It’s May in Nebraska, and that means I’m thinking about Ryan.
In 2021, I wrote about Ryan as the situation was occurring, so the prose is uneven and too immediate—I was obviously still processing everything—but when I read back through it now, I can see why I’d woven the section into “Ghostheart,” the third essay in A Calendar is a Snakeskin, the one that takes place during May 2021. In fact, up until the final edit, Snakeskin used to END with the last paragraph I’m sharing here.
With more distance, I can see why I couldn’t let go of Ryan being a part of my 2021 snakeskin until the last minute—his story was a living fear of mine, playing out literally in my backyard—and why the inconclusive nature of Ryan’s absence felt like it belonged with the lessons of Snakeskin.
But I think about him more often than I mention to my spouse or my daughters; I think about him every time we go to Walnut Creek and the lake is low. As of today, there is still no conclusion—in 2023, his mother tried to have him declared legally dead, though her petition was denied—though I expect to see another update from the LVPD this May 17th, sharing that the search has begun its fifth year, just like they shared last year.
An eleven-year-old boy—a giant of a boy, a 5’8”, 125-pound, Kristine-sized boy—has been missing here in suburban Omaha since mid-May when he bolted away from his elementary school caregiver after lunch. The earliest news stories claimed the boy had been searching “how to hide from police” on his computer. But had he, really? That “fact” has to be reframed now, because recent anonymous social media comments claim the cadaver dogs found the boy’s DNA all over the dock down at Walnut Creek Lake. Ryan is autistic. I’ll use the present tense because I have no proof otherwise. I’ll imagine it’s still the first day or two after Ryan went missing and police were encouraging homeowners in the neighborhood to leave out water bottles for Ryan at the end of their driveways, to check their door cams and inside their sheds for a little boy playing hide-and-seek from the police. After the first 48 hours, I kept picturing Ryan huddled and scared underneath someone’s deck, regretting his actions but fixed on seeing them through.
As I drove my oldest daughter to improv camp, we passed a cluster of cars by the train tracks behind our neighborhood, where two men in shirts with “FBI” on the back were gesturing. My neighborhood is, after all, less than a mile from both Ryan’s home and his elementary school. “If they find his body out by the tracks,” I kept thinking, “I will lose my mind.” The police and the FBI were riding around our neighborhood in a golf cart when I returned with my middle daughter, the one who turns eleven in a month, after our walk around a nearby lake. The theory that “maybe Ryan went to the lake and accidentally drowned,” suggested during the early days of Ryan’s disappearance, has spilled over its banks—how would a little boy have made it over four miles south to Walnut Creek Lake without detection? Someone said a family member failed her polygraph, but that the police won’t accuse her until they can find Ryan’s body in the murk, too thick for the divers to see more than five feet below the surface, which is always where the things we don’t want to see float.
It is the phantom coiling around every time a mother is fed up with her child, the ghost of a loss that cannot be spoken aloud, the Christmas-Future finger pointing.
I retract, I retract. I want a narrative, not an unsolved mystery. My backyard has leafed out now, the ash spreading its shadow over half the yard, when it once left a shadow-circle so small I had to reposition both the blanket and my 14-month-old daughter every hour. The row of lilacs is growing on the west, the peach tree bending to meet them, to lock a wall against the May tornadoes, those storms I both predict and cannot predict, the ones whose terrible potential draw me outside to watch every time, though the authorities tell me to go back inside. I want to bear witness; I have a compulsion to see the things I fear.
*
My family and I went to Walnut Creek and walked around the lake. There was a temporary road sign telling visitors to keep off the mud near the lake’s edge. The lake looked as if it had been drained by ten feet—a significant amount of shoreline was exposed—and I knew it was for the divers who were still searching for Ryan’s body. It was eerie, walking on the sidewalks above the lake with my husband and daughter, another daughter on roller blades, another daughter on her skateboard, while I was keeping an eye on the shores, but not telling my family I was, in case I did see something floating. Ryan’s 12th birthday has come and gone, marked by a community gathering to raise awareness that Ryan is still missing. It was hosted by the La Vista Police Department at the same community park we drove past on our way home from Walnut Creek. I could see a crowd of people in lawn chairs, all angled the same direction, but it was just the Friday Concert Series; they were listening to a band with a singing police officer, broadcasting across the grassy hills that he was still searching for a heart of gold.
