Chapter 2
Amy was quieter than normal for the rest of the day. I knew not to rush her. She needed to process things at her own pace. She always had.
After they returned from the park, I spent time with Lyle.
We had an early dinner, then he and I retired to my “den”—the spare bedroom—and read.
It was one of our favorite things to do.
Our routine was well established. He sat in one recliner, nearly disappearing into the overstuffed cushions, and I sat in the one next to him.
A small desk with a reading lamp sat between us.
We read, me with my book, him with his. In minutes he was deep in a novel most librarians would have pegged at many times beyond the reading ability of a seven-year-old boy.
Today it was Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, culled from my shelves of heavily worn paperbacks.
I had never been much of a reader. My parents hadn’t read books.
We spent dinners in my youth eating off TV trays and watching sitcoms. I moved away from television and toward film in my teens, going to the theater at least weekly with my friends to escape our respective houses.
Even later, in college and beyond, Amy and I typically spent our evenings watching a movie from my ever-growing collection.
But after Lyle came along and after we started to understand his gifts, Amy showed me the research on how parental reading encouraged children to read and how important reading was to expand a child’s mind and help them understand the world.
I pivoted. I became a fixture at the local used bookstores, of which Madison had many, and shifted the money I might’ve spent on movies to picking up books for Lyle and me.
I gave away or sold old DVDs and Blu-rays to make shelf space for books.
I never gave up on movies, of course, and I had a whole list of ones I wanted to watch with Lyle when he was old enough.
But I cherished this nightly reading time with him.
As Lyle churned through Crichton’s world of genetic engineering and business interests gone awry, I tried to read a popular nonfiction account of Lincoln’s presidency, a book I’d missed back when it had been on the bestseller list. My mind kept wandering.
I found myself staring at my son in the soft light, watching as his eyes skimmed along the pages behind his thick glasses.
My whole body hurt, even with the aspirin, and I kept shifting in my seat to keep from pressing on one injury too long.
Even so, Lyle never looked up, never appeared aware of my frequent glances or my constant fidgeting.
He was amazing. This full-fledged person Amy and I had conjured into being. A little human, product of a miracle of nature so commonplace we never gave it a second thought. But now, after displacing an entire day, I was reminded forcibly of how miraculous he was to me.
Funny how getting your life briefly knocked off-kilter could cause you to reevaluate things right in front of you.
At eight o’clock, Amy appeared and announced it was time for Lyle to go to bed. Lyle looked up, blinked at her, and nodded, solemn as ever. He never complained.
Amy regarded me in the doorway after he’d left. “Remember anything yet?”
“Nothing new.”
She hesitated, just enough for me to sense it. “All right.” She took a deep breath, her eyes tracking over the bandages on my face and hands. “Come to bed, okay?”
“Right.”
She gazed at me a moment longer and walked out. I rubbed my eyes and let out another long breath. Then I stood and shut off the light.
Amy made pancakes the next morning. A rare treat.
It was the day of the week I took Lyle to school, Gifted and Talented day, where he and other gifted students met before class and took on more challenging coursework.
On non–Gifted and Talented mornings, Lyle took the bus to school, just as he took the bus to get home in the afternoons.
Gifted and Talented was a district-wide initiative, and Amy was one of the teachers who helped with the early-morning group at her own school, so she couldn’t take Lyle and still make it to her school in time.
We lived in a different elementary school carveout than the one in which Amy worked.
Amy and I had done this deliberately when we were finding a place to live so Lyle wouldn’t have to put up with being that kid, the one whose mom was also his teacher.
As it turned out, Lyle probably wouldn’t have cared.
But we hadn’t known that at the time. We hadn’t known Lyle.
Amy gave me a hug. It felt spontaneous, and I hugged her back and kissed the top of her head.
“Have a good day, boys.”
“Okay, Mom,” Lyle said, as if he was making a promise he had every intention of keeping.
Amy looked at me. “No mountain lions, okay?”
“No mountain lions.” I shot an exaggerated look at the microwave clock and eyed Lyle, brows raised. “Ready to go, partner?”
“Yes,” he said, eyes intense and serious.
The Civic was roadworthy. We followed Amy in her minivan for a few blocks before we turned and headed for Lyle’s elementary school.
I stopped in front of his school. There were a few other parents there, letting their sons and daughters out.
I recognized them as part of the Gifted and Talented program.
“You want me to walk you inside, bud?” Sometimes he still wanted me to.
I thought it might be one of those days, after the day we’d all had before.
“No, that’s okay, Dad.” He pulled his backpack to his chest and moved to get out of the car but stopped and looked back with his hand on the handle. “Dad?”
“Yeah, bud?”
“Are you going to leave again?”
A vise clamped down over my heart, pulling the breath out of my lungs. I leaned over and met my son’s eyes. “No, bud, I’m not going to leave again. I don’t know what happened, but I’m not going anywhere.”
He gazed at me. “Bye, Dad.”
I watched him make his way into the building, a small figure among other small figures. Then, taking a breath, I put the car into drive and left the parking lot.
I made it to work early, even before Casey, the receptionist. I walked through the maze of silent cubicles to my small work area and sat.
A headache formed behind my eyes, pulsing distantly but growing more insistent.
I was still bandaged up. The headache was likely thanks to my neck muscles, still stiff and sore from my tumble down the road, so I did some brief stretches in front of my monitors, watching the twins of myself move in the matte reflections.
When I logged on, I had dozens of emails of varying levels of priority, including one from Melissa telling me to come see her for a one-on-one regarding my absence for the last two days and how I should have handled things.
Others were code changes, checkouts, reviews.
Two days of my work life gone, and now I had to catch up.
I was trying to organize the emails when it happened. One moment I was sitting there, my hand on the mouse, headache pulsing with my heartbeat, then everything
slipped
again, a fractional impression of world-shifting movement.
I fell and landed ass-first on the hard carpet of my cubicle. Off-balance, I reeled backward, my back hitting the seat of my chair. The chair rolled into the aisle and thudded into the wall of the cubicle across from mine.
“Whoa, shit,” someone said a few feet away. I looked up in time to see Andy, my coworker and cubicle neighbor, poke his head up over the side of the separator. “Scott?”
I sat there, blinking. “Andy?”
“Scott, man, I didn’t hear you come in.” He walked around the edge of the cubicle. “Where’ve you been the past few days? Mel’s going apeshit. And your wife, she called here, like, four times looking for you.”
I pulled myself up using the edge of the desk for support. “The past few days?” My computer was off, the screens dark.
“Yeah, man. You didn’t show up Monday or Tuesday, then we hear you got in a car accident or something. You were supposed to come in Wednesday, and your computer was on, but you were gone. Where you been? Your wife sounded upset. I mean, like, really upset.”
My phone chimed and buzzed. I pulled it out and unlocked the screen. I had dozens of new texts and voicemails. But I took in the notifications as an afterthought. My eyes were drawn to the time and date.
7:52 AM. Friday, April 17.
“Jesus Christ,” I whispered. “It’s Friday?”
Andy frowned at me. He reached up, tentatively, as though to pat me on the shoulder, but he let his hand fall. “Um. You okay, Scott?”
“No. No, I’m not okay, Andy.”
“Can I, like, do something? Help?”
“No.” I stopped. “Yeah, actually. Tell Melissa I’m sorry, and I’ll call her later.” I pushed by Andy and headed out the way I’d just come in. The way I’d just come in two days ago.
“You serious? You’re going to get fired, man. You gotta talk to her yourself, explain whatever happened.”
“Just tell her I’ll call,” I said over my shoulder. I was already thumbing the icon on my phone to bring up my voicemail. I started to jog.
My car was in the same spot. Two yellow tickets flapped under the windshield wiper, blaring in large letters that employees could not use the office lot for overnight parking and threatening me with a tow. I grabbed the tickets and got in, holding the phone to my ear with my shoulder.
“Mr. Treder.” It was Melissa. “You know, this is becoming a habit. And I don’t mean that in a good way—” I deleted the message.
The next message started. “Scott … I can’t believe—I can’t believe this is happening again.
It’s seven at night, Scott. I called Andy.
He said the Honda’s out in front of your office and your computer was on, but no one’s seen you.
I don’t—Lyle’s upset. He hasn’t said anything, but I can tell… ” There was a long pause. “Call me.”
I grimaced and gripped the steering wheel with one hand as I started the car.
“Mr. Treder—” I deleted Melissa again.