Chapter 9: Echoing Footfalls, Best Laid Plains_________________________________
Present.
AFTER I’D PICKED UP MY MOM AND PUT HER TO BED, I set myself up in the converted home office that stood just past the living room. The room was equipped with a cheap plywood desk, an old desktop computer that had been purchased sometime in 2008, several notebooks, pens, pencils, and a series of framed motivational posters my mom had suspended on the walls immediately after I’d moved out almost seven years ago.
The tingling numbness that occupied my brain after brunch had faded by this point, fully replaced by my concern over what Kylie told me about Skylar’s house. She’d described an “absolute shithole”, and one that looked abandoned for that matter. According to her, there was little evidence that Skylar’s dog was still on the premises--unless he was dead. My mind wasn’t willing to fly through that grim headspace just yet, but, as I sat down at the desk and took out a notebook and pen, I admitted to myself that there were things that needed to be worked out immediately.
I had precious little to go on as far as Skylar’s current status was concerned, but it was becoming obvious to me that something fucked up was at work. I wrote down each of the things I’d discovered since I launched my little investigation two days prior, mainly as an exercise in justifying the feeling of Skylar-related anxiety that, like a bad guest, had stuck around too long. Now, I was wondering what the next step should be.
I’d floated the possibility of contacting the cops to Kylie but quickly retracted it. For some reason, it seemed too early to do that. In spite of my good sense, I felt loyal to the idea of maintaining Skylar’s privacy for the time being because I knew just how important it was to him. I worried that filing a missing person’s report would call things about him into question that he would never forgive, particularly if something was going on in his life that he wanted to keep quiet.
The truth was that Skylar hid a great deal about his life from his family and friends. I never really knew how much. He was an elusive person even at the best of times and you either respected that or you simply weren’t his friend. I’d chosen the latter option and watched many people walk out of his life because they wanted more than he was equipped to give them. They couldn’t understand how a person got to be that way. Truth be told I didn’t understand fully either, but I knew it had a lot to do with how he was raised. If you listened to him closely, you realized that he was always talking about you and not himself. He didn’t hang pictures of his family and had all but cut off contact with the group of friends we’d formed in high school.Everyone thought they knew what he was up to because he was memorable and would mention his work in public from time to time, but almost nobody knew anything about his private life beyond little details he seemed to share for the sake of appearances.
Almost nobody, I should correct, but me.
Though I was sure that I was overstepping the bounds of our lifelong closeness, I knew at this point that there was only one group of people that I needed to talk to: Skylar’s family. They lived several blocks down from me and though he never let on to anyone that they even existed--most people thought Skylar was an only child and only knew he had parents because someone had to have given birth to him and fed him throughout our pre-collegiate life--the truth was that they’d lived in the same place for nineteen years. Moreover, I knew, based on the periods of time I’d lived with Skylar or stayed with him, that he chatted with his mother at least every so often and confided certain details about his life to her that he didn’t share with anyone else. Namely, he talked to her about his future plans, how he was feeling, what he was reading, and, most importantly at the moment, his financial situation.
Money was important to Skylar and, typically, when he seemed stressed out--as he had for a while before what I was now calling his disappearance--it was because money had been the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. Everything else, Skylar seemed to handle on an even keel; it was when money was introduced as a problem that I found Skylar would act erratically. I remember how he’d pace back and forth during our lean days in freshman year, trying to figure out how he’d come up with a large sum of money for rent or some other expense he was falling short of. He always seemed to figure it out--but to see him before he did even made me sweat.
I stood up from the desk and headed padded lightly toward the door, hoping to sneak out without disturbing Robert the Beagle, whose separation anxiety would have him howling relentlessly. His howling--annoying though it was--was not the problem I was trying to avoid. I just knew that if he woke my mom, she’d want to start talking again and, given that it had to be some time around 2 PM by this point, I knew I wouldn’t be able to escape her any sooner than nightfall if she started drunkenly blabbing now.
Even with the jingling of my keys and the relative heaviness of my footfall--I confess that I wear a size eleven shoe, which my mom describes as “outrageous for a woman”--I was able to get out of the house with Robert so much as making a peep. Instead of driving, which would likely have alerted the dog’s attention, I decided to walk to my next destination. I’d willfully avoided considering the implications of my actions and decided that, this afternoon, I’d be paying Skylar’s mother a visit.