HE COULD FEEL the minutes passing—what might be the last minutes of his life. All through dinner, he felt them going by, one by one by one.
They ate at the kitchen table, Rick and Raider and their mom. Raider chattered away the whole time. Yammer, yammer, yammer. It seemed his piping voice never ceased. Such-and-such happened at school and his teacher said such-and-such and his best friend Shane did such-and-such and wasn’t such-and-such stupid and wasn’t such-and-such great and on and on. When did he find time to breathe? Rick wondered. When did he find time to eat?
On another day, he might’ve been annoyed by the constant chatter. He might’ve told the kid to clam it. But today, he listened patiently. He thought: These may be the last minutes I get to spend with him. If he didn’t make it back tonight, he wanted Raider to remember that his big brother listened to him, cared about him.
Amazingly, Raider somehow managed to clean his plate and eat dessert without ever shutting up. Then he got up from the table and announced he had to finish his homework. Rick stuck out a fist and touched knuckles with him by way of good-bye. He wanted to say something more, some words of wisdom the kid could remember in case he didn’t come home. He wished he could think of something profound or important. But all that came into his mind were the words of the famous football coach Vince Lombardi.
“Remember, kid,” he said. “It’s not about whether you get knocked down, it’s about whether you get back up.”
Rick thought it sounded dopey, him giving Raider advice like that for no reason. But the eight-year-old’s big round freckled face beamed like sunrise. The kid pressed his lips together with determination and gave Rick a second fist bump for good measure. Then he was gone, and Rick sat at the table, feeling hollow.
When he looked around, he saw his mother watching him from the other end of the table. She didn’t say anything. Just watched him. It seemed to him she’d been doing that a lot these days—watching him silently. And yet she never asked him anything: where he’d been, what he’d been up to. She just watched.
Rick tried to think of something to say to her. But he couldn’t.
“Well . . . ,” he said.
He worked his way to his feet. Got his crutches from the wall. Thumped his way out of the kitchen and down the hall, his legs aching under him. But before he got to his room, he paused at the foot of the stairs. He looked up. He could hear Raider making dopey noises in his room: singing the theme song to some cartoon show or something. He was probably blowing up his friends on his computer instead of doing his homework. Whatever.
Rick changed course. He put both his crutches in one hand, grabbed hold of the banister, and started hopping up the stairs. Good, good, good, he thought with each new thumping jolt of pain. When he reached the landing, he hobbled down the hallway to the room at the end of the hall. It was a room with a closed door—a door that hadn’t been opened in months. He opened it now. He went through.
He was in his father’s study. Such as it was. Little more than a closet really. An almost empty cell. There was nothing in the small corner cubicle but his dad’s wooden work desk and wooden chair. A few stray papers stacked on the floor in the corner. There wasn’t even a rug on the wooden floor.
Rick hobbled across the small space, leaned his crutches against the desk, and plopped down into the chair. He stared at his father’s empty desktop. The laptop that had been on the desk was now gone. So was the framed family photograph—the only photograph in the room. So was the cross that had hung on the wall—the only decoration. His father must have taken that stuff with him when he left.
Rick took a deep breath of the musty air, trying to feel his father’s presence, trying to touch his dad’s mind with his own.
Where did you go? Why did you leave us? What does it have to do with the MindWar?
He was so intent on his own thoughts that he was startled when he looked up and saw his mother standing in the doorway.
Without a word, she came in and closed the door behind her.
It struck him again how bad his mom looked, how worn and weary. No makeup on. Her blond-and-silver hair pulled back sloppily off a face that looked as if it had aged ten years in the last few months. She leaned against the door and looked at Rick—and still, she didn’t say a thing.
Rick finally felt compelled to say . . . something. Something to fill up the silence. So he said, “I have to go out tonight.”
His mom nodded. Still silent.
It struck Rick full force now how strange this was: her silence. How strange her silence had been these last four months. As strange as his father walking out on them and leaving nothing more than a note.
“How come you’re not saying anything?” Rick asked her.
“What do you want me to say?” she said.
“I don’t know. You could say, ‘You’ve been acting strangely, Rick.’ Or ‘How come suddenly you disappear for hours on end and come home all beat up?’ Or ‘How come gunmen break into our house in the middle of the night?’ Ever since Dad left, you hardly ask me anything.”
She shrugged. “I trust you. I know you’ll tell me if you want to.”
Rick tried to meet her tired, steady gaze, but he couldn’t. He looked down at the empty desktop. “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t tell you.”
“I know that, too,” said his mother. “That’s why I didn’t bother to ask.”
He looked up at her again, surprised. She knew? How much did she know, exactly? Her face was impassive. It gave nothing away. But as he continued to stare at her, her eyes shifted, just a little. She glanced at the desktop. The slightest smile played at the corner of her mouth.
What was she looking at? Rick followed her eyes to the spot. She was looking at the corner of the desk where the photograph had always stood. It had been a framed snapshot of the four of them—Dad, Mom, Rick, Raider. They were standing in front of the gigantic Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center during last year’s trip down to New York City. A police officer had been kind enough to take the photo for them. Rick remembered it. In the snapshot, Raider was doing his funny skeleton grin, and Rick was rolling his eyes and laughing in spite of himself. Dad had his arm around Mom. She had put her head on his shoulder and he had turned his face toward her slightly as if to kiss her hair . . .
Rick’s lips parted as a thought came suddenly into his head. He stared at his mother.
“He took the picture with him,” he said.
His mother went on smiling. She nodded, as if she had been waiting for Rick to notice this very thing. “He did.”
“If you’re running away with another woman,” Rick went on, “you don’t take a picture of your family with you—”
She cut him off, putting her finger to her lips. “Raider’s still awake,” she said softly.
She came across the room then. She sat on the edge of the desk, looking down at Rick. She seemed to take a moment to gather her thoughts, to figure out exactly what she wanted to say.
“Your father is a funny kind of a man,” she said. “He has a very complicated mind, but a very simple soul. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
Rick thought it over. “Sort of. I remember how he was always forgetting things . . .”
“He once walked out in the middle of a blizzard without his shoes on.”
Rick smiled. “You had to run after him almost every morning. It was like he never left the house without forgetting something. His glasses. His briefcase. His coat. Something.”
“For the longest time after we moved here, he used to forget our address and get lost coming home. He’d have to phone me and I’d give him directions. Then, one time, he forgot his phone. A policeman found him wandering around aimlessly and had to bring him back in his patrol car.”
Rick laughed—and then he stopped laughing and his voice choked up, his eyes filling with tears. He had forced himself to forget how much he missed his father, but now it hit him hard. “He’s really absentminded,” he said hoarsely. “I guess he’s always thinking about his work and stuff.”
His mother looked away to give Rick a chance to discreetly wipe his eyes with his hand. “It isn’t always easy living with a man like that. Taking care of him is a lot of work. Throw in a couple of kids, and it’s more than a full-time job.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” said Rick.
“Dad’s old girlfriend understood that. The girl he was with in college, I mean: a woman named Leila Kent.”
Rick didn’t answer. He and his mother both knew, of course: this was the woman in his father’s note, the woman he said he’d run off with.
“Leila was a really nice girl,” his mother went on. “Incredibly smart. And very, very ambitious. She had big plans—very big plans—for her career. And she knew that she was going to have to choose between her work and your dad. She understood that both of them were going to need all her time and attention. And in the end? Well, I guess she decided she didn’t want to spend her life making sure that Dad was wearing shoes when he walked out into the snow. So they broke up. But they stayed friends. In fact, Leila came to our wedding.”
“She did?” said Rick, surprised.
“Sure. After the ceremony—and a couple of glasses of champagne—she told me that she sometimes wished she could’ve been more like me, the kind of girl Dad needed, but . . . She was who she was. And she went on to have a very important, high-level career in government. As I understand it, she helps coordinate between the State Department and our intelligence agencies, the spy guys. She helps the country defend itself against terrorists. Very secret, high-security stuff.”
Rick opened his mouth, but at first he couldn’t speak. It was a long moment before he said, “And all this time . . . you trusted him. Dad. He didn’t tell you anything. You didn’t hear anything. You just . . . You read his note, and you trusted him anyway.”
“Him,” his mother said. “And you, Rick.” And she leaned toward him as if she were about to tell him a secret, and she whispered, “And it’s been really, really hard.”
She gave a quick, tired smile. She got off the desk. She walked to the door.
The pain in Rick’s legs was nothing compared to the pain he felt in his heart just then. As his mother’s hand moved to open the door, he cried out to her in a lost small voice, sounding almost as if he were still just a kid. “Ma!” he said. “I’ve messed up everything! Ever since he left. Ever since the accident. I didn’t trust anything! I didn’t have faith in anything! I made it so much tougher on you. It was like a test and I failed it!”
He was glad his mother didn’t turn around. He was glad she didn’t see his face. She kept looking at the door.
“You just got knocked down, Rick,” she told him. “And now—you’re getting back up.”
She pulled the door open. She glanced back at him where he sat with his hand covering his eyes.
“Wherever you go tonight,” she said, “be careful.”