No Location Found

by Alan Ginsberg-Cobden, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

Every night at 11:40 I open an app on my phone and look at my dead son.

Not a photograph. I have photographs. Joanne has them in frames on the stairs, arranged by grade, so that going up to bed you watch Danny grow from a gap-toothed Cub Scout to a six-foot-three senior who had to duck under the kitchen light. I don't need the photographs. I need the app.

It's called Find My. You know it. You've used it to locate your keys, your AirPods, the phone you left in an Uber. When Danny got his first iPhone at twelve, we set up Family Sharing, the way the kid at the Apple Store in Paramus told us to, and after that Joanne and I could see his little blue-rimmed circle on a map any time we wanted. Memorial Middle School. The Y. His friend Ahmed's house on Saddle River Road. A Rita's Italian Ice at nine at night in February, which led to a conversation.

Eighteen months ago, the circle stopped on Goffle Road in Hawthorne, beside the brook, at 11:52 p.m. on a Friday in March.

The next morning, it said No location found.

It has said No location found every night since. I know, because I check. I pay the line, too. Forty-one dollars a month on the Verizon bill, which I moved to my own card so Joanne wouldn't see it. The phone was never recovered. The police assumed it went into the brook. Goffle Brook is maybe a foot and a half deep in March, but it moves, and a phone is small, and Sergeant Albanese from Hawthorne PD had a kind face and a lot of cases, and I did not have it in me to argue about a phone.

So I pay forty-one dollars a month for a phone that is at the bottom of a brook, and every night at 11:40, because that was the time, I open the app.

I'll tell you about 11:40 later. I'm not ready yet.

This was a Tuesday in late September. Joanne had gone up at ten. I was at the kitchen table with a Rolling Rock I didn't want and the Giants game on mute, and I opened the app, and I tapped Devices, and I tapped Danny's iPhone.

The circle was there.

Not No location found. A circle. Blue rim, the little phone icon. It was on Plaza Road in Fair Lawn, near the Radburn train station, and while I sat there with my thumb frozen on the glass, it moved.

---

I would like to tell you I did something smart. I would like to tell you I called Albanese, or woke Joanne, or at least put down the beer.

What I did was stare.

The circle moved along Plaza, slowly, the speed of a car hunting for an address. It turned. It went up Fair Lawn Avenue. It turned again. My brain, which had been running on grief and Rolling Rock, finally caught up with the street names and did the arithmetic, and the hair went up on my arms.

It was coming here.

We live on Morlot Avenue. The circle turned onto Morlot. I got up so fast the chair went over. I stood in the dark front hall, in my socks, looking at my phone, and the circle crept down the block and stopped.

It stopped at our house. Right on top of the little dot that is me.

I went to the front window. Our street has those old gas-lamp-style streetlights the borough put in to look quaint, and in their yellow light I saw a car at the curb. Small. Dark. Maybe a Civic. The engine was running; I could see the exhaust. I couldn't see the driver. The windows were tinted, or it was just night.

Here is the thing nobody tells you about grief. It makes you stupid in a very specific direction. My first thought was not someone found his phone. My first thought, for one second, one full terrible second, was he's outside.

Then I got angry, which was better.

I went for the door. I got the deadbolt open. And the car pulled away from the curb, no lights, and by the time I was down the steps in my socks, it was at the corner, and its lights came on, and it turned left and was gone.

I looked at my phone. The circle was moving south.

I found my keys.

---

I left Joanne a note. I'm not proud of what it said. It said Couldn't sleep, went for a drive. Eighteen months of practice and that's the best lie I've got.

The circle went south on 208. I followed it on the map, one eye on the road, the Accord doing seventy-five, which it does not enjoy. It got off at Goffle Road.

Of course it did.

I think I knew then. Not who. But where.

The spot is about half a mile past the Hawthorne line, where Goffle Road bends right and the brook comes up close on the left, and there's a guardrail now that there wasn't eighteen months ago. The county put it in in May. I have not driven that way since the week it happened, and I don't know how I know about the guardrail, except that I know everything about that half mile. I know the speed limit is thirty-five. I know the curve is posted with a yellow sign that someone has shot with a BB gun. I know that Danny's blood alcohol, according to the medical examiner, was 0.09, which is just over the line in New Jersey, and which was printed in the Record in a story headlined HAWTHORNE CRASH KILLS FAIR LAWN TEEN, and which every parent in the Fair Lawn school district read over coffee and then looked at their own kid a certain way.

I know one more thing. I know that the medical examiner told us, in a small room with a box of tissues placed at exactly the right distance, that Danny died on impact or within seconds. He was not wearing his seatbelt. He was thrown from the car. He would not have suffered.

And I know that at 11:52 p.m. a call went to 911 from Danny's phone.

Joanne held on to that call like a rope. He called for help. He was awake. He was alone and he was awake and he called. The ME said it was impossible, with those injuries. Albanese said maybe a pocket dial, it happens with iPhones, the emergency SOS thing. The dispatcher said nobody spoke. Just breathing, and water, and then the line went dead. Joanne heard he suffered. I heard pocket dial and chose to believe it, because I had to believe something, and I was the one who got to pick.

There was one more thing, a thing I noticed and told nobody. When I went to the impound yard in Totowa to get his gym bag out of the trunk, I opened the driver's door. And the seat was all the way forward. Jammed up against the wheel. The way you'd set it if you were five-foot-four.

Danny was six-three. He drove that car with the seat so far back he was practically in the rear. I used to yell at him about it.

The crash did it, I told myself. The frame buckled. Things move in a crash.

I told myself that for eighteen months.

---

The Civic was parked on the gravel shoulder just before the guardrail, lights off. I pulled in behind it and killed my engine, and in the quiet I could hear the brook.

Someone was sitting on the guardrail.

A girl. Small. Hoodie, the hood down. Her face was lit from below by a phone, and even from twenty feet away I could see the case. Black, with a Rutgers R on it, scratched white at the corners. I'd bought that case. I'd bought it at the Target on Route 17 because the Apple one was fifty dollars and I said, For a case, Danny? Fifty dollars?

I got out of the car. The gravel was loud. She didn't run. She looked up at me, and I saw her face, and I knew her.

"Mr. Kasprzak," she said.

Tess Ferrante. A junior at Fair Lawn High when Danny was a senior. She'd been one of the kids at the wake who didn't come up to us, who stood by the back wall of Vander Plaat's in a black dress that was too big for her and left early. Joanne had noticed her. Who's the little one who's crying so hard? I'd said I didn't know. A friend. There were a lot of them.

"You came to the house," I said.

"I was going to leave it on the porch." Her voice was steady in the way that takes enormous effort. "In a bag. I had a note. I sat there for ten minutes, and then I saw the light come on in your hall, and I—" She looked at the phone in her hands. "I didn't know it would show you. I didn't know it was still on your account. I charged it tonight for the first time. I never charged it before. I couldn't."

"Tess," I said. "Why do you have my son's phone?"

She looked past me, at the bend in the road. And then she stood up, and I saw that she was trembling from the knees, and she made herself look at me.

"Because I was driving," she said.

---

I'd like to tell you what I felt. I don't know what I felt. The brook kept going. A car went by on Goffle Road, slowed at the sight of us, sped up again.

"He called you," Tess said. "First. Before me. We were at Kyle Brunner's, his parents were in Aruba, and Danny had, like, three beers, maybe four, and he said, I'm not driving, I'm calling my dad. He called you. You didn't pick up."

I didn't move.

"He called twice," she said. "And then he said, He's asleep, it's fine, I'll call a Lyft, and there weren't any, it was Hawthorne at midnight, and I said I'll drive, I only had a Coke, and he said, You don't have a license, and I said I had my permit, and he said, That's not how permits work, Tess, and he was laughing." Her face did something. "He was laughing. And he gave me the keys. He was trying to do the right thing. You have to know that. He didn't drive. He never drove."

I found I was holding on to the guardrail.

"I took the curve too fast. I didn't know it was there. There was a deer, or I thought there was a deer, and I pulled the wheel. I had my seatbelt on. He was asleep, he'd put his seat back, he'd taken the belt off because it was cutting his neck, he was so tall, he—" She stopped. She started again. "The car went over. I was upside down. When I got out, he wasn't in the car. I found him in the water."

"The call," I heard myself say. "The 911 call."

"His phone was in the cupholder. Mine was dead. I called on his. I couldn't talk. I tried, I couldn't make words, I was just—and then I heard the sirens coming, and I was sixteen, and I was driving, and he was—" She held out the phone. "I ran. I ran up through the woods to Lafayette Avenue and my sister picked me up, and I still had it in my hand. I didn't even know until I was in her car. I've had it in a shoebox in my closet for eighteen months. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. We're moving to Raleigh on Saturday, my mom got a job, and I couldn't take it with me, I couldn't leave it in Raleigh—"

I took the phone.

It was warm from her hands. The lock screen came on when I touched it. Seaside Heights, the summer he was fourteen. Joanne and me and Danny in the middle, sunburned, all three of us squinting, his arm around both our necks. He'd set it himself. I'd forgotten he'd set it.

"I'll go to the police," Tess said. "I'll tell them. I'll tell them tomorrow. Everybody thinks he was a drunk driver. It was in the paper. They should know he wasn't. That's why I—that's the other reason. I wrote it down. The note. I was going to leave the note."

She held out an envelope. On the front, in round careful handwriting, it said Mr. and Mrs. Kasprzak.

I didn't take it. I couldn't do two things.

---

11:40.

You've figured it out. You're ahead of me. That's fine. I've been behind for eighteen months.

At 11:40 on that Friday in March my phone buzzed on the nightstand. Joanne was asleep. I looked at it and saw Danny, and I thought: he's going to ask for a ride from Kyle Brunner's, because he's been drinking, because he's seventeen, and if I go get him I'm the dad who shows up at the party, and if I don't go get him—

If I don't go get him, I thought, he'll figure it out. He's a smart kid. That's how they learn.

I sent it to voicemail. It buzzed again. I turned the phone face down.

There was no voicemail. He didn't leave one. Of course he didn't. He was laughing. He's asleep, it's fine.

The next morning, when the Hawthorne police came to the door, I went into the downstairs bathroom and deleted the two missed calls from my recent-calls list, and I have never been able to explain to myself why, except that some animal part of me understood it was going to be a very long rest of my life, and it wanted to get started on the lying.

---

"Mr. Kasprzak?"

Tess was still holding the envelope. There were headlights on the bend, a truck downshifting.

"Don't go to the police," I said.

She stared at me.

"Not yet," I said. "Go to Raleigh. Give me—I need to talk to my wife first. Before anybody. She has to hear it from me. All of it." I looked at the phone. "There's a part she doesn't know. It's not your part."

"But everyone thinks—"

"I know what everyone thinks." My voice cracked in the middle and I let it. "He called me, Tess. He called me, and I didn't pick up. That's why you were driving. Do you understand? You didn't do this. You were a sixteen-year-old kid who said yes when he asked. I'm the one who said no."

She started to cry then, finally, the way she'd cried at the back wall of the funeral home, and I did something I hadn't done in eighteen months. I put my arms around a child and held on.

I took her number. I took the envelope. I watched the Civic go up Goffle Road until the lights were gone.

---

It was after two when I got home. The kitchen light was on.

Joanne was at the table, in her bathrobe, where I'd been sitting three hours before. The chair I'd knocked over was upright. My Rolling Rock was in the sink. She had her phone face-up in front of her, and on its screen was a map, and in the middle of the map was a blue-rimmed circle, sitting on top of our house.

She looked at the circle. Then she looked at me.

"I check it every night," she said. "Did you know that? Every night, when you think I'm asleep. I watched it come down our street." Her voice was very calm. "I watched you follow it."

I put Danny's phone on the table between us. The screen lit up. Seaside Heights. Three squinting faces.

Joanne didn't touch it. She looked at it a long time.

"You pay the bill," she said. "I know you pay the bill. You put it on your card. I've known since the first month."

"Jo—"

"And I know he called you." She lifted her eyes to mine. "That night. Twice. The buzzing woke me. I saw his name, and I saw you turn it over, and I went back to sleep. I thought, Tom knows what he's doing." She didn't blink. "And after the police came, I looked at your phone, and the calls were gone."

The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere on Morlot Avenue a dog barked once and quit.

"Eighteen months," I said.

"Eighteen months," Joanne said. "I was waiting for you to tell me."

I sat down across from her. I put Tess's envelope on the table, next to our son's phone, next to her phone with its little blue circle, and I slid all three into the middle, where we could both reach them.

"Okay," I said. "Here's everything."

---

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem tertium Kalendās Octōbrēs (29 September 2026), ab Alanō Ginsberg-Cobden per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Alan Ginsberg-Cobden, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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