Late.
I pull into the first spot I see, hit the brakes with a screech and clamber out.
“Sorry,” I call out over the roof of my car. “We’re here, we’re here. Sorry.”
Ethan steps from the backseat, pausing to watch the kids race around the lawn. His face betrays his thoughts, his longing so obvious it’s almost written in the air. It hits me right in the stomach where his body used to, back when I was nine months pregnant and he kicked so hard his tiny foot would almost punch through my skin. My beautiful, brilliant son wants nothing more than to belong, and I don’t know how to help him.
With a sigh, he reaches inside the car, hoists his backpack onto a shoulder.
I poke him on the other. “Hey, I got you a surprise.”
The look he gives me is dubious. Ethan knows money is tight, and surprises are reserved for special occasions. “What kind of surprise?”
I pop the trunk. He tips his head around the side, taking a peek, and when he returns his gaze to mine, his eyes have blown wide. “You got me the mummy bag?”
I grin. “I got you the mummy bag.” The sleeping bag that had made him desperate with want when he’d spotted it at Walmart. Not because it comes with a flip-over hoodie and a built-in pillow, but because of the hidden pocket for the raggedy strip of baby blanket he doesn’t want any of his classmates to know he can’t sleep without. “Your you-know-what is already in there, zippered into the inside pocket.”
The smile that creeps up his face is worth every hard-earned penny.
“Do you like it?”
He reaches in, clutches the roll with both arms to his chest. It dwarfs his tiny body, looking like it might topple him over. “It’s totally awesome.”
“Excellent. Then maybe you won’t even need the other thing I brought you.”
His eyes narrow into slits. “What other thing?”
I reach in the car, into my bag on the middle console, and pull out a worn, brown leather pouch.
Ethan recognizes it, and his face alights with excitement. “Your great-grandpa’s compass?”
Or more accurately, his surveyor’s compass. This one is from the mid-1800s, with a pair of brass flip-up sights on opposite ends, which my great-grandfather used to measure the wooded land along the border of Tennessee and Kentucky. It’s probably not worth much, thanks to the web of scratches and the star-crack in the northeast corner, but since it’s the last thing my mother gave me before she died, to me it means the world.
He grabs it from me now and presses it with both hands to the mummy bag. “I’ll take real good care of it, Mom. I promise.”
“For the record, I am not giving it to you—not yet. But you can borrow it for a couple of days if you think it might make being away from home a little easier.” I bend down, looking him in the eye. “And to be honest, it makes me feel better knowing you have it. If you get lost, you can use that thing to find your way back home.”
He gives me a happy grin. “I’m not gonna get lost.”
“I know. But take it anyway.”
Behind us, the bus starts up with a loud rumble, a sleek black machine more suited for a rock star and his entourage than a couple dozen screaming eight-year-olds. Most of them are already inside, bleating their excitement from behind the tinted windows, telling us it’s beyond time to go. Miss Emma turns, looks our way. Her gaze catches Ethan’s, and she smiles and raises both hands in question. Are you coming or not?
We gather his stuff and hustle across the lawn.
At the edge of the lot, I squat, putting me face-to-face with Ethan. This farewell will be quick. Clean and clinical, as much for him as for me. “Be good. Listen to Miss Emma and the chaperones.” I straighten his glasses, fix his rumpled collar. “And have the very best time.”
He gives me a close-lipped smile. “I’m pretty sure I can do that.”
I think back to the first time I held him, in the hospital delivery room. He was so tiny, so pink and sticky and fragile. I remember how he looked up at me, his tiny mouth opening and closing against my arm like a fish, how that first swell of motherly love took my breath away. The hopes and intentions and fears—they’re nothing compared to what I feel now.
“God, I’m going to miss you.” I pull him into a hug, one that’s quick and fierce and strong enough he can’t wriggle away. I inhale his familiar smell—shampoo and detergent and the tiniest whiff of stinky puppy.
“You ready, Ethan?” Miss Emma, holding out a hand to him. She looks at me and smiles. “We’ll take good care of him, I promise.”
I nod and hand him off, telling myself he’ll be fine. Ethan will be cared for and looked after. Maybe outside of schoolyard and classroom constraints, he’ll even make a friend.
Please, God, let him make a friend.
With one last wave, Miss Emma nudges Ethan toward the rumbling bus. Hours from now, it will be this very moment I keep returning to, replaying the images over and over and over in my mind, not the part where my son disappears behind the smoky glass, but the part where an icy chill creeping up my spine almost makes me stop him.
3 hours, 13 minutes missing
I’m awakened before dawn by a commotion outside my front door, and my first thought is of Andrew. Not the sweet, charming Andrew who used to hook his pinkie around mine in the grocery store or wash my car every Saturday, but the drunken, domineering version who’d appeared more and more often the further we got into our marriage. The stack of self-help books on my nightstand would call my thinking of him now a textbook example of conditioning, a learned response to a repeated stimuli, like ducking from an oncoming backhand. I don’t need a book or a psychologist to tell me it’s Andrew’s fist downstairs now, beating on my front door.
I drag a pillow over my head and wait for the sound of his wails to worm their way through my wooden bedroom door. Kat, I can fix this. Why won’t you let me fix this?
But Andrew’s voice doesn’t come. Only a steady rain drumming the roof and the old, rickety house holding its breath.
I toss the pillow aside and check the alarm pad on the far wall, an electronic line of defense I installed after things in my house kept getting moved around. My framed photographs crooked on the walls. A pile of papers, shuffled and shifted. The woven throw rug, pulled out from the easy chair’s legs. It was Andrew’s way of fucking with me, of letting me know that even though he didn’t have a key, he was still the one in control. It stopped six months ago, on the day a DeKalb County judge signed a paper ordering him to stay two hundred feet away. Just in case, I stabbed an alarm company sign into the dirt by the front steps. This place is secured by ADT, asshole. Don’t even try it.
A glowing red light tells me the system is armed, but another thumping from downstairs tells me Andrew is as determined as ever to haul me out of bed. The restraining
