navy Adidas gym bag, dropped it on the wooden living room floor with a heavy thud, and waited expectantly for one of them to ask what it was.
“I’ll bite,” Paul finally said. “What’s in the bag, Mag?”
“It’s your ransom fund.”
“We don’t need your money,” Paul said tightly, but they do.
Now Paul puts the van in reverse, backs slowly three feet out of the driveway, his eyes trained on the illuminated windows of the house in front of him. He can see Magnus pacing the living room, phone to his ear, giant hands gesticulating, and he wonders if he told him not to leave her alone. Suicide watch, Haberman had said. “Don’t need a double tragedy,” he’d said, and Paul took this as a bad sign, that Haberman was already thinking of Wyeth as a tragedy.
Paul drives, slowly, staying on the spaghetti loops and dead ends and U-shaped streets that make up Portland Heights, eyes scanning, head swiveling. As though Wyeth is a lost dog and Paul might spot him, might catch his attention if he rolls down his window and does a special whistle. Paul considers going door-to-door, knocking, explaining, asking people if it would be all right if he just, well, searched their home for a bit. How would he have reacted if some red-eyed, unshaven crazy guy in a two-days-unwashed electrician shirt asked to search his house for his missing son? And what would that get him? The silence at the opened door would be his answer—Wyeth was never quiet at this time of night unless Eva or Paul or Magnus had him up over their shoulder, walking the halls.
If he did hear a baby crying, then what? “Mind if I just inspect your baby, ma’am? Check and be sure you’ve got the right one there?”
And for how long would this be feasible? For how long would he even be able to recognize his own son? There were hundreds of houses in this neighborhood alone. It could take him weeks, door-to-door, and with each passing moment, Wyeth would already look less like he did the two nights ago when Paul came home late after the sprinkler incident. The last time he saw his son.
What would it be like to have his son, the boy who carried half his DNA curled up with Eva’s inside him, being raised by another couple, calling another man “Daddy”? (Because this is the only path down which it is safe to let the mind wander: a crazy, possibly bereaved, maybe barren couple so desperate for a child of their own to shower with their misguided love and affection that they took advantage of the critical lapse in Eva’s attention. There is no other possible explanation. Period.)
Paul wonders anxiously how long this will go on, alarmed to find that what he is most worried about is that this feeling, the Unknown, will drag on and on. Disturbed to realize that if he digs, he will discover a complete lack of faith in Wyeth’s return. (They didn’t take the car seat. Why didn’t they take the car seat?) How long until, like a soft-eyed George Clooney on ER, he can be the one to gently suggest that it is time to call it? Paul looks at his dashboard clock: 8:02 p.m.
Paul is taken back to a moment outside his father’s hospital room, when the hot Asian doctor, her hands so softened from endless scrubbing he was afraid her skin would slough off when she took his big callused one in her satin palms and said softly, “You know your father isn’t going to leave this hospital now.” And Paul recalls having to contract his muscles to keep from wetting himself, so complete was his flooding relief that she had said it. That she had said, Soon it will be over, and they could move on. Eva in there prattling on to his dad about plans for the summer—“And I’ve got some new tomato plants started, ponderosa pinks, just in the flats in the kitchen window, but Paulie and I are going to need your expertise”—as the ventilator hissed and fell in answer.
So grateful to this doctor for saying it like it was. Because Paul Nova knows, the very worst thing you can be in these kinds of situations is hopeful.
DRIVING PAST THE OVERGROWN lawn of a small run-down cottage off Upper Drive, Paul spies a familiar SUV on the curb and, lugging her trash bags down from the porch, the famous Chloe Pinter. He depresses