The Nix(54)

He heard her footsteps disappear down the hall. Heard her wrestling with the suitcase down the stairs. He heard the car start, the garage door open and close. He heard her drive away.

And Samuel tried to obey his mother. He tried to fall back asleep and not feel scared. But this unbearable panic rose up in him and so he got out of bed and ran to his parents’ room and found his father still sleeping, curled with his back to the room.

“Dad,” Samuel said, shaking him. “Wake up.”

Henry squinted at his son. “What do you want?” he said in a sleepy whisper. “What time is it?”

“Mom’s gone,” Samuel said.

Henry lifted a heavy head. “Huh?”

“Mom’s gone.”

His father looked at the empty side of the bed. “Where’d she go?”

“I don’t know. She drove away.”

“She drove?”

Samuel nodded.

“Okay,” Henry said, and he rubbed his eyes. “Go downstairs. I’ll be there in a minute.”

“She’s gone,” Samuel said.

“I got it. Please go downstairs.”

And Samuel waited in the kitchen for his father until he heard a crash from his parents’ bedroom. He ran upstairs and opened the door and saw his father standing straight and rigid with the reddest face Samuel had ever seen. Faye’s closet door was open, some of her clothes strewn on the floor.

But it wasn’t the clothes Samuel would remember best, nor the crash, nor the broken pieces of a small vase that had been hurled at the wall, apparently with great force. What he would remember clearly, even decades later, was that color on his father’s face: a deep crimson, and not just in the cheeks but all over—neck and forehead and down into his chest. A dangerous-looking color.

“She’s gone,” he said. “And her stuff, it’s all gone. Where did all her stuff go?”

“I saw her leaving with a suitcase,” Samuel said.

“Go to school,” his father said, not looking at him.

“But—”

“Don’t argue.”

“But—”

“Just go!”

Samuel didn’t know what it meant, that his mother was “gone.”

Gone where? Gone how far? When would she come back?

During the journey to school, Samuel felt himself far away from his surroundings, like he was looking at the world through binoculars turned backward—standing at the bus stop, getting on the bus, sitting and looking out the window and not really hearing any of the kids around him, focusing on a water spot on the window glass, the passing landscape beyond all blurry and whizzing indistinctly by. Samuel felt a gathering sense of dread, and narrowing his attention to something very small, like a water spot, seemed to keep the dread, for the moment, at bay. He just needed to get to school. He just needed to talk to Bishop, to tell Bishop what had happened. Bishop, he had decided, would keep him afloat. Bishop would know what to do.

Only Bishop wasn’t at school. Not at his locker. Not at his desk.

Gone.

Bishop was gone.

That word again: What did it mean? To be gone? Everyone was disappearing. Samuel sat in his chair examining the wood of his desk and didn’t even notice when Miss Bowles called his name, then again, then a third time, didn’t even notice the class nervously laughing at him, nor Miss Bowles walking up the row toward him, did not even notice when she stood directly above him waiting while the class chittered behind her. It wasn’t until she touched him, physically contacted his shoulder with her hand, that he flinched and broke away from what had become a really absorbing exercise in tracing wood grain with his eyes. And he wasn’t even mortified when Miss Bowles said “Good of you to come back to us” in her mocking way, to the class’s laughter. He didn’t even feel embarrassed. It was as if his misery overwhelmed everything else—all his normal worries were buried. Gone.

Example: At recess, he left. He simply marched away. He walked toward the most distant swing set and then walked on. He just didn’t stop. It had never occurred to him before that he could not stop. Everyone stopped. But in the face of his mother’s goneness, all the world’s normal rules fell away. If she could leave, why couldn’t he? So he did. He walked away and was surprised how easy it was. He walked along the sidewalk, didn’t even attempt to run or hide. He walked in plain view and nobody stopped him. Nobody said a word. He floated away. It was a whole new reality. Maybe, he thought, his mother also found it this easy. To go. What kept people where they were, in their normal orbits? Nothing, he realized for the first time. There was nothing to stop anyone from, on any given day, vanishing.

He kept going. For hours he kept going, staring down at the sidewalk, thinking Step on a crack, break your mother’s back, repeating this until he finally reached the copper front gates of Venetian Village, then slipping between the bars and not even looking at the security window, just walking right on through, and if the guard saw him he didn’t say anything, and Samuel briefly wondered if in the middle of everything he hadn’t in fact turned invisible, such was the oddness of this total lack of reaction from the world, his breaking all the rules and the world completely not noticing. And he was thinking about this and walking Via Veneto’s smooth asphalt and cresting the neighborhood’s gentle hill when he looked down at the street’s terminating cul-de-sac and saw, in front of Bishop’s house, two police cars.