Ever since Mathew went missing, it was either solemn silence or violent outbursts between me and her.
He was our son. The one thing in this world we were supposed to protect with every ounce of strength in our bodies, only for him to disappear right below our noses.
We used to hike as a family, head up to the trails and get away from the city. It was grounding. Tantalizing, almost. Picnicking, taking dips in whatever stream or river we could find, feeling Mother Nature embrace us in her arms.
Hell, I still remember the hike we went on the day everything happened. The day our lives crumbled around us.
March 16th, 2006.
The air was starting to warm up again here in the south. Trees had started blossoming again. The sun felt actually inviting rather than ironic.
Mathew was 6 at the time. His mother and I had planned an entire day out for our journey, packing water, soda, sandwiches, and each of our favorite snacks.
Things were going smoothly until about a half-mile into the hike. My wife had to use the bathroom, and she made sure that me and Mathew knew it, complaining every 100 steps or so.
It got to a breaking point when her complaints began to carry anger within them.
“Can you just stop for one second?” she snapped, glaring at the two of us.
“Woah, there, honey,” I replied, as gently as possible. “No need to get upset, we’ll stop. Here, I’ll just stay here with Matt, you go do your business.”
We stepped a few feet off the trail, and me and Mathew leaned up against a boulder in the forest while his mom went behind a distant tree to do her thing.
I noticed that the forest was quieter than usual. Not even a single chirp of a bird. In hindsight, that should’ve been a dead giveaway, but in the moment all I could think about was just how beautiful the weather was. Not a single cloud in the sky. Just a bright blue canvas that looked almost too perfect.
While we waited, the two of us teased a bit, poking fun at how, even though she had tried to put distance between us, we could still hear the trickle of pee hitting the leaves.
We went back and forth until a new sound, the snapping of a twig, choked the laughter in our throats. That’s all it took. The brief moment it took for me to turn my head, and he was gone.
I thought he was playing a prank at first, hiding behind the rock, waiting to jump out and scare me. I called his name once, twice, three times, and was met with that same unnatural silence.
As if to taunt me, right on the brink of my panic attack, the forest exploded. Leaves rustling, twigs snapping, and footsteps. Fast ones that erupted through the brush at a breakneck speed.
My wife came running back when she heard my shouts, appearing to be panicking herself, even though she didn’t even know what had happened yet. It wasn’t long before she noticed Mathew’s absence, though. They were the first words out of her mouth.
“Where’s Mathew?”
No response.
“Honey, where did Mathew go? Did he have to pee too?”
I’m crying now.
“Donavin, where is our son?”
There are few questions that could break a man in half, but this one, this one destroyed me.
I didn’t know how to answer her. All I could do was stammer through an explanation.
“He-he… he was right here…”
“I looked away for one second.”
“I don’t know where he went.”
There are a multitude of things that made my wife blame me for what happened this day, but I think that last sentence is what really drove home her newfound hatred of me.
We didn’t have time to dwell on that now, though. My wife didn’t even wait for the last word to leave my mouth before she was darting off through the woods.
The two of us must’ve searched an entire 5-mile radius before the sun went down, and another 5 before it rose again the next morning.
With a search team, there wasn’t a single part of that forest that hadn’t been searched. And through all that looking, all that we found of my boy was his left sneaker.
The laces were untied, and that made my heart shatter in a way that I can’t explain. I just pictured him out there, alone and barefoot.
It was nothing but emptiness between my wife and I from that day forward. I wanted our love to continue, but she had checked out entirely. We were both alone in the same rooms.
I think what kept us together were the search efforts. In some sort of twisted way, it was like a hobby for us to search the woods, to pin up posters, to maintain hope.
I swear it was like we were being toyed with every time we went back to that forest. Maybe it was just our minds breaking. Maybe we really were hearing our son call for us just beyond our reach. Maybe that’s what kept us there.
Illusion can only take you so far, though, and after years of enduring that illusion, I think both of our tanks were running on empty. That’s probably why the arguments started.
We argued before, but now those spats had teeth. Personal. Ugly. Marriage-ending spats.
We never tried for another child. It felt like betrayal. Like we were abandoning the old for something new.
Mathew was gone. There was nothing left for us. Each fight brought us closer and closer to the thread we had been hanging from for the last year.
So when last night’s argument began, I knew that thread had been severed.
Instead of the usual screaming match, we just agreed with each other. Agreed that we had reached the end. There was a calmness around us. Not a good calm. The kind of calm that comes right before the explosion of sound. And I wasn’t gonna be around for that bang.
So I left, unsure of what to do.
Though I’d been sober for 8 years at this point, I found it extraordinarily difficult to resist the buried urge.
I can’t even say it was by luck that I came across my son’s missing person poster on the way to the local bar. Maybe in some alternate reality I would’ve taken a different path, walked past a store I’d never seen before. But the truth is, I’d walked this route a thousand times, watched my son’s face get replaced by advertisements and missing pets.
That’s the thing, though. It had been covered up, buried beneath years’ worth of replacements. I cannot think of a feasible reason as to why it was in that storefront window, looking freshly printed.
I stopped walking, freezing in place at the sight.
“Have you seen me?”
The words felt like a challenge. I was sick of things taunting me, sick of feeling alone, sick of feeling blamed, and sick of not having my Goddamn son.
I didn’t need to be piss drunk to find the will to go back to that forest. The fire that burned inside me was enough to get me there and push me forward into the trees.
I felt swallowed by the tall pines, a feeling that I had become far too familiar with over the last 20 years.
My knees ached. My heart raced. I felt tired. I wasn’t the man I was the year my son went missing. I was 48 years old at this point. I’d slowed down. Life had beaten a lot out of me, but not everything, and I used that little pinch of energy I had left to put my everything into one final search.
With nothing but the flashlight on my phone to guide me, I searched like a madman. It was as though I had rediscovered the same adrenaline and restlessness I had on the day it happened.
I didn’t even keep track of time. It felt like every second that passed was a second that brought me closer to my sweet Mathew. All I knew was look. Look harder than you have in your life.
That’s the funniest part, or cruelest, depending on how you look at it.
I was so entranced that it was by sheer accident that I stumbled upon that rock. That lone boulder in the woods. I could replay the scene in my head perfectly.
My wife walking deeper into the woods. Me and Mathew giggling with each other. Up until this point, I figured the forest was silent due to the fact that it was night time. But now, I was thinking something else. Something darker.
I’d been in these woods thousands of times since he went missing. Never once had it been silent. And now that I was thinking about it, I realized that it wasn’t even silent at night.
This silence was an omen. A calm before a storm.
As if to punctuate my thoughts, once again, the forest erupted with noise. It’s a weird feeling when your already racing heart drops into your stomach. I didn’t know whether to pass out or start running.
What froze me in my tracks, however, is when the sounds of the forest morphed into something. Something foreign to the forest, but deeply familiar to me.
It was like his voice surrounded me, encircled me from every corner of the woods.
“Daddy.”
“Help me, Daddy.”
“Daddy, I wanna go home.”
“Please, Daddy.”
The voices were off. It was like there was no emotion behind them, just flat pleas. Nevertheless, it had me spinning in circles.
And then, just as suddenly as it had started, the voices stopped. The woods fell silent again. The only sound that I could hear was the snapping of a twig behind me.
I turned slowly at first, afraid of what my eyes would show me the moment I turned around. However, when I heard my son’s voice from directly behind me, it had me breaking my neck to look.
“Look at me, Daddy,” announced in that same monotone voice.
And there he was.
My sweet, sweet boy. My beautiful baby Mathew. Missing a shoe. Smiling at me with that same snaggletooth smile.
I scooped him up in my arms. I could finally feel him again. But what I felt didn’t feel like how I remembered.
There was no warmth in his stiff body. It didn’t even feel like he wanted to hug me. His arms lay limply on my back as I squeezed him.
I put 20 years of pain and suffering into that hug, and all I could feel was emptiness.
“Come back with me, Daddy,” Mathew croaked. “I want you to meet my new family.”
Setting my son back down on the ground, I looked him in his eyes as he spoke to me about this new family. As I did so, I don’t know if it’s due to the fact that it was dark or if it was just my mind playing tricks on me, but Mathew’s eyes looked pitch black.
“We’ve all been waiting so long for you to find us, Daddy.”
“You finally did it.”
“We can all be together now.”
With a cold, limp hand, my son grabbed me by mine and began tugging me deeper into the forest. With each step, it seemed like a new pair of footsteps joined us, keeping their distance from us as they stomped through the fallen leaves and pine cones.
All I could do was follow him.
I’d waited 20 years for this moment.
Comments