I watched very carefully as both she and the guy (I caught a glimpse of his profile but not enough to see a face) looked at the control panel in the same instant.
I waited. Aimee picked up the cell and checked the incoming number.
And then she placed the phone back down.
Her voice: “It’s Aimee, please leave a message, thanks.”
I clicked off. I was sweating. I turned on the air conditioning.
“She didn’t pick up,” I said out loud.
“Who, Daddy?” Sarah asked. “Who didn’t pick up?”
The light turned green. The BMW drove away. As it did, the guy turned in his seat and looked back at the Range Rover, but the sun was reflecting off the rear window and I couldn’t make out any of his features. My anxiety restrained me from following them. I didn’t even want to know where they were going. Plus what would the kids tell Jayne? Mommy, Daddy followed somebody and when he called her she didn’t pick up. A car blaring its horn was my reminder to start moving again. I made another U-turn and drove toward the mall, where I circled the miles of asphalt that surrounded it until Robby leaned over and said, pointing, “There’s a space right there, Bret. Just park the car.” I did.
We went straight to the multiplex. I was too distracted by the guy in the passenger seat to proceed with this day leisurely. Could it have been Alvin Mendolsohn, her thesis instructor? No, this guy was younger, her age, a student maybe. I flashed on the profile and the blurred face but came up with nothing. I purchased the tickets for Some Call Him Rebel and was so out of it that when the kids asked for candy and popcorn and Cokes I numbly bought them whatever they wanted even though Jayne had warned me not to. I let them choose their seats in the cavernous auditorium, which was oddly empty for a Saturday matinee and I feared that I’d chosen an unpopular movie but Robby—who was a movie nut—didn’t complain. Again, I thought of all the bartering Jayne had gone through to get him here and realized that he probably would have sat through Shoah. Sarah sat between Robby and me and was drinking her soda too quickly and when I warned her not to Robby rolled his eyes and sighed while opening a box of Junior Mints and soon both of them were concentrating on the action storming across the screen. About twenty minutes into the movie when I could stand it no longer I leaned over and told Robby to watch his sister while I went to make a phone call, and I hesitated because I remembered the name of the most recent missing boy: Maer Cohen. Robby nodded intently without looking at me and I realized that no one was going to take him anywhere (unless he let them, came an unbidden thought). I paced the lobby of the multiplex while dialing Aimee’s number again and this time I left a message: “Hey, Aimee, it’s Bret. Um, I saw you about forty minutes ago coming out of Whole Foods and it looked like you were, um, having fun . . .” I laughed weakly. “Well, that’s it. Call me on my cell.” I clicked off. When I went back to the auditorium the screen was a blur. It was hopeless. I couldn’t concentrate on anything except the fact that I kept thinking I had been in that car with Aimee Light. I thought the guy in the passenger seat was myself. When I focused: fleets of black hovercraft anchored in space.
After the movie I just went through the motions: soft-serve frozen yogurt in the food court, a game of laser tag in the arcade, and Sarah wanted to go to Abercrombie and Fitch, where I flipped through a catalogue, clutching my cell phone and willing it to ring and the kids tried on clothes until Robby told me he wanted to stop by Mail Boxes Etc. I remember asking him why but don’t remember his answer (this would prove to be a key mistake on my part). Sarah and I followed him to the other side of the mall. Sarah was numbering her steps and telling me that she wanted lots of neon and a curtain made of beads in her room. Outside Mail Boxes Etc., Robby ran into a group of his disaffected clique, who were exiting the same upscale post office that Robby was (coincidentally) heading into and where he was forced to introduce me.
“This is Bret,” he said.
“I’m his father,” I offered the group of boys.
“Yeah, he’s my dad,” Robby said tonelessly.
Robby’s face was suddenly flushed. He nodded even though his expression suggested that he didn’t have the slightest idea of what that exchange signified. That this was the first time he had called me Dad. When I realized he was not going to introduce the boys (there were four of them) individually, I sat down with Sarah on a nearby bench and watched them interact. A discussion ensued about the school’s banning of dodgeball and then they compared notes on Halloween. The boys glared at one another as they talked yet everything was said with a marked lack of enthusiasm, and they made vain, halfhearted threats at one another. All of them had headphones dangling around their necks and cargo pants from Banana Republic and they all wore the same orange-tinted wraparound sunglasses that Robby was wearing. When one of the boys glanced over at me as if I were contagious I finally understood that I was The Distraction—the reason this conversation was not going to last much longer. Once they realized I was observing them, the one I instinctively loathed the most gave me a look that said “Who the f**k are you?” and I overheard the term “dickweed”—though in relation to whom I wasn’t sure. The hard smooth faces barely touched by acne, the fashionable crew cuts, the hands jittery because of the meds, their uncertainty with one another—it all led to one thing for me: I did not trust any of them. And then, without warning, the group of boys broke up. Whatever interest they had in each other evaporated so rapidly that it seemed not to have existed at all. Robby trudged toward us under the glare of the mall light and it suddenly bothered me that so little of his life revolved around poetry or romance. Everything was grounded in the dull and anxious day-to-day. Everything was a performance. But what bothered me more—the thing that actually was the reason I became riveted by the boys—was that I’d heard one of them—as I turned away to guide Sarah to that nearby bench—say the name Maer Cohen. When I heard that name uttered I quickly glanced back as two of the boys made a hushing motion to the boy who’d spoken the name. Once they saw the startled expression on my face they perfected their poses. Poses they maintained despite the fact that Maer Cohen was one of them, was their age, was a boy who had lived only minutes from this mall, but now had vanished. And the thing that made me squirm with unease on that bench was the fact that not one of the five boys, including my son, had seemed frightened. None of them seemed scared. What bothered me most was how they had to dampen their enthusiasm—their glee—in front of the adult.