Джозеф Файндер - Vanished

The soft morning light glinted off the gray-green glass skin of the Gifford building. It was a strange, futuristic-looking tower, a twenty-four-story parallelogram. She couldn’t decide if it was ugly or beautiful. It was a “green” building – ecofriendly, energy-efficient. Built of concrete made from slag. Floor-to-ceiling insulating high-performance glass windows. On the roof, a rainwater harvesting system and a one-megawatt solar array.

As she walked toward the main entrance, someone called out to her. It was a senior vice president, Tom Shattuck: tall, broad-shouldered, blond.

“Lauren, I’m so sorry to hear about your husband,” he said with the somber concern of an undertaker.

She wondered how the word had gotten around so fast and whether everyone assumed Roger was dead.

“Thanks,” she said.

“If there’s anything I can do, you know I’m here for you.”

He was always extremely cordial to her, but she knew all about him from his admin. He was a tyrant to the woman who worked for him all day. The admins all talked, of course. Didn’t their bosses realize that?

She smiled, nodded, and kept walking. She waved her badge at the proximity sensor, stepped into the revolving door, and entered the cavernous atrium. Right in the center, surrounded by tropical foliage, was a huge bronze globe, the continents sculpted in sharp relief. On the front of the globe, set at a jaunty angle, was the Gifford Industries logo, which couldn’t have been more hokey: retro squared-off streamlined script that must have looked futuristic when it was designed in the 1930s.

A couple more people waved at her, flashed sympathetic looks, and she ducked into the express elevator to the twenty-fourth floor. She slid her security card into the slot, and the elevator rose.

The lights in the executive suite were already on, which surprised her. She was normally the first one in. She passed her prox badge against the sensor until it beeped, then pushed open the glass doors. When she rounded the corner, she saw someone sitting at her desk.

Noreen Purvis.

Gabe’s room was as dark as a cave.

He was asleep under the covers, a barely discernible lump. His crappy music was semiblasting from the speakers on a big black clock/radio/CD player on his desk, his iPod docked into the top of it.

The music was the audio equivalent of needles being stuck in my eyeballs. I flipped on all the lights. He groaned.

“Let’s go,” I said. “You should have been up twenty minutes ago.”

He pulled the blanket over his head, and I said, “You can run, but you can’t hide.”

He made a surly sound and burrowed in deeper.

“You can’t get rid of me that easy. Move it, or you’ll experience firsthand how I flushed those al-Qaeda terrorists out of their caves at Tora Bora.”

His head slowly emerged from the covers like a turtle from its shell. “That’s such crap,” he said. “You guys never even found Osama bin Laden.”

“Hey, don’t blame me.”

He mumbled something vaguely caustic, and I said, “Anyone ever tell you you’re a smart-ass? Turn off the music.”

He did. “What are you doing here?”

“Making sure you get to school. Move it.”

“I’m staying home. I don’t feel good.” He pulled the covers back over his face.

“You sleep with that stuff on all night?”

“No, it’s my… alarm.” His voice was muffled.

“No wonder you overslept. The music’s too lulling. Don’t you have anything more strident? Celine Dion, maybe?”

He grunted, unamused. As much as I liked Gabe, he was a difficult kid. Fortunately, he was someone else’s problem, not mine. The thought of having a kid, or kids, gave me the heebie-jeebies, but raising a teenager truly seemed like a horror show. I didn’t understand how people did it, though evidently people did. My mother, for one. (Dear old Dad, smart guy that he was, took off when I was thirteen. He missed out on most of the fun.)

“Come on, kid,” I said. “Get up.”

“You can’t make me.”

“Oh yeah? You didn’t know I have police auxiliary authority? I can have you arrested right now for truancy.” It sounded almost plausible.

Gabe slowly pulled down the covers just enough to peek out at me. He uttered a pretty hard-core curse word.

“I can also have you arrested for obscenity.”

“Is that what Grandpa’s in prison for?” he said.

“You’re quick.”

“I’m staying home today.”

“What’s the problem, Gabe?”

He mumbled something I didn’t understand, and I moved in closer, yanked the covers down. “I didn’t hear you so good,” I said.

He put a hand over his eyes to shield them from the light, and croaked, “It’s like all over school anyway.”

“What is?”

“About Dad.”

“What’s all over?”

He sat up, hung his legs over the side of the bed, and stood. Reaching over to his desk, he ran a finger across the touchpad of his MacBook, and the screen came to life.

It was his Facebook page. His picture in a box at the top and a bunch of other little boxes and things. I said, “What am I looking at?”

He tapped the screen. I looked at where he was pointing, an area of the page called “The Wall,” which had a column of little pictures of what I assumed were junior-high-school kids, mostly face pictures but some weird posed shots. Some of the guys had baseball caps on backwards. Next to each picture was a name and some comment, like “What was English homework??” and “quiz on verbs 2morrow?!” Apparently this was how Gabe and his friends communicated.

On one line was a blue question mark instead of a picture. And the comment:

“hey Gay Gabe, you loser, your dad ditched you, can’t blame him, why don’t you just kill yourself?”

I looked at Gabe, saw the tears in his eyes. “Who wrote this?” I said.

“I don’t know.”

“There’s a name here. Can’t you just click on it?”

“It’s fake. Someone made a fake Facebook page.”

“You think it’s someone from school?”

“Gotta be.”

“Is this what they call cyberbullying?”

“I don’t know.”

“Back in the day, someone called you names, you’d wait for him after school and beat the crap out of him.”

“Oh, please,” he said. “You went to some fancy private day school in Westchester County. Like, in a limo with a chauffeur.”

“Granted,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean we didn’t have fistfights.”

I came close to telling him how often I beat up kids who made fun of his father, after Victor’s arrest. But I didn’t think he’d want to hear that his uncle Nick had been his father’s defender. Especially since Roger was my older brother.

“ ‘Why don’t you just kill yourself,’ ” he said, bitterly. “Maybe I will.”

“That’ll show them,” I said, then realized that sarcasm was probably a bad idea at this point. “Come on, Gabe. You can’t pay attention to jerks like this. You know what I always say – never let an asshole rent space in your head.”

He sat back down on the side of the bed, resting his head in his hands.

“Move.”

Gabe started getting dressed – jeans so tight he had to squeeze into them, his black hoodie, black Chuck Taylors. He grabbed an already open can of Red Bull and took a long swig.

I looked at my watch. “Ten minutes before your car pool gets here. Your mother wants you to have breakfast.”

He toasted me with his Red Bull. “What do you think this is?”

I shrugged. The last thing I wanted to be was this kid’s authority figure.

“Gabe, why do you think kids at school say that kind of stuff about your dad?”

“Because they’re assholes?”