What a ride! Like fish-tailing down the water slide full tilt – no – better than that, like a German on the Olympic luge, and then that subwoofer boom – 400 watts, man – somersaulting, better than the Corkscrew at the PNE, and soaring – ever tried the Drop Zone, but higher, flying, free-falling? What a buzz!

He’s still singing along with the Collective Soul CD . . . Lay me on the ground, Fly me in the sky . . . what will I find . . . let your light shine down. His mouth laughs wide into the wind, orthodontically corrected teeth glinting. His do-rag flies off and his dark hair is a jet stream.

Gotta remember this, he thinks, my hockey buddies won’t believe this one.

¶

The voice on her cell phone is bottomless. Wispy fog filters the sun, draws a thin curtain between summer and fall. She is driving to a wedding in the Kootneys this Labour Day week-end. But the voice, an RCMP voice, is a riptide.

Opal coasts her car to a stop on the shoulder just short of the small mountain city where she plans on gassing up. The radio blares Like a true nature's child, We were born, born to be wild. She jabs it off, tells the deep-water voice she needs a minute, she'll call back.

"Welcome to Golden" says the sign on the side of the road. Golden: a name that promises riches, favour, perhaps eternal reward. She feels nothing. Numb. Thick. Where was she going? To get gas, yes, and then . . . ? The Shell symbol ahead on the left floats above the signage flotsam, veiled in mist, and she coasts powerless toward it, washed on an unknown wave. It covers the monster. The under-toad.

She calls back to the voice and it seeps out the details: four boys . . . cars passing . . . loose gravel . . . catapulted vehicle . . . three injured . . . .

She’d yelled at him before she’d left today -- his broken promise to mow the lawn beforehand, his habitual procrastination. Opal had fumed as she drove away, at her own sense of ineffectual parenting. She had to be on the road to the wedding hours before he was leaving for the camping trip, and knew she couldn’t be there with the threat of no camping till the lawn was done. He’d promised to do it as soon as he got back. Promises.

Cody had been in the back seat apparently, the dragnet voice had said. Absurdly, this comforts her. When Cody was three years old his activity level prompted a new house rule: no jumping off the fridge. By nine he’d graduated to thirty foot cliffs over Shuswap Lake , and carried the same Evel Knievel attitude into his teen-age driving.

Opal creeps away from the gas pump, reluctant to leave that umbilical energy source, intravenous for her car. The fumes sedate her. The human activity at the gas station is a film screen, flat. They say that in dreams a car symbolizes your driving force in day to day life -- rusted and battered when you’re sick or overwhelmed, sporty and sleek when your life is too. So what’s her Honda Accord?

She hesitates at the mouth of the driveway before the No. 1 Highway. Left? Right? Where’s she going? To a wedding. But, no, that’s not appropriate now. She has to go home. To a funeral. She’s only ever attended funerals. Never planned one.

Which way? She’s always had a good sense of direction. In grade two her teacher had the class stand beside their desks as she called out "north", "south", "north-west", and they quickly turned to face the correct way. Later in Girl Guides there’d been compass reading: 90 – 180 – 270 – 360 degrees. She’d been the quickest.

Almost one p.m. She checks for the sun, a twenty watt salmon glow in the September sky, and finds it directly in front, therefore south. Home is west. She turns right.

The dotted centre line pulses a steady rhythm as it slips by her left eye. The chain gang of power poles marches past her right eye, morphing out of mist. They mark a counterpoint semibreve to the dotted lines’ grace notes. Sparrows on the wires write the notes of a musical staff.

The tapes in her head are stuck on replay -- car pulled out to pass . . . loose gravel . . . deep ditch . . . huge rock . . . somersaulting over. Over and over she imagines the scenario. The tree that stopped it all. She wonders if it’s still standing. Did it break, too? She imagines him hurtling through the air to meet the tree. Thrown from the car the voice had said. Instantaneous.

She feels the thrumming of the car, tires against pavement, vibrations through her feet, foot-bone-connected-to-the -- leg-bone . . . she’s not sure she’s moving . . . that anaesthetized sense of standing still while ribbons of whip-lashing road straighten under her, whiz past.

This must be what it’s like to experience No Time, Opal muses. Maybe this is what it’s like to be inside quantum physics where solid objects are not solid because there’s more space between the molecules than there are molecules of substance. Where time does not behave according to our human experience of it.

Opal believes there’s no such thing as time. No, not 'believes'. She knows. Belief implies uncertainty, and she knows in her gut that time doesn’t exist in reality. Reality being the spirit world from which we all come and to which we’ll all return, many times. 'Hocus-pocus' her ex had said.

Time is a necessary invention for the earth plane, she argued, this illusory place of our learning -- cause and effect, choice and consequence, karma played out. "Psycho!" Cody had laughed, but he enjoyed these talks, full of questions and what-if’s. Eighteen is like that, peeking through the cracks in the cosmos.

Cody, where are you now? Opal notices she hasn’t cried. Don’t normal people collapse at the knees with this sort of news, dissolve and moan and want to die themselves? Are you with me here? She doesn’t want him to be earthbound. Oh god please. It’s not an expletive, it’s a prayer. Has he gone in the right direction? Another veil of fog floats gently over the windshield and drifts away. She remembers.

¶

There is a sliver second of black, like a power outage flicker in a thunder storm. Gotta remember to tell the guys.

It’s quiet, peaceful after the ride. It always takes a couple moments to get your bearings, might be all that stuff in the inner ear like a milkshake. Like that floaty sensation after doing a bit of weed. There’s a shimmering light way over there, warming, like the Aussie sun on his face when he lies spent on the sand, his board dripping beside him.

¶

Opal’s tongue was raw and blistered. Steadily gulping scalding coffee for a few hours will do that. At first Cody’s eruption over the vacuuming and dishes issue after school was just that, another blow up. He’d stormed off on his bike, swearing over his shoulder. It wasn’t the first time in their volcanic relationship.

Best case scenario -- he’d blow off steam for a few hours then come home hungry and laughing. Water off a duck’s back. And she’d have time to think about how to handle it. Or, he’d pedal to his Dad’s house on the other side of town and try to play one off against the other. More aggravating dealing with the two of them, but she’d been there before, too. Emotionally exhausting, but she’d managed.

The sun had set, twilight leeched into night. Still not home. Three hours now. Damn that kid. She wondered if she should phone her ex. Maybe he was out and Cody was holed up in his house alone. Getting away with it. She’d wait a bit longer.

It was possible he was lying in a ditch somewhere bleeding. This was her kid who raced BMX bikes a few years ago. He didn’t confine his daredevil jumps and twists to the track. It was dark now. If he was lying by the side of the road it would be easy for a speeding car to not see him.

Her ex answered the phone.

"Kurt, it’s Opal. I was just wondering if Cody was there?"

Lofty pause. "Why would he be here?"

"He went to a friend’s after school and he’s a little late getting home," she fibbed. "I thought he might have stopped by your place on his way home. No problem. Sorry." She hung up fast and picked it up again so he’d get a busy signal if he called back.

Eleven o’clock. This hadn’t happened before. She called the police but they couldn’t do much, he hadn’t been missing long enough. Said they’d keep an eye out for a sixteen year old of his description. She called his friends. Both Jason and Brent swore they knew nothing, hadn’t seen him since school.

She phoned Wyome. Mr. Bearden answered on the first ring, breathless, urgent, "Yeah?" As if he was expecting a call at that late hour. She explained about Cody, downplayed her worry, attributed it to his adventurous nature.

But before she could finish he broke in, "Wyome’s gone, too. So’s the Mustang. Gone when we both got home at supper." His jaw sounded tight, speaking through his teeth. In the background she could hear Mrs. Bearden, she presumed, wailing, something about all-your-fault-getting-him-that-car-too-soon.

Opal heard the phone muffled and Mr. Beardon’s bark, "Cody’s gone, too, eh." The female lament subsided.

"Cody must be driving, he just got his licence last month." She knew Wyome was a year younger and wouldn’t be sixteen till next year. She realized she owed these people more and explained the emotional explosion after school. "Do you have any idea where they might go?"

"Called everyone we could think of. Finally called the police. Can’t do a missing persons but said they’d do a stolen car."

"Is it licensed?"

"Yup. Sometimes use it when the pick-up’s acting up, eh." They made assurances to stay in touch with each other through the night.

Opal poured another coffee and curled up on the sofa with a quilt. Going to bed would feel like abandoning him. It was nearly two a.m. when every nerve ending was jangled out of the doze she’d slipped into. The phone rang again. She reoriented herself and snatched at it.

"It’s Jack, Opal." The voice was familiar, like her quilt. "Cody’s here, he’s okay, and so is his friend."

Jack, her step-father in Vancouver, who’d been like a father to her, even more so since her mother’s death nine years ago.

He told her the boys had arrived unannounced around midnight, and he’d been talking to them -- well, to Cody really -- for the past couple of hours, and Cody eventually agreed to Jack phoning her.

Of course he would run to Jack, she thought. She had a flash of the two of them crafting birch bark canoes years ago, floating them on the lake. Jack had always had time for him when Cody had run Opal and Kurt ragged.

"But how did he find you? He’s only ever been to the new house once, and that was over a year ago?"

Her step-father couldn’t answer that one either -- said Cody claimed he just drove around till he felt it was the right direction. Since tomorrow was Saturday, he’d keep the boys there for the weekend while he had some more heart-to-hearts with them, and they’d drive home Sunday.

"Thanks, Jack. I’ll call the Beardens." She paused, wondering how to express what she felt. "You’re an amazing father."

She was mystified. How could he have found his way? To Vancouver, yes. But through all the streets once he exited the No.1? All during his childhood they’d gone to the Kerrisdale house. Cody didn’t know the new address. How would he know to get to the Second Narrows Bridge , where to leave the Upper Levels Highway , how to negotiate the twists and turns of the Capilano streets to find the tiny cul de sac Jack lived on?

As she drifted toward the sanctuary of sleep she recalled Mooloolaba.

¶

He’d been full of beans that day. He’d never been in a parade before and his exuberance that morning was saturating. Opal was surprised at her own pleasure in seeing her tough and tumble ten year old willingly spiff up in his Boy Scout uniform – wetting his hair before combing and jamming on his wide-brimmed hat, rubbing his sand speckled shoes with a tissue.

"I’m ready early," he’d announced, "can I go down to the beach and look for shells?"

"We have to drive out to Mooloolaba for the parade in twenty minutes. Besides, you’ve done such a great job fixing yourself and you might get all mussed up." Opal was sorry to put a damper on his enthusiasm.

"Mom, it’ll only take me a coupla minutes. Did ya hear the waves crashing last night? There’ll be zillions of new shells."

Opal and Kurt had still been together then, and for a whole year they’d come to Australia where Kurt was working. They were living in Maroochydore, just three blocks from the ocean, and Cody was in heaven. He’d started a shell collection and labelled each with its proper name gleaned from his little Seashells of the World pocketbook. They’d bought him a boogie board and in their two months here so far, he’d become skillful, negotiating the waves like the locals, wary of the 'under-toad' as he’d originally misunderstood the term for the riptides.

In the car Kurt had driven south to Mooloolaba by the inland Sunshine Motorway, over Cody’s protestations. "Please, Dad, please – if we go along the beach road we can see what washed up after the storm last night."

True, it was a much more scenic route, the powder sand beach stretched listlessly all along the coast. The ultramarine east Pacific was a shade of blue-green she’d never seen off Canada ’s west coast. But they’d been pushed for time and the rallying point for the Scouts was an unfamiliar address.

In Mooloolaba the streets buzzed. Barricades around the parade route thwarted them and Kurt drove in ever widening concentric squares looking for a parking spot.

"I’m gonna miss it, they’re gonna start without me." Cody twisted on the edge of the back seat.

"I can’t manufacture a parking spot out of thin air." Kurt’s frustration had resounded through the car and spilled out the open windows. Cody shrunk back into the seat.

In the end Kurt had dropped them as close as he could get to the rallying point while he hunted for a parking space. Opal had been anxious by the time he’d finally rejoined her. She didn’t want to miss a photo op of their float going by and Cody was long gone with his Aussie mates. He’d grinned exuberantly, and his 'see you later' already sounded like his buddies’ say-ya-lighter.

As Kurt and Opal had loped to the parade route Opal puffed out an unexpected turn of events to Kurt. She’d told Cody to wait for them at the rallying point after the parade, and he’d suddenly remembered to tell her the parade ended at the shopping mall, not back at the starting point. Typical Cody – exasperating twists and turns out of nowhere.

"What? That’s three kilometres away. I parked in the opposite direction." Kurt’s irritation propelled him into a run, as Opal trailed.

The scouts’ float was crammed full, boys waving, singing, tossing lollies into the crowd. Opal’s photo shows Cody popping one into his mouth, foil wrapper in his waving hand. She’d called his name to let him know Here we are, we see you, but his face only registered confusion, unable to find them in the wave of people that enveloped the undulating parade. Opal had a pang just then in the midst of all the hoopla – Cody’s wanting to be recognized, to see that admiration from them, but missing it, like overlooking a turn in a road he was so sure of.

They hadn’t watched the remainder of the parade, but dashed back to the car and snailed their way through the jammed streets. At the shopping mall parking lot they found the float, like a bright Christmas toy on Boxing Day. A few boys in uniform straggled about. Opal talked to one kid sitting on the edge of the float swinging his heels. Kurt asked another, cross-legged in the shade of a scraggly gum tree. Each one they asked said yes, they knew Cody – the Canadian bloke, but no, didn’t know where he’d got to.

A traffic cop, sweat beading off his nose, waved his arms at ornery vehicles and distractedly listened to their story of a missing boy. "Look, mate, I reckon there’s always some’ll wander off or get confused. Isn’t a one-off. Check the public dunnies over there," he pointed with a toss of his head lest some car roar off in the direction of the toilets, too, "then have a go over at the cop shop on the Esplanade." They’d searched the area another hour themselves after reporting Cody missing.

Resigned, Kurt and Opal had driven back to Maroochydore. If emotions were colours, their car would have been filled with purple and red and yellow. Opal’s fear: He could’ve been lured into some perv’s car if he thought he’d missed us. Kurt’s anger: Damn kid, totally tuned out. Does what he damn well pleases. Opal’s hope: He may have caught a ride with another scout’s family back home. Mixed together it was a lump of shit brown in her solar plexus.

When they arrived home Cody had been sitting on the front step. Opal’s instant of relief was swamped by vexation. "What on earth happened?"

"I waited and you didn’t come."

"Did you get a ride with another kid’s parents?"

"Nope, went down to Mooloolaba beach. Just followed it back in the direction of home." His pockets were bulging with shells.

¶

She’s on autopilot . . . the car, too. Perhaps this is a lucid dream and she doesn’t need to drive the car. Trees, road signs, vehicles, pavement lines -- they all rush past, swooping and dipping and straightening again, fog-shrouded then materializing. Time is inert. Opal has seen behind-the-scenes TV specials that show how motion is simulated in a still vehicle filmed in front of a blue screen, a moving background added later. This is the first time she’s experienced it. Cody, where have you gone?

She knows Salmon Arm lies ahead of her – west. The mist shreds and the insipid sun slants diagonally through the windshield from her left. It must be mid afternoon. Do you see the light, Cody?

Her answer is the archangel’s trumpet peal. The sudden response to her silent question snaps her into alertness, brown eyes popped wide, expecting – what? That the diaphanous world of spirit might fracture and allow her a privileged peek, like one of those near death experiences reported back to doubting Thomases on this gritty earth plane? The trumpet crescendos and, swivelling her eyes left toward the blast, she catches the swerve of a pick-up truck as it veers by in the opposite direction. The dotted drone of white lines bisects the car and her ghost white knuckles yank the wheel to the right.

¶

He notices a haze beneath him, like looking through the mosquito netting of his tent. He’d seen that mesh sailing through the air he thinks. He sees his Mom in her Honda through the mesh below, through the sunroof. Grey roots show in the crown whorl of her spaghetti coloured hair. "Mom, here I am, I see you." She doesn’t hear. On the phone again. He turns his face in the direction of the warm glow.

¶

"Okay look sharp, Opal." She says it aloud and her voice surprises her – high and taut and vibrating like a power line. The fog has burnt off.

She stabs the radio knob and hears the coffee rich voice of CBC Radio One ". . . and this golden oldie by The Doors goes out to her on this sublime Labour Day week-end." 

Opal knows this one. She sings along, loud, to keep from drowning in her head. The gate is straight, deep and wide, Break on through to the other side, Break on through to the other side.