Finding Jake Read online

  DEDICATION

  With limitless love comes limitless worry . . .

  To Lily and Ben, of course.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  My name is Simon Connolly. You may have heard of my son, Jake. Most people have, but they don’t know him. Not really.

  As for me, they don’t know me, either. I’m not even sure why I’m still here. I can barely stand up, let alone venture beyond the front door. If I let such a simple effort beat me, I’m not sure what’s left.

  As I step outside, the sun warms the too-tight skin of my face. Although the air is gentle, inviting, the season has not changed. It remains the bleakest winter imaginable and the toes of my New Balance push dried leaves across the pavement. Each sound stirring memories too fresh to accept.

  So much has happened that I struggle to envision the next day, the next hour even. But going to the mailbox draws my focus to a pinpoint intensity and gives me purpose. Neither necessity nor curiosity provides the motivation. On the contrary, my driving force is a last desperate attempt to embrace banality. Get the mail, I tell myself, like before.

  I never could have imagined that an oversize purple envelope, resting in that box, could contain such a bright glimmer of hope. I don’t even notice it until I am back inside; but, when I do see it, when my eyes focus and I read the name written on the front in young, bubbly script, my heart stutters. It is addressed to my son.

  Maybe someone out there knows him better than I thought.

  CHAPTER 1

  JAKE: EIGHT MONTHS BEFORE HIS BIRTH

  It all started with a fateful decision and the most wonderful news of my life, not necessarily in that order. On a gray day in late February, the kind of day that makes everyone wish Christmas lights still hung from their neighbors’ tree branches, my wife called me at my office.

  “I took it,” she said.

  I knew that by “it” she meant a pregnancy test. In the movies, the wife always calls saying I have to tell you something, brace yourself. In reality, my wife and I had been married for five years, and engaged for three before that. I’m not saying that I was so in tune with her womanly cycle that I knew she was late before she did. What I am saying is that there is much less surprise when it comes to married couples’ privates than the movies like to admit.

  “And,” I said.

  “Don’t sound so excited.” She laughed.

  I cleared my throat and tried again in my effortless deadpan. “I feel like my heart is going to jump out of my chest.”

  “Cliché.” She laughed even harder.

  Only one person, my wife, knew I wanted to be a writer. An English minor in college, she felt compelled to critique me on occasion, but she was always unflaggingly supportive of this hidden dream of mine. She’d buy me “How to” writing books and fancy fountain-type pens for Valentine’s Day.

  “Caught again.”

  “Look, not by phone. Let’s go get some lunch.”

  “Sure.” I really just wanted to know if I was going to be a dad, but the suggestion of lunch pretty much clued me in on what I expected to be good news. “Where?”

  “Fancy. How about Blue Coast? Noon?”

  “I’ll meet you at the restaurant. Love you.”

  “I love you, too, Simon. And I’m pregnant.” She hung up.

  I wanted to call her right back, to laugh and talk too loudly about the news, but I knew that wasn’t how this had to work. My wife had an agenda. Not in a bad way, just a very deliberate way. This monumental news must be celebrated with a lavish meal and discussed in hushed tones while surrounded by opulence. This was not meant in a showy manner, more like an artist applying color to a canvas. She was painting our memory and I was all for it.

  Blue Coast was about as hip a restaurant as Wilmington, Delaware, could support. Although it would be lost in the midrange mediocrity of a city like New York or Chicago, it tried its hardest and rose above the mom-and-pop Italian places and the vanilla chain restaurants that most of Delaware favored. Instead, Blue Coast had that not-quite-Wilmington look with its minimalist architecture and deep, rich, but subtle colors. Soft but modern alternative music piped through the hidden speakers and men and women in business suits sat at two-tops, some leaning forward and whispering intimately about love or money, others leaning back and scoping out the room to see who was who and who wasn’t.

  I met my wife there. She was already sitting at a table, her long, runner’s legs crossed and her dexterous fingers tapping along on her BlackBerry. I stopped at the host stand and just watched her for a second. Dressed in a form-fitting suit jacket she’d bought in NYC and had tailored by a woman who lived in a trailer with her three young kids, she fit right in at the restaurant. The crease above her right eyebrow hinted at some struggle at work.

  She was a lawyer for one of the three nationally prominent law offices in the city. Due to the corporate tax laws of Delaware, its chancery court was one of the most powerful in the U.S. judiciary system; therefore, the big boys set up shop here. She did not practice corporate law. Instead, she was a civil defense expert and the office’s youngest local partner.

  We met when she was still in law school. At that time, she was interning for the state’s prominent U.S. senator and I was working for the county executive. I was his go-to guy, at least in my head, and was very busy that day. The Democratic presidential candidate was coming in to stump for votes. Not for himself, but for the candidate for Delaware’s other U.S. Senate seat. The race was closer than anyone expected considering the Republican incumbent was well liked and hadn’t been caught with his pants down, neither literally nor figuratively.

  I was helping find volunteers to work the event and her name came up. I had never met her but one of the other guys there said she was the “best.” At what, I didn’t ask. Had I known what she looked like, I might have, because when she showed up that day all bets were off. She walked into the office in these form-fitting black pants and a T-shirt that kept offering the most suggestive peeks at her perfect abdomen. Her blond hair, shoulder length and sleekly straight, was pushed behind one tiny, cute ear. If I had called it cute that day, she would have written me off as a frat boy idiot. What caught my eye, though, was a perfectly shiny silver ball pierced through the cartilage halfway up the side of her ear.

  “Who’s that?” I had asked a buddy of mine.

  “She’s that intern from the senator’s office. Goes to Villanova.”

  “Wow.”

  She claims that she heard me say that. I think that little tidbit became legend as she told and retold our love story over the years. Either way, our eyes met, as cheesy as it sounds, hers icy blue and mine dark
as midnight. I followed her around the entire day. It got so bad that the presidential staff blacklisted me from further events because I pretty much ignored my duties and just shadowed her. By the end of the day she was in my web, or maybe it was the other way around.

  Standing at the entrance to Wilmington’s hippest lunch bistro, a tempest of contradictions swirled in my mind. There she sat, looking as amazingly beautiful as she did that first day we met. It was as if the cloying progress of time had no effect. At the same time, so much had changed. She, the fresh-faced new girl, the intern, was now a partner at a big-time law firm; me, the impressively young and successful leader of the day, was now the less impressively young and less successful bureaucrat who had stayed in the same position like my feet were encased in government-issued quick-dry cement.

  Rachel looked up at that moment, seeing me and smiling. With a little wave, I walked across the restaurant. Along the way, I recognized people at a few of the tables.

  “Hey, Connolly,” a guy in a suit said. His name was Bob Weston. Although he worked for a bank, I’d met with him and his boss a few times about county tax issues.

  “What’s up, buddy?” I said, grabbing the hand he offered and patting him on the back while we shook. He craned his head. Most people have to, considering I’m six feet four inches tall. “You playing ball tonight?”

  “I’ll be there,” I said.

  “Me, too. Whadaya think of that new pitcher the Phils signed?”

  I tried to give him a short answer, something about the fact that a single pitcher wasn’t going to help them return to the glory of 1993. I glanced over my shoulder while I spoke, but Rachel was flipping through her calendar. Still, I hated keeping her waiting, so I closed up the conversation faster than I would normally and moved on. I nodded to a few other acquaintances and smiled when Rachel looked up again.

  “Hey there,” she said.

  I’m not going to say she was glowing (cliché!), although some kind of warm energy seemed to radiate from Rachel’s eyes when she met mine. I could tell she had been thinking, a lot. Something about the curve of her eyebrow made me smile. I pulled her to her feet and gave her a squeeze. Normally, on a workday, that would be all the PDA we would dare, but not today. I kissed her full-on, not a peck. When I pulled back, her cheeks flushed.

  “Wow.”

  “I love you,” I said. “You look so beautiful.”

  We sat down. I held on to her hand.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  She grinned. “Same.”

  “Oh.”

  Rachel’s head cocked to one side as she assessed my reaction. I thought I might have messed up. Maybe my inflection hadn’t appropriately lifted or maybe my eyebrows betrayed me. Her grin became a smile, the one she gave me when I didn’t exactly know what I had done but I knew it was good.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You just look happy.”

  And I was.

  The first half hour of lunch consisted of banter over the best names for our child.

  “Ben?” Rachel offered.

  I shook my head. “Every time I hear you call him, I’ll know you’re picturing Ben Affleck without his shirt on. How about Simon? Then we could call him Junior.”

  “Cliché.”

  I laughed. “Do you want to find out if it’s a boy or a girl?”

  “I think so,” she said. “Why not? It would give us time to do things right.”

  “You mean gender stereotyping?”

  “Stop it.” She smacked me on the forearm, lightly, lovingly, while she smiled.

  As we spoke, I sensed something bigger behind her words. I’ve always been too observant of nuances. I knew it was best to ignore it, not to press her, but I’ve never been able to resist.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “What do you think about day care?”

  I blinked, two or three times, sensing a loaded question. I attempted to tread lightly. “It’s great . . . for others?”

  “Seriously.”

  Uh-oh. “What do you think?”

  “Come on, Simon. We talked about this.”

  We had, I guess, in passing, maybe over drinks when we were twenty-four. I wondered if it was a husband thing, trying in vain to remember conversations deemed time wasters to he but paramount to she.

  “Yeah, I mean, that’s kind of . . .” I stopped myself, my senses tingling. I was about to say up to you at the end of that, but I had a sudden feeling that was not my best option. Instead, I finished with: “. . . what I was thinking.”

  “What were you thinking?”

  “About day care.” Then that little guy in my brain charged with digging up the hard-to-find stuff earned his room and board. “Like your nephew and niece. I mean, those kids are awesome. I think we should just cheat off them.”

  My wife’s reaction calmed my nerves. I’d hit dead center in the sweet spot of marital communications, I could tell. I was so proud, until she continued.

  “And my brother . . .”

  Honestly, I didn’t hear anything she said after that. Rachel’s brother, soon-to-be Uncle Marky, was legend. A college football standout with shoulders wider than my, well, anything of mine, represented everything right about men of the new millennium. A successful midmanager in the corporate world with an MBA from Duke, he surprised everyone when he decided to stay home with his kids. His wife, a college associate professor, worked full-time. Mark went on to raise impeccably perfect little angels, a boy and a girl, while starting his own successful consulting firm.

  “He’s amazing,” I said when I noticed the expectant silence. “Really.”

  “Financially,” she said, which didn’t make sense to me, probably because I missed something. “That’s what I’m saying. What do you think?”

  “About what?”

  She frowned. “About staying home with the kids.”

  “Huh?”

  I’m not a dull person. By dull, I mean I am not slow witted. I knew where she was going. Nor was my obfuscation meant to be humorous or disrespectful. Nor was I utterly surprised. My response represented a deep-rooted defense mechanism. In other words, I was scared out of my Dockers.

  CHAPTER 2

  DAY ONE: FIVE MINUTES AFTER THE SHOOTING

  Jake’s room is a mess. I asked him to clean it Sunday but he insisted it would have to wait. He ran off to a buddy’s house and did not return until after dinner. I forgot to nag him; ergo, his room is still a mess.

  Without thinking about it, I start to clean. My schedule is light today. Checking my phone for messages, I halfheartedly pluck dirty clothes off the floor. No new messages means a fade-away jumper from the top of the key. Swish, Jake’s Lax shorts disappear inside the blue nylon hamper by the door. I lean down, grabbing hold of a textbook, and shake my head. Jake is always forgetting stuff, leaving homework or books at home, not taking his phone with him, leaving the cap off the toothpaste. All part of what makes him Jake.

  Turning to place the book on his desk, I notice the cover: Psychology 101. Having been a psych major, nostalgia urges me, an otherwise nonsnoopy parent, to open the hardbound cover and leaf through the pages. I move toward the window for light and notice a torn-out spiral notebook page full of Jake’s handwritten notes folded up inside. I pull it out but do not unfold the sheet. I face the age-old parental dilemma—to look or not. Giving myself a second to consider, I look out the window.

  Although we own two acres, our house sits fairly close to the street. Two large, dark-leafed maples engulf the front yard, obscuring the view for most of the year. Opening the shades, which Jake always closes, I glance outside, my fingertip toying with the frayed edge of the paper.

  The day is warm for November, making it easy to forget that Thanksgiving is only two and a half weeks away. Half of the maples’ leaves have turned a steely brown and fallen. Half of that half I raked and dumped in the woods out back the week before last. A fresh layer of the dead foliage blankets the yard. I add that to m
y mental to-do list.

  Maybe I should have noticed something amiss. I feel no ominous dread hanging over me or the house, or even Jake’s messy room. That’s what everyone always says, that they wake up the day of some tragedy and feel it coming. Not me. I am blindsided.

  The first hint shows itself while I look out the window. The neighbor across the street and down two houses is the resident stay-at-home-mom-extraordinaire. I have referred to her as the mayor since Jake was about two years old, mostly because next to her, I felt like I raised my kids like we lived in a den in the woods somewhere. Standing at Jake’s window, I see her car careen down the long driveway. She takes the ninety-degree turn onto the street without slowing, her maroon van with its bike rack on the roof literally tipping up on two wheels. The tires scream and she is gone, jetting out of sight down the tree-lined way.

  At that instant, my cell phone dings, announcing a text. I startle, half tossing the psychology text onto Jake’s desk and racing to our bedroom. I’m not sure why I react the way I do. I certainly have no idea what the message says, but something about the way the neighbor raced down the street fuels my pace as I rush out of the room.

  My phone rests on the nightstand beside our bed. Putting the notebook page down, I scoop the phone up and read:

  Shots have been fired at the high school. Calmly report to St. Michael’s across Route 5.

  I’m moving before I process what I read. The terse statement gives direction: report to St. Michael’s. In times of utter chaos, the human mind responds to orders. It provides an avenue for action while our thoughts flash like a lightning storm.

  At a run, I swipe my keys off the counter in the kitchen and I am out the back door. Crossing through the tight space between the front of my Ford pickup and the wall of the garage, my shin slams into our old bike rack. I don’t feel it, nor does it slow me down. I am in the front seat, driving out of the neighborhood, careening through a stop sign, before I’ve processed anything but this direction.

  It is not until I see other cars, driving as recklessly as my own, that I begin to understand. There has been a shooting at my kids’ school. My kids, Laney and Jake, are at the school. My kids are in danger. I am not afraid. I am not worried. I am protective, animalistic in my instincts. I will do anything to keep my children out of danger. I will die to protect them. This is not bravado. It is simple fact.