Part 12
Part 12 of 27 of Eleven Years of Thursdays by Helen Abbott
I asked him about the lake in October, and he told me, and it took three Thursdays and it came out sideways, the way he told everything.
What happened, as best I can put it together, is this.
There were nine of them at a rented place on the water for a long weekend in August. He was nineteen and it had been coming on for eight or nine months and nobody had a name for it, including him. He had not slept properly in eleven days. He told me he could hear the refrigerator in the house from the end of the dock, which he said in the tone of a man reporting a fact and not a symptom.
Somewhere around one in the morning he went into the water off the dock. He says he doesn’t know why. I have decided to believe that, and I have also decided that I don’t need to know, and those are two separate decisions and I made them at different times.
He came up in the dark forty or fifty yards down, in the reeds, and he could hear them yelling on the dock, and he lay in the reeds and listened to his friends screaming his name.
“Why didn’t you answer,” I said.
“I was going to.”
“Danny.”
“I was going to,” he said. “And then I’d been in there a while, and it got to where answering was worse.”
He walked out through a soy field to a road and he got a ride from a man in a work van who did not ask a single question, which he said twice, which I think means it was the kindest thing anybody did for him that year.
And then it is eight months of nothing. Columbus. A shelter for a while, then not. He’ll talk about the weather that winter and he will not talk about anything else, and I have stopped asking.
In April of 2015 a hospital in Columbus had a young man with no ID and a hand injury they were interested in, two fingers that had healed badly a long time ago, and a social worker who did the work nobody pays her to do got a photograph in front of somebody who had seen a missing persons bulletin from Montgomery County.
They called the last number on the file. It was our house on Kenwood.
“Mom came and got you,” I said.
“She came.” He turned his mug a quarter turn. He does that. She did it too, on Patty’s porch, and neither of them ever knew. “She sat in the chair in the hall for two hours because they wouldn’t let her in yet. When they let her in she didn’t say anything for a long time, and then she said, okay.”
“Okay?”
“That’s what she said. Okay. Like she was picking me up from practice.” He almost smiled. “Then she went out to the parking lot and I watched her through the window and she screamed in her car for about ten minutes and then she fixed her face and came back in.”
I couldn’t get anything out for a second.
“Danny, in all that time, eight months, you never called.”
“I called.”
The radiator ticked.
“When,” I said.
“Christmas. From a gas station.” He was looking at the table. “Somebody picked up and I couldn’t get it out fast enough and they hung up on me.”
“Who picked up?”
And my brother, who had been dead for four months at that point as far as the state of Ohio was concerned, looked up at me with our father’s face and said, “Dad did.”