WE WERE HOMELESS. THOUGH WE STILL HAD A ROOF over our heads, several changes of clothes, food, heat, bank accounts, toilets, a TV, Michael’s disappearance rendered it all useless. The things of life are not pleasures so much as protection from pain, and once they can no longer stop or even mitigate your misery it is as if they have disappeared. Our beds turned to stone; the food rotted in the refrigerator, or the frying pan, or in our very mouths; and the roof was lifted off as if by a storm—though we could hear the rain beating against it, it also fell directly upon us, soaking us, freezing us, as we staggered from room to room, wondering where in the entire world he could be.
Amanda came home Sunday morning around eleven. We had hoped she would stay with Elektra for the whole day, but Elektra and her mother were fervently religious and they spent Sunday in church. We would have liked to protect Mandy from the truth about Michael, but we were ravaged, and we knew we had to tell her he was Out There Somewhere and that we were looking for him.
“The important thing, sweetie,” I said, “is that you don’t worry. Okay?” I was sitting at the kitchen table, with Amanda half on my knee. She had slept in her clothes; her hair held a faint whiff of incense. I tapped my knuckle on her chin and smiled. Olivia, I noticed from the corner of my eye, was frowning at me. Was I saying the wrong thing? Or the right thing in the wrong way? Was I appearing too nonchalant, or acting like a liar? What? It was all I could do to restrain myself from looking at Olivia and saying, “Do you have a problem?”
Amanda was beautiful, like Olivia, like Olivia’s sister, Elizabeth, like their mother. Tall, bony, dark-haired, coal- eyed, with a full, red mouth and a long neck, she even had a copper-colored birthmark the size of a ladybug beneath her right ear, just like the rest of them. She seemed to belong to them in some immense and fateful way. I could imagine all of them, years from now, shopping together, traveling to Scotland, drinking tea laced with whiskey by the fireplace, sharing their secrets. They seemed like an unbroken chain, a chain of women, and I was just something that had happened, someone who had come in and out of their lives.
As the immensity of Michael’s absence settled into Amanda, she began to cry. And as she wept, she managed to say many of the things Olivia and I had been thinking but would not say.
“What if someone takes him?” she said. “What if they kill him?”
“He just needs a little time out,” I said.
“But you must never do this,” added Olivia.
“I know. But what if?”
“What if what, sweetie?” I said. I heard my voice; it sounded so reasonable, that baritonal calm.
“What if someone hurts him? What if he’s crying for help and we can’t even hear him?”
By now, Olivia had walked around the table and scooped Amanda off my lap and held her close. In some way too vague to mention (then) but real enough to sting, I felt she was rescuing her from me.
By noon, I was aching with sleeplessness; my undreamed dreams seemed to have turned to flu. Waiting was intolerable—we had to do something—so we got into the car, this time with Amanda, whom we could not decently leave on her own, no matter how we wanted to shield her from our predicament, and began again to look for Michael. It was hopeless, and we knew it. For every road we turned down, we passed ten without turning. If he was running from us, he would be able to spot our car well before we spotted him, and he might hide. If he had found a place to sleep, then he was hidden from us. If he had left Leyden, gone to New York, or hitchhiked in whatever direction the first driver was heading, then we certainly had no chance of finding him. If he was injured, a hospital might call. If he was dead, we would hear from the police, once the body was recovered.
I did not believe he was dead; but the possibility of it, or, really, the impossibility of completely ruling it out, assaulted me. I felt his absence as a kind of wanton violence against me. I felt what he was doing was unforgivable. Yet I had been a runner, too. Many times, growing up, I had shot out of the house and stayed at a friend’s apartment, or slept on the subway, or just walked the streets, catching catnaps on park benches, or with my head down on the counter of a Chock Full o’ Nuts. (Nabokov was right and Tolstoy wrong: all unhappy families are alike.) I had survived these times on my own and had not even been aware of any particular danger.
“Go on Maple Street,” said Amanda, pointing to a block of modest, stocky frame houses.
“Why? Do you see him?”
“No, just…I don’t know.”
“Does Michael have a friend on this street?” Olivia asked, as I made the turn.
“I just have a feeling,” said Amanda.
My heart swelled with extravagant, idiotic hope. “A feeling?” said Olivia; and though I did not want to see her expression, I could tell from the sound of her voice that she, too, was lending particular credence to our daughter’s pointing us in a direction, any direction. It was our first lead. And even as I went from one end of Maple to the other, and then turned around and patrolled it a second time, though there was nothing we could have failed to see the first time, even then it seemed as if we might actually find him.
“Then how about…whatchamacallit? Where the school is?” said Amanda.
“Livingston?” said Olivia.
“Yeah. Livingston. Let’s go to Livingston and look for him.”
“Are you just saying whatever pops into your mind, or is this based on something?” I asked.
My daughter looked at me, visibly hurt by my tone. Add it to the list: ambivalent, unfaithful, verbally abusive.
When we finally arrived back home, Michael’s voice was waiting for us on our PhoneMate answering machine. “The beep’s a little long. Are you clearing your old messages? Anyhow, it’s me.” (A pause, background sounds of wind, a passing truck—he was obviously calling from a phone booth.) “I’m okay. Sorry for…well, you know. Things aren’t right for me and I’m just going to figure stuff out. I need a little time. I’m okay. I’m completely safe. Okay? So don’t worry. I’ll make up the schoolwork when I get back. I realize I’ll be grounded or punished in some other way, but that’s cool.” (Another truck went by, downshifting. I wondered if some computer analysis of the noise could determine exactly where a road was graded in a way that would cause a truck to downshift in close proximity to a phone booth.) “Maybe I’ll call later so you can realize I’m saying this stuff on my own and there’s no one putting a gun to my head or something.”
We played the message over and over, with Mandy standing to one side, wondering, isolated, afraid. And then, while we played it for the fifth or sixth time, the phone rang and I grabbed it quickly, not wanting to give Michael a chance for second thoughts.
However, it was my agent, Graham Davis, on the line.
“It’s me again,” he announced, like a kid, expecting his voice to be instantly recognized.
“Hello, Graham,” I said, with a roll of the eyes toward Olivia, She sighed, put her arm around Amanda, led her out of the room—as if I were about to embark on something obscene.
“This is an awkward time,” I said. “I’ve got family problems.”
“Oh,” said Graham. “I’m sorry.”
There was a long silence, and finally he waited me out and I asked, “Well, what was it you wanted?”
“It’s not what I want, Sam. It’s what Ezra Pointy-Head Poindexter wants. It’s all this incredible mania about Visitors from Above. They got orders for fifteen thousand copies.”
I sat down on the steps leading to the bedrooms.
“This is just yesterday, Sam. Not grand total—one-day sales.”
Amanda and Olivia emerged from the kitchen and walked around me, mounting the stairs with delicate, almost inaudible steps. Where are you going? I asked with my eyes. “Bath,” Olivia mouthed. I nodded, but something felt wrong. Like anyone with a guilty conscience, I was beginning to refer everything to myself and my shitty little secrets; I could not help thinking that this midday bathing was somehow associated, even if only unconsciously, with a feeling of there being something unclean in me.
“That’s great, Graham,” I said. “That’s a lot of books.”
“Understatement. It’s fucking marvelous, is what it is. May I tell you something in absolute confidence, and please even under pain of death not to repeat it?”
“I may crack before they actually kill me, but I’ll try not to.”
“I’ve never represented a book that’s sold fifteen thousand copies in a single day, not in my entire career.” He said this as if he were a dying man confessing he had never known love.
“It’s not been such a long career, Graham. You’re younger than I am.”
“I mean, fucking hell, even at that somewhat reduced royalty we took—which I think was the right way to go, by the way, and I hope you’re not annoyed, but, you know, given past performances and all that—but even at five percent royalty, we made $14,212.50 yesterday.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“Great, fantastic, wow.”
“I must say, I thought you’d be more pleased. Those family problems must be grim.”
“Yes, I guess so. But I am happy about the money. It’s the stupidest book I’ve ever written, but at least now I’ll be able—”
“Oh, don’t say that. I think it’s extremely professional and much of it is fascinating. I was just looking through it before ringing you.”
Right, I thought, and probably for the first time, too.
I felt something crashing within me, like a chair banging down in the next room. Michael.
“Anyhow,” Graham was saying, “the thing is, Ezra feels we have to respond to this sudden flurry of sales. He says we need a plan, and of course he’s dead right. I’ve been telling him this for weeks.”
“God, Graham,” I said, “maybe this is it. Maybe this book can actually make some money, some real fucking money, and I can put this whole nightmare behind me and do what I meant to do.”
“What you meant to do?” asked Graham, forgetting for the moment that I still considered myself a real writer.
“Write novels—write things that are real.”
“Yes,” he said, back on track, “exactly. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? I understand how you feel, I truly do. That’s why I’ve been telling Ezra Pointy-Head Poindexter we need a plan of action. That’s why we need you.”
“Me?”
“In Ezra’s office, eleven tomorrow morning.”
“Do I really need to be there? I don’t think I can.”
“Please, Sam. Don’t give me a nervous breakdown. It would be an unmitigated disaster if you weren’t there. Ezra’s talking about putting tens of thousands of dollars behind your book, and you need to be there.”
“You need John Retcliffe, not me.”
“Listen, Sam, for the next few weeks you are John Retcliffe. Come on, it won’t be so bad.”
“I can’t.”
“You have to. We’ll get you in and out of there quickly. I promise.”
“Graham…”
He knew I was getting ready to say yes, just the way I said his name; it was like “Be gentle with me.”
“Sam,” he said, “if you fail to capitalize on this opportunity, you’ll hate yourself for the rest of your life. How many chances like this are going to come along? If this thing continues to grow, you could be set financially for years, maybe for the rest of your life. Meet me in my office and we’ll walk over together.”
I heard the water thundering into the tub upstairs, thought of my wife and daughter in the bathroom as it slowly filled with steam.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be there, but I have to make it quick.”
I hung up but continued to sit on the steps with the telephone on my lap. I expected Michael to call. Perhaps the planets had just lined up in my favor, as the universe turned in a circle like a vast combination lock. He would call, say he was on his way home; I would be free to go. But the phone remained a silent weight on my legs, and finally I got up, put it back on its spindly little table, and proceeded to my study off the kitchen.
Was it just because I thought I might become rich, or was there some other reason that I chose that moment to finally do what I should have done months before? I gathered Nadia’s letters into a bunch, resisted the impulse to read them a final time, to savor them. Tearing them to shreds as I left the house, I got into my car and drove to town, more or less looking for Michael as I went. Once in town, I deposited bits of Nadia’s letters in various public trash barrels, so it would have taken a genius of paranoia and detection to ever piece them together again.
There, I said to myself, driving back to the old homestead on Red Schoolhouse Road. Done with it. I felt such a surge of happiness and accomplishment that I forgot for a moment that my son was still out there.