The Leaving(34)

Turns out, his wife has died and his daughter is being cared for by a very pro-Leaving neighbor. He has to kill the woman—a childless widow—to claim his daughter and bring her with him. Alas, forces align against them and they are caught. He’s sent to prison. His daughter is sent to The Leaving. His only hope is that his son will one day rise up and fight back. His son, the keeper of those family photos, the keeper of all that is real about life and loss, may one day become a hero.


By the time he was done reading, Lucas was starving. The pickings were slim, so he grabbed a slice of cold pizza and wondered whether he knew how to cook. If he didn’t, it was time to learn.

What was taking Scarlett so long?

Why hadn’t she texted yet?

The keeper of photos.

The camera tattoo.

He went back to his room and lay down on the sagging mattress, watching dust dance.

His brain sought connections but found none.

Then, soon, noises.

Ryan.

Miranda.

The TV.

The news:

“Meanwhile, the victims of The Leaving are starting to be met with increasing skepticism about their story that they don’t remember anything about the past eleven years, or about Max Godard, whose fate remains unknown.”

Lucas got up and joined them just in time to see the clip of Avery playing again: “They must know something.”

He shouldn’t have rushed her out of the RV like that.

Shouldn’t have told her that, no, she could not come talk to Ryan with him.

They’d exchanged phone numbers before she left, and he’d promised her updates, but she was a distraction.

“Have you ever seen this book?” Lucas held it out to Ryan. Miranda went to his side to also look.

“No.” Ryan took it from him and thumbed the pages, and the air suddenly smelled old, borderline vomit-y. Then he turned to the cover, to study the illustration of small children in pods beneath the title: The Leaving. “Was it out there?”

“Out where?” Miranda asked.

“Yes.” Lucas ignored her. “You’ve really never seen it?”

“No.” Ryan turned it over.

Miranda stood at his shoulder also reading the back cover. “That is messed up,” she said, almost too quickly.

“There’ve been a few books,” Ryan said.

“This was written in 1968.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Ryan said. “This is ringing a bell now. Dad was writing to some author’s son or something. It was a few years ago. I’d stopped paying attention and he’d stopped telling me what he was doing anyway.”

“Where’s his computer?”

“Bedroom.”

They went down the hall together, and Miranda followed. Ryan powered up the laptop on the desk in the corner, and they waited.

Lucas hadn’t been in there yet, hadn’t seen how his father had been living—in a small brown room that barely fit the queen bed and desk. Lucas was sure there had once been curtains with flowers on them, perfume bottles on a silver tray reflecting sunlight. But she was long gone and all that was, too.

Miranda had the book now. “If you don’t mind my saying it, this is a stretch.”

Lucas said, “Scarlett told her mother she was going to the leaving.”

“All right, all right,” Miranda said. “So you think it’s the author? Or his son?”

“Maybe,” Lucas said. “I don’t know.”

But it had to mean something.

When the monitor lit, Ryan clicked to an e-mail bookmark, and the mail loaded. Lucas went to sit at the desk.

There was a lot of recent spam and more than thirty-five thousand e-mails in the account, so Lucas searched for the name Orlean and found a correspondence with the author’s son, Paul, from several years ago.

Thank you for your letter, Paul had written. I handle all my father’s correspondence now that he has gotten on in years.

“I’ll read through this,” Lucas said. “I’ll tell you what I find.”

Ryan nodded—“Of course”—and took Miranda’s hand, and they left.

I would say that my father’s novel became a cult classic in the truest sense of the word. It’s not that it was cherished by a small group of people; it’s that it became doctrine for a smaller group of fringe elements. People who really thought the country was going to hell and that the government could do something about it. He has a few boxes of fan mail, which makes it look like he has a lot of fans, but they’re mostly repeat customers. People who called him a visionary. He was, for a time, a well-respected scientist, but his reputation suffered after he wrote the novel. (Mind you, the print run was minuscule.) People thought he started to let the more “out there” ideas he put forth in the novel creep into his research and that he’d lost his way. Maybe he had. Anyone who saw any value in his scientific work, which focused on erasing memories, mostly saw applications for PTSD, but he started to move away from that line of research.

Which is a long way of saying that yes, it’s possible the situation you are describing has something to do with his work, though I can’t for the life of me see a direct connection—unless perhaps . . . a fan?

His father had written back,

Can you send me the letters? Or the names and addresses of his biggest fans? Did you ever speak to the police after my son and the others disappeared? Didn’t you see a connection?