Oliver disappeared after school on a Friday afternoon, way back when we were in second grade, and small things seemed really important and important things seemed too small. That afternoon, it wasn’t weird to see him get in his dad’s car, a red convertible whose screeching tires rang out in my mind for years afterward.
Oliver and I had been best friends since the day we were born up until the day his dad picked him up from school and never brought him home. We even lived next door, our bedroom windows reflecting each other.
His window’s been empty for ten years, but sometimes I can still see into his room and it’s exactly how it was when he disappeared. Oliver’s mom, Maureen, she never moved anything. In the past ten years, she remarried and even had two little girls, but Oliver’s bedroom never changed. It’s become a makeshift shrine, dusty and childish, but I get it. If you clean it out, it means he might never come back.
Sometimes I think that all superstitions—crossing your fingers, not stepping on cracks, shrines like the one in Oliver’s room—come from wanting something too much.
Oliver’s dad was pretty smart about the way he took him. It was a three-day weekend and he was supposed to bring Oliver to school on Tuesday morning. By ten a.m., they hadn’t shown up. By eleven, Oliver’s mother was in the school office. By three o’clock that afternoon, there were news cameras scattered across the school parking lot and on Oliver’s lawn at home. They bore down on us like electronic versions of Cyclops, wanting to know how we were holding up, what we children were doing now that our friend was missing.
Caro cried and my mom made us sit at the table and eat a snack—Double Stuf Oreos. That’s how I knew it was really bad.
We all thought Oliver and his dad would come back that night. And then the next day. And then surely by that weekend. But they never did. Oliver and his dad were gone, drifted into nothingness, like clouds in the sky and even more difficult to chase.
They could be anywhere and it was that thought that made the world seem so large, so vast. How could people just disappear? Oliver’s mom, in her more lucid moments when she wasn’t crying or taking tiny white pills that just made her look sad, said that she would go to the ends of the earth to find him, but it seemed like Oliver had already reached the end of the world and had fallen off into the abyss. At seven years old, that was the only explanation that made sense to me. The world was round and spun too fast and Oliver was gone, spinning away from us forever.
Before Oliver was kidnapped, my dad used to say, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder!” and give me smacking kisses on both cheeks when I ran to greet him after work. After, he stopped saying it (even though his hugs were tighter than ever before) and I realized that it wasn’t true. It wasn’t true at all. Oliver’s absence split us wide open, dividing our neighborhood along a fault line strong enough to cause an earthquake.
An earthquake would have been better. At least during an earthquake, you understand why you’re shaking.
The neighbors formed search parties, holding hands as they walked through wooded areas behind the school. They took up collections, bought officers cups of coffee, and told Caro and Drew and me to go play. Even our playtime had been altered. We didn’t play house anymore. We played “Kidnapping.”
“Okay, I’ll be Oliver’s mom and you be Oliver and, Drew, you be Oliver’s dad,” Caro would instruct us, but we weren’t sure what to do after Drew dragged me away. Caro would pretend to cry and say, “My baby!” which was what Maureen had been screaming that first day before the tranquilizers kicked in, but Drew and I just stood there, holding hands. We didn’t know how to end the game. No one had shown us how and, anyway, my mom told us to stop playing that, that we would upset Oliver’s mom. “But she’s always upset,” I said, and neither of my parents said anything after that.
Sometimes I think that if we had been older, it would have been easier. A lot of conversations stopped when I came near and I learned how to creep down the stairs so I could hear the grown-ups talking. I discovered that if I sat on the ninth step I could see past the kitchen and into the living room, where Maureen spent nights sobbing into her hands, my mom sitting next to her and holding her, rocking her the way she rocked me whenever I woke up dreaming about Oliver, dreaming about the tag on the back of his shirt, my pajamas damp with nightmare sweat. There were always wineglasses on the table, lined with dark resin that looked more like blood than Cabernet. And Maureen’s crying made my skin feel weird, like someone had turned it inside out. I couldn’t always hear what they were saying, but it didn’t matter. I already knew. Maureen was sad because she wanted to hold Oliver the way my mom was holding her.
“I can never leave,” Maureen wept one night as I sat on the stairs, holding my breath in case anyone saw me. “I can never leave here, you know? What would we do if Oliver came back and no one was . . . ? Oh God, oh God.”
“I know,” my mother kept saying to her. “We’ll stay with you. We won’t leave, either.”
It was a promise that she kept, too. We didn’t leave. We stayed in the same house next door. Other neighbors left and new ones moved in, and all of them seemed to know about Oliver. He had become a local celebrity in absentia, famous for not being found, a ghost.
As time went on, it became hard to imagine what he looked like, even as the police age-progressed his second-grade school photo. We all watched an artist’s rendering of Oliver grow up over the years. His nose got bigger, his eyes wider, his forehead higher. His smile wasn’t as pronounced and his baby teeth morphed into adult ones. His eyes never changed, though. That was the strange part. The hopeful part.
We stayed and looked and waited for him to come back, as if our love was a beacon that he could use to light his way home, to crawl up the sides of the earth and back through his front door, his tag still sticking up in the back.
After a while, though, after years passed and pictures changed and false tips fell through, it started to feel like the beacon wasn’t for him anymore. It was for those of us left behind, something to cling to when you realized that scary things could happen, that villains didn’t only exist in books, that Oliver might never come home.
Until one day, he did.