Like how the wet and rotting leaves on the ground in the ravine where Jeremy plays turn everything spongy. He gets so dirty from those leaves, but tonight she must be glad they’re soft. She must think of him there, his cheek creased from small twigs as if from a pillow, the way his hair flops in his eyes when he’s too sleepy to brush it off. Jeremy sleeps like a puppy on his side, his arms and legs flung out in front of him. His pink mouth open, the little puffs of air. She used to watch him breathe when he was a baby. All new mothers do that, she supposes, but it still felt like a miracle, the way he just kept breathing.
She shakes off the thought. Over the tree line, the search beams make a cat’s cradle, and she watches the pattern change. Richard says that in the morning they’ll call in helicopters. Why they wouldn’t bring them in now, when her boy’s out there alone and cold in the dark, she doesn’t know.
“Want a drink?” She looks up and the man from the afternoon is standing at the side edge of the porch. It takes her a second to recognize him, the afternoon feels so long ago. Back before everything.
“Ricky, right?” she says.
“Yes, ma’am,” he says. He’s holding a bottle in one hand and he raises it to her in invitation. Behind him, the darkness of the woods is like a fog. It’s as though he stepped from nothingness.
Lorilei doesn’t drink. She hasn’t had a drink in years. She used to run wild with her drinking, the arrests landing her in the local newspaper, her name a tight “L. Guillory” on the police blotter. But when Jeremy was born she cleaned herself up. She wanted to do right by him. Now there’s another baby to think of, three months inside her.
But she’s so scared about Jeremy and that bottle looks so good, its amber color glowing in the light. Jeremy’s kindergarten went on a class trip to the science museum in Lake Charles today. The same trip she took at his age, and perhaps the drink’s warm glow makes her think of the resin fossils she saw then. It’s a strange night, Jeremy gone, all the neighbors out and looking, a night outside time. A night that could last forever, suspended like a bug in that amber, Jeremy always out there somewhere, she always on this porch, waiting. All she has to do is make it through this night.
She takes the bottle. There’s two inches of liquor. “Thanks,” she says.
The first sip is sharp and glass-smooth. It shimmies down inside her, curls up in her belly, warm.
The second sip is sweet. The third.
“Sorry they haven’t found your boy,” Ricky says. In the glare from the porch light his glasses are opaque.
She doesn’t say anything.
“It sounds like people are sure looking,” he says.
Lorilei’s tired. She doesn’t want to talk. So she doesn’t. She just leans back against the stoop for a long time, sometimes with her eyes closed when she can’t bear the quiet and sometimes with her eyes open when she can’t bear the black. The liquor’s gone before she knows it. The man stays at the edge of the grass, his hands in his khaki pockets, silent. It’s companionable. They could almost be friends.
Later she won’t be able to say how long passes before he coughs, a polite sound as if he’s afraid to disturb her. “Well,” he says then, “I’d better be going back in. I really hope they find him.”
Four
New Jersey, 1983
After we’re settled into the new house, my father leaves his job as a government lawyer and opens a solo law practice in the nearby town of Teaneck, finding another gray Victorian and renting the first floor as his office. He buys a piece of black lacquer sixteen inches long and eight inches wide and has ANDREW ROBERT LESNEVICH etched into it, followed by the word he worked for: ESQUIRE. The sign will be the first of many. He hangs it over his door and waits for cases to arrive.
Come they eventually do, the parade of the unlucky and unwise that make up any small-town lawyer’s work. There’s the housewife with the secret fondness for drink who gets behind the wheel and won’t admit that her head isn’t bobbing only from fatigue. There’s the old man who slips on the shopkeeper’s icy walk downtown, and the teenage shoplifter whose hands, always so quick, finally fail her. My father’s not a gossip; he can be trusted and he likes it this way, one foot in the web of everyone’s lives. He is needed, but not too closely. Best of all, he is admired. Years in the Air Force have given him a straight-backed public bearing that allows him to take on others’ stories with ease and authority.
Law wasn’t his first choice. My father dreamt of flying fighter planes as a boy. His father had been lost at sea in World War II. His mother never went on another date, and his father’s naval legacy made a military career feel like a birthright. He had flat feet, he was color-blind, he was six feet four—he would never, after all, be a fighter pilot. But he could play tennis. He joined the Air Force and sat out the Vietnam War at a wooden desk in the tropics, stamping papers over and over and then signing them in triplicate, giving his wrist a workout on the courts beating Army and Navy. When he finished active duty, the question of his future loomed. He had studied geology in college, psychology for a master’s. He could resume his studies. Maybe he could become a scientist. Maybe a teacher.
But he didn’t want to sit behind a lab bench any more than he wanted to sit behind a desk. If he couldn’t be a hotshot pilot he wanted a political stage. He wanted to stand in front of people and have them know that little fatherless Andrew from Cliffside Park, New Jersey, had made it.
*
When my father reaches this part of the story, one I listen to him tell often, his deep voice grows more insistent, its cadence more punctuated. My father is a storyteller. He tells stories to juries for a living, and he tells them to us around a thick white Formica table so big he found it for a discount; no other family wanted it, he says. We fit perfectly. My father sits on one side of the table, flanked by two of us, my mother on the other side, flanked by two more. The table’s edges are curved so Elize, the youngest, just learning to walk, doesn’t hurt herself when she bumps into it. Around the table we are his audience and his life is the text. Listening as a child I always imagine that the fork he describes in the road is literal: a one-lane highway somewhere in eastern Missouri, no cars on the road except for his, the yellow cut of headlights through the dark his only guide. It is night, the time for dreams and big decisions, and the velvet sky above is pinpricked with light. From behind the wheel my father sees the road ahead of him split. To his left, the West. A left turn will free him from his mother’s clutch. It will save him the depression that has started to haunt him as surely as it does her, from the way his father’s death made his tie to her seem fated, his life cast when he was still a baby. Out West is California, where he will have a life as solid and stable as the rocks he once studied. He will be a teacher, yes, but maybe a politician, too. He will feel beloved. He will be happy.
“But instead”—he always comes to this point in the story—“I knew my mother needed me. I took a right turn. I came back to New Jersey. And then I met your mother.”