Saturday, 11:10 p.m.
The psychiatrist on call was a woman about Jo’s age in a cardigan over scrubs, with her hair tied up in a yellow scarf and a mug that said WORLD’S OKAYEST AUNT. Her office was a converted exam room off the ER with a desk, two chairs, a box of tissues and a paper-towel dispenser nobody had taken off the wall. The badge said DR. IMANI PRICE, PSYCHIATRY.
“Mrs. Voss.” She didn’t get up. “The charge nurse says you want to talk about the hold on the patient in 412. The hold you asked for.”
“Yes.”
“At eleven at night.”
Price looked at her over the mug. “Sit down.”
Jo sat. She had driven forty-five minutes with the heater off to stay awake, and her hands were cold to the wrist, and she put them between her knees.
“He’s my son,” she said.
Price didn’t write anything down.
“His name is Toby Voss. He’s the boy on the posters. He went into a lava tube above Two Sisters Lake on August twenty-second, and he came out somewhere else, and he lived fifty-five years there, and on Wednesday he knocked on my door and asked for a glass of water.” She kept her voice level. She’d practiced it on the highway and it had come out worse every time, so she had stopped practicing. “He isn’t confused. He knows where he is and who I am and what year it is. He knows what his heart is doing. He wants to go home. I told the attending he was delusional because I wanted him to stay. Every word I said was true and none of it was honest.”
“Mrs. Voss—”
“I hid his boots. I told the sheriff I didn’t know him. I let them take his medicine.” She heard her voice go and brought it back. “He is my eight-year-old son. I’m the one you should be worried about. Not him.”
Price set the mug down on the desk. She looked at Jo for a while, not unkindly, the way Jo looked at a patient who swore they flossed.
“You understand what this sounds like,” Price said. “From my side of the desk. A mother whose child has been missing for two weeks tells the attending that a stranger believes he’s her son. Twelve hours later the same mother comes back at midnight and tells me he is her son. I have two options, and neither of them is that you’re right.”
Jo kept her hands between her knees.
“The sheriff’s office has a deputy in the hall.”
“I saw him.”
“He’s been there since nine. He tells me the sheriff wants to interview your—the patient at eight a.m.” Price turned a pen over in her fingers. “Do you know why?”
“She has a DNA result she can’t explain.”
“Can you explain it?”
“Yes,” Jo said. “You won’t like it.”
Price looked at her for another moment. Then she stood up, and took her badge off the desk and clipped it on.
“I’m going to talk to him,” she said. “Alone. You’re going to sit here and not follow me.”
◆
Jo sat there and didn’t follow her.
The clock on the wall over the paper towels was the kind with a second hand that jerked. She watched it for a minute and then made herself look at the floor, at the linoleum, which was the gray-flecked kind that was meant to hide dirt and didn’t.
At 11:40 she got up and went to the door and looked out. Deputy Haskins was sitting in a plastic chair outside 412 at the end of the hall with his hat on his knee and a coffee from the machine, in uniform, looking at his phone. He looked up. He saw her. He looked back at his phone, and then up again, and she saw him decide not to get up.
On Thursday he’d sat across a table from her son for two hours and asked him where he’d buried him.
She went back in and sat down.
Price came back at 12:04. She came in and shut the door and sat down behind the desk and picked up her mug and found it cold and put it down.
“Twenty minutes,” she said. “He asked me what my scarf was for. I told him. He told me it was a good color and that his wife would want to know what I dyed it with. He told me what day it is, what hospital he’s in, who the president is, and that his heart is failing and the cardiologist is probably right about it. He told me he knows he could die on the way. He told me he’d rather die on the way than live here.” She turned the pen over. “He was not confused about a single thing, Mrs. Voss. Except arithmetic. He told me he doesn’t do the math on purpose.”
“He also told me you’d been sitting by his bed since three, and that you’d have said all of this sooner if you could have. He said you’re not a liar. He said you’re a mom who goes quiet.” Price looked at her. “Those were his words.”
Jo held on to her own knees.
“I’ve been doing this eleven years,” Price said. “I’ve put holds on people who thought they were Jesus and people who thought the CIA was in their fillings.” She pulled a form across the desk and uncapped the pen. “He’s oriented times three and he knows exactly where he wants to go. I don’t lock people up for having a home I can’t find on a map.”
She signed it.
“The hold’s lifted,” she said. “It’ll take me half an hour of paperwork. Cardiology’s going to want to talk to him before he goes, and they’re going to scare you both, and they should.” She capped the pen. “And, Mrs. Voss.”
Jo waited.
“Whatever you’re about to do,” Price said. “Don’t do it alone.”
◆
At 12:15 she went down to the parking structure. The Subaru was on level three where she’d left it at 11:05, nose in against the concrete. The structure was empty and lit a hard orange and smelled like cold oil. Her footsteps came back to her off the ceiling.
She opened the hatch. She lifted the cargo floor.
They were where she’d put them Thursday morning at 7:30, curled around the donut spare, the left one against the rim and the right one folded over it, with Pip’s sand toys pushed into the corner. She took them out. They were cold and stiff from three days in the well, and the smell came up off them into the orange light, smoke and fat and that sour green under it, and for a second she was standing on the gravel at site 9 at five past five on Wednesday with the jay screaming.
She closed the hatch. She carried them back through the ER in both arms, past the triage desk and the man with the towel around his hand and the vending machine, and nobody stopped her. Up in 412 the sitter’s chair was empty now, the cocoa cup gone from beside it. She set the boots on the chair, side by side, heels together, and he looked at them from the bed and didn’t say anything.
◆
The on-call cardiologist was a tall young man with a Stanford lanyard and a shaving cut on his jaw, and he stood at the foot of the bed at 12:45 with a clipboard and told Toby, in plain words, what Feist had told him that morning in longer ones. The valve. The rhythm. Two days without his leaf before anybody gave him anything in its place, which was why he’d gone down in the lobby. Two broken ribs. Cold, exertion, a confined space. “Very likely fatal,” the young man said, and looked at Jo, and then back at Toby, because Toby was the patient.
“Okay,” Toby said.
“I can’t stop you. You understand that I’m strongly recommending you stay.”
“I understand.”
The young man wrote something. He looked at the IV in the back of Toby’s hand, and then he said, to the nurse and not to either of them, “Give him his twelve o’clock dose before you pull that,” and the nurse brought a paper cup with a small white pill in it, and Toby took it with a sip of the dead milkshake and made a face.
The AMA form was two pages. The nurse put it on the tray table on a clipboard, with a pen on a beaded chain, and showed him where. I am leaving against medical advice. The risks have been explained to me, including. He read all of it, holding it at arm’s length because he didn’t have Rob’s readers. Then he took the pen.
He drew a triangle first. Three quick lines, the corners closed, the way a man draws something he’s drawn ten thousand times. Then beside it, slowly, pressing hard, he printed his name. Big square capitals, each one separate, the O a careful circle that met itself at the top. TOBY. The letters took up the whole line. It was the name on the inside cover of his library books.
The nurse looked at it, and at him, and signed underneath as witness.
When the nurse had pulled the IV and gone, he was sitting on the edge of the bed in his own clothes. The nurse had helped him with them. The wool trousers, the oilcloth coat. The linen shirt had no buttons left on it since the lobby, and he’d pulled the coat closed over it. Rob’s old work boots were on the floor by his feet, the big scuffed Red Wings, with the laces trailing, where he’d been trying to get them on and had given up. He was gray around the mouth from trying.
Jo took the elk boots off the chair.
His hands went flat on his knees.
She put them on the floor in front of him. She pushed Rob’s Red Wings out of the way with her foot, under the bed. Then she knelt.
The linoleum was cold through her jeans. She took his right foot in its gray darned sock, and it was heavy, heavier than a foot had any right to be, and she held the boot open and worked it on over the heel. It went. She did the left. She pulled the tongues straight. Then she took the thongs, one in each hand, and crossed them, and started up.
They went through hooks, not eyelets. Bone hooks, she thought, or horn, sewn to the hide. She crossed and hooked and pulled, and crossed and hooked, up his shin, and when she got to the top of the left one her thumbs went down inside the collar to straighten the lining and found it. The ridge. Rows of it, tight, raised, running around the inside of the boot. She’d felt them in the dark in the garage on Thursday at four in the morning, eleven lines, and the last one short. She didn’t take her thumbs away. She held them there.
He was looking down at her. She didn’t look up.
She pulled the thongs tight and made the loops. Bunny ears. She had taught him on the front step at Larch Street the summer he was five, sitting behind him with her arms around him and her hands over his hands. Bunny ears, cross them over, one goes under, pull. He’d done it wrong all summer. Then one day he did it himself, and never let her do it for him again.
She crossed the loops over. She pulled them tight. Then she did it again.
“Double knot,” she said.
“Double knot,” he said.
She did the other boot. She sat back on her heels on the linoleum with her hands on her thighs. He put both his feet flat on the floor and looked at them.
He didn’t say thank you. She was glad.
◆
Rob came down the hall at 1:08 with Aurel beside him.
She had called him from the parking structure with the hatch up, and he’d picked up on the first ring as if he’d been sitting with the phone in his hand. Bring the kid, she’d said. St. Anne’s. Now. He hadn’t asked her anything. He’d hung up.
He was in his work coat, with sawdust still in the seams, and his face was the face from the lobby. Aurel was half a step behind him in a Voss Decks & Fence sweatshirt that came to his knuckles, and Rob’s carpenter’s pencil was behind his ear.
Behind both of them, twenty yards back, at the corner by the elevators, a deputy Jo didn’t know stopped walking and stood there with his thumbs in his belt.
Haskins got up out of his chair.
Aurel didn’t look at Haskins. He looked through the door of 412 at the old man on the edge of the bed in the boots, and said three or four words in Varran, low and fast. Toby answered him. Aurel came in and went down on one knee on the linoleum where Jo had been, and looked at the boots, and then said a longer run, dry and unhurried. Toby laughed, the bark, and it hurt him, and he put his hand on the back of Aurel’s head.
“What’d he say?” Rob said.
Toby looked at the boots. “He said Grandmother will know who tied those. He said they look like a child did it.”
“That’s a double knot,” Jo said.
“That’s what I told him.”
◆
Haskins stood in the doorway. He’d put his hat on.
“Mrs. Voss. Mr. Voss.” He looked at the old man in the boots and at the kid in the sweatshirt and back. “Sheriff wants him at eight.”
“The hold’s lifted,” Jo said. “Dr. Price signed it at twelve-forty. He signed out against medical advice at twelve fifty-eight. He’s not under arrest. He’s not charged with anything. The DA wouldn’t file on him. The sheriff let him walk out of her own building on Friday.”
Haskins opened his mouth and shut it. He took out his phone and walked five steps down the hall and stood with his back to them, talking low.
Rob came over to the bed and crouched, the way he crouched at a footing to look along it, and looked at the boots on his son’s feet, and at the knots.
Haskins came back. He put his phone in his breast pocket and buttoned the flap over it.
“She says go ahead,” he said. He didn’t look happy about it. “She says she’ll see you.”
◆
They went out through the ambulance bay at 1:15, because the front entrance had a TV van parked across from it with its mast down and somebody asleep in the driver’s seat. The bay doors opened on the cold. The air smelled of juniper and diesel. An ambulance sat dark with its back doors open and a medic on the bumper eating a sandwich, who watched them go by, the old man in the elk boots between Jo and Aurel with an arm over each of their shoulders, Rob behind carrying the white plastic PATIENT BELONGINGS bag with his own old Red Wings in it, which Aurel had fished out from under the bed.
Toby stopped twice between the bay and the Subaru. The second time he stood with his hands on the roof of a stranger’s Camry and breathed, and Jo stood beside him with two fingers in the groove of his wrist, and she didn’t say the number out loud and he didn’t ask.
Two cars. The Subaru, with Toby beside her in the passenger seat where he’d sat on Wednesday. Rob’s truck behind, with Aurel. The deputy’s car behind that, with its lights off.
◆
Tamarack Loop at 2:00 in the morning was dark except for Dee’s porch light, which was on.
Jo left the engine running. Toby stayed in the car. Behind her in the street Rob’s headlights went off, and then the deputy’s, farther back, at the corner.
Dee opened the door in the bathrobe before Jo had reached the top step. She’d been up. She had a mug in her hand and her reading glasses in her hair and the look on her face that she’d had at the bottom of her own porch steps on Wednesday, the one that made a thing hold still.
“You left,” Dee said. “You didn’t wake me. I came in to check on her at eleven and the front door was unlocked.”
Jo didn’t say anything.
Dee looked past her at the Subaru in the drive. At the shape in the passenger seat. At the truck in the street.
“No,” she said.
“I promised her goodbye.”
“Jo. No.” Dee set the mug down on the porch rail. “It’s two in the morning. You want to take a five-year-old out of her bed and put her in a car with a man who just walked out of a cardiac unit, and your ex-husband, and whoever that is in the truck, and go—where? Where are you going, Jo? Tell me where.”
“The Whistler.”
Dee stared at her.
“He’s Toby,” Jo said. “He’s going home. He’s going home tonight, and there’s a door up there, and it closes Tuesday, and his heart might not make it, and I promised her she could say goodbye to him and I’ve broken every other thing I promised her this week.” She came up the last step. “Look at me.”
Dee looked.
“You know my lying face,” Jo said. “You’ve known it since I was three. This isn’t it.”
The porch light buzzed. A moth hit it and fell and climbed back up. Dee stood with her hand on the rail beside the mug, and she looked at Jo’s face, all of it, the way she’d looked at the car on Wednesday, the way she’d looked at every bank statement and report card and lease agreement Jo had ever handed her. It took a long time. Jo let her.
Dee took her hand off the rail. She went into the house.
She was gone three minutes. When she came back she had Pip in her arms, asleep, wrapped in the blue fleece blanket off the back of the couch, with her rain boots on the right feet now and Captain Otter jammed under one arm and her mouth open against Dee’s shoulder. The purple unicorn backpack was hooked over Dee’s other wrist.
Dee put her into Jo’s arms. She was heavy and hot with sleep and she didn’t wake. She smelled of grape.
Dee put the backpack over Jo’s shoulder. She settled the strap. She took a corner of the blanket and tucked it in under Pip’s chin, hard, and held on to the corner for a second after it was tucked.
“Bring her back,” Dee said.
◆
Jo carried her down the steps and around the car. Toby had the back door open from inside, leaning between the seats, and he held the pink booster steady while she put Pip in it and did the buckle. Pip didn’t wake. Her head fell against the side wing of the seat, and Captain Otter slid down into her lap.
Toby stayed turned around in his seat, looking at her, with the belt cutting across his throat.
Jo got in. She backed out of Dee’s drive past Marcus’s boat under its tarp, and Rob’s headlights came on in the street behind her, and she went down Tamarack Loop toward the highway with the truck in her mirror.
At the corner, a car that had been parked at the curb with its lights off turned them on, and pulled out, and came after all of them.