David Silva - The Disappeared

He had to check his watch. “A little after two.”

“Another day wasted, huh?”

“I wouldn’t call it wasted.” He got up and went into the kitchen. The breakfast dishes from yesterday were still in the sink, where he had simply forgotten about them. He turned the water on and let it run, waiting for it to make the long trip from the heater through the pipes. So many things hadn’t gotten done the past couple of days. In a way, he had been sleeping as much as she had.

Teri came up and stood in the kitchen doorway. “I’m ready now.”

He glanced at her.

“I’ve done my crying, and I’m done feeling sorry for myself. I want my son back.”

He smiled. “That’s all I wanted to hear.”

“Where do we go from here?” Teri asked. She brought a cup of coffee to the table and sat across from Walt.

“After the bad guys, I guess.”

“And how do we do that?”

“First off, we have to figure out who the hell they are.”

She nodded. She was beginning to feel better now. After he had made lunch and she had showered and cleaned up, she had taken a few extra minutes to sit down and close her eyes, to try to gather up whatever strength she could find inside herself. Walt had been right about what had happened. It was in the past, and there wasn’t anything she could do about it. The future, however, was still in the making, and that was something she wasn’t going to let herself forget.

“Have any guesses?” he asked.

“I don’t know who they are,” she said. She took a sip of coffee, which had been the last of a pot that Walt had made earlier. It was bitter and only lukewarm. “But they’re tied to Gabe somehow. They’re the ones who took him the first time; I know they are.”

“You have any ideas why they might be interested in him?”

“No, it doesn’t make any sense.”

“Okay,” he said, looking away. He picked up the pencil he had brought with him to the table and tapped an absent meter against the yellow legal pad underneath. “What do you know about Dr. Childs?”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not. There’s something about that man.”

Teri had known the doctor for twenty, maybe twenty-five years, ever since she had first met him at a community health clinic, where he volunteered his time on weekends. That had been long before he had started his own private practice, and long before Gabe had even been born. “I don’t know. I know he’s a good doctor.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why him? I mean, why not this Mitch guy? He’s the one who’s showing up everywhere.”

“Mitch is just a stooge. There’s someone else behind this.”

“I’ve known Childs a long time,” Teri said, feeling suddenly uneasy. She took another sip of coffee, trying not to let herself runaway with the idea that the doctor might actually be involved somehow. There weren’t but a handful of people you could trust in your life, and you desperately wanted to make sure one of those was your doctor. If you couldn’t trust your doctor…

“I don’t want to leave any avenues open,” Walt said.

“I know. And I understand that. It’s just that…” It was just that what ? Suddenly it was hitting too close to home? In her mind, she had always imagined that the source of their trouble was someone or some thing out there, some external, faceless enemy that had picked them at random. This , though, wasn’t like that at all.

“He may not have anything to do with it at all,” Walt said. “But we’ve gotta make sure.”

She nodded, knowing he was right.

“So why don’t you tell me what you know about him.”

“Like what?”

“Like how you first met,” he said evenly. He appeared only mildly interested, but that wasn’t the case here at all. At least not in Teri’s eyes. Walt had done this before. He knew how to keep an even tone in the conversation, how to listen without spooking the person who was doing all the talking. It had all been part of his job at one time.

“It was the first time I ever thought I was pregnant,” she said. “Michael and I were going together, and I had missed my period. We were both in college then, and the chance that I might be pregnant… neither one of us was ready for that. We talked about it and talked about it, and it was like running into a mine field. You think you have everything under control and then suddenly there’s this out of nowhere explosion and all your dreams start disappearing out from under you. It was…”

She stopped and realized how long ago that had been and how fresh it still seemed in her mind. Some things become part of who you are whether you invite them in or not. “I ended up at a health clinic off campus.”

“And Childs worked there?”

“He volunteered there.”

“Doing abortions?” Walt asked matter-of-factly.

“No, of course not,” Teri said. “This before Roe versus Wade. Abortion was still illegal back then.”

“That didn’t prevent them from happening.”

“It wasn’t that kind of clinic.”

“ Were you pregnant?”

She cast her eyes downward at her coffee cup and shook her head. “No. We had Gabe four years later, after both of us were out of school and Michael was working for Henry & Patterson.”

“You left the Bay Area and moved up here?”

“There was a group of us, a bunch of friends who always hung around together. After college we decided to stick together if we could. Back then, communal living was a pretty common thing. So we all kind of migrated up here.”

“And you lived together?”

“For awhile,” she said. She finished the rest of her coffee, and got up to return the cup to the kitchen sink. “Then some of us got married and moved into our own places, and others got jobs that took them out of the area, and some just lost interest and drifted away like lonely clouds in the sky.”

“How did you hook up with Childs again?”

“When I got pregnant with Gabe we started asking around about a good general practitioner. It was all part of that getting back to nature thing we were trying so hard to do at the time. I was planning on using a midwife for the birth, and after that I wanted to take my baby to a good family doctor, a Marcus Welby type, like they had back in the Fifties, someone who might actually make a house call once in awhile.” Teri finished washing out her coffee cup and placed it in the rack next to the sink. For a moment, she gazed out the kitchen window at the apartment across the way, letting the color of her thoughts melt into the creamy caramel color of the building. “Someone mentioned to me that Childs had set up a practice in the area. So three weeks after Gabe was born, I took him in to see him.”

“What was Childs doing up this way? Did he ever say?”

“I don’t remember exactly. Something about wanting to get away from the city.”

“Like everyone else, huh?”

“Yeah.” Teri broke away from the window and came back and sat down at the table. Her thoughts drifted through the last time she had spoken to Childs and what he had told her about Gabe’s aging. Then magically, they drifted to the night when she had put Gabe on the phone to talk to his father. It was the only time she could remember Gabe lighting up with a smile.

“I’ve gotta call Michael and tell him what’s happened,” she said suddenly.

Walt dropped the pencil and stretched. “Maybe he already knows.”

“No, we talked to him the other night on the phone. He didn’t know anything. I had to convince him it was really Gabe.”

“You called him?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Gabe wanted to talk to him.” And then something suddenly occurred to her, something she had nearly forgotten. She slumped back in her chair, and felt all the energy drain out of her as if it were one final breath before dying. “Oh, my God.”