(SYLVIA
is looking at a map. DANNY walks in.)
DANNY: Ma, what’s
wrong? They need me down at the store.
SYLVIA: You’re
working now? At a time like this?
DANNY: People are
buying gas like crazy. Everybody’s
headed out of town.
SYLVIA: Where they
going? Is there a place the comet isn’t supposed
to hit?
DANNY: People just
gotta run. Nobody just wants to sit
around waiting for something to happen.
SYLVIA: I should have
moved to Vegas when I had the chance. I
wouldn’t have minded dying there.
DANNY: You’ve never
even been to Vegas.
SYLVIA: I go there in
my dreams.
DANNY: What’s with
the map?
SYLVIA: I’m trying to
figure out where your brother went.
(A
beat.)
DANNY: Ma, c’mon—
SYLVIA: I feel like
we might have missed something.
DANNY: We didn’t miss
anything.
SYLVIA: Well, we
never found him, did we?
DANNY: You’re talking
twenty years ago.
SYLVIA: He didn’t
want to go camping.
DANNY: Ma, we looked
everywhere. Why are you doing this?
SYLVIA: Because we’re
running out of time.
DANNY: I thought we
gave up on this.
SYLVIA: Maybe you
gave up, I never gave up. You just kept
saying he was dead. You and your
father. I never said that. He’s somewhere. Everybody’s somewhere, you just have to find
them. People don’t just float off into
space or evaporate into thin air. He’s
somewhere on this map.
DANNY: What do you
think you’re going to see looking at something you’ve looked at a million
times?
SYLVIA: A place where
we forgot to look.
DANNY: We looked
everywhere. And then when the search
party got called off, Dad and I used to go weekends and look. There was just too much ground to cover.
SYLVIA: I should have
gone.
DANNY: You in the
woods?
SYLVIA: I should have
been there the first time you went. Then
he never would have gotten lost.
DANNY: Let’s not—Ma,
let’s just not, okay?
SYLVIA: You don’t
want to figure this out before we all die?
DANNY: Yeah, Ma, and
while we’re at it, why don’t we try finding Jimmy Hoffa too?
SYLVIA: This isn’t a
joke.
DANNY: No, it’s
not. You’re spending what could be your
last night on earth trying to figure out something that’s never going to be
figured out. There isn’t going to be a
happy ending to this, Ma. I thought you
knew that years ago.
SYLVIA: It’d be one
thing if they found him, but they never did.
They never found anything.
DANNY: It’s the
wilderness, Ma. It’s miles and miles of
nothing. Finding him would be like—
SYLVIA: If he’s out
there—
DANNY: You’re talking
a decade. It’s not like he stumbled into
some cabin somewhere and learned to live off the land.
SYLVIA: I can’t die
not knowing what happened to my son, Danny.
I’m sorry.
DANNY: You were
probably going to die not knowing anyway.
That’s the truth, Ma. I’m sorry,
but that is the truth.
(A
beat. She sits.)
SYLVIA: You know, at
my age, you’d think I’d know better than to always expect a happy ending.
DANNY: You think I
like having things cut short like this? You
think I don’t have things I want to know about?
SYLVIA: Like what?
DANNY: Like, I don’t
know. What it’ll feel like to get married
or make good money or have a kid.
SYLVIA: Marriage,
when it’s a good marriage, feels like a heated pool, making good money makes
you paranoid because you know it won’t last, and having kids is like holding an
egg on your nose with your head tilted back while somebody screams at you ‘Don’t
drop it, don’t drop it.’ Any other
mysteries you want solved?
DANNY: What’s a bad
marriage feel like?
SYLVIA: I wouldn’t
know.
DANNY: Ma?
(A
beat.)
SYLVIA: Like walking
through a swamp. A swamp that used to be
a heated pool.
(A
moment.)
I know you had it tough.
Having a crazy person for a mother, running around these past ten years,
always being the kid who wasn’t lost—
DANNY: It’s okay, Ma.
SYLVIA: It’s not
really. I always told myself when we
found Sam it’d be…
(A
moment.)
That it’d be over, and we could go from there. I really thought this would all just be one
chapter, you know. One chapter and then
the next. Not the end. I didn’t think it would all just end like
this. I thought there’d still be time
for Vegas.
DANNY: We had fun on
that trip, you know.
SYLVIA: Did you? How did I not know that?
DANNY: All things
considered, I guess it just never came up.
The actual trip.
SYLVIA: But Sam hated
camping.
DANNY: Yeah, but once
he got there, we found this nice spot, and we made s’mores, and we just kind of
sat around and talked. Dad told stupid
jokes. The tent fell down five times
before we got it right. It was…nice. Right up until it wasn’t.
SYLVIA: He just
walked away?
DANNY: To—you know—and
he didn’t come back. It was five
minutes, maybe ten, before I started feeling…like something was up, and I
started calling for him. How far could
he have gone in five minutes? In ten
even? Fifteen? I mean, how far could you get?
SYLVIA: It’s all
right, Danny.
DANNY: I think about
that sometimes—
SYLVIA: You should go
to work.
DANNY: He’d be so old
now. He’d be—
SYLVIA: It was wrong
of me to start picking at all this again.
I just think too much sometimes.
DANNY: How old would
he be?
SYLVIA: Twenty-five.
(A
beat.)
DANNY: I should go.
SYLVIA: Go to work.
DANNY: You need
anything?
SYLVIA: No, I’m all
right.
DANNY: Quit looking
at maps, all right?
SYLVIA: All right.
DANNY: All right?
SYLVIA: I said all
right, didn’t I? I’ll quit. I’m sorry.
I…I’m sorry.
(A
moment.)
DANNY: It’s like they
say in the movies, you know? Like, bad
movies where a kid goes missing or somebody dies, they say—Is this how they
would want us to be? Living like
this? Spending our last few hours crying
about…about whatever. But who
knows? Maybe they would. Maybe they’d be pissed off if they came back
and looked in the window and saw everybody happy and laughing. Maybe they do want us to be sad forever. I mean, you can’t…
(A
moment.)
SYLVIA: Just another
thing we’ll never know, huh?
DANNY: Yeah. Yeah, I guess you’re right.
(He
leaves. SYLVIA sits, and glances over at
the map.)
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