I once overheard Mr. Yam in the faculty lounge talking to a junior colleague, one of the legion of bright young women who annually enter the ranks of American public education only to marry or burn out within three years. He was explaining to her the process he had deduced whereby all the difficult students end up in his class. He has a remarkable talent for failing to perceive his failures as his own.
“Every year in May, Mr. Collier—” that’s me “—has a meeting with the principals at Agawam and Florence Crane—” our two feeder elementary schools “—where they go through the incoming class head-by-head to identify the tough nuts. They try not to put them all in one homeroom, but Mr. Collier knows who can handle what. I was a bit of a hellion in my day,” he said, “back in Revere.”
To be present when Jim Yam begins to speak is a little like witnessing a ship disembarking. At first the movement is subtle, so subtle one might be surprised to notice the ship is in motion and no longer at dock, but by that time terra firma is out of reach, the hawsers stowed, and the vessel underway. Such is Yam’s quiet art. He is so milquetoast a man one does not notice him beginning until the harbor is little more than a distant memory and, ahead, nothing but open ocean.
I watched the young teacher begin to survey the teacher’s lounge for modes of egress, life rafts and the like as Yam went on to recount an anecdote involving him and a gang of “tough nuts” carrying a teacher’s Volkswagen beetle up the steps of town hall in broad daylight during study hall. It is the anecdote he always uses to illustrate his hellion-from-Revere bona fides, and it always lapses into the story of Brett Boswell, the varsity football player who, in Yam’s seventh grade class, had been the toughest of tough nuts, but who, in eleventh grade, was diagnosed with leukemia. The boy’s diagnosis came only months after Yam’s own, while Yam was on extended sick leave, and the two bonded over baldness and the proximity of death at the Beth Deaconess Oncology Center. Yam, of course, recovered, but the boy did not, and he is damned now to live on in Yam’s saccharine and self-serving memorial.
Yam’s theorized meeting between myself and the principals of Agawam and Florence Crane Elementaries does, in fact, happen each year, but it does not go as he imagines. We do not spend most of it talking about students—the students, in a few years, will pass on—we spend most of it talking about teachers, the worst of whom seem certain to be ours for life. I missed the meeting this year, however, which is how my Stephen came to be in Yam’s homeroom. Had I been there, of course, I would have maneuvered him into Ms. Allen’s class. She is competent at least, and I am sure she will move on soon.
For the first few weeks of the school year, I work long hours. Alice’s parents have volunteered to take Stephen those afternoons. They pick him up and ferry him out to their place in Rockport, where they spoil him mercilessly. It is their way of grieving, I think. Mine is to bury myself in work, which is unhealthy. I recognize that. I recognize, too, that it is not best for Stephen, but I have given myself permission to grieve in my own way. Stephen is nothing if not resilient.
I pick him up after dinner and drive him home. Often as not, Alice’s mother Martha will have fixed me a plate and kept it warm for me, which makes me feel like I’m living in some strange world where the microwave was never invented. It is a kindness, one in a great line of kindnesses I will never deserve or repay. Were Alice here, she would be keeping track and churning out the thank-you notes almost as quickly as the kindnesses could be done. At her parents’ knee, she learned well the art of respectability. Maybe it will rub off on Stephen, but I have no such ambitions.
It is late September before I get around to asking Stephen how Yam’s class is going. We are driving home in the dark on 128.
“So what’s the dirt on Yam?” I say. “You’re my inside man now.”
“Is that what I am?”
“Yes. You’ve got to keep me posted. We’re going to crack this tough nut at last.” He knows what I think of Yam.
“It’s fine, Dad. He’s not bad.”
“No. No. You’re right. He’s not so bad.” The highway is empty, and the car is rank with the scent of some new body spray his grandmother has bought him. It’s called Rabid or Lascivious or something else apt. “Still. I am sorry you got stuck with him.”
“I’m not.”
“I’d have rather you got Ms. Allen. She’s a fine teacher.”
“He’s a fine teacher too, Dad.”
“Sure.” Our exit, and I slow. “But still.”
“He’s more than a fine teacher.”
“Of course, buddy. Of course you’re right.”
We ride in silence the rest of the way home, and when we arrive, Maisie is barking at us from behind the fence like we are the great liberators arrived at last. Stephen goes to her and grabs her around the neck. She is nearly as big as him and bowls him right over with her canine brand of idiotic, slobbery affection. I let myself in the house. I can hear them outside, wrestling around, Stephen ruining his school clothes, peals of laughter leaking through the walls and windows and reminding me.
I know I should be the one to hold him. I know, and I will. I have two advanced degrees, in child development and in education administration, but my cognitive faculties are lagging somewhere behind the dull morass of my dumb grief. And anyway, the boy is resilient. I sit in the recliner, but I cannot bring myself to turn on the television.
The next day, Yam is at the door of my office almost before the dismissal bell. I am behind the desk with the overhead lights off, working my way through a grant application.
“Mr. Yam,” I say, without looking up. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Mr. Collier.” And there is a moment. I wait, but still don’t look up. Plug some figures into the application. Annual district budget. Special education students served in the previous academic year.
“Yes. Mr. Yam. My Yam man.” I sit back and look up, remove my reading glasses, which have been perched on the end of my nose in front of my regular eyeglasses. Bifocals are in my future; I can see that much.
He is there in the doorway backlit like the squat, submissive emissary of some sad discount deity. They call him Mr. Yam because he has a long, unpronounceable Greek surname the first syllable of which is Yam. Not because his bald head looks like a plump, misshapen tuber. It’s just because of the name. I’m sure the yam thing doesn’t occur to most of the students until years later—they are only seventh graders, though they can be cruel in their own ways.
“What can I do?” I say. “Have a seat.”
“Will you stand, actually?” says Yam.
“Beg pardon?”
“Stand up, Mr. Collier.”
“Is something wrong?”
“Stand up.”
Not sure why I feel compelled to take direction from him, I stand.
“Come around,” he says, beckoning me with both hands. For the moment, my desk is between us. It is a nice desk, black walnut. Alice bought it as a gift for me when I took this post. We had the janitor haul away the district-issued piece of wood composite shit that came with the office.
I do not want to come around the desk and erase the space between Mr. Yam and myself. He has not said anything to me on the subject of Alice’s passing, and something about his squishy, emotive presence suggests this is the purpose of his visit, and that there may be a hug involved. I’m not much interested in a hug, not from Mr. Yam at any rate.
And yet, preferring momentary suffering to a needless conflict, I come around, and when I do, Yam swallows me in a horrible, marshmallowy embrace. He is trying to squeeze the life out of me, constricting like an anaconda of unprofessional empathy. The door to my office is open, and I can hear the secretaries tittering. They know how I feel about Yam. They must think this is just a riot. Now I hear his chest heaving a bit. “She was just such a wonderful gal, Michael. Such a gal. God Almighty, I am sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you, Mr. Yam.” I try to straighten to no effect. Yam is shorter than I, and this is beginning to strain my back.
“You know you can come to me if you need an ear. Or a shoulder. I’m here, Michael. I know how hard it is.”
His words wash cold down my spine, and I can feel my face flush. I push back, make space between us. The goddamned audacity. Loitering at the doorway to death is not the same as standing aside while she passed through it. I look at him, and the teary mess of his eyelashes suggests he does not register my rage, and that is just as well.
“Thank you, Mr. Yam. Now I should get back to this grant application.”
I go back around the desk and sit. I feel the urge to shout, to drive a vehicle faster than is advisable, to destroy something small and inanimate. Instead, I return my reading glasses to their perch and pull up the spreadsheet with data on district property taxes. But Yam does not leave.
“Was there something else?”
“Well, yes. There was. There is. It’s Stephen.” He sits now. I take off my reading glasses again.
“Did he do badly on his social studies test?”
“No no. Not that. It’s just.” He’s looking down at his hands like he’s holding something incomprehensible there.
“Go ahead.”
“I’m not sure how he’s doing.”
“Well, what’s his average?”
“No. I mean—emotionally.”
“We’re all concerned naturally, but he’s sturdy. He’s been spending time with Alice’s parents, and I have him seeing a very good counselor down in Salem. She comes highly recommended.”
“Yes, that’s all good, Mike. But—I believe he needs something more, something larger.”
“Well, he has me, Mr. Yam. Shall I walk you out?”
Once Yam is gone and the door is shut, I am back to the grant application, and I do not leave the office until it is dark. The halls are empty besides the distant hum of a vacuum cleaner running in one of the music rooms. The click of my shoes on the clean floors is a kind of comfort, the dark of the large spaces. I go up the stairs, and I am standing outside Yam’s classroom door. Inside, it smells like him: antiseptic. Like the chemo cleaned out the organic parts of him along with the cancer and all that’s left now is a squishy plastic shell. More mass than man. I find the desk I know to be Stephen’s, and I sit. It is uncomfortably small, but I stay there a long time.
When I arrive at Doug and Martha’s, Stephen is not there. He has gone to an event, Martha tells me.
“What sort of event?” I say. Martha brings a plate from the oven and sets it in front of me.
“A church event,” she says, a hint of hesitation in her voice. She smiles. “Would you like a drink?” Then she speaks over her shoulder, “Douglas, bring Michael a drink.”
Doug brings me a Glenlivet neat. He sits across the table from me with a newspaper folded over on itself, nursing his own scotch. Rocks, because Doug likes watering down twenty-year-old scotch. Martha has drifted off to the kitchen and is washing dishes.
“A church event,” I say eventually.
“Someone invited him.” He squints down at the paper and picks up a pencil. “G-H-A-L-I, right?”
“Sorry?”
“Secretary General during Rwanda. Five letters. Boutros doesn’t fit.”
“Sure.”
“Well, you’re the educator.”
“Who invited him?”
“I don’t know. Martha, who invited Stephen to church?”
“A boy from school.”
“Presumably this boy has a name?” I say. “I do know most of them.”
“We don’t,” Doug says.
“He was a nice boy,” Martha says. “Very polite.”
“Who started game four in oh-four? Four letters.”
“Oh-four?” I say.
“When the Sox won, Michael. Broke the curse.”
“You know I don’t follow baseball.”
“Lowe,” Martha says from the kitchen. My brain works through Stephen’s classmates for a boy called Lowe.
“Right,” Doug says. “Derek Lowe. Good girl, Martha.”
I set my fork down. “Will someone please tell me about this goddamned church thing already?”
Doug puts the paper down. “Michael. You’re his father. You’re perfectly welcome to forbid whatever you’re inclined to forbid, but for my part, I can’t recommend coming down on him right now. We let him go because he wanted to go. What’s the harm?”
“But you didn’t feel compelled to ask how I might feel about it?”
“Michael.”
“What, Doug?”
He sips his drink and sets the paper down, seems to weigh his words. “We have lost her too. All of us. You are not alone in your grief, and you cannot hold a corner on it.”
“But maybe I can have the final word in raising my son, at least.”
“You can have whatever responsibility for him you are willing to take. And until you are ready, we are more than happy to help in every way.”
Stephen arrives back at nine, and I am waiting for him in the driveway. He is riding in the backseat of Carrie Ewing’s SUV beside her boy Tom. Tom is a well-behaved, unpopular kid, and it doesn’t surprise me to learn his family are churchgoing types. Stephen throws an awkward wave back toward the SUV as he climbs the drive toward me. You can see the harbor from here, its quaint boats bobbing.
“Hi,” I say.
“My backpack is inside.”
“I already loaded it up.”
“Can I say goodnight to Poppy and Mama?”
I defer, and he disappears into their house for a moment.
It’s quiet across the bridge and most of the way home. We’re nearing our exit when I come around to asking. “So how was church?”
“Fine. It was youth group.”
“Did you learn anything interesting?”
“Not really.” He’s looking away from me out at the night. It’s a deep and leafy kind of black. I’m feeling too worn out to press him, and Doug has me questioning my instincts, so I let the quiet settle back over us. “They were nice to me,” he says.
“Good. I’m glad to hear that.” But I’m thinking: Aren’t the people at school nice to you? The counselor in Salem? Aren’t I nice to you? “What species of church was it?” I ask. Not that I’m up on the latest denominational doings. I only want to make sure it’s not Mormon, or Baptist, or something awful.
“What do you mean?”
“Was it Catholic?”
“We’re not Catholic.”
“We’re Catholic,” I say. “We’re basically Catholic.”
Stephen tips his head toward the window like he’s trying to see the tops of the trees. “I don’t think it was Catholic. There wasn’t a priest or anything. It was in the same place with that natural grocery store in Beverly. Across from Dunkin.”
“In a strip mall?”
“By the dry cleaner where you took Mom’s dresses.”
A church in a storefront. “Did they do anything weird?”
“No. They were just nice to me, and they talked about God a lot. Made him sound nice, too.” Clearly not Catholic, then.
We’re off the highway now, and the roads are bending through woods and farms. We’re sliding through this world, attended by one another. Talking at least. I’m glad they made him feel welcome, whoever they are with their storefront church. Strip Mall Congregationalist. First Pres of Cabot Plaza. Our Lady of Perpetual Accessibility. It’s quiet for a moment, and then he says, “Mr. Yam was there.”
This time it is my turn to visit Yam on his turf, so I walk up to the seventh-grade wing shortly after the dismissal bell. The hallways are full of the noise and funk of adolescence. Homework sheets drift unattended in the passing current, and the chaos of voices is punctuated by the periodic slam of a locker. Some of them greet me, but mostly I pass through the swarm unnoticed. I see Stephen and proffer a friendly wave he pretends not to see. Yam is standing outside his classroom chatting up Ms. Allen. It is her third year, and she is no longer under his spell. She is looking for an opportunity to break away, and when I walk up, she takes it.
“Mr. Collier,” says Yam. “What brings you to our neck of the woods?”
“Can we talk?” I say, gesturing toward his classroom.
“Of course, yes.”
I go ahead of him through the door, and he closes it behind me. Once inside, my eyes are drawn again to Stephen’s desk and I drift toward it without thinking. Standing beside it, I imagine that I can still feel the warmth of him hovering there above the stiff plastic.
“How can I help, Michael?”
I look up and around the room. There are maps on the walls, laminate curling at the corners. The fluorescent overheads are off, but daylight is pouring through the windows. “Strange question, but I feel compelled. I hope you’ll allow it.” He will, he says. “Did you, by any chance, prompt Tom Ewing to invite my Stephen to your church?”
His posture changes very slightly, and his mouth hangs open for a half-second. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, I did. I hope that’s not a problem.” I am watching him closely, and I realize it is because I enjoy his discomfort in this moment. “Is that a problem?”
“Do you mind my asking what variety of church this is?”
“We’re nondenominational.”
“Nondenominational. What’s that mean, exactly? I’ve heard that term kicked about, but it seems internally inconsistent.”
“It just means we’re not affiliated with a particular denomination. We’re not Presbyterian, or Baptist, or Congregationalist, or anything. We’re just—”
“Nondenominational,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Which is kind of its own brand, I guess?”
“Sure. I mean—”
I’m enjoying this a bit too much, and it’s all irrelevant. I don’t care a lick about Yam or his sectarian situation. I ought to thank him for caring about my boy, but now I’ve scraped my way to something resembling moral high ground.
“And your church meets in a strip mall? Is that right?”
He laughs, open-mouthed and fake. “That’s right. We’re not much for your flying buttresses and whatnot.” Here he leans on the edge of his desk, disrupting a heap of student work. My hand is flat on Stephen’s desk now.
“Let’s just establish this,” I say. “Stephen is my son, and for any future extracurriculars, I’ll expect you to come directly to me, not use some adolescent go-between.” I straighten. “Clear enough?”
“Perfectly,” he says. And then, as I am leaving, he says, “Can I tell you something that happened today? In class?”
“Are you addressing me as your principal or as Stephen’s father?”
“His father.”
“Go ahead.”
“He laughed.”
“Go on.”
“Some of the boys were joking about something they’d seen in a movie or some such, and Stephen laughed. Just right there,” he pointed at the desk where I’m hovering. “Just put his head back and laughed right along with them.”
“I’m pleased to hear he’s connecting with his peers.” Not that this has ever been a concern with Stephen.
“Michael, I haven’t seen your boy so much as crack a smile all year. Not once. And today he laughed, and seeing it, Michael. Seeing it, I had to step out into the hallway to collect myself. Now I’m not going to suggest some direct correlation to his visit to our church last night. But Michael. That boy is on the precipice. That boy needs every kind of love he can get. Every kind of light.”
“Not from you, he doesn’t.”
Yam takes an audible breath through his nostrils.
“Maybe not, but from someone.”
By which he means: from me. I begin toward the door. I will not be lectured by this half-wit.
“Michael, when we look death in the face. When we look right at it like you and Stephen have done, like I did once a long time ago. When we stand toe-to-toe with it, none of us come away unmarked. Not one.”
I must either leave now, or this will come to blows. As I open the door, he fires off his parting shot, “I’ll pray for you, Mike.”
“Please don’t,” I say.
“I hate to defy a superior, but—” The click of the door cuts him off.
A word about Alice: we did not have a storybook marriage. There is no such thing. I was very fond of her though, and she was a good mother. Behind our house, there is a stretch of forest, cut through by trails, and she would walk there with Stephen and Maisie. In the spring, especially. They wore Wellingtons and would return mud-covered and glowing with exertion, talking loudly in the mudroom, laughing. Over supper, they would report the new growth. One week the pale shoots of snowdrops. Then, crocuses. Then, ferns. And so, in stages, the world would wake again as out of slumber, and they would name for me each successive waking. In their report, I could see it more clearly than had I walked there with them: the shoots breaking the black dirt, wet and strange, life out of fecund death. They would count the birds, and Alice would name them by their songs.
I do not believe in resurrection. The dead are dead, and as much as I might like to hear her voice again in the mudroom, the call and response of her and Stephen too loud in that small space, I know I will not. She is gone, and that is all.
It is fall, and the days are dark early. When we get home most days, it is full dark already, and I am disinclined to stomp through the woods under the best of circumstances. On Saturday, though, I let Stephen go with Maisie, and they are gone a long time. Long enough that I begin to worry. I come down from my office and warm some soup out of a can for our lunch. Toast some cheese sandwiches, which get cold on the counter while I stand at the picture window watching for them to emerge from the woods. It is a gray day, and the trees have already lost much of their foliage. From here, I can see the trailhead, and there is no sign of them.
In the mudroom, I find my walking shoes next to Alice’s Wellingtons. The screen door slaps closed behind me, and the gate creaks. Once I am in the woods, I am struck by the quiet of it, the dormancy, the world making ready for winter. My steps are the loudest sounds, and I have to stop altogether when I want to listen for them. I do not call, not yet. I go deeper into the forest, the smell of the cold, the firm of the earth. I stop to listen. I go on. At the end of this trail is a small lake. There are homes nestled into the forest around the edge of it, homes we could not afford. The gunmetal water between trees. Still no sound that might be Stephen and Maisie, not even when I stop and devote my ears to the task. No birds, no breeze, only the broad quiet of the empty day. I arrive at the end of the trail, and they are not there.
Doug and Martha don’t know anything. She is outright alarmed, actually, drawing as near hysterics as I’ve ever heard her do.
“He’s gone?” she says.
“It seems so.” I am standing in the kitchen on the old telephone.
“Where can he have gone?” Her voice fuzzes in the receiver as it rises in pitch.
“I was hoping you might have some idea.”
“He can’t exactly walk to Rockport,” Doug says. He’s on an extension.
“So you don’t know anything?”
“He could walk to a friend’s, maybe,” Martha says. But I’ve already called the nearby friends.
“We don’t know anything, no.”
“Okay, well, I’m calling the police.”
“We’re on our way, Michael,” she says.
“No need for that.”
“We’re coming down,” Doug says.
After three days, they dredge the lake. I tell them it’s no use. They’re not at the bottom of that lake. This is a misuse of departmental funds. The lead detective is standing beside me on a dock owned by some of the summer people, and it is clear he’s not listening to me anymore. It’s slow work, and the day is cold. I stand with my arms crossed, adopting the posture of a professional though I know my aspect communicates something different altogether. I am unshaven and dressed in layers of flannel and sweatshirts. I haven’t been to work, and Doug is staying on the couch. He’s worried for me, which is kind. Martha is beside herself though, and he should probably be with her. She brings over dinners wrapped in tinfoil, and we eat in silence around the kitchen table.
It takes the boat all day to make the circumference of the lake, dragging the shallows so that a line of churned-up sediment follows them. Meantime, a bevy of officers make systematic passes through the reedy wetlands, their waders slurping as they pull free of the mud. They find exactly nothing. There is a leash they surmise might have been attached to Maisie, but it’s entirely nondescript and means nothing. I do not know where they have gone, but they are not there at least.
Standing there beside the captain, it occurs to me to wonder how I would respond if they did drag up a body, his body. I imagine a moment of great histrionics, leaping off the dock into the muck and slap-swimming to the boat, grabbing hold of my limp and bloated boy, picking the duckweed out of his hair, the silt out of his mouth. Imagining this, I find myself overcome, and I sit and sob.
But he is not in the lake.
Alice looked elegant bald. She carried herself with her usual grace even when schlepping down the cold halls in slippers and a hospital gown, drawing her IV pole beside her. We would walk the halls together those days, leaning in, making little jokes to keep our heads above water.
They were strange days, those last days, walking the halls with her, laughing and flirting. It was like we’d slipped back into our former selves, before Stephen, before careers, when we were young and hapless, foolish and lost in love. I think she knew already. It was spring. She had begun her decline in earnest.
A few nights before she passed, late, I slid into her hospital bed, still wearing my tie and eyeglasses. The hospital wore the weight of all the sleep contained inside it. I kicked off my shoes and untucked the tight corners of the blanket, wound my way between the tubes, and I lay my head against what was left of her. She shuddered and stirred.
“Well, hello, old man,” she said. “Here, I thought you were just another randy nurse.”
“Lots of those around,” I said.
“You would know,” she said. And we both laughed. “As I understand it, you get to choose one to take home with you after we close up shop here,” she said. “I suggest the redhead on the day shift. Good rack on that one.” But then instead of laughing, I was weeping. “Stop that,” she said, suddenly severe. “You stop that, Michael. That’s the rule. That’s the one fucking rule. None of that.” But I could not stop. I could not. I wanted to tell her no, that she must not leave me. I wanted to tell her that I would not be able to navigate this world without her. I wanted to tether her to this broken world with my weakness and my want. But all I could do was sob. “Get out of my bed, you asshole. Get out of my goddamned bed.” And she was pattering at me with her gaunt and skinny fists, but then she was crying too, and we were holding one another, and we held one another for a long time, and finally we both slept.
When you think about a twelve-year-old boy, especially your own twelve-year-old boy, who is slight and soft-spoken, who has not yet hit his growth spurt, who is accompanied by an eight-year-old golden retriever (all of which information I supplied the police), when you think about him, it is hard to imagine how he might live as a runaway. It is hard to imagine him in the mold of the at-risk youth I do see, if rarely in our well-off and bucolic school district. It is hard to imagine him loitering in whatever dark and cold places he might access by train. (Boston is easy to reach, and it turns out he had taken some money from my wallet and a credit card. I have spent nights in his bedroom lately, drinking Lagavulin out of a coffee mug, looking at the framed map of the T subway system I gave him for his tenth birthday.) It is hard to imagine because, in your mind, he is still scarcely more than the toddler with wild hair whom you found curled in the warm hollow of the bed beside your wife on nights you worked late. He is still the grade-schooler who did not want to play soccer and so stood listless in his shin guards while the others poured around him on the field in their scrum of energy and incoordination. But he is somewhere, and he is not at the bottom of the lake, so where is he?
I am nearing despair. I am not eating the dinners Martha is making. I am not sleeping. Several grant deadlines have gone by unheeded.
The church is precisely where Stephen described it. And as he described it. They’ve rented space in an aging and uninspired strip mall. There is a Dunkin’s across the street and a Laundromat next door. It is, as Stephen said, the Laundromat I use, so it seems somehow telling that I have never noticed this strange little house of worship abutting it. Was blind, but now I see, I suppose. When I was here last, I left all of Alice’s dresses to be cleaned, and I have not returned to collect them in spite of many calls from the proprietor. Likely the dresses have been consigned by now. No doubt they fetched a good price.
I have chosen a parking space far from the well-lighted entrance to the church. The glass front windows are frosted, so all I can see are the shapes of bodies as they pass. There is nothing remarkable about any of this, and I know better than to hope I will find Stephen here. I do not hope I will find him here. I simply hope I will find him, and I do not know where else I might go to chase that daft hope. I have spent some of the past week riding the T to all parts of the city, staring hungrily at any young person who resembles a runaway, disembarking the train and loitering in a few of the stations where I saw packs of them, but never approaching, never asking have they seen my boy. My boy. My boy swallowed by the city, and our grief, and the winter now upon us.
There is a line of minivans and other inelegant family vehicles beginning to gather near the doors of the church, so it is harder to see. I see Carrie Ewing’s SUV and a few others I recognize from the school pick-up line. He is not here. I know he is not here, but my grasp on every kind of certainty is more tenuous than ever, so I get out of the car and walk across the empty parking lot. I have turned up the collar on my long wool Burberry overcoat, which I am wearing over a filthy flannel and bluejeans. When I duck under the awning and into the shadow, I turn and look toward the church. There is a cluster of parents gathered near the door with hands deep in the pockets of peacoats and work jackets. The children coming out seem normal. I know many of them. Some are surprises—Tom Currier, who dresses in unwashed black t-shirts and has a nose piercing that, according to eighth grade legend, he gave himself—but most are not. Stephen is, of course, not among them. But Jim Yam is.
When Yam comes out the door, tugging an anorak over his soft arms and shoulders, I sink deeper into the wall of the building. I knew he would be here, but I did not imagine encountering him somehow. He is saying goodbye to some of the parents, wantonly hugging anyone who gets near enough. And now he is walking in my direction. There are very few cars on this side of the lot, but there are some. One is his, I suppose. As I do not frequent the faculty lot, I do not know which. I am looking for an escape, but there is no escape, and now he has seen me. He has slowed and seems cautious. I am, I realize, a dark figure lurking, from his vantage. I step toward him.
“Where is my boy, Jim?” I am surprised to hear my voice shaking. “Where is my son?”
His affect shifts. “Oh, heavens. Michael, you scared the tar out of me.” He laughs, and then his affect shifts again as though my words have only now made their way through the neurons to his damaged cerebral cortex. “Your boy? Oh, Michael. Oh, Michael, I have been praying so hard for Stephen.”
“Where is he, Jim?”
“I don’t know where he is.” He is now walking toward me, which I did not anticipate, but I lean in, take two long strides and now my finger is in his doughy chest.
“Bullshit, Jim.” My voice is quaking and cracking. I can feel the zipper of his anorak and the soft stop of his sternum. “Where is my boy, Jim? What the living fuck have you done with him, Jim?”
Now I am crying, and he is trying to pull me in to embrace me. “Keep your goddamned hands off me, Jim. I want my boy.”
“I know you do, Mike. I know it. We all want him home with you.”
I cock my arm back to hit him, which I want to do, but I have neither talent nor experience for this sort of thing, so when I swing the blow feels soft and impotent, and Yam uses my own momentum to pull me closer. He does not embrace me, but he puts one fat hand on each of my shoulders, turns me around, and walks me down the sidewalk toward his car.
“Let’s take a drive, Mike. Let me buy you a soda or something.”
I do not want to go with him, but I am empty of everything, so I do.
Yam’s vehicle is an older Civic, adorned with several dogmatically optimistic bumper stickers and a little metal Jesus fish. The inside is a mess of student papers and food wrappers, which he moves to the backseat to make room for me. He turns on the car and drives out into the dark.
We move in silence from one streetlamp to the next. Out of the commercial strip of Beverly, into the residential district where the streetlamps become sporadic, and now toward the bay. There are glimpses of darkness between trees, a deep and anonymous black, which I know to be the ocean. The flat of the sea, the drag of the low waves, the promise of deep and still. Yam winds around the roads, the unmarked turnoffs past towering houses built for sea captains of bygone days.
I have not said a word since I tried to punch him, and I do not say anything now. He turns toward the little dead end known as Hospital Point. There is a small lighthouse here. From here, in the day, you can see the smokestacks of Salem and, if you know where to look, Misery Island. Yam parks his car facing the seawall and kills the engine. We sit in silence for a few moments gazing at the blank of the bay, the beam of the beacon moving across, the pretty little lights of Salem and Boston beyond. Somewhere out there: Stephen. The police tell me they are still optimistic. They tell me he will turn up, that he will eventually use the credit card, and that we can then find him, bring him home. They are optimistic, but I have spent whatever reservoir of hope I once had. I have spent it, and it is all gone. I set my face in my hands. Yam lays a hand on my shoulder, and I let him.
I imagine that Jim Yam has something he might say to me in this moment—wisdom, or prophecy, or some such. He might tell me it is only love that holds us together in the face of great trouble, that in my failure to love Stephen when I had the chance, in our hour of trouble, I have set in motion this far greater disaster in which I now find myself.
More likely, he would tell a story. He might tell the story of Brett Boswell. In his last days, when it was clear that his and Yam’s trajectories had diverged, his toward death and Yam’s toward life, he asked Yam to come to his hospital room. I have heard Yam tell this story to pep rally bleachers packed with teary eyes on more than one occasion. Once Yam arrived, Brett wanted to apologize to him for the trouble he’d been all those years earlier in his class. But Yam did not let him. Instead, he insisted that grace had already washed it all away, that the communion they had shared there at the doorway of death was the communion of the broken and re-made. And for cancer-sapped Brett Boswell, with death already written into his darkened veins, that hope of restoration was a light bright enough to stand and walk toward. I imagine the youth group version of this tale lapses into something rather more doctrinal, but I’ve never heard that version, and it occurs to me that Yam might tell it to me now.
But he doesn’t say anything.
Instead, he sits beside me in the silence with his hand on my shoulder, and the waves on the rocks below the seawall are a low susurrus we can hear faintly even through the car. And the night is cold and getting colder.
On the morning of the tenth day, I am beside the lake before dawn. It is cold, and the sky is low overhead. Gray and threatening. It will snow soon. I am wearing layer over layer of the same things I’ve been wearing for days, and I cannot remember walking down here. I remember opening my father’s 1950 Macallan and drinking it out of the same unwashed coffee mug, and I remember standing in Stephen’s bedroom, breathing in whatever remains of his smell. And now it is dawn, and I am sitting slumped in the tall grass near the edge of the lake. I am wearing Alice’s Wellingtons, which are too small for me. The cold is a smell, frost on lakewrack.
I am thinking—for reasons I cannot interpret—about Jim Yam again. I am remembering standing in his classroom just two weeks ago, standing there and listening to him tell me what’s best for my boy. And I’m remembering him telling me how to feel about it, how he feels about it. And I am remembering sitting with him in his car at Hospital Point, his hand on my shoulder.
And it is out of this remembering that I receive the vision. It is not a fantasy or a daydream. It is not even a hallucination, though I am probably ripe for that sort of thing. It is a vision, a thing received, and in the vision, Jim Yam is standing beside me with his hands in the pockets of his anorak. I see him there, and he looks back at me in that intrusively kind way of his. Then, without prelude, I go to him, grab him, fall on him, and drag him to the edge of the lake, drag him through the reeds and push him under the duckweed. The vision is so total that I feel the strain in my arms, the grind of my teeth, my lips wet with lake slosh and spittle. And I strain and hold him there while he thrashes, his hands and arms flopping and smacking the surface, shaking the water so the duckweed slaps up and back, and between the waves of its cheerful green, I see his face under the water. His mouth opening and closing like a fish, the occasional bubble surfacing. And I hold him there, kneeling on his chest. It feels as though I’ve lost one of the Wellingtons in the struggle and my sock is saturated, sliding in the mud, and my fists begin to numb from the rigor of their grip and the cold water. And it takes a long time, but he is still and the water stills, the duckweed covering his face again like a shroud.
I stand and feel the vision slough off of my mind and body, but my hands are clenched and wet and soiled with mud. One of Alice’s boots is indeed missing and the soaked left sock is sticking in the mud. I am wet to the knees. I look around for Yam, but it is only the cold morning, the sharp gray, the smell of the frost.
And what sort of vision is this? And what sort of god offers up such nonsense revelation? If this is a vision, shouldn’t it mean something? If this is a vision, Yam will transmute underwater and become Stephen, or Alice, or myself, and there will be some grand lesson in it. But there is no lesson. There is only a fantasy of drowning Jim Yam in the lake. The lake, the very last place I know for certain my son was. Yam, who by all accounts ought to be dead already. Whatever god has cued up this vision is a blank and incompetent thing, and I can expect to receive nothing back from him for all his eternal blathering. He is a god of no account, and he is better off dead, just as we are.
My legs do not support me, and I let myself back to the ground, and I cover my face with my muddy hands, and I open my mouth as though to weep, but there is nothing, and there is nothing for a long time, and it is in that posture that they find me.
First, a form beside me, and a voice, and it is Stephen. I do not believe in him. I do not believe in him here beside me. I am hallucinating again, or this is some new and sinister vision, still more deranged than the last, so I do not stand. I do not say his name. Away across the lake, nameless songbirds trill in the thorny cages of naked undergrowth. I look at Stephen, through him. I have very little feeling in my fingers or my left foot. My teeth have been chattering and have now stopped. I realize it would not be difficult to die here, and perhaps that accounts for this cruel final vision bestowed on me.
Then Stephen sets his hand on my arm, and his face pinches in concern. He says “Daddy,” and then again, a question, “Daddy?” And now—vision or not—I cannot help myself, I fall onto him, and my fingers are in his hair, and it is his own hair, his own solid self, and I cannot clutch him tight enough to me, and he says, “Daddy. Daddy.” And he says, “You’re hurting me,” and I say, “Oh, oh.” And that is when I see Jim Yam standing behind him with his hands in the pockets of his anorak, and I know that he sees me with perfect clarity as though from beneath the surface of the lake.
“He was outside the church,” Yam says. “I went to clean the bathrooms before the Ladies Bible Study this morning.” I look to Stephen, who nods. “I brought him straightaway, Mike,” Yam says.
There will come a day, and it will not be long, when this will all distill in my mind, and I will understand that in this moment I have been played for a fool. That in receiving Stephen back from the hand of whatever god, I have indebted myself to him so totally that I will now live forever under his yoke, and that—in this moment—I should throw myself under the cold water or drag Stephen there, but I am not built for great acts of heroism or defiance, so I stay there holding my boy, and he is my warm and living boy, and we are all three breathing there in the cold of the dawn air, and I hear Maisie bark from far away, in our backyard. The world is not at all as I have understood it, but there is light in the air, the gray of the sky shaken and peeled away, and the three of us walk back up the bank toward the woods and the house beyond.
