Long lost

"We don't know for sure he told my mom."

"Then who did tell her, the goddamn tooth fairy?"

"All right, all right."

Petey had nearly bumped into me when I'd turned. I'd thought about that moment so often and so painfully that it was seared into my memory. He'd been short even for nine, and he'd looked even shorter because of his droopy jeans. His baseball glove had been too big for his hand.

"Sorry, Petey, you have to go home."

"But…"

"You're just too little. You'd hold up the game."

His eyes had glistened with the threat of tears.

To my later shame, I'd worried about what my friends would think if my kid brother started crying around them. "I mean it, Petey. Bug off. Go home. Watch cartoons or something."

His chin had quivered.

"Petey, I'm telling you, go. Scram. Get lost."

My friends had run toward where the other kids were choosing sides for the game. As I'd rushed to join them, I'd heard the clachclackdack of Petey's bike. I'd looked back toward where the little guy was pedaling away. His head was down.

Standing now by the bicycle rack, remembering how things had been, wishing with all my heart that I could return to that moment and tell my friends that they were jerks, that Petey was going to stay with me, I wept.

5

Unlike the baseball field, the house had changed a great deal. In fact, the whole street had. The trees were taller (to be expected), and there were more of them, as well as more shrubs and hedges. But those changes weren't what struck me. In my youth, the neighborhood had been all single-story ranch houses, modest homes for people who worked at the factory where my dad had been a foreman. But now second stories had been added to several of the houses, or rooms had been added to the back, taking away most of the rear yards. Both changes had occurred to the house I'd lived in. The front porch had been enclosed to add space to the living room. The freestanding single-car garage at the end of the driveway had been rebuilt into a double-car garage with stairs leading up to a room.

Parking across the street, seeing the red of the setting sun reflected off the house's windows, I was so startled by the change that I wondered if I'd made a mistake. Maybe I wasn't on the right street (but the sign had clearly said Locust) or maybe this wasn't the right house (but the number 108 was fixed vertically next to the front door, just as it had been in my youth). I felt absolutely no identification with the place. In my memory, I saw a different, simpler house, the one from which my dad and I had hurried that evening, scrambling into his car, rushing toward the baseball diamond in hopes of finding Petey loitering along the way.

A wary man from the property next door came out and frowned at me, as if to say, What are you staring at?

I put the car in gear. As I drove away, I noticed half a dozen for sale signs, remembering that in the old days everyone on the street had been so dependent on the furniture factory that no one had ever moved.

6

Mr. Faraday had thin lips and pinched cheeks. "My wife says your brother died or something?" "Yes."

"That's why you need the dental records? To identify him?" "He disappeared a long time ago. Now we might have found him."

"His body?" "Yes."

"Well, if it wasn't something important like that, I wouldn't go to the trouble." Faraday motioned me into the house. I heard a television from the living room as he opened a door halfway along the corridor to the kitchen. The quick impression I got was of excessive neatness, everything in its place, plastic covers on chair arms in the living room, pots on hooks in the kitchen, lids above them, everything arranged by size.

Cool air rose from the open cellar door. Faraday flicked a light switch and gestured for me to follow. Our descending footsteps thumped on sturdy wooden stairs.

I'd never seen a basement so carefully organized. It was filled with boxes stacked in rows that formed minicorridors, but there wasn't the slightest sense of clutter and chaos.

Two fans whirred: from dehumidifiers at each end of the basement.

"I can't get rid of the dampness down here," Faraday said. He took me along one of the minicorridors, turned left, and came to a corner, where he lifted boxes off a footlocker.

"What can I do to help?" I asked.

"Nothing. I don't want to get things mixed up."

He raised the lid on the locker, revealing bundles of documents. "My wife complains about all the stuff I save, but how do I know what I might need later on?" Faraday pointed toward a stack of boxes farther along. "All my tax returns." He pointed toward another stack of boxes. "The bills I've paid. And this stuff…" He indicated the documents in the locker. "My father's business records. The ones I could find, anyway." He sorted through the bundles and came up with a stack of file folders. "What was your brother's name?"

"Peter De

"De

I tried to keep my hand steady when I took it.

"What about these others? Do you want yours? Who are A

"My parents." I felt heavy in my chest. "Yes, if it's okay with you, I'll take them all."

"My wife'll be thrilled to see me getting rid of some of this stuff."

7

By the time I got back to the car, dusk had set in. I had to switch on the interior lights so I could see to search through Petey's file. No longer able to keep my hand from trembling, I pulled out a set of X rays. I'd never touched anything so valuable.

Back in Denver, when I'd gone to the dentist to get a copy of the X rays he'd taken of the man who claimed to be my brother, I'd made sure to get a duplicate set in case the FBI lost the ones I gave them or in case I needed copies in my search. Now I could barely wait to get to a motel. Driving to the outskirts of town, I picked the first one I saw that had a vacancy. After checking in, I rushed to my room, too hurried to bring everything from my car except my suitcase, which I yanked open, pulling out the X rays from Denver.

A child's teeth and an adult's have major differences, which made it difficult to tell if these X rays came from the same person. For one thing, when Petey had been kidnapped, some of his permanent teeth would not yet have grown in. But some of them would have, my dentist had said. Look at the roots, he'd said. On a particular tooth, are there three roots or four? Four are less common. Do the roots grow in any unusual directions?

With the adult's X rays in my left hand and the child's in my right, I held them up to my bedside lamp. But its shade blocked much of the illumination. I almost took off the shade before I thought of the bathroom and the bright lights that motels often have there. Hurrying past the bed, I found that this particular motel had a large mirror in front of a makeup area. When I jabbed the light switch, I blinked from the sudden glare above the mirror. After raising both sets of X rays to the fluorescent lights, I shifted my gaze quickly back and forth between them, desperate to find differences or similarities, frantic to learn the truth. The child's teeth looked so pathetically tiny. I imagined Petey's frightened helplessness as he was grabbed. The adult's. Whose were they? Slowly, I understood what I was looking at. As the implications swept over me, as the various pieces of information that I'd found began fitting into place, I lowered the X rays. I drooped my head. God help Kate and Jason, I prayed. God help us all.