David Morrell - Long lost

The area was busy enough that it took me a while to find a parking spot. My emotions pushed and pulled me. When I'd been a kid, downtown had seemed so big. Now the effect was the same, but for different reasons-helplessness made me feel small. Despite the passage of years, I managed to orient myself as I passed a comic-book store and an ice-cream shop, neither of which had been in those places when I was a kid. I came to the corner of Lincoln and Washington (the names returned to me) and stared at a shadowy doorway across the street. It was between a bank and a drugstore, businesses that had been in those places when I was a kid. I remembered because of all the times my mother had walked Petey and me to that doorway and had taken us up the narrow echoing stairway to our least favorite place in the world: the dentist's office.

That stairway had seemed towering and ominous when I'd climbed it in my youth. Now, trying to calm myself, I counted each of its thirty steps as I went up. At the top, I stood under a skylight (another change) and faced the same frosted-glass door that had led into the dentist, except that the name on the door was now cosgrove insurance agency.

A young woman with her hair pulled back looked up from stapling documents together. "Yes, sir?"

"I… When I was a kid, this used to be a dentist's office." I couldn't help looking past the receptionist toward the corridor that had led to the chamber of horrors.

She looked puzzled. "Yes?"

"He has some dental records I need, but I don't know how to get in touch with him because I've forgotten his name."

"I'm afraid I'm not the person to ask. I started working for Mr.

Cosgrove only six months ago, and I never heard anything about a dentist's office."

"Perhaps Mr. Cosgrove would know."

She went down the hallway to the office that I'd dreaded and came back in less than a minute. "He says he's been here eight years. Before then, this was a Realtor's office."

"Oh."

"Sorry."

"Sure." Something sank in me. "I guess it was too much to hope for." Discouraged, I turned toward the door, then stopped with a sudden thought. "A Realtor?"

"Excuse me?"

"You said a Realtor used to be in this office?"

"Yes." She was looking at me now as if I'd become a nuisance.

"Does he or she manage properties, do you suppose?"

"What?"

"Assuming that Mr. Cosgrove doesn't own this building, who's his landlord?"

"You mean the Dwyer Building." The bantamweight man in a bow tie stubbed out a cigarette. His desk was flanked on three sides by tall filing cabinets. "I've been managing it for Mr. Dwyer's heirs the past twenty years."

"The office Mr. Cosgrove is in."

"Unit-Two-C."

"Can you tell me who rented it back then? I'm looking for the name of a dentist who used to be there."

"Why on earth would you want-"

"Some dental records. If it's a nuisance for you to look it up, I'll gladly pay you a service fee."

"Nuisance? Hell, it's the easiest thing in the world. The secret to managing property is being organized." He pivoted in his swivel chair and pushed its rollers toward a filing cabinet on his right that was marked D.

"Dwyer Building." He searched through files. "Here." He sorted through papers in it. "Sure. I remember now. Dr. Raymond Faraday. He had a heart attack. Eighteen years ago. Died in the middle of giving somebody a root canal."

After what I'd been through, the grotesqueness of his death somehow didn't seem unusual. "Did he have any relatives here? Are they still in town?"

"Haven't the faintest idea, but check this phone book."

"… a long time ago. Dr. Raymond Faraday. I'm trying to find a relative of his." Back at my car, I was using my cell phone. There'd been only two Faradays in the book. This was my second try.

"My husband's his son," a suspicious-sounding woman said. "Frank's at work now. What's this got to do with his father?"

I straightened. "When my brother and I were kids, Dr. Faraday was our dentist. It's very important that I get my brother's dental X rays. To identify him."

"Your brother's dead?"

"Yes."

"I'm so sorry."

"It would be very helpful if you could tell me what happened to the records."

"His patients took their records with them when they chose a new dentist."

"But what about patients who hadn't been his clients for a while? My brother and I had stopped going to Dr. Faraday several years earlier."

"Didn't your parents transfer the records to your new dentist?"

"No." I remembered bitterly that after my father had died in the car accident and it turned out that his life-insurance policy had lapsed, my mother hadn't been able to afford things like taking me to a dentist.

The woman exhaled, as if annoyed about something. "I have no idea what my husband did with the old records. You'll have to ask him when he gets home from the office."

The baseball field hadn't changed. As the lowering sun cast my shadow, I stood at the bicycle rack where my friends and I had chained and locked our bikes so long ago. Behind me, the bleachers along the third-base line were crowded with parents yelling encouragement to kids playing what looked like a Little League game. I heard the crack of a ball off a bat. Cheers. Howls of disappointment. Other cheers. I assumed that a fly ball, seemingly a home run, had been caught.

But I kept my gaze on the bicycles, remembering how Petey had used a clothespin to attach a playing card to the front fender of his bike and how it had created a clackclackclackclack sound against the spokes when the wheel turned. It pained me that I couldn't remember the names of the two friends I'd been with and for whom I'd destroyed Petey's life. But I certainly remembered the gist of what we'd said.

"For crissake, Brad, your little brother's getting on my nerves. Tell him to beat it, would ya?"

"Yeah, he tags along everywhere. I'm tired of the little squirt. The friggin' noise his bike makes drives me nuts."

"He's just hanging around. He doesn't mean anything."

"Bull. How do you think my mom found out I was smoking if he didn't tell your mom?"

"We don't know for sure he told my mom."

"Then who did tell her, the goddamn tooth fairy?"

"All right, all right."

Petey had nearly bumped into me when I'd turned. I'd thought about that moment so often and so painfully that it was seared into my memory. He'd been short even for nine, and he'd looked even shorter because of his droopy jeans. His baseball glove had been too big for his hand.

"Sorry, Petey, you have to go home."

"But…"

"You're just too little. You'd hold up the game."

His eyes had glistened with the threat of tears.

To my later shame, I'd worried about what my friends would think if my kid brother started crying around them. "I mean it, Petey. Bug off. Go home. Watch cartoons or something."

His chin had quivered.

"Petey, I'm telling you, go. Scram. Get lost."

My friends had run toward where the other kids were choosing sides for the game. As I'd rushed to join them, I'd heard the clachclackdack of Petey's bike. I'd looked back toward where the little guy was pedaling away. His head was down.

Standing now by the bicycle rack, remembering how things had been, wishing with all my heart that I could return to that moment and tell my friends that they were jerks, that Petey was going to stay with me, I wept.

Unlike the baseball field, the house had changed a great deal. In fact, the whole street had. The trees were taller (to be expected), and there were more of them, as well as more shrubs and hedges. But those changes weren't what struck me. In my youth, the neighborhood had been all single-story ranch houses, modest homes for people who worked at the factory where my dad had been a foreman. But now second stories had been added to several of the houses, or rooms had been added to the back, taking away most of the rear yards. Both changes had occurred to the house I'd lived in. The front porch had been enclosed to add space to the living room. The freestanding single-car garage at the end of the driveway had been rebuilt into a double-car garage with stairs leading up to a room.