38 Berry
Berry
It’s the third day, and he’s still gone. My brain can barely grasp it. Cops have been coming and going on a loop. They’ve
sent officers to speak with people from the high school, the Y, the robotics class. They met with Tatiana and even called
McKenna. Nobody knows where he is.
While we waited for them to check the Port Authority yesterday, I continued imagining horrible scenarios, but especially the
ones with cops trying to touch Leo, making him melt down. I pictured him terrified. Hitting them, getting hit back, then being
handcuffed and dragged away, writhing in agony with all those hands on him.
But they didn’t find him there. They searched every bathroom of the Port Authority, put out an APB, did all their cop things,
and nothing. His phone’s been offline since he disappeared. I don’t know if that was intentional, or if the battery is dead,
or if the phone was stolen, destroyed. I don’t know anything at all.
Yvonne is here again. She’s walking into the living room with a steaming bowl in her hand. I assume it’s matzah ball soup. We always said matzah ball soup was magic, the cure for everything from runny noses to heartbreak. But not this.
At the expression on my face she says, “Just a few spoonfuls. You need your energy.” Setting the bowl on the coffee table,
she scurries from the room in a move that’s positively un-Yvonne. I feel a little bad for scaring her away, so I pull the
soup closer and take a mouthful. I can hardly swallow it. Sinking deeper into the couch cushions, I wipe another tear from
under my eye.
But then Phil comes running through the front door.
“They got another hit! They know where he is!”
It takes me a split second to process, and then I’m running toward the garage. “Let’s go!”
“Wait, wait, wait.” Phil reaches for my arm. “He left again. He’s on a bus. They’re intercepting the bus.”
I stop and look at Phil. “A bus? Where?”
“He showed up on a camera at a bus station in Richmond.”
“Richmond?!” I shriek. “How the hell did he get to Richmond?” It’s a dumb question. Phil just said the bus station. I can’t
breathe. Leo all the way in Richmond by himself. I can barely let the kid out of my sight, and now he’s halfway down the East
Coast.
Suddenly Yvonne is beside me.
“Breathe, Berry. You have to breathe. Leo needs for you to breathe right now.”
I grab her arm and inhale through my nose.
“That’s good,” she says. “The police are going to get him.” She looks over at Phil. “They’re going to stop the bus?”
At her words I start hyperventilating again. “He’s going to be so scared. He’ll think he’s in trouble. We have to talk to
them. Get me on the phone with them.”
The officers are back inside now. I don’t know when they came in. I’ve suddenly forgotten all their names.
One of them hurries toward us from where she was standing near the dining room, her hands up in the universal “don’t shoot”
pose.
“We’ve prepped them,” she says. “They know Leo has autism. They know to treat him accordingly.”
She’s wrong. There are plenty of stories of cops knowing they were dealing with an autistic person and doing everything wrong
anyway.
“You have to relax,” Yvonne says. “There’s nothing you can do from here.” She starts steering me back toward the sofa.
I stand firm, not responding to the nudging. “There has to be something I can do. I can’t just sit here eating fucking soup.”
“They’ll call as soon as they’ve got him,” the female officer says. “But this is good. This is good news.”
I look over at Phil, and I can see on his face that he’s a little calmer, that he’s relieved. His eyes fall to the soup on
the table. There’s still steam rising from it.
“You should eat,” he tells me.
But I can’t. I can’t do anything until my boy is back home.