Alligator Candy by David Kushner

sake of someone else. For years, I had built up a wall between myself and others when it came to Jon, a defensive fort against rumormongers and bullies. But by doing so, I had kept out, or at least not been aware of, the strangers and friends and neighbors around me who had done so much for us.
    Another one of those mentioned in the articles was Arnie Levine, a close family friend and attorney who became, I discovered, instrumental that week. Up to this point, I had known that there was a special relationship between Arnie and my family, one that I didn’t fully grasp other than that he was a lawyer who had helped us out. I had known Arnie’s kids from IDS, and we spent many long, playful, and memorable Sundays at their house on the bay, swimming in their black-bottomed pool and having pillow fights. The Levines had a boat named Olive , and on other days, we’d sail off into the bay, climbing the mast and listening to Jimmy Buffett while everyone ate freshly boiled shrimp and laughed.
    But here was another Arnie before me now, the man telling the reporter about the search party’s door-to-door campaign. I pictured the long-haired college students walking up to houses around town, houses decorated with pumpkins and witches for Halloween. In a dark twist, the search was called off that night to, as the paper put it, “avoid confusion with Halloween festivities.” Mitch, for one, was wearing down. “I never worked so hard and felt so useless,” he told a reporter.
    By the next day, November 1, the door-to-door search, which had covered thirty square miles but failed to turn up evidence, was called off. However, Mitch told reporters that they were not giving up. This was a grassroots effort, the kind of which the city hadn’t been seen before. Over five thousand posters were being passed out to over forty businesses and government offices, and they were now being distributed as far as a hundred miles away, and soon made it as far as the borders of Georgia and Alabama. Volunteers raised $5,000 to offer as a reward for clues to Jon’s whereabouts. The FBI was now on the case as well. The US Air Force dispatched planes with heat seeking equipment to scan the area.
    On November 4, a week after Jon went missing, and still with no apparent leads, a Tribune reporter came to our house to interview my parents. The story ran with the headline “Missing Boy’s Parents Keep Their Hope Alive.” As I sat there in the school library looking at the page, numbness washed over me. There before me were pictures of my parents, pictures I’d never seen taken in the moment, grainy shots of black and white, showing them in our house, waiting. The photos made everything seem so real.
    There was my mother: nine years younger, her dark hair a bit longer, her face slack, her eyes a bit puffy from what must have been a lack of sleep, or just the strain. “Every Day Is a New Day,” read a quote from her underneath. Below it to the left was a close-up of my dad: tired eyes behind his glasses, curly, dark hair twisting above the frames, puffing a cigarette as a long ash hung. “Kushner Shows Tension of Waiting for Word from Son,” this caption read. To the right was another shot of him, sitting on our striped recliner, the one that was still in our house all these years later, his hands crossed as he looked down at some papers, including a child’s drawing of a smiley face, on the floor—papers identified in the caption as the letters of support from students at the Boys Academy.
    The question the reporter and readers had then was almost certainly the same question I had now as I read the story: How could my parents survive this horror, this interminable wait, this nightmare? I had my own suppositions at thirteen, just from having grown up around them. In the years after Jon’s death, I knew that they remained sensitive and open to life, that they cultivated a large support