Thomas Cook - Red Leaves

I was still sitting in the same place when Warren's car made the lazy turn around the driveway and came to a halt in front of the house.

He got out and headed toward me, his gait far more determined than I'd ever seen it, an awkwardly charging bull.

"I just heard it on the radio," he said breathlessly when he reached me. "They're organizing a search. Volunteers. The whole town is gearing up for it." His face was red and appeared a bit puffy, the way it looked after he'd been drinking.

"So," he asked. "Are you okay?"

"I just hope Amy turns up," I said. "Because if she doesn't—"

"Don't think about that," Warren blurted.

This piece of advice did not surprise me. It was precisely the advice Warren had spent his life following. I recalled how he'd put my father's bankruptcy out of his mind, pretending that our precipitous fall into poverty had simply never happened. And so he'd obliviously urged me to hold to my plan to go to college, though there was no money for that. Years later, with my father now in a low-rent retirement home, he'd broached the subject of our starting a landscaping business. When I'd asked how he intended to come up with sufficient seed money, he'd replied, "Well, you know, when Pop goes," even though our father had long ago lost everything he had, everything he might have given us. Warren had reacted to Jenny's illness the same way, by simply refusing to face it. During the months of her dying, as she grew steadily weaker, losing one faculty after another to the growing tumor in her brain, Warren had talked on and on about a future she could not possibly have. "When Jenny gets a boyfriend," he'd say, or "When Jenny gets to high school." Only once, the afternoon of Jenny's death, when she lay mute and helpless, but nonetheless frantically trying to communicate, had he actually looked stricken by her circumstances. In my mind I could still see the way he'd stood at the door as she squirmed and sputtered, unable to speak, but seized with a raw determination to make some final statement. I'd leaned down and put my ear to her lips, heard nothing but her feverish breathing until even that had ended and she sank into a coma from which she never awakened.

Now Warren was with me once again in a time of trial, and once again he was refusing to admit the nature of the problem or how grave it might be or yet become.

"So," Warren said, "I just wanted to tell you that it's going to be okay, Bro."

There was no point in arguing with him, so I said simply, "The police have already been here. Keith told them that he never left Amy's house and that he walked home alone."

Warren plopped into a lawn chair opposite the grill and folded his hands over his belly. "The police had to talk to him," he said. "But they wouldn't think he had anything to do with something bad."

There it was again, mindless optimism, my brother's particular form of adaptation. He'd found a way to survive by taking in only the information that kept him afloat. In high school, he'd played the happy fat boy. In adulthood, the role of jovial alcoholic had fit like a glove. Now he was playing the steady family adviser, a role that clearly pleased him until I said, "They'll probably talk to you, too."

Warren smiled, but with a hint of nervousness. "Me? Why would they talk to me? I'm not involved."

"Of course you are, Warren."

The faint smile now drooped. "How?"

"You drove Keith to Amy's house," I explained.

"So?"

"I'm just telling you that they know about it," I said. "They asked for your address. They have to talk to everybody, Warren. Anyone who had any contact with Amy in the hours before she disappeared."

Warren said nothing, but his mind was clearly working hard.

"Did you have any contact with her?" I asked evenly.

"I wouldn't call it ... contact."

"Did you see her?"

Warren didn't answer, but I knew from the look in his eyes that he had.

"Where was she?" I asked.

Warren's face grew very still. "She was in the yard when I let Keith out in front of the house. Playing. She came up to the car."

I leaned forward. "Listen to me," I said. "This is serious business. So I'll tell you what I told Keith. When the cops come to you, when they ask you questions, think before you answer. And tell the truth."

Warren nodded gently, obediently, like a child receiving grave instructions.

"Did you talk to Amy?" I asked.

Warren shook his head.

"Not even a quick hi?"

"I don't know," Warren said.

"Think, Warren."

He shrugged. "Maybe something like that, like what you said. You know, a quick hi."

"Nothing else?"

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes," Warren answered.

I could see that he was worried now, but I also knew that this worry wouldn't last, his momentary fretfulness precisely that—momentary. Or so I thought. But to my surprise the veil of trouble didn't lift from my brother's face.

"Do you think they suspect me?" he asked.

"Why would they suspect you?"

Warren shrugged. "I don't know," he said weakly. "Maybe they just do."

I shook my head. "They have no reason to suspect you, Warren," I assured him.

But the pained expression remained on his face, an expression that reminded me of the look on Meredith's face, and on Keith's, so that it seemed to me that trouble had fallen upon my family like a net, leaving all our faces webbed in gray. "Everybody's a little worried at the moment"—I placed my hand on his shoulder and gave it a brotherly squeeze—"but it's nothing," I said, "compared to what Vince and Karen must be going through. A missing daughter, can you imagine?"

Warren nodded. "Yeah," he said quietly. "Such an adorable little girl."

SEVEN

Here is the illusion—a normal day predicts a normal tomorrow and each day is not a brand-new spin of the wheel, our lives not lived at the whim of Lady Luck. And yet, now, when I recall the morning in question, a bright sunny morning, before that first ring of the phone, I see myself as living in a world that was almost entirely illusion. Then the phone rang and I heard Vince Giordano's voice, and suddenly the wheel stopped. Instead of falling on the number upon which I'd bet the full wealth and value of my life and which it had always landed on before, the red ball skirted past, made another circle around the wheel, and dropped into a very different slot. And like a gambler who'd won every spin before that moment, I stared, dazed, at the grim result of this latest turn of the wheel, and in my mind I set the wheel going backward, lifted the ball from the fateful slot, and sent it whirling back as if by sheer force of will it could be made to fall again where it had fallen so many times before. It was the afternoon of the day that Amy Giordano disappeared, but I refused to accept the fact that anything had changed.

And so, when I returned to the shop, I tried to appear normal, as if nothing were bothering me.

But Neil knew better. He attempted to hide it, but I often caught him glancing at me surreptitiously, as if I'd begun to manifest some curious symptom, a slight tremor in the hand, for example, or a peculiar tendency to stare into space.

"Something wrong, boss?" he asked finally.

By then the local radio stations had been reporting Amy's disappearance for several hours. People were searching her neighborhood, as well as more remote areas, particularly the woods that surrounded the subdivision where she lived. It was a big story, and so I knew that it was only a matter of time before the whole community would find out that Keith had been babysitting Amy the night of her disappearance.

"It's about Amy Giordano," I said. "Keith was at her house last night. Babysitting. The police spoke to him this morning."

The layer of jovial self mockery with which Neil presented himself dropped away. "I'm sure Keith didn't do anything wrong," he said. "Keith's very responsible."