We Are Unprepared

I was sure that I didn’t know what she meant, but I nodded my head like our problems were all about the same.

“Anyhow,” she went on, “I got a friend who runs a fancy bar on Martha’s Vineyard, and as soon as I have enough savings, I’m going to meet her there. I figure it will be like a working vacation.”

She walked away to check on the other guy and I puzzled over the idea that someone could be stuck, financially marooned in our town. This was a side of Isole I hadn’t experienced much of since moving there: the real locals. There are pockets of immense wealth and worldliness in northern Vermont, but the state wasn’t built on those people; they’re just interlopers in its history. At its core, Vermont is defined by tough, industrious people who live modestly and know the land intimately, even if they no longer make their living from it. They prize independence and privacy over any allegiance to a nation or political identity, and they resent the ceaseless push by outsiders to transform the state to a socialist utopia. (I knew such generalizations made me seem like a patronizing asshole, but the locals had their own generalizations for me, too; it was how we made sense of our cohabitation.) Pia’s prepper meeting was a funny mix of the old and new Vermont, I realized, though it wasn’t a flattering light for either camp.

The clock above the bar struck eight, so I paid and thanked the bartender for her wisdom, which sounded stupid as soon as I said it out loud. I just wanted to get out of there before the prepper meeting ended, and Pia and her new friends made their way to Polly’s. It seemed important that this nameless bartender never find out that I had been at that meeting. Plus I was concerned about how angry Pia might be.

I walked back in the cool air and waited in the car as people streamed out of the Elks Club and said their goodbyes. Some were laughing as they emerged, but there was a seriousness to the whole enterprise. That was perhaps the part that bothered me the most. On its own, preparing for disaster was inarguably a wise thing to do. And if Pia hadn’t dragged me to that meeting, I would probably have regarded those people as nonthreatening curiosities. But Pia was always searching for religion. When she was a vegan, she emptied our fridge of all my favorite foods; and when she was a performance artist, she announced that she needed to be surrounded exclusively by creative people; and when she was a political activist, she accused her parents of being fascists.

Then there was the time that she actually did find religion, when she decided that we should be Buddhists. It involved a lot of Tibetan prayer flags in our apartment and mercifully little else. Her zeal was always genuine, but she lacked the conviction to see any of it through. And, inevitably, her avocations failed to deliver on whatever promise she thought they held. I regarded all of these phases as the hobbies of a passionate artist seeking purpose. They gave her focus, briefly, and a frenzied sort of pleasure. It wasn’t a placid existence, but it was interesting.

This particular hobby, though, seemed more morbid. Her new friends weren’t the ethereal waifs she used to bring home from tantric yoga class. (Weirdos are always harder to spot when they’re bendy and beautiful.) No, this was darker and stranger. And maybe I knew it appealed to something frightened inside her, a part of her that I never fully understood. I wanted to believe this was out of character, but somewhere in my brain I knew that wasn’t true.

The passenger door opened violently.

“We can go now. Are you happy?” Pia said, dropping into her seat like a child.

I looked at her in disbelief. “No, I’m not happy at all, Pia. I’m annoyed and a little freaked-out about the meeting you just tricked me into. What was that about?”

She shook her head in disbelief. “It was about seeing the truth, Ash.”

And with that, our fight was under way. I didn’t bother trying to reason or even argue; I just drove and let her fume. She pinned her hair up and took it down again, making the faintest huffing sounds to herself. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of an argument. My plan was to just get home, open a bottle of wine and, after she’d consumed most of it alone on the couch, feel her groggily fall into bed beside me. That was how it was supposed to go.

But when we got home, Pia wasn’t interested in wine or the couch. She sat down at the kitchen table and pulled out her little book of lists and nonsense. The handwriting was wild—alternately big and sharp and then small and controlled. She was making notes in the margins in a tiny new cursive style.

“You can go to bed, or do whatever you do,” Pia said without looking up.

Whatever I did wasn’t such a mystery, really. Unlike my wife, I was predictable, boring even. When it was warm outside, I would drink one or two Otter Creek Ales on the porch with a book until I got tired enough to pad upstairs to our bedroom. Pia would join me outside sometimes and we’d talk about all our plans for life in Vermont. And on the rare night of marital discord, we would just give each other space to ride out our anger privately. It was comforting to know that the parameters of our conflict had been set.

What I wanted to do at that moment was storm into another room and watch cable television loudly, but that wasn’t an option. I missed ESPN and the foggy passivity that only mindless TV can enable. But Pia said that it would be “counterproductive” for us to get cable in our Vermont life. And, even though we had it in Brooklyn, thanks to a spliced wire from a neighbor, she felt that we didn’t really have it have it. We didn’t pay for it and, most important, we had an Argentinean tapestry draped over the shameful box when it wasn’t in use—like it didn’t exist at all! This always struck me as comically pretentious, but in truth, I’d adopted enough of these pretensions by then to go along with her. So the tapestry and its dirty secret followed us to Vermont, but our only option on that night was fuzzy network news.

I decided instead to sit on the porch with a wool blanket and a book about bird migrations of North America. The temperature had cooled to the low sixties, finally, but the sounds of summer weren’t completely gone yet, which was disorienting. I could hear the unmistakable call of an American bullfrog—a rare treat anytime, but unheard of in late September. When we were little, my older sister and I used to go for walks down our dirt road in bare feet, collecting any living thing we could find in buckets. It was red salamanders mostly, sometimes dozens if we went out on the right day, but wood frogs and bullfrogs on occasion, too. They were hard to contain, so if one of us was lucky enough to capture a bullfrog, we’d stop everything to consult my pocket guide to amphibians before letting the terrified thing go again. I thought about digging around for that old book, but instead I rocked on the porch swing until I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer.

FOUR (#ulink_bc7d8661-beca-51b1-bb78-fdffaf602fe2)

“ASH, OPEN UP!” Bang, bang, bang. “Are you in there, Ash?”

I pushed my laptop aside and jumped off the couch for the front door. When I opened it, the first thing I saw was August’s mother standing before me. She wore a knitted red cap over long gray hair and a terrified look in her eyes. This was the closest I had ever been to her and I could smell something on her that reminded me of dorm-room incense.

“August is missing!” she said. “Do you know where he is?”

My stomach jumped as I worked to take in the scene before me. It was late afternoon on a cool, windy day. August’s father stood a few steps behind the mother. I couldn’t remember either of their names, so I wasn’t sure how to address them. He was thinner and sadder, but they could have been siblings, they looked so much alike to me.

“No, I don’t,” I sputtered. “How long has he been gone? Wait, let me get my shoes.”

I stepped outside again with sneakers and a light jacket. This time I noticed a short, round, middle-aged woman with a nice face standing in the driveway. Despite the cool air, she wore a large T-shirt with a picture of an amusement park on it. She was moving her cell phone around, trying to find a signal. I had a hard time focusing on the scene before me as panic took hold of my body. Pia had left early that morning, still angry about our fight the night before, and I wished that she was there with me.

“What’s going on? What happened?” I asked the group.

The new lady put her phone in her pocket and stepped toward me. “August has been gone since last night. He does this—wanders off sometimes—but this is a long one, even for him.” She glanced to her left at August’s parents and planted a lingering look of disapproval on each of them. “He goes into the woods. We need to get in there and fan out.”

“Have you called the cops?” I asked.

August’s mother stiffened. She hated that idea.

My stomach turned over and over on itself.

“They’re already in there,” the lady said, nodding at the woods behind me. “We have to get going, too.” She pointed at August’s parents now. “You guys go to the east. I’ll pair up with Ash and we can go to the west. Go on.”

August’s parents walked away quickly and obediently. They didn’t look confident in their ability to brave the woods alone, but this woman wanted to be alone with me for some reason.

“I’m Bev.” She put her hand out for a quick, joyless shake. “I’m the social worker. August says you’re his friend, so let’s talk.”

I nodded and we walked toward the woods with impatient strides.

“I don’t understand what’s going on,” I said.

“As you’ve probably figured out—” Bev was walking ahead of me and pumping her arms “—August’s parents are not up to the job. His father has paralyzing depression, which leaves him near comatose most of the day. And his mother is so panicked about the father that she barely notices the poor kid. I shouldn’t be telling you any of this, but I know he looks up to you and I need another set of eyes on him. They abuse prescription drugs in front of him and can’t be bothered to keep a damn thing in the fridge. They’re not monsters. They love him. But they’re selfish and irresponsible and getting worse all the time. I first started coming around here a year ago when August’s ‘treks’ started. That’s what he calls it when he goes off into the woods. He always has some important mission or something in mind and just takes off with a backpack. But it’s usually just for four to maybe six hours. Once, it was eight. But he has never been out overnight and this is just... These goddamn people... I’m sorry. I’m mostly mad at myself. I should have removed him months ago.”

My toe caught on a root and I nearly fell over as I tried to wrap my head around what she was saying. “He’s been out here overnight? What could have happened to him? What does he do out here? We’ll find him, I’m sure.”

“I don’t know. I think we will. August is a real adventurer, but he’s not stupid. This is really bad, Ash.”

“Wait, you said ‘remove him.’ Are you going to take him away from his parents?”

She shook her head, still walking quickly ahead of me, and said, “Forget that for now. Let’s just find him. We have to just find him.”

My head was spinning now, on top of my churning stomach. August had been out there all night long. I tried to imagine him smiling, sitting at the base of a tree with a piece of beef jerky in hand, talking to a chipmunk. But I couldn’t hold on to the cheerful image. Unwanted pictures kept flashing before me: August, shivering in the dark; August, injured and crying; August, facedown in the fall leaves. The feeling was unbearable, like no other concern I’d ever felt. That wasn’t even the word for it: concern. It was heartsickness and desperation—and I had known August for only a few months. I wondered how his parents were feeling at that moment. Desperation mixed with guilt. Those motherfuckers. I felt guilty now, too, for not seeing it all sooner. All of a sudden, I wanted to find them and push them into the forest floor, make them stay there all night. Whatever happens to them will be deserved, I thought. But August, we have to find August. Stay focused.

“Ash? Ash!” Bev was right beside me, yelling to break through my nightmarish thoughts.

“What?”

“You look pale. Are you okay? I need you to stay with me here.”

I rubbed my face with my hands. “Yeah, I’m okay. Should we be shouting his name? Let’s do that.”

“Yes, okay,” Bev said. She seemed at least as frightened as I was, but not as confused. Bev had seen families like this, cases like this, no doubt. She was probably fighting back her own images of what had become of August, but hers would be more vivid and plausible because she’d seen it all before, I imagined.

We watched our feet as we walked along the uneven forest floor, veering close to each other and then back out again. I shouted August’s name, loud and hoarse. It hardly sounded like my own voice and I wondered if the boy would recognize me if he heard it from afar. As I walked, I had a strange realization that this was the longest I’d gone in weeks without thinking of The Storms. The weather seemed insignificant all of a sudden. And then it didn’t. What if the weather changed tomorrow, before we find August, and he’s trapped out here without a coat? What if the cloud cover gets so bad that he can’t use the sun for direction and time? This was fear compounded by fear.

I wanted to ask Bev how this works. How long do we look and what clues can we search for and where were the police... But we just kept going. Step, step, shout. Step, step, shout. After an hour, I excused myself to pee behind a large tree and check my phone, hoping to see a message from Pia. I wanted to tell her what was going on and ask her to join me. This was too hard without her. She would be a help and a comfort. But she hadn’t called. As far as she knew, this was still a normal day in which she could stay mad for hours and wander back when the feeling faded.

I sent her a text: August is missing. Please come home. I’m sorry for everything.

Within seconds, she responded: I can be there in twenty. That’s horrible.

I felt a small, unsatisfying flash of relief as I pushed my phone into the back pocket of my jeans, but then I was back in reality, looking for my lost seven-year-old friend. He was my friend. That was the word, I suppose. Or was I his mentor? His surrogate big brother? It wasn’t the sort of friendship I’d had before, but I wasn’t a parent, so what else could I have been?