In Things Unseen Read online

  It was a devil’s bargain: risk madness to have his old life back, or risk nothing and keep his present one, which was almost no life at all.

  * * *

  “I need a new computer.”

  Lisa didn’t catch her father’s comment. “What?”

  “I said I need a new computer. Mine doesn’t work anymore.”

  “Doesn’t work how?”

  “What do you mean, how? It doesn’t work. I tried to use it last night and nothing happened.”

  “You mean the screen didn’t turn on?”

  “No, no, no. The screen is fine.” Milton put down his toast, waited to stop chewing before continuing. “It’s that search thing. What do they call it? The Google?”

  “Google, yes. It’s a search engine, Daddy.”

  “Well, that. That’s what’s wrong with it, the Google engine. It doesn’t work anymore.”

  “You searched for something and couldn’t find it. Is that what you mean?”

  “Yes. That’s it, precisely. I need a new computer.”

  Lisa laughed. “No, you don’t.”

  The two of them did breakfast together like this every Wednesday, taking the same table in the back corner at Sherman’s, his favorite deli. Lisa ordered according to her mood, but Milton was happy to have three boiled eggs and toast every time. Janet had an open invitation to join them whenever she wanted but she almost never did. She liked to use work as an excuse, but both Lisa and Milton knew Janet just wasn’t interested in blocking out a regular space in her calendar for them. Her father was too aggravating and her sister far too cheerful.

  “I don’t? Why don’t I? You think you can fix it?”

  “It doesn’t need to be fixed, Daddy. Just because you can’t find something when you google it, that doesn’t mean your computer’s broken. Sometimes, what you’re looking for just isn’t there.”

  “Not there? Of course it’s there. It’s always there. But last night, it wasn’t.”

  “What wasn’t? What were you looking for?”

  Milton suddenly realized his mistake. He hadn’t meant for the conversation to turn in this direction. Neither of his daughters knew about his habit of revisiting the past and he wasn’t ready to tell Lisa about it now. She had more patience than Janet did for talk of how he’d killed that little boy, but even she wouldn’t understand his need to keep the memory fresh in his mind.

  “Nothing,” he said, biting into another egg in the hope of closing the subject.

  Lisa studied him. She took a sip of her coffee, set the cup down gently. “What was it, Daddy? Tell me.”

  Milton kept chewing.

  She waited.

  “I was looking for a story in the paper. What time is it?”

  “Don’t worry about the time. I’ve got all morning and so do you. What kind of story?”

  He wiped his mouth with a napkin, one last effort to put her off, but he could see it was useless. She wasn’t going to let him leave their table until he’d answered the question.

  “About the accident,” he said. “And I don’t want to talk about why so don’t ask me. I have my reasons, that’s all you need to know.”

  “Accident? What accident?”

  “The accident in the park. What else?”

  “The park?”

  “Yes, the park. Of course the park. Why are you acting like you don’t know what I’m talking about?”

  His daughter’s eyes grew big. “Oh, my God. You had an accident in your car at the park? When? Was anybody hurt?”

  Milton tried to decide if she was playing some kind of cruel joke.

  “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I’m ready to go. Where’s the check?”

  “Daddy, you have to tell me. If you had an accident and somebody got hurt—”

  “Hurt? Hurt?” Milton couldn’t hold back his anger any longer. “I killed that little boy! I ran him over and killed him! You know what I did as well as I do!”

  All color drained from Lisa’s face. “You killed. . .oh, my God. Oh, my God!”

  Milton realized now she wasn’t faking it; she really didn’t know what he was talking about. The more she questioned him, the more obvious this became.

  His agitation turned to fear. Clearly, one of them had lost their hold on reality and common sense said it wasn’t the one who was only thirty-eight years old. The prospect of growing senile had always terrified Milton. His brother Stuart, three years younger, had died from complications of Alzheimer’s six years earlier, and what Milton had seen of him near the end was horrifying.

  “Take me home,” he ordered Lisa, pushing away from their table. “I want to go home!”

  She tried to continue grilling him on the drive back to his apartment but Milton was all done talking. As she let him out of the car, he could tell they had both arrived at the same conclusion, one Milton knew she would relay to Janet before the day was out.

  The old man’s mind was slipping.

  ELEVEN

  MICHAEL WANTED TO SEE the boy Diane insisted was Adrian again, but at some distance and without his wife around, so he drove out to Yesler Elementary. He timed his arrival for the ten o’clock recess, when all the children would be out in the yard, playing and having a snack.

  He went straight to the main office. By rights, asking to see his son should earn him some strange looks and a few questions about how he was feeling. They would sit him down somewhere with a glass of water and shake their heads and wonder who they should call, too concerned for his wellbeing, the poor devil, to trust him to get home safely on his own.

  But that was not the treatment he was expecting.

  Based on all he had experienced over the last twelve hours, he anticipated a brief exchange between himself and the clerk, and maybe the principal, Howard Alberts, if he was around. Everyone cordial and polite, no one acting as if anything was amiss. Just a parent asking to see a student to deliver a personal message. That the parent was Michael Edwards and the student Adrian would raise not a single eyebrow.

  And that was precisely how things transpired.

  He had been to the office only twice before that he could recall, once to deliver a forgotten lunch and, on another occasion, to pick up Adrian after he’d fallen ill and Diane’s car had failed to start. But Michael used to do morning drop-offs with some regularity, so he was known by sight to most if not all of the staff.

  The office clerk, Edna or Edie, smiled warmly when he entered, and reacted to his request to see Adrian as if it were routine.

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with what happened yesterday, does it?” she asked, lowering her voice, presumably so that no one behind the closed office doors behind her could hear.

  “No,” Michael said. “It’s just a small family matter, nothing at all serious.”

  And there it was. What happened yesterday. What else could she be referring to but the epic scene Diane had said Adrian’s teacher caused upon laying eyes on him? Michael hadn’t come here looking for additional confirmation of his wife’s claims about their son—what he’d seen at Forest Glade Cemetery had been confirmation enough—but now there could be no doubt. Everything Diane had told him was true. Time itself had been rolled backward to undo not only Adrian’s death but any record of it.

  Still, for all the reasons he had to believe, Michael needed one more: Adrian himself. Michael had to see him again, to watch him move and hear him laugh, to see him do all the things little boys do, to finally be sure he was Michael’s son. The child he had thought he’d lost forever, returned to him by the grace of God.

  Edie (or Edna) offered to have Adrian brought into the office but Michael declined. He asked instead if he could go find his son in the yard; Adrian was in recess, wasn’t he? The clerk hesitated—technically, parents weren’t supposed to be given free rein of the campus—then decided to let h
im go. She had Michael sign in, gave him a name badge, and sent him on his way.

  He found Adrian almost immediately. His son was watching a group of children play kickball on the tarmac, happy as always to coach and counsel rather than take part in the game himself. Adults had often mistaken Adrian for a snob, a child who held himself in too high esteem to behave like one, but that wasn’t Adrian at all. It wasn’t contempt he felt for his peers but empathy; the desire to help, to facilitate the joy of others, drove him more than anything else. Michael used to worry about him, unable to understand how a seven-year-old boy could be happy observing fun rather than having it, but eventually he realized Adrian was content. The boy’s isolation was not indicative of insecurity, but of uncommon comfort in his own skin.

  Michael watched him from a distance, behind a corner of the cafeteria where his son couldn’t easily spot him. Adrian and another boy were engaged in a discussion that seemed to revolve around kicking motions. Adrian was no doubt imparting a lesson on the most efficient, and when Adrian began to laugh, amused by the other kid’s inability to mimic his example, Michael had to do the same. The sound of the boy’s laughter was dim but unmistakable. When the tears came, Michael knew he’d seen and heard enough. The child he had been watching was no apparition or facsimile.

  He was Michael’s only son.

  * * *

  Milton definitely needed a new computer now.

  He’d come home from his breakfast with Lisa and immediately gone back to his laptop to try again. Over and over he entered Adrian Edwards in the Google engine box, and every time the results were the same as they’d been the night before: nothing. No articles, no blog posts, no photos. Everything on his screen referred to some other, adult Adrian Edwards, or had no connection to the name that Milton could discern. After an hour he’d lost his temper, ripped the mouse thing right out of its socket and flung it across the room, then pounded his fists on the keyboard until it was in pieces and keycaps were all over his desk and the floor.

  He couldn’t understand it. An old man needed to be able to trust his memory. In order to function like a normal person, he had to be able to recognize what was real and what wasn’t. When confidence in that ability was shaken, fear took hold, visions of hospitals and nursing homes, faces that all looked strange and unfamiliar. And in Milton’s case, the lure of drink would reassert itself. Milton would kill himself before he slipped that far.

  The problem was his computer. It had to be.

  He had killed a little boy last March. Adrian Edwards, seven years old, in Lakeridge Park. His foot had slipped on the brake and hit the accelerator. The proof was out there, it had always been out there, and Milton needed to find it again to stave off the notion dementia was written in the cards for him.

  Milton went to the library. It had computers and they were free to use. He would run his search on one of them and put his fears to bed.

  He tried three different machines before he surrendered to the unthinkable. His agitation eventually drew a librarian to his side, but she was of no help. He wanted her to explain how pages and pages of content pertaining to a given subject could be on the internet one day only to be gone the next, and naturally she had no answers for him.

  Milton realized the young woman was starting to talk to him like he was one of the homeless people there who had nowhere else to go, so he left before his shame could turn into something more volatile.

  TWELVE

  MICHAEL COULDN’T BRING HIMSELF to go into the studio so he went home. He was in a daze, halfway between euphoria and delirium.

  He went straight to the bathroom and took a shower, setting the water temperature hot enough to make a sauna of the room. For a long time, he just stood there under the showerhead, eyes closed and face upturned to the spray, not moving a single muscle. Waiting to be cleansed, for the last of his doubt—or his sanity?—to be rinsed down the drain.

  He left the shower and fell onto his bed, naked and exhausted. His mind had been churning at a breakneck pace for over fourteen hours, ever since he’d fled the sight of his son curled up in Diane’s bed the night before, and his body craved sleep.

  He found it the moment his head hit the pillow.

  * * *

  Diane went to answer the doorbell thinking she was doing it for Michael, but it was Adrian’s teacher, Laura Carrillo, standing on the porch. The young woman looked haggard and shaken, her clothing seemingly tossed on, and Diane couldn’t help but feel a pang of guilt, knowing her son’s role in his teacher’s sad condition.

  “I need to talk to you, Mrs. Edwards. Please,” Carrillo said.

  “Miss Laura. Of course, come in.”

  Carrillo didn’t move. “Is Adrian. . .?”

  “No. He’s at school.”

  They settled in the kitchen at the breakfast table, Diane using every minute beforehand to ponder what she would say and how she should say it. She’d known this meeting would happen sooner or later and had prayed for the wisdom to deal with it appropriately. She was still guessing as to God’s true intentions and feared one wrong word from her would prove disastrous.

  “How are you?” she asked after Carrillo had declined all offers of food and drink. “I heard about what happened yesterday. Are you okay?”

  Carrillo shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m still trying to make sense of it, I guess.”

  “Howard Alberts said you had some kind of panic attack.”

  Diane waited to let Carrillo do with that what she would. She would speak the truth only when the younger woman led their conversation to a place where nothing but the truth would do.

  “That’s not what it was,” Carrillo said. “And I came here this morning because I think you know that.”

  “Me?”

  “It may very well be that I’m insane. That all this”—she glanced about the room—”is just a figment of my imagination. I’ve been trying to convince myself since yesterday morning that that’s what’s going on. I called and made an appointment today to see a psychiatrist because they won’t let me return to school until I do. But I don’t believe I need a psychiatrist. If I haven’t lost my mind and you and I are really sitting here, in this house, at this table, then yes, Mrs. Edwards, I think you know exactly what happened to me yesterday, and why.” She fixed her eyes on Diane’s. “Don’t you?”

  After a brief hesitation, Diane nodded.

  The confession seemed to take Carrillo’s breath away. She inhaled deeply and said, “Oh, thank God.” Her eyes welled with tears and she wiped them away with the palms of both hands. “I knew it. I knew it was all some kind of trick. It had to be.”

  “It wasn’t a trick. This is all very real.”

  Carrillo blinked at her. “But you just said—”

  “That you didn’t just have a nervous breakdown yesterday.”

  “So, what are you saying? That the accident in the park, Adrian’s death. . . .”

  “All really happened. Yes. That’s what I’m saying.”

  “But how?”

  “I’m afraid there’s only one word that fits: it’s a miracle. God performed a miracle. I know that sounds ridiculous, but there’s really no other way to describe it. I’m sorry.”

  “A miracle?”

  Diane told her the way it was and how it had been. Her recital of the same prayer every morning and every night since the accident, her faith ebbing and flowing as the weeks and months passed. Michael’s eventual loss of his own faith and the disintegration of their marriage. And finally, finding Adrian back in his bed three nights ago, in every respect the same little boy he had always been. Her little boy.

  “It isn’t possible,” Carrillo said, shaking her head.

  “But it is. Adrian is living proof.” Diane smiled, letting her contentment serve as all the additional evidence necessary.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “You
don’t believe in God.”

  “No. Frankly, I don’t. But even if I did—”

  “Did you ever?”

  “Oh, sure. Once. Before I knew better.”

  “I see. So what do you believe in now, if not God?”

  Carrillo had to think about it. “I’m not sure. Love? Death?” She found a smile of her own. “Taxes?”

  “That’s not much to live on.”

  “No. But I’ve been getting by on it. At least, I was until yesterday.”

  “You believe me, then?”

  “No. Of course not. I still don’t fully understand what’s going on, but I know it’s not what you’re describing.”

  Diane got up to put some fresh coffee on and to let a moment pass before asking, “So, what are you going to do?”

  “Me? I’m not going to do anything. Now that you’ve admitted the truth—”

  “Miss Laura, God didn’t just bring Adrian back to me. He changed things—everything, as near as I can tell—so that to everyone but the two of us and my husband, his death never happened. Surely you’ve noticed that by now?”

  “I’ve noticed that it appears that way, yes,” Carrillo said, turning all the way around in her chair to face Diane again. “That’s why they all think I’m crazy. Howard, Betty, Edie, even Elliott. My fiancé. No one seems to remember anything about the accident, the funeral. . . .”

  “And they never will. That’s what you need to understand. If you go on trying to make them remember something that never happened—”

  “But it did happen! You just admitted it!”

  “No.” Diane shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry?”

  Diane only looked at her.

  “But you have to tell them the truth! If you don’t—”

  “If I don’t, what? The world will go on exactly as it is. Which is precisely the way I want it, now that I have my son back.” Diane had no desire to be cruel, but Carrillo needed to understand how things were. “I didn’t ask for it to be this way, Miss Laura. I didn’t care how He made it happen, I just wanted it to happen. And it has. It’s the Lord’s miracle, not mine, and I’m not going to do anything to undo it.”