CROSS (A Gentry Boys Novella)(41)

Stone scooped my sweatshirt off the floor. “This can be fixed,” he was saying as he draped the sweatshirt gently over my shoulders. “This can be fixed.”

“How?” I whispered. Right now Conway wouldn’t have any reason to believe a word we said. “We need to find him,” I choked out. “We need to explain, to make this okay somehow.”

“We will.”

“We have to find him.”

“We will!”

“Now, Stone! We’re just sitting here and Conway’s alone. He can’t be alone out there, running around in that kind of pain and thinking that we…OH GOD! It’s got to be now. Right now. Tomorrow will be too late.”

I was babbling, rocking back forth. I didn’t know why I was so sure that tomorrow would be too late (too late for what?) but I knew that it was.

Stone disappeared down the hall. When he returned he was pulling a blue t-shirt over his head. He took his phone out of his back pocket and then threw it down, probably realizing that there was no chance he could get in touch in Con that way since Con had lost his phone in the accident last week.

“Fuck!” he shouted. He started pacing back and forth and breathing in gasps.

Somehow the sight of Stone losing it calmed me down a little. I pushed my arms through the sleeves of the sweater and stood up.

“Where would he go?” I asked calmly.

Stone stopped pacing. He looked around wildly. “I don’t know.”

“Back to Carson’s Garage maybe?”

He shook his head. “Doubt it. He’s probably run off somewhere to be alone. That’s what I’d do, if I were him. I wouldn’t be able to stomach the company of other people.”

“Well.” I clasped my hands in front of me. My mind was working quickly. “Emblem isn’t that huge. Your mom’s at the pharmacy, right? Any chance she would lend you her car?”

Stone snorted. “Are you kidding? My mother wouldn’t give me a glass of water at this point.”

“Wait for me,” I said and walked out the door.

Stone followed. “Where are you going?”

“Home. I’ll be back.”

My house was silent but my father’s car was in the driveway. I was glad my sisters weren’t home because I couldn’t handle explaining anything at the moment.

I found my father on the couch again, asleep, still in his uniform. He’d probably fallen asleep there a thousand times since the bleak day of my mother’s suicide. I watched him breathe and allowed myself to think about a terrible time I’d been mentally running from since it happened.

It had been all over by the time I got home from school. A neighbor had walked his dog past our house and smelled gas so he called the fire department. They found her there in the kitchen, the same kitchen where we’d made cookies and laughed through family dinners. The coroner’s report said she’d died around eleven a.m. When I found that out it seemed important to remember where I’d been at the moment she gave up. I’d been in gym, standing out in left field with my softball glove and hoping no one hit a ball out that way. Eleven a.m. I only knew that because I’d heard my father talking to Aunt Bonnie. To us girls he didn’t say much, just trying to make it from day to day the best he could. He called it an ‘accident’. I understood. I never corrected him. The man just wanted to go on with the business of healing and bypass the chore of grief. I couldn’t blame him for that.

My father snored lightly, looking younger in sleep than he ever did when he was awake. I took the soft afghan from the reclining chair and covered him gently with it.

“I love you, Daddy,” I whispered and felt a surge of tenderness and he smiled briefly in his sleep. Then I pocketed the car keys that were sitting on the coffee table.

Stone waited on his front stoop. He was hunched down with his head bowed. It was the first time in a long time he seemed like a boy. He looked up when he heard me approach.

I held up the keys. “Let’s go find him.”

“Whose are those?”

“My dad’s. Can you drive? I don’t feel well.”

He nodded and went straight to the silver Camry in my driveway. We didn’t have much to say to each other as we drove through the streets of Emblem. For once we were both united with the same purpose.

Find Conway. Make him understand the truth.

Stone thought there was a chance Con was at the old bridge but he wasn’t. When we stopped by the pool we saw a few kids from school and asked if they’d seen him but they all shook their heads.

“Think he’d climb the butte?” I asked. The butte was a tiny mountain that sat right outside town. There was crypt at the top in the shape of a pyramid. It was a place people went to hang out, or drink, or f*ck, or just ponder the miserable state of the world.

Stone considered. “Maybe. I’ll turn around when we get to the end of Main Street and we can swing by there.”

“Okay,” I said. I was tired, so tired. But there wouldn’t be any rest until we’d found Conway. I wouldn’t sleep until I’d extinguished that agonized look in his eyes.

Just last year the town installed a new park just west of Main Street. It was little more than a wilting patch of grass with a few lonely swings. As we passed by it was empty. The only movement came from the sprinklers, which simultaneously rose from the ground and sprayed the grass with a fine mist of water. The harsh sunlight was softening. It would disappear soon. But the lingering rays dallied in the Main Street park, playing in the gentle spray of water. Together they formed small rainbows.