Buried Treasure. Jack B. Downs

      In a drawer in the sewing room were several of Maureen, smiling and holding James. There were also a couple of Maureen posed with James, David, and Sam. She was thin, with bobbed light brown hair, much like his, thick and well-mannered. The light had done a funny thing in the pictures. He couldn’t make out her eyes. That was pretty much how he pictured her. A woman in her twenties, before and after David disappeared, with a dark blur under her bangs where her eyes must be.

      Each year, James and he would receive a gift from her on their birthdays, along with a short note. Nana always said the same thing—“This came for you.”—and Dylan had followed his brother’s habit of opening the gift and note in private. Once he had asked James about the notes he got, and James had replied, “It’s always the same stupid ‘How are you? Miss you. Hope you like the book.’” James had never mentioned the notes, but Dylan had once seen the stack of them at the bottom of a desk drawer under a cigar box.

      No one ever said much about Maureen’s leaving, and David’s disappearance. Nana once, maybe fearing that Dylan would blame himself for his mother’s departure, tried to explain. But her words sounded like she was at the far end of a tunnel. He couldn’t make them into something he cared about.

      James mumbled something, his back still to them.

      “Sorry, son?” Nana responded.

      “Where is mom—where was she?”

      “Your mom was somewhere around Houston, Texas. I got a call from your father, from California. She got real sick, and she talked to your dad just days before she died. Then another man called your dad to say yes, Maureen Paxton had passed. She was only 39 years old.”

      Nana rocked, her face clouded. Dylan watched his grandmother out of the corner of his eye. For a second, she looked much older, like her neck had collapsed into her shoulders, and she was shrinking like the evil witch in the Wizard of Oz. He turned to her, startled, and she was normal again.

      A puzzled look crossed over her face. “She told your father she was sorry and wrong. Over and over. I think it really helped him. He sounds—so different now. I guess she finally healed up enough to see how other people must hurt about it too.”

      This last elicited a bitter snort from James.

      Nana patted Dylan’s hand. “I am sorry too. Sorry for her short, sad life. But she did accomplish some mighty good work.”

      “She did? Like what?” James turned for an instant. His face was twisted and deep red. Dylan swung his legs to coax the glider to move, and drained his glass.

      “Why, she made you of course.” Nana smiled, and bent to pour them more lemonade.

      Nana had another piece of news.

      “Your dad is coming home.”

      4 / Superman’s Rocket

      Seasons changed, but James’s life was still. In the place where his mother used to live, James had draped a dark shroud. Not a lifeless, droopy thing, but a breathing, expectant shadow. It pulsed with anger and hurt, and he stoked it like a furnace. For James, the world was forever tilted since that April morning.

      “My bike fell over. My bike fell over. Let me go. My bike fell over.” He chanted in a cadence to distract his father, who already was traveling to a different place on a ride without controls that was picking up speed.

      Mrs. Somers had been only too glad to let his dad use her phone. She’d set James down on her porch glider, trying to calm him. He remembered not breathing, and the hiccoughing terror, and snot pouring down his chin. James hadn’t understood what was wrong. But he sensed his father fleeing after the baby, and the screeching was his own voice. It lasted until his air was gone, then a viscous sucking. Dying. First his mother, waving goodbye, smiling, to live at bus. Then David. How did he climb from the buggy? And his father, eyes empty, licking the lips in a hollowed face. The sound of the sirens, piercing between his cries. His father stumbling off the porch and back across the street to stand beside the carriage.

      His father seemed to shred like Superman’s rocket from Krypton. Pieces of his dad flaming up in his own wake, ripping away. Two police cars arrived together. The first pulled up alongside his father, the second nosed to the bumper of the first. Four police heaved out of the cars, stepping slowly toward his dad, glancing down the empty street.

      “You Mr. Paxton?” That’s how it started. Before his father stopped answering questions, he was a broken and much older man, a pebble that finally dropped, spent and gray, to the surface of the earth. Superman blasted to tiny bits.

      His mother never looked at him again, not directly, not after David left. He understood David had been taken. Then he was furious at David for getting lost when James was naughty. David’s leaving made his mother leave, and then his father. James wanted to go where they’d gone, but he couldn’t find the way. Nana wanted to make him hers, and that would’ve been all right. But his father wanted it too, and James simply couldn’t bear it. He’d refused to leave his father, even when his father left him.

      Then there was another baby, and he was not alone. But he wanted his mother to come back, and his father to come back, so they would not be mad at him anymore. He waited, and he tended the anger and hurt that kept him from being ripped apart too.

      5 / Tale of a Fateful Trip

      Dylan picked his path up the sidewalk, avoiding the cracks. Lightning-bolt fissures caused by tree roots, shifting ground, freezing and thawing water. Dylan paced the same route daily. Patterns kept the world aright. He stopped and gazed up at the neat exterior of Nana’s home. The dormers looked like the hooded eyes of a friendly troll. The roofline of the porch was the troll’s crooked smile. All appeared normal, but there was a rumbling disquiet. He did not want to go in.

      His father had arrived Monday. Today was Thursday, when Nana went shopping with Mr. Thompson down to the A&P. It was the day when Dylan and James and Billy, and sometimes Ryan and Tink, watched Gilligan’s Island at four o’clock. But that was before. What would happen today?

      Before his father had arrived, Nana had told him “it” would take time. Dylan wanted to ask her what “it” was. What she had not said also made him uneasy. Nana didn’t say, “He’s coming to visit,” or “He’s coming to see you.” Dylan knew that Sam had lived here as a boy, and remembered Sam being here for a time after he and Maureen stopped being married. So this had been his home once. But was he coming home to stay?

      When Sam left, Dylan wondered where he had gone, and why, and if he was coming back. No one had told him, maybe because nobody knew. James was the only one who asked questions. But he asked with a boy’s wounded snarl, as if he already knew the answers. After a while, James would say, “Good riddance the bastard,” by way of opening and closing the book on his dad, anytime Dylan mentioned him. For his part, Dylan was sad, but he noticed that kids at school didn’t bother James about it the way they did Dylan.

      “Your mother and father just left you. What kind of parents just move away without you?” “With Dylan, his mom warn’t willin’. ”

      When he cried to James about the teasing, his brother said, “Act like it doesn’t matter. Kids’ll get bored, and find someone else to pick on about something else.” He wasn’t as good at it as James was.

      Dylan squared his shoulders and strode up to the front steps. His father nodded at him through the open window to the right of the door. Dylan gave a little wave and hopped the steps, two at a time.

      “Hi. Um.”

      “Hi. Your brother’s upstairs.”

      Dylan slipped his book bag off his shoulder. He patted Buster, who stood in greeting, tail wagging, then plopped back down sighing on the cool porch deck.

      His father cleared his throat. “Mother—Nana—is off to the store with Mr. Thompson. She was all morning in the back yard, still trying to call forth the dead. Rhododendrons, I mean.”

      Dylan nodded, looked back at the