I whispered something that caused a disturbance. What I whispered was not what they were hoping for.

Jayne’s exhausted face died. I became blinded by it.

When we were told that Robby Dennis was now officially missing I could not describe the sounds Jayne began making, and neither could the writer.

31. the endings

Questions the writer asked me: How long do you hold on to a child? You have to decide if the world is worth returning to, and in the end, what are your options? I know where Robby went, but do you?

For the first few days after Robby’s disappearance I was still recuperating and underwent four more operations—so substantial was the damage to my right leg—and during this time I was lost in the mercy flow of the morphine drip. Ultimately the leg would be saved, and doctors told me I should be grateful, but the only thing I could think about was Robby. There was nothing else to take the place of that. We were conscious of only that one thing. We could only wait and then, as time passed, we began waiting without hope. But Jayne kept coming out of the cave she would hide herself in and emerge newly determined, even after admitting it was all useless. Why? Because I had offered her something to grasp on to with the deposition I gave when I told the Midland authorities I believed our son was a runaway and that he had not been abducted. When asked why I believed this “theory,” I realized very quickly that there was nothing to sell them. I had not seen the e-mails to—or from?—the other missing boys on the afternoon of November fifth because the computer had died (and when the police searched the house after the attack, the computer was no longer in Robby’s room, even though I told them I was positive I had seen it) and the evidence of a conspiracy (a drunken Nadine Allen, the playful whispers of boys in the courtyard of a mall, the two Salvation Army boxes I’d glimpsed in Robby’s room—no one could ascertain if any clothing was missing or not—and the twelve trips we eventually estimated he made to Mail Boxes Etc. in October alone, the point of which we still could not decipher) was too thin to hang anything on. But again: what did it matter if they ran away or if they had been kidnapped? The boys were gone. All that anyone knew was that Robby and Ashton had been dropped off at the Fortinbras Mall by Nadine Allen on the morning of November ninth (according to Nadine, Robby was wearing a backpack) and had bought tickets for a movie that began at noon. Robby, according to an oddly calm and eerily serene Ashton, had whispered that he needed to use the restroom and left the theater. He never returned. No one saw him wandering the mall. No one saw him anywhere else in Midland County. Only the writer saw him disappearing into his new world.

Jayne could not fathom my lack of fear or anger. She called my despair “rehearsed.” Her resentment toward my acceptance caused us—almost immediately—to separate from each other. Our only consolation: nothing worse can come to us. I didn’t want explanations, because in those, my failure would take shape (your love was a mask, the scale of your lies, the irresponsible adult at loose, all the things you hid, the mindless pull of sex, the father who never paid attention). The case received, at first, substantial media coverage, but because Jayne refused to participate in the parade of grief that was demanded of her, the press slowly lost interest. Plus there were so many fresh horrors—the dirty bomb in Florida, the hijackers who killed the air marshals—that the disappearance of a movie star’s son took a back seat to what was becoming this country’s future. Jayne hired a private investigator to stay on the case. (But what case? Boys leave. He was gone. He had orchestrated this absence himself, as had all the others.) Jayne went into seclusion while Sarah just kept asking, “When is Robby coming back?” until the question conspired against her and additional meds were prescribed so that Sarah became as catatonic as her mother. And even though I knew Robby was never coming back, and that Robby had left us and that he had wanted to leave, I still asked, “Why?” The writer whispered answers to me that I half heard before the Ambien took effect: Because his spirit had been broken. Because you never existed for him. Because—in the end, Bret—you were the ghost.

Regarding the details of the attack, I didn’t tell anyone about them (how could I?) even though I remembered enough of what happened that I relive it daily. People seemed satisfied that the dog had attacked me, and there was too much evidence—my mauled leg, the blood on the staircase leading to Robby’s room, the manager of the kennel at the Four Seasons verifying that Victor had been “unstable and uncomfortable” and “behaving so strangely” that the dog had to be removed—for my story not to make sense. (And it made sense because I never mentioned what the Terby did.) However, when I described what happened on the street concerning the accident with the Range Rover and the 450 SL, I was greeted with skepticism. At that point my recollection was deemed unreliable by everyone, and I was supposed to be comforted by the idea that I had lost too much blood to remember anything clearly. When Ann and Earl Bishop called 911 and ran out to the car smashed against their oak tree, they did not recall seeing another vehicle. The scenario that seemed most viable was that I had swerved out of the driveway, losing consciousness, and careened into the oak in the Bishops’ yard. There was “minimal” evidence (very faint traces of a cream-colored paint) that another car “might” have been involved, but since no cream-colored 450 SL was registered in this or any bordering state, my account of the accident was written off; it was considered a memory lapse due to blood loss. In other words, I had hallucinated the car and the boy walking toward me. (All the writer would say: The boy was you.) Also, “Victor” was not found. Something that the authorities first thought was perhaps a “skinned deer” was located that Sunday afternoon in the woods behind the house. But there was no blood trail leading from the house to the woods where it died, which meant that whatever had attacked me had not dragged itself all the way from the second floor of the house and across the meadow to the bank of trees. (The writer mentioned that something had crawled up the chimney; the writer mentioned that something had “flown” across that field.) The veterinarian who examined the carcass determined it was most likely “a coyote” that somehow had been turned “inside out.” (I never discovered exactly what it actually was, but according to the veterinarian it was not Victor.) The police who surveyed the scene at the house had confirmed the existence of the nests but in the end these were attributed to something “your son” had made, though Robby took no classes at Buckley in which any remotely similar project had been assigned, but did it really matter? What part did the nests play in the “unfortunate incident” with our dog? When I asked about the “objects” in the nests, I was told they were “cracked open” and “empty”—they were just the remnants of shells. “Why did you want to know this, Mr. Ellis?” I was asked with a grave concern bordering on hostility. (The writer whispered so no one could hear him: Tell them they hatched.) Added note: When I was found in the Range Rover, my hair had turned completely white.