“I made Wain’s favorite lunch,” Elizabeth tells him when he arrives back at the condo. “Cheese dreams and apple boats.”
“Sounds good,” Sid says, although he has no idea what a cheese dream is. “I brought cookies.” He holds the bag out to Elizabeth.
“How thoughtful,” she says. “Now go wash up and I’ll pop the cheese dreams under the broiler.”
It turns out that cheese dreams are what Megan calls cheese toasties: English muffins, cheddar cheese and bacon broiled until the cheese melts and the bacon crisps. Bacon twice in one day, Sid thinks. That would never happen at home.
“I used to ask Megan to make these all the time,” Sid says. “She didn’t use English muffins—no white flour in our house—and we had them with applesauce. But apple boats are good too,” he hastens to add. “If the apples aren’t mushy.”
“Agreed,” Elizabeth says. “There’s nothing worse than a mushy apple.”
They eat in silence for a few minutes. Elizabeth hasn’t yet asked about his morning. She seems very calm for someone whose daughter and grandson are missing. Maybe she’s a naturally calm person or maybe she’s had to learn to be calm, with a crazy daughter and an outof-control grandson. Sid isn’t used to taking the lead in conversations, but he wants her to know that he made a bit of progress, if you can call it that.
“I met a girl today who says she’ll help me look for Wain,” Sid says. “Her name’s Amie. She works at the bakery where I got the cookies.”
Elizabeth nods.
“So could I have some more copies of Wain’s picture? And I need a contact number for people too.”
“You should have a phone while you’re here,” Elizabeth says. “One of those throwaway phones criminals always use on TV.” She smiles. “Although you don’t look like much of a criminal to me.”
“A burner phone, you mean?” Sid says, thinking of his shrinking two hundred dollars.
“Is that what they’re called? I’ll ask Phil where to get one. And don’t worry. I’ll pay for it.”
Sid starts to stutter that he can pay, but he doesn’t sound very convincing, even to himself.
“I’m a rich old lady, Sid,” Elizabeth says. “And you’re my grandson. I have some indulging to catch up on.”
“Okay. But I don’t need, like, an iPhone or anything. There’s no service on the island. And I’m not going to be here very long.”
“I understand,” Elizabeth says, and Sid believes her.
Phil buys Sid a phone at a 7-Eleven, and when they get back to the garage, Sid goes up to the loft and calls Chloe. He knows it’s long distance, but he doesn’t care. He needs to talk to her. Of course, she doesn’t answer her cell; even if she is in an area that gets service, his number will show up as Unknown. He leaves her a message. “It’s me. I have a cell. Yeah, I know. I said I’d never get one, but I need one down here. Call me. Please. I miss you. I know you’re mad at me for leaving, and I’m sorry.” He leaves his number, disconnects and then phones home. Megan doesn’t pick up either. He leaves his number again, feeling lonelier than he has since he left the island. He climbs down the ladder and watches Phil sand a chest of drawers.
“No luck?” Phil looks up and stops sanding.
Sid shakes his head. “Is there a bike I could use?” he asks. “I thought I’d go for a ride. Check out the ’hood.”
“My bike has two flat tires—I don’t use it much—but you can take Devi’s sit-up-and-beg or Wain’s BMX.”
“Sit-up-and-beg?” Sid has never heard of such a thing. It sounds like a dog, not a bike.
“You know, a ladies’ bike with a low bar, high handlebars and a chain guard. Devi’s bike is hot pink and it has a wicker carrier basket. And a bell.” Phil grins.
Sid shudders. He’d rather crawl on his hands and knees than ride a bike like that. “What about Wain’s bike? He’s big for thirteen. Should be okay.” Sid wishes he’d thought to bring his dirty gray mountain bike with him. BMX bikes always feel strange to him—as if he’s stolen a bike from a six-year-old.
“It’s on the back porch,” Phil says. “He loved that bike. For a while he talked about getting into competitive riding—he’s really good—but lately it’s just been sitting on the porch, gathering dust.”
“Cool.” Sid heads out the door. “When should I be back?”
“Couple of hours,” Phil says. “I thought we’d order in some pizza, strategize.”
“Strategize?”
“About Wain.”
“Right,” Sid says as he shuts the door behind him.
Wain’s bike is bright green and expensive. The words The Green Knight are written in an old-fashioned script on the bottom bar. Sid laughs. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Awesome. He still has an illustrated version of the old tale from when he was about ten. He remembers how the Green Knight put his severed head back on his shoulders, how Gawain confronted an ogre, a dragon, a pack of wolves. How it all turned out well in the end. He swings the bike off the porch, checks its tires and rides down the bumpy driveway to the street, feeling like a giant on a midget’s bike.
He turns left and then right, heading for the ocean. At least he thinks he is. He figures he can’t go too far wrong—they are on an island, after all. A bigger island than he lives on but still an island. A few blocks later he can smell the sea, and he follows a road that winds along the shoreline. He passes a marina with a life-size model of a killer whale out front. Next to the marina is a small park. A mile or so farther is another park, this one with a children’s playground and a long promenade. He stops to watch some kids making a sandcastle, and then continues up a hill to another park with a boat launch. He rides the Green Knight over the rocks to the water and watches some sailboats race across the choppy waves toward an orange buoy. In the distance to his left is an enormous snow-capped mountain. It looks, improbably, like a postcard of Mount Fuji propped up on the horizon. He’ll have to ask Phil its name. He thinks it might be in the United States, but he’s not sure. All he knows is that everything here feels both familiar and strange at the same time. The same coast, but different. If he rode his bike for half an hour at home, he would be in the wilderness, or close to it. Here, after a half-hour bike ride, he is still surrounded by the evidence of civilization: waterfront mansions, SUVs, tour buses, well-dressed women walking designer dogs on fancy leashes. Overflowing trash cans. Hip-hop blasting from a car stereo. And yet, the rocks, the sky, the water, the wind, the sun—all the same. He imagines the water rushing up the narrow strait from here to the island. If he threw a message in a bottle into the fast-moving whirlpools here, maybe Chloe would pick it up in the cove. Maybe she would reply. He needs to talk to her: about Elizabeth, about his dead grandfather, about the Green Knight.
He sits for a while, watching the boats navigate the orange buoy, listening to the gulls fight over some garbage, and then hops on the bike and heads back to Phil’s.
“It’s not really much of a strategy,” Sid says to Amie the next day. “More like a plan. In the daytime, I’m going to spend some time downtown, show Wain’s picture around. At night, Phil will drive around, talk to people.”
Amie’s shift at the bakery is over and she wants to get some sushi before they start searching for Wain.
“Did you bring more pictures?” she asks. “We need to hand them out.”
Sid nods. “Elizabeth printed out a bunch for me. She’s got everything—iMac, photo printer, fax machine, digital camera. She says she needs it for her career.”
“Her career? Isn’t she, like, eighty?”
“More like seventy, I think. She’s an actor. You’ve probably seen her—she does a lot of commercials.”
“Like what?”
“Well, she’s the Gray Matter Granny.” Sid feels ridiculously proud when he says this, as if Elizabeth had won the Nobel Prize for peace.
“No kidding! I love that shit. It’s all over YouTube. Does she know that?”
“I doubt it,” Sid says. “I don’t think she’s a big YouTube watcher.”
He doesn’t add that neither is he. “Anyway, I put my cell number on the backs of all the pictures.”
“Good plan,” Amie says. She stops in front of a sushi restaurant. “My friend Dan works here. Come and meet him. We can ask him about Wain.”
Sid expects Dan to be Asian, but he looks like he belongs on a California beach: long messy blond hair, serious tan, blue eyes, straight white teeth. A young Keanu Reeves with a bad dye-job.
“Here’s your tuna roll, Ames,” he says, handing Amie a brown paper bag. “Extra soy sauce. This the guy you were telling me about?”
Amie nods. “This is Sid. Sid, this is Dan.”
Dan raises a fist in greeting and taps Sid on the shoulder. “I hear you lost your baby bro.”
“You could say that,” Sid replies. “Although I’ve never actually met him, so it’s kinda weird to say I’ve lost him. But yeah, he’s missing. Has been for about a week. He’s only thirteen.”
“Harsh,” Dan says. “That’s young. You got a visual?”
“A what?”
“An image. A picture.”
Sid pulls one of the photographs of Wain out of his backpack and hands it to Dan, who does a double take.
“Dude, he’s black,” Dan says, as if it might have escaped Sid’s notice.
“Duh,” Amie says. “And your mother’s Korean. What’s your point?”
“Nothin’,” Dan says. “I was surprised, is all. I mean, look at him.” He points at Sid. “Doesn’t get much whiter than that.” He jabs a thick finger at the picture of Wain. “Or much blacker than that. I’m just sayin’.”
“Point taken,” Sid says, edging toward the door.
Amie pays Dan and follows Sid out the door. “Sorry about that,” she says. “He’s a good guy. Just not all that… subtle.”
“I picked up on that,” Sid says. “Being a subtle guy myself.”
Amie laughs and pulls a black plastic tray of sushi out of the bag. “Can we sit for a minute while I eat?”
“Sure,” Sid says. “Where?”
“Here is good.” Amie says, pointing at a bench outside a Starbucks. “I come here all the time. We should leave a picture with them.”
Sid goes inside while she eats. The kid at the counter takes the picture without looking at it.
He gets a similar response at most of the places they go that afternoon. No one seems very interested, or concerned. “He’s only thirteen,” Sid says over and over. “Looks older,” one woman says in an accusatory tone, as if Sid is lying.
“What’s wrong with people?” he asks Amie when they stop to get a drink from a street vendor.
She shrugs. “Burnt out maybe. Lots of kids come here when they run away. Get into drugs, hooking, panhandling. Stores get broken into, pissed on, vandalized. The retailers get a bit paranoid. He’s just another runaway to them. Potential trouble.”
Sid wonders how bad your home life would have to be to want to sleep on the cold concrete, sell your body, beg. He can’t even imagine. But it doesn’t change the fact that Wain has disappeared. That he has done so before. Presumably there’s somewhere he goes, somewhere nobody knows about. Maybe he has a friend he stays with, a friend no one in his family has ever met.
“My sister Enid’s home right now,” Amie says. “I told her we’d come by. She works part-time at a drop-in center for kids, so she might know someone who’s seen Wain.”
She tosses her cup in the recycling bin and waits for Sid to do the same. He follows her down an alley and up a steep set of stairs in an old building that smells of cat piss and garbage. When they knock on the door of the apartment at the head of the stairs, it’s opened by what appears to be a geisha.
“Hey, Enid,” Amie says. “Cool kimono.”
Enid bows and murmurs, “Konnichiwa,” and steps aside to let them enter the tiny apartment. She is wearing white socks with black flip-flops, and her black wig is askew.
“Enid’s in the theater program at the university. They’re putting on The Mikado,” Amie says to Sid. “She’s a Method actor. Obviously.”
Enid pulls off the wig and puts it on the futon beside her; it looks like a black spaniel puppy. Her blond hair is French-braided close to her head. “That thing makes my head soooooo itchy,” she says, “especially under the lights.”
She sticks her hand out at Sid. “You must be Sid. I’m Enid, otherwise known as Yum-Yum.”
Sid sings a few bars of “Three Little Maids from School” and Enid’s eyes widen. She clutches Amie’s arm.
“Where did you find this delicious boy?” she says.
Amie rolls her eyes. “Ignore her, Sid. She’s such a drama queen.”
“But seriously, Sid darling, where did you learn to sing?” Enid takes off her kimono to reveal torn jean shorts and a brown short sleeve shirt with the name Larry embroidered on the breast pocket.
“At home,” Sid answers. “Lots of Gilbert and Sullivan freaks on the island. Once a year we have a community sing-along. You pick stuff up.”
Enid gives him an appraising look. “And they grow cherubim there too, I see.” Her eyes, the light golden brown of pancake syrup, are amused, but kind.
“Cherubim?” he asks.
She frowns. “No, that’s not right. You look like a Caravaggio cupid. The eyes, the curls, the lips. Innocence wronged.” She turns to Amie. “Am I right?”
“Art history class,” Amie says to Sid. “Pay no attention. Show her the picture, Sid.”
Sid pulls a picture out of his pack and hands it to Enid, who stares at it for a long moment before putting it down on a coffee table covered with musical scores and dirty dishes.
“The Green Knight,” she says. “He’s missing?”