Chapter 20

Gavin is starting to tune out his mother’s lecture. She’s been at it for a while now and he’s exhausted. They’ve moved past the point of hysterical denial to the admission that he broke a rule and kept a secret and have now arrived at that place where he says ‘sorry’ on endless repeat while she tries to focus him on the underlying lesson. She won’t let it go until he gives some acknowledgement that he knows why it was wrong and what was at stake, but he’s incapable of that right now. The heat in his cheeks has dried his tears and he’s picking at a balled-up tissue in his fist, shredding it—not in frustration at this point, but agitation. He just wants her to shut up, just wants this to stop. He wants to immerse himself in something comforting and distracting. Like a game.

And that’s when the peripheral consequences of the punishment start to sink in, and his breath starts hitching in his chest again.

“W-what ah-bout F-Face (breath) Timing with (breath) Jacob? If I (breath) can’t be on the internet, I’ll (breath) n-never be able to t-talk to (breath) him and I don’t have any other friends!”

“Easy, Gavin. Just breathe. We’ll figure it out. Okay? We’ll figure it out. One thing at a time. But honey, even if you weren’t keeping secrets, this is all feeling way too much like an obsession. An addiction.”

The fact is, his interest in Rainblocks started fading a week ago when Dave just disappeared for a while, stopped updating the quests and sending him private messages. As of yesterday, Dave is at least posting new videos on his YouTube channel again, so Gavin knows he isn’t sick or something, but the loss of personal contact makes him feel so bad he can hardly bear to think about it for more than a minute at a time. He’s sure he failed in some way, but he doesn’t know how. The last thing Dave asked him to do was pour the heavy bag of metal marbles down a storm drain when no one was watching, and he did that. He knows no one saw him. The real-world quests made no sense anyway—taking inventory of bathroom cleaning products and fetching metal marbles from a chicken coop in the woods just to pour them down a drain? But he’s sure it was leading up to something cool.

Now it feels like it’s leading nowhere.

And if he can’t even chat with Jacob or watch his videos on TV, he will have nothing. No Dad, no Dave, no friends, nothing but a mother who’s afraid of everything and punishing him for it.

“Can I (breath) still watch my (breath) v-videos? Can I still watch R-Rainbow Dave?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet.”

“When will you decide? Before three? Because he uploads them at three and if you don’t decide before three that’s not fair, it’s not—”

Jessica holds up her hand. “It depends on how honest I feel you’re being with me.”

“But I told you. I told you, and I’m sorry.”

“Try to calm down. This is important, so I’m going to ask you again: do you know who was texting you in the game?”

“No.”

“Gavin.”

“I thought it was Rainbow Dave, but it was probably somebody pretending.”

“Did you see their face? Did they see you?”

Gavin tries to tell her yes, to let it all out and get it over with, but he’s too stressed to form the words, his lip quivering, breath shortening again, speeding up. His mother waits it out, staring at him. And then, as if his escalating stress has caused it, her phone rings and buzzes on the kitchen counter.

When it gets to the third ring, Gavin starts thinking she isn’t going to answer it, but then she looks at who’s calling and swipes it off the counter so fast she almost throws it across the room.

“Hello?”

The worry lines are forming on her forehead before she even has time to hear what the person on the other end is saying. Gavin wonders if it’s Jacob’s mom. Did he tell her more about their quest in the woods that day or spill some of what Gavin told him about his encounters with Dave? Sometimes he can’t sleep at night worrying about the things he’s told Jacob. His little heart is beating to burst. This is just too much. He’s gone from working himself up to spill everything to dreading that Jacob already spilled it. At least if he fessed up on his own, he’d get some credit for it.

But the longer he watches his mother, the less sure he is that the call is about him. She backs up to the refrigerator, then slides down the door, knocking magnets and postcards free until her bottom reaches the tile. It’s like the phone opened a valve in her head and let all the air out. She closes her eyes and shakes her head, her body saying no to whatever they’re telling her. Gavin doesn’t know who’s on the other end, but he hates them for hurting her. It’s so clear that they’re hurting her, and he wants to take the phone from her and stomp on it and destroy whatever news is coming from it because he knows. He may only be ten, but he knows it’s the Army and it’s about Daddy.

It’s THE BAD NEWS.

He’s heard them talking about it. Always in lowered voices, whether it’s between his mother and father or between Nana and Mama or between Mama and one of the other moms in the FRG. Ever since he was little, they’ve whispered about who got THE BAD NEWS. He’s not stupid. It means a soldier was killed by the terrorists.

She’s asking questions now and he’s trying to listen to what they are, but he can’t hear clearly through the images in his head and the heat in his face. Most of all he can’t hear over his own voice in his head shouting: CAN’T BE, CAN’T BE, CAN’T BE!

Did she say, “When will you know?”

She’s not crying, but it’s coming. She’s picking up the magnetic notepad from the floor and using the fridge door handle to pull herself to her feet. She picks through the pencils in the coffee cup that holds all the ones he’s been given with crazy graphics or big erasers that look like characters. Finally she finds one with a sharpened point and writes something on the pad.

Gavin reaches up on his tippy toes and reads it: DUSTWUN.

What does that mean? His mind forms a picture of his father lying dead on the ground and covered in the dust of Afghanistan, like the dust won, and for a second, he feels a rising wave of nausea.

Should I run to the toilet to hurl?

But it passes when his mother asks, “Who was with him?”

Gavin can’t hear the reply, but she nods and says, “Okay… I understand. Okay,” and thumbs the END CALL button. Her nostrils flare with a deep breath and he’s sure she’s about to scream, but instead, she cocks her arm and throws the phone across the room. It bounces off the dishwasher with a hollow clang and skates across the floor.

Gavin regards the glossy black rectangle lying dormant on the white tile with newfound suspicion, like a pet that has learned to bite.

His mother looks at him, her face a pale mask. She takes a step toward the phone and raises her foot to stomp on it, but he scrambles and covers it with his hand. “Don’t.”

She’s about to do what he wanted to do just a moment ago, but he knows he can’t let her. What if they made a mistake and need to call back? “You’re scaring me,” he says.

She lowers her foot to the floor, kneels beside him, and cups the back of his head in her hand, pulling him into a shaking embrace.

“Is Daddy okay?” Gavin asks. “What does DUSTWUN mean?”

Her voice is husky, like she’s been screaming for hours. “Duty Status: Whereabouts Unknown.”

“What does it mean?” Gavin asks.

“It means Daddy is missing.”

Gavin tries to absorb this—not dead, but missing—and gropes at vague shapes for the right question to ask next. His mother follows his gaze to the phone on the floor. Her chest heaves as she contemplates it, and for a moment he thinks maybe he can read her mind, because he knows what she’s thinking: all of their troubles come from those little rectangles of black glass.

* * *

When Gavin is finally asleep, Jessica lets the dog out into the yard to do his nightly business. She lights a citronella candle she keeps on the back deck to ward off mosquitos, dimly wishing she was lighting a cigarette instead. She was never a heavy smoker and hasn’t had one since she found out she was pregnant with Gavin, but she sure could go for one now. There isn’t even anything worth drinking in the house since she finished the one bottle of Chardonnay she had in the fridge when Andy was over. Thinking of that afternoon now fills her head with an ugly residue of guilt. But why should it? She told Matt she was going to consult with Gavin’s teacher. It’s not like she kept anything from him. And it’s not like she cheated on him; she never would.

So why does it feel like she committed some sin—and only now, in retrospect, in light of Matt’s disappearance?

Because she had a man over to the house and drank a little too much wine and felt a little giddy about having some emotional support. And maybe she found his hands attractive before they unlocked sobering secrets and looming threats. And for that she feels like she betrayed her true love and invited this calamity into their lives, this punishment. Because she was lonely.

She looks up at the night sky and tries to tell herself she’s not responsible for everything that happens to everyone she loves. The night is hazy after a humid day, but a few stars shine through the tatters of cloud. It’s tomorrow already in Afghanistan. Patrols will be out searching for him. Satellites will be moving over the mountains, allocating cameras and bandwidth to the task.

The sympathetic officer on the phone couldn’t tell her shit.

What do they say in Boston? As per fuckin’ usual.

Her gaze drifts down from the heavens to the TV flickering through her neighbor’s window. Jessica has noticed that Mrs. Deering often falls asleep in front of it—her only company since her husband passed away. It’s usually tuned to Fox News, the election cycle circus that feels like it’s been going full tilt for years. Jessica can’t stomach either candidate, a couple of rich New Yorkers arguing over how to spend everyone else’s money. She has little confidence that either of them has any genuine empathy for the men and women who risk their lives to serve their country every day, for the families who risk their loved ones.

You can’t truly understand the sacrifice if there isn’t a piece of you over there. A phantom limb. Is that what she has now? A missing part that can’t be replaced and may never be returned? How many wives and husbands, sons and daughters have suffered invisible amputations in this fifteen-year war?

She thinks of how she was so afraid she’d lost Gavin when he pulled that stunt in the woods. But she didn’t lose him. Her phone rang and she brought him home. She brushes her hand over the phone in her back pocket, reassuring herself it’s there. She can’t believe she almost destroyed it in a moment of blind rage.

Cooper has returned from the yard; he waits at the door, swishing his tail and whimpering.

This house is supposed to be a temporary home for them. Matt is supposed to return to it around Thanksgiving time, when they will get on with life. Next year they’ll buy a place of their own in a good neighborhood with other kids for Gavin, and she’ll go back to school and get her Master’s so she can teach when Matt retires young. That’s the shape of Happily Ever After for them. But now, with a chill that has no place under her skin on a midsummer night, she can see herself wasting away here in the silent village with all the other widows.

Jessica looks up at the sky again. The clouds have gathered and only a single star shines through. She makes a wish, or a prayer. She doesn’t know which it is. “Bring him home,” she whispers. She blows out the candle and goes back inside.