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Disappeared | Jul 25 2004

I’m on the phone with a client when my mother calls to tell me my brother has disappeared.

My mother is calling from a restaurant, she says. She’s outside a restaurant with my brother’s wife and his two girls. The police are looking for my brother. I ask my mother to hold while I end my other call.

When I return, my mother says that when they arrived at the restaurant, my brother went inside to see how long the wait would be. They were told a half hour, so my brother’s wife suggested they get sandwiches from WaWa.

WaWa is a convenience store, like a 7-11 or a Store 24.

My brother didn’t want to get sandwiches from WaWa. Instead he wanted to go to the restaurant. However my brother’s wife said that a half hour was a long time for the kids to wait and anyway it might be fun to get sandwiches.

At this point my brother got out of the car and walked away.

I ask my mother what she means by walked away.

I mean walked away, she says.

My mother looked in the drugstore for my brother and couldn’t find him. Then she looked in the restaurant, including the men’s room of all places, but my brother wasn’t there. This was more an hour ago and finally Michelle had no choice but to call the police.

Michelle is my brother’s wife. She’s a tax accountant.

Where the hell did he go? I ask.

We don’t know, says my mother. We weren’t watching. Jilly says he walked down the road.

Jilly is my brother’s youngest daughter. She’s almost three.

My mother says two policemen arrived five minutes ago, in separate cars, and one went off to look for my brother.

He’s fine, I say. He’s the most responsible person on the planet. He was upset and went for a walk. Maybe he got lost.

My mother says my brother doesn’t have anything with him—no keys or credit cards or money or ID—because he left his wallet in the car.

I ask my mother what Michelle is doing.

She’s talking to the police, she says. The girls are in the car, watching a movie.

I say I didn’t know you could watch a movie in their car.

They just bought a new one, says my mother. It has a VCR. The screen or monitor or whatever it’s called hangs down from the ceiling. The girls are watching Shrek.

Shrek is good, I say. It’s entertaining. This is the only thing I can think to say.

Then my mother says that the other police car has just returned and my brother is in the front seat, waving to them.

There he is, she says.

Thank fucking god, I say.

My mother says she’ll call me back as soon as she can and hangs up.

Three hours later the phone rings and it’s my mother again. She’s calling from the basement of my brother’s house. Everyone else is upstairs.

I ask why she’s calling from the basement. There’s nothing in the basement, I say.

I don’t want anyone to hear me, she says.

My mother tells me that no one is talking about what happened, except to say that Daddy went for a walk and got lost, which isn’t really what happened. Instead my brother was furious at his wife and stormed off. My mother knows this because my brother told her about it in the laundry room. My brother was upset because his wife wanted to get sandwiches from WaWa, which his wife knows he doesn’t like, and because he’d been having a horrible day and was looking forward to a nice dinner. So he left the car and walked away in anger, figuring his wife would come after him. He was certain she would do this. However when she didn’t do it, he became even more angry and decided to keep walking to spite her. At a certain point he realized she really wasn’t going to come after him no matter how far he walked, but he kept walking anyway. This part my brother couldn’t explain to my mother. Probably it can’t be explained.

I ask my mother how the girls are.

They’re fine, she says. They’re watching Shrek. Jilly likes the donkey, she says.