Part 22
Part 22 of 27 of Eleven Years of Thursdays by Helen Abbott
There is no missing persons report for a man who died in 2014.
I found that out in a room at the district station on Third with a patrol sergeant who was patient with me for forty minutes and then stopped being patient, not out of unkindness but because I kept saying things that could not both be true.
“Ma’am, you’re telling me your brother is deceased.”
“He was declared deceased. He isn’t.”
“Do you have identification for him?”
“No.”
“Social?”
“It was closed out in 2015.”
“Is he under guardianship? Is there a court order?”
“No. He’s competent. His doctor says he’s competent.”
“Then he’s an adult who left his own apartment,” the sergeant said, “which is not against the law, and I can’t tell you any different.”
He did take the information down. He did put out something, I don’t know what, some internal note, and he told me to call the hospitals and he wrote down two shelter numbers on a Post-it and slid it over, and then he said, off the record, in a different voice: “Where would he go?”
And I said I didn’t know, and that was the true answer at eleven in the morning.
We looked all day. Tom took the west side, Patty called every shelter in three counties because that is a thing my aunt is genuinely excellent at, and Ray Kozak, seventy two years old, drove the riverfront and the underpasses on Patterson with his hazards on for five hours.
At seven fifteen that evening, coming back from nothing, I turned onto Kenwood out of habit.
I had been going to my mother’s house four times a week for six months. My hands did it without me.
He was standing across the street from the house, on the tree lawn in front of the Hendersons’, in eleven degrees, in a sweatshirt.
I stopped in the middle of the road. I left the car in the middle of the road with the door open, which is the second time in this story I have done that, and I did not touch him, because I understood at about six feet away that touching him would be a mistake.
“Danny.”
“They cut it down,” he said.
He was not looking at the house. He was looking at the corner of the yard where there is now a stump ground down flush and a circle of grass that has not quite taken.
“The silver maple,” I said. “Two years ago. It had the fungus, the whole crown was dead, it was going to come down on the Hendersons’ garage.”
“She never said.”
“I don’t think she”
“She wouldn’t have,” he said. “That’s not a thing she’d have thought to say.”
His lips were gray. He had been standing there, we worked out later, for something like three hours.
“I only wanted to see if it was still there,” my brother said. “That’s all I came for. I was going to come back.”
“Danny, we were moving you today. I was at the apartment at nine.”
“I know when you were there.”
And then he said the thing that reorganized the entire six months for me, the thing I have never told anybody except Tom and Dr. Feld.
“I’ve walked past this house forty or fifty times,” he said. “Eleven years. I’d come at night. I never knocked, I never went up the drive, I stood right here.” He put his hands under his arms. “And every single time I thought, if the tree’s still there then it’s still a house I’m from.”
He finally looked at me.
“And then I came today,” he said, “and it’s just a yard.”