Leo

LEO

NOW

On your third day home, you start talking about some kid named Gus. It’s by accident that it happens. Someone’s playing ball outside. The thump of the ball hitting concrete carries inside. It gets your attention. “It’s just a basketball,”Dad says, seeing that you’ve gone white. Ever since you’ve been home, Dad’s neurotic about keeping doors and windows shut and locked, the blinds closed. You can never be too careful. He spends his nights awake. He sits in the parlor and reads. No one’s taking you on his watch.

“Gus plays basketball,” you say.

Dad looks up from his scrambled eggs and asks, “Who’s Gus?”

You tell him. Dad goes white, too. He excuses himself and leaves the room, taking his cell phone with him.

You weren’t alone in that basement. Someone was with you. Someone got left behind.

We drive back down to the police station. The lady cop becomes more assertive in her questioning. She no longer tiptoes around you like you might break. Now that we know someone else is still there, it’s time, she says, to get down to business.

She asks what you know about this kid Gus. You don’t know much. You can’t even tell the lady cop what he looks like because, for all your time together, you never got a good look at his face. You don’t know how old he is. You don’t know where he’s from.

The lady cop looks in those missing kids’ databases. She and her henchmen come up with a handful of missing kids named Gus, or some variation of it. Argus. Augustus. Gustavo. They show you pictures, and ask if any of them is your Gus. You don’t know. A missing kid from Cookeville, Tennessee, might be, you think. But really, you don’t know. You’re just trying to please the lady cop by saying something. I probably would, too.

I spent a lot of time on those missing kids’ websites when you were gone. Did you know that? Here’s the cracked thing about those sites. Not only do they have pictures of the missing kids that they’re looking for. Sometimes what they have is found skeletal remains and they’re trying to figure out who they belong to. They call these kids Jane and John. There are a bajillion of them, just red and blue dots all over a map, one dot for each unidentifiable body they’ve found. Cops don’t know who they are, but they’re in bad shape when they find them, or parts of them, anyway. There’s no end to the evil things people will do to one another.

When you were gone, I spent a lot of time online wondering if you were going to be one of the unidentifiable.

I told Dad about these kids. He took my internet away for a month. I never mentioned them again. I wasn’t stupid enough to suggest to Dad that you were skeletal remains. Still, I put the idea in his head.

The lady cop asks you a lot of questions. You know nothing. We get nowhere.

When they first found you, a local cop drove you around and around that town, trying to see if you could remember where you’d been. But other than identifying smokestacks and a fence, you were clueless. I looked that town up on the internet, if it can even be called a town. You have to zoom in real close on the map to see it. It’s called Michael and has a population of about forty-five. It’s five hours from our place, somewhere close to the Mississippi, in an area that’s all farmland and trees. Every year it floods.

From the couple of pictures I saw of it on the internet, it’s pretty skeevy. Vacant storefronts, with boarded-up and broken windows. Decrepit farmhouses. The only other houses besides farmhouses are tornado bait, aka mobile homes.

Makes me wonder how you ended up there.

Dad’s the one who suggests hypnosis to see if that will help dredge up memories, about Mom, about Gus. The lady cop isn’t going for it. She says you’re not in the right state of mind for that.

It’s true. You’re shell-shocked. You don’t sleep, and even when you do, you have nightmares. You wake up sweating and screaming. You sleep on the basement floor at night because it’s the only place you can actually sleep. You can’t look anyone in the eye. You’re afraid of running water. You shit bricks when the elementary school bus drives by.

“Someone’s child,” Dad tells the lady cop, “is still missing. Mine is home. I can’t have that on my conscience.”