The Great Forgetting Read online

  The screen switched to a shot of the Franklin Mills town hall, where Jack had attended middle school dances. That detective with the chop-top stood on the steps and addressed a few reporters. “Mr. Felter is wanted for questioning in the death of local resident Mark Brooks and the abduction of a teenage boy.” Cole’s class photo from Pencey, three years old, flashed on-screen. “We ask anyone who may have seen Felter or this boy to call the FBI immediately at the number listed below. Please do not attempt to apprehend Felter on your own. He may be armed and dangerous.”

  9 There was this funny show on the Food Network Sam used to watch, How to Boil Water, which taught you to cook even if you didn’t know where to start. In reality, Sam was amazed by how difficult it was to boil water. The problem was she needed a lot. Jack had only ever made enough for himself, day by day. Sam wanted gallons. She was going to set out to find Jack and she didn’t know how long she’d be on the road. And if they’d boiled their water, she was going to boil hers.

  She’d learned once, in some rudimentary physics class in high school, how long it took water to boil and how, when you increased the volume of water, that time increased exponentially. Something to do with calories of energy. It was too much time. She could feel her window of opportunity closing, threatening to separate her from Jack forever.

  In the end, she settled on four two-gallon pots on separate burners, cranked to high. Eight gallons didn’t seem like enough, but it would have to do.

  While they cooked, Sam rummaged in the basement for Tony’s Boy Scout backpack, a metal-framed contraption with space for a rolled sleeping bag on top. She scooped out the dead silverfish and filled the sack with a few items she thought might come in handy if, as Dr. Quick had suggested, Cole really was leading Jack to Alaska in search of a lost continent. She raided the Twinings tea tin behind the flour, where she kept the money that was supposed to go toward a new roof. A little over seven hundred dollars.

  When the water began to bubble she clicked off the burners and placed each pot next to an AC vent and waited for them to cool. An hour for eight lousy gallons of water.

  By the time the car was packed, it was dark and a half-moon was low on the edge of the world. The spring peepers were terribly loud that night. She wanted nothing more than to sit on her porch with Jack, listening to the frogs in the woods make love by starlight. She wanted to tell him that she was three days late and a little afraid.

  One more stop.

  The Driftwood was dead. Even the juke was silent. Shelly was washing pint glasses in the sink.

  Sam knocked on the bar with a bronze key held tight in one hand. Shelly came over wiping her hands on her jeans. “How’re you holdin’ up?”

  “Mmm,” said Sam with a shrug. She handed Shelly the key. “Going out of town for a bit. Can you collect the mail at Nostalgia while I’m gone? Keep an eye on the place? Thermostat’s wonky. Needs to be turned down at night.”

  Shelly nodded. “You coming back?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Hiya, Sam,” said a familiar voice.

  She turned to find Nils May slumped in a booth, back to the wall, his smelly sneakers resting on the vinyl seat cushion. He held a pint of Guinness against his gut. Sam walked to him. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a while.

  “Debbie turn you out?” she asked, meaning it as a joke, but she could tell she’d hit the nail on the head by the way the Viking’s eyes got all watery.

  “She’ll get over it,” he said. “But she’s meaner’n a coon in a cage when she wants to be. Goddamn, Sam. I didn’t even do nothin’ this time. Not that wasn’t right, anyhow.”

  “Give her some time.” She patted his hand, like petting a mastiff. “I gotta jet.”

  “Where you going?”

  “To find Jack. Try to, anyway.”

  Nils scooted to the end of the booth, set down his beer. He shook his head. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea. Not with the FBI after them. Did you see them swarming around the town hall this morning? Couple of ’em come in here about an hour ago, looking for food. Poor bastards.”

  “I’m done waiting.”

  “But where you going to look?”

  “The detective said something about Pymatuning. I’ll start there.”

  “What if Jack doesn’t want to be found right now? I mean, maybe he thinks you’re safer here.”

  “I don’t give a flying fuck what Jack thinks. And what if Jack is the one who needs help?”

  Nils started to say something, then shut his mouth. His cheeks flushed, but he clamped his jaw tight.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

  “Nothin’.”

  “Out with it.”

  He sighed.

  “Nils May,” she said, “you know something about this? You got that look on your face like you do when you call your wife and tell her you’re still making pizzas when you’re in here chugging wheat beer with your buddy Berman. I’m no dummy.”

  He put a finger to his lips, peering around to see if Shelly was eavesdropping. But she’d gone around to the kitchen.

  “Fuckin’ what?” said Sam.

  “I seen Jack last night,” he whispered. “Gave him my truck. That’s why Debbie’s so miffed.”

  Sam folded herself into the seat across from him. “I want to know everything you know. Everything.”

  10 After she put Paige to bed, Jean walked to the toolshed, where the Captain kept his rowboat. It was dark and there was no electricity out here, but Jean had a flashlight. She opened the door and stepped inside. The air was stale and heavy with the scent of petrified grass clippings. The cops had searched here, but not well. They would have never thought to look inside her dad’s rusty screwdriver anyhow.

  She found it hanging on the plywood wall where she’d left it. It was one of those screwdrivers you can unscrew, the kind with all the extra Phillips heads in the hollow body. Except, there were no extra Phillips heads in this one. Inside this screwdriver was a plastic baggie filled with green meth.

  Jean took it inside. She set it on the kitchen table. She sat and stared at it. Her whole body shook. Craving. This would take away her pain.

  * * *

  When Paige was three, she’d nearly choked to death on a crayon. Jean was tweaking at the time, so focused on peeling away the old wallpaper in the kitchen, bit by bit, so she could put up a new border, that she’d forgotten, just for a moment, that Paige was sitting on the floor, drawing with crayons. She felt a hand on her leg and looked down from the stepladder.

  Paige stared up at her with a purple face. Her mouth was open but no sound was coming out. From where she stood above her, Jean could see the end of a pale blue crayon lodged in her daughter’s windpipe.

  Jean jumped down and snatched up the little girl. She pounded Paige on the back. But that didn’t work. And so she tried to reach in for it. But she reached in too fast and pushed the crayon deeper. Jean screamed. But then Paige’s color came back. She was breathing. She’d swallowed it.

  Jean sank to the floor and gripped the girl tightly in her arms and cried. When Paige fell asleep for her morning nap, Jean made herself snort a spoon of the stuff Mark had left behind and then she lay down on the porch and waited for the Captain to find her. He needed to see her at her worst so she could never lie her way out of it again.

  * * *

  Jean wiped away a tear. That was a memory she could not afford to forget, even if this stuff promised relief. She walked the baggie all the way to Claytor Lake and then emptied its contents into the water.

  There were other ways to survive.

  11 “There’s dangerous men out there, Sam,” said Nils, jogging out the big oak door of the Driftwood after her. “People worse’n your dad and brother. You can’t go alone.”

  “I can take care of myself,” she said, climbing into her car.

  Nils kicked some gravel, then climbed into the passenger seat. “You never even been to Pymatuning. It’s empty country. Kind of plac
e serial killers hide out. All they got is serial killers and fishermen and you can’t tell those kind apart.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m coming with you, I guess. Debbie’s angry enough. Don’t matter if she’s a little madder, right? Can’t sleep at home tonight anyway.”

  Sam leaned over and kissed the Viking on his hairy cheek.

  “That’d make her terribly mad,” he said.

  In a moment, they were heading east at sixty-five miles an hour. Neither Nils nor Sam noticed the cruiser pull away from the bar and follow at a prudent distance.

  THREE

  A PENNY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS

  1 The plan, if that’s what you called a vague idea and wishes, was this: hang out by the elevators and wait for someone to come down from the thirteenth floor.

  Jack wanted to leave Cole and the Captain at the hotel, but the old man wasn’t having it. “Your mother, she had this habit of always asking me some stupid question during the best part of a movie,” he’d said. “Right when the action was picking up, she’d say some shit like, ‘I’m going to the store tomorrow, should I grab some prosciutto for homemades?’ No. Fuck that. You drag me all the way to New York, I’m going to see the action. Besides, I’m better in a pinch than you. You wouldn’t know what to do if things go south. You’re not a fighter. It’s my fault for letting you drop out of wrestling in fifth grade.”

  There was a wooden bench in the elevator alcove. Jack and the Captain waited there while Cole paced the wide, open lobby. The Captain read the Times while Jack watched the archaic dials above the doors, waiting for one to park in the empty space between twelve and fourteen.

  “We’re a blurb on page seven. Not even a picture,” the Captain said. Jack was unsure if he heard relief or disappointment in his father’s voice. Probably a little of both.

  By eleven, Jack was beginning to rethink their plan. Maybe they should try the stairs. His eyelids kept closing. Forcing them open again, Jack noticed elevator two had stopped in that special, empty space.

  How long had it been there? He suddenly couldn’t feel his body. Everything felt too cold. The arrow drifted down.

  “Here we go,” he said to the Captain, who was leaning against the granite wall with his eyes closed. The old man popped up, fully alert. His father had learned to catch z’s when he could, in the bush.

  Cole caught their movement and scurried over from his perch by one of the tall, narrow windows. “Which elevator?”

  “Number two.”

  The Captain shook his head and tried not to laugh. “You two flakes really break my heart. Can you look any more conspicuous? You, tie your shoe or something,” he said to Cole. “You, pretend you’re walking me out,” he said to Jack as he limped toward the revolving doors, feigning a bad back. Cole kneeled and untied his shoe, then worked on tying it again, slowly.

  The doors opened and a woman stepped out, heels clicking on the granite. She was roughly thirty-five, with shoulder-length hair that curled in dark ringlets. Gray suit, white tights. She carried a venti Starbucks and a briefcase with a Nu-Day logo on the side. Her face was stern, focused, but gentle somehow, as if she were thinking about a proposal she’d given that morning that had gone better than expected.

  She pulled ahead of them at the revolving doors. Outside, Jack stepped forward as she made to cross the street. He pushed a five-dollar flashlight into the small of the woman’s back. He tried to speak, but something caught in his throat and, instead, he coughed. She pulled away from him, mistaking his nudge for a bump by another rude pedestrian, but then Jack grabbed her arm with his free hand and pushed the flashlight into her spine.

  “Turn right and keep walking,” he said into her ear. “Understand?” The woman nodded and gripped her coffee tighter.

  He was nearly overwhelmed by a sense of stinging guilt. He thought of the nuns at St. Joe’s. If they could see him now. But he hadn’t asked to be here. He hadn’t asked for any of this.

  “I’m not gonna rape you,” he said.

  She walked where he directed her. He made to look like they were a couple, walking back to their room. Another minute and they were in the hotel elevator. When the doors shut, the woman looked to Cole and then the Captain. “What the hell do you want?” she asked them in a whisper.

  Jack slipped the flashlight back into his pocket. “I want you to tell us everything you know about the Great Forgetting.”

  2 Pymatuning was bigger than Sam had expected, a colossal man-made lake meandering around glacier-cut gullies. She and Nils came into the park near Black Jack Swamp, a parcel of dead trees sticking out of a smelly lagoon. They combed through parking lots by the marina, checking the dirt drives of summer cottages for Nils’s truck. By the time they reached the southern tip of the lake it was getting on past eight and they were forced to suspend the search to have breakfast at a greasy spoon in Jamestown. Sam was on her second cup of coffee when the park ranger walked through the door and took a seat at the counter next to a man in bibbed overalls.

  “Morning, Hadley,” said the man in the overalls.

  The ranger smiled back.

  “You hear I reeled in a snapper off the Snodgrass deck yesterday?”

  “Don’t eat the turtles, man,” the ranger said.

  “Ain’t never had turtle soup?”

  “I kept a pet turtle as a kid.”

  “I had a fish tank. I still eat fish.”

  “Fish is different.”

  Bib Overalls shrugged. “Some action up at the Gate House this morning,” he said.

  This piqued the ranger’s interest, Sam noticed. “What did you see?” he asked.

  “Couple a men come walking out at dawn, dressed to the nines. Gray suits. Ugly mothertruckers.”

  “Ugly, how?”

  “I don’t know. Just generally ugly. You think it’s really the NSA that owns it?”

  “That’s the story, morning glory,” the ranger quipped.

  “What do you think they’re doing out there?”

  “It’s above my pay grade. But it’s been busy, I’ll tell you what.”

  “That so?”

  The ranger nodded. “Saw some weirdo cruising the place last week. Guy from Franklin Mills everybody’s after now. You seen him on the news?”

  “The guy what took the boy and his old man? Get the fuck out.”

  A piece of over-medium egg stuck in Sam’s throat. She coughed it away and shot Nils a look.

  “Yup,” said the ranger. “Got a call from a detective yesterday, telling me to keep an eye out in case they return.”

  “Turn on the teevee, Linda!” Bib Overalls shouted. “Let’s see if they got this fella yet.”

  The waitress came around the counter and used a broom handle to switch on the small television suspended over the grill. Sam cringed, expecting to see Jack’s DMV picture on the news again. Except what they got was a picture of a large fire at sea, shot from some great height above the waves. The nose of a giant ship sank into the ocean as they watched.

  “Crank it up!” said Hadley.

  Linda got the broom and knocked it against a button a couple of times. A woman’s urgent voice spoke in a hushed tone: “… you’re seeing is the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, a floating station located in the Gulf of Mexico, forty miles off the Louisiana coast. According to Coast Guard officials, a transmission was intercepted from the cruise ship Nautilus at seven o’clock this morning. The message was relayed by a man with a thick accent who identified himself as Mohamed Atta, an Egyptian national. He claimed affiliation with an Islamic extremist group known as al-Qaeda. Shortly after the broadcast, the Nautilus veered off course and crashed into Deepwater Horizon. It is not yet known if the explosion was caused by ignited oil on the rig or if there were explosives on the cruise ship. Since the impact, there has been no contact with crew members or passengers. About five minutes ago, the Nautilus sank beneath the waves. Estimates put the death toll at nearly three thousand souls. In this clip, captured by New Orlean
s affiliate WLTV, you can see people leaping from the Nautilus moments before it is pulled underwater. A warning to viewers, the footage you are about to see is graphic and may be extremely disturbing to children.”

  Sam watched in awe with the rest of the diner patrons as the images played out. Waves churned up the sides of the sinking ship as passengers crawled across the forward railing. She could tell that one was a child. Maybe eight years old. One by one, they jumped before the waves crested. But they could not escape the great currents that gripped the Nautilus, the unforgiving fingers of Davy Jones tugging it to the briny deep. The camera held the spot until the whirlpool collapsed into itself and the ocean settled.

  “We’re being attacked!” shouted Overalls. “This is it, amigo. I told you. I told you we never should have pulled out of Iraq. We should have taken Saddam out while we could.”

  “She didn’t say nothin’ about Saddam,” said the ranger.

  “He’s behind it. You watch.”

  Over and over, the footage repeated. Three thousand people eaten by the vortex, as if they had been swallowed up into some other dimension. There was also footage of President Obama being pushed into Marine One by Secret Service agents, the helicopter waiting in some high school football field.

  “I can’t watch this,” said Sam.

  The waitress was glued to the set and didn’t appear interested in handing out checks. Nils put a twenty on the table and then they left.

  An attack like that changes everything, Sam thought. And yet it didn’t change anything for them. She still had to find Jack.

  3 The elevator doors opened and Jack pointed the woman to their room. Once inside, he directed her to a paisley occasional across from the bed. Cole locked the door behind them.