The End is Now Page 3

  Except the wedding.

  If the rapture really were going to happen (and of course it wasn’t), the thing he would be most upset about missing would be the wedding. He could see how beautiful and perfect and angelic Emily would look in her crystal white dress. He would be there with a handkerchief to wipe away her tears right before they walked down the aisle. He would say, “You look perfect, honey,” and she would hug him tight, maybe for the last time, as she said, “I love you Daddy.” The music would swell, all would stand, breathless, as they watched his little girl walk down the aisle. And he would grin from ear to ear with each step, feeling so proud, knowing that giving her away would be the bittersweet crowning achievement of being her father.

  “Hey Dad,” Emily said glancing toward Jeff as he walked through the door.

  “I’m home,” Jeff said.

  “Hello honey,” Amy said as she covered her hands with oven mitts and put the roast on the table. “How was your day?” she asked.

  “It was all right.”

  “Any sales?”

  “I have a couple of good leads. I’m hoping one or two of those will pan out tomorrow.”

  “Gotcha,” Amy said. “Emily, Will, come on, it’s time for dinner,” Amy said.

  “Roast for dinner again?” Emily asked as she took a seat.

  “Yes, roast for dinner. Where’s Will?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not his babysitter.”

  “What time is it?” Amy asked.

  Jeff checked his watch. “7:13.”

  Amy walked outside. Jeff followed.

  “I’d say it’s dark out, wouldn’t you?” Amy asked.

  “Pretty close.”

  “Will asked if he could go to Nate’s house. I told him yes but he had to be home before dark. He said he would. I said, ‘Do you promise?’ and he said, ‘Mom, I promise.’ Jeff, he’s got to learn some responsibility.”

  “Totally agree,” Jeff said.

  “You don’t think he’s hurt? Do you?”

  And then a flash came to Jeff: Will, listening to his iPod, singing along to whatever as he crossed the road at the exact wrong moment as teenagers were speeding by in a Cadillac. They’d slam on the brakes, but they’d be going too fast, and it’d be too late.

  The thought made Jeff sick. He wished he wouldn’t think like this. But fears often popped into Jeff’s head. Probably because at such an early age he learned how fragile life was. He learned that you could just be going along and then something could happen that could change everything. For Jeff it was going from being single and carefree — and then snap — a wife and a baby. It made Jeff wonder what other things could suddenly change without a moment’s notice. When he was driving he could picture his tire popping and the car flipping over and over. When Jeff was at work he could imagine Amy driving with Will and Emily in the car, someone drifting into their lane, and — BAM, the end — Jeff would be left alone to plan the funeral for his entire family.

  Sometimes the fears weren’t even realistic.

  Sometimes Jeff could see kidnappers or thieves in his house, his family tied to wooden chairs with coarse ropes and shotguns aimed at them. Other times he could see random ways his family could be harmed — Amy taking a bath and the hairdryer drops in, Will landing on the trampoline wrong and snapping his leg, Emily parked with some drunk jock pawing at her after home-coming. It would be easy to say how morbid Jeff was for thinking about such things. And Jeff would agree, it was morbid, and he didn’t want to dwell on things like this — in fact he didn’t dwell on them at all.

  They just kind of popped up. Like flashes. Quick. He’d shut his eyes and the image would be gone. The fear would still be there, for a moment, and he would tell himself there was nothing to worry about.

  He told himself and his wife there was nothing to worry about at that moment when he said, “Will’s fine. He got caught up playing at Nate’s and lost track of time.”

  “Well he’s got to learn his lesson.”

  Amy went back inside. Jeff walked into the kitchen to see her setting the table with the speed and determination of a pit crew.

  “Mom, what are you doing?” Emily asked.

  “We’re going to sit here and wait for your brother. He’s going to walk in and see us with the table set and the food on the table getting cold. He has to learn that there are other people in the world.”

  “Sure Mom,” Emily said.

  She was reading Cosmo. Seventeen’s got to be too young to be reading Cosmo. There’s some pretty grown up stuff in there, Jeff thought. In high school he used to read Cosmo with his friends after school. They thought it would teach them the secret to understanding women. And understanding women was the key to getting women. They took the quizzes as if studying for the bar exam. And tonight Emily was reading Cosmo. Which meant there were boys out there, somewhere, taking Cosmo quizzes to get Emily.

  “Put the magazine away, honey,” Amy said.

  Emily slid the magazine under her seat. Jeff grabbed a chair. Dinner looked great: baked potatoes in foil, green beans with bacon, sweet potatoes, fruit salad, and a roast in a Crock-Pot. Jeff hoped Will would get here soon. This was a lot of good-looking food just to waste on an object lesson.

  As if reading her father’s mind, Emily reached for the fruit salad.

  “What are you doing?” Amy asked.

  “I was going to get some fruit salad.”

  “Nobody eats until your brother gets here.”

  “But fruit salad’s already cold. What does it matter if it gets more cold?”

  “That’s not the point and you know it.”

  “Well, what are we supposed to do until he gets here?”

  “We wait,” Amy said.

  JEFF HENDERSON

  For the first half hour they were more annoyed than worried. A meal like this was meant to be eaten piping hot — if they didn’t eat it now, no microwave could ever make it taste the same. But as the steam evaporated, the concern started to rise. They didn’t say anything about it; they tried to talk about other things — things they would be talking about even if Will were with them. But Will knew what a big deal Monday night was to his father, he wouldn’t just ditch it; there was losing track of time, getting carried away with your friends, and then there was this.

  Amy snatched the phone from its charger and called Nate’s mother.

  “Hi Cindy. It’s Amy. Will’s not over at your place is he?”

  “No, he left at 6:15,” Cindy said.

  “6:15? But it’s 7:45.”

  Oh, please no, Jeff thought. His stomach was in a free fall. Jeff could suddenly see: Will’s face on milk cartons, search parties, sitting on plush chairs on a talk show and speaking about what it is like to be living with a missing son. Usually Jeff could push the fears and flashes away. But this was real. This was the type of evening that started normal and ended with a phone call from the police. Or even worse, the evening would never end, life would be split into two distinct moments: Before, when they were a normal, average, all-American family — and after, when every dinner for the rest of their lives would feel empty because Will’s empty chair would be an eerie, nauseating reminder of how simple and great things once were.

  “Yeah, no, I don’t know where else he could have stopped. He was supposed to come straight here,” Amy said and then listened. “Yeah, you betcha. I will.” She hung up.

  Jeff looked at his wife and said, “I’m going to find him.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Call the police,” Jeff shouted as he sprinted out the front door.

  Moments later Jeff was in his car with his brights flicked on, cruising the gravel road that was between his home and the Jacksons’ house. This was not the ideal night for Will to disappear. Clouds covered the moon like thin black sheets. It was nearly pitch black. There were no streetlights — any light from Goodland was too dim to make a difference. As Jeff drove down the road, the headlights cut through the dark, but only for a bit,
and only right in front of Jeff’s car. Will could be right outside of the headlights’ reach, passed out and hurt, and Jeff could drive right by. It was difficult to concentrate with so much at stake. Because something was wrong. That wasn’t even the issue anymore. The only question now was, how wrong were things? Jeff needed to think straight, to get creative and aggressive if he was going to find his son.

  The clock was ticking. But that’s when Jeff was at his best.

  He popped the trunk, ran to the back of the car, and took the flares and flashlights out of his emergency kit. He opened up the first-aid kit: gauze strips, Neosporin, Band-Aids. He could help a minor injury, but if it was something major — no time to think about that. He threw the kit in the backseat of the car. He flicked his headlights to bright, he rolled up the passenger window, bracing a flashlight between it and the car door, and he held a flare out the driver’s side window. Probably wasn’t a safe thing to do, as if that mattered right now.

  He drove slowly down the road yelling Will’s name over and over. For a second he wondered if he should be saying something more. Should he be asking, where are you? Or, are you okay? But that was nonsense. There was no need to be creative. It wasn’t as if Will wouldn’t come running to his dad because he couldn’t quite understand what his father was asking. It wasn’t as if Will would think, Oh, sorry Dad, I thought you meant the other Will.

  Jeff scanned to the right, the left, and right again. His car was a lighthouse, shining in every direction at once, giving him the largest possible radius to find his son. Assuming he was stranded on the side of the road. And if that were the case, it was possible another car would have driven by and seen him. He would have been taken somewhere. They would have received a phone call, and he would be at the hospital with Amy at least knowing what happened.

  No, he wasn’t on the side of the road. Which left three possible things that could have happened: (1) He ran away; (2) He’d been kidnapped; or (3) He’d used the cornfields as a shortcut. Jeff knew Will had done it before. Will thought he could get away with it and no one would notice. And maybe Amy didn’t notice, but Jeff could tell when Will took the shortcut. But he never said anything because boys will be boys and there’s no harm in that. He’d probably cut through those fields a hundred times.

  Only this time something went wrong.

  Jeff supposed there was a distant fourth possibility, which was that many people in town, including his son, had been raptured and his family had all been left behind. The apocalypse had begun. Jeff felt embarrassed for even thinking that. The rapture wasn’t going to happen. It was just some quaint old legend. He was certain. He was almost certain. But on a night like tonight, anything felt possible.

  Jeff ripped the flashlight out of the car window and marched into the cornfields. There were large stalks everywhere; they’d never seemed that tall before, but tonight they were towering over him. After twenty steps his car seemed well out of reach, and he suddenly understood why Fred Johnson was so adamant that kids stayed out of his cornfields. It really would be easy for any kid to get lost in here. Heck, it’d be easy for Jeff to get lost in here. How embarrassing would —

  you just turn around

  — that be? Still, turning back —

  is your best option; he’s probably not even in here

  — was out of the question. Will could be hurt, his leg could be broken, and he could be screaming for help. What was Jeff going to do, wait for sunlight? Not a chance. He would do whatever it took to find his son. But then, as if mocking his resolve, his flashlight burned out. If it was pitch black before, there was nothing to describe what it was now.

  Jeff hurried back to his car, tripping over cornstalks and getting back up. He was obsessed now. One cornstalk twisted his ankle, badly, and Jeff couldn’t feel the pain. He knew the pain was there, but it was more of an idea. He could feel the blood rushing to his ankle as it ballooned, but it was distant, as if it were happening to someone else. The adrenaline wouldn’t let him think about anything but the search.

  He rummaged through his trunk for the next three minutes: books and golf clubs and tennis rackets and sneakers and tire irons and flip-flops.

  God, Jeff, why is your trunk so filthy?

  He could almost hear his mother’s voice saying, This is what happens when you don’t stay organized. Your boy is out there dying and you can’t save him because you never bothered to keep your trunk clean.

  Okay, so no D batteries in the trunk. Or if they were there he didn’t have time to find them. But he knew where the flares were. He was always paranoid about breaking down on the side of the road whenever they took trips to visit Amy’s mother in Manhattan (Kansas) and so he always had his trunk packed with supplies to help in an emergency. He grabbed three flares, stuck them in the back pockets of his Dockers, and cracked another one open. The flare’s crimson light danced all over his face as he headed back into the cornfields, and he almost made it until he heard —

  “You go out there alone and we’ll have two missing persons we’re looking for.”

  Jeff turned around holding the flare. And he saw Mike. “I’m looking for Will,” Jeff said. Mike was in uniform, the lights of his squad car were flashing, and Jeff hadn’t even noticed. There was nothing he could think about but the fields.

  “Amy called it in, said you’d be out here.”

  “Well, I’m going to look for him.”

  “With a flare?”

  “It’s all I got.”

  “I called the boys back at the station, they’re getting some fellas together right now. We’ll get organized and comb through this field in twenty minutes. We’ll find your boy in no time.”

  But how could Jeff just wait when Will was out there? Was he really supposed to just sit on the side of the road while his son was hurting and lost in the cornfield? Still, he couldn’t just rummage through the cornfield alone with a busted up ankle and a flare.

  There was nothing to do but wait.

  Jeff leaned against the squad car and tied his shoe as tight as he could so his ankle wouldn’t swell anymore. Mike leaned against the squad car next to him. When Jeff finished tying his shoe the two stood there in the dead silence for a moment. What was there to say? After a minute, maybe two, Mike lit a cigarette.

  “So,” Mike said.

  “So,” Jeff answered.

  “How are things at Hansley?” Mike asked.

  “They’re picking up. I’ve got a couple of good leads.”

  “That’s good to hear.”

  “Yeah,” Jeff said. He always felt awkward talking about work with Mike. Even when there were much bigger things to think about — like a missing and/or critically wounded family member — Jeff still felt uneasy about this subject.

  He’d been best friends with Mike for twenty years. Or maybe he’d been best friends with Mike twenty years ago. They had both been on the baseball team, Jeff the lefty pitcher and Mike the catcher, and they both planned on going to college together. But when Jeff got Amy pregnant everything changed. Emily was Jeff’s own mini-apocalypse. After she was born he started to drift apart from Mike and the other guys in high school. Jeff was always working on odd jobs and Mike decided to go to the police academy. Mike saw how much Jeff was struggling with work and tried to convince him to join the force. “There’s a steady salary, full benefits, retirement plan, and you get to make a difference,” Mike said with bright eyes and a hopeful tone in his voice. Jeff didn’t know how to tell Mike he didn’t want to make a difference. And if he did want to make a difference he didn’t want to do it by handing out speeding tickets.

  So, whenever work came up, Jeff tried to steer the conversation elsewhere. Tonight he did so by saying, “How’s the remodeling of the basement going?”

  “Great. We’re installing a projector in the basement. It’ll project in HD. We’ll have you guys over once it’s finished. We’ll barbeque and watch a Royals game.”

  “For sure,” Jeff said. But he wasn’t thinking for sure
. He was thinking Will loves the Royals. How could he ever watch a Royals game again if his son was dead? What else out there would be daily reminders of his little boy?

  Then, thankfully, other squad cars started pulling up. He’d never been so happy to see flashing red and blue lights.

  Once the search party assembled outside the cornfields, Jeff thought they had a pretty decent group. There were deputies with search dogs. There were friends, co-workers like Kevin from Hansley Auto, and Fred Johnson himself even came out. His help would be invaluable; he knew the fields backwards and forwards.

  Mike, the senior officer on duty, made a plan for the search party. They would fan out in groups of two, but stay well within earshot of each other, and thoroughly comb through each section of the field. When one section of the field was complete, they would go on to the next. Mike gave each one of the teams a flare gun and instructed everyone to fire a shot in the air the second they found the boy. Finally, Mike had one of the deputies call the paramedics. They should be on standby. Just in case.

  Mike’s final instruction was, “Okay men, Jeff’s boy is out there. He needs us. Let’s not waste anymore time.” At that the search party fanned out and marched into the field, focused and determined. But again, Jeff barely made it into the field when his flashlight burned out.

  “You have got to be kidding me. Again?”

  “Again what?” Sam the deputy asked.

  “My bulb burned out.”

  At that, flash, Sam’s light was out.

  “What’s going on, Jeff?”

  Jeff didn’t have time to answer. He could see the other’s lights, and one at a time, like dominos falling, they burned out. A chorus of “hey,” “what happened,” and “my light just died” swirled around him. He grabbed a flare out of his back pocket and cracked it open. “Come on,” Jeff said to Sam. They found the closest group. “Here’s a flare,” Jeff said. “Use this, find the other groups, and guide them out of here. It’s dangerous in the dark and we don’t need anyone getting hurt. I’ll head east and do the same.”