It happened the way things these days do: a text from my mother with a link to Facebook. The Washington County Sheriff’s Department posted a missing person’s notice. A face familiar at once, but from memories I would’ve thought atrophied completely by now:
MISSING
NAME: Tyler (TJ) Johansen
AGE: 38
DISTINGUISHING CHARACTERISTICS: red hair, beard, facial tattoos
LAST SEEN AT HOME
In the picture they had chosen for the flyer, a group photo with everyone else cropped out, he wore a Dale Earnhardt Jr. shirt with a hole forming under the collar. He was smiling, but the shadow from someone’s hat next to him covered it. The low-quality image distorted when blown up or zoomed in, so his face was almost unrecognizable.
TJ’s Mom shared the post and wrote that she was organizing a search tomorrow and asked everyone to call her with any information. I was walking home from work when I got the message, waiting for a crosswalk, so I just texted Mom back: ugh. When I stopped to open the door to my building, I saw her reply: God I haven’t spoken to his Mom in years.
Part of leaving a place is that only most of you makes it. Some of you stays and takes up residence in someone’s out-of-reach cabinet and learns to live on the animal crackers and ramen. It’s easy to forget you left it there until something beckons it out.
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I don’t know how it started, but once it did, it never left. Old fridges, washers, and chest freezers. Once or twice, whoever owned the lot would pay someone to load up their flatbed trailer and haul it all away. But pretty soon, someone would drop off an old couch or dishwasher and trashlot was back.
The neighbors on either side kept their windows facing trashlot closed. One built a fence and the other drew their blinds to forget it was there. It was an ever-evolving ecosystem for kids who skipped school, kids who’d stopped going to school, or kids who just didn’t want to go home.
There was the washing machine we blew our smoke into, the bald tire we stashed our weed in, the glass doors we smashed with rocks. Kittens were born in an oven with a broken door. Lots of people went there. Even kids who’d gotten through graduation and had nothing better to do. But if TJ was there, it was almost a guarantee I would be too.
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When I got home, Mom wanted to call and talk about it.
I knew you were friends. I hung up my jacket and slipped off my shoes. “Yeah, we were. A while ago.” I heard he was in an argument. I sat down at the dinner table. I organized the half-burnt candles and grocery store mail ads. “I could imagine that.” He has two kids. I took a deep breath and looked out the window of my apartment. My cat trotted across the couch towards me. “I don’t think I knew that.” Those poor kids. “Those poor kids.”
In my memory, I see him sneering. Tucking candy bars down his pants, throwing glass bottles out the driver’s window at the sides of houses. His arm seemingly forever coiled back in a threatening mid-punch. He wasn’t always like that, but the older I get, the harder it is to dredge that nuance out. To remember, I have to dig into the brambles. I have to remember that behind every hurt he caused, I was there, egging him on. I have to bring to the light the hurts I caused with him behind me, the ones I caused without him there. I have to excise my lesser angels from their graves, blow the dust off their bones.
I’m going to join the search party. Got to do something right? God, you spent every weekend together as a kid. I would be meeting her in Salt Lake City, hours north of where I grew up, in a few weeks. But what could I even do by then? Three weeks on Utah highways. By then, you could be anywhere, but most likely you were long gone.
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I walked by trashlot every day on my way to and from school, but it wasn’t until the summer between elementary and middle school that I braved entry. Five kids huddled in the far corner with their backs against piles of bricks and boards fashioned into couches and armchairs. Someone asked me what the hell I was doing there.
“I was bored,” I said, “I don’t know.”
Mom worked all summer and this summer was the first she hadn’t sent me to a babysitter’s while she was gone. I watched television, played games, and listened to loud music all day. But everything becomes boring after a while, so I’d left the house one day to find something else.
A pale, red-headed boy nodded. “Cool.”
I pulled some old tires into a bean bag style lounge chair next to TJ and sat down. Someone had set up a warped piece of plywood on a ramp and a game had been formed from it. The goal was to skip a rock off the ground and have it slide up the ramp, but not off. Points were given for how close it got to the top edge. TJ handed me my first rock and I threw it as hard as I could. It bounced off the bottom of the board and hit a girl across from me in the shin.
“Dammit! Fuck!” she screamed, pulling up her jeans and pressing her hand to the skin. “Shit, that’s definitely going to bruise!”
Shame pinched in my gut. I almost got up and ran back home, but then I heard TJ laughing.
“Idiot shouldn’t have been standing so close,” TJ snickered.
I felt bad for her, but TJ’s cruelty shifted the attention off me. I felt lighter. Air passed easier through my lungs. I didn’t know how good it felt to be on the other side of the joke. How you felt powerful and strong, like it didn’t matter you’d hurt someone, or it mattered less. I didn’t know how bad I wanted that until I got it.
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In the days after TJ’s disappearance, locals dug their noses deep into every detail they could pull from TJ’s life. He had been married twice. His first, right out of high school, ended in divorce within a year. The picture of the wedding was in front of the Washoe County courthouse, so they discovered he’d left town at one point. But then his second marriage was at a state park a few miles from where he grew up. So, something brought him back.
Within six months of the marriage, people found a birth announcement in the paper. A son. I imagined this made him beam with joy. Beyond the birth of the first child, things got easier to find. He posted on various social media accounts several times a month. Sometimes it was him at the hospital holding a wrinkled newborn. Sometimes it was a vague callout to no one in particular with a picture of a pit bull beneath.
There’d been a local Facebook group set up by TJ’s Mom and this is where most of the sleuthing took place. Mom joined, ignoring my feelings against it. I think she was trying to help. She organized an awareness event for him in town, handed out flyers and hand-made signs with TJ’s Mom for people to post around town. Twenty people came.
Mom would send me screenshots of the group as little updates on the efforts to find him. They would arrive at random times: when I was trying to fall asleep, walking Waterfront Park with a friend, in the waiting room at a doctor’s office, etc. What started out as genuine interest in bringing him back to his family became a town role-playing murder investigators. The screenshots showed how quickly attempting to help became attacking a neighbor you barely knew.
Organizing for Go-Fund-Me’s and meal trains gave way to people declaring they saw his Mom and she didn’t seem as sad as they thought someone should be after losing their son. Or his wife had been seen wearing something too revealing and flirty at the grocery store. Or where was his first wife after all? Maybe, being jealous of his life, she had taken him?
While speculation shifting blame to TJ existed, people saying he’d run off to Vegas or ODed on fentanyl, those accusations were snuffed out under the weight of those aimed at the women in his life. His male family members got to drink too much. They got to scream too loud at a kid’s soccer game. But, the women’s behavior was monitored like a child you were fairly sure was lying to you. It was hard, once I came out as a woman, to not point out these hidden standards and rules that now seemed obvious, but the longer I was out, the more certain I was that I shouldn’t have to.
I asked Mom repeatedly to leave the group. I told her it wasn’t good for her, that it made her hate old friends for being a part of it. But she spent hours there. At first, she defended the presumed innocent. Then people turned their attention on her, so she had to give that up. She then just lurked. Convinced she had to bear witness to all of it before whatever conclusion was coming occurred, before everyone would sweep their ugliness back under the rug. As if nothing had changed at all.
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After my first week at trashlot, Mom made me invite TJ for dinner at our house. It was not like me to make friends with boys. She was happy for me, but she wanted to make sure he was the right kind of boy. Since Dad had left, this had been Mom’s goal: finding men and boys who could bring something to my life she was convinced she couldn’t.
TJ came well-dressed and clean. He talked about his mechanic father. He asked her what she did for work. How she liked it. He complimented the meal she’d made and thanked her for inviting him to our house. Mom liked him. When he stood up to go to the bathroom, Mom leaned over and spoke low into my ear.
“I’m so glad you’re going to have a friend going into middle school.”
I nodded along to what she said, but my mind was tumbling. In the past week, I’d seen TJ harass grown women, threaten kids, and get so drunk he fell onto the edge of an old chest freezer and busted his lip. I’d watched the blood drip down over his teeth as he smiled at me.
Was this his normal? What he showed to adults? Was it this unknowability, this unpredictably, that made me come back to trashlot the second day? I reached my fingers through the dark waters, but no bottom to any of it.
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Once a few weeks had passed from his disappearance, people started to lose interest. The internet sleuths had exhausted their leads. Even the wilder accusations, about Mexican cartels and drug mule tunnels, faded away. TJ’s Mom noticed the interest dying down, and it made her desperate.
Mom called after they spoke. She wants to do something in the cities. Vegas and Salt Lake at least. Maybe LA too. She wants to talk to the police departments, hand out flyers, that kind of thing. She said the cops here are worthless. She said the only way to get anything done was to do it yourself.
TJ’s disappearance hung like a malevolent fog over the town, but failed to make the jump to broader news coverage. His Mom was doing her best to make up for it. She continued: She’s only got her family going so far, and I guess me too. She’s looking for anyone.
These conversations with Mom had been harder to have the longer he was gone. There was desperation mounting in her voice too. The more conversations we had about his disappearance, the more frustrated I was with him. That part of my life had been dead until he brought it back up again. The longer he was gone, the more I had to live with its ghost.
Mom had an ability to ask for something without asking for it. Laying a hurt kitten in my lap without telling me to do anything about it. I’ll be in Salt Lake anyway, I can push my flight back a few days.
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TJ was two years older in school. We never shared classrooms, but I always kept my eyes out for him during passing period. He had a place by the teacher’s parking lot where I knew to meet him after school. We spent any free hours we had together. Sometimes at trashlot, but if no one else was there, he would invite me to his house.
He knocked and listened for anything inside. If his parents were home, he pretended like he’d forgotten something. If his parents weren’t there, we did whatever we wanted.
The house itself was fairly bare. There were the necessary furniture pieces: tables and chairs, couches and armchairs, but not a lot else. My eye was drawn to a painting of Jesus on the wall behind the couch. It took coming over a few times before I realized how I knew it.
“Are you Mormon?” I asked him.
“My parents are.”
There was a code Mormons followed. They were nice like they were trying to sell you something. They had large families. They married young, couldn’t swim on Sundays, and stayed home every Monday for Family Home Evening. TJ had done much I was only now realizing trespassed on the faith. I wanted to ask him about it, but took his curt response as a hint, and followed him back to his room.
He jumped into a pile of dirty laundry on his bed like an asteroid into a planet, sending clothes flying out from under him. Under a pair of wrinkled jeans, I saw a floral edge of fabric. I pulled at it. Gently, at first, then all at once.
I held it up by the neckline. “What’s this doing here?”
TJ looked up from his magazine to me, standing up, holding a dress. He kept his face blank. A practiced effort.
“Mom must’ve mixed up the laundry.”
We stared at each other for a while. I expected him to have more, to fumble a hurried excuse. But he didn’t, so I spoke first.
“It’s pretty.”
TJ held his blankness for a moment, then stood up to face me. Together, we stood at the edge of something as terrifying as it was thrilling. He grabbed the dress from my hands and looked over my frame. Short, but skinny. Then, in a swift moment, he slipped the dress over my shoulders. The length of it piled up around my feet and the lace front hung three inches below where it was supposed to, but he adjusted it and smiled. The way a father might for his son’s suit. Neither of us knew where we would go next.
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By the time I got to Salt Lake, TJ’s Mom had already visited the police department. She had come in well-dressed and spoke firmly. Her son was missing. He had been gone for a month. She wanted to talk to an officer.
She eventually found an officer to listen to her story, but they took no notes. When she was finished, he handed her a detective’s business card and told her to call the detective. When she called, no one picked up, so she left a message. After three days without a response, she took the hint and started doing it herself.
She and Mom visited churches, social service organizations, and overnight shelters. They visited people under overpasses, camping on sidewalks, and spending hours on park benches. They asked if anyone had seen him. They asked if there was anyone they knew who might have seen him. All roads were followed to the end. All doors were knocked on. There was nothing.
I wasn’t sure if Mom had explained to TJ’s Mom how I was different than when we’d last seen each other, fifteen years ago. I had another name, another gender. I didn’t know if I could explain it, really, to someone so stretched thin by grief. When I met them at Pioneer Park, she barely looked before she handed me a stack of flyers and walked off trying to get someone’s attention.
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The last time I saw TJ was at a gas station. I was visiting Mom for a week, but barely left her house. When we did, it was only for a short while. It was only to places I was confident nobody would know me. I was early in my transition, and I was terrified I’d be recognized.
Mom wanted to go out before I left. We negotiated on a Sunday morning breakfast, early enough that most of the town would be in church or sleeping. I stopped for gas on the way and as I stepped out to fill up the gas tank, TJ walked out of the convenience store. He held an energy drink and a plastic bag swung gently by his side.
We made eye contact. He looked down briefly at my body, then back up at me. I expected confusion, I feared disgust. Instead, he was curious. Like I had stepped through an entryway he had stood under and now he saw a portal to another version of himself where I stood. Before I could think to say something, he nodded his head gently, then stepped out into the parking lot and drove off.
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Two weeks after we handed out flyers in Salt Lake, TJ’s Mom got a call from a hospital in Bakersfield, California. Her son was alive. The whole family drove out to see him immediately.
I got it as a Facebook link. Another post from TJ’s Mom’s Facebook account: TJ has been found. We praise and thank God for bringing him back to us. We are at the hospital now with him and ask for everyone to respect our privacy as TJ heals and returns home.
In the comments, people disregarded the request and asked for more info. The Facebook group suddenly reignited with questions and theories. Mom sent me screenshots and texts about her disgust over people’s actions until even she got too disillusioned and left the group.
Within a week, TJ was spotted back in town. He was in a wheelchair at first, then transitioned to crutches, but was never alone. His wife or Mom were always with him in public. If anyone dared to ask what had happened, they were quick to say they weren’t talking about it. It was the women, in the end, who protected his privacy the most.
Eventually, people stopped asking and TJ started walking on his own. He had a slight limp and moved slowly, but he was more or less the same as before. Mom started helping his family out in little ways. She dropped off food once a week and watched his kids if TJ and his wife wanted to go out.
A few days before Christmas, TJ visited her to drop off a gift. She told me they spoke for over an hour about his kids, how stupid he felt for running off on them. Then he asked how I was. She told him I was doing well, living in Portland now, and that I’d helped out a bit in Salt Lake. She said he smiled when he heard that. She didn’t tell me what name he used when he asked about me. I didn’t want to ask.
When she called to tell me about their conversation, I was in my apartment. A lit tree sat in the dining room, shedding needles. Friends helped me get it up to my floor and in a few days would open the presents under it too. I told Mom our plans. How I had gone shopping two weeks back and found a dress for one of them. I was sure she’d love it, with citrus print and flutter sleeves. Worst comes to worst, I told Mom, if she doesn’t like it, I can keep the dress for myself.
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Keegan Lawler (he/him) is a writer currently living in Washington State with his family. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming from the Los Angeles Review, Salon, the Offing, Michigan Quarterly Review, Fourteen Hills, Phoebe Journal, and Tahoma Literary Review, among others. His chapbook, My Own Private Idaho, is forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks. His book, Fairyboy: Notes on Growing Up Queer in Rural North Idaho, was selected as the runner-up for the 2024 Autumn House Press Nonfiction Prize.