In Things Unseen Read online

  “He didn’t do anything to frighten her?”

  “No. All he did was come in and take his seat. At least, that’s what he and all the rest of the children say.”

  Alberts decided to go talk to the boy himself. As a precautionary measure, they were sending all of Carrillo’s students home, but most of them, including Adrian, were still here, waiting for their parents to pick them up. Alberts found Adrian in Chris Gianetti’s classroom, where Marx had left him, and brought him out to the vacant lunch area, where they could sit and chat alone.

  As always, Adrian was clean and neatly dressed, today in khaki shorts and a crisp blue T-shirt. Dark-haired and hazel-eyed, of average height and weight, he would have blended right into any second-grade class photo. As they took their seats at a table, Alberts studied him, looking for some sign Carrillo’s actions had upset the boy in some way, but Adrian appeared as eerily imperturbable as ever.

  “Adrian, I just want to ask you a few questions about what happened with Miss Laura in class today.”

  “Okay.”

  “Can you tell me what happened? In your own words?”

  The boy shrugged. “She just started yelling ‘no.’ And then she got up and went to the corner.”

  “No?”

  “Yes. ‘No, no, no,’ like that.”

  “Do you know why she said that?”

  Adrian shook his head.

  “You told Ms. Marx she was afraid.”

  The boy nodded.

  “What was she afraid of?”

  “I don’t know. But. . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “She was looking at me.” He shrugged again.

  “Why would she be afraid of you? Did you say or do something to frighten her?”

  “No.” His head swiveled emphatically from side to side, his Zen-like façade finally giving way to the hurt of a child falsely accused. “I didn’t do anything to her.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I just sat down. That’s all.”

  “And that’s when she started saying no over and over and got up to . . . stand in a corner? Is that what you said?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then she ran out of the room after that? Without saying anything else?”

  “She said it couldn’t be.”

  “It couldn’t be? I don’t understand.”

  “She said, ‘It can’t be.’”

  Alberts’s throat was suddenly dry. He took a moment to ward off a growing sense of unease. “And when she said that, she was still looking at you?”

  “Yes. But I don’t know why. I didn’t do anything. I just sat down. Am I in trouble, Mr. Alberts?”

  Adrian was almost in tears. Alberts was both ashamed and relieved to see the boy react, at last, with some genuine emotion. “No, no, of course not. You haven’t done anything wrong, Adrian, I promise.”

  He got up and drew the boy to his feet, tossing an arm over his little shoulders. “Come on, we’re done. Let’s go back to class.”

  When they arrived at the classroom, Adrian’s mother was there waiting for them. Alberts remembered her name was Diane, though they had met only once before, three months earlier at a Yesler fund-raising carnival. She looked concerned but not afraid, which struck Alberts as a little odd. Edie Brown had been instructed to offer people only the merest whiff of an explanation for sending their children home only hours into the school day, and the principal was expecting many parents to show up in a state of panic. Diane Edwards seemed significantly more relaxed than that.

  “Are you okay?” she asked her son, hugging him close.

  “Yes.”

  His mother turned to Alberts. “I understand Miss Laura had some kind of a breakdown. Is that right?”

  “That’s probably too strong a word for it, ‘breakdown.’ A slight panic attack would be more like it.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “I’m sure she’ll be fine. We’re only sending the kids home because some were a little spooked by it all, as you might imagine. Adrian, included, I’m afraid.”

  “Adrian?” She looked down at the boy. “Is that right? Were you spooked?”

  Before her son could answer, Alberts said, “He seems to think, because it happened just as he came into the room, that he had something to do with Laura’s behavior. Of course, I’ve told him that’s not possible. Is it?”

  He had asked the question just to see her reaction.

  “No. Of course not,” she said. Choosing the exact words he would have chosen in her place—if he had been addressing Adrian. She should have been trying to reassure her son, but she’d been looking straight at Alberts when she spoke, as if hoping to allay his fears and not the boy’s.

  Alberts didn’t know what it meant, or if it meant anything at all. And he chose not to care. He let Diane Edwards take her son home and turned his attention back to Laura Carrillo. Because whatever had caused the teacher’s meltdown, it hadn’t been a little boy risen from the dead.

  Of that much, Alberts was certain.

  THREE

  THANK YOU.

  Diane couldn’t get the two words out of her head. All day Monday, she spoke them out loud and recited them in silence, with tears and without, a mantra of gratitude to the all-merciful God who had finally heard and answered her most improbable prayer.

  Thank you.

  Her son was back. In the flesh, whole and unblemished, the same little boy his parents had laid to rest last spring.

  She spent the entire day in a state of dizzying euphoria, alternating between holding him in her arms and watching him at a remove, marveling at the miracle he represented. And surely that was the word for this: miracle.

  She thought of all the times she almost gave up hope. Got up off her knees and made up her mind never to get down on them again. It had happened more than she cared to admit. The excruciating pain was unrelenting and her loneliness, especially after Michael left, pushed her ever closer to the breaking point. What use was faith if it couldn’t provide the one thing, the only thing, you needed most in the world? But somehow she had always held on. Not simply to the hope but the belief God would do this incredible thing she was asking of Him. And now He had.

  But how to tell Adrian’s father?

  From the moment she found their son in his own bed the night before, Diane had wanted to call her estranged husband to tell him what had happened. Keeping something so immense, so unimaginably wonderful, to herself seemed both selfish and impossible. But she never reached for the phone that night, and as of Monday evening, still hadn’t. She waited for the dawn instead, fully awake in her own bed, trying to imagine what words she could use that would not make her sound like a madwoman.

  Had she made a call to Michael, she realized now, it would have been a huge mistake. Because more than just the obvious had changed. Beyond the fact Adrian had returned to it, this was a different world than it had been before. With Monday’s morning light, Diane had begun to see evidence of this everywhere she looked. Two days earlier, Adrian had been a child she only used to have, her home bearing few reminders of the place he once held in it. But on Monday, his closet was full of clean clothes and his hamper overflowed with dirty ones. His favorite foods were stocked in the kitchen again, and the shrine Diane had built for him atop her bedroom dresser had been reduced to a single photograph, the pamphlet from his funeral service conspicuously missing.

  Time, it seemed, had been rewound to erase all signs of Adrian’s death.

  Even the boy himself had no memory of the event, as far as Diane could tell. He woke Monday as he always had on weekdays—on his own, prepared to go to school—and only agreed to stay home after Diane insisted it was a holiday of which he’d been unaware. As wary as ever of breaking the spell that had brought him back to her, she passed the hours on Monday studying her son with tender care,
quizzing him only enough to ascertain he had no answers for any of the questions she longed to ask him. Wherever he had been over the last eight months, heaven or hell or somewhere in between, Adrian thought he had been right here, safe and sound in his family’s home.

  Like the timing of his return, this wasn’t at all how Diane had envisioned it would happen. She had thought the world would remain as it was, and that the miracle of a dead child rising from the grave would simply turn it upside down. That she would have to draw on every ounce of her strength to protect her son from the towering wave of believers and nonbelievers that would come crashing down upon him, seeking answers he could not provide. The skepticism of the faithless would be relentless, and the curiosity of the faithful would be no less so.

  But that was clearly not God’s plan. The final proof was the call Diane placed to her sister Vicky early Monday night, after she’d put Adrian to bed. No one other than Michael had been more devastated by Adrian’s death than Vicky, who lived seven miles away in Columbia City, and no one had ever taken greater pains afterward to avoid the very mention of his name. But on this night Adrian’s aunt asked about him as if nothing more than mere hours had passed since she last placed a kiss on the boy’s forehead. Hearing he was alive and well surprised Vicky not at all.

  God hadn’t simply reversed Adrian’s death; He had undone it. But why? How could a miracle bring glory to God if God Himself had chosen to make a secret of it?

  Diane ultimately decided she didn’t need to understand and she didn’t care to. She had spent every night of her life since that nightmarish day—every night for eight months—praying for one thing only: to have Adrian back. And now that God had seen fit to answer that prayer, she wasn’t going to question the rhyme or reason of His methods. Instead, she would take comfort in the safe assumption her son was not meant to be shown off and displayed like a circus freak. He was proof of God’s great love and mercy, His power to change the unchangeable, but he was not intended to lift the veil of unbelief from the eyes of the entire world. For the moment, at least, he was just a little boy who had once been lost and now was found, and all that was incumbent upon his mother was that she treat him accordingly.

  So Tuesday morning, after sleeping beside him more soundly than she had slept in months, Diane resigned herself to follow the script Adrian seemed to be writing. Counter to her most fervent wish to hold him close, she sent the boy to school, exactly as she always had before the accident, and waited to see what would happen.

  * * *

  When the call from Yesler Elementary came, less than an hour after she’d dropped Adrian off, Diane had feared the worst. Had she misread the signs? Heard her sister say something she hadn’t? Were the teachers and children at school thrown into a panic at the very sight of her son, their collective memory of his death fully intact?

  No. From Edie Brown’s voice over the phone, Diane had been able to tell that wasn’t the case. Something unusual had happened, yes, but it had involved Adrian’s teacher, Laura Carrillo, not Adrian himself, and nothing along the lines of a school-wide horror show had ensued.

  The minute she arrived at Yesler to hear Edie’s vague description of what had occurred, Diane realized Carrillo alone understood the import of Adrian’s reappearance in her classroom. No one else had a clue. Diane could not imagine why the young teacher had been singled out to receive the gift of insight, but she suspected she would find out soon enough. In the meantime, Diane would pretend to be as shocked as everyone else by Carrillo’s actions. When the right time came to speak the truth, Diane would do so gladly. But this was not the time.

  Speaking the truth to Michael was another matter. Shortly after bringing Adrian home from school, it had dawned on Diane that her husband’s memories of the last eight months, and the tragedy that preceded them, were likely to be as intact as those of Laura Carrillo. Because otherwise he’d be here with her, the disintegration of their marriage erased by God’s hand like all the other consequences of Adrian’s death. The boy had barely mentioned his father more than once since his return, apparently accustomed to his parents’ separation and the reasons—another mystery in this new world—they may have had for brokering it. This seemed proof enough to Diane that Michael, too, must be living in a past no longer in effect.

  He needed to be told.

  Diane knew Michael would refuse to believe it. His love for Adrian had always been as boundless as her own, and he had mourned for the boy with a passion she would have thought was beyond him. His faith in God, unlike hers, had been an open secret at best, rarely mentioned and almost never demonstrated, but in the beginning his prayers—to wake up one morning and find the accident in Lakeridge Park was nothing more than a bad dream—made Diane’s pale by comparison.

  Eventually, however, as the reality of Adrian’s death sank its teeth ever deeper into him, Michael lost his faith. His sorrow turned to anger, black and cold and insurmountable, and Diane found herself more alone than ever. Her prayers for Adrian went on, her own spiritual beliefs tested but never quite shaken, and her refusal to swallow the bitter pill of defeat finally drew Michael’s ire and contempt. She couldn’t hold him, and five months after laying their little boy to rest, she stopped wanting to.

  Which was not to say she no longer loved Michael. She did. And she was certain he still loved her. But what Michael had needed from her—an admission they would never have Adrian back—was the one thing she could not give him.

  And now she wouldn’t have to. Any future they might yet have together suddenly depended not on her ability to accept a difficult truth, but on his. All he had to do was lay down the sword of bitterness that had closed her off to him and open his eyes. Trust what they would soon be telling him and believe in the impossible again.

  Diane hoped there was enough light left in him to do so.

  FOUR

  ELLIOTT KNEW SOMETHING was terribly wrong when Laura called him home just after noon. Laura never called him at the office, and rarely went home early from school herself. He pleaded for some explanation but she wouldn’t offer any over the phone. Her tone of voice, flat and lifeless, was one he had never heard before.

  He arrived to find her in the bedroom, fully dressed and sitting atop the covers on their bed, a cup of tea growing cold in her hands. She was staring at the television but it wasn’t on, and she only seemed to notice his entrance when he sat down beside her.

  “Laura, what is it? What happened?”

  Her eyes, rimmed in red and filmed with tears, slowly turned in his direction. “I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what happened.”

  Elliott guessed she was in shock. He’d imagined all kinds of horrible things on the drive home but this was more frightening than most. Laura didn’t shake easily.

  “Are you ill? Should I call a doctor?” He touched her forehead. Her temperature seemed normal. “Laura, talk to me.”

  “Adrian Edwards. He was run over by a car in the park and killed.”

  “Oh, Jesus—”

  “Last March,” she added. “We went to the funeral together. I said a few words for him at the service and slept for two days afterwards, right here in this bed.” She searched his face. “Please tell me you remember that. Please.”

  Elliott was confused. The name was familiar, of course. Adrian was one of Laura’s favorite students and she talked about him incessantly. But this was the first Elliott had heard about any accident in the park, let alone the boy’s death. And the only funeral Elliott had attended in the last four years was for his sister Jayne.

  “I’m sorry, babe. I don’t.”

  Her eyes flashed. “You’re lying.” She slapped him hard across the face, upending her tea into her lap. “You’re lying! He’s dead, you know he’s dead. Why can’t you just admit it?” Her voice cracked. “Why won’t anyone admit it?”

  She burst into tears as Elliott recoiled, cheek burning.
“Laura, what the hell is going on? You’re not making any sense!”

  * * *

  Slowly, word by painful word, it all tumbled out. She began with Adrian’s appearance in her classroom that morning and ended with her dismissal from school, Howard Alberts sending her home for the day with the concern of a doting grandmother. In between, Laura recited all she could recall that was germane to the boy’s death: the children’s various emotional breakdowns in the classroom afterward, their questions about life and death that she could answer only in riddles, the time she saw a boy at the Willowbridge Mall who resembled Adrian so strongly that she nearly fainted. Elliott had been there with her that night, he had to remember it.

  And yet he didn’t. He didn’t remember any of it.

  It left Laura with only one conclusion, the same one she’d been terrified to face ever since she’d glanced up from her desk that morning to see a dead child walk into her classroom: she was going mad.

  She cried for a long time in her fiancé’s arms, not knowing what else to do. Elliott was as lost as she, but he didn’t push. He was a man who always understood the value of silence, even in moments of crisis. He stroked her hair and face and held her close, offering an occasional word of comfort.

  She sat upright again and met his gaze. “What’s wrong with me, Elliott? Why is this happening?”

  He showed her a brave smile. “I don’t know.”

  “They think I’m crazy. Everyone at school, I mean. The district psychologist was called out to examine me. She questioned me for over two hours, treating me like a mental patient. She thinks I’m just overworked.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “No. You know I’m not. And you know I’m not insane. Or am I?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Then tell me what’s going on. Adrian Edwards is dead. He died last March, exactly the way I’ve been saying he did. I’m not making it up and I’m not imagining it, Elliott. It happened.”