A Note from the author

Dear Reader,

When I was a teenager, Steven Stayner, who had been abducted from his family and who had gone missing for seven years, escaped his captor and returned home, freeing a second boy, Timothy White, in the process. To me, Steven was a hero because I had been seized from my family by the state, in what felt like a legally sanctioned abduction. My brother Carl also went missing (stolen by his foster family) and was lost to us for 40 years. My experience and Steven’s are not identical. They are emotional cousins.

This book holds Steven Stayner – that boy from Merced who has lived in my chest for forty years. It also holds being among the missing. Once a child has been forcibly removed from their home and family, and has been assigned a new name and biography, there is no going back to being fully among the living.

— Eileen Cleary

If Stevie Were Never Taken

I’d stop seeing the parkway where Red Ball Gas persists
long after it closed for business. The service clerk
sponging the windshield, dusty as a country road,
could finally retire. If I recognized Stevie, sluggish
in the backseat, I’d see where the sedan’s spectacled driver –
nearly hairless, hyperglycemic, haphazardly eluding
capture – must be fleeing. And I’d pursue him,
learning by heart his license plate and face.
The hard years of his years. His wintering.
I’d rid his Buick’s trunk of its church fliers with fake monks,
shred the ruse he printed to appeal to the gullible
and plain-old religious, every one with a young son.
I’d gag his Give to the poor, Mrs. Jones and Mr. Bean –
He’s out of Grimm’s, with sleeping pills spilled
in the console, coursing through Yosemite.

If he leaves no tracks on the packed ground of Tioga Pass,
who can follow where he crossed into the camp. I can’t
think because of the cabin I’d be forced to tour.
I might have to touch.
not a monster, per se –

more like eyes torching dry leaves in fire season.

Thirteen Reasons Stevie’s Seven Years Late from School

I
Missing child posters
trashed.

II
Fireflies do not answer
when lightning bugs are called.

III
Hidden in the open city.
Who am I?

IV
Father and son
Act 1
New father; same son.
Act done.

V
We know to search for
a gunny sack in a ditch.
but not a boy at a school desk,
not a boy at recess.

VI
The grimy window’s a veiled lens.
Half-hidden by fern.
The cabin’s peeling dove-grey.

VII
O most trusted man in America,
Why is this news too old?
Mr. Cronkite, Don’t you see
how Stevie outgrows his shoes?

VIII
Giving a Manchester Terrier
tied the boy to him.

IX
He washes and rinses the boy’s mind,
leaves it blowing on the line.

X
Though neighbors noticed his strange,
Parnell not meeting their eyes,
his tight lips about the boy,
they never made an outcry.

XI
Parnell drove to work each night
in a gasping Buick
certain
that the silhouette of his threats
would hold.

XII
Though Steven’s heart flutters,
it doesn’t flee.

XIII
He was seven for seven years.
the perverse was getting worse.
Still the boy tarried,
trapped between Mendocino and Merced.

Portrait of Missing Child as a Cloud

Caged by trees, could be a boy.
Another’s hands stroking or strangling.
Or are these day moon ponderings?
Even if this is the child, he cannot answer.
So, do not ask: is that you?

You cannot reach him,
though he seems to stir in you.
And who is mute,
if you hear him whisper
and do not answer.

Because the sky grieves to hold him,
this parcel of air is heavy,
sultry and purple, pressed on the rangy
shoulders of wild saplings.

Years and the cloud has not disclosed
itself. Are you Nobody too?