A Son's Tale

Sammie was still gone. Todd had been questioned and released.

Detective Martin was around someplace. Outside, maybe, directing the canvas of the neighborhood. They’d tapped her cell phone. And her father’s. Morgan didn’t have a home line. But they wanted her there, anyway. In case Sammie came home. Or someone brought him home. Or tried to contact her there.

Morgan listened to the flapping sound of Julie’s flip-flops out in the foyer where she’d gone to answer the door. Her friend had been sitting on Morgan’s other side on the couch for most of the afternoon. She was wearing the sleeveless, long, tie-dyed cotton dress that she’d bought the year before at a clearance sale. Her husband hated the dress. Morgan loved it.

The couch was nice. Soft. And clean. Morgan had gone over it twice with leather cleanser and antibacterial cleanser, too, when she’d purchased it. She wanted to make certain that it was safe for Sammie. Should she tell Detective Martin she’d done that? It proved how much she loved her son, didn’t it? Proved that she was a good mother.

Jumping up, Morgan stood at the window. Staring out. No matter how tightly she wrapped her arms around herself, she couldn’t seem to get warm.

Julie flapped in, flip-flop, flip-flop.

“Morgan?”

She heard her friend. She just didn’t turn around. Watching the flurry of activity on the street was as close as she could get to doing something. The inactivity was driving her crazy.

For a second she imagined herself and Sammie on the beach. In Florida. They couldn’t afford the Hilton Head vacations she’d taken as a child with her parents. Florida’s beaches were more fun. Less stuffy. She and Sammie were holding hands, screaming as they took a big wave together… .

Outside, a man she didn’t recognize moved into her line of vision.

She should be doing. It was her job to see to her son’s needs. To look after him. She was always the one who was doing for Sammie. The only one…

“Morgan, Dr. Whittier’s here.”

She turned. Still outside looking for her son. Still on that beach in Florida.

The man standing in her living room was as unreal as the rest of her current world. Dr. Whittier? In her home?

“Hi, Morgan,” he said. “I looked up your address. I hope you don’t mind my stopping by, but after the way you left

class, I just wanted to make certain you were okay.”

She shook her head. “My son’s missing.”

“I know.”

Of course he did. The whole class knew. Maybe the whole town did. She hoped to God the whole town knew.

“Dr. Whittier? Are you Sammie’s doctor?” Morgan heard her mother’s voice as if from a distance greater than the couch across the room.

Morgan looked back outside.

Surely someone would have seen a ten-year-old boy wearing cutoff shorts, a Phoenix Suns T-shirt and black sneakers with a hole in the toe. Sammie was small, like her, but he wasn’t invisible. That blond hair, and those big brown eyes of his…

“…her English professor…” Cal Whittier’s voice infiltrated briefly.

Sammie had wanted her to practice catch with him the night before. She’d been too busy cutting decorations for Saturday’s picnic. She’d started at the day care when she’d been pregnant with Sammie. The job had offered free child care, which saved her enough money that she’d been able to get them the duplex in the nicer neighborhood rather than settling for an apartment in a less safe part of town.

She’d worried, at first, that she wouldn’t qualify for the job, but Tennessee law allowed you to teach in a day care with only a high school diploma. She’d started out as an assistant teacher and then was offered the job of executive assistant to the director. She liked teaching, though, and she substituted for the full-time teachers whenever she could. She’d lucked out. She got to spend the first five years of Sammie’s life with him and earn money, too. And once Sammie had started school, Morgan’s boss had allowed Sammie to come to the day care after class to play and help with the little kids until Morgan was off work.

As a bonus, she’d loved working with the preschoolers—she’d been a natural—and had found a career.

“Morgan was in my class when she got the call about her son… .” She assumed Dr. Whittier was still addressing her mother and she turned back around.

The three of them—Morgan, Whittier and Julie—were standing in the middle of her tiny living room, while her mother perched on the edge of the couch, her thumbs rubbing back and forth across opposite palms.

“I’d just seen Sammie half an hour before he went missing,” Julie was telling Whittier. “I’d gone into his classroom to take a message to his teacher and he’d called out to me, flashing that big grin of his.”

He’d just run away. Sammie was doing this to prove he could. To prove that he was old enough to be on his own. To prove…