Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

people walking. Sometimes he thought he saw Eugene. Half the young men in the world seemed to be wearing jeans and white T-shirts, to be short and slight and have hair of about that length. He found himself looking into people’s faces and wanting to ask them, “Have you seen a young man?” He thought he might meet somebody who had been at the pier this morning. He looked for Mr. Clifford or Mr. Morey. But it was too far, it was out of their territory.
    On the other side of the golf course was an area of wild brush, bushes about as high as a man’s head. There were rocks slipping into the water. No beach here. The water looked fairly deep. A man was standing out on the rocks holding onto a kite string. There were small boats out on the water, with red and blue sails. Could a man fall here, and not be noticed? Could a man slide in quietly causing no stir, and be gone?
    Earlier in the day, in fact while he was sitting drinking his coffee in that café, something had come to him, a scene which he took to be the ending of his dream. It was a clear and detailed scene effortlessly retrieved from somewhere—either from the dream or from his memory, and he did not see how it could have come from his memory.
    He was walking behind his father in some long gray grass. It was gray because the night was ending and everything could be seen clearly but the sun was not yet up. They seemed to have become separated from the other men searching. They were near a river, and in a little while climbed a bank onto a dirt road. The road led to a bridge, crossing the river, and Mr. Lougheed, a child of course in this scene, hurried out onto the bridge. He was about a third of the way across it before it occurred to him what an unlikely, and positively unsafe, structure this was. Boards were missing from its floor, and the girders seemed crumpled up in some way, as if the bridge were a toy someone had stepped on. He looked back for his father, but his father was not there; this was as expected. Then he had to look down through the floor of the bridge where a plank was missing and in the shallow water of the river which flowed among white stones he saw a boy’s body spread out, face down. Which in the dream, if that was what it was, seemed just as natural a sight as the stones, and as clean and white.
    But in his wakened mind of course this sight could not be received so casually and he asked himself if that was Frank McArter, if that young man after killing both his parents had actually thrown himself into the river. There was no way now of finding out.
    Once he had suffered what the doctor told him later was a tiny stroke, in which a jagged line, blinding white, danced in a corner of his vision for forty-eight hours or so, then disappeared. There was no damage, such things were not uncommon, the doctor told him. Now the dream, or the ending of the dream, kept doing the same thing in his mind. He expected it would go away after a while. And another thing which he hoped would go away, when he got back to himself, were these fears or strange thoughts about Eugene going into the water—committing suicide would not be his words for it, not Eugene’s; you might be sure he would have some far-fetched and tricky way of describing it—for which that morning’s show might have been only a rehearsal, an imitation.
    He was very tired. Finally he came to an empty bench and sat there a long time, wondering if he would ever gather the strength to walk home.

    “Eugene’s door is unlocked and his window is wide open,” he said to Calla. The room behind her was silent now. She smiled at him as before. He thought to look at her eyes but as far as he could see they were normal. He was so tired, so shaken he had to hang onto the newel post.
    “He always leaves his door open,” Calla said.
    “I have reason to worry about him,” said Mr. Lougheed, trembling. “I think we ought to get in touch with some authority.”
    “The police ?” said Calla in a soft horrified voice. “Oh, you can’t do that. You can’t ever do that.”
    “I think something might have happened to him.”
    “He might have gone away.”
    “If he did, he left all his belongings behind.”
    “He might have done that. He might have just—you know, he might have suddenly thought he wanted to go away, and so he went.”
    “I think his mind was disturbed. I think he might have tried to—he might have gone into the water again.”
    “You think so?” said Calla. He had