Eighty-Seven Missed Calls

When I turned my phone back on after six days away, I had eighty-seven missed calls from my neighbor.

All from Beatrice Gable.

Beatrice was seventy-three and lived two houses down from me in Redwood Valley. She wasn’t the kind of person who called repeatedly. If my trash can blew into her driveway, she’d roll it back herself rather than bother me.

So eighty-seven calls made me pull my truck onto the shoulder.

I called her.

She answered before the first ring finished.

“Lucas?”

“Yeah. What’s wrong?”

There was a pause.

Then she said something I still can’t repeat without hearing exactly how her voice sounded.

“Your son has been staying at my house for six days.”

I gripped the steering wheel.

“What?”

“I can’t keep hiding him, Lucas.”

“Beatrice, I don’t have a son.”

She didn’t answer.

I looked through the windshield at the yellow agricultural plane parked beyond the hangar across the road.

Seven years earlier, my wife Claire and our two-year-old son, Toby, had died.

I had buried them both.

“Beatrice.”

“Just come home.”

I drove the remaining forty-three miles without stopping.

Beatrice was waiting on her porch when I pulled up.

She didn’t wave.

There was a child’s backpack sitting beside her front door.

It was faded blue, one strap repaired with black electrical tape.

I pointed at it.

“Whose is that?”

Beatrice opened the door.

“Come inside.”

“Whose backpack is that?”

She looked past me toward my truck.

“The boy’s.”

I followed her into the living room.

A kid was sitting on the far end of her couch.

He looked about nine.

Thin arms. Brown hair cut unevenly above his ears. Gray sweatshirt even though it was warm outside.

He had his shoes on.

That was the first thing I noticed.

He was indoors, sitting on a clean couch, and he still had his shoes tied tight.

He looked at me.

I stopped.

There are things people tell you that grief will preserve.

A voice.

A smell.

The shape of someone’s face.

It doesn’t.

Seven years changes memory.

I couldn’t look at that boy and say I recognized my two-year-old.

But his eyes bothered me.

Claire used to tell me Toby had my eyes.

I had always thought she was just being nice.

The boy reached beside him and picked up a folded piece of paper.

“He said you’d come back.”

“Who said that?”

He looked at Beatrice.

She took the paper and handed it to me.

The note was short.

Beatrice—

Please keep him with you until I get back. Don’t call anyone unless you have to.

Lucas

I read it twice.

Then a third time.

“Where did you get this?”

“It was in his backpack,” Beatrice said.

“This isn’t funny.”

“Do I look like I’m joking?”

I stared at the signature.

My signature.

Not close.

Not similar.

Mine.

The capital L leaned too far forward. The D in Drake never closed properly. Even the final stroke kicked upward the way mine did.

I looked at the boy.

“What’s your name?”

His fingers tightened around the cuff of his sweatshirt.

“Leo.”

Then he said:

“Sometimes.”

“Sometimes?”

“They called me Buddy before.”

Beatrice sat beside him.

“Tell Lucas the other name.”

The boy stared at the carpet.

I didn’t breathe.

Finally he whispered:

“Toby.”

The Boy in My House

The sheriff’s office got involved that afternoon.

So did county child services.

Nobody handed me a nine-year-old and said congratulations.

They photographed the note, took the backpack, asked Beatrice how the boy had arrived and asked me the same questions several different ways.

I understood why.

A grieving man claiming a strange child was his dead son wasn’t exactly something they could take on faith.

The boy couldn’t explain much either.

A woman had driven him to the end of Beatrice’s street six days earlier.

He didn’t know her name.

He had been told to walk to the green house with the white mailbox and give Beatrice the note.

“Why her?” an investigator asked.

The boy shrugged.

“They said she knew my dad.”

I was sitting across the room.

He didn’t look at me when he said dad.

Eventually I was allowed supervised contact while they worked on identification.

The first time they brought him to my house, he didn’t look at the photographs.

He looked at the doors.

Front door.

Kitchen door.

Sliding door to the back deck.

Then the windows.

He walked through the downstairs twice before sitting.

“Bathroom?”

I showed him.

He left the door cracked.

That evening I made spaghetti.

He ate half his plate and wrapped a piece of garlic bread in a napkin.

He slid it into the front pocket of his sweatshirt.

I pretended I hadn’t seen it.

Later I found another piece under the pillow in the guest room.

He slept fully dressed.

Jeans.

Sweatshirt.

Socks.

Shoes lined up beside the bed.

The bedroom door stayed open six inches.

I didn’t ask why.

On the third visit, I showed him an old photograph of Toby.

He barely looked at it.

“Do you remember this?”

“No.”

It was Toby sitting on my shoulders at a county fair.

Claire was behind us holding cotton candy.

The boy pointed at me.

“You look different.”

“I was thirty-four.”

“Your hair was darker.”

“Yeah.”

He studied the photograph again.

Then his finger moved toward the edge.

“Is that the yellow plane?”

I looked.

In the far background, barely visible behind a fence, was my old Air Tractor.

“Yeah.”

He nodded.

“The lady said you flew a yellow airplane over farms.”

I lowered the picture.

“What lady?”

“The one with the boxes.”

“What boxes?”

He shrugged.

“Paper boxes.”

I sat across from him.

“What did she look like?”

He picked at the napkin under his plate.

“Older.”

“Hair?”

“Brown. Then gray.”

“Did she tell you my name?”

He shook his head.

“She said my father sprayed fields from a yellow airplane.”

I owned one yellow airplane.

I’d flown agricultural jobs since my twenties.

That detail had never been in the newspaper coverage after the accident.

That night I called the investigator.

Then I called the lab.

I wanted DNA testing.

No assumptions.

No more guessing.

I wanted an answer.

The Signature I Never Wrote

While we waited, I pulled out everything I still had from 2019.

Claire had been driving north with Toby when her car left the road near a washed-out section of Highway 128.

The vehicle burned.

Claire was identified through dental records.

Toby wasn’t.

The official explanation had been simple enough at the time: his remains were too badly damaged for direct identification.

I had been thirty-four, barely sleeping and signing whatever people put in front of me.