6
The Millers had a son named Tommy who was the same age as me. We were the best of friends growing up, always laughing, exploring the woods, getting our hands muddy and our hearts open and imaginative. He was a really sweet kid. Everyone thought so.
When we were in the third grade, Tommy went missing and nobody ever found him.
It was the most fucked up week. Search parties, the entire town on alert, complete chaos. Worst part, by far, was that Tommy was so damn kind. We really could have used him out here in the world.
I like to pretend that Tommy made it out somehow and just never found a way to make it home, being so young and blond and hopeful. I imagine Tommy still out there being beautiful to everything, visiting nursing homes and playing the guitar for the less fortunate and things like that. I imagine him like this otherwise I can’t sleep nights. Tommy ran through my nightmares for a decade, and sometimes, still. I’ll wake in a burning sweat and his eyes will blink on my ceiling like blue mournful stars above.
The Millers never really got over Tommy being taken and who could blame them? They only lived a mile or so from my place, and I still remember them somber, eyes swollen and faces beet red at our kitchen table the night after it happened. Mr. Miller had his hands crossed gently in front of him and he rubbed away layer after layer of the nail on his right thumb while Mrs. Miller bit her left cheek, wanting to cry but being all out of tears. My father didn’t have anything to say, so he sat quiet. Ma was some ten feet away preparing a small basket of bread and butter, vegetables and fruit, trying to say something healing and kind. She put the gifts in the center of the table, and nobody moved. I was eight years old. I didn’t know anything about kids being taken away from their families and atrocities like that yet. We all sat in silence for a good long time, and nobody ate the vegetables in the basket.
I would find out later, that was the same night the police pronounced Tommy was dead, or gone, or whatever. More than missing or however they said it. What I remember is, at the time, I still believed with all my heart that I would wake up one day and Tommy would be ringing the doorbell, candy-faced and asking my mom if I could play a round of imaginary something or another with him out in the woods as long as we were home for dinner. But that day never came.
Twenty-one years later, listening to Springsteen with Prince and cracking a cold Budweiser, I’m standing in the Millers’s kitchen wondering where to start the paint job.
“You remember Tommy?” I ask. Prince takes a gulp and nods.
“Yeah man. Of course.” I look around the place almost hoping they’d have a picture of him hanging somewhere still, but they don’t. Suppose that’s healthier, though I guess I’m not sure.
The Millers are solid people, but in the years following Tommy’s abduction, I would describe them as stifled. It’s fucked up, man. People go through unbelievable horror and sometimes I wonder if everyone else really understands that those horrors are real. They aren’t fake or imaginary even though sometimes it feels that way when you read about them in the news, or you hear about them from a stranger. They’re real lives out there and the stories are real. These tragedies were happening all the time, and a guy needn’t look any further than the Millers to know that was true.
I’m painting the whole interior of their kitchen a calm, off-beige color Mrs. Miller picked out a week back when I stopped by with some options. I have a book filled with these choices. It ain’t much, but it works. Anyway, she picked out the beige, and so beige it would be.
“You know, I think Tommy might have been the nicest kid in the entire town.”
Prince grunts, nods, slicks his hair back and says, “Yeah man.” And he looks up at me more thoughtful. His eyebrows raise.
“I had a dream about Tommy like, last month, man.”
“Really?”
“Yeah man, it was kind of fucked up.”
“Yeah?”
“I was like, driving past this field man, this tall green field of corn. And I pull off to the side where there’s this big old opening, ya know? Bunch of it cleared. And I get out of my truck, and I start walking toward it, and sure as shit, there in the middle, standing there looking at me, is Tommy. His hands were all muddy, man and he was wearing this old battered tank top. He was just staring at me.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
That was the funny thing about Prince. He had that fuckin dream. You just don’t have dreams like that unless something is really entrenched in your thoughts. He had been thinking of Tommy, but he wouldn’t admit nothing like that to anyone. He’s not the most vulnerable sort, my friend, but that’s fine by me. We don’t all have to be open wounds. I scratch an itch on the back of my neck—I need a shave—and I say, “Fuckin crazy man.”
Prince scoffs, runs his hair back again.
“Yeah man. It is.”
Sitting on the Millers’s kitchen counter in procrastination I find myself thinking of Tommy and all the terrible things we people went through in Johnston.