6:47 p.m.
Pasadena, California ~ Friday, August 15, 2014
I spoke with my husband for only about five minutes between his afternoon meetings and the clients’ big evening event. It was three hours later out in New York than it was at home, so when he’d called earlier, I knew he still had a very busy and very long night awaiting him.
Again, I didn’t want to worry him needlessly, but I also didn’t want him to be blindsided by disaster if our son didn’t show up on someone’s radar soon. So, I told him only that Charlie had been impossible to reach during the day and asked again if he had any idea where he might be.
“There are only so many places he’d go,” my husband said, distracted, I could tell, by the swarm of business people around him. Sounded like he was somewhere cavernous. A large reception room, maybe? “He probably took Cassandra on some romantic getaway.”
Ah. So he hadn’t known about their breakup either. This made me feel marginally better, although I decided to wait to tell my husband about that, too.
I still couldn’t believe I’d missed seeing my son’s relationship fizzle.
My so-called “mother’s intuition” may have been running at less than one-hundred percent lately, but my record over the past three decades had been pretty decent. Not only had I detected obvious things, like the time I caught Jay smoking in high school, but I’d also picked up on subtler ones, like Charlie’s school frustrations and his touch of ADD. He’d had trouble in reading for “no good reason,” according to his clueless fourth-grade teacher, who later admitted that the only material she ever personally read were fashion magazines. “It’s so weird,” she’d said at our conference, “because he likes telling stories.”
I suspected then that this was her attempt at diplomacy, since Charlie was a boy who loved exaggeration. So much so that he couldn’t always distinguish between where the tall tale ended and the outright lie began. But, once I’d pointed out the likely source of the problem, help was given and school fell into place quickly for Charlie.
My accuracy in picking up signals had begun to wane only after the boys left home. I needed the person I was studying to be there—ideally, right in front of me—in order to intuit at my highest level. Phone calls were less effective, of course, but I did my best.
I was not, however, psychic. I couldn’t read a damn thing without any visual or auditory input. With no facial expressions. No vocal tones. No gestures or tells.
After my husband and I clicked off, I decided the only productive use for my nervous energy would be to clean the house, starting with the kitchen. I systematically went through the lower cabinets (how did we get so much Tupperware?), collected a bag of canned goods from the pantry for whenever the next local food drive would be, wiped the dust away from my teapots on the window ledge and scrubbed the tile floor. Then I tackled the refrigerator, which made me feel even less like eating than I had all day. I had a small apple and a cheese stick for dinner, but that was all I could manage.
The rest of the night I spent thinking through possibilities of where Charlie might be—clinging onto the most likely, the most reasonable, as if they were my life preservers, while my imagination ran the gamut of the most wacky, the most dangerous, and I tried desperately to ignore those.
And, well, I had to admit, I even briefly entertained the notion of an alien abduction. It didn’t seem the worst of the possibilities out there because, based on what little I knew of UFO lore (I’d watched some sci-fi movies recently on FX), the aliens tended to return the stolen humans back to Earth. With amnesia or an occasional implant, perhaps, but generally unharmed.
Certainly, it said something about me that I was comforted by this farfetched idea. I didn’t want to dwell on the more commonplace possibilities like violent muggings, car crashes or serial killers.
The most probable scenarios for Charlie’s unexplained absence, though, involved experiences I knew about firsthand. Spontaneous road trips out of state. Involvement with illegal items that could cause injury, like, oh, explosives. Wild parties where sex, drugs and rock-n-roll were the norm.
If my son followed in my footsteps in any way at all, I knew he could be in a lot of trouble.