About half an hour later, Dan’s phone buzzed. He snatched it from the coffee table as if it were a bomb about to go off — which it was close to being, metaphorically. His fingers were shaking so badly that it took a few tries before he could successfully open the text message.
“What’s it say?” Jean asked timidly.
Dan pored over the message for another small eternity. The suspense was so thick that Thomas, who was munching on his fourth Eggo waffle, would have felt justified in grabbing the phone from his brother-in-law and reading the message himself. Glancing at his parents, it looked like they felt the same way.
Finally, Dan replied: “It says, quote, I need to spread my wings. I’ll be in touch. Don’t worry about me, end quote.” Before anyone could comment on this, the phone was sailing through the air towards the wall. Thomas expected an electronic explosion, with chips, wires, and cracked plastic flying everywhere, but nothing of the sort occurred. The phone was as tough as a brick, and it thumped loudly against the wall and fell to the hardwood floor, apparently unharmed. The wall itself actually sustained more damage; a small indentation now marred the off-white paint.
“That bitch! That selfish, idiotic, self-centered bitch!” Dan raved, pacing back and forth. “All I put up with, the long hours I work at the firm, and she runs away like some, some, hippie named Sunshine, and all she feels obligated to do is send one lousy text message to me! I thought she was mature! I thought she was an adult! Now I don’t… there’s a man involved with this, there has to be! That sneaking adulterer!”
“Now, now Dan,” his mother-in-law cooed, “we don’t know anything for certain…”
“Shut up! Stop defending her! You’ve been trying to convince me she’s ‘just had a spell’ all night. She’s not your perfect little daughter! She’s a heinous, lying whore, and by God, I’m going to do something about it!”
“Control yourself, Dan,” Frank Copeland commanded, rising from the couch to challenge his son-in-law. “You’re not going to talk to us this way.”
But Dan ignored his father-in-law. However, the “something” he was going to do had not yet been determined, so Dan stood there, momentarily lost, his figure trembling in the charged air, his hair even wilder than before, the formerly innocent bears on his pajamas transformed into mauling beasts.
Finally, Dan, perhaps emulating his wife, ran outside, hopped into his Touareg, and backed out of the garage. However, he immediately encountered the same problem his wife had had: Thomas’s Malibu and his parents-in-law’s Traverse blocked him in. He madly spun the Touareg around, and now the emulation became complete: he zoomed across the yard, bumped up onto the road, and was on the hunt, or whatever it was he thought he was doing.
The rest of Christmas day was mostly spent trying to track down the fugitive Dowlings. Dennis appeared eventually, looking disheveled and half-blind, like all just-woken teenagers. He listened as his grandparents informed him of the terrible, terrible events that had blighted an otherwise happy Christmas, but he refused to be traumatized, despite his grandmother nearly making him traumatized by asking him at least ten times if he was.
There was some present-opening after lunch, and Thomas saw in his parents the same anti-consumerist feeling he always had after everything had been opened. They frowned at the scattered wrapping paper and the needless gifts, and they only reluctantly reached into the personalized stockings hanging from the mantle. All of it seemed so pointless in light of what had happened to the family.
Dennis, however, persisted in acting normal. He’d energetically opened his presents and thanked everyone profusely, then returned to his room and fired up the Xbox.
Dan returned a few minutes after sunset. Where had he been? “Around.” Had he found Emily? “No.” Well, what had he accomplished, if anything? “I calmed myself down, which, believe me, is very important right now. Now excuse me — I’m going to take a bottle of some sort of liquor to my room, along with a bucket of ice and a glass, and I’m going to stay there for the rest of the evening. Don’t bother me.” No one did.
The next day, Thomas packed up as soon as he woke up. He had to work that night, and while he could’ve called Vernon and gotten the day off, he needed to escape this insane asylum. Dan had emerged from his cave and was prowling around the house, staring at old photos and mementos, as if trying to figure out a way to return to those golden days. Jean’s optimistic warbling had gone into overdrive, since she felt she had to battle the gloom that had settled on the house, like an elvish princess battling a dark lord. (She’d just read a good fantasy novel with that plot.) Frank Copeland frowned and muttered, since this wasn’t a problem he could immediately solve in the bull-headed Frank Copeland way. Only Dennis remained unconcerned; he seemed to regard the whole situation as an overblown comedy, the kind where you laughed at the actors for their ridiculous performances, not because the gags were actually funny.
Thomas’s parents weren’t leaving, as was the custom, and they chastised Thomas for abandoning the cause.
“What if she’s… well, mentally unstable?” his mother whispered.
“I think that’s already been established,” Thomas replied.
“You know what I mean…”
“Yes, consider the family history, son,” his father said forebodingly. “I know you have to work tonight, but in this case, the situation here trumps work.” It caused him great psychic pain to say this. To Frank Copeland, very few things trumped work. During his own working life, he’d missed graduations, ignored his wife’s sicknesses, skipped church, and drove through hurricanes to get to his furniture store. This, however, was different. Something had happened, was happening, to Emily, and while he didn’t understand all of it, he knew that tragedy was likely at the end of the trail she was slashing for herself — and maybe death. He thought back to his father’s suicide, to the bloody remains of Wallace Copeland’s head, and shuddered — though when his wife noticed his shudder, he grumbled that the room was too cold.
No, Dan clearly couldn’t handle the situation. Frank Copeland would have to solve everything, as he always did, though no one ever gave him any credit.
Thomas was worried about Emily, of course, but he didn’t see any point in staying. All they’d do was wait. And wait. And wait. With no one having any idea where she was, and with Dan not wanting to involve anyone outside the family, it meant the ball was in Emily’s court — and Emily had made it clear she’d deflate the ball and burn it rather than keep playing the game under someone else’s rules.
So Thomas had returned to Oxendine’s Grocery. Since then, Emily had sent two more text messages to Dan, both on the 28th. One said “I’m fine, stop worrying. The more you try to contact me, the more you drive me away,” and the other said, in response to Dan’s harsh accusation of adultery, “NO I AM NOT CHEATING ON YOU GOD.” Thomas was informed of these epistles via e-mail from his mother, who was still, along with his father, staying at the Dowling residence “until this all blows over.”
“And that brings us up to the present,” Thomas said now, completing his story.
Throughout this tale, Reggie continued to be remarkably patient. He only interrupted to ask a few clarifying questions, and when someone from the party came outside and tried to pull him back into the fray, he jokingly but firmly sent them back in empty-handed. Thomas, who’d never before dropped such a monologue on Reggie, was impressed with his friend’s comportment.