“Oh, relax, Caroline,” he said, and I knew he was using her full name just to annoy her. No one ever calls her Caroline. It’s just too many syllables.
“I’d like to see Oliver before suffering from debilitating whiplash,” I told him, trying to loosen my iron grip on my seat belt.
“So how real do we think this is?” Drew asked.
He had a point. This wasn’t the first time that Oliver had been “found.” The sightings had been intense at first, hundreds of calls pouring in to the hotline saying that they had seen a sandy-haired, freckle-faced seven-year-old in Omaha, Atlanta, Los Angeles, even Puerto Rico. The calls died down over the years, but every year or so, there was a ray of hope. A short-lived ray, but hope nonetheless, enough to live on for another year.
“Maybe real?” I said. “I don’t know, I . . .” I trailed off, not really sure what to say.
Caro took over.
“Emmy’s mom called me because Em wasn’t answering her phone,” she said. “Something about a fingerprint. He was in a police station for a school field trip? I’m not sure. Anyway, it matched the one in his file and they went to arrest Oliver’s dad at home. He wasn’t there, but Oliver was.”
“New York?” Drew asked. “Really?”
“New York City,” Caro emphasized. “But here’s the part that’s bonkers: they still haven’t found his dad. Apparently, he’s on the lam.” Caro always liked the police lingo. I don’t think she’s ever missed an episode of Law & Order: SVU.
“Wow,” Drew murmured. “New York.” I didn’t have to look at Drew’s face to know what he was thinking. He would pretty much like to be anywhere else but our town. New York must’ve sounded like a dream.
We live in a tolerant community, so long as there’s nothing to tolerate. So when Drew came out and announced he was gay last year, it caused a bit of what he called the “muffled kerfuffle.” Caro and I already knew, of course, but Drew’s parents were a little . . . different. They were accepting at first, lots of “we love you just the way you ares” and all that, but to hear Drew tell it, the mood was heavier at his house. The silences longer, the words shorter. “They look at me sometimes,” he said one night when we were sleeping over at Caro’s, his voice quiet in the dark. “And I can’t tell if they like what they see.”
I could understand why Drew sounded wistful about New York.
I glanced out the window as Drew turned right, all of us quiet for a moment. In our second-grade class picture, we were lined up by height in the middle row: Caro on the end, then Drew, then Oliver, then me. And then Oliver went away and there were just three of us, with no idea of how to make sense of our loss. And to make it worse, every adult was super nice in the months after Oliver disappeared: “Ran your bike into my car? It’s just a tiny scratch.” “Threw a ball through my window? Be more careful next time.” It was unsettling. When the adults are full of indulgence, you know things are really bad.
Drew swung a left and pulled onto our street. His normal routine is to careen until the last possible second and then spin a U-turn in our cul-de-sac before zooming into my driveway. You can imagine how exciting that is in a top-heavy VW bus. The first time my mom saw Drew zipping toward us, she said, “He does know that the street dead-ends, right?”
It was a fair question.
I have to admit, though, Drew knows what he’s doing, and ten seconds later, he was pulling the parking brake as we eyed a caravan of news trucks and cameras. “Hello, hello, old friends,” Drew drawled when we saw them. “How long has it been?”
“Two years,” I replied, glaring out my window. After Oliver didn’t show up to school that Tuesday ten years ago, the news cameras became a noisy cavalry for a few months. At first, everyone thought it was great. They were bringing attention to the case! Surely, someone would see Oliver and call the police and he’d come home in time for Drew’s eighth birthday party. Caro and Drew and I used to draw pictures of Oliver and try to get the newscasters to film them, but mostly they just stood in front of Oliver’s home and said things like “This tragic disappearance has left a community shaken . . . [dramatic pause] . . . to its core.”
The ironic thing is that even though Oliver’s disappearance was a huge deal in our town, it didn’t really get that much attention outside of the city. He was a young kid taken by a non-abusive parent who had no citizenship in a foreign country. It was terrible, yes, but when it came to criminal investigations, finding Oliver wasn’t at the top of most people’s lists. That’s when I first learned about true frustration, that wrenching ache when the thing that matters most to you barely makes a ripple in other people’s lives.
One afternoon, after the story had faded slightly in the local headlines, the reporters decided to talk to me. My parents were inside and didn’t know that I had snuck out to see if Oliver was secretly in his backyard, and the cameras descended on me. Even now, when I think about it, it makes me want to throw up.
“How does it feel to know that your friend Oliver might never come home?”
“What can you tell us about Oliver, sweetheart? Do you think he wanted to be with his dad more than his mom?”
“Did Oliver say anything to you? Did you know that his father was going to take him?”
I’m not sure when I started to cry, but when my dad came storming out of the house, I was in full-blown hysterics. He grabbed me up and told all the newscasters to go fuck themselves (which definitely did not make it into the seven o’clock broadcast), then carried me back inside. Soon after, he taught Caro and Drew and me some Beatles songs and told us that whenever we saw people with cameras, we should just sing those songs.