Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

Bill Prentice, too, had his fifteen minutes of institutional scrutiny. As the husband of my father’s lover the notion that he might have exacted a fatal revenge was not something the police could ignore. It turned out almost immediately, though, that the day after Pat’s funeral, Bill had taken his BMW and headed down to Los Angeles to visit his mother. While down there, grief over his wife’s death had driven him to the bottle and on the evening and night of my father’s disappearance he had the cast-iron alibi of having been locked up in Santa Monica while he was processed for DUI.

Patterson came around to our house for the last time a month after my father vanished. He told me the police had run out of ways to approach the case. Stan was up in his room at the time and Patterson asked me not to call him down. We went out into the back garden and sat in the shadow of the house.

“Truthfully, we have no indication as to what might have happened to him. We’ve listed him as missing but I have to tell you, those details have been available to the California law enforcement community since the start of the investigation and nationally for the last two weeks and we haven’t had a bite. The length of time is very much a negative factor. On the other hand, we have nothing concrete to say he isn’t alive and well-no items of clothing, no blood, nothing. The case will stay open of course, and we’ll keep doing what we can, but we’re off that part of the curve now where we could expect any sort of timely resolution. I’m sorry. Basically, all we can do is hope he makes contact with you, or…” He shrugged, and didn’t say any more, but it was plain enough he meant:… or the body turns up.

After Patterson had gone I went upstairs to Stan’s room. He was sitting on the corner of his bed, crying quietly. His head was bowed and he didn’t look up when I came in. I sat beside him and put my arm around his shoulders. After a long time he cried himself out and his breath shuddered through his heavy body.

“I saw him through the window. I didn’t want to come down.”

“It’s okay.”

I told him what the detective had said. When I’d finished he said solemnly, “Dad’s dead.”

“Yes, I think he must be.”

“Does it feel weird to you, Johnny? That there’s just you and me now? It feels like we’re in the sea and there’s nothing holding us in the right place anymore. Like everything around us is empty.”

“Yeah, it’s weird.”

“Remember that night at the beach, when you were showing me the stars?”

When I had just turned sixteen and Stan was nine our parents took us on a short summer vacation to Santa Barbara. One warm night Stan and I lay on the beach after dark and looked up into the sky and I pointed out the few constellations I knew and told him how a planet didn’t twinkle and how sometimes you could see satellites moving against the backdrop of stars. And Stan had been lost in thoughts of infinity and dreams of what might be out there, and I felt his wonder and shared it, and in sharing had been drawn so close to him that it seemed we became for those moments almost part of each other, seeing with the same eyes, feeling together the vastness of the universe passing through us…

“Yes, I remember.”

“I wish we could be back there.”

Stan’s voice slowed and a little while later he started to drowse. I laid him on the bed and pulled the covers over him even though the sun was still high outside and the room was warm. I went downstairs and made a cup of coffee and sat at the kitchen table and thought about that night in Santa Barbara.

It was a memory I had cherished through all my years apart from Stan. My mother and father had both been alive then, Stan had not yet slipped beneath the dark waters of Tunney Lake, and I had still to spiral from my own good graces. It seemed a memory like that should have led to a better life for Stan and me, should have been part of a lifetime of events that were equally as cherished. In the kitchen that day I felt that I had thrown something away, that I had been granted some magic opportunity but had chosen to waste it.

In the evening the phone rang. I knew it would be Marla but I didn’t answer it. Stan slept without waking until the following morning and I was left alone with my own terrible thoughts.

Between my father’s disappearance and Patterson’s last visit there had been days where Stan and I did nothing more than sit in the house waiting for news. But there had been days, too, when we could not bear to be alone with our thoughts. On these days we either went into town and walked ourselves to exhaustion delivering Plantasaurus fliers, or to the warehouse to tend to our stock of plants. And once each week we drove to the Slopes to maintain the displays at Jeremy Tripp’s house. In this way we put Plantasaurus into a holding pattern while we absorbed the absence of our father.

But the news that the police had reached the end of their inquiries was a turning point for us. We did not discuss it. We did not sit down and try to figure out what the right thing to do was. We simply started work in earnest the day after Patterson’s visit.

We got to our warehouse around ten that morning. We’d had around twenty responses to our fliers so far and I started calling people back and making appointments to see them. We took a guess at how many plants we might need over the coming month, on top of those that Bill had given Stan, and placed our first order with the wholesaler in Sacramento. In the afternoon we went into Oakridge and closed deals with three of the stores I’d contacted, then we went back to the warehouse and made up displays. It was a good day. We were occupied enough not to think too much and we had made definite progress with Plantasaurus.

In the evening Marla came to our house. She’d been over a number of times in the past weeks to cook for us and be supportive. That night she brought a bottle of wine and the three of us had dinner at the kitchen table with the back door open and the warm evening air drifting in. There were moths above us, softly battering themselves against the frosted glass of the ceiling light. Stan looked at them often as we ate.

“There’s a lot of moths, Johnny.”

“It’s the light.”

“I know, but there’s more than usual.”

“Do you think so?”

“I think it’s a message.”

“Really?”

“Because of Dad and Plantasaurus and everything.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We need power, Johnny, to make sure Plantasaurus works. They might be here to bring it across for us.”

“Dude, you’re freaking me out.”

“They might be magnets for power.”

“Stan-”

“They might be, Johnny, you don’t know.”

“They’re not magnets, they’re moths. They’re insects.”

Stan ignored me and lifted his hand toward the light. One of the moths, in the process of making a longer than usual loop, touched down on his finger and clung there for a second before continuing its mad orbit. For a long moment after that Stan looked as though he had discovered a wondrous secret.

That night he wore his Superman suit to bed. He made me open his windows and leave the light on.

“I wish there was a Mothman, Johnny, with moth powers and stuff. I could have one of his costumes.”

“What sort of powers would he have?”

“Walk upside down on the ceiling? Be able to fly?”

“Be a bit of a pain, though. Every time you went past a light you’d have to run into it.”

Stan rolled his eyes. On the way out of the room I turned the light off by reflex, but he called out and I went back and turned it on again. When I left this time he was staring at the bulb.