The Absence of Mercy

51

Early May. Dr. Ben Stevenson pulled the dark blue Honda into the parking lot and killed the motor. The lingering caress of winter had grudgingly slipped away two weeks ago, giving way to warm sunshine, a multicolored tapestry of blooming things, and the frenzied flurry of insects eager to begin the new season. Normally, the nicer weather would have lightened Ben’s spirits, which tended to be darkest during Ohio’s cold, grim, intractable winters. This year the change of season only heightened his sense of loss. It reminded him that life went on, and subtly suggested that wounds, however deep, might someday heal, and that loss, however poignant, was but a temporary condition that would fade ever so slightly with each successive year.

He climbed out of the car and closed the door, glancing behind him as he crossed the parking lot. No one watched from the driver’s seat of an unmarked police car. They’d stopped following him two months ago, and even that had saddened him. Have they given up that quickly, he wondered, or have they just decided I have nothing further to contribute? If their assumptions coincided with the latter, they were right. He was in the dark as much as they were—perhaps more. There must be leads they are pursuing, he told himself. There have to be. A mother and two children cannot simply disappear from the face of the earth without a trace. Could they? No. Surely, there must be something.

On the day they’d disappeared, Ben had been detained for further questioning. For eight hours they’d interrogated him, asking the same questions over and over in a thousand different ways, trying to get him to contradict himself, not believing he hadn’t known. “You mean to tell me,” Special Agent Culver had asked, looming over him behind the chair in which Ben sat, “that you examined the bite marks on those victims, photographed them, discussed them with the investigating detectives, and never noticed that they matched the dental architecture of your own son? I mean, look at the pictures!” He’d thrown photographs of Thomas down on the table all around him, framed pictures that had been prominently displayed in Ben’s own home. “You don’t see that gap between the upper left canine and the first premolar—the one we’ve been focused on throughout the investigation? You don’t see that?!”

The truth was, he hadn’t. Or more precisely, he’d seen it every day, and had never made the connection—had never allowed himself to make the connection. During medical school, one of Ben’s mentors—a surgeon with the last name of Zaret—had been fond of telling his students, “The eyes cannot see what the mind does not know.” If you don’t consider the possibility of a particular disease, in other words, you won’t recognize the signs and symptoms for what they truly are. “You have to think about it here,” the scrub-clad surgeon would say, pointing to his forehead, “before you can see it here,” he’d finish, the index finger descending to the level of his eyes.

Ben shook his head. He hadn’t seen it—hadn’t allowed himself to see it. But what if he had? Would he have been able to intervene somewhere along the way, before it became too late for all of them? And what about Susan? How much had she known, and when? Why had she not come to him with that knowledge? More important, why hadn’t she done anything to stop it? And the question he kept asking himself more than any other: Why had she chosen to run?

He wondered if perhaps she’d been trying to tell him all along, and that he simply hadn’t been listening. Bits of conversation stuck out in his mind like thistles, catching him when he wasn’t looking, wounding him with their missed significance.

…“I don’t think he should be dating that girl. One way or the other, he’ll end up hurting her.”…

…“Why don’t you talk to him about it?”…

…“You have no idea about the measures that I am prepared to take—that I have already taken—to safeguard the lives of those children…. I would do anything—anything—for them.”…

…“Mom says everyone deserves forgiveness. She says it’s not up to us to judge each other. It’s up to God.”…

…“We have to take care of each other. Just as we always have.”…

…“I just don’t want to lose him.”…

Ben recalled how, after the first murder, he’d asked his wife—nearly pleaded with her—to take the boys away for a while. Their safety was the most important thing, he had argued.

“It won’t make any difference,” Susan had told him, and now he realized why.

The sliding glass doors of the hospital’s front entrance retracted dutifully. He crossed the lobby, turned right at the first intersection, and proceeded down the familiar hallway leading to the west stairwell. He passed several people in the corridor but said hello to no one. These days, that was best. He was a well-known presence in this town, but he walked the streets and buildings alone, like the ghost of a soul who has not yet realized that he is dead. People studied him with sideways glances, drew their children close in his company, and gave him wide berths as they passed. His son had decimated this town like a disease, an infection, a plague of one—and at the very least Ben was guilty by association, although there were many within Wintersville who claimed that his culpability ran far deeper than that. As a result, he was not only unwelcome here—he was suspect. And he would have left this place months ago if there were anywhere else for him to go.

But it was here, within this town, that he had lost them. For although Susan and the boys had been on the other side of the country when they disappeared, he had lost them long before that—in the lines of communication that had fallen short, in the clues that had gone unnoticed, in the innumerable opportunities he had had to stop this, if only he had listened carefully to the messages all around him. No, he couldn’t leave—couldn’t abandon the only tangible connection with his family that remained, couldn’t walk away from the things they had once touched, the rooms they had once occupied, the place they had once called home.

Distracted by these thoughts, he almost ran into her as she exited the gift shop.

“Monica,” he said, but she grimaced and stepped backward as if he were contagious, as if he might suddenly reach out and try to grab her.

Ben looked at her anyway, trying to see her as his son might have seen her. It was true that Thomas had pursued her through the woods, had torn apart her body, had left her lying there in the rain to die. She would never be the same because of it, would never be truly free of what his boy had done to her. But was it possible that Thomas had also come to care for her, to love her in some perverse way? Was he capable of that? Or had he only been toying with her all along—fascinated with Monica because of her survival, a living display of his handiwork. At the same time, Ben wondered what she might have once seen in him, if there was some shred of goodness and kindness she had discovered hidden within his son, a saving grace within his deep pit of damnation.

“I…” He faltered, searching for some means to connect with her, for some way to ask her about the things he was thinking. “How are you?”

She stared back at him without answering, her body poised in a defensive position.

“I heard that your father was in the hospital.” Ben stumbled onward. “Pneumonia, is it? I… I just want you to know that I’ve been thinking about him. I hope he’s feeling bett—”

“You stay away from my father,” she responded with such vehemence that for a moment Ben thought she was on the verge of striking him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, stepping past her and continuing down the hallway. “I didn’t mean to…”

“You stay away from both me and my family,” she called after him.

Ben reached the end of the hall and placed a hand on the doorknob leading to the basement.

“Do you hear me?” Her tone was loud and defiant within the tiled passageway.

Ben pushed the door open, stepping into the stairwell. It was quiet in here, but the sound of Monica’s voice carried through the open door as it swung slowly closed on its pneumatic piston. Her words snapped at his heels as he hastened down the concrete steps toward the floor below. “You stay away from us. Do you hear? You and the rest of your twisted family. You stay away from us all!”

52

Sam Garston drove by the residence for the third time that day, stopping at the entrance to the driveway. Ben’s car was parked in front of the house, and Sam pulled the cruiser in behind him and turned off the engine. He sighed. He had no business here, he knew. Ben was no longer under formal investigation. There was no piece of news they had to discuss, no change in the situation between them. So, why do I keep coming here? Sam asked himself. What am I looking for? What do I expect to find? Perhaps nothing, he thought as he stepped out of the vehicle and approached the front door, the soles of his shoes clicking lightly on the warm pavement. As odd as it sounded, Sam still considered himself Ben’s friend—one of his only friends, he realized. Perhaps he came here more as an ally than an adversary, to see how Ben was holding up under the strain of the last several months. He had seen the way people in this town treated him—their collective judgments raining silently upon him without mercy or reservation—and although Sam had difficulty blaming them, he also couldn’t help but feel empathy for the man. There was no one Ben could talk to now, no one in his corner. And so he had stopped by once again to check up on him, to let him know there was someone in this town who still worried about him, who was available if Ben wanted him to be.

He ascended the steps and rapped three times on the door.

From inside came the heavy rush of a hurried approach down the front hallway. For a brief moment, Sam was struck with the certainty that Thomas had returned. In his mind, he imagined the door swinging open, the boy’s face staring back at him as the long, sharp instrument in his hand fell in practiced and determined swings into the side of Sam’s neck—an arch of pulsing blood jetting upward into the fine spring air.

Something large hit the door with enough force to make it shudder on its hinges, and Sam took a reflexive step backward, his right hand falling instinctively to the grip of his firearm. Then the guttural bellows of the dog erupted from the other side of the thick wooden slab that separated them: “WHOOOOOOH!! WHOO! WHOO!! WHOOOHHWHOOH!!”

“I’ve already had to replace that door once,” someone commented from the driveway behind him, and Sam spun around quickly, beginning to pull the weapon from its holster.

“Hey, take it easy,” Ben exclaimed, dropping the long-handled shovel he was holding and showing Sam the palms of his hands.

Sam reseated the weapon. “Don’t sneak up on me, Ben.”

“I wasn’t trying to,” Ben assured him. “I mean,”—he looked around—“this is my property. I may not be welcome anywhere else in this town, but I do believe I have a right to be here.”

Sam descended the steps and joined him in the front yard. He nodded at the shovel. “Doing some planting, are you? A little yard work?”

“The thought occurred to me recently that I ought to dig a moat.” Ben stooped to pick up the shovel, then leaned it against the house.

“You still having trouble with the neighborhood kids? I told you before I can go talk to their parents.”

“No, it’s fine,” he said. “It’s mostly harmless pranks. I’ve had to replace two broken windows from rock-throwing, but that’s really been the worst of it. It’s probably best to ignore them.”

“Well, I don’t tolerate vandalism in this town. You let me know if you want me to put a stop to it, and I will.”

Ben nodded.

“How you holdin’ up otherwise?”

“Fine.”

“I heard you quit the CO.”

“Yeah,” Ben said. “I couldn’t do it anymore. Too many bad memories there.”

“Nat’s gonna miss you. That kid really looks up to you.”

“He comes by the house every once in a while.” Ben smiled.

Sam looked out at the quiet suburban street. A young boy on a bicycle pedaled past. “You ever hear from Susan?” the chief asked, unable to help himself. “She ever try to contact you?”

“Nothing,” the other replied, and Sam, who’d based a large portion of his career on the ability to separate truth from dishonesty, knew that Ben wasn’t telling him everything.

“You know, the best thing for all of them would be to turn themselves in,” he said. “We know they crossed the border into Mexico, and we have people tracking them down even now. It’s only a matter of time. This won’t play out for long.”

Ben looked as if he was about to respond to that, but chose instead to change the subject. “How’s the ticker?”

Sam smiled confidently. The five days he’d spent in the hospital following a heart attack on the day Ben’s family had disappeared were already receding in his memory. “Good as new,” he declared, and tapped his chest with his right hand as if to demonstrate.

Ben nodded. “I guess one way or the other we’re all on borrowed time,” he observed as they made the short walk together to the parked police car in the driveway.

Sam considered this for a moment, then opened the door of his cruiser and lowered his large frame inside. “I’ll let you get back to enjoying your weekend. You give me a call if you want to talk.” He offered Ben a discerning look. “I’m sure you’ll contact me if you hear anything from them, won’t you, Ben? You don’t want to allow yourself to become an accomplice in all of this.”

“I already am,” the man in front of him replied, turning his back on the chief and heading for the front door of the only refuge he still had left. “I already am.”

53

Ben stood looking down at the wooden crate submerged in the earth, the sweat rolling freely down his flushed face. It had taken him thirty minutes this time to dig his way down to it. He was getting better at it, his arms becoming accustomed to the stony soil and the way it resisted his efforts.

The long-handled shovel lay at his feet. He wondered why he had carried it with him to the front of the house to answer Sam’s visit. It had been an instinctual move, but he wasn’t sure it had been the right one. The big man had a curious nature, his eyes missing nothing. Perhaps, on some level, Ben wanted to be caught—although he didn’t think so. More likely, he had brought the tool with him because the best way to hide something is not to hide it at all. People never look carefully at what’s directly in front of them. He had learned that lesson over the past year. He had learned it well.

He got down on his hands and knees, reaching his arms into the hole. The tips of his fingers dug for purchase at the corners of the lid, and then he was lifting it upward, casting it aside on the grass next to him. Inside the crate was a blue duffel bag wrapped in plastic, and he brought it to the surface. He got to his feet, removing the bag from the plastic and carrying it—almost gingerly—into the house.

In the kitchen, he placed his possession on the table and unzipped it. Inside was his passport, a map of Mexico, ten thousand dollars in small bills, and a series of postcards he’d received sporadically in the mail over the past two months. On the kitchen table was another postcard, one that had arrived in his mailbox three days ago. The front displayed a photograph of an old church rising up from amid a lush tapestry of variegated gardens. Villahermosa, it said. La Esmeralda del Sureste. Beautiful village. The emerald of the southeast. On the back was Ben’s name and mailing address—nothing more. No brief personal note or return address. But the message had been clear enough: We are here. We are safe. Come if you want.

The first card, he remembered, had come from the town of Tampico. It had arrived in his mailbox two and a half months after they’d disappeared. He had been sitting right here at the kitchen table sorting through mail when the thing had slid out from between two larger envelopes onto the flat wooden surface in front of him. He’d turned it over in his hands, curious but not yet realizing its significance. Then his body froze when he saw the soft slopes and curves of the handwritten letters—unmistakably Susan’s writing. He’d stared at those letters for a long time, as if he were an astonished biologist encountering a novel species of animal for the first time. Eventually, he’d turned the card over again to study the front. Tampico, it said in pink cursive writing overlying a picture of a white sand beach, the shimmer of the setting sun reflecting off the water’s surface. “Tampico,” he’d repeated to himself, the word sounding surreal and otherworldly in his own ears. The urge had fallen upon him to leave at that very moment, to purchase a plane ticket and to just go—to leave everything behind, bolting in the direction of the only contact he’d received from his family in more than two months.

Several considerations, however, had prevented him from doing just that. The most significant concern being, What if they’re just passing through? What if he got there to find that his wife and children had already moved on? And how would he go about finding them in the first place? Would he wander the streets asking people in English—the only language he spoke—whether they’d seen an American mother with two boys fitting Joel’s and Thomas’s descriptions? Tampico was a tourist destination. How many families vacationing there fit that exact picture? No, it wouldn’t work. He’d needed something more to go on.

For the time being, therefore, he had decided to wait, imagining that since Susan had sent him one postcard advising him of their whereabouts, more were sure to follow. Six weeks passed without further contact. Each day he’d stalk the mailbox, certain that this would be the day, and each day his heart would sicken with despair when he rummaged through the bills, catalogs, and assorted junk mail to find… nothing.

Then one day it came. A second postcard. On the front was a picture of a large pyramidal relic, above it the name El Tajín. Entering the name into an electronic search engine on his desktop computer identified it as a famous archeological site to the north of Veracruz, Mexico, along the Gulf of Mexico some 250 miles south of Tampico. They had moved on. This time, he decided, he would go after them.

Another concern had worried him, though. Would he be followed? Both the Sheriff’s Department and the FBI had been keeping tabs on him since Susan had taken the boys and run. If he suddenly purchased a ticket to Mexico, it was likely that someone in law enforcement would know about it. Traveling by car would be better, he decided one evening, a large map of the United States and Mexico sprawled on the kitchen table in front of him. He sat back to ponder the details, absently running his hand across the top of Alex’s broad head. Suddenly, he realized something else he hadn’t considered. What would he do about the dog? On the one hand, Alex was the only family he had left, the only one who hadn’t deserted him. On the other hand, traveling with a 180-pound Great Dane was not exactly the best way to keep a low profile. Finding accommodating hotels would be a persistent problem, and he doubted whether he’d even be allowed to bring the dog across the border. Eventually, he’d turned to the only person he felt he could trust with the responsibility.

“No problem, Dr. S. You leave that glandular freak to me.”

“I may be gone for a while, Nat. I’m not sure when I’ll be coming back. Are you sure you can handle—”

“You leave me a good supply of beer and keep payin’ the electric bills, and you can take a six-month trip to China, as far as I’m concerned.”

There was something else to discuss. The postcard from Villahermosa had come only a week after the last one, as if Susan and the boys had to leave their prior location unexpectedly. Ben could think of several possible reasons for their hurried relocation, but the one that kept surfacing in his mind involved his oldest son, a long sharp object, and the remains of yet another mutilated body discovered in his wake. In his mind, he could see the gaping holes left behind—flesh torn away by human teeth—and he wondered to himself once more: What sort of creature am I chasing? And what will I do when I find it? Then Nat’s voice was pulling him back to the moment.

“Yo, Dr. S. You still with me?” Nat searched his face with eyes that did not yet seem to understand that the world is full of predators, and that they are often much closer than we allow ourselves to believe.

Ben pulled the first postcard from his back pocket, the one from Tampico. “I need to ask you another favor,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“I’m expecting some additional correspondence from the same friend who sent me this.” He handed Nat the postcard. “If any more of these show up in the mail”—he tapped the card with his index finger—“I need to know about it. I’ll call you periodically to check in with you.”

Nat looked up at him skeptically. “A friend is sending you these.”

Ben nodded slowly. He felt stupid for taking this chance—he was making himself incredibly vulnerable—but it was the only way he would know if they moved on again. He had to trust someone, and strangely, that someone turned out to be this lanky twenty-two-year-old standing in front of him.

“And I imagine you wouldn’t want me to mention anything about this friend to, say… Chief Garston, for example.”

Ben’s face remained flat, devoid of expression—or so he hoped. “Chief Garston would not be interested in this friend, Nat. I wouldn’t bother him with it.”

“No,” Nat agreed. “I can’t imagine bothering him with stuff like that.”

“Thank you,” Ben said, unable to recall a time when he’d uttered those words with greater sincerity. He had begun to leave, but what Nat said next made him pause in mid-stride.

“’Bout time you went looking for them.”

Ben turned and looked back at his assistant. “Is it?”

Nat’s face was still, his eyes clear and earnest. “I would,” he responded.

“And when you found them?” Ben asked. “What then?”

Nat shrugged. “Don’t know. I guess I’d try to bring them home.”

“I don’t think he’s salvageable,” Ben said. “He won’t stop. More innocent people will die because of him.”

“Maybe there’s nothing you can do about him then,” Nat mused, “and maybe there is. But there’s more to this situation than just Thomas. This is about what’s best for all of you. Isn’t it?”

54

She opened her eyes in the dark, the fragments of a dream she could not quite remember slipping from her shoulders like a tattered shawl. Something had awakened her—a dog in the street, perhaps, yapping incessantly into the predawn hours. She listened. There was scratching to her right near the large dresser she shared with Ben. Alex must have entered their room last night, pushing the door open with the top of his head, curling up on the floor beside them. She should get up and let him out. She should—

A chair shifted near the corner of the room, and she froze, her eyes straining to penetrate the darkness. Someone is in here with us. Someone had broken into the house and… no… that wasn’t quite right. Where was she? She forced herself to wake up more completely, to push herself the last few inches to the surface, and as she did the reality of her situation came tumbling back in on her—a nightmare that was not a nightmare at all, but rather the nightmarish truth of her existence. A phone call from a neighbor (“There’re a bunch of cop cars sitting in your driveway”)… a hasty stop at the bank to withdraw as much cash as possible… a frantic car ride across the desert… the tense, heart-pounding moments at the border crossing… and now… a motel room, in a city she could barely recall. And how many others before this? How many days spent etching out the terms of their survival in the thin veil of anonymity, how many nights spent lying on a dilapidated mattress in a run-down motel room as the paint peeled imperceptibly from the walls of their lives and she wondered how much more of this she could stand?

The soft scratching noise began again, and this time she tried to focus more concretely on where it was coming from. Through the slightly parted curtains, a vague hint of light illuminated the room in amorphous, ghostly detail. Someone was sitting in the chair by the small table near the foot of her bed. That was where the sound was coming from—a steady, methodical scratching of a pen across some flattened medium. As her vision adjusted to the light and the shadows coalesced into more discernible detail, she realized it was Thomas. He had been sitting there and watching them with his dispassionate eyes while they slept. What is he doing? she wondered. The sound of the pen’s scratching went on and on.

She observed him from the bed. Here was the boy for whom she had sacrificed everything to protect—whose secret she had locked away in her heart as if it were her own. And at what cost? she asked herself. At what cost to all of us? The life they had once known was over now, and days that lay ahead were as shapeless and lonesome as the room around her. During those first desperate weeks after crossing the border, escape and concealment had been the only strategies she’d allowed herself to contemplate. But what now? What comes next? What purpose will define the course of our lives from here? The silence of her reply was loud and stifling in her ears, the sound of the stone slab of a tomb closing above her.

The scratching stopped, and her oldest son’s body sat rigid and motionless for a moment, as if caught in a trance. She maintained her breathing as before, slow and steady, as if she were still asleep. She wondered if he could make out her open eyes from across the room, and she allowed her lids to slide halfway shut, a compromise between seeing and being seen. She could hear the ceaseless rhythm of her heart drumming along in her ears, could feel the mounting tension in her body, and she wondered to herself: When did I begin to fear him? For that was what this was, wasn’t it? That was the manner in which she’d come to perceive him. She feared him, and resented him, and hated him for having placed them in this position—she and Joel, both. He had forced her to choose, and Susan realized on some level that she had chosen wrong. She had failed him as a mother, and had certainly failed Joel. In trying to protect them, she had done her children more harm than good, and now they were all paying for that transgression—each in their own way.

Thomas stood up from the chair and walked to the bed, standing over Susan and her youngest son as they lay defenseless beneath the covers. She closed her eyelids to mere slits, watching him through her lashes. She could have reached out with a tentative hand and touched his leg.

He stood there for what seemed like a very long time. The sun was beginning to crest above the horizon, the room becoming faintly brighter with every passing minute. A rooster crowed in the distance, and then fell abruptly silent in mid-intonation, as if quieted by a farmer’s axe. Thomas leaned over and placed a hand on Joel’s shoulder. Susan’s muscles bunched beneath her skin, the adrenaline flowing freely as she readied herself to act. She could no longer control her respirations, which slid in and out of her with increasing rapidity.

Thomas withdrew his hand from his brother’s shoulder, returning to a full upright position. He studied Joel for a moment longer, then turned and crossed the room to the door, flipping back the dead bolt and opening the door just wide enough to allow himself to pass through to the exterior walkway beyond. There was a soft click as the door swung shut behind him.

Susan slipped out from beneath the covers, stood, and crossed the floor to the window, pulling back the curtain several inches so that she could peer outside at the second-story exterior walkway and through the rails at the parking lot below. She could see the top of Thomas’s head as he descended the stairs. She turned her attention back to the room—to her sleeping son, to the suitcases standing at attention in the corner, to the plastic cups and napkins on the table beside her. She drew the curtain back farther, letting in some additional light. There was something else lying on the table, the thing on which Thomas had been scribbling, and she picked it up now for a closer look.

It was a photograph she had taken of Joel and a young Mexican girl of roughly his same age. There had been times over the past few months when their lives had fallen into transient normality—brief moments and unexpected encounters when the suffocating reality of their situation was temporarily lifted. This picture had captured such a moment, a fleeting friendship Joel had made with a young girl in the time it had taken Susan and Thomas to acquire gas and a few groceries. She’d allowed Joel to stay with the car while they shopped, and when she returned she’d been surprised to find them playing on the withered, sun-beaten grass, the two of them laughing and giggling as if they were the closest of friends rather than strangers who became acquaintances for the space of fifteen minutes at a roadside convenience store in rural Mexico. It had saddened Susan’s heart to see the way her youngest son interacted with the girl, for it made her realize how starved he must be for social relationships like this one. She had put the groceries in the car, and had sat there watching them for another twenty minutes, wishing there was more she could offer him. When it was time for them to go, she’d gone back inside and purchased a disposable camera to take their picture.

She looked down at that photograph now, clasped in her hands, and the only face smiling back at her was the girl’s. Above the neckline, Joel’s face had been scratched away by the dark lines of Thomas’s pen.

She stood there breathing deeply, the hurt and rage coursing through her body in alternating currents. Did he care so little for them that he would destroy even the few small tokens that brought them joy? He’d done it out of pure maliciousness, she decided, to spite them regardless of the sacrifices they had made to protect him. It was…

No, she corrected herself. This was something else she was seeing here.

She thought of Thomas sitting there at the table, watching them as the pen in his hand scratched back and forth across the face of her youngest child. There had been no spite or maliciousness in his expression, only a detached, calculating manner she had seen several times before. She recalled the way he had stood over them, one hand resting lightly on Joel’s shoulder as if… as if to say… good-bye.

Outside, a car trunk slammed, and she turned to look out the window. Thomas was heading back across the parking lot. In his left hand he held a lug wrench from the spare wheel compartment, the prying tip at its distal end catching the early morning sunlight along its black metallic surface.

“Joel. Joel, wake up,” she hissed, going quickly to the bed and shaking him roughly, casting aside the covers.

“What… ,” he replied, his voice still thick and muddled with sleep.

“Get up,” she urged, dragging him from the bed. “We’ve got to go. We’ve got to go right now.”

“Where’s Thomas?” Joel asked, looking around the room.

“He’s coming,” she replied, snatching the extra set of keys from the pocket of her jeans. She went into the bathroom, turned on the shower, pushed the doorknob’s button lock, stepped out of the bathroom, and closed the door behind her. “Thomas is coming, but I don’t want him to hear us leave. We’re leaving without him. Do you understand?”

“Why did you lock the bathroo—?”

“Don’t worry about that. I don’t have time to explain.” She glanced at her clothes in the corner of the room. She would have to leave them here, remaining in her T-shirt and pajama bottoms. There was no time to get dressed. There was no time for anything.

“I want to get my—”

“No, Joel. We have to leave now.” She opened the door and poked her head out of the room. She could hear Thomas’s footsteps on the stairs, heading up toward them. He would be on their level in less than ten seconds. Halfway down the corridor in the direction of the stairs was a small alcove with a soda machine and an ice box. If they were quick about it, they could hide there until Thomas passed them along the walkway.

She pulled her head back inside the room and looked at Joel. “Very quiet,” she said. “Not a word.” Her son nodded, and she took his hand in hers. “Follow me.”

They slipped out into the hallway and closed the door gently behind them. The sound of Thomas’s tennis shoes on the steps was getting louder. His head would clear the level of the floor and they would be in his line of sight at any moment. Susan sprinted down the corridor to the alcove, pulling Joel along. Their bare feet were nearly silent on the concrete flooring. She could see the top of Thomas’s head come into view as she leapt into the alcove, dragging Joel with her. The large soda machine jutted out from the wall on her left, and they pressed their bodies against the space to the right of it, allowing it to shield them from view.

Susan wrapped her left arm around Joel’s body, pulling him toward her. In her right hand she held the key to the car, the short tip protruding from between her index and middle fingers. She would punch with that hand, she told herself, if it came to that. It wasn’t much of a weapon—and certainly didn’t match what Thomas was carrying—but it was the only one she had. The element of surprise would afford her one good shot, and she thought quickly about where to place it.

Then the sound of his footsteps passed them along the walkway. A moment later, she heard him open the door, step inside, and close it once again.

“Let’s go,” she whispered, and the two of them left the alcove and headed for the steps, taking them as rapidly as their bare soles could tolerate. They reached the bottom and hustled across the parking lot. Susan pressed the button on the remote to unlock the doors in anticipation of their arrival, and the car chirped responsively.

Shit, she thought, and on the second story above them a door suddenly opened and Thomas appeared at the railing.

“Mom,” Joel said.

“Get in the car,” Susan ordered, running around to the driver’s side of the vehicle.

“But Mom…”

“What?”

“He’s coming.”

Susan looked up. The spot where Thomas had been standing a moment before was now empty. Her eyes shot to the stairwell.

“Get in, Joel,” she said, dropping into the driver’s seat and fumbling to get the key into its slot in the ignition. The passenger door opened and Joel climbed inside. Through the open door Susan could see Thomas as he appeared at the foot of the stairwell, taking the last three steps in a single leap.

“Close the door!” she yelled, and Joel swung the passenger door shut. The fingers of her right hand felt numb and clumsy as she jammed the key home in the cylinder. Still, it wouldn’t turn. In her peripheral vision, she could see her oldest son sprinting toward them across the parking lot.

She grabbed the steering wheel and yanked it counterclockwise, freeing the key to turn in the ignition. The engine sprang to life just as Thomas reached the car and the door on Joel’s side began to open once again. “No!” she screamed, dropping the transmission into gear and mashing her right foot down on the accelerator. The vehicle lurched forward, wresting the door from Thomas’s grasp, and when it shut this time Joel locked it. The engine raced, but the vehicle moved slowly, as if it were being held back by invisible wires. In the rearview mirror Susan could see him, still running, still coming for them. For a frantic moment, she realized that he was gaining on them.

“The emergency brake,” Joel reminded her. Her right hand grabbed the handle, and her thumb pushed the release button as she slammed it downward.

The car sped up, sending them flying out onto the street. She hooked a left, scraping the right front quarter panel on a parked vehicle as they negotiated the turn too widely. When they reached the next intersection, she went right, barely slowing as the right rear wheel jounced up over the curb. She straightened out the steering, then gunned the automobile in the direction of the closest highway.

“Slow down, Mom! You’re gonna crash!” Joel yelled, reaching across himself to snap home the buckle of his seat belt.

Susan forced herself to back off on the gas. She was shaking uncontrollably, but she couldn’t bring herself to stop the vehicle until they’d covered another twenty miles. Then she got off at the next exit and eased the car to the shoulder, placing it in park and killing the engine. She leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes, attempting to pull herself together. Joel was quiet beside her, looking out through his window.

“I… I know this is very confusing for you… ,” Susan said haltingly. She began shaking again, and willed herself to stop, reminding herself that her son needed her. “It’s been… it’s been confusing for me for a long time,” she said, and she took a deep breath and let it out. “I owe you an explanation, and an apology.”

A car passed on the otherwise vacant early-morning stretch of highway to their left, and Susan turned abruptly in her seat to watch until it disappeared from view. She looked back at the nine-year-old in the seat next to her, his light brown hair still tussled and wild from the night’s sleep, a pillow mark fading on his face.

“I can’t explain everything right now,” she said. “But I want you to know… I want you to know that I’m sorry.” She began to cry then, the tears large and shameful and naked on her face, and she refused to lift a hand to brush them away. She deserved each and every one of them. “I want you to know that I’m sorry for bringing you into this, Joel. You’re a good kid, and I love you. You… you never deserved this.”

She tried to go on, but she couldn’t. The grief and fear and regret were all muddled up inside of her, and the more she tried to talk the more she wept, until at last her son placed a hand on her forearm to quiet her.

“It’s okay, Mom,” he said, and she looked at him and nodded, allowing herself to accept his forgiveness for the moment. Joel leaned over and gave her a hug, and she held him tightly against her, closing her eyes and mouthing a silent prayer of gratitude that he was safe—that they both were—for the first time in months.

A few minutes later, she started the car, readying them for the next leg of their journey. “Mom,” Joel said, and she smiled over at him, smoothing his hair with her hand.

“Yeah. What is it, honey?”

His freckled face was earnest but hopeful. “Can we go home now?”