“You spend time here, I guess,” I said, looking at the dog.
“Until this week, I never bothered taking her anywhere else,” he said. “We used to have druggie types around but the sheriff’s deputies are always coming through, waving. After a couple of town meetings, you understand. But now they haunt it well enough, keep things tidy. They patrolled it this morning, for heaven’s sake, before the body was found. Now my wife won’t let our daughter bring the kids up to visit, not until this is sorted.”
After a few minutes, the little dog did its business and the man picked up the mess with an inside-out plastic bag over his shaking hand.
On the way out of the park, I met another dark SUV coming in and turned my head. Safe as houses, except I’d only known houses to be as safe as anyplace else. Which is to say, not a guarantee.
“JOSHUA,” I CALLED from the front door. “I’m home.”
The bare white walls seemed to bounce my voice back to me. All that talk of the missing and the dead gave me the shivers. I felt equal parts relieved and silly when I spotted his backpack on the dining room table. Not where it should be, as usual, but here. Here.
“Joshua? Are you home?” I listened for the telltale sounds of his video games, but then he’d be using the new headphones he’d gotten for his birthday. His games were quieter and more private now, which kept Margaret from whacking her broom at us or, worse, from shuffling upstairs in her slippers to snoop and have her say.
Right now all I cared about was he was here. I’d just spent a good deal of the day talking about a little boy gone missing and a woman found dead. Keller had given me a look behind that cordoned area in the courthouse lobby, where it seemed most of his staff and several other battalions of law enforcement now holed up. No one offered credentials to make my next visit any easier. Outside again, I’d taken a slow walk around the square, stopping to look at listings in a real estate office’s window. Cheap real estate was of no more interest to me than outlandishly expensive real estate, but I dutifully read the details on farmhouses and split-level ranches until an agent came out to chat me up. After the park I’d driven to the school to catch the end of junior high football practice, only to discover the field empty.
All the way home, I had felt the low sizzle of my nerves. Aidan Ransey was missing, and now any boy could go missing. Maybe I was being a little overdramatic, but that was fine. I had decided years ago to be anything I wanted to be.
But you didn’t become anything else. That’s what the sheriff thought. He was wrong, but it was better if he didn’t know it.
I dropped my bag on the table. At Joshua’s room, I pressed my ear to the door. The clacking of his thumbs on the game controller gave him away.
In my bedroom, I traded the skirt and blouse for a pair of sweats and a T-shirt. I pulled my hair into a bun, pausing to gather myself in front of the full-length mirror some unkind soul had attached to the inside of the closet door. The sweats did nothing for the waist I’d ended up with after thirteen years sitting behind a computer, and the T-shirt was plain and dumpy. The uniform of a stay-at-home spy.
In the hall, I hesitated at Joshua’s door, then knocked. No response. I knocked again. Either he couldn’t hear me or he didn’t want to.
When I finally opened the door, he was sprawled on the floor on his back, his head propped against his red beanbag chair. His thick brown hair, always too long, hung into his long eyelashes, flicking when he blinked. I loved his eyelashes, and of course the eyes, a deep brown with flecks of colors that had yet to be named. I loved everything about him. I even loved the profile, the straight nose and high cheekbones inherited from another face.
At that moment, he grimaced at something happening on the screen. His nose sneered, his lip curled in disgust, and everything about him turned into his father. He tossed the game controller to the floor, disappointment changing his face back into his own. Then he saw me at the door, and his scowl twisted back into place.
“Mom, God, what?” he said, his voice too loud for the room.
I gestured for him to take off the headphones. He sat up and pried them off. “I wasn’t even being loud,” he said.
“No, I know.”
He swiped the hair out of his eyes with the back of his wrist, irritated. At the game or at me, I couldn’t tell.
“I just wondered how your day was,” I said.
He rolled his eyes. “How my day was?”
Sometimes he reminded me to get mad in return. Sometimes he pushed me to a raw anger that made me almost understand things I’d never understood, and then the heat would rush away, replaced by emptiness. That hollow feeling explained a few things, too. Wouldn’t I do almost anything to keep from experiencing it? I would. I had.
“Yeah,” I said, swallowing everything else I might have said. I leaned against the doorframe, crossing my arms. I wished I’d kept my business clothes on. Maybe the scent of the jail would have still been on them. “Your day. We humans mark time in twenty-four-hour allotments. How was yours?”
He gave a sharp-shouldered shrug. “’s OK.”
I glanced at the alarm clock next to his bed. “No football practice tonight, I guess.”
He looked up at me, considered, then decided on a shake of the head. I didn’t press the issue of having driven out to fetch him. He wanted a cell phone, and I was pushing off any evidence that he needed one.
“Well, I guess I’ll go make dinner, and you’ll do your homework,” I said.
Joshua sighed. “Fine.”
“I’ll call you in just a few minutes, and I don’t want to see that gentleman again tonight,” I said, nodding toward the TV, where a muscled military man was frozen in midfrenzy, mouth wide in the rage of attack. The headphones hadn’t been for Margaret’s sake alone.
“I said fine.”
I closed the door. Another twenty-four-hour allotment, another chance to see how much I could screw this up.
In the kitchen, I opened the fridge and stared in, going over its contents and the conversation again. It had gone off the rails, but where? At last I had to admit that it was the moment he’d seen me.
Normal teenage stuff. We’d always been close, but his wingspan was wider now. He wanted more rights—more than permission to get himself to school, to join sports teams, to have a TV and games in his own room, to let his hair grow. He wanted his own life.
Of course I would worry how far this would go, how fast. I worried. When he was little, I had feared dropping him, not feeding him well enough, mysterious fevers. In elementary school, he came home scuffed up and knees torn. From playing, he said, but I wasn’t fooled and worried that he didn’t fit in.