December Park(168)

When he finally let me go, I smeared the tears from my face and saw a figure standing on our front porch. The figure wore a police uniform.

Clearing his throat and running a thumb along the rim of his lower eyelids, my father said, “I should go inside and see to your grandparents. Do you want to come in or sit out here awhile longer?”

I couldn’t face my grandparents in whatever condition they were in. What did they already know? Had someone told them what had happened? Or had this cop just been sent here to babysit until my dad got home?

“I don’t want to go inside just yet.”

He squeezed my shoulder. “Do you want me to stay with you?”

“No, it’s okay. I’m okay.” I looked at him. “I don’t understand what happened, Dad.”

“Neither do I,” he said, and he nearly lost it and broke down again, too.

When he got out of the car, I felt the vehicle rise on its shocks. Fathers are big, heavy things, I thought. He closed the door gently, then walked like a man to judgment up to the front porch. He spoke briefly with the officer before going inside. Lights went on in the kitchen.

The officer came down from the porch and cut across the yard. On his way to the squad car, he glanced at me from over his shoulder, and I immediately recognized him as the suspicious-looking cop who’d been following me.





Around midmorning, two men in suits came and asked me questions while I sat with my father at the kitchen table. I told them everything we’d done that summer and all the things we’d learned, starting with the locket Adrian had discovered in the culvert beside the road last fall. I told them about finding the statue head in the Werewolf House, the railway depot where Jason Hughes’s bike was hidden, and ultimately how we had arrived at the abandoned Patapsco Institute.

I thought my father would become angry when I spoke of the places I went and the things I did, but he said nothing.

“What happened to Adrian?” I asked the men. When it was clear they didn’t know who Adrian was, I said, “The boy who we went in to rescue.”

“Oh,” said one of the men. He had a sliver of a mustache and sparkling blue eyes. “He’s still at the hospital, but they say he’ll be just fine.”

After they left, I expected my father to lay into me for disobeying him all summer, but he never said a word. He poured himself a glass of water from the kitchen sink. Then he poured me one and set it down in front of me at the table, where I remained sitting, seemingly unable to move.

Later I met with a psychologist—a rotund bald man with wire-rimmed glasses and breath that smelled like onions. Like the men in the suits, he asked me to recount what had happened, though he seemed less interested in the details and more concerned with how I felt about what happened. I couldn’t answer his questions; I didn’t know how.

After a time, I asked him some questions of my own. They seemed to make him uncomfortable and succeeded in cutting our session short. Afterward, he talked for a long time with my father. I was left with the distinct impression that I wouldn’t see the bald man with halitosis again.

There were other men who showed up, too—men in military uniforms and stoic expressions. They spoke to my father at the house, and twice they took him someplace else to talk. My father returned from these meetings looking like he’d had blood drawn. He never talked about them and I never asked.

When reporters from the Caller showed up at our door, my father said to ignore them. When reporters from the Sun and the Capital and the Post and the Times showed up, two policemen were stationed outside our house to make sure we weren’t disturbed. One night, a helicopter hovered over our house for nearly half an hour, its spotlight sweeping across our backyard. When neighbors appeared outside with signs on poster boards, I asked my father if they thought we were somehow responsible.

“I can’t say what’s in people’s heads,” he replied sullenly. He noticed Tom Matherson from across the street among the mob. “We can’t live here anymore, Angie. You understand that, right? We’re going to have to move.”

I said nothing.

Because my father didn’t want us watching the news, or any TV for that matter, he unplugged the set and hauled it down to the basement. I stayed in my bedroom and listened to Pearl Jam.





Adrian suffered from dehydration, a concussion, various contusions to the head and upper chest, and a ruptured eardrum. (The eardrum thing was from the gunshots I’d fired, which had been close to his head.) The day after I met with the men in suits and the shrink, my father took me to visit Adrian in the hospital. Doreen Gardiner was standing outside her son’s room. Her dead gaze fell on me, sending a bolt of electricity surging down my spine, and I felt my body grow cold. Then something in her face softened. For one fleeting second I thought I saw a regular human being behind those sightless, taxidermy eyes.

“Thank you,” she said simply. “I know what you did for him.”

It felt like my mouth was full of sand. At my back, my father rested one hand on my shoulder, then urged me forward.

“Angie!” Adrian beamed as I entered the room. My father waited in the hallway for me.

“Brought you some stuff,” I told him. I approached his bed and set a few comic books, some mix tapes, and my Walkman on the nightstand beneath a wall of blinking, bleeping machinery. The whole room smelled of antiseptic.