cups and glasses. “Would you like some coffee? Or maybe some water?” the detective asked us.
“No, thanks,” I said.
“Water,” my mother said.