Following Christopher Creed

  "She came pretty close today," I said with a shudder.

  "Yeah? Is he back?" Hughes looked interested but not overly so. "Rye told us not to list him as a runaway, which means the guidance office at school knew where he was all along. You think I've got trouble. She's been visiting the guidance office every day, trying to get them to spill, which, technically, they don't have to do. A minor is allowed to get psychiatric care without parental permission. All they have to say is that they know where he is and they helped him get there. Why she checks the Lightning Field, I can't fathom, but her actions are regulated, like a drill sergeant's."

  I could see clearly the scene from Adams's tale when they were watching her systematically taking apart her missing son's room looking for clues. She did a half hour every night, starting with one wall and proceeding around.

  I wanted to head back to the Lightning Field but had misgivings. "So, um, what time does she usually leave?"

  "As I'm also trying to steer clear of the woman, I don't know her every move. But..." He pulled out his cell and speed dialed, giving me a wink. "Maggie? Look out the window. See if Sylvia's car is in her garage."

  He held the phone patiently for half a minute, then said, "Thanks," and hung up. "She's back home."

  "And ... there's no chance she'll go back."

  He watched me, chuckling at my concern and shaking his head. "One thing all the neighbors know: Sylvia does all her errands in the morning and early afternoon. She's in for the night by three o'clock. You won't see her—unless a body turns up or something highly unusual like that. Hopefully, we're done with bodies for another year or two."

  He seemed so emphatic about the woman staying home that I believed him. I returned to RayAnn and Lanz, who were waiting in the car.

  "She's home to stay is the good news," I told her. "Bad news is ... they may have to list Darla's death as a homicide."

  RayAnn turned on the engine. "That's not bad news, because that's not part of your story."

  "Right," I said. "I'm not emotionally involved. I'm not, I'm not."

  Nonetheless, we hurried back to the Lighting Field. When we got there I left Lanz standing on the floor in the back, eating dog food out of his dish. No sense dragging him where he didn't want to be.

  RayAnn spotted Justin on the other side of the rock formation where she had found his pills. A flat rock was backed by three higher rocks, and he was using the middle as a back rest. The whole thing, once I zeroed in on it, looked like a primeval lawn chair.

  "My throne," he said, motioning to his feet. "Kneel and pay homage."

  I wanted to share his upbeat mood but broke the news to him: "Dude, your mother was here earlier."

  I thought he would gasp or maybe yell. His smile didn't even waver. "Yeah, I heard she's been doing that. Have fun on your interview escapades?"

  "We did," I said. "But listen. Your mom took your prescription. You had left it on the rock."

  He just kept smiling, leaving us in awe. "I'll get it tonight. Don't sweat it. My God, you are a stress puppy. I've been living with my mom for sixteen years, and I'm not dead yet. I have a recent chemical imbalance in my brain, but that's probably more her genetics than her ability to upset me."

  Again, I just smiled. The kid amazed me.

  "There, see? A smiling face is a good face. You should know that you can't give certain people power over you." He looked up at the sky, gazing at puffy clouds, gray on the bottoms. It had turned the Lightning Field from a diamond-twinkling dance of tree trunks and white blossoms to something almost like a black-and-white film clip.

  We stepped close enough to get a whiff of his clothes. He stank worse than Woodstock.

  "We're paying homage to the party Gods, I detect." I inhaled and faked a cough I almost didn't have to fake.

  He kept his ornery grin and offered nothing.

  "We don't honor our promises," I said.

  "I promised you 'no coke, no ludes, no 'shrooms, no Vals.' I'm good to my word." When neither of us spoke, he spread his arms wide and laughed in amazement. "Pot is like smoking cigarettes—once you've done the chronic stuff! We don't count marijuana."

  "Oh, we don't." I turned until I found RayAnn's eyes, which spoke volumes of no interviewing of loadies. I shuffled around, letting my determination build to abandon him. It wasn't all so easy to leave, even with the cloud cover taking the shimmer off the place and making it more than creepy.

  RayAnn sort of read my thoughts, muttering, "On peut se demander si Charlie est comme celui-ci." That's French for "You wonder if Charlie has become like this."

  "Ah, non, non," I argued, but without any conviction.

  "Ne pas obtenir impliqué émotionnellement. Il ne peut arriver à tout bon." Don't get emotionally involved. It can't do you any good.

  "Frère Jacques, frère Jacques, dormez vous? " Justin sang out of key, with a giggle. It was the extent of his French, I took it.

  I had learned a lot of French from RayAnn, but she was reciting truths that she had learned from me. Just because I'd left an alcoholic home didn't mean I was automatically free of the awkward dance I had learned to do with addictive 194 personalities. I still went to Al-Anon meetings at school, at least once a week, to prevent myself from getting swept up with the guilt over leaving—or getting swept into new, deeply manipulative relationships.

  RayAnn didn't have to remind me that the beginning of sanity in any Twelve-Step program is to look after yourself first. And she was accurate on the Charlie/Justin angle. She was reminding me that looking after Justin should not be some sort of penance for my leaving home.

  "Okay ... we're not staying," I said. "It's really bad journalism ethics to interview a person who is not sober."

  "So? Don't interview me. Just kick back! Take a load off. God, you guys are high-strung. Coupla nervous creatures..."

  We were no more high-strung than your average sober person. It was meant to wear us down.

  "Look, marijuana does nothing to me, in the sense that it does not impair my ... whatever. My judgment. I am the same as when you left me. Only now I feel slightly more relaxed. And my mouth isn't running so fast."

  He did sound calmer, but it seemed as if he were throwing two weeks' worth of rehab down the toilet.

  "Why don't we work on getting you this missing dose your mom just took off with an hour ago, and quit adding to the problem?" I asked.

  "Relax!" he tried again. "Let's just say ... I know what I want. Right now, I need to feel alive. I need my energy. I need to feel more and talk less, so ... maybe it's good my mom showed up. She took away the drug that makes me numb. It's all good."

  Nice try.

  "We'll see you later, maybe," I said, and we headed back toward the trail. He shimmied over the rocks and followed us.

  "Come on, you guys. Don't leave me alone."

  I paused, hearing a pleading behind all the joking. Justin was vulnerable, and it probably was not wise for him to be alone. But he had already crossed over into Stonersville, and I ought to let him reap the consequences of his actions.

  RayAnn dug her fingers into my side with "Ne pas succomber." Don't succumb.

  I could think of only a couple reasons to stay, which had more to do with our profession than his condition. I had promised him we would not bring up the subject of Darla—at least not directly.

  "They're telling tall tales down at the police station. Suicide ... murder ... it's all up in the air." I was walking away backwards, which I wasn't very good at.

  We exchanged silent grins for at least three steps. I won, in that he spoke first.

  "Couple years back, when Bo left for boot camp, he told me to look after Darla. Guess I didn't do a great job." He toed the ground, and when I found his face again, the grin was gone. He turned and moseyed back over to this throne, which was facing the water, away from us.

  "Round one, Justin," RayAnn groaned.

  We moved slowly back toward him, this new bit of intrigue all but irresistible. But I knew how deeply m
anipulative people in addictive families can be, and how they always seem to get their way, even though it appears you're making all your own choices.

  I eased down on the flat rock by his feet and heard him light a cigarette. His arm waved to get the smoke going in the opposite direction, but the wind was not our friend. I ignored the blast of staleness.

  "So, you think you failed Bo," I proceeded cautiously.

  "I know I failed Bo."

  "What made you say it was a suicide?"

  "Gossip runs thick in these parts." The line sounded terse and rehearsed, but I couldn't argue with it.

  I was looking for something not obvious to reply with, but RayAnn shot off in a simple direction, and sometimes keeping things simple is the answer. "Justin, you're sixteen years old. If Danny Burden couldn't handle Darla, how are you supposed to? She didn't even go to your school anymore, right?"

  "Right," he muttered quickly. "I only saw her a couple times a month. She returned my calls when she felt like it. Sometimes a week later, sometimes not at all."

  "Have you ... seen Danny Burden lately?" she asked. I didn't think she planned to tell him that Danny Burden was dead if he didn't know, but I cleared my throat to warn her, just in case.

  "No, no. I haven't seen him since..."—he waved his hand in a motion I took as "way back"—" since before Christmas. Bo didn't tell me to look after Danny. In fact, after Danny came along last fall, Bo said he thought she was in good hands ... maybe Danny would finally be the person to calm her down. But one of my disorder symptoms is a slight obsession with things. I thought of her five times a day. Not that I was ever stupid enough to call her five times a week, even. I just ... I knew I was supposed to look after her. Ha."

  I wanted to know in the worst way how he fell into that suicide gossip. When something weird like that turns out to be true, you want to jump on it. But my instincts were telling me not to upset him.

  I bided my time. "Justin, you need to look out for Justin. Everybody's responsible for themselves in this world. Including Darla."

  "Including Darla..." He smoked the cigarette until it was halfway gone, then dropped it absently into a crack be-198 tween the rocks. My heart went out in a way I wished I could control better. I resisted the urge to rub the back of his head, and said nothing.

  "Don't look back ... don't look back ... don't look back," he said, as if trying to drum in something he'd heard. "Look ahead ... look ahead ... look ahead."

  "They teach you that in rehab?" I asked.

  "They were heading in that direction. Place has cool counselors."

  My one challenge with the support group that I'd become involved with on campus is that the people seem to spend as much time talking about their ill-begotten pasts as their promising futures. It's as if people are drawn to looking back. They can't move on until it all makes sense. Humbly submitted: It never does.

  "At least, I think they were heading in that direction. I get most of my meat from in here." He pulled a paperback out of his jacket pocket—the inner pocket that can hold bigger things. He dropped it on the rock in front of me. I did my bobble-head routine to take in the wide title: Quantum Thought: Science and the Power of Your Mind.

  I'd actually seen the jacket on Amazon. It featured three geometric cubes—a red, a yellow, a purple—sort of spilling into one another and creating a shimmering effect of every color in the rainbow. Seeing so little color in my days, I was always hungry for it.

  "Don't judge me," he said defensively.

  I hadn't been—not exactly. But I imagined he'd suffered through comments from friends around here.

  His face was red and strained, but his eyes were dry. "If it weren't for quantum thought, I would be so depressed right now that I might have thrown myself into the bay. Did you know your thoughts have energy?"

  "I ... yes." I shook my head a little, trying to get on his track. "Being blind makes you very aware of that. I don't have to see people to know what they're thinking. I don't often have to hear them either."

  "Ta! I'm not that good. But I believe it in theory. When Henry Ford developed the eight-cylinder engine, he was using quantum thought, though he probably wasn't aware of it. Your desires leave your head. They have energy. What happens to the energy?"

  I shrugged. "It dissolves?"

  "Uh-uh. My dad says energy can't dissolve. It goes somewhere. It does something. Where, and what? You think of something you really, really want. You imagine yourself getting it over and over. You fill your mind with what could happen, over and over, until it gets to be a habit, until it replaces all the reasons something couldn't happen. You keep releasing that energy. It's scientific how belief energy eventually replaces doubt. You get what you want."

  I couldn't help but smile. "I don't think a legitimate scientist would love this."

  "Probably not, but they're all screwed up with their paperwork and politics. You should hear my dad talk about the fights at the college over research money. Trust me, there's no money for quantum thought. It falls between the science and soc departments, and they're too busy fighting for money to trust each other."

  "Touché," I said. One of my biggest stories in the fall had been about faculty scrapping over research funding.

  He leaned back on his throne in exhaustion. "Why'd you let me smoke that blunt?"

  "Sorry."

  That made him laugh. "I'm not a scientist. I can't always explain what works or why or how come. But I know quantum thought has worked in my house."

  "Really?"

  "How do you think I manage to get along with my mother? My brothers couldn't do it. Chris, man. He could not get a handle on her to save himself, and all I did was shift my vision. I see myself as bigger than her. I know the responses I want from her. After I started seeing my energy as being bigger than her energy, she started to react like it was real. It had become real."

  "So ... how does she act now?"

  He leaned forward and grabbed my arm for emphasis while laughing victoriously. "You've read Torey Adams's whole website and you met her in the flesh this afternoon. You'd think she was a bull rhino. News flash: My mother is a small child. It's just covered up in all this bluster. She drinks from the part of herself that is a small child. She cleans and scrubs and takes care of the house, me, her dad, all day, but at night she's a scared kid. And the nights are starting earlier all the time, if you get my drift. I almost wish she weren't such a small child."

  I thought of Officer Hughes's emphatic statement that she never left the house after three. Was cocktail hour starting at three? Alcoholism is a progressive illness, and she could easily be... His mother my mother his mother my mother ...Images started diving through each other frantically.

  "You're inspiring me," I had to confess.

  Obviously, contacting my mother was not something that would happen tomorrow or even this year. I had never been a fast mover. But if he were onto something that magical, there were some maybes in my future.

  Maybe shifting my energy could keep my mom in boundaries. Maybe I could march back into my own home, using this type of energy I had never really thought about. Maybe my mother would respond differently.

  It was an epiphany moment. RayAnn had gone off toward the water and I hadn't heard her return. I just felt her hand on my shoulder, and I laced my fingers absently through hers.

  "Are you thinking about going home?" she whispered. We had just talked the night before about how maybe I could write about myself and my own life in twenty years.

  "Uh ... no. Capital N," I said dizzily. "For the moment, I'm just enjoying Justin's lessons in quantum thought. It's, well, kind of interesting."

  Justin jumped up excitedly, climbed over the rocks, and moved to a lightning tree, my eyes following his one shoulder. I was suddenly feeling cautious. He hadn't said anything so far that I didn't believe myself. I'd forgotten for a moment that he was stoned and might be prone to lapses in judgment.

  He was touching one of the lightning trees—very much the wa
y I had touched one the night before. It was a freaky coincidence watching him do exactly what I had done on instinct, taking in the same deep breaths.

  "I know I can find my brother this way. I can use quantum thought to bring Chris back."

  Hearing that made me draw a line in the sand. I believed in the power of my own thoughts to bring me good results. He believed—

  "I touch this tree, and I focus, and a lot of the time I can get an image in my head of where my brother is. I have gotten his attention. I have made him think of me. I'm drawing him back to me."

  "What is he doing?" whispered RayAnn, close to me.

  I scowled at the sky, which was now dark with cloud cover, making it seem more like sundown than three-something. It didn't feel like rain, but I suddenly felt nervous and a little foolish. I settled on sarcasm. "I think he's being a loadie."

  FIFTEEN

  THE ONE THING I DIDN'T DOUBT, due to personal experience, was that if I got too close to Justin, he would sense my skepticism. A part of me related—this place could make you believe weird things were true—but he was carried away, and I was afraid the results could be devastating to him.

  But he didn't sense my negative energy. In fact, he beckoned me closer. I didn't move, and he didn't seem to notice that either.

  "I'm not always good at this," he confessed, shutting his eyes tighter while clutching the trunk. "You've had your personality tests, and I've had mine. Getting diagnosed as bipolar started with a symptom that kept getting me in trouble in school. When my mind races, I can't slow down and observe things like other people do. I can't tell when I'm hurting people's feelings and when I'm being inappropriate. They say most people learn that just from watching others' responses to them. I ... don't watch. So, the fact that this has even worked for me a few times—that I can see details of a person I'm not even looking at—is utterly amazing."

  "Okay..." I said, though "utterly fictional" seemed more reasonable. "What exactly have you done?"

  "I saw him. It was not my imagination. I had never seen this place before, had no reason to throw it into my own head. It was just a big, dark room filled with guys. Looked like an army barracks. Lots of guys' voices..."