I’d rather not talk about this. Everyone kept saying, “logical explanation.” The other campers, then the park rangers and county deputy-sheriffs. I was ready to scream the next time I heard, “Just you wait, he’ll come back and there’ll be a logical explanation.” There was no logical explanation. Buggie went up in smoke. No amount of tragedy rehearsal even grazes the horror of a worst nightmare come true.
The police insinuated Buggie either ran away or was stolen by his grandparents. The reporters pushed us and demanded articulate answers. “Mrs. Paul, how does it feel when your son disappears?” Ann stared through them, not seeing or hearing. It was as if the rest of the world ceased to exist. While search parties pored over maps and divided up the area, Ann wandered randomly through the woods and along the shore, calling Buggie in a voice that was more prayer than beckoning.
We camped at Lizard Creek all summer until the snows came in November. I went over every inch of that area a hundred times. “He’s not here,” I said to Ann.
“I know he’s still alive somewhere. Maybe if we go home he’ll come back there.”
Back in Denver we mailed posters to kindergartens, day-care centers, and grade schools. We handled leads and religious cranks and well-wishers. We cried. We hated ourselves. I stopped eating. Ann stopped sleeping. Every child on the street caused an emotional explosion.
Jesus, I’d rather not talk about this.
Ann and I both did what we had to do to survive each day. Remembering past insanities, I made an appointment at the county mental health center and found someone to talk to. Ann went back to Buggie’s pediatrician for tranquilizers and sleeping pills. He was the only doctor she’d ever known. Ann told me once she used to take barbiturates, so I guess she was reverting to her past also.
Since I was supposed to be a writer, the therapist at county mental health suggested I try a form of grief therapy called implosion. It’s when you dwell on the cause of your grief until you beat it to death. Then, according to the theory, you let it go. Implosion therapy is a little like cutting an arrowhead out of your chest with a sterilized Bowie knife. My Bowie knife was my typewriter. I started with the first time I saw Buggie and wrote down everything I could remember, every conversation, every look in his eyes, every morning wake-up and good-night kiss.
The book about Buggie became my obsession while Ann’s obsession was Buggie himself. There’s quite a bit of difference. While I re-created his speech patterns, Ann washed and ironed his shirts and baked brownies just in case he came back suddenly. Every day Ann expected Buggie to walk through the door, and every day he didn’t, she withdrew a little further.
• • •
The second rainy October after Buggie disappeared I drove downtown to check out some photographs of a murdered boy at the police station. I didn’t bother to tell Ann where I was going. We’d been through the emotional rip of identifying dead children so often by then—praying it’s not Buggie because there’s a chance he’s still alive, knowing that if it is him the wait will be over, but a new grief just as bad will take its place. The rising gorge of guilt, hope, and fear as we slide the pictures from their manila envelopes, then relief and a sick drop in the stomach when it’s not Buggie. The revulsion at our own emotions for being glad someone else’s son is dead. Finally, nausea at the pictures of white, silent little boys that could have been Buggie. No wonder Ann needed more and more sleeping pills to close her eyes.
It wasn’t Buggie this time either. I sat at a wide desk with a gray top, shuffling through photos of a little boy about four years old. Blond hair. He’d been found in the well of a farm outside Roanoke, Virginia. I could see the trachial membrane inside a gash that showed from one side of the jaw to the other. He couldn’t have been in the well for long. The Winnie-the-Pooh Collection label was still readable on his T-shirt. He wore OshKosh shorts. His left hand had been cut off.
“No, this isn’t Buggie,” I said.
The lieutenant didn’t look up from the papers he was reading, “Well, thanks for coming down. We’ll just have to keep looking.”
“Sure.”
Later, I sat in the car and shook. A song called “Wasted Away Again in Margaritaville” played on the radio. I looked at the rain on the station steps and imagined Buggie’s face on the body in the photograph, Buggie’s neck slashed, Buggie’s hand cut off. I imagined Buggie as dead and rotting. I screamed. Something had to change. I had to dump some pain even if it meant giving up hope. Even if it meant forgetting Buggie.
Driving home on the Interstate, I said, “He’s not coming back,” several times to see how it sounded. Could I believe it? “Buggie is dead.” The words came out all scrambled, like I was speaking backwards or something. They didn’t relate to anything I knew about.
Two teenage girls from down the street stood on the wet sidewalk in front of our duplex, watching my garage. I waved as I pulled into the driveway, but they didn’t wave back.
Smoke seeped from the crack under the garage door. I ran through the side entrance and found Ann pressed against the wall, her eyes gone animal. The smoke came from a great wad of white paper stuffed under the pile of baby beds, cradles, and bassinets. She had gone after the beds with my ax before setting the fire.
“Come on,” I said, pulling Ann toward the door.
“I don’t have to.”
The open side door provided enough oxygen to burst the pile of beds into flames.
I pulled harder, yelling, “It’s okay, let’s go in the house and talk.”
“Buggie knows every move you make.”
I leaned down and picked up one of the papers she’d used to start the fire. It was page 148 of my Disappearance manuscript.
“Please come outside, Ann.”
“Why?”
I forced her out into the air and shut the door. Together, we stumbled across the yard through the rain, stopping next to the Chevelle.
“Why?” I asked.
Ann looked at me. “I miss Fred.”
We turned to watch the flames through the garage door windows. The fire was pretty, all oranges and pink, little lines creeping like cancer up the dry wall and under the rafters of the roof. The two teenage girls came over and stood near us.
One said, “Look at her go.”
The other said, “Should we try to put it out?”
Through the window I saw the pile of broken beds and cradles collapse, sinking into the flames. Ann held her hand up at shoulder level, whispering, “Bye-bye.”
• • •
Someone called the fire department and soon a group of men in yellow slickers and fire hats stood around watching the garage glow. They pulled out a hose to cool the side of the duplex next to the fire, but the rain did all the real work. After a while the firemen turned the hose off and loitered around the front yard with our neighbors and their children.
Ann sat on the street curb, her back to the garage. Her dirty blond hair reflected the fire. Once every revolution the blue firetruck light flashed on her face, showing her straight mouth and sunken eyes. I knelt at Ann’s side and touched her shoulder. Her head turned and in the next flash I saw Buggie staring at me, accusing me, never forgiving me. Then the dark came, and when the light circled back, Buggie had been replaced by a mask.
• • •
Three months later while I was typing at the kitchen table, Ann sat on the edge of Buggie’s bed and swallowed a large number of pills. She washed the pills down with apple juice. I was working on a scene in which he learned to ice skate and I needed to know what color to make his sweater. I went into the bedroom to search his drawers and found Ann dead on top of the blankets.