Boomerang Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Helene Dunbar

  Excerpt from “Poem” (You do not always seem able to decide) from Poems Retrieved by Frank O’Hara, Copyright © 2013 by the Estate of Frank O’Hara. Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books.

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  First Edition

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are from the authors’ imaginations, and used fictitiously.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available on file.

  Cover photo: iStock

  Cover design by Kate Gartner

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5107-1321-5

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-1322-2

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Beth Hull,

  who held on to my rope when I was at the end of it.

  And to Brent Taylor,

  who broke my fall.

  You do not always seem to be able to decide

  that it is all right, that you are doing what you’re doing

  and yet there is always that complicity in your smile

  that it is we, not you, who are doing it

  which is one of the things that makes me love you

  —Frank O’Hara (“Poem”)

  To know the road ahead, ask those coming back.

  —Chinese Proverb

  ONE

  I wasn’t sleeping and I wasn’t thinking about sleeping, which was sometimes all I could do when my mind was racing with thoughts of everything I should be doing and everything I shouldn’t have done and everything I needed to figure out but couldn’t.

  Instead of sleeping, I was lying in the oversized tree house in McKuen Park like a homeless person. Appropriate, since I was between homes.

  Instead of sleeping, I was pressing my nose against the wood and closing my eyes and letting the faint smell of cedar remind me of another tree house an hour away. I was thinking about the things I’d done there. And about the things that had been done to me. And about the things I’d wanted to do, but hadn’t been brave enough to try.

  I was wondering why threats that hung over your head felt sharper than the blade of an ax, and why caring about people made you responsible for them in ways you hadn’t intended.

  I was watching the sun rise through the wooden slats and reminding myself it was the same sun that rose over that other tree house in Barlowe. And I was considering the different ways that you could leave a place by running away from it or by running toward something else; and the different ways that you could come back, by choice or by force.

  I was thinking about how everyone assumed I was forced to leave and came back by choice.

  And how much they would hate me when they learned they were wrong.

  The flashing red and blue police lights danced against my eyelids while my head throbbed in time to the screaming sirens.

  To their credit, the time it took for Millway’s police department to get here had to be some sort of local record. Still, they didn’t need to show up with all of their toys turned to high. It wasn’t like I was going to make a run for it.

  I stuffed my blanket into my backpack and stood up, stretching my muscles, which had gotten stiff and cramped from the cold. I ran my palms over the wooden face carved into the roof of the park’s tree house—the logo of Woodhouse Houses—one last time. If anything felt like home in Millway, it was this small carving.

  My best friend, Trip, said I should call the cops on the emergency “direct-line-to-the-police-in-case-your-cell-is-dead” phone as soon as I got to the park. But I’d needed time. Time to convince myself that I wasn’t making the biggest mistake of my life. Time to get used to the idea of being back in freaking Millway. Time to wrestle with my anger. Time to miss him. The past couple of hours hadn’t been enough to process any of those emotions.

  The blaring sirens stopped and a fifty-something police officer headed my way, flashlight drawn, casting shadows as he walked through the park and up the wooden ramp to the tree house in the uncertain darkness of early morning.

  On second thought, maybe Millway hadn’t changed that much. I would have thought most towns would spare at least two cops for the return of a missing kid.

  “Michael Sterling?” he asked, looking me over from head to toe. The name sounded strange, kind of like hearing your favorite bedtime story long after you thought you’d forgotten the words.

  With one hand, I shaded my eyes against the bright flashlight beam. I wrapped my other tight around the small wooden boomerang Trip had carved for me. As it had for the last two years, the charm hung from a leather cord around my neck like a talisman. Without Trip, I felt small, insubstantial. Without his voice in my ear, our desperate plan seemed like nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

  The officer was still waiting for an answer.

  “My name is Sean Woodhouse,” I mumbled, both because of the cold and because it was easy to tell that my answer wouldn’t thrill him.

  A shadow crossed his face as he lowered the flashlight.

  “But, yes,” I admitted through chattering teeth. “I used to be Michael Sterling.”

  I was still bleary when Police Chief Perkins walked me to his car. I reached for the handle on the back door, but he quickly opened the front one for me. With a cautious smile I didn’t deserve, he said, “You aren’t a prisoner, son.”

  I got in and waited for him to close the door. Then I shut my eyes, letting my head rest against the window.

  “Your mom is going to meet us at the hospital later,” he continued as he climbed into the car and started the engine. “I know you’re eager to see her, but I think you can understand why we need to take you to the station and verify it’s really you first, right?”

  I nodded, even though eager wasn’t the word I would have chosen.

  “She’s been on pins and needles ever since you left that message on our hotline. You could have just called the precinct or 911, you know. We would have sent a car right out.”

  I opened my mouth and then closed it. He didn’t want to know that Trip had been the one to leave the message, not me. He didn’t want to know how pissed I was about being blindsided by the whole plan that brought me back.

  Perkins drove off. The movement of the car made me start to zone out, but I kept getting pulled back by a wave of adrenaline-fueled fear. I wasn’t afraid of seeing my mother, although that wasn’t high on the list of things I was looking forward to. It was more that I kept picturing Trip confusing left and right like he did, and crashing the truck on his way home after dropping me off at the park. That fear poked into me like pine needles. It didn’t matter how angry I was with him for almost single-handedly forcing my return and putting Maggie and himself—everyone I cared about—at risk. Every time I closed my eyes, I imagined his body crumpled by the side of the road, bruises stalking his skin in the early morning light.

  I swallowed the urge to tell the officer to slow down. To lie and say that I’d never met, mu
ch less been, Michael Sterling. I wanted to be back in the cottage in Barlowe, making sure that Maggie took her medication on time and hopelessly trying to help Trip with his math homework. I wanted that life back so badly that I had to link my fingers together to keep from throwing open the door of the squad car and running away. Again.

  The radio crackled and whistled like an orchestra gone mad. I entertained myself with the idea that Millway had become some hub of criminal activity. But I quickly dismissed the idea and turned my attention back to the window. With a thin coating of snow over everything, the town looked like Pompeii frozen in time under a blanket of ash. Main Street was still filled with tiny stores under striped awnings: ice cream parlors and coffee shops, book- and pet stores, and a shop that sold candles and charms to those who had nothing better to do with their money.

  Perkins drove us through town at a good clip. We cruised past the high school, its parking lot dominated by a million-year-old GO MUSKETEERS sign, to the police station, a building still stuck in the 1950s. Single-level. Red brick. Desperately in need of a paint job.

  Before he opened his door, Perkins said, “We have your fingerprints on file from Frost’s school registration day. That’s been a good program for us. After you …” He stopped, clearly remembering who he was talking to. “Well, we’re just going to run them now and match them up, and then we’ll get going.”

  I pushed my way out of the car and stumbled, one black sneaker over the other. I took a deep breath, mumbled an apology, and tried to pull my head together. Getting out of this car was the easiest thing I was going to do all day.

  When we walked into the station, the few officers in the room turned and watched with wide eyes, like I was some ghost back from the dead. The weight of their stares was unnerving after I’d spent the last five years trying not to be seen, working to never stand out. Did they see a seventeen-year-old kid with dark shaggy hair who’d rather be in a million other places? Or were they remembering some picture flashed on the evening news five years before?

  I had an urge to stick out my tongue or give them the finger, but didn’t want to end up on the other side of those bars. Instead, I focused on the gun bouncing in Perkins’s holster as I followed him, and wondered if he’d ever needed to fire it in Millway.

  He sat down at a metal desk, then gestured for me to take a seat on the other side. Remnants of a half-eaten breakfast littered the surface: milky coffee that was starting to separate and a half-gnawed bagel with speckled cream cheese. If it had looked remotely appetizing, the fact that I hadn’t eaten in what felt like days might have mattered. As it was, the leftovers made me vaguely sick.

  I pushed my bangs off my forehead and clenched my surprisingly sweaty hands.

  “You okay, Michael?”

  I dried my palms on my jeans. I’d only been back a few hours and I was already falling apart.

  “Sean,” I demanded, and then caught myself. I needed this guy on my side. Pissing him off wasn’t part of the plan. “Can you call me Sean?” I asked as nicely as I could manage.

  Chief Perkins lifted an eyebrow like he was already tired of the whole ordeal. He pulled an electronic pad out of a side drawer and held his hand out for my own. Then he cleaned my fingertips with an alcohol wipe and rolled them one by one, pressing them down onto the pad. The whorls and valleys of my fingertips were captured in black images on the screen. For a minute, I prayed that the record would come up empty—This boy doesn’t exist—and I could walk out.

  I wondered if the machine could tell the cops anything aside from my identity. Could it read the sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach? Would it betray the fact that the details surrounding my leaving and coming back weren’t what everyone thought? Or would those whorls still have cells from Trip’s skin embedded in them?

  I wrapped my arms around my stomach. I couldn’t look away from the monitor. Neither could the police chief. We both inhaled, our eyes fixed on the screen.

  “Here we go,” he said and pushed a button.

  The machine hummed ominously and then beeped. I dragged my eyes away from the screen to look at Perkins. When he turned back to me, his eyes were shining. Everything about him had softened, like ice cream melting in the sun.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. He cleared his throat, and for a minute I thought that the search had come up empty, that I’d gotten my wish. Then he reached over the desk to squeeze my arm. “Welcome home, Michael.”

  This time, I didn’t bother to correct him.

  There was a buzz in the police station. A feeling of celebration for a job well done, although they seemed to forget that no one had actually done anything.

  My return had zero to do with them. I would have pointed that out had they not seemed so damned proud of themselves. I didn’t want to be the one to bring everyone back down to earth. That would happen soon enough.

  The cops who were staring at me earlier came to the desk under the guise of grabbing paperwork or dropping off files. One by one, they gave me some complicated kind of smile and clasped me on the shoulder. No doubt, each assumed I’d been through years of torture and was about to start the happiest part of my life.

  For a moment, I wished they were right. That I’d spent every night of the last five years dreaming of coming back to Millway.

  I waited while Perkins conferred with some officers and then collected an armload of files. The amount of paper lying around was enough to make me wonder if the police department’s computer was just for show.

  “We’re heading to the hospital,” Perkins explained as he led me back to his car. “Your mom will meet us there with the department’s social worker. It’s just a formality. Nothing to worry about.”

  I got in the front seat without prompting, and listened to Perkins carry on a conversation with himself. My head kept hitting the window from exhaustion, but I got the subject matter of his monologue: Millway’s new ice rink, the connection to the freeway, how other police forces around the country were studying the town’s methods for collecting data on children to keep them safe.

  Then he started talking about my mother. That subject kept slipping in and out of my mind.

  He seemed to know a lot about her, but I knew better than to ask the questions that had bugged me even from the safety of Maggie and Wilson Woodhouse’s home in Barlowe.

  I wanted to know whether my mother had gotten a job that didn’t involve sweaty dark rooms and leering men. I wanted to know what sort of carnage I was going back to. And if I was allowed a bonus question, I wanted to know if she’d drunk her way through the trust fund my “damned grandparents” had set up for me. They’d wanted to make sure I had a future, even if their own daughter didn’t.

  It was clear that none of those questions would please Chief Perkins and there was nothing to be gained by pissing off a cop, so I kept quiet and watched the trees go by. Each one made me feel more on edge, as if the rustling of their snow-tinged branches was an accusation. I wasn’t sure what they would think my biggest crime was: going away or coming back. They’d probably have had a good argument either way.

  By the time we pulled into the hospital parking lot, I was sweaty and full of nervous energy. My fingers tapped a rhythm on my jeans, and it made me nuts that I couldn’t figure out what song they were playing.

  Perkins gripped my shoulder, a strangely comforting gesture. “You have nothing to worry about, Michael,” he said. “Your mom never gave up hope that you’d come home. Hell, no one in Millway did. Today is going to be the best day of her life. Of both your lives.”

  The sincerity of his expression made my stomach lurch. Throwing up in a cop car wasn’t going to win me any friends, though.

  I pushed hard against the door and puked outside until I had nothing left.

  TWO

  In my memories, my mother is taller than I am, dressed in a dirty pair of jeans and a ripped T-shirt with dull hair pulled back in a messy blonde ponytail and nails bitten to the quick.

  It took
me years of being away to remember any of the good things about her. How sometimes she’d try: staying home to cook me dinner, paying the bills often enough to keep the lights on, looking over my homework like it was something she cared about. Then she’d be gone for a couple days—or she’d be so drunk or hungover it didn’t even matter—and I’d run out of packs of ramen and clean clothes for school.

  It took Trip’s dickhead uncle to teach me that my mother’s dance with oblivion and neglect had nothing to do with me. Even though, maybe, it should have. Even though having a kid should have been more important to her.

  But standing here now in the hospital hallway with its shiny walls that reeked of antiseptic, the first thing I realized was that I was taller than her. It surprised me more than it probably should have.

  Next, I took in her blue dress, necklace, and matching earrings. I’d bet most people wouldn’t fixate on jewelry when they were seeing their mother for the first time in years. But to me it stood out. It was something she hadn’t bothered with before, and it made her look different, like maybe the mother in my head had a pulled-together twin I’d never met.

  Chief Perkins pushed me forward as my mother’s watering eyes passed over me like she was trying to commit every inch of me to memory.

  I wrapped my hand around the boomerang that hung from my neck and took a deep breath. It was almost physically painful, but I forced myself to look straight at her. For a minute, I was worried she’d rush up and grab me. Instead, she held back, linking her fingers together in front of her like a little girl in a store full of expensive, but useless, glass figurines.

  Perkins cleared his throat. “It’s okay, Amy,” he said. “It’s really him. He’s back.”

  She nodded like she didn’t quite believe his words, then returned my stare with gold-flecked brown eyes that mirrored my own.

  She took a step and reached up slowly toward my hair. I was sure she was going to ask how my natural blond got to be the color of midnight, but she didn’t. Her hand stopped before it touched me, and I was relieved when she drew it back.