The Disappeared

[1]

How had it come to this?

Retreating to the safe, familiar darkness of the house.

Keeping the drapes drawn, day and night, summer, winter.

Wearing sunglasses in public to keep others from looking in, to keep her from looking out.

Fading hopelessly into the mind-numbing distraction of television, hours fading to days, days to months.

Dreaming him, missing his little-boy laughter, the sweet summer-sun smell of his hair, the mesmerizing dark brown eyes.

Giving up on him.

Such a long time now.

How had it come to this?

She didn’t want to think about it.

And that was precisely the point, wasn’t it?

[2]

Someone was knocking at the door.

Teri Knight, who was lying on the couch with a damp wash cloth draped over her forehead, opened her eyes and stared at the living room ceiling, listening. The sun had gone down. It was late evening now, seven-thirty, maybe eight. She had drawn the drapes earlier, and turned out the lights, and now there was a slit of brightness from the neighbor’s back porch light slipping through the sliding glass doors, through the far corner where the drapes didn’t quite cover, pitching a rectangular gray cast across the wall next to the fireplace. In the background, she could hear the gritty chorus of “Round Here” by Counting Crows. It seemed a thousand miles away.

Teri closed her eyes again, fighting against a headache that had come on late this morning, just before her lunch break at the post office. It had dogged her relentlessly all afternoon, through her regular postal route, through the traffic after work, through four doses, 500 milligrams each, of ibuprofen, and there was still no sign of relief in sight. Michael would have told her there was nothing she could do about it, that she just had to let it run its course, as if it were a cold or the flu. Michael would have told her to let go of it and get on with her life. But then Michael was a ghost now, wasn’t he? Or as close to a ghost as a man can get without dying first.

Michael.

In the distance, a crack of thunder exploded.

The music wandered away, voice to thunder, rhythm to rain, sweetly, innocently. Maybe it would be back. Maybe it wouldn’t. And maybe Michael had been right. Maybe she just had to learn to let go of it and get on with her life. Let the past rest in peace. If only the past wasn’t such a long stretch of road.

She didn’t know where all the miles had gone, only that somewhere along the line the miles had begun to run together, monotonously, an endless stretch of yellow dashes leading the way into the horizon. She would be forty-three in late November, wife to a man who lived on the other side of the country, a man she hadn’t seen in several years; mother to a son who had gone to the park on his bicycle one day and had disappeared off the face of the earth, a ghost of a different kind.

Such a long, long stretch of road.

Another crack of thunder exploded.

Teri felt it rumble across the floor beneath the couch. Just the storm, she thought wearily. She let out a slow, deliberate breath, feeling her headache ebb and rise, then ebb again, fighting to hold on.

Just the storm.

A flash of lightning illuminated the sky, burning white-hot into the back of her eyelids before leaving a trail of browns and grays and blacks. Teri winced and turned away. She wasn’t a woman who normally gave herself to nightmares. If they wanted her, they had to come get her. Lately, that was exactly what they had been doing. And just now, she thought she had caught a glimpse of something that looked like a granite headstone, its face weathered and spider-webbed with cracks, a name chiseled crudely into the stone, unreadable against a backdrop of muddy colors and a gray-white mist rolling in from somewhere in the…

in the…

past.

Another roll of thunder.

She shuddered, and sat up again, the wash cloth slipping off her forehead and dropping into her lap. It wasn’t the storm that frightened her. Storms were like out-of-state relatives, they came and went with a vengeance, but once they had moved through, life soon returned to normal. It wasn’t like that with everything. Nightmares, especially the bad ones, had a way of coming back for you. She tossed the wash cloth at the coffee table and when it fell off the far side, she made no effort to pick it up again.

Behind the roll of thunder another sound made itself evident. It took a moment before she was able to make sense out of what she was hearing, and this time there was no mistaking the sound. It wasn’t the storm. And it wasn’t the music.

Someone was knocking at the door.

[3]

When she went to investigate, Teri found a young woman pacing uneasily off to one side of the front porch. She was not a familiar face. Teri would have remembered this particular woman, whose hair was tied back in a ponytail, revealing the most striking eyes Teri had ever seen. They were pale blue, almost ghost-like, the kind of eyes that you couldn’t turn away from even if you wanted.

The woman was not alone. Behind her, looking rain-soaked and a bit out of sorts, stood a young boy, maybe ten or eleven. He appeared on the thin side and a bit pale, as if he had been out of the sun for a good long time. His hair was long and pressed against his face by the rain. From beneath his bangs, he looked up and Teri felt an instant, tugging sense of familiarity. Her hand tightened on the doorknob.

“Mrs. Knight?” the woman asked.

“Yes,” Teri said. It was unmistakable how much this boy looked like Gabe. All the way down to the clothes he was wearing: Levi’s, a black tee-shirt, a blue-and-white wind breaker like the one she had bought at J.C. Penny’s only a day or two before Gabe had disappeared. Part of a white sock was visible through a rip in the toe of one shoe, and though Teri didn’t remember the rip, she did remember those shoes. They were a generic brand that K-Mart had quit selling a number of years ago.

“I think he’s missed you, Mrs. Knight.”

“What?”

The rain began to come down in sheets. It took her back in a flash to when Gabe had been young and had come home from school one day and asked her about God. One of the kids had told him that whenever God cried, it rained. Only there was something he didn’t understand. He didn’t understand what was so terrible that it could make God want to cry? Teri had been at a loss for words. And here she was again at another loss. She looked at the woman and smiled, numbly trying to comprehend what she was apparently failing to grasp.

“He’s not a hundred percent, Mrs. Knight. He needs to sit down.” The boy moved forward and snuggled into the comfort of the young woman’s arms, his eyes half-awake and downcast, rain drops running down his forehead and jumping off at the tip of his nose. The woman switched what was apparently his walking cane from one hand to the other. “Please.”

Teri stepped inside the house, an invitation for them to follow.

The woman nodded in appreciation and took the boy by the arm. “Come on, Gabriel,” she whispered.

Gabriel.

Teri heard it clearly.

The woman called him, Gabriel.

But that was impossible. Gabriel—Gabe—had disappeared nearly ten years ago. Teri had just started working for the post office, feeling that he was old enough to be on his own after school since he had recently turned eleven. They were new to the neighborhood then. Michael had received a promotion the year before and they had bought the house some six months later. For awhile the bees were busy and the honey was sweet, as Michael’s grandmother would often say. And then one day Gabe went off on his bicycle and had never come home again.

Teri blinked, trying to find a place in her mind where such a hope against hope might exist. In that second, the boy started to sink under his own weight. The young woman caught him, and together they managed to get him into the living room and onto the couch. Teri went back to retrieve the cane, which had fallen out of the tangle and was lying on the floor near the front door in plain sight now, like an ugly secret finally out in the open. She turned it over several times in her hands, wondering what was wrong with the boy.

“He’s still a little weak,” the woman said when Teri returned. “Ten days ago he couldn’t even climb out of bed.”

Teri hooked the cane over the back of the couch. The boy, his head propped up by a pillow, took a deep breath and closed his eyes. The woman gave the back of his hand a reassuring pat.

“Is he going to be all right?” Teri asked.

“He’s just a little tired.” The woman brushed the hair back from the boy’s forehead. She seemed ill at ease inside the house, glancing down the short hall toward the door every now and then as if she feared she might not be able to find her way out again now that she had found her way in.

“What’s going on?” Teri said. She backed into the wall, feeling an uneasiness of her own, as if she, too, were a stranger in this house. “Who are you?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“The hell it doesn’t.”

“Please, Mrs. Knight. I know this is sudden and confusing and I wish I could sit down and explain everything. Unfortunately, I just don’t have that kind of time. You’re going to have to trust me.”

“Trust you? I don’t even know you!”

“I know you, Mrs. Knight. And I hope I’ve done the right thing by bringing your son home.” The woman brushed past her, suddenly looking older than her years, the fear naked in her eyes now. “Please, don’t make me regret it someday.”

“My son?” Teri said. “No, I’m sorry, you’re mistaken. This can’t be my son. Gabe’s…”

“He’ll probably sleep more than normal the next week or two. You’ll need to push him, to make sure he gets enough exercise and keeps building his strength.”

“Wait a minute. You’re not listening to me. This can’t be—”

“Oh, there’s something else you should know. Gabe has no recollection of where he’s been the past ten years. He believes he was in an accident on his bicycle several weeks ago and that he’s been recuperating.”

“You aren’t leaving him?”

“He’s your son, Mrs. Knight.”

“No, I don’t think you understand. Gabe disappeared years ago. This boy, whoever he is, he can’t possibly be my son.”

The woman paused in the doorway, staring out at the rain, looking wistful. “I know how long he’s been away. And I think I know how difficult it’s going to be for you to accept that he’s home again. But don’t make the effort for yourself, Mrs. Knight. Make it for your son.”

“But he’s not my—”

“Trust me. He’s Gabriel.” The woman stepped off the porch and started down the walkway. She stopped half-way to the curb and turned back momentarily, the rain washing over her face in tendrils. “He still has a chance for a normal life, Mrs. Knight. Both of you still have a chance.”

“But what am I supposed to—”

“Good luck.”

Teri cupped her elbows in her hands and leaned against the doorjamb, feeling wan and confused. She watched the woman climb into her car and pull away from the curb. A cloud of blue smoke spewed out of the tailpipe and dissipated in the rain. The car turned the corner, disappearing from sight long before the sound of its engine faded ghost-like into the patter of raindrops.

[4]

Teri stood in the open doorway, watching the way the rain washed over the neighborhood, casting everything under its gray, somber spell. The moment felt strangely dream-like, only this wasn’t a dream. If she had any doubts of that, they were quickly put aside once she made her way back to the living room. The boy had fallen asleep on the couch, curled into a semi-fetal position with the extra pillow tucked between his arms and chest.

In all honesty, she had to admit he did look a little like Gabe. If she could suspend time and put aside the fact that ten years had passed, well, they would both be right around the same age, with the same brown hair, the same build, even the same facial features. But ten years had passed. Gabe would be twenty-one. And there was something else, too. The eyes. Gabe’s eyes had been a wonderful dark brown pool that seemed wise beyond their years. But this boy, his eyes were bluish-green, flecked with gray specks around the outer edges.

Outside, the sound of the rain softened to a quiet murmur.

Inside, the music had come to an end and Teri couldn’t remember how long the house had fallen under the spell of silence. She stared down at the boy a moment longer, watching a rivulet of water run down the side of his face and disappear under his shirt collar.

Who are you? she wondered as she peeled off his jacket. She tossed the damp wind breaker at the coffee table, surprised at how the boy simply rolled over toward the back of the couch and curled up again, undisturbed. Who are you and what are you doing here?

Those questions, like ghosts, haunted Teri as she went down the hall to retrieve a towel from the linen closet. They provided the chill that ran up her spine as she stopped at the door to Gabe’s room and glanced inside. They stood next to her, reminiscing, as she looked past the dust at a room which had been preserved exactly as it had been left. She had only been in here three times since then. Once – so the police could take a look through Gabe’s things. Another time, when she didn’t think she could hold herself together a moment longer and she had come here looking for the strength to get her through another day. And finally, when she had closed the door for what she had thought would be the last time.

Now the door was open again.

Over Gabe’s bed, which he was supposed to have made that afternoon and never had, was a poster of Sly Stallone. It was from the movie Rambo II. Stallone was wearing a ragged strip of cloth across his forehead and holding some sort of gun in one hand—an M-something or other, according to Gabe. Teri hadn’t allowed Gabe to see the movie; he had just turned nine and nine was too young as far as she had been concerned. But she had allowed him to have the poster. It was a compromise that had managed to keep them both satisfied.

On the far wall, between the corner and the window, was a poster of Haley’s Comet. On top of the dresser was an army of war toys: tanks, rocket launchers, soldiers, jeeps, the same kinds of toys Teri’s foster brother had collected as a boy. And above the light switch on her right was a bumper sticker that said: I BRAKE FOR MUTANTS.

Nothing had been touched. Not even the small pile of dirty clothes he had hidden in the corner on the other side of the dresser. Standing in the doorway now, it was almost as if Gabe had been gone only a day or two. Maybe off to day camp or on a school trip of some sort.

Almost.

But then not like that at all.

She stood there, mulling over the past as if it were a script she hoped she might still be able to rewrite someday. Maybe if she hadn’t starting working at the post office. Or maybe if she had been home that day or if Gabe had done his homework before going out to play or if the park had been off limits. Maybe if she had taught him not to talk to strangers or if she had enrolled him in a self-defense course. Maybe then the story would have turned out differently.

Maybe.

Teri closed the bedroom door, and by the time she returned to the living room, the boy was awake again. She found him sitting up, looking a little tired, a little unhappy, and very much out of place.

“Can’t sleep, huh?” she said.

He shrugged, a little boy’s ambivalence.

She sat next to him and unfolded the towel, surprised to find her hands trembling. It had been a long time since she had last been called upon to dry a little boy’s hair. The smell was sweet, his skin soft and perfect. She placed the towel over his head, something fluttering in her stomach.

“You’re wet as a tadpole.”

He squirmed. “I can do it, Mom.”

[5]

“Don’t ever call me that again!”

The boy turned white as a sheet and sank back into the corner. “Sorry.”

“No,” Teri said, stunned by the ferocity of what had come out of her mouth. She touched him on the forearm. “No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you like that. It’s just that…” That what? she wondered. That he had scared her? That she had suddenly found herself looking into his face and seeing Gabe’s face, as bright and precious and loving as the day he had disappeared?

“It’s my bike, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“My bike. You’re mad because I wrecked my bike.”

“Oh, no. It’s not that.”

“I didn’t mean to; it was an accident.”

“I know,” Teri said. “Your friend, she explained what happened.”

“I was unconscious for awhile,” the boy added. He had somehow taken possession of the towel and ran it through his hair a few times before dropping it back on the coffee table. Then he stared at her a moment and Teri realized that he was looking at her intently for the first time. Not only that, but he was bothered by something.

“You look different,” he said.

“Different from what?”

“From the way you used to look.”

“You mean before the accident?”

“Yeah.”

“Which was all of two weeks ago?”

“Yeah, you look… older,” he said impishly.

Teri felt herself smile with him, though a little uneasily. It had been a long time since she had taken good care of herself. First Gabe had disappeared. Then Michael had walked out. And after that, well, it had seemed harder to focus on the day-to-day matters of life, the little things like getting her hair done or shopping for new clothes.

“Two weeks is a long time,” she said, brushing the hair back from his face.

“Not that long.”

“No, maybe not.” She got up from the couch, grazing her shin on the edge of the coffee table, and stood by the folding doors that separated the living room from the family room. Before she had boxed them up and stored them in the garage, there used to be dozens of family photos covering the walls on either side. You could still see patches where the wood paneling around the picture frames had faded from the afternoon sunlight slipping in through the living room window. Some scars were forever.

“She called you Gabriel,” Teri said. “The woman who brought you here.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s my name.”

“Then what’s your full name?”

“Mom…”

Teri tensed again. “Please, just don’t call me that. All right? Not just yet.”

“Gabriel Knight.”

“And how old are you?”

“Eleven.”

“What’s your father’s name?”

“Michael.”

“What school do you go to?”

“Banton.”

“What’s your sister’s name?”

“Mom…”

“Just tell me – what’s her name?”

“I don’t have a sister.”

She felt herself slump back against the corner of the folding door, the edge digging into the small of her back. Her breath caught somewhere between her lungs and her throat, a lump that she could neither swallow nor seem to exhale.

“Okay,” she said at last, speaking in a near whisper. She clasped her elbows in the palms of her hands, and stared out the window. It had turned cold in here. She could feel the coldness burrowing into the marrow of her bones. “Let’s say you are Gabe, just for argument’s sake.”

[6]

This was what she had been able to gather so far: according to the boy, he remembered going to the park on his bicycle to play, which was something he had often done after school. He remembered fooling around on the baseball diamond, running the bases a couple of times, tossing rocks from the pitcher’s mound to the backstop, and he remembered getting a drink from the water fountain behind the little league dugout. After that, he claimed he didn’t remember much of anything. He said he had looked up at the sky one moment and the sun had been bright and well above the horizon, and in the next moment he had found himself in the hospital.

“Well, what made you think it was the hospital?”

The boy shrugged. “I don’t know. There were these machines next to the bed, like the ones you see on TV, the ones that make that beeping sound like your heart.”

“An EKG.”

“Yeah, I think that’s it,” he said without a breath. “And I had this needle in my arm, with this tube that was hooked-up to a bag with this clear stuff dripping out. It looked like water, but I’m pretty sure it was some sort of medicine or something like that.”

He said he had fallen asleep after that, and when he woke up again there had been a woman standing over his bed. She told him her name was Miss Churchill, and that he had been in an accident on his bike and that it was going to take awhile before he would be strong enough to go home again. The boy wasn’t certain how long he had been in the hospital, but he thought maybe it had been as long as ten or eleven days.

“Was that Miss Churchill with you tonight?” Teri asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“And she took care of you while you were there?”

“She was my nurse,” the boy said. He leaned forward and a shudder went through him like some sort of spontaneous seizure. He closed his eyes and fell back again.

“A little cold in here, isn’t it?”

“A little.”

“Let me see if I can find something to warm you up.”

Teri brought a blanket out from the linen closet. She sat next to him on the couch and wrapped the blanket around his shoulders. For the second time, she took in the sweet, honeysuckle smell of his hair. She smiled to herself, remembering how much of a fight it used to be to get Gabe to take a bath at night. He had always hated wasting time washing since he was “just going to get dirty again anyway,” as he had often gone out of his way to remind her.

“How ’bout some hot chocolate?”

The boy nodded without a word, and made no effort to hide the fact that he was growing tired again. He pulled the blanket up under his chin and snuggled into the corner of the couch. His eyes, those blue-green crystals of the soul, gradually disappeared behind their lids, and Teri found herself wondering if maybe something was seriously wrong with him.

When she returned with the hot chocolate, she tapped him on the forearm. His eyes fluttered open, and waif-like he cupped the mug in his hands, looking so much like Gabe that it frightened her for a moment.

“Thanks.” He took a sip, and then placed the mug on the coffee table, next to the damp towel. His hands quickly disappeared back beneath the blanket.

“What else can you tell me?” she asked.

He had never seen a doctor in those ten or eleven days, he said. It had always been Miss Churchill who had come to check on him, to bring him food, to get him out of bed and walking around the room. She told him his muscles would be weak for awhile, but that everyday, if he worked hard, they would get a little stronger. And when they were strong enough, then he would be able to come home.

“And here I am,” he said.

“Here you are,” Teri answered obligingly. He had been convincing. She had to give him that. Someone had spent a whole lot of time with him, feeding him answers, making sure he had at least an air of credibility. And he hadn’t missed a beat. It was all tied-up in a neat little package, and now all Teri had to do was decide if she was going to cut the ribbon to see if it was booby-trapped or put it aside and wait to see if it went off on its own.

“Now, I suppose, we’re going to have to figure out what we’re going to do with you, aren’t we?” she said.

“I don’t get it. What do you mean?”

“I suppose I could call someone from Child Protective Services.”

“What for?”

“Because you don’t belong here, and I don’t know where you do belong.” She plopped into the recliner across from the couch, her lungs emptying out in a rush of air. The frightening thing was that she wanted to believe him. More than anything in the world she wanted to believe him. It had been years since Gabe had disappeared and there hadn’t been a night, not a single, lonely night, when she hadn’t dreamed of him showing up on the front porch just like this. Except in the dreams there had never been a doubt.

“I do, too, belong here.”

“I don’t think so,” Teri said. She stared out the window at the rain that had turned into a lazy evening mist now. It came floating out of the sky like an apology for the earlier downpour, mystical and somehow suspended in time. “I wish you did, though. God, you’ll never know how much I wish—”

Before she could finish, someone knocked at the door.