Deb called in sick and then drove down each and every winding island road. She didn’t sleep, nicotine and coffee fueling her next workday. She brought Hulk on her drives, both for company and the hope the mutt could pick up Robert’s scent, chase him down and tree him if that’s what it took. She thought about using the copy machine at work to make flyers, but then was mortified to realize she’d only captured a few blurry snapshots of her son since he’d shed boyhood like a too-tight skin.
Every search ended at the beach, where she took off her shoes and surrendered to the shadowy scenarios she otherwise fought off. Her son’s broken body washing up on the shore. Mangled by the side of the road. Hanging from a beam in some abandoned Seattle building.
She never should have told him about his father. Who knew what crazy ideas that had put in his head? When he came back, she decided, brushing sand off her toes, she was going to sell the trailer and anything else she had to and move them off the island. To somewhere with open fields instead of thick forest, grass instead of sand.
* * *
Robert tried to study by the television’s blue light, afraid to draw attention to himself by turning on a lamp. Quick pencil strokes next to a diagram of an altitude meter. Chapter after chapter after chapter about flying at night, flying in bad weather, in high winds, with glare in the pilot’s eyes and thick, churning clouds. So much to know, but his thoughts scattered as easily as those geese back at the airfields, his own brain firing shot after shot. One word sent his attention flapping away. Altitude needle reminded him of getting a shot at the doctor’s and the doctor’s office reminded him of Barry Lancaster’s office, which reminded him of the Adderall he was supposed to be on and his mother and getting kicked out of school and what was he reading about again? Robert tried to will himself to stop tapping his pencil, stop bouncing his trampoline knee, and read. Were the kids whose names were printed in the paper when they made honor roll, report card after report card, the kids with their homework finished and their permission slips signed and their binders tabbed and divided, were they really that much smarter than him? Could he truly not read a manual?
He flipped back to the first page. He didn’t realize he was grinding his teeth until his jaw began to ache. He read the manual straight through, underlining, tattooing the pages with his scrappy printing, and he didn’t remember a word of it.
He threw down the manual. He watched a sitcom for a few minutes but couldn’t tell why the audience was laughing. Then he checked out a basketball game where he didn’t recognize any of the players. Then local news. A bank robbery. A car accident. A local forecast coming right up!
No reports of a boot camp escapee.
Was anybody looking for him? Sure didn’t seem like it. In the movies, squads of searchers would be deployed, scouring the beach with flashlights, distributing flyers, driving red-tipped pushpins into a map of the coast. His mom would have been on TV, pleading for his safe return. Robert pictured Holt in a war room, a walkie-talkie pressed to his ear, pointing platoons of officers into the woods. But during the off season, summer towns grew desolate, and Robert could easily pretend he was the last person on Earth.
He was just the tiniest bit disappointed.
He’d face a heavy punishment at Sea Brook, he was sure. Goodbye, lounge. Catch ya later, foosball. They’d lock him up in Redwood, without a roommate. Those guys only left their floors for classes and therapy and had to slowly earn the privileges Robert had already enjoyed, like the ropes course and archery practice. Knowing that Dalton and the others were outside while he was trapped in his room would make his sentence that much worse.
Or maybe they’d kick him out, ship him back over the bridge to Yannatok. And then where would he go? If he didn’t complete the terms of his diversion agreement, would they send him somewhere else? He imagined diminishing rooms, one fitting inside the next, his room at Sea Brook nestled inside the trailer, tucked into the high school, each place he got booted from smaller and smaller.
He couldn’t go back to Sea Brook and he didn’t want to go back to Yannatok, so he stayed put all day, TV and manuals, manuals and TV, until the allure of the airstrip pulled him back for a third visit. This time he didn’t skulk along the edges of the building, didn’t feel a jolt of adrenaline at the fence’s rattle, didn’t ease the door closed. His footsteps thudded and echoed around the hangar as he strode toward the desk and its tackle box, luring him in with its key-stuffed compartments.
Robert grabbed the keys and tested out the pilot’s seat of N97681. He put himself through the paces of an entire imaginary flight, takeoff through landing, maneuvering through some thick cloud cover. The blue-gray sky, the cottony cloud swaths could have been painted on the hangar’s wall, Robert saw them so clearly.
An hour raced by, and his concentration never wavered. Something about those controls, those gauges, washed out the tide of distractions.
He was returning the keys, jangling them against his thigh, strutting through the hangar, congratulating himself on a successful flight, when the hangar door swung up and open.
Heavy footsteps.
Flashlights swept over the room.
Robert ducked behind the desk. He closed his eyes, afraid their animal shine would give him away. He should have waited until three or four a.m., like he had for his other visits. Being here at eleven o’clock was obviously a mistake.
“Who’s there?”
The loudest silence Robert had ever heard. His blood roared, his veins throbbed, his heart hammered.
Footsteps again. More than one guy, he could tell now.
He would burst from behind the desk, rush them, knock them over, push them down, and run for the woods.
“I know I heard something.”
“Gotta be an animal.”
“Tomorrow let’s check for nests upstairs,” the second man said. “Which locker did you need to get into?”
Robert sat frozen, tense, ready to spring, until their footsteps faded and the door slammed shut behind them. He waited an hour, his legs cramping, his neck stiff, before he slipped from the hangar and ran back to the house. Later, as he was trying to get to sleep, he couldn’t remember if he’d returned the keys to the right spot, or simply left them flung under the desk. The kind of mistake that could cost him his freedom.