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 order is great in theory, but so far mine has proved to be useless. I know from experience that by the time the police arrive, Andrew will be long gone. I reach for my phone, 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.”