Empty Mile

CHAPTER 14

Between my father’s disappearance and Patterson’s last visit there had been days where Stan and I did nothing more than sit in the house waiting for news. But there had been days, too, when we could not bear to be alone with our thoughts. On these days we either went into town and walked ourselves to exhaustion delivering Plantasaurus fliers, or to the warehouse to tend to our stock of plants. And once each week we drove to the Slopes to maintain the displays at Jeremy Tripp’s house. In this way we put Plantasaurus into a holding pattern while we absorbed the absence of our father.

But the news that the police had reached the end of their inquiries was a turning point for us. We did not discuss it. We did not sit down and try to figure out what the right thing to do was. We simply started work in earnest the day after Patterson’s visit.

We got to our warehouse around ten that morning. We’d had around twenty responses to our fliers so far and I started calling people back and making appointments to see them. We took a guess at how many plants we might need over the coming month, on top of those that Bill had given Stan, and placed our first order with the wholesaler in Sacramento. In the afternoon we went into Oakridge and closed deals with three of the stores I’d contacted, then we went back to the warehouse and made up displays. It was a good day. We were occupied enough not to think too much and we had made definite progress with Plantasaurus.

In the evening Marla came to our house. She’d been over a number of times in the past weeks to cook for us and be supportive. That night she brought a bottle of wine and the three of us had dinner at the kitchen table with the back door open and the warm evening air drifting in. There were moths above us, softly battering themselves against the frosted glass of the ceiling light. Stan looked at them often as we ate.

“There’s a lot of moths, Johnny.”

“It’s the light.”

“I know, but there’s more than usual.”

“Do you think so?”

“I think it’s a message.”

“Really?”

“Because of Dad and Plantasaurus and everything.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We need power, Johnny, to make sure Plantasaurus works. They might be here to bring it across for us.”

“Dude, you’re freaking me out.”

“They might be magnets for power.”

“Stan-”

“They might be, Johnny, you don’t know.”

“They’re not magnets, they’re moths. They’re insects.”

Stan ignored me and lifted his hand toward the light. One of the moths, in the process of making a longer than usual loop, touched down on his finger and clung there for a second before continuing its mad orbit. For a long moment after that Stan looked as though he had discovered a wondrous secret.

That night he wore his Superman suit to bed. He made me open his windows and leave the light on.

“I wish there was a Mothman, Johnny, with moth powers and stuff. I could have one of his costumes.”

“What sort of powers would he have?”

“Walk upside down on the ceiling? Be able to fly?”

“Be a bit of a pain, though. Every time you went past a light you’d have to run into it.”

Stan rolled his eyes. On the way out of the room I turned the light off by reflex, but he called out and I went back and turned it on again. When I left this time he was staring at the bulb.

In the morning, after Marla had gone to work and Stan and I were still cranking up for the day, the mail came. Among the usual junk from supermarkets and electronics stores there was a single window envelope. I opened it while Stan was upstairs in the bathroom cleaning his teeth and combing Brylcreem through his hair. It was a form letter from one of the banks in town, addressed to my father, and it said that payment on the mortgage for the house was overdue.

Two things went through my mind in quick succession. First, that it must be a mistake. My father, as far as I knew, owed nothing on the house. The small life insurance policy when my mother died had enabled him to get enough of a jump on it to close out the debt a year or so before I returned to Oakridge. He’d told me so in an e-mail while I was in London. The second was the realization, whether the threat to the house was real or not, that I was now solely responsible for Stan, for the place he lived in, the food he ate, the clothes he wore… My father was no longer here to cover what it cost for him to survive in the world.

I called the bank and got an emergency slot with one of their customer service people that morning. Before Stan and I headed into town to keep the appointment I filled a cardboard folder with various papers-our copy of the missing persons report, my father’s bank account details, his passport, a statement by Detective Patterson attesting to his disappearance…

The bank was air-conditioned and the cubicle we were shown into had a small octagonal aquarium of goldfish in one corner. Stan and I sat on padded vinyl chairs across a low table from a bank guy who had a name plate clipped to his shirt pocket that said he was a loan officer and that his name was Peter.

I showed him the contents of my folder to prove I had a right to the information I was asking for and after he’d called Patterson to confirm things he spent a couple of minutes checking records on his computer. Stan sat very straight in his chair. Every so often he glanced worriedly over at me. His hand rested against the top of his thigh and beneath it he held a matchbox. I saw that he’d pushed it open a crack.

Peter looked up from his computer and spoke earnestly. “It’s true that at one point your father had paid off the house. But two months ago he remortgaged it in order to buy a piece of land at a place on the Swallow called Empty Mile. The house was the only collateral he had.”

“How much?”

“Two hundred and fifty thousand.”

“We owe two hundred and fifty thousand dollars?”

“Your father does.”

“But he’s disappeared, he might not even be alive anymore. How can you expect him to make payments on a loan?”

“We’re a bank, that’s what we do. We lend money on the expectation that it’s going to be paid back.”

“But that means we’re going to lose the house.”

“It’s brutal, I know.” He paused for a moment and softened a little. “In the final analysis all the bank cares about is that the debt gets serviced. It’s immaterial to us whether your father makes the payments or someone else does. This might be an option for you. Though you should know that he took this mortgage out over a much shorter period than usual-ten years. Possibly because of his age. The payments are proportionally higher as a result.”

“There is no way we can make payments whatever level they’re at. No way at all. We’ve just started a small business, we have virtually no income.”

“Do you have any assets?”

I was about to say no when I remembered that I was now technically the owner of the land at Empty Mile. I told Peter about the transfer of title.

He nodded and thought for a moment, then cleared his throat. “Okay. Given the situation with your father I’m sure we can put the payments on hold for a few weeks to give you some thinking room. But what it’s going to come down to is one of four options. You make the mortgage payments; you don’t make the payments and the bank forces a mortgagee sale of the house; you make payments until your father is officially declared dead and you can then legally sell the house yourself; or you sell the Empty Mile land and, if it realizes sufficient funds, you pay off the mortgage and keep the house.”

“Jesus.”

Stan reached over and tugged at my sleeve. “We gotta keep the house, Johnny.”

Peter made an unhappy face. “It’s a horrible situation. But unless your father reappears there really are only a set number of outcomes.”

He walked us to the bank’s front door. As it slid open he put his hand against the back of my shoulder.

“I’ll see what we can do about that freeze.”

And then Stan and I were outside on the sidewalk again in the sun and the heat with people passing by. Stan lifted the matchbox he was holding to his nose and breathed deeply.

“What’s that?”

“We don’t have enough power, Johnny.”

“Let me see.”

He handed over the box. I pushed it a little further open and saw two silvery-brown moths fluttering limply inside.

“Don’t be mad, Johnny, okay? Please?”

I closed the box and gave it back to him and we worked through another day at our plant business.