Leaving Blythe River: A Novel Read online

  “I have it.”

  He pulled it out of his jacket pocket and handed it to her. She handed both passports to the airline employee, a tall woman who scrutinized them closely before setting them on her keyboard and beginning to type.

  “Destination?”

  “Cusco,” his mother said. “With a stopover in Lima.”

  “I just need to see your tickets.”

  Silence. Ethan watched his mother’s face, startled at the blankness he saw there. He couldn’t shake the feeling that the earth was holding still.

  “Tickets?” his mother asked. It was more than just a question. It was a criticism of the request, an accusation of its foolishness. As if the woman had asked to see their sailplanes or their giraffes.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the woman said, either ignoring the subtext or too tired and burned out to recognize it.

  “They’re e-tickets. Everything is e-tickets these days.”

  “No, ma’am. Not everything. Some smaller non-U.S. airlines still use paper tickets on certain flights.”

  “But we weren’t given paper tickets!”

  Ethan could read the panic in his mother’s tone now. This was not a simple misunderstanding. They were missing something they really would need to board this flight. It dawned on Ethan that they might not be going to Peru that night. It was a nearly impossible chasm for his brain to jump.

  “Well, you should have been issued paper tickets, ma’am. Did you book the flight through a travel agency?”

  “My husband did.”

  “You might want to call him. If you wouldn’t mind moving over enough that I can help the next person while you call . . .”

  Swallowing what felt like his heart, Ethan leaned on the counter and watched his mom call home on her cell phone. For too long. With every beat that passed, he could see the irritation and fear grow in her eyes. If his dad was ever going to pick up, Ethan was sickeningly sure he would have by then.

  “Damn!” his mother shouted suddenly. She raised the phone as if to smash it on the counter, then stopped herself. “I’ll try the landline,” she said.

  More waiting. More of that sense of growing panic.

  Ethan made up his mind to let the trip go. To simply release that beautiful dream. It was better than being tense and afraid. Anything was. And if everything somehow worked out, and the dream was handed back to him, so much the better.

  “I’m going to kill him,” she said under her breath.

  “Not picking up?”

  “No. I swear he has the worst timing.”

  His mother waved at the airline employee. Tried to talk to the woman. All she got for her trouble was a signal that Ethan and his mother would have to wait until she was finished with the traveler currently being helped.

  “Okay,” the tall woman said. “There’s another flight to Lima leaving at ten forty tomorrow morning. You can go home, see if your husband has the tickets. If not, he can contact the travel agency, and you can try to get them in time. I can switch your reservations to that flight right now if you want. We have seats available.”

  Ethan’s mom looked into his eyes. Her panic seemed to be fading. Well, not so much fading. Not going away on its own. She seemed to be forcing it into some kind of submission. Breathing it down, one lungful of air at a time.

  “That’s not so bad, right, Ethan? It’s less than twelve hours’ difference.”

  “Yeah,” Ethan said, still thinking it felt like a big deal. “We’ll manage. Besides. What choice do we have?”

  Ethan had no intention of sleeping in the cab, and no memory of drifting off. But the next thing he knew, his mom was shaking him by the shoulder. He looked out the window to see the front of their apartment building.

  He stumbled onto the cold street as she paid and tipped the driver. Their doorman came out to help with the luggage, and the cabdriver popped the trunk lid.

  Ethan felt strangely vulnerable to the cold, and as though he were walking in a dream.

  “Thought you were off to Peru,” the doorman said, apparently to Ethan. “Something go wrong?”

  “You might say that. Turns out we were supposed to have paper tickets.”

  “Paper tickets? I didn’t think they even had those anymore!”

  “Neither did we. But I guess we were all wrong.”

  “And the travel agent didn’t tell you that?”

  “We’re not sure. My dad made the arrangements. We couldn’t get him on the phone. He’s not picking up.”

  Ethan felt his mom move close to his side. It was a comforting feeling.

  “Sorry about your trip, Mrs. Underwood,” the doorman said.

  “Thanks. I’m going to go upstairs and kill my husband now. He’s still home, isn’t he? He was home when we left. Did he go out that you know of?”

  “Sorry, Mrs. Underwood,” he said, lifting the last of their bags. He had one over each shoulder, hung by their long leather straps, and now one in each hand. “I just came on shift at midnight.”

  They followed him through the door and across the lobby to the elevator.

  “You can just leave the bags here, Robert. Ethan and I can carry them up.”

  He nodded and tipped his cap to them, and as he walked away the elevator dinged. They dragged their luggage inside.

  Ethan’s mom looked over at him as the doors closed. Pityingly, as though only Ethan were having a bad night.

  “You okay, sweetie?”

  “Yeah. Just sleepy.”

  “I know you’re disappointed.”

  “We’ll still go, though. I mean, if you can get those tickets in time.”

  “You let that be my worry.”

  She stroked his hair back off his forehead, and then the elevator stopped. It made his stomach tip slightly. The elevator always made his stomach tip slightly. It stopped and started too suddenly.

  The doors opened. They hauled their bags a few yards down the hallway to their apartment door.

  “If he’s in there and just vegging out by the TV with his phone turned off, I swear I’ll kill him.”

  She turned the key in the lock and swung the door wide.

  “Oh, good God,” she said. Breathed, really. Just a bare whisper.

  Ethan couldn’t see around her. Couldn’t see what she saw. Without thinking the action through, he put one hand on his mother’s shoulder and pushed her out of the way.

  On the couch he saw his father. And Jennifer. His father was wearing only a short purple silk robe, a robe Ethan was fairly sure belonged to his mother. Jennifer was only wearing one of his father’s big shirts, her long bare legs draped one over the other. They were half sitting, half lying on the couch, Jennifer resting her upper body on Noah’s chest. They were eating something together, something from a bowl. Ice cream, maybe, or yogurt. Noah’s arms wrapped around Jennifer, offering her a spoonful, and she had to take his hand in both of hers to direct the spoon to her mouth.

  They looked up.

  Jennifer jumped to her feet, using her hands to keep the long tails of the shirt in place.

  “Oh my God, oh my God,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  It was a strange, disjointed thought, but it struck Ethan that if he and his mother had not walked in, Jennifer would be happy. She would be having fun. Having a great night. She would not be sorry. Not at all.

  “I’ll get dressed,” she said, and ran out of the living room, purposely avoiding Ethan’s eyes.

  Ethan felt his mother brush by his shoulder. Watched her stomp down the hallway. He heard a door slam. Hard enough to make him jump. And wince.

  He looked at his father. His father looked at him.

  First there was only silence.

  Then Noah said, simply, “This is embarrassing.”

  But there was a different truth hiding in plain sight in that moment. It was a truth that Ethan would go over time and time again, just underneath the level of his consciousness. Anytime it reached a level of conscious thinking, he would push it down again. Still
it played down there without pause, like a film clip set to run on an endless loop.

  It was the look in his father’s eyes. Noah wasn’t embarrassed. Not even a little bit. He looked pleased with himself.

  He looked like he’d won.

  Ethan couldn’t bring himself to put a name to it beyond that, or to look at it for a moment longer. He turned and ran out of the apartment, slamming the door behind him. He expected his father to try to follow him. Try to apologize. Try to keep him home.

  Noah never did.

  It’s hard to account for everything that happens while a brain is switched to the off position. Maybe Ethan was too stunned to use his brain in a normal way. Maybe he was in a mild state of shock. Or maybe all the thoughts available to him in that moment were thoughts he didn’t want, and refused to allow.

  Even a sense of how much time he’d been walking seemed beyond him.

  He didn’t know exactly where he was—not because he didn’t know the area, or wasn’t capable of finding his way around in Manhattan, but because he didn’t bother to look. At anything. Street signs, familiar businesses. Nothing got in.

  He remembered traffic noise. And cold. Not much else.

  Now and then a thought would force its way through. For a minute or so he found himself unable to prevent replaying his lunch with Jennifer in this new light. Everything looked different. Everything felt reframed. Her enthusiasm at getting to know him seemed so obvious now, its meaning revealed. More the interest of a woman who hoped to be his stepmother. Or maybe she’d been told she could be at some point.

  And that comment she’d made about how they were all looking forward to Ethan and his mother’s trip . . .

  He forced the thoughts away again. Forced his brain to shutter itself, lock the door. Put out the lights. Admit nothing and no one.

  It could have been two minutes later when he noticed the man across the street. It could have been two hours. Time had become a yardstick with no lines and no numbers. Something you could only stare at while feeling perplexed.

  Two things about the man broke through. First, he was looking at Ethan. Not glancing. Looking. Second, Ethan thought this was not the first time he’d seen this guy. Ethan hadn’t been paying attention the first time, or the second time if there had been one. But in that slightly jolting moment, Ethan played back the tape in his brain and realized he had made eye contact with this man before.

  Ethan stopped. He looked behind and around himself, searching for the assurance of others. Of someone else on this block with him. There was no one else.

  The man didn’t stop walking, but neither did he take his eyes off Ethan. He veered diagonally in Ethan’s direction and began to cross the street.

  Ethan broke into a run. He didn’t look around, but he could hear footsteps.

  Ethan found himself level with an alley, and made a sudden right-hand turn into it. The minute he did, he knew he’d made a mistake. The man would see which way he’d gone. In theory it worked, to make a turn to throw someone off the trail. But the footsteps told him the man wasn’t far enough behind for it to work now.

  Ethan couldn’t see if this new route was a dead end. He saw a delivery truck parked in the alley. It was impossible to see around it. Maybe he could run around the truck and keep going. Maybe he would be trapped there. Irreparably trapped.

  Ethan could feel his heart pounding in his ears. He’d been afraid in his life—many times, in fact. He’d been afraid of being hit or taunted. Afraid of getting in trouble at home or at school. Afraid of humiliation, or losing something that mattered. But he had never thought he might be about to die. Until that moment.

  The thought of a dead end was just too terrible, so Ethan made another huge mistake. He turned and tried to sprint back to the street.

  Something big and dark blocked the light from the streetlamps, creating shadow, and then a hand grasped his throat. Ethan felt himself slammed up against the brick of a building, hard enough to knock the wind out of him.

  He held very still, in a state of complete surrender. He could think of no other survival plan but to hope to survive.

  The hand disappeared from his throat and Ethan swallowed desperately, still trying to restart his breathing. He felt the sharp tip of what could only be a knife pressed high on his throat, just firmly enough that Ethan could feel the sensation of its presence underneath the base of his tongue.

  Ethan looked at the man’s face. It was reflexive. He didn’t really want to see it, but still his eyes went there. Flickered up for a second.

  The man’s eyes looked dark and cold. Dead. Like no one lived behind them. Like nothing mattered. He wore a stubble of beard that he’d probably been growing for several days.

  “What’re you looking at?” The man growled the words more than spoke them.

  Ethan could smell the man’s rancid breath. He quickly averted his eyes.

  The man’s other hand, the one that wasn’t holding a knife to Ethan’s throat, began exploring. Ethan was relieved to feel that his pockets were the target. Giving the man all the money he had was nothing. Easy. That was the least of his fears.

  He felt his small wad of bills extracted. The man held the money close up under his face and peered at it in the dark.

  “You better have more than just this.”

  That’s when Ethan knew he was going to die. Because he didn’t. He didn’t have more. He had maybe twenty dollars. Maybe thirty. He had his passport in his jacket pocket. And nothing else. His mother had been holding everything else they would need.

  Ethan desperately needed to swallow, but he couldn’t. Because he didn’t dare increase the pressure of his neck against the tip of the knife. The more he knew he couldn’t swallow, the more he needed to, and it was a panicky feeling, as if he were drowning. For a flash he wished it could be over. If he was going to die, better to die in that moment. Not have to endure the terror of waiting.

  He felt his watch roughly pulled off his wrist. The expensive watch his father had given him as a gift when he turned sixteen.

  “You better have more than just this,” the man said again, crushing Ethan’s hope that the watch would be enough.

  He wanted to say that it was, that it should be. That it was worth a lot. But he couldn’t speak. Even if the knife had been withdrawn from that frighteningly vulnerable soft spot, Ethan could not have made so much as a squeak.

  The man patted Ethan’s back jeans’ pockets for a wallet. He rummaged in Ethan’s jacket pockets. Pulled out the passport. Glanced at it. Threw it away on the filthy concrete.

  The horrible face leaned in until its nose was just an inch from Ethan’s nose. Ethan felt a small trickle of blood, just a drop or two, as the knife nicked him. He pressed his eyes tightly shut.

  “Bye . . . bye,” the man said.

  Then the knife was gone. But Ethan fully expected it back. He was going to cut Ethan’s throat—that’s what Ethan thought. That’s how it felt. Ethan felt strangely sure it was his last moment on earth. He waited for it. Just for a split second he thought he knew what it felt like to be dead.

  Still the moment dragged on.

  He heard a light shuffling noise at the end of the alley, and instinctively opened his eyes.

  He was alone.

  His bones seemed to dissolve, and he slid down the rough brick and landed on his butt in the alley. He wrapped his arms around himself.

  It took Ethan a minute or more to realize he was trembling. And that he was alive.

  Chapter Four: Far

  Seven weeks before his father disappeared

  The phone woke him with a start. Ethan lay in bed feeling his heart pound.

  His mother had picked it up on the first ring. But Ethan still couldn’t get back to sleep. Because the shock of the sudden sound had been replaced with a different, more concrete fear. It was dark outside his windows. His alarm clock said it was barely five.

  Nobody calls at five in the morning with good news.

  He could hear
his mother talking from her bedroom on the other side of the wall, but faintly. Just a trace of voice. He couldn’t make out words.

  He slid out of bed and padded quietly to their common wall. Pressed his ear there. But her voice was still nothing but a buzzy, garbled series of sounds. He slipped back into bed and waited. Waited to hear her hang up the phone. Or even to hear her voice go silent. Then he would go in and ask her what was wrong.

  Ethan opened his eyes to see that it was after seven. He had fallen back asleep in spite of himself. In spite of everything.

  He found his mom sitting at the kitchen table, her face in her hands.

  “What happened?” he asked her. “What was that call?”

  “Oh,” she said. Sudden and unbalanced, as if he’d wakened her. “Ethan. You’re up. It’s your grandmother.”

  Ethan just stood a moment in his pajamas and bare feet, waiting for the jolt of her simple statement to settle. Ethan had assumed it would be about his dad. That all bad news tracked back to Dad.

  “Did she die?”

  “No. But it’s a bad situation. She had a stroke. A serious one.”

  Ethan slumped into a chair without even meaning to.

  “A stroke on top of the cancer? Does that mean she won’t even live as long as the doctors thought?”

  “Not necessarily. But it does mean that she won’t be able to take care of herself in the meantime. And that means nobody to look after Grandpa, either. She was the only thing keeping him from leaving the stove on all day or wandering off.”

  “I didn’t know he’d gotten that bad.”

  Ethan waited for her to say more. To get to the part about what this really meant. What would have to happen now. She didn’t speak for a long time, and he didn’t ask her any questions. Because these were her parents. And he knew she was upset. So was he, but in that moment it seemed right to let it be more about her.

  “When it rains, it pours,” she said at last. On a long sigh.

  “I never did know what that meant.”

  “It means everything happens at once. So, you know I have to go to Albany and stay with her, right?”

  “Guess so,” he said. “When?”