December Park(157)

Muffled conversation could be heard through the wall. A woman’s voice—not necessarily panicked but there was a definite note of apprehension to it.

“Angelo,” my father called after a moment, “could you come here, please?”

I dropped my fork and shoved my chair away from the table. Down in the vestibule, I was rendered speechless to find Doreen Gardiner standing in our doorway. She looked just as she always did—a scarecrow whose eyes were made of dull plastic buttons. She wore a sleeveless blouse and a pair of beige slacks that were so threadbare I could see the dark outline of her underwear through them. Her hair was a nest of snakes.

“Ms. Gardiner says Adrian never came home this afternoon,” said my dad. There was an accusatory inflection in his tone that made me feel like I was being interrogated. “She wants to know where he is.”

“I didn’t see Adrian today.”

“Adrian said he was going to the park in the morning, then to the movies with you and his other friends,” Doreen said, the palsied temperament of her speech suggestive of someone under the influence of sedatives. It was the most I’d ever heard the woman speak at once.

“Do you know where Adrian is?” my father asked me.

“No.”

“Did you see him at all today?”

“No, sir.” I was trembling.

“They play in the park,” Doreen blurted, and it was like she was ratting me out.

I felt paralyzed. “Sometimes. We didn’t today. I haven’t seen Adrian since Thursday. Neither have my friends.”

To Doreen, my father said, “I’ll go out and have a look around for him. You should stay home in case he comes back. I’m sure he’s just out playing somewhere.”

She nodded as if her head were spring-loaded.

“Go get my shoes from the closet,” my father instructed me.

It took me a second or two before his words made sense. Then I hurried upstairs where I dug his worn cordovan shoes from his bedroom closet. When I returned, he was jingling his car keys and telling my grandparents that he was going out to look for the boy next door.

I set his shoes down by the front door and said, “I want to come with you.”

I expected a protest but he just nodded. He looked extremely tired, and despite the tension between us for the past several weeks, I suddenly felt immense sadness for him.

After we pulled out of the driveway and turned slowly up the street, I saw Doreen Gardiner framed in one of the front windows of her house, a blue strobe of television light behind her.

When my dad took a right onto Haven Street, I noticed Keener’s truck still there. The truck’s interior light was nearly dead now: it gave off only a pathetic little glint in the ceiling of the cab.

“If you have any idea where he might be,” said my father, looking straight out the windshield, “now’s the time to tell me.”

I thought of those two thick tree branches leaning against the window of the Patapsco Institute. But I couldn’t tell my father. If Adrian had gone in there, it was only a matter of time before he came out. It was best I kept my mouth shut and waited for him to return.

Unless something happened to him in there, said a voice in my head. It chilled me to realize it was the voice of the Piper from my nightmares. Unless I became him and he became me and us became us and we became we.

“The park, maybe,” I said. There was a chance that we might catch him coming out of the woods on his way home for the night.

“December Park?”

“Yes.”

I felt rather than saw his gaze swivel in my direction, then dart back out through the windshield.

(we became we)

It was a Sunday evening, and the streets were almost preternaturally quiet. Only a few vehicles drove past us on our way to the highway interchange. Except for the lampposts and the twenty-four-hour pharmacy, all the lights were out in the Superstore plaza.

My dad took the Point-Counterpoint intersection, which was a desolate crucifix of blacktop, straight out to December Park. I had anticipated driving the circumference of the park, but my father hopped on the shoulder of the road and drove on the grass until he reached a break in the guardrail and spun the wheel sharply to the left. The sedan eased down the grassy slope toward the dark pool that was the park grounds below.

“I told you to stay out of this park,” said my father.

I looked down at my hands that were twisting in my lap.

We coasted along the field, every bump and groove and rut amplified by the vehicle’s lousy shocks, and slowed as we came to the cusp of the baseball diamond. Moonlight dripped blue honey off the metal backstop.

My father clicked on the spotlight that was fixed beside his mirror—the light that looked like a small snare drum—and directed its beam across the baseball diamond. Shadows canted as he swept the light from left to right. The swings beyond the diamond swayed minutely in the soft, warm breeze. December Park looked like the dark side of the moon.

Spinning the steering wheel, my father took the car to the perimeter of the field and motored next to the plywood fence that separated this section of December Park from the Dead Woods. He drove slowly, shining his spotlight into the trees. “Any specific place you boys play down here?”

I had been dreading the question. “Just around,” I said.

My father continued along the perimeter of the park. As we approached the mouth of the underpass, he slowed down again and repositioned the spotlight to shine directly into the tunnel.