Before Oliver was kidnapped, my dad used to say, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder!” and give me smacking kisses on both cheeks when I ran to greet him after work. After, he stopped saying it (even though his hugs were tighter than ever before) and I realized that it wasn’t true. It wasn’t true at all. Oliver’s absence split us wide open, dividing our neighborhood along a fault line strong enough to cause an earthquake.
An earthquake would have been better. At least during an earthquake, you understand why you’re shaking.
The neighbors formed search parties, holding hands as they walked through wooded areas behind the school. They took up collections, bought officers cups of coffee, and told Caro and Drew and me to go play. Even our playtime had been altered. We didn’t play house anymore. We played “Kidnapping.”
“Okay, I’ll be Oliver’s mom and you be Oliver and, Drew, you be Oliver’s dad,” Caro would instruct us, but we weren’t sure what to do after Drew dragged me away. Caro would pretend to cry and say, “My baby!” which was what Maureen had been screaming that first day before the tranquilizers kicked in, but Drew and I just stood there, holding hands. We didn’t know how to end the game. No one had shown us how and, anyway, my mom told us to stop playing that, that we would upset Oliver’s mom. “But she’s always upset,” I said, and neither of my parents said anything after that.
Sometimes I think that if we had been older, it would have been easier. A lot of conversations stopped when I came near and I learned how to creep down the stairs so I could hear the grown-ups talking. I discovered that if I sat on the ninth step I could see past the kitchen and into the living room, where Maureen spent nights sobbing into her hands, my mom sitting next to her and holding her, rocking her the way she rocked me whenever I woke up dreaming about Oliver, dreaming about the tag on the back of his shirt, my pajamas damp with nightmare sweat. There were always wineglasses on the table, lined with dark resin that looked more like blood than Cabernet. And Maureen’s crying made my skin feel weird, like someone had turned it inside out. I couldn’t always hear what they were saying, but it didn’t matter. I already knew. Maureen was sad because she wanted to hold Oliver the way my mom was holding her.
“I can never leave,” Maureen wept one night as I sat on the stairs, holding my breath in case anyone saw me. “I can never leave here, you know? What would we do if Oliver came back and no one was . . . ? Oh God, oh God.”
“I know,” my mother kept saying to her. “We’ll stay with you. We won’t leave, either.”
It was a promise that she kept, too. We didn’t leave. We stayed in the same house next door. Other neighbors left and new ones moved in, and all of them seemed to know about Oliver. He had become a local celebrity in absentia, famous for not being found, a ghost.
As time went on, it became hard to imagine what he looked like, even as the police age-progressed his second-grade school photo. We all watched an artist’s rendering of Oliver grow up over the years. His nose got bigger, his eyes wider, his forehead higher. His smile wasn’t as pronounced and his baby teeth morphed into adult ones. His eyes never changed, though. That was the strange part. The hopeful part.
We stayed and looked and waited for him to come back, as if our love was a beacon that he could use to light his way home, to crawl up the sides of the earth and back through his front door, his tag still sticking up in the back.
After a while, though, after years passed and pictures changed and false tips fell through, it started to feel like the beacon wasn’t for him anymore. It was for those of us left behind, something to cling to when you realized that scary things could happen, that villains didn’t only exist in books, that Oliver might never come home.
Until one day, he did.
CHAPTER TWO
I remember it was a Thursday because I had gone surfing that afternoon. I always go out on Thursdays because both my parents work late those days, which makes it easier to sneak a surfboard in and out of my car. It had been soft that afternoon, the sky hazy and the waves no bigger than three feet or so, and I was rinsing off in the shower at the edge of the sand when I heard someone screaming my name. “Emmy! Emmy! Where is she? Is she here?!” I looked up from the end of the path and saw my best friend, Caroline, tearing toward me.
Her hair was tangled, as tangled as mine after dousing it in salt water and sea air for a few hours, and she was dashing barefoot toward me, her shoes dangling from her hand. The whole beach stopped and watched as she hurtled down the hill, and I heard one surfer say to his friend, “Dude, she’s fast.”
I stepped away from the water, my heart racing. Was it my parents? An accident? Where was our friend Drew? Oh God, it was Drew. Something had happened to Drew! “Em,” she said, and there was something scary in her eyes, wild and hopeful and terrified all at the same time.
I had never seen her look like that before and I probably never will again.
“Emmy,” she said. “They found Oliver.”
It’s funny. You think about hearing certain phrases and you plan how you’ll react to them. They found Oliver. And yet when you do finally hear the three words you’ve been too frightened to even think about, for fear of jinxing them, for fear that you might never actually hear them, it’s like they aren’t real at all.
“Emmy!” Caroline grabbed me by the shoulders and bent down so she could look me in the eyes, her grip so hard I could feel her fingertips through my wet suit. “They found Oliver. He’s okay.”