Ink and Bone(73)

What Wolf liked about the smaller publication was that they let you do your own thing. The Road Less Traveled let him wander and find the article he wanted to write about a certain place. They sent him down to Jazz Fest a few years after Katrina. Attendance was back up, and though the city was still struggling, the music scene was making a healthy recovery. He talked to artists, music lovers, and bar owners, everyone echoing the same sentiment, that New Orleans was coming back, and that the music scene was alive and kicking. It’s just that no one really said that exactly. So he just fudged something an old trombone player said. Most of the people who Wolf talked to had been drinking; hell, he’d been drinking. So what if the old guy didn’t say exactly what Wolf wrote?

The only person who picked up on it was Merri.

“He really said this?” she asked when she was editing the piece. She read all his work, and he didn’t feel good about anything until she liked it.

“Who said what?” he asked, even though he knew exactly what she was talking about. Merri had an eagle eye. She missed nothing.

“This quote: ‘It’s been hard, no one’s denying that. But New Orleans is back, better than before. You can’t crush the soul of a place like this.’ ”

“Why?” asked Wolf.

“It’s just such a perfect quote, such a great way to end a story.”

“Sometimes you just get lucky.”

The guy had said something like that. But it had been somewhat less eloquent. What did it matter if you made people sound better than they actually did? No one ever complained about that.

Then, over the years, it just started to become a habit. You kind of knew what people were going to say, didn’t you? After you’d been to enough places and talked to enough people and seen enough things, you had an idea of what you were going to find before you ever got where you were going. Nearly twenty years as a travel writer, and real surprises came few and far between. Except he was surprised when he finally got caught.


*

After he texted Merri, Wolf woke up his mother and told her that he had to go help his wife. She agreed completely and even seemed relieved to hear it.

Then Wolf pushed into Jackson’s room and found him awake. As ever, the kid’s room was weirdly neat. Jackson kept all his books organized by size on the shelves. He’d laid out his own clothes for the next day. Wolf didn’t even bother asking whether or not he did his homework. He was a perfect student.

“You’re going up there?” said Jackson when Wolf sat on his bed.

“I have to, buddy,” he said. “Your mom shouldn’t have to go through this alone.”

“Can I come?”

“Maybe on the weekend, okay?” said Wolf. “But what I need you to do is to stay with your grandparents and go to school. We can talk every afternoon and you can call when you need me.”

Jackson was such a trouper. Wolf remembered being his age; he’d never been half as smart or kind or mature as his son. He still wasn’t.

“Do you think you can find her?” asked Jackson. He sat up and put on his glasses. He was a towheaded Harry Potter, his face a beautiful, delicate mask of hope and still, even after everything, innocence. He still believed in happy endings.

But the answer was no. Wolf felt with his whole heart that Abbey was gone; he didn’t feel her, not the way Merri claimed to. He knew what the odds were of finding Abbey alive. The truth was, he wasn’t going to The Hollows for Abbey. He was going because he needed to be there when Merri realized, too, that their daughter was dead. That someone had taken her because Wolf had failed as her father, her protector, and she wasn’t coming back. He had given up on happy surprises long ago.

“I don’t know, kiddo,” he said. “We’re going to try.”

“Did you ask Uncle Blake about the missing man?”

“I did,” said Wolf. “He’s looking into it.”

Jackson released a breath and looked up at his father. “Okay.”

“Grandma will take you to school in the morning,” said Wolf. “And she’ll pick you up, too. I’ll call you in the afternoon.”

“You’re going now?” Jackson glanced at his clock. It was nearly midnight.

“I don’t want your mom to be alone up there.”

Jackson nodded, seeming more relieved than anxious or upset as Wolf expected—which Wolf took as a positive sign that he’d made a good choice. He tried not to think about the fact that both his mother and his son had the same reaction, as if everyone was silently hoping that he’d do the right thing for once.

He threw a few things in a bag and was on his way out the front door by twelve thirty. He was surprised, though he really shouldn’t have been, to see Kristi standing outside the building.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

He knew he sounded cold, but he didn’t have time for this, for her. Her face was blotchy from crying, her mascara running. It didn’t soften him.

“What?” he went on when she didn’t say anything. “Were you going to ring the bell—with my parents and my son up there?”

Something in her face shifted from hurt and vulnerable to angry.

“This is what you think of me,” she said lifting up her phone, presumably to show him the text he’d sent. The street was quiet the way TriBeCa was at night. It was more of a residential neighborhood, and lights were dark, streets felt empty. It didn’t throb and pulse like the rest of the city. Her voice echoed in the emptiness. “You think you can just send me a text and that’s it. I just disappear like I never existed.”