Douglas Kennedy - Five Days

‘OK — cards on the table,’ I said. ‘I look at my life and frequently wonder how I have ended up with this existence, this identity, this daily role to play.’

‘Well, we all do that, don’t we?’

‘So what role would you play, if you could?’

‘That’s easy,’ he said. ‘I’d be a writer.’

‘No doubt, living in a house by the water up in Maine. or maybe you do that already.’

‘Hardly. We live in town in Bath. And the house, though nice, is pretty modest.’

‘So’s mine.’

‘Anyway, if I was a writer I would be living here, in Boston. City life and all that.’

‘Then why not New York or Paris?’

‘I’m a Maine boy — which means Boston is my idea of a city. Small, compact, historic, in the East. And then there’s the Red Sox. ’

‘So you are tribal.’

‘Aren’t all Red Sox fans?’

‘Most everyone is tribal. Especially when it comes to their own flesh and blood. Look at that woman, Margaret what’s-her-name, who ensured that your son’s incident at MIT went public. Why did she do that? Because her own son wasn’t as talented or gifted as Billy. So she turned tribal and decided to wreak havoc. From where I sit, that’s five times worse than you and your wife saying nothing about Billy’s math camp problem. You were simply trying to protect your son. She was being deliberately malicious — and, in the process, damaging a young man. She ought to be ashamed of herself.’

‘Trust me, she isn’t.’

‘What happened after CalTech found out about Billy’s problems?’

‘The inevitable happened. They withdrew their offer of admission and, with it, the full scholarship. What made this even more terrible was that this transpired while Billy was still missing. Next thing I knew I had reporters on me from all the local and regional papers, even a TV team from the NBC affiliate in Portland, parked outside my house, wanting a statement from me about why I covered up for my son. I’m surprised you weren’t aware of it all, Maine being such a small place.’

‘I rarely watch TV. And I tend to get my news from the New York Times online. Dan always says that, for a Maine lifer, I have little interest in local stuff. Maybe because it’s often nothing more than local gossip. Other people’s small-town miseries and tragedies. I’m sure if I asked some of my colleagues at the hospital about the incident they’d remember it all. But, trust me, I’m not going to do that.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Did you release a statement to the press?’

‘I had my lawyer do it. A short statement saying that, as Billy was still missing — and we were genuinely fearful about whether or not he was still alive — we asked to be left in peace “during this very difficult time” and all that. To Dwight Petrie’s credit he came out on our side, declaring that since MIT had decided it was a private matter, he felt we were right to say nothing to the school — and he was appalled that “some very bad citizen felt it necessary to inflict more damage on a clearly troubled young man by leaking it to the press”. Dwight also made it clear that we had been friends for forty years — and under the circumstances he would have done what I had done. But the terrible fact was, Billy’s chances of getting into any college were null and void. And all thanks to the maliciousness of one little woman.

‘Meanwhile, the trail had gone cold in the search for Billy. Those eight days. they were beyond terrible.’

‘And how did your wife take it?’

‘She did what she often does when things get on top of her — she voted with her feet. Went to stay with her sister in Auburn. Called me once a day for an update. Otherwise she was elsewhere.’

‘And it didn’t get to you?’

Silence. His eyes snapped shut again for a moment — something I noticed that frequently happened whenever the conversation strayed into difficult territory. Yet he never tried to dodge the tough stuff. Instead, opening his eyes again he said:

‘I thought I would go out of my mind.’

‘Was there any specific reason why he’d vanished?’

‘His girlfriend told him it was over between them. Just like that. Out of the blue. I only found this out around seventy-two hours after Billy went missing. Early one morning — it must have been around six — someone started banging loudly on my front door. I staggered downstairs and found Billy’s girlfriend, Mary, standing there, tears running down her face. Once inside my kitchen, the whole story came out — how Billy had become over the past few months so remote, so difficult and unsettling, that she finally had no choice but to tell him that it was over. As she filled me in on all this, I felt a desperate sense of shame, especially when she asked me: “Did you notice him acting stranger than usual?” The truth was, I hadn’t noticed anything different about him, yet here was my son coming undone due to this break-up with the first woman who had ever loved him.’

As if reading my thoughts — or maybe the expression on my face told all — he looked at me and said:

‘That’s right. Billy never knew much in the way of maternal love. But in Muriel’s defense, I suppose she did her best.’

‘Do you really believe that?’

‘No.’

He met my gaze straight on as he said that — and I felt the strangest shudder run through me. Because from the way he was meeting my gaze I felt what he felt: that this was a moment of shared complicity. And a silent frontier had just been traversed.

‘So where did they finally find Billy?’ I asked.

‘Way up north in the County,’ Richard said, using the Maine verbal shorthand for Aroostook County: the most isolated, underpopulated, and largely unexplored corner of the state, defined by its vast forests and intricate network of logging roads that never appeared on any official map of the state.

‘How bad a shape was he in?’

‘Very bad. He told the state trooper who found him that he’d driven up to Presque Isle, went into a Walmart there, bought a garden hose and some thick electrical tape, and was planning to drive deep into the woods, tape the hose to the exhaust pipe, feed it in through the car window, use the tape to mask the crack in the window, then turn on the engine and leave this life.

‘But he also bought a week’s worth of food at the same time and a sleeping bag and a portable stove. So I can’t help but think that part of him still wanted to live. Then, once he had all these supplies, he started driving deep into the woods, crossing eventually onto those logging roads that are off-limits to anyone not working for one of those big paper companies up there. He drove and drove and drove until the car hit a ditch on one of those unpaved tracks. It broke an axle. There he was, in late April, snow still on the ground up there, the temperatures still well below freezing after dark, stranded in real wilderness. He had all the equipment necessary to take his life. But instead he simply lived in his car. Keeping the heater on at night until his gas finally ran out. Using the woods as a toilet. Eating meals made on the portable stove. All alone in the forest. And — as he told me some months afterwards — happy for the first time in his life. “Because I didn’t have to confront the fact that I was this freak of nature who couldn’t fit in anywhere. And because being alone is, Dad, the best place for me.” His exact words.

‘Then he got lucky. A logger came upon him at dawn. At this point, Billy had completely run out of food, and besides being starved and suffering from exposure, he was also delirious. He had locked all the car doors, and wouldn’t open them when the logger kept slamming his fist against the window, trying to get Billy to allow himself to be rescued. But Billy was so out of it that he refused to open the door. That’s when the logger drove off and returned around four hours later — that’s how isolated the spot was — with the state police. Again they tried to convince Billy to open the door and let them help him. This time, seeing the men in uniform, he became irrational. Refused to unlock the door. Started screaming abuse at the officers. When they finally had to jimmy open the door with a crowbar, he turned violent. So violent that they had to subdue him. After they’d handcuffed him, he still went crazy in the back of the squad car, and they drove him to the nearest doctor, who administered such a strong tranquilizer that Billy was under for over twenty-four hours.