The day dragged on as we waited for more news about Oliver. Not that there was anything to hear, of course. He was on a plane in the sky, hurtling back to us with the same instantaneous force that had caused him to disappear in the first place. His dad was still missing, but my parents kept Caro and Drew and me away from the news and computers. (They don’t know that Caro and I figured out how to disable the internet parental controls years ago. Plus, hello? iPhones.)
Drew and Caro immediately got permission to sleep over. Caro’s parents hadn’t even heard that Oliver was found and I could hear her enthusiasm diminish with every sentence between them. “They found him! . . . No, they don’t know where he is. . . . No, I already cleaned my half of the room. . . . That’s Heather’s mess, not mine. . . . Okay, yeah. No, I don’t know. Thanks, bye.”
Sometimes, I suspect that Caro’s parents lose track of their kids. There’s six in all, and Caro’s the youngest. “I’m shuffled to the bottom of the deck,” she says whenever it comes up. I think the biggest problem is that she’s had to share a bedroom her entire life with Heather, her older sister, and Heather is basically a tornado with legs. Caro, on the other hand, is a very organized, neat person, and watching them share a room is like watching two movies on one screen. Caro is desperate for Heather to move out.
Drew’s parents were beside themselves with joy that he wanted to spend the night with us girls. “Just Caro and Emmy,” he said into the phone, wiggling his eyebrows at us lasciviously. “We just want to hang out and talk . . . no, Mom, it’s Friday. No school tomorrow . . . okay, fine. Fine. Bye.”
“You lucky guy,” I said as soon as he hung up. “Spending the night with two lovely ladies such as ourselves.”
Drew just grinned and pushed his hair out of his eyes. It was getting long and I suspected that it was a metaphorical middle finger to his straitlaced parents. Who could blame him? “Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink,” he said mournfully, then plopped himself on my bed next to Caro and sighed.
The nervous energy started to creep in once the sun set. It had been setting later now that Christmas was over, and by seven o’clock, the sky was dark. No one really ate dinner, and finally my dad pushed his chair back from the table and said, “Well, I’m done,” and the rest of us followed suit.
There had been so much food when Oliver first disappeared. So much, in fact, that Maureen’s kitchen couldn’t hold it all and much of it made its way to our house. Not that anyone was eating then, either. Casseroles don’t look appetizing even in the best of times, and there were just so many of them. Even at seven years old, I knew there was a limit to the magical healing powers of baked ziti. Neighbors kept bringing them by, trying to look past us and into our house and Maureen’s house, like we had shoved Oliver into a cupboard under the stairs. We gave some of it to the nicer reporters. Caro and I spent an afternoon eating an entire bowl of ambrosia salad with teaspoons and then an entire night in total abdominal agony. We weren’t in trouble, though—that creepy indulgence was in full effect—and for the first time in my life, I had wished we had been. At least that would have been normal.
From the moment they discovered Oliver was found through the next day, a few neighbors came knocking on our door. “I didn’t want to disturb Maureen,” they said, then offered their brisket/creamed-corn casserole/Jell-O mold with mandarin orange slices jiggling in the middle. Drew looked at all of it and shook his head. “Why don’t people just bring alcohol?” Drew wondered aloud.
“Hear, hear.” My dad sighed as he tried to make room for the Jell-O in the refrigerator. He had spent the entire Saturday with Drew, Caro, and me hanging out in our backyard, not eager to leave the house in case something happened and we missed it. I didn’t know what “it” would be, but it felt better to be at home than anywhere else. (Well, besides surfing, but I had no idea how to sneak out to the ocean and back with news crews parked all the way up the street.)
“Ugh, ambrosia,” Caro muttered when she saw the salad in the refrigerator. “I can’t even use coconut body lotion without feeling ill.”
“Pretty much,” I said, then helped myself to some tomatoes off the veggie tray that our neighbors across the street had delivered an hour ago.
I knew we’d eventually toss most of the food, like we had ten years ago. Seeing the dishes lined up on the countertop made my stomach flip and I gripped the tile in my hand just as I heard some shouts from the cameramen.
“Mom!” I yelled, since that seemed like the right person to call for, and suddenly my parents, Drew, Caro, and I were tumbling out the front door and onto the porch. The camera lights shone like high beams as a police car made an eerily silent path toward Oliver’s house. There were two figures in the backseat, one much taller than the other. I saw the outline of Maureen’s hair and realized with a sickening feeling that I didn’t recognize the other person at all.
And right then, I wanted it to stop. I wanted to go back to surfing yesterday afternoon and have Caro announce nothing more exciting than a pop quiz in calculus that she totally failed. I wanted the neighbors to mind their own business and to my complete horror, I realized I wanted Oliver to go back to New York. His disappearance had created such a huge chasm that it still hadn’t fully repaired itself, and I didn’t know if I was ready to have it ripped open all over again. As terrible as the past ten years had been, they were familiar. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to trade them in for a brand-new set of issues and worries.
The police car’s passenger-side door opened and Maureen climbed out, along with the officer in the front seat. Cameras descended like electronic locusts and next to me, I saw my mom grab my dad’s arm. There were tears in both of their eyes. The police did their best to clear a safe path up to Oliver’s front door, but they couldn’t stop the barrage of questions that the reporters began to yell.
“Are you angry with your father?”
“What was it like seeing your mother again?”
“Do you know where your father might be?”
“What’s the first thing you’re going to do now that you’re home?”
Oliver’s door opened and he stepped out.
He was a stranger.
Taller, broader, dark hair, just like my mom had said. He was glaring at the cameras as Maureen put her arm around him. Maureen had seemed smaller and frailer ever since that day Oliver hadn’t come home from school, but next to her son, she looked tiny. I tasted blood and realized I was biting my lip too hard. Caro was crying next to me and Drew put an arm around each of us, hugging us tight. He was shaking. I think we all were.
When Oliver looked up and over at us, I made a noise in the back of my throat. I hadn’t seen him in ten years, but I had seen his face every night in my dreams, his little seven-year-old face that seemed way too young, and when his eyes met mine, I knew that it was him. He had the same frown, the same eyes, the same posture.
“I wonder if anyone checked his shirt tag,” I wondered out loud, and before anyone could ask what I was talking about, Oliver disappeared into his house, the door shutting behind him.
And that was it. He was home.