*
They ate dinner all together that night; Emily made a big pasta bake and heated up some dinner rolls. To the parents, this gathering felt miraculous: it was fifteen hundred miles from Collins to West Covina; they hadn’t reckoned the other distances collapsed at the table, from Portland and Santa Fe, from the outside silo to the upstairs room. The weird shock of the videotapes James had recovered from the Oldsmobile loaned a sense of common purpose to their reunion now, something easier to approach than the things they’d all been both thinking of and trying not to think about just yesterday morning: advancing age, graduation, their various places in the world.
“So tell me about Nevada,” Ed said to his son. He intoned the long initial a in Nevada with relish: it takes outsiders forever to get over it.
“I met the dude’s dad,” said James. “Steve. He says his son is fine and lives in Des Moines and he used to work at a video store.”
“And?”
“That’s pretty much it,” said James, looking around the table. “Abby thinks we should just drop it from there.”
“Do you think that?” Ed asked, turning.
“Kind of,” said Abby. “I don’t know.”
“Well,” Ed said, and his children both steeled themselves: Dad was about to try to shepherd them toward a conclusion. The opening gambit of Dad’s conclusion schtick was always a barrage of questions. “What if these had been just somebody’s regular home movies?”
“Dad, I know where you’re going with this, but please with the what-ifs,” said James. Ed looked back at him with wonder, trying to suppress his delight: he didn’t want to condescend; there’s a complex but palpable joy in seeing your children outgrow you. “There are three things we can do, OK? One, we can watch all the tapes and keep finding people if they say their names and check up on them. No, right?”
He waited, looking around the table, then continued. “Two, we go to the horse’s mouth and talk to the guy whose name we do know, which we can do because his father gave me his e-mail address. Jeremy.” Ed and Emily exchanged a glance; none of this was news to Abby, but she followed along, enjoying the mildly ridiculous but still impressive persona James had adopted, its ad hoc expertise cut just today from whole cloth.
“Or we don’t do anything,” said Emily, certain she’d arrived at James’s third possibility. “We talk more about why this bothers us and respect that it’s not our affair.”
“No, Mom,” said James. “I mean, yes, to me that’s obvious, but Abby hates that one.”
“Would you just tell them?” Abby said.
“She made me send the e-mail,” he said. Everybody exhaled quietly.
“We decided together,” protested Abby.
“That’s what you’ve been doing up there all afternoon?” said Emily.
“I looked at a few other things first. Abby was right, it was all a dead end.”
“Has he written back?” Ed asked, visibly concerned.
“It took him, like, a minute,” James said, measuring his tone; he felt his father’s need for something close to a definitive yes, something to shift the conversation back into the world of known quantities. “He sent me the address of the woman asking him questions on the tape. She lives in Tama. It’s less than an hour from here.”
He was holding something back; families can tell. They waited.
“He also said to leave her alone,” James said, finally. “‘You should leave her alone,’ is exactly what he wrote. ‘You probably won’t. I know how it is. I’ve seen it personally. But I wish you would.’”
They looked around, and down at their plates.
“He’s right,” said Abby resolutely.
“I know he’s right,” said James.
“Is it going to make a difference?” asked Abby.
“No,” said James.
“Was there anything else?” said Ed.
“He said never to write to him again. Not in a mean way, I don’t think,” said James. “‘I know you probably have a lot of questions, but I would appreciate it if you would please not write to me again. Don’t take this personally but all this stuff is none of your business. Sincerely, Jeremy Heldt.’”
“‘Sincerely’?” said Abby.
“‘Sincerely,’” James repeated, and Emily Pratt, alone among his audience, caught the sadness in his voice, this mood of concern for a stranger whose need to insulate himself from some unknown grief seemed both so clear and so hard to claim. It made her feel proud, to have a son like James.
When the pasta was all gone they finished off the dinner rolls. Any casual onlooker would have thought they were locals.
7