The Boy Disappeared (excerpt)

    A long row of windows made up one wall of the newspaper office. That afternoon the room had been a blur of activity, as it usually was before early deadline, but everything came to an abrupt halt when the voice of the front desk receptionist, returning from the break room downstairs, pierced the cacophony of phones, printers, and overlapping conversations.
   “What’s he doing?” she shrieked. “What’s he doing?” First one person and then another abandoned their tasks and followed her gaze out through the windows to where a boy dressed in a light blue coat was creeping on all fours across the river ice, followed closely by his dog. He had a long stick and was tapping on the ice as he went. They saw him, but nobody could do a thing to stop him. Nobody had time. 
    Several people got up and ran to the windows. David moved as if by instinct, but now, in the warmth and comfort of his apartment, he felt shame to recall that his instinct was not to run outside and save the boy but rather to grab the notebook from off his desk. His first thought was that he was finally watching an accident, a news story as it occurred. The boy went further out, then still further, and someone, forgetting that the child could not hear him, shouted a warning. That had brought David back from his reverie and with a shudder he got up and ran for the door, hoping he could make it to the boy before the ice gave way.
   He hadn't gotten far, not even past the last in the long row of office windows. His gaze was fixed on the boy and he saw the ice jolt and begin to give way. The boy, his balance shifting awkwardly, cast a look over his shoulder, a look that washed over David with its raw fear. Then the ice collapsed neatly, as if cut from beneath with a sharp blade, and the boy disappeared.
   David was the first person to reach the river. He ran down the snow-packed embankment, his dress shoes sliding as he tried to pull up short at the river’s edge. There was no sign of the boy. Even if he had been visible, grasping at the rough lip of the hole in the ice, David could think of no way he might rescue him. The exposed rim showed the ice was too thin for a full-grown man to traverse.
   David felt a strange, placid feeling in the air, as though his ears were packed with cotton, as though the wind had ceased to blow and all traffic had stopped on the bridge above. Standing there, staring at the black opening where the boy had been crawling moments before, he noticed the lighted bank display across the river blinking 16°, 3:15, over and over. Then there were sounds behind him—other people from the newspaper office sliding down the embankment, someone calling to him. Two squad cars arrived from opposite directions, skidding across the snow as they came to a halt near the bank. A young officer he didn’t know emerged from one car and from the other came Janet Blake, the only female officer in the local force. She took charge quickly, sliding down the embankment and shouting as she approached David, asking what he had seen. He told her and they wasted no time laying themselves out on the ice in a human chain. One of the pressmen from the paper, a quiet old fellow named Rennett, had also joined them. Officer Blake, the lightest of the four, finally reached the hole and plunged her free arm in up to her shoulder. She groped furiously until she could no longer stand the cold and rolled back from the brink, her face a mask of pain.  
   In his mad dash outside, David had taken no coat with him and within minutes he was chilled to the bone. Reluctantly, he returned to the newsroom, but once inside, he realized he did not want to go back to the scene. He went to the bathroom, staying as long as he could, and emerged again, heading quietly to his desk, swiveling his chair so he sat with his back to the windows. He tapped at the keyboard occasionally, adding nonsense to the story he’d been working on before. That was when Lemke, the city editor, had descended on him.
   “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked David. Lemke’s shirts were always wrinkled and he smelled bad, as though he used the bitter office coffee for aftershave. He smoked heavily, too, and David could smell the stale odors as Lemke leaned over his shoulder to peruse the screen. “I thought I saw you down at the scene there. That’s your story, you know. You’re supposed to be down there right now.”
   “No, that’s not my story,” David said abruptly.
   “It damn well is yours, so you better get your coat and get back down there.” Lemke had come around the front of David’s desk now, resting his coffee cup on top of the computer monitor. David didn’t look up.
   “I’ve got one I’m working on,” David said. “It’s the one-car rollover on East Canyon Road. Besides, I still have the morning police reports to check downtown. I can’t get to it. Vacarro’s down there. Let him have it. He’s taking notes like a madman.”
   “Well you go down there and ask for his notes, then. I want to you cover this.” David didn’t reply. Lemke’s sour breath enveloped him, and he knew the man wasn’t going to give it up.
“Look, I’m not asking you,” Lemke said. “Don’t give me any shit about this. That’s your story, not Vacarro’s. He’s supposed to be at the city council meeting in a half-hour.”
   At that moment, David thought of standing up, taking his coat, and walking outside, not toward the river but toward the ratty bar across the street that he had always avoided—that everyone avoided, except the pressmen who had claimed it as theirs. It would be dark inside, and quiet, and he’d order a stiff drink, something that burned going down. From there he could watch the whole thing transpire and never have to ask a question of another anguished parent or friend of the victim. Lemke could fall through the ice, too, for all he cared. Maybe I ought to escort him out to the hole myself, he thought, and imagined taking the diminutive Lemke by the scruff of the neck, like a mewling kitten, and dropping him into the black.
   “I’m waiting,” Lemke said.
There was no use in resisting. He hated to admit it but Lemke was right. The boy, the hole in the ice, the red spin of the ambulance lights, these things were David’s domain. “OK,” David said. “OK. I’ll get Vacarro’s notes.” He rose, Lemke’s eyes boring into the back of his head, and made for the door.