“The FBI has gotten involved in this investigation. Apparently Ethan Engroff is friends with Senator Collier and he wants more people on the case. I’m going to have to tell them you had that information and didn’t turn it over. Also, I need to know where I can reach Roger Claus today.”
“I’m afraid that will be difficult to do. Roger is out of the country.”
“Where?” I said.
“His father has an oil operation in Saudi Arabia. Roger went to visit him there.”
“Is he from there? Does he live there?”
“No, he lives in Connecticut. Norwich.”
I took down my pad and wrote down his name and the town. I put the pad back into my coat pocket.
“When did Truman and Roger become lovers, if they did?”
He looked up in the air as if calculating.
“I guess last summer. Roger was here for a while and that’s when Truman and Roger met.”
“Did they get along well?”
“They had their moments, but mostly they did well together.”
“What kind of ‘moments?’”
He smiled. “The usual between lovers, I suppose. Disagreements, I guess.”
“Did they argue the night Truman was killed?”
“No,” he said quickly. “No, not at all.”
He didn’t look particularly worried by what he’d just told me. He’d probably spoken with his father about it and was confident there couldn’t be any legal recourse for his inaction. I doubted there was, too.
“I don’t think there will be much they can do about you withholding this information, but these agents are used to things going their way. They may want to interview you again.”
“I’m really sorry,” he said. “I was certain it would have been common knowledge Truman and Roger were together.”
I stood. I put out my hand and he took it in his. He had a firm handshake.
“Nothing like this has ever happened here before,” I said. “The town and I are taking baby steps on this one. Fortunately the press has found other things to do with their time and I hope it stays that way.”
He took his hand away and smiled. “I know after what you’ve learned here today this may sound spurious, but if there is anything I can do to help, anything about Truman you need to know, please just call me.”
I thanked him and then walked toward the patrol car. It was a Saturday, but I’d thought I could justify using the squad car rather than my own. It was official business, after all, and I was getting used to the idea of “official business.” The agents who had suddenly invaded this small town made everything official. Partially I was impressed with their efficiency, but I was also annoyed at how I’d been considered ineffective in my investigation. Considering that I hadn’t interviewed Logan Marsh earlier, maybe they had justification. They’d been in Persia for nearly a week, and they hadn’t gotten any closer to who’d done it than I had. But now there was Roger Claus. Out of the country soon after Truman was killed. Maybe I finally had the lead I needed. Maybe.
Amy
Four weeks after Truman’s death
I didn’t realize he was gone until the day after he left. I’d gone down the stairs in the middle of the previous night, and I’d expected him to be somewhere on his sleepless wanderings through this quiet and mostly dark fortress we had once called our home. He wasn’t there and I felt relief, the way we both used to feel when weekend guests would trudge down the stairs with their suitcases, and we’d walk them to their cars and, as they went around the circle of the drive, wave to them, both of us letting out a deep sigh of relief that it was only the three of us now and we could resume. Resume. And after I’d poured a glass of chilled chardonnay I crept back upstairs and passed Truman’s room—there was no light showing beneath the door—and to the room where Ethan had taken up residence. I opened the door slowly so as not to awaken him, and there was what I thought was a slight form under the covers, and I quietly closed the door again and went back down and sat in the dark.
It had become such a ritual, the two of us wandering alone in the house at night. I felt strange without Ethan making his way somewhere in the house with his glass of whiskey and his silent grief. He’d been my companion, in the same way we’d once shared companionship by talking and hiking and making love and waiting for Truman to arrive from his own dwelling inside me. The cord connecting Truman and me, like when I used to string two soup cans pulled tightly so I could talk to my friends when I was a child, that kind of connection.
Every morning Ethan would put his head on my bare stomach and listen to our Truman, making a thrum of sound that even then was like Truman and no other person. But Ethan couldn’t hear what I heard, because I knew it was Truman even when he was the first jejune brain and lungs, and then coming out of me as if all that was needed was that squawking and thinking Truman. A beautiful boy with white-blond hair and black eyes and the cord was never ever cut.
Now, though, it was just the nightly sojourn we each had, like Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, each of us in our own heads, sharing only fate rather than love or bonds or anything as it once was. And as soon as I peeked into the room with the form there on the bed under the covers, I assumed he was sleeping. I felt a tug of anger toward him. He could sleep! How could he finally sleep? And I returned downstairs, back to my wine, some place in one of the rooms where I could feel safe from drafts and leaking air and I could listen for even the slightest stirrings of my Truman. Because that was the conundrum as I saw it: I had to listen and wait for even a minor stirring, a slight tremor of Truman’s presence, but I couldn’t conflate that with the malevolent stirring of air working its way into our house for the sole purpose of carrying me away from my Truman.
However, the next day I realized Ethan had not been here the night before and had not come home the entire day. I’d made food for us, mistakenly thinking he would arrive. I could make certain he’d not disappeared as I had thought would happen to me, floating like some inflated balloon with no possible way of navigating back to Truman. And so when Ethan didn’t show up for dinner, I looked out into the garage where Truman and Carly had once held all their secrets, beautiful and their own, and the car was gone.
Again, my first reaction was relief, this time because he hadn’t been taken away, but then I remembered the times in the last several weeks he’d been driven home from TRUAM. He was too drunk to drive, as Susan confided in me, worrying over his health and whether he would be stopped by the police. As if I cared whether he was stopped or not. But now I had to consider the possibility that that was exactly what had happened. He had been carried away, because he’d been here the evening before and now he was gone.
I dialed his cell phone and I got his voicemail and I hit end. What would I have said?
“Are you floating somewhere, Ethan? Are you taken away just as I always thought would happen to me, so that you will never be here in case your son returns?”
And I knew almost for certain that he would return, that my Truman would return, because the FBI had been brought into the case. That senator, John Collier, had called Ethan one morning and I had listened in on the conversation. He wanted the FBI in on it. Nelson Parachuk wasn’t doing enough, or not finding who did this to our Truman, but, of course, the obvious reason was that Truman wasn’t dead. They’d been mistaken. Because even with the state police and the local police and the FBI, no one was caught, not even that Rich Beck and his son Tommy who had stolen Carly’s heart, had taken her heart from Truman. They weren’t even responsible because NO ONE was.
But now it was possible that Ethan would never know. Because it was after two days that he was not in the house, wasn’t here at night, wasn’t up with me in the middle of the night drinking his whiskey, and it was then I became concerned that he would never return. What would I tell Truman when he came back and looked in the study for his father? What would I say to him?
“Your father did not have the sense to stay away from dangerous places. I saw him several times outside talking to people—I think once I saw him speaking to Frank Rodenbaugh—and the wind was whipping around and I watched from the window, Truman, and I confess I saw your father look back toward me with his imploring look as if I was to rescue him. But you must understand that the wind was blowing to the point that I’m not sure how your father was able to stay standing, that he didn’t blow away just then, but I was not about to go out there to help him. I wasn’t the one who’d gotten myself into that situation, and even though I could see desperation in your father’s eyes, I was not going out there.
“He was safe that time, though, Truman, because he was loaded down with bourbon. But since the spring weather had set in he was going outside more frequently, and so I couldn’t account for when he went out. I never saw it happen, but you know as well as me, Truman, that your father loved the grounds and he loved to go out there even late at night. You did too, but that was before things became so ethereal, when a person could just walk into a kitchen and say to his parents, ‘I’ll see you later,’ and then just walk out after planting a kiss on the top of my head and not return, as if that wouldn’t make everything tenuous from then on.”
I began to think what I would do if both Truman and Ethan were gone from me. They’d been my whole life. Yes, I’d gotten my master’s, begun to teach at a local community college, done something other than just read books. And I enjoyed teaching the classes with a circle of people speaking about meta this and meta that. Whoever uses metacognition or meta-reasoning at a dinner or even at a party where people stand around with cocktails?
Yes, it became clear to me, through metacognition, that I didn’t know what I thought I knew until I knew what I knew,
or,
I know what I know because it was always there through meta-memory,
and what Ethan always said about that was true, that it was bullshit or mental masturbation.
“Because you can’t say that in a diner or anywhere else because it doesn’t mean anything. It only gives people some self-satisfying feeling, and the only way it really is important is when you know in a ‘meta-knowledgeable’ way that if you use words like that, you’ll scare the shit out of people and they won’t want to stand next to you or bring you your eggs and bacon and rye toast after all.”
And Ethan made me laugh the first time he said that because it was so true, but I taught the classes and enjoyed them anyway because I loved it.
I have all these books for a class I was taking in African-American studies, slave narratives, Frederick Douglass’s autobiographies and Harriet Jacobs’
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
and Shirley Anne Williams’s
Dessa Rose
. The teacher was a beautiful, lithe black woman who walked into class with the self-assurance born of a PhD from Princeton, along with a few published books on African-American literature. She was gentle and patient with the mostly white class. I didn’t tell her I was also teaching college. I didn’t see the point in it. Even then, when I began the class in January and read the first texts, even then I felt the greatest pull of guilt and despair thinking about the women and men who’d had their children sold from them. I tried to discuss it with Ethan and he’d listened patiently, but I could tell he was thinking,
That was then and this is now.
And he finally said,
“We can’t do anything about what happened then.”
And I said, “But that isn’t the point. I’m talking about how those poor people must’ve felt when their own children were taken and sold so that there was a chance they would never see them again, never know the fate of their own children. Just imagine if Truman were taken from us and we had no idea if we’d ever see him again, ever.”
And three nights ago I’d almost said that to him. I’d almost said, “Now we know how it feels, Ethan, to have our boy taken from us, to have our boy disappear and not have any idea where he’s gone to or if he’ll return.”
I didn’t, though. I knew it was pointless. I knew he had his own ideas about Truman and his fate.
And so I wander the house alone. I often wonder where Ethan has gone, but I don’t dwell on it. He knew the consequences of taking Truman’s disappearance lightly. Not that he wasn’t and isn’t devastated by what has happened to our son. He is. I can tell just by the fact that he can’t sleep at night.
There was a time when Ethan could sleep through anything. He loved to sleep and then he loved to awake to another day. In that way he was like a boy who never really grew to complete adulthood. But I saw a difference in Ethan ever since he’d returned that Sunday morning and said that our Truman was dead. I don’t think he fully grasped what it meant to say such a thing. I don’t think he took the time to really analyze what that word “dead” signified. I could only imagine all those enslaved blacks who must’ve wondered what happened to their children, if they were alive or gone for good, and would there be a chance they would become free so they could track them down and bring them back from some awful place, restore them to their natural place with their parents.
I wanted to tell Ethan that. I wanted to remind him that we needed to wait patiently and be careful so that we would both be there for him when he returned. When the lights went on in his room and I could once again open the door and see him stretched out on his bed with his hands behind his head, looking out the window or up at the ceiling, thinking Truman thoughts.