Humans were so complex, how could you possibly predict how they would react in the face of the impossible?
You couldn’t.
He stood in the center of the kitchen, trying to get his bearings. On the fridge, there was a picture of a grinning Little League team. He squinted at it closely, made out Tommy in the bottom left, holding a placard that read, LITTLE LEAGUE CHAMPIONS MILLERTON SOUTHERN DIVISION, “THE NATIONALS.”
Ah, the Nationals. The missing piece. He’d forgotten they sometimes named the recreation league teams after the Major Leagues. A good piece of evidence, yet it held no satisfaction for him. What good was evidence now?
He walked out of the kitchen and began to look for the missing boy.
*
Janie stood in the back door of Denise’s house and looked out at an expanse of nothing.
She had let her vigilance flag for merely a minute, but it had been a minute too long, and now Noah was gone.
She’d done another sweep of the pantry, living room, and bathroom on the ground floor and the teenager was rechecking the other rooms in the house, but he wasn’t there.
He must’ve slipped out the back door when she was talking to Denise and Charlie went off to practice his drums. He must have thought Denise had rejected him and that’s why she had kicked him. Of course he would have thought that. Or maybe he thought that it was his own fault—his fault, when it was Janie’s … well, no time for that now. There’d be plenty of time for regrets later.
She opened the back door: a stretch of muddy grass, yellow patched with new green coming up like an inversely graying head. A birdbath cradled a dark puddle of water, a leaf turning round and round in its center. The silhouette of a tree, buds at its fingertips. Then the yard stopped and the fields started, stretching as far as she could see.
“Noah?”
She’d forgotten how silent the country was. Somewhere, a dog barked.
“Noah!”
How far could a four-year-old get?
Fragments of consoling words flitted through her head: any minute now, don’t worry, it’ll be fine, it always has been, he’s got to be here somewhere. Underneath them, panic rising like floodwaters, obliterating everything else in its path. The grass stretching out toward the low, green stalks of the newly planted cornfields.
“NOAH!”
She broke into a run.
Cornstalks prickled her ankles as she ran across the fields, searching for a blond head. She felt the tender stalks breaking beneath her feet as she ran. “No-ah!”
He could be anywhere. He could be curled up on the damp ground just beyond her field of vision, surrounded by green stalks. He could be in the trees beyond the fields, in the dark shadows of the woods.
Maybe it was the name. He was a stubborn boy. Maybe he was making a point and if she used the other name he’d acknowledge her.
“Tommy?” The name tore itself from her throat, scratching at the air. “TOMMY!”
“Noah? Tommy? Noah!” The sound reverberated against the flat earth and the gray bowl of the sky.
“Tommy! Noah! Tommy!” Janie called, scouring the green and gray world. Was she looking for a blond head or a dark one? Was he to be lost a second time, was that his fate? To be lost and lost and lost again?
No. You’re panicking. He’s around somewhere. You’ll find him any minute.
Or maybe you won’t.
“Noah! Tommy!” She ran past the fields, into the woods, until she had lost all sense of direction. How could she help her boy when she herself was lost?
She thought then, couldn’t help but think, of Denise Crawford. Denise, who must have stood in this same place not so very long ago, calling out this name, screaming it to the indifferent sky until her voice went hoarse, and in her panic and misery Janie knew that the distance between herself and this other woman had shrunk to nothing. They were mothers. They were the same.
Twenty-Six
Denise lay on the bed. She had wanted to help find the boy but her legs were unstable beneath her, and that doctor, or whatever he was, had taken one look at her and insisted she lie down. The pain in her head had been bad but was dulling fast, what with the two more pills she had taken. Looking at herself in the medicine cabinet she had been tempted to pour the whole damn bottle down her throat and put a stop to all of it once and for all, but she consoled herself with two more for now, popping them dry in her mouth and swallowing them without water, and put the rest in her pocket.
And now she was feeling no pain, no pain at all, thank you very much, and she was in a dream, an alternate reality, whereby everything had turned around upon itself and become something else entirely. Some demons had tried to deceive her, and she had injured an angel who had wanted something from her, but they were gone.
Shards of sharp voices, slicing through the air. Life was a glass that had dropped and shattered and they were the pieces. The people were the pieces.
Someone was calling for Tommy.