The Dream Thieves

But Adam wasn’t there. It turned out that Adam wasn’t anywhere.

He was not in the onion-scented kitchen or the brick-floored library or the small, moldy mudroom. Not stretched on the stiff sofas in the formal living room, nor the voluminous corner couches in the casual family room. He was not holed up in the basement bar nor wandering in the humid garden outside.

Gansey replayed the argument from the night before. It felt worse this time around.

“I can’t find Adam,” Gansey told Helen. She’d been dozing in an armchair in the upstairs study, but when she saw his face, she sat up without complaint.

“Does he have a cell phone?” Helen asked.

Gansey shook his head and said, in a smaller voice, “We fought.” He didn’t want to have to explain further.

Helen nodded. He didn’t say anything else.

She helped him look in the trickier places: the cars in the garage, the attic crawlspace, the rooftop patio on the east wing.

There was no place for him to have gone. This wasn’t a walking neighborhood; the closest coffee shop or retail area or congregation of women in yoga pants was three miles away, accessed by busy four- and six-lane Northern Virginia streets. They were two hours from Henrietta by car.

He had to be here, but he wasn’t.

The entire day felt imaginary: the Camaro news this morning, Adam lost this afternoon. This wasn’t happening.

“Dick,” Helen said, “do you have any ideas?”

“He doesn’t disappear,” Gansey replied.

“Don’t panic.”

“I’m not panicking.”

Helen looked at her brother. “Yes, you are.”

He called Ronan (Pick up, pick up, for once pick up) and he called 300 Fox Way (Is Blue there? No? Has Adam — Coca-Cola T-shirt — called?)

After that, it was no longer only Gansey and Helen. It was Gansey and Helen, Mr. Gansey and Mrs. Gansey, Margo the housekeeper and Delano the neighborhood gateman. It was a discreet call placed to Richard Gansey II’s friend at the police department. It was evening plans silently shunted aside. It was a small force of private vehicles canvassing the nearby shaded streets and crowded shopping districts.

His father drove a ’59 Tatra, a Czech specimen rumored to have once belonged to Fidel Castro, while Gansey cradled his phone in the passenger seat. Despite the air-conditioning, his palms sweated. The true Gansey huddled deep inside his body so that he could keep his face composed.

He left. He left. He left.

At seven p.m., as the thunderheads began to build over the suburbs and as Richard Gansey II once more circled the beautiful, green streets of Georgetown, Gansey’s phone rang — an unfamiliar Northern Virginia number.

He snatched it up. “Hello?”

“Gansey?”

And with that, relief melted through him, liquefying his joints. “Jesus, Adam.”

Gansey’s father was looking at him, so he nodded, once. Immediately, his father started looking for a place to pull over.

“I couldn’t remember your number,” Adam said miserably. He was trying so hard to make his voice sound ordinary that it sounded dreadful. He either didn’t or couldn’t suppress his Henrietta accent.

It’s going to be all right.

“Where are you?”

“I don’t know.” Then, a little quieter, to someone else, “Where am I?”

The phone was passed to the other person; Gansey heard the sound of cars rushing by in the background. A woman’s voice asked, “Hello? Are you a friend of this kid?”

“Yes.”

The woman on the other end of the phone explained how she and her husband had stopped by the side of the interstate. “It looked like there was a body. No one else was stopping. Are you close by? Can you come get him? We’re near exit seven on 395 south.”

Gansey’s mind shifted abruptly to adjust his image of Adam’s surroundings. They had been nowhere close. It hadn’t even occurred to him to look that far away.

Richard Gansey II had overheard. “That’s south of the Pentagon! That’s got to be fifteen miles from here.”

Gansey pointed to the road, but his father was already checking the traffic to make a U-turn. When he turned, the evening sun suddenly came full in the windshield, blinding both of them momentarily. As one, they both threw up a hand to block the light.

“We’re coming,” Gansey told the phone.

It’s going to be all right.

“He might need a doctor.”

“Is he hurt?”

The woman paused. “I don’t know.”

But it wasn’t all right. Adam said absolutely nothing to Gansey. Not while curled in the backseat of the car. Not while sitting at the kitchen table as Margo brought him coffee. Not after standing by the sofa with the phone clutched to his ear, talking to a doctor, one of the Ganseys’ old family friends.

Nothing.

He’d always been able to fight for so much longer than anyone else.

Finally, he stood in front of Gansey’s parents, chin lifted but eyes faraway, and said, “I’m very sorry for all the trouble.”

Later, he fell asleep sitting up on the end of that same sofa. Without any particular discussion, the Gansey family in its entirety moved the conversation to the upstairs study, out of earshot. Although several engagements had been canceled and Helen had missed a flight to Colorado that evening, no one had mentioned the inconvenience. And they never would. It was the Gansey way.

“What did the doctor call it?” Mrs. Gansey asked, sitting in the armchair Helen had slept in earlier. In the green light through the verdant lampshade beside her, she looked like Helen, which was to say she looked like Gansey, and also to say she looked a little bit like her husband. All of the Ganseys sort of looked like one another, like a dog that begins to look like its owner, or vice versa.

“Transient global amnesia,” Helen replied. She had listened to the phone conversation and following discussion with great interest. Helen very much enjoyed climbing down into other people’s lives and muddling about there with a pail and a shovel and possibly one of those old-fashioned striped bathing suits with the legs and arms. “Two- to six-hour episodes. Can’t remember anything past the last minute. But the victims — that was Foz’s word, not mine — apparently know they’re losing time while it’s happening.”

“That sounds dreadful,” said Mrs. Gansey. “Does it get worse?”

Helen doodled on the desk blotter with a two-inch pencil. “Apparently not. Some people only have one episode. Some people get them all the time, like migraines.”