Boomerang Read online

  I inhaled, expecting the sharp smell of vodka and sweat, but there was nothing except a whiff of drugstore perfume—floral. It reminded me of the lilies that grew on the border between the Woodhouse property and the state park behind it.

  My mother and I stared at each other like little kids trying not to blink. It wasn’t until Perkins pushed me forward and said “Hug your mom, son” in a voice that left no room for argument, that I raised my arms and we touched for the first time in five years.

  There were, apparently, manuals for these things. Kids went missing all the time—typical police business. Tracking. Interviews. Reconnaissance. Search-and-rescue. Search-and-recovery.

  The police knew what to do when things ended badly. They were given courses in how to comfort grieving parents, and all of that.

  But in the cases where the kids were found, things got more complicated. Apparently too complicated for local police forces to deal with themselves. After the doctor gave me the once-over, we waited for everyone to figure out what they were supposed to be doing. Perkins told me that a few years back, the FBI published a bunch of manuals to help. I couldn’t stop thinking of the sex ed pamphlets Trip brought back from school—pamphlets we’d cracked up over with titles like “Love or Infatuation?” and “Sex Makes Babies.” What would these ones say? “Victim or Runaway?” “Leaving Breaks Hearts”?

  I wasn’t sure why Perkins decided to share that no one in Millway had ever cracked open the “returned kids” book. I thought he was apologizing, but it was hard to tell.

  He told me they’d question me. And after, if my mother wanted, we could follow one of those pamphlet bullet points and meet with some social workers to “learn to communicate” and “rebuild our relationship.” I hoped she wouldn’t think that was necessary.

  I closed my eyes and pictured the police officers frantically searching the station for the right guidebooks:

  Damn, where did the manual go? We didn’t think he was going to be found. Do you have it, Ron? Oh, wait. Here it is under a box of donuts.

  I didn’t know what was actually in those books, and I was both unprepared and terrified to find out. There would be questions I didn’t want to answer. And probably a bunch I couldn’t. I had no intention of lying to the police, not that I could anyway. Trip always called me “pathologically honest.” I was incapable of lying under pressure.

  But just because I was going to tell the truth, that didn’t mean the answers I had to give would make anyone happy.

  I wanted to feel like I was coming home, like I was taking charge. Instead, it felt suspiciously like I was giving up. The problem was, I didn’t know how to give up the woods with their rustling trees or the family I’d chosen to be a part of in Barlowe or the dusky nights I’d spent crashing into Trip, never with a plan, but always in a kind of raw and desperate frenzy.

  Perkins had another officer drop us at the house to escape the chaos of the hospital. My mother and I sat quietly in the back of the police car looking out our respective windows, a flurry of questions hanging between us like a curtain. Why? What? How?

  When we got to the house, the cop of the moment held back a bunch of reporters clutching microphones like sabers, and ushered us to the front door. My mother’s house looked like every other one on the block. I’d forgotten how fussy and manicured the area was and how the neighbors used to complain when my mother would leave two weeks’ worth of trash out and always on the wrong day. How she’d never rake, telling me it was Maine and eventually it would snow and cover the dead leaves, so why bother?

  Now, I kind of got her point. I searched for a wildflower, a bent tree, something unique, but it seemed like the only way people here showed any kind of individuality was by painting their front door a different color.

  Walking through the blue door (the neighboring houses were red on one side and green on the other) made me feel like I was waking up from a dream, no idea where I was. As the fog cleared, everything came into soft focus: splashes of color, the angle of a chair, the expression on the face in a picture on the wall. Every tiny element jabbed somewhere deep in my brain like it didn’t want to be completely forgotten.

  My mother reached up and touched my shoulder with a light, birdlike hand. Tentative, as if she wasn’t sure how I’d react. My shoulders tensed, but I didn’t pull away.

  “If there’s anything you need, let me know.” She sounded like the hostess of a party or a flight attendant making the rounds.

  I closed my eyes and took a step farther into the room. It’s just a table. Just a chair. Just air in the room, I repeated to myself as I moved to the flowered couch and sat on the edge.

  Being here felt wrong.

  “Can I get you something?” My mother headed to the kitchen. I knew she meant a soda or something to eat, but suddenly everything I needed was far away, wrapped in the safety of the trees of Barlowe State Park.

  I didn’t trust myself to speak so I shook my head.

  “You’re so …” Her voice cracked and we stared at each other. I wasn’t sure whether to wish this awkwardness away. Without it, we’d have to talk, really talk, and there was no way I was ready for that.

  It suddenly felt like the air in the house—or maybe all of Millway—was too thin. Sweat trickled down the back of my neck. I didn’t need to touch the wooden charm to feel it resting against my chest, rising and falling with every breath, pulling me back.

  My mother swallowed the rest of her sentence and started a new one. “We have a couple of minutes until Chief Perkins comes by,” she said as she straightened her skirt again. Her face was open and expectant. She looked younger than I remembered, like I’d been growing up and she’d been aging down. Maybe she had a painting in the attic, like Dorian Gray.

  “That’s fine,” I said, because I needed to say something. Only it wasn’t fine. In fact, there was only one possible good thing about being back—the plan Trip and I had come up with when we were thirteen. Someday, we figured, I’d come back to Millway, get control of my grandparents’ trust fund, and then leave again. That was the day I could save Trip from his uncle, Leon. We’d take off and see the world. Eventually I’d go to college and Trip would start his own woodworking business and we’d have the life we’d always wanted.

  I’d never thought about what coming back would feel like. I never thought Trip would be the one to set the plan, prematurely, in motion. I never thought I could hate him for it. And I never thought that my own fear of the darkness lurking in his uncle would become something so tangible that it was Leon’s face I saw when I closed my eyes and his voice I heard ringing in my ears, telling Trip he was worthless.

  I shook my head, trying to clear the sound away. “Everything’s fine.”

  The clock was ticking impossibly slowly. Did anyone use ticking clocks anymore? Weren’t they all digital?

  I ran my thumb over the grooves in the wood of the boomerang and imagined Trip out behind the house, an ax raised over his head. “You’re dangerous,” I told him once. He could chop up a log in no time. I think I was hoping he’d believe me and use the ax the next time his uncle came after him. Instead, he’d made some crack about it turning me on and I’d gone inside and sulked for the rest of the day.

  “Is it? I mean, is everything really fine?” She sat and wrapped her arms around herself. “I don’t even know the right questions to ask. Were you hurt? Did you … I mean the police will ask all of those questions I guess, but …”

  I stared at her. Yes, I’m hurt, I wanted to say. Wouldn’t you be hurt if your best friend betrayed you? But I knew that wasn’t what she was asking, and I knew she wouldn’t understand even if I could bring myself to tell her everything.

  After a pause, my mother cleared her throat. “I don’t know that much has changed in the house, but I can show you around, if you want. I didn’t move, in case you came back. I wanted you to be able to find me.”

  I was pretty sure this woman was an alien. My real mother wouldn’t even have stayed home for
a whole evening so that I could find her.

  “Do you want to see your room?”

  I tried to remember what my room here looked like. All I saw in my head was my room in Barlowe. The blue walls with scrolling quotes painted on them. The wooden star carvings that hung from the ceiling and cast shadows all around the room. The kinetic sculpture made up of a dizzying array of intersecting circles that Trip made from an oak tree that had been struck by lightning.

  I blinked the picture away and saw my mother waiting. Following her, I stopped to look at the photos lining the stairway. My mother as a teenager staring out from the frame with so much focus it was as if she could’ve taken a step and ended up in the room next to me. A little boy who must have been me—blond with a forced smile, sitting in a field of sunflowers the same color as his hair.

  There were no pictures of a man. I never knew who my father was. It didn’t matter how drunk she’d gotten, my mother would never tell me. I wasn’t even sure if she knew. I’d stopped caring about getting an answer years ago.

  These photos should have made me feel some sort of connection. Instead I felt detached. Intellectually, I knew it was me on the wall reading a book, kicking a soccer ball. The problem was I couldn’t tap into what being Michael felt like. All I knew, all I felt, was Sean.

  My mother opened the door and waited for me to catch up. The room was a time capsule, a child’s room with a patchwork quilt on the single bed and slightly faded posters of baseball players on the wall. MICHAEL was scratched into the desk. The room felt desolate and unused, as if it were holding its breath, waiting for someone to come back.

  There was an eerie lack of dust. How often did my mother come in here?

  Her eyes crinkled as she pointed to a stack of wrapped boxes in the corner. “I bought you presents every year for your birthday and Christmas. Of course, it’s silly now,” she said, almost to herself. “I mean, you’ll have outgrown most of it. But I wanted you to know I didn’t forget. I never forgot you, Michael. Every day, I hoped and prayed.”

  “That’s …” but I couldn’t finish. What was it? Sweet, but at the same time, I felt a wave of anger about all the birthdays and Christmases she never remembered when I was here. Hell, to be honest, I was pissed about all the dinners and school events and bill deadlines she’d missed, as well.

  I could tell she was biting back tears. If I was still Michael inside, I would have put my arms around her like I’d done when I was eight, crying and begging her not to go to work and leave me alone in the cold, dark house. Michael was like that.

  But now it seemed like there was too much space between us, and not because we were on opposite sides of the room.

  Normal sons didn’t run away. I got it. But normal mothers didn’t, either. A bunch of presents in the corner weren’t going to give me my childhood back.

  As if she knew what I was thinking, my mother sank onto the bed with a sigh. “I might as well just say it to you. I’m sorry I wasn’t a better mother. It was such a hard time and I was so young. It never meant I didn’t love you, though. You know that, right?”

  Another surge of anger rolled through me, stronger this time, dizzying in its intensity. All the years in Barlowe that I’d had to let my anger at her dissolve and reconfigure into something like pity seemed like only a tick of the clock as my calm was eaten away. “It was a long time ago,” I spat out with only half of the bitterness I felt.

  I moved toward the window to get as far away from her as I could in the small room. The way the houses were set up, I could still see straight into the Gordons’ backyard behind us. I remember spending a lot of time running through our yard to get to theirs. Their daughter, Jenny, was the same age as me and she had been the only thing I’d ever missed about Millway. Still, I hadn’t even thought about her in a long time.

  My mother’s voice pulled me back. “Now that you’re older, maybe you’ll understand. I want to make it up to you.” The determined tone in her voice was something new. It wasn’t like the “I’m going to stop drinking” promises she used to make, and it wasn’t like the “When you get home from school, we’ll do something special, just the two of us” lies I’d stopped believing when I was young enough to still believe in Santa Claus and fairytales. Maybe she actually meant it this time. Too little, too late. The role of mother in my life had been filled by someone else.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. And it was true. I’d done my best to stop wanting anything from her a long time ago. Besides, I wasn’t sure I was sorry about how things turned out.

  If I was planning on staying, I’d tell her that.

  If I was planning on staying, I’d make sure she knew I wasn’t the boy she wanted back.

  THREE

  Chief Perkins cut a path through the reporters and into the house, followed closely by a young guy who was, I guessed, in his twenties and maybe on his first case. He was looking at Perkins for permission to even walk in the door. For some reason I couldn’t explain, I felt as close to comfortable with Perkins as I was going to with a cop. Having this extra witness created a strange knot in my stomach. I didn’t even catch his name.

  “How are you feeling?” Perkins asked as we all settled onto the floral couches and fake suede loveseats. My mother’s decorative style had improved. But where Wilson and Maggie’s house was a mismatched jumble of well-loved items collected during their travels or made by artistic friends, my mother’s house felt like a magazine ad for a discount store. Everything matched, but nothing had any personality.

  I shrugged. If I was honest and said “pissed off and homesick,” it would have caused more problems. If I told them I felt like an amputee who woke up with stabbing pains in a leg that had been cut off, I was pretty sure they’d take me somewhere far more unsettling than the police station.

  “We’d like to ask you a bit about what you remember,” Young Guy said to me, reading off a pad. His face was so pockmarked, all I could think was how much it must have sucked to have been him in high school. I actually felt bad and wondered what he’d done in his past life to get stuck with this case. It was a hell of an unlucky break.

  He stared at me, trying to look older and more experienced than he was, so I stared back and asked, “What do I remember about what?” I wasn’t trying to be a dick. I just had no problem making them work for the info I was going to hand them.

  Perkins coughed and gave me a stern look. “The day you went missing.”

  My mother inhaled sharply. Her surprise shocked me. What else was she expecting we’d talk to the police about? The weather? Last year’s Red Sox season? She had to know this was coming. My “youth” and my “potentially fragile emotional state” were the only reasons we were here in the house instead of at the station.

  “I was at school,” I said. That much was true. I’d gone to school and aced my first English test of the year even though I’d spent most of the hour staring out the window at the fall leaves as they dropped one by one from tired trees.

  “And then you walked Jenny Gordon home and went to the library?” Young Guy asked, fiddling with his pen. It turned out he was the type who drummed his pen without thinking about it. I could see him itching to do it now. Badly. And Perkins must have known, because he kept looking over and the fiddling would stop for a minute.

  “Yeah,” I said to Perkins. “I walked Jenny home. She lived over there.” I glanced toward her house, looking through my mother’s kitchen, the same kitchen that had been totally empty the day I left. On top of it, my mother had never bothered to sign me up for the lunch program. All I’d had that day was a bottle of energy water I’d managed to swipe from the locker room and half a bag of chips someone had left on their tray. I was so hungry when I got to Jenny’s that when she jokingly offered to trade me a bag of homemade cookies for a kiss, I jumped at the deal.

  I vaguely remembered feeling bad about leaving Jenny. But she had what I never did—a family—and I’d been sure she’d be okay without having to deal with all my drama.
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  Better, even.

  From my mother’s expression, it was clear Jenny still lived there. I felt a pang of something I hadn’t in a long time. Once we’d been friends. Then I left, and Trip found me. After, it was like the memories of my whole life before I got to Barlowe played back in black and white.

  Young Guy bounced his knee up and down. “The library?” he asked, sounding annoyed.

  I glared at him. “Yes, then I went to the library.”

  I didn’t bother telling them that after I walked Jenny to her house, but before I’d gone to the library, I’d stopped home to find the house cold and empty. My mother was out and had either forgotten to, or chosen not to, pay the heating bill. I didn’t tell them that I’d almost sat down at the table and started my homework. I didn’t tell them that I’d been overwhelmed by the idea of another night, cold and alone, and packed a bag hoping some miracle would happen.

  The cops nodded in unison. Of course they were relieved by the lack of anything new in what I’d said. They figured they knew the whole story already and that this entire conversation was simply a formality.

  “Do you remember anyone following you? Anything strange on the way?” Chief Perkins asked while Young Guy started taking notes. At least his transcription gave him something less annoying to do with his pen.

  I told them how I walked, uneventfully, to the library. About how I tried to study, but couldn’t focus. And how from there I’d gone to the park. In those days, it always felt like I was leaving. Never moving toward something, always away.

  My heart beat uncomfortably hard as I told them about how I talked to Wilson at McKuen Park. I knew, from some community day, that Wilson owned Woodhouse Houses, even though, I learned later, they didn’t qualify as houses. What he really built were cottages people used as offices or beach bungalows. He built playhouses for parks, like the one I’d slept in at McKuen, and he built the most insane tree houses ever, like the one he’d built with Trip.