He smiled more often, and he began seeing a man called Ivan. He never brought him to the house though. I only knew because he would tell me, “I’ll be staying at Ivan’s tonight, you all right on your own?”
I was more than happy to be on my own.
He was less critical of me. For a long while after Mama’s death, it was, “Silas, not like that. Your mother put the flour on this side of the pantry and sugar on the other,” and “Fecking Christ, Silas. Not so much cream in my coffee. Your mother always had it perfect for me.”
A ton of little things like that. Nothing that mattered, but a little piece of me flinched at each critique. When he began seeing Ivan, he eased off.
He worked at the table as I worked on the dishes I’d left until Oliver was tucked into bed. I’d brushed my hair straight leaving it out of the ponytail I wore during the day. I knew that was fucked up when I did it. At the time I didn’t care. I would do whatever I could to get Darius home. If that meant putting on a display for Father, so be it. I wasn’t too worried. He had a boyfriend now.
I turned to him, bringing all my courage with me. “Father, you seem a lot better,” I said. “Therapy’s going well?”
“Hmmm…?”
“Therapy. You’ve been going to therapy.” My heart rate sped up. Had he been lying about that too?
“Oh, right yes. It’s really helped with your mother’s death. Ivan’s helped too.”
“And what about with, Darius?”
“Yes. With that too.”
I released the breath I’d been holding. A buoyancy lifted me. “So, we can get him back?”
He twisted his face. There was genuine confusion there. “Get him back? Silas, you know I want him to come home as much as you do. We can only hope he’ll return or that the police will find him for us.”
The floor fell out from under me. He was so convincing even I questioned reality. “Father. He didn’t run away. You brought him to a boy’s home of some kind, you said.”
“Did I?” he said casually, his face frowning as though trying to remember if he’d forgotten to rsvp’d to a party. “I was distraught for a while there. I probably said a lot of things. No, no. He ran away. I’m sure of it. Do you need to see the police report? I’m sure I know someone who could get you a copy.”
Of course, he did. He knew everyone.
“Please. I think I need to.” Was I the one going crazy? At that time, it seemed possible. I crumpled to the floor, dropping the pan I held. It smashed against the linoleum and miraculously didn’t wake Oliver.
Father sat on the floor, gathering me into his arms. My senses filled with his fresh scent and I relaxed into the safety of his presence. His honeyed voice washed over me. “Oh, I know. I know. This has been hard on you too. I’m going to make it up to you though. I promise. Next year we’ll hire someone to look after Oliver and you can go to college. He’ll be old enough and we’ll be through this.”
He rocked me. He ran his fingers through my hair. I didn’t realize the load I carried until that moment when he promised me a light at the end of the tunnel. He pried my hands from my head and let me cry on his shoulder. I needed someone. I let him be there for me.
As promised, he got me a copy of the police report and there it was. He had made the report the day I found Darius missing. He was reported as a runaway forty-eight hours afterward. I stared at it for a long time, my mouth hanging open. I knew it wasn’t what he told me. “You said he was with Uncle Pax.”
He moved slowly like I was the crazy person he had to be careful with and not the other way around. “No, son. You said that. I admit to letting you believe it. You were distraught. I realized after your call with Pax I needed to make you understand the truth. Take your time with it, come to me if you need me.”
He placed a fatherly hand on my shoulder and moved to leave me at the table with the report. I didn’t know what the fuck to believe. It was an outlandish idea that Father would pull a hoax so elaborate. It was hard to rememberexactlywhat was said—I hadn’t written it down. Me being distraught and perhaps dissociating was a more believable explanation; a better one. I was familiar with the term because of Mother. She often lost patches of time. She forgot things that we’d had long conversations about.
“I remember you coming in the door,” I said. “You and Darius had a fight that evening, and you’d had enough.”
He stopped and turned to face me, sadness marring his handsome features. “Correct. We had a fight. He took off. I spent the night looking for him. You’re remembering when I came home after my search.”
Tears sprung to my eyes. Both realities were horrible. In one, I was going crazy; I couldn’t trust my memory and Darius had run from us, leaving me here. In the other, I was the only one who knew that Darius had been thrown away. I was the only one who could get him back with no tools to do so and my father was trying to deceive me.
Father sighed. “I didn’t want to give you this, but I can see you need a little more proof.”
He opened his briefcase, a place I never went. He slid a folded paper from one of the pockets. It looked like it had been unfolded and refolded several times. The blues lines had hit water at some point and were blurred. A rusty smudge blemished the outside. Blood.
I took it and read. It was definitely Darius’s tidy scrawl. The kid’s room was always like a cyclone hit it, but even his twelve-year-old handwriting was like a seventeenth-century scholar’s. It was almost as nice as mine. Father had spent considerable time teaching us what he called “the Randall hand”, which was a unique cursive of the Randall family. It was how you always knew you were reading something a Randall had written.
I could tell he’d written it in a rush, so it wasn’t as tidy as usual. Half of it didn’t make any sense. But the letter made it clear he’d run off.
Sye,
