Freedom Road Read online

  “Where’s that son-of-a-bitch son of mine?” he barks.

  Petra glances behind her for a moment, before stepping outside onto the stone of the front portico and closing the door behind her. “You’re upset about the police,” she says in her breathy German accent.

  “I’m pissed as hell. He had no right.”

  “I asked him to send them.”

  Oliver cocks his head. He has been so filled with a fierce, joyful rage at his son’s betrayal that he doesn’t want to imagine the possibility that what happened to him was anything but personal. “You might have asked him to do it,” he says trying to maintain the comfort of his anger, “but he’s the one who did it. The parole officer said as much.”

  “People were talking. You had become part of the story.”

  “I’m not part of anything in this house anymore.”

  “You’re right,” she says calmly, before taking hold of the cigarette and putting it between her lips. She inhales like she’s done it before and blows out a thin line of smoke. “And now everyone else knows, and they can get back to finding my daughter.”

  Oliver never much cared for Petra; her hair always done, her clothes always stylish and pristine, the tense smile she always gives him—but he also never felt the heat of animosity from her that emanates every second from his son. When he finally lets go of his anger and fully registers her condition, he feels enough shame to turn and look away. So concerned over his own humiliations, he has missed sight of the big screen.

  “I assumed Erica ran,” he says, “like any normal kid forced to live in a frigid stone cathedral. Is it something else?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Was she kidnapped? Is there a note?”

  “No note, no communication of any kind. But her phone is off, which is not like her. She feels naked without her phone. Even if she only ran away, we don’t know where she ran to, so forgive us if we are scared.”

  “She’ll turn up, they always do.”

  “Except when they don’t.”

  “Was there any indication of trouble?”

  “There were constant indications. She is not an easy child. But you haven’t been around, so you wouldn’t know.”

  “It wasn’t my choice.”

  Petra shrugs and takes a sip of wine.

  “I thought she was still a sweet little princess,” says Oliver.

  “They’re all sweet little princesses until they’re not. When was the last time you saw her?”

  “The last time you let me. Before the trial.”

  “She changed. There were drugs. We found marijuana.”

  “Oh no,” he says. “Not marijuana.”

  “Spare us your wild past.”

  “Have you talked to her friends?”

  “Of course. They say they know nothing.”

  “It’s hard out there. These kids don’t know how hard. She’ll get hungry, come home, put back on that prep-school skirt.”

  “Let’s hope so,” she says. “Erica would look so—”

  Before she can finish, the door is yanked open and Fletcher looms in the gap, red tie loosened, white shirtsleeves rolled up, a glass of liquor in hand. Chunky and freckled, with wispy red hair, he is already half in the bag. As Oliver takes in his son’s middle-aged softness, whatever anger he feels dissolves and he is flooded with emotions that he doesn’t completely understand because he can barely remember when he felt them before.

  This is the boy who slid into the world and into his arms on a river of blood in the old stable at Seven Suns as Helen lay screaming, surrounded by what seemed like a coven of witches. This is the swaddled boy he rocked to sleep every night as he softly sang “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” the sweet boy Oliver tossed high in the clean mountain air, and crawled alongside in the seeding grass, and ran with through the fields, arms outstretched, screaming at the sky as they chased away the rabbits. The boy he taught how to hunt with the bow and arrows they had made together in the shop, how to weed with a short-handled hoe, how to plane a piece of wood flat as slate, how to swing the Ernie Banks signature bat he had brought him from one of his visits to Chicago. This was the boy he coached in Little League when they returned to the world, the boy he watched run track in high school, still chasing those rabbits.

  “I’m sorry about Erica,” says Oliver, softly.

  “And that’s why you came banging on the door, calling me a bastard?”

  “The police came to my house,” says Oliver.

  “Good.”

  “They searched my house.”

  “And what did you expect me to do? The police are helping look for her; I needed to tell them everything. What you did was part of it. I had no choice.”

  “You had a choice. You chose to poke me in the gut.”

  “I did what I had to do. Now do me a favor and haul your rotting carcass off my property.” Fletcher grimaces at Oliver with those straight white teeth of his, an exhibition that allows Oliver to shake away his misty-eyed remembrances and clutch at the one emotion that never lets him down in the sunset of his years.

  “Piss off,” Oliver says, slapping the air with one of his big palms before he turns and starts shambling back down the front lawn. As he retreats, he turns his head in an act that echoes from his past and yells behind him, “Go choke on your money.”

  “I bet you choke on my money every day,” says Fletcher from the safety of his porch. “Every damn day.”

  “Damn right I do.” Oliver stops, turns around. “You should have told me you were having problems with Erica. Maybe I could have helped.”

  “What were you going to do, poison her, too?”

  “I ought to bust you in those choppers of yours.”

  “Erica used to talk to Mom all the time,” says Fletcher. “Later she kept on telling us how much she missed her. Maybe if she still had Mom to talk to, she wouldn’t have left.”

  “What about you?” says Oliver. “Why couldn’t she talk to you?”

  “I was too busy selling out.”

  Fletcher backs into the house and slams the door behind him. Oliver, his teeth clenched so tightly his jaw hurts, looks at Petra, who coldly takes a drag from her cigarette.

  “He go to the dentist much?” says Oliver.

  “Like clockwork,” says Petra. “Four times each year.”

  “That’s my boy,” says Oliver Cross.

  5

  SHE SAID SHE SAID

  Oliver Cross rages, but not against the dying of the light.

  The light can’t die soon enough, as far as Oliver is concerned. He has even considered turning it out himself on more than one occasion, but he doesn’t want to give the bastards the satisfaction. He can’t tell you for sure exactly who the bastards are, but they know who they are and that is good enough for him. So he soldiers on, ignoring the Prozac™ prescribed against his will, but taking his Aleve™, his Lipitor™, his Warfarin™, his Flomax™, his Rheumatrex™, his Benicar™, eating the vegan slop he prepares twice a day, exercising by pacing back and forth like a leopard in his cage, back and forth, forth and back, raging all the while.

  He rages because the people don’t deserve their country and proved it by electing a racist orange glob of hair coughed up by the Russian cat. He rages because the politicians have elbowed their way to the trough and will wreak whatever havoc necessary to keep their faces in the slop. He rages because those politicians he votes for are just as lily-livered as those he opposes while the real beasts march ever forward, biting off heads and sucking blood. He rages because everything he fervently believes with his heart and soul has been discarded as useless weight slowing down the great capitalist machine that is devouring mouthful by mouthful the entirety of the earth.

  But most of all he rages because his wife is dead and his son despises him and his life has lost all purpose and he is old and cold and the pain in his back is like a corkscrew ever turning. And when his rages reach a point that boils his brain, it seems only his wife’s sweet voice can b
ring him back from the abyss of his torment and fury.

  “Oliver, dear,” she whispers into his ear, and from the first word the song of her voice begins to wrap around him like a blanket of calm. “You finally saw him, our son.”

  “Yeah, I saw the bastard,” he says to her out loud.

  “How did he look, our darling boy?”

  “He looked . . .” Oliver hesitates a moment, not wanting to break his dead wife’s heart. “He looked well fed.”

  “He always had an appetite,” she says. “Did you kiss him for me?”

  “I didn’t kick him, so there’s that.”

  “You didn’t fight with him, did you, Oliver? Oh, Oliver, of course you did. Why can’t you forgive him?”

  “I don’t want to forgive him. And he doesn’t want to forgive me. It’s the only thing we have in common, that and blood on our hands.”

  “Oliver, stop. He was always just like you. A mini-Oliver.”

  “He has a better smile.”

  “Are you still on about his teeth?”

  “We never should have left. That was our big mistake.”

  “We had no choice.”

  “He left us no choice, and he’s the one who paid the highest price. Even his daughter can’t stand him. She ran away.”

  “Erica?”

  “She took off. I’m almost proud.”

  “Why did she leave?”

  “She hit the road to find herself, like we did, and good for her. Against all odds, even in a mausoleum like that house, Kerouac lives. Remember when we took off for the west. San Francisco or bust, hitchhiking the whole way.”

  “We gave up everything just to go.”

  “You gave up everything.”

  “True. The deposit on the wedding dress was nonrefundable, as my mother never stopped reminding me.”

  “I remember taking peeks at you in the back of the truck that picked us up outside of Pittsburgh. You were so beautiful in the morning light that I was afraid to look at you for too long. You’d see through me and I didn’t want you to know how scared I was.”

  “I knew.”

  “The richest moment of my life,” he says. “When everything was still in front of us.”

  “Traveling hopefully.”

  “Who said that? Vonnegut?”

  “No, not Vonnegut. His son, maybe.”

  “So I was right.”

  “Yes, you were right.”

  It might just be his imagination running off with him, these conversations with the voice of his dead wife that fall loud and clear as a summer rain in his head, but it doesn’t feel like his imagination. Whenever she comes to him it is as if the great crack in the universe has widened to let her voice slip into his heart.

  Reality first cracked for him in a sweat lodge in the mountains of New Mexico, in a ceremony replete with song and drum and a gray sludge passed hand-to-hand in a hollowed gourd. This was three years after Chicago. Helen had stayed on in San Francisco, organizing an art show in Golden Gate Park, as he sat cross-legged on the dirt with a Carlos Castaneda paperback in his back pocket and his heart open to all the possibilities of the multiverse—including extreme nausea. His stomach was twisting fitfully from the foul concoction, while young men danced in a circle, pounding on water drums and singing ancient chants. It had seemed wildly unpleasant and a bit ridiculous when, suddenly, the mud-covered roof of the sweat lodge tore open, letting in the light of an infinite stretch of stars that split the sky in two. He turned into a bird and flew high over the landscape, and then the heavens themselves cracked apart, letting in a light so pure that it burned like fire as it poured into him through his little bird eyes. It seemed as if the light were full of truths, impossible truths, truths he couldn’t quite grasp or relay because of his own ignorance, truths that were unknowable but still somehow known. They burned his brain, all the perfect truths in that light, and filled him with all the wonder of this world and the next and the next and the . . .

  It took him months to recover.

  When he did, finally, when the mania had passed and he could focus on the simple tasks of bathing and feeding himself, when he could have a conversation without his words shooting off into the cosmos, the world had been altered irrevocably and he saw things ever more clearly. But as an aftereffect, there was now a fault in the dome of the universe, and it is through that fault, from the other side of things, that Helen speaks.

  “You don’t sound worried about our granddaughter,” she says.

  “I’m happy for her,” says Oliver. “She got out, like a bear cub from a trap.”

  “You know better.”

  “Do I?”

  “She could have been taken.”

  “There’s no ransom note, no demand. She left on her own.”

  “Then she could be lost.”

  “You can’t be found until you’re lost. Our goal was exactly to get lost, remember.”

  “I remember the Haight.”

  “We shared a room with a drummer from that band—what was its name?—and a puppeteer from the Diggers, and spent our days plaiting flowers in the park.”

  “And I remember all the lost children,” she says.

  “Eyes like marbles, dancing naked like zombies.”

  “They had gone west to find themselves, too.”

  “It’s not for the fainthearted, we learned that. It’s hard work. At the farm, starving through the winters. But wasn’t it worth it?”

  “To us. Yet some never came home. What if Erica ends up one of the dazed, one of the lost?”

  “She’s too tough for that. She always reminded me of you.”

  “I wasn’t so tough, not without you.”

  “You were our strength.”

  “We were only strong together.”

  “I know that now.”

  “Do you miss me?”

  “You don’t let me, you keep talking and talking.”

  “Do you love me still, Oliver? Enough to do anything for me, enough to move the world?”

  And there it is, the lilt in her voice, the tell that says to him as sure as there is fire in the sun that she wants something. Helen never just comes to bear love and companionship, there is always some deeper purpose to her visits. Take your medicine, Oliver. Get to the doctor for your back, Oliver. Eat something, you’re getting so thin. Shouldn’t you have the bump on your neck looked at? Don’t forget your appointment with the parole officer. Take out the garbage, Oliver, the kitchen is beginning to smell. During their life together, he loved that she was in charge; it left his mind free to soar. But he has grown to resent that she is still in charge even after her death.

  “What do you want?” he says.

  “You know what I want.”

  “Fine. I’ll take my medicine.”

  “This is bigger than that, Oliver.”

  “Bigger than Flomax?”

  “We had our hard times, didn’t we?”

  “Yes, we did.”

  “And you blame yourself.”

  “Who else would I blame?”

  “Then think of this as making it up to me, darling. Think of this as clearing the slate.”

  “What do you want, Helen?”

  “Find her, find Erica. Wherever she has disappeared to, whatever she thinks she is looking for, find our granddaughter, Oliver, and bring her back to our son.”

  6

  SOMEBODY TO LOVE

  Oliver Cross sits in his truck drinking coffee, waiting for some absurd rich man’s car to leave its driveway, which is well down the street. That Oliver’s son will be driving the car on his way to his white-shoe corporate law firm only makes the acid in the convenience store coffee burn more bitterly in his throat, but bitter is how he likes things now.

  He can read Helen’s maneuvering like he is reading a map. She knows there is no way he can find a missing girl. He has no computer, no fancy cell phone, no sources in law enforcement to tap into, other than a parole officer overseeing his every move. You might as well send a b
lind man into the desert after a missing goat. But Helen has been trying to get him back into the good graces of his family ever since he was released from Rockview two years before, and she surely sees this as an opportunity to finally get it done. Already he has seen his son for the first time in years. Glorious day! Now she is sending him out to find Erica, knowing just the fact of his asking questions could change the toxic familial dynamic. Helen was always too clever for her own damn good, but it is hard for Oliver to say no to the voice of a dead wife he loved more than life itself.

  So he sits in the truck and slurps his bitter Wawa coffee. He needs the coffee because he was up early and he needed to be up early to catch his son leaving, and he needs to catch his son leaving because the questions Helen wants him to ask Petra can’t be asked with Fletcher’s virulent hatred coursing through the house. The only flaw in the plan is the coffee.

  He eyes the neighboring shrubbery, wondering which plant he can piss on for the five painful minutes it will take for him to unload without getting waylaid by a property owner or a dog, when he sees a black Mercedes sports car roll down his son’s driveway. Fletcher’s puffy face bobs behind the windshield, looking like it belongs to an inflatable punching doll, one of those you hit as hard as you can and still it bounces back with that same infernal smile. The Mercedes turns away from where Oliver is parked, headed toward the train station.

  Oliver finishes his coffee, tosses the cup atop a pile of trash on the passenger seat floor, starts the engine, and drives down the road, up the long driveway, and around the back. He bangs on the kitchen door.

  Petra is a mess when she answers his knock: her face undone, her hair askew, wearing a blouse creased by a fitful night’s sleep. She looks like she drank herself unconscious on the couch the night before.

  “I need to pee,” he says, barging past her in a bent-back waddle.

  “There’s a bathroom down here,” she calls after him as he starts pulling himself up the wide stairway to the second floor. He knows there is a toilet on the ground floor, but his wife has set him on a task, and what is he going to learn in a first-floor powder room?