then remember I left it downstairs in the kitchen.
From downstairs comes another pounding, five sharp thuds on the door with a fist.
Normally, this would be the moment when Ethan comes stumbling into my room, his curls sticking up every which way from his pillow, his fingers scrubbing the sleep from his eyes. I’ve tried to protect him from his father’s and my histrionics, but there have been enough moments like this one to make me wonder if our constant fighting hasn’t left permanent scars. Divorce is a cesspool of soul-sucking sorrow, especially for the innocent child stuck in the middle.
As I push back the covers and step out of bed, I worry that Andrew’s ruckus will wake the neighbors. I worry he’ll take his frustration out on my rosebushes or punch a fist through the glass. That this might be something else has yet to cross my mind.
And then I open my bedroom door.
The upstairs hallway, normally lit up with the muted yellow glow of a streetlight, is a blaze of red and blue. The colors crawl up the walls and slash across the ceiling and send me hurling across the carpet. I trip over an overflowing laundry hamper and a pair of Ethan’s ratty sneakers, catching myself just in time to fly down the stairs. I take them by twos and threes, my legs suddenly wobbly with terror. It’s the middle of the night, my son is who-knows-how-many miles away and there’s a police car in my driveway.
God forgive me, I’m praying this is somehow about Andrew.
He had an accident. He was arrested.
Just please, God. Don’t let it be about Ethan.
At the bottom of the stairs, a man fills the vertical window next to the door. He’s huge, six feet and then some, with wide shoulders and the kind of bulk that comes from kickboxing and barbells, not doughnuts. His blue eyes lock onto mine, and the hairs rise, one at a time, on the back of my neck.
He presses a badge to the window. “Brent Macintosh, Atlanta Police Department. I’m looking for Kathryn Jenkins.”
Everything inside me turns to stone. If I open this door, if I verify that yes, I’m Kat Jenkins, he’s going to tell me something I don’t want to hear. For the longest moment, there’s no sound except for my breathing, too hard and too harsh.
He’s not in uniform but his clothes are dark. Dark shirt, dark pants, the fabric inky as the sky behind him. “Ma’am, are you Kathryn Jenkins?”
I clear my throat. Nod. “It’s Kat.”
He slips his badge into his pocket, stepping back to reveal his car on my driveway behind him. The siren lights turn the falling raindrops red and blue, dots of color swirling through the sky like a kaleidoscope. “Could you please open the door?”
I turn on the foyer light, flip the locks and tug on the handle, and a siren splits the air. Oh shit, I think in that half second before my body snaps into action, lurching to the pad to punch in the code. My shaking fingers won’t cooperate. It takes me three fumbling tries to get the sequence right.
The house plunges into a silence so intense it’s like a whole other sound ringing in my ears.
His expression is carefully blank, but his body language makes me brace for what he says next: “Is your son, Ethan Maddox, with you?”
“No.” My heart gives an ominous thud. “He’s away, on a school trip.”
“Then I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Ethan has been reported missing from Camp Crosby.”
Static hisses in my ears. My mind has shoved aside all of his words but one—the most important.
“Ethan is missing?” I need this man to explain it to me. I need him to be exact and specific.
He does so without consulting his notes. “Ethan’s teacher conducted a head count sometime around 2:30 a.m. and found Ethan missing. She and another chaperone searched the surrounding area, and when they couldn’t find any sign of your son, they alerted the authorities at 3:07. The Lumpkin County Sheriff’s Office arrived at the scene shortly thereafter and has initiated an organized search of the camp. So far they’ve been unable to locate him.”
“I’m sure he... He probably just...went to the bathroom or something and couldn’t find his way back.”
“It’s one of the scenarios they’re looking at. A city kid in the woods could get turned around easily, especially in the dark.”
“What... What are the other scenarios?”
“At this point, they’re not ruling anything out.”
I picture my son out there in woods darker than a nightmare, and there’s a teetering in my balance, a slow unraveling in my chest. Ethan still sleeps with a night-light. He still insists on leaving his bedroom door cracked and the hallway sconces on, so the light can creep across the carpet to the foot of his bed. I think of him out there in the cold, dark woods, and I feel his panic, as tangible as electricity in the air.
Every mother lives with this secret terror. The kind we let creep into our consciousness in our darker moments. It wheezes with hot, sour breath in our ears our most primal fear—that some sort of harm will come to our babies. We console ourselves by dismissing it as an impossibility. Not us, we tell ourselves. Not our children. It’s how we survive the danger that the worst could happen, by shoving our terrors to the dustiest, most forgotten corners of our mind.
But sometimes, when the house is quiet and everyone is asleep, we allow ourselves to wonder. What would I do? How would I respond?
I respond with legs of jelly and lungs of concrete, no air moving in or out. My skin goes hot and my blood goes cold and my vision goes blurry with tears or lack of oxygen or both. Something sharp and biting tears into my stomach, doubling me over at the waist.
Ethan is missing.
The words play over and over in my mind, along with images of him in the pitch-black woods, a pack of wild animals nipping at his toes or dragging him by the skin of his neck through the underbrush. Is he hurt? Is he conscious? Is he alive?
I lurch upright, my breath returning with a series of choked sobs.
The policeman steps inside, shutting the door with a soft click and reaches for my elbow. “Let’s find you a place to sit down.”
I swat his hand away. “How long have they been searching?” My voice is too high and too shrill. The hysteria has thickened into a spiky knot in the center of my chest. I can barely talk around it. “How long?”
He checks his watch. “Somebody’s been looking for just under three hours now. We’ve been trying to reach you for most of that.”
“Three hours! Three... How many people?”
“I don’t know the exact number, ma’am, but a missing child is about as high priority as you can get. If they don’t have the staff on hand, they’ll be calling in nearby precincts and recruiting volunteers. It takes a little longer to pull a search party together in the middle of the night, but the sheriff knows what he’s doing, and his guys know those woods like the backs of their hands.”
If that were true, if the sheriff and his guys knew every moss-covered stone, every cave and fallen
