The Banks of Certain Rivers (34 page)

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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

When I blink my eyes open I’m
assaulted
by a bright blue glow; the full moon is setting over
the dunes, and the light of it shines through the living room window
and onto my face. I’m still on the couch, I realize, and the
clock on the cable box under the TV says four forty-four. I roll to
my back and rub my eyes, and remember the email I got in the middle
of the night.

Wendy’s account has expired, I realize; no more emails to
Wendy.

No more.

Then I remember my son has been missing, and I push myself upright.
Did he come back home sometime in the night? I jump to my feet and
run to his room, the door is closed but unlocked—it’s
unlocked!—and I go in.

The bed is made, he’s not there, and the memory of checking in
there last night returns to me.

“Neil?” Wendy calls.

“He’s not here,” I say.

“Come to bed,” the voice says, and I blink and realize I
cannot be speaking with Wendy.

“Hold on.” I go into the bathroom, relieve my
night-filled bladder, and shuffle through the darkness to my room to
climb into my bed with Lauren’s voice, with Lauren, for real.
She’s so warm, the real Lauren, it’s perfectly warm under
the covers with her, and I curl in behind her, tucking my knees
against the backs of her legs and sliding my arm up under her shirt
and around her waist.

“Is he home?”

“No.” I press my lips to her shoulder and neck.

“Did you sleep at all?”

“A little.” I say.

Curled together, we rest.
Daylight fills the room when I wake again; Lauren remains in heavy
slumber. I take my arm from her slowly, slip out from under the
covers, and get myself dressed.

There are no messages on my phone. It’s ten after seven, and I
dial Chris. Nothing. I check my email, and there’s nothing
there either. I check to see if I can get into my school email
account and sure enough I can; maybe a student knows something about
Christopher’s location and will have sent me something,
anything
to give me a hint of where he could be. The inbox is
empty except for one email from the network administrator, Cory, with
a subject of: VERY IMPORTANT!! Could he know something? I open it and
read:

I DO NOT THINK THIS FLOATS SO VERY WELL NEIL!!

Below the line of text I see the beginning of a photograph. I can
only see the top: blue sky, white clouds. I scroll down. Tops of
trees, summertime green. Scroll some more, and there’s damp
concrete. White tile. NO DIVING in stenciled letters. Chlorinated
blue water. And I know I shouldn’t,
I know I should not do
this,
I scroll down to the bottom of the page.

There’s a body at the bottom of the pool. A woman’s body,
lifeless.

I stare at it, and stare; my teeth are clenched, the world goes
white, in a rage, a
rage
, my phone is in my hand, the name in
my contacts is tapped and I’m rising to my feet in fury.

“You little fuck!” I nearly scream when the call is
accepted. “You weak little piece of shit!”

“No, Mr. K.—”

The world is white with rage, and all I can see is a body at the
bottom of a pool.

“You thought this was funny, right? Right? You think this is
funny!”

“No, stop, please,” Cory says, begging. He sounds
pathetic to me. “We were—”

“I want to hurt you right now,” I spit. “And it
wouldn’t be funny. So help me, I want to take my own hands
and—”

“—We were hacked! Someone got in, they took over the
whole network. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, the police have
been here. We got hacked, it wasn’t me, I swear.”

“Jesus Christ,” I say, feeling sick. Lauren is at the
door.

“Neil, what’s going on?” she whispers.

“They got in five days ago,” Cory goes on, pleading.
“They locked me out of my account, out of everything, I don’t
know how they got in. I tried to call you, I kept trying to call you,
I’m sorry, I left messages on your machine—”

My phone shakes in my hand so violently I can barely operate it, but
I hang up on Cory and dial Chris again immediately. To my amazement,
I get a ring, and to my even greater amazement, the call connects
with the sound of fumbling.

“Chris!” I say, “Christopher, where—”
Immediately, he hangs up. “Goddammit!” I shout, and I try
to call him back. Nothing.

I feel myself beginning to come apart.

“Neil?” Lauren says, her eyes wide. “What’s
happening?”

I grab a jacket and dash out of the house, and the emptiness of the
space to the side of the garage where Christopher parks his car seems
like a taunt. “Damn it!” I shout. “Damn it, Chris!”
I set off in a run, down the drive and to the path by the highway all
the way to Alan’s house. I burst in the door, startling Alan in
his kitchen. He’s wearing a robe and holding a coffee mug, and
he spins his body toward me in surprise as I come in.

“Hey, what’s going—”

“You told me to tell him!” I shout. “You told me it
would be okay!”

“I did tell you to tell him.”

“None of this is okay! You said it would be okay!”

“I never said—”

“You’re supposed to know everything! How the fuck could
you be so wrong!”

“Neil, you need to calm down if we’re going to deal with
this in a reasonable way.”

I shake my head and leave his house, starting out fast but settling
into a jog halfway home. I feel like an idiot. I feel better, maybe,
for the outburst, but I still feel like an idiot.

I’m nearly calm when I get back home, but I see Leland’s
truck parked in front of my driveway, which gets me agitated all over
again. I run in through the front door and Lauren jumps up from the
couch.

“Is he in here?” I bark. Lauren puts her hand to her
chest.

“No, Chris isn’t—”

“Not Chris, Leland!” I go back outside, and Leland steps
from around the side of my house, staring at an unrolled surveyor’s
map.

“Hey,” he says, glancing up as he notices me. “Just
the man I wanted to—”

“Get out of here!” I yell.

“Excuse me?”

“I said get the fuck off my property!”

“Whoa, Neil, what is going on?”

“Get…out…of here!” I pick up a fist-sized
limestone cobble from the landscape border by my garage, and hurl it
at his truck. It bounces off the rear quarter panel with a
tunk!
I pick up another rock.

“Settle down, I’m leaving! I’m leaving!” I
throw the second rock and miss widely just as Leland jumps into his
truck. The wheels spin out and throw gravel as he drives away.

My breath comes heavily as I watch him go, and the inside of my head
seems close to crumbling. I do not want to break. I go to the barn
slab, pick up a basketball, and squeeze it between my hands. Instead
of taking a shot, I rear back and throw the ball off into the brush.

It was two months
after
Wendy’s accident when I finally brought myself to go into the
barn again. Everything was there, just as we’d left it: a case
of beer in the refrigerator, a last few boxes of Dick’s things
to be classified on the workbench. A push broom rested against an
open stepladder, right where Wendy had placed it, waiting for her
return from a weekend trip to Wisconsin. The broom seemed especially
hard to take. I held it, thinking how Wendy’s hands had gripped
it last, how, through the simple act of her using it, it ceased to be
inanimate and became an extension of her. A broom! A stupid, fucking
broom. I assigned sentimental value to all sorts of things back then,
but the broom was, for a while, the most significant.

Being in the barn was not troubling for me. It provided an unusual
comfort; it was quiet, it kept me out of the rain, it kept things
cold for me to drink. A bottle of gin joined the beer in the fridge,
and a bigger bottle joined after that. A pill bottle filled with
anti-anxiety drugs stayed in the cabinet where Dick had kept fishing
lures.

With this pharmacopeia, I kept myself numbed.

Chris went back to school, and I spent more time in the barn. I
started accumulating things there, Wendy’s things, my own
morbid museum dedicated to my almost-late wife. I set a length of
rusty salvaged conduit across the peaks of a pair of stepladders, and
from it hung every article of Wendy’s clothing that had been in
our closet. Her toiletries were spread over the workbench.
Toothpaste, hairbrushes, facial scrubs. Could I really ever bring
myself to throw these things away? Every one of them had been, at
some point, an extension of her.

I kept a padlock on the door. I kept it on the outside when I wasn’t
there, or on the inside when I was; I didn’t want anyone to see
her things in there, and I certainly didn’t want anyone to see
me in there with them.

I didn’t want anyone to see me falling apart.

Chris spent a lot of time with Carol then. For a period of time after
he’d lost his mother, he lost his father as well.

After Leland has gone
,
back inside my house, Lauren grabs me as I dash through the living
room.

“Neil,” she says firmly, pressing her hands to the sides
of my head as she stares me in the eyes. “You need to calm
down.”

I try to twist away from her. “But I’m—”

“You are starting to panic. Breathe. Now.”

I take a shaking breath, and another, and the whole time she holds my
face and looks at me.

“Okay?” she asks. She doesn’t blink. “Breathe.
Keep breathing for me. Don’t break.”

I draw air deeply into me, hold it, and exhale. The tremor through my
body begins to slow.

“Okay,” I say through clenched teeth.

“Good,” she says. “I mean it. Don’t break.
What happened? What set you off?”

“There was a picture in my email,” I say.

“What was it?”

I shake my head. I can’t bring myself to say. “Then I
called Chris. He picked up, but he disconnected as soon as he knew it
was me.”

“You probably woke him up,” Lauren says.

“He’s mad at me.”

“I can leave if you need me to. If you don’t think I
should be here.”

“Don’t leave.” My phone rings. It’s a local
number on my display, not one that I know, and I answer it eagerly.
“Hello?”

“Neil.” It’s Leland. “I need to—”

“You don’t need shit right now,” I say, feeling
myself wind up again. Lauren puts her hand on my arm and whispers,
“Easy.”

“I need to apologize. I just heard about Christopher.”

“What?”

“I just stopped by Massie’s place. He filled me in.”

“Christ. I’m sorry, Leland.” I take a deep, slow
breath. “I’m sorry I flipped out on you.”

“It’s all right. Let me know when he’s back, okay?”

“I will,” I say. “Hey, wait, will you….”
Breathe. “Will you do something for me? Ask Steve if he knows
anything.”

“I’ll give you a call if I come up with any news.”

I drop to the living room chair and let my shoulders sag. Lauren sits
across from me on the couch with her hands on her knees.

“I’m an asshole,” I say to the floor.

“You’re not. You’re worried. It’s okay to be
worried. Just breathe.”

I press my own hands to my face to rub my eyes. “Where the hell
is he?”

We sit, and wait
. Time
passes and passes; Lauren puts some music on, but I ask her to turn
it off. Nothing seems right; there’s no appropriate soundtrack
for the situation. I stay calm, mostly, but from time to time, I
stand up and begin to pace around and Lauren has to tell me to relax.

“Easy,” she tells me. “Don’t break.”

I try to call Christopher, again and again, but he doesn’t
answer.

Lauren gets up to make some tea, and Alan stops by while she’s
in the kitchen.

“I’m really sorry about this morning,” I say as he
joins me in the living room.

“Don’t even,” Alan says. “I understand.
Really. I probably never told you about the time Angela stayed out
all night.” Angela is the younger of the two Massie daughters.
“It wasn’t the year she had you for AP, no, it must have
been the year before. She was a junior. All night she was out, no
call, no nothing. Kristin was the calm one. I was just like you!
Maybe even worse. Didn’t sleep, tore my hair out. She got home
the next morning, man, I didn’t know whether to get on my knees
and thank God, or ground Angie for the next year for giving me a
scare like that. And when I found out she was with a boy, whew, I was
ready to go wring his neck. But Kristin calmed me down.”

“Wait up,” I say. Alan’s story has reminded me of
the possible appeal of old relationships. “Hold on a second.”
I go to the spare room and find, in my old planner, Jill Swart’s
family’s number. I get her father and explain what’s
going on, and he in turn gives me my son’s ex-girlfriend’s
cell number. Alan watches from the doorway. She doesn’t answer
when I call, so I leave a message.

“Hey Jill, it’s Christopher’s dad, Saturday
morning, hope you’re doing well in Ithaca, can you give me a
call?”

Maybe he’s talked to her. Or maybe not. Anything’s worth
a try at this point.

“Boot up your computer,” Alan directs me after I hang up.
“Bring up your video. I have something to show you.” I go
to the page, and I’m not thrilled at all to see it’s up
to nearly half a million views.

“Oh boy,” I say.

“Move over. Let me sit. Now watch.” Alan starts the video
and allows it to play almost all the way through, pausing it right at
the moment Cody Tate says: “I had to like fight him off me.”