The phone rang before dawn. It startled me awake and I knew instantly that something was wrong. No one calls that early unless something’s wrong. My husband Jonathan answered it. Then I heard him hang up.
We weren’t sleeping together by then, so he came to my bedroom door. “That was your father. He said, ‘Come and get your son.’ He was angry.”
Jonathan was angry, too—no surprise, since he wasn’t speaking to either of my parents, not since my father had told him to get a job three years before. Jonathan was a self-employed industrial designer, had been for nearly sixteen years. But he’d been more out of work than working for the last five. We would have been divorced already if we could have afforded it.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“He didn’t say. Just to get over there now.”
I had left our youngest son Todd with my parents the night before, so I could attend the monthly board of education meeting and then drive to the airport. Jonathan had flown to Miami to meet with a prospective client. I was against him traveling. It had been less than four weeks since his quintuple bypass. But he was desperate for work, and I didn’t fight him very hard.
Todd was sixteen and a half, but I couldn’t leave him alone. Neither Jason nor Dane, his two older brothers, would stay with him, and he was having an episode. He’d left school after lunch, run crazily across a busy street, oblivious to cars, and gone straight to his therapist’s office a block away. But his therapist hadn’t been there and the receptionist called the house for someone to come get him. I was at a board committee meeting so his brothers picked him up, brought him home, and kept him calm until I could get there.
It was the second time in five months that Todd had run from school, straight to his therapist. He had admitted to smoking pot, but I knew there was more to it than that. He was so depressed. And he wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. Well, I was determined to find out.
That same afternoon, I made an eight a.m. appointment with his therapist for the next morning. Things were going to be different. We would not leave the therapist’s office without an understanding and a plan. If it meant home schooling, so be it. I would be at his elbow all day, every day, until we got him turned around.
For his stay at his grandparents’ I packed him an overnight bag, a toothbrush, clean jeans, and the shirt I’d given him for his birthday seven months before. He had never worn it, refused to wear it, even though it was a perfectly fine shirt. It was from JC Penney, their “cool Arizona Company brand. He’ll wear it to our appointment in the morning, like it or not, I remember thinking.
When Todd got into the car to go to his grandparents’, I angrily asked him, “How do you think you can be an Air Force pilot or even a mechanic, for that matter, if you smoke pot? Trust a multi-million-dollar machine to someone who smokes grass? I don’t think so.”
He looked at me, then said, “I forgot something. I’ll be right back.” He jumped out of the car and went inside the house. Two minutes later he was back, empty-handed.
“What was it?” I asked.
“Nothing, I just had to do something.” He locked his seatbelt and I backed out of the driveway.
I took him to my parents’ house, my refuge. He would be safe there and, I prayed, on his best behavior. As I was leaving, he was sitting on the floor in their family room in front of the television. We locked eyes. I silently implored him to be good. It was one of those moments—we connected, heart to heart, soul to soul. Mentally, I embraced him. Then I left for my board meeting.
And now, Dad’s call. Pushing down the dread, I sprang up and went to the bathroom, washed my face and brushed my teeth. Automatically I reached for makeup, then looked at myself. Your son’s in trouble. Get your clothes on and go. I pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and glanced at the clock. It read six forty. It felt like Jonathan and I had just gotten home from the airport.
Jonathan was waiting in his studio. “I’ll drive,” I said. He didn’t argue. The incisions in his legs, from where the surgeons had taken healthy veins for his heart surgery, had been bleeding the night before. It was a fifteen-minute drive to Woodlake, the gated community in Athens, Georgia where my mom and dad had built a home for their retirement.
Waiting for a red light to change, I pushed down the dread again.
“Just go,” Jonathan said before the light turned green.
As I turned into Woodlake, the sun hinted at the beautiful day to come. My parents’ place was the last house at the end of a cul-de-sac. I parked next to their car, in front of the house. As we entered, Dad met us in the front hallway. His nose was red, with a small cut on the tip.
“Todd had us up all night,” he said, his voice hard. “He ran out. We don’t know where he went.”
“What happened? Where did he go?”
“He woke us up around two,” Mom told me. “He couldn’t sleep. He tried to call somebody, I don’t know who, but he couldn’t get a dial tone. Then he wanted to go across the street to use Peggy’s phone. I told him he couldn’t wake the neighbors in the middle of the night. We tried to get him to go back to bed, but he couldn’t stay still. Then he wanted to use our car, and started arguing with your father. I hid the keys. Dad tried to make him go back to bed and Todd knocked him down and began punching him. I tried to pull him off. Then he jumped up and said he was leaving. I told him ‘Get out.’”
I was horrified; Todd had never been violent with his grandparents. “We’re going to look for him,” I told them.
As we turned to leave, Jonathan took the keys from me. “I’ll drive and you can get out and look.” I didn’t argue.
We checked each street and cul-de-sac in Woodlake, but saw no one. This is a waste of time, I thought. Todd must have left a half-hour ago. It made sense to rule out all the options in his path, but I was frantic to get out to the main road. My mind raced to where he might have gone. A friend of his lived off Timothy Road—did he head that way?
We were back at the gate; it opened automatically to let us out. Jonathan headed toward Timothy Road. The sound of sirens came from the left—the way to his friend’s house. We turned right. I leaned out the open window, calling Todd’s name, desperately scanning front stoops and yards for a tall, blond-headed figure. Nothing, no sign of him, block after block. As we approached the elementary school, Jonathan slowly turned the car around, back toward the sirens. Silently, numbly, I agreed.
The road was blocked off by police cars. I could see a fire truck farther down the block. Jonathan parked the car at a cut-in on the left side of the tree-lined street.
“Stay here,” he said, “I’ll find out what’s going on.” He disappeared behind a police car.
I waited, terror seeping into every bone, every cell, until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Why wasn’t he back? I got out and walked toward the pavement and the first police car. Jonathan appeared in front of me and said quietly, “There’s been an accident. Someone’s been killed.”
I stood there, repeating to myself “no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” until interrupted by a fireman. He was standing in front of me, a small piece of paper in his hand.
“Ma’am, your husband says you’re looking for your son.”
“Yes.”
“Someone’s been hit by a car. The victim was a young male, with no identification. He was wearing,” he looked at his note, “Adidas tennis shoes.”
He looked up at me; I said nothing. He went on. “Blue jeans.” Still I said nothing. It could be anyone. “And a shirt with the label, Arizona Company.”
That’s when I screamed.