Period 8 - By Chris Crutcher Page 0,18
finding the truth and exposing it was Jesus’s modus operandi. You wouldn’t tell some poor kid that you recognized the shirt he was wearing because it used to belong to you, or chide someone for some other reality that could only hurt. But with the big things, the things that bore consequence, well, you told it; you told what happened. But as he gets ready to hit the water, Paulie thinks it’s a little more complicated than that. He told Hannah what happened. She didn’t want to hear more. What happened was all she needed to bring the curtain down on what Paulie had considered the best thing that ever happened to him. Hannah knew how Paulie felt about his father’s wanderings, about the hours upon hours he’d sat listening to his mom. She was there the night his mother went totally off and broke nearly every breakable thing in the kitchen—dishes, glasses, CorningWare—packed a suitcase, and stormed out.
“Guess she’s finally had it,” Hannah had said, holding Paulie’s hand as they stared at the carnage.
“It just means a new set of dishes,” Paulie had replied. “This time tomorrow night there won’t be a trace of this.”
In the end Hannah had agreed with Paulie: his dad was a horn dog and his mother was weak.
But there were things Paulie admired about his father. His dad had saved more lives than Paulie could count. He had pulled bleeding or burned victims from the edge of death; he had even gone into a freezing river once to rescue a woman and her baby from the roof of a car. His pay was modest, the hours unpredictable, and failure at times inevitable. Paulie admired his dad’s toughness but he’d vowed never to turn into that guy when it came to relationships.
But what Paulie did wasn’t like that. It wasn’t.
The idea of swimming without the wetsuit—in only his Speedo—tempts him. He knows the water is in the low fifties, testicle-numbing at best, but if you can take it for just a few minutes, the body actually feels warm. Stay in too long and you flirt with hypothermia, but he’s done it before and it’s pretty exhilarating as extreme sports go. He stuffs the wetsuit back in the car and walks toward the end of the dock, hyperventilating, determined, laughing inside when he considers he’s providing his own punishment. Ten feet from the end he takes three long strides and dives.
Hannah walks into her bedroom after coming up empty scanning the guest room for possible missed clues, throws her car keys and cell on top of the dresser, and flops onto the bed. She wishes she had asked Mary more questions. Mr. Wells was weird today—if she’d gone missing, her parents wouldn’t have been asking witnesses what they were doing out so late; they’d have been desperate and welcoming of any useful information. And what about Mrs. Wells?
She clicks the remote, looking for the evening news. A local talk show host pops on the screen so she hits the mute button, rolls over, and gathers her pillow. For those few quick moments this morning when she thought Mary Wells might be . . . well, dead—in the time between when she saw the news on TV and then the impossibility of that news registered—she also thought about Paulie. What if something happened to Paulie? Would this be how she wanted her last time with him to be? There was a moment of clarity that almost made her text him.
She rolls over to see Dr. Johannsen filling the flat screen, standing before a mike with a large 4 on it. Mr. Logs stands in the background. Hannah un-mutes.
“. . . news of Ms. Wells’s disappearance. It was kind of automatic,” Dr. Johannsen is saying. “We got parental permission for the students we sent and it was the most natural thing to load a bus and see if we could assist. A teacher supervised and the police department directed the operation.”
“Were there students present without parental permission?” Mallory Preston, local TV reporter, asks.
Dr. Johannsen looks at her askance. “Not that I know of,” she says, and smiles. “I’ll have a better idea about that tomorrow morning. The important thing is, those students are safe and the young woman in question, whatever her difficulty, seems not to have been the victim of foul play.”
“Speaking of Ms. Wells,” the reporter says, “do you have any further knowledge of her whereabouts?”
“I don’t,” Dr. Johannsen says. “I’m sure more will become apparent