A Son's Tale

He’d never seen it that way. Or if he had, he’d been too young to remember a time when it felt like the world was a safe place for kids.

“Eight hundred thousand kids go missing each year in the United States. That’s two thousand a day or one every forty seconds. But most are safely returned.”

She stopped pacing in front of her house and faced him, studying him in the blackness. Light from the streetlamp shone on one side of her face, giving it a white hue that was almost sickly, and throwing the other side of her into shadow. But he could see the panic in her eyes.

“I… Are you sure you want to be here?”

“I can go if you’d like.”

“No!” Her hand reached toward him and then hugged her arm again without ever making contact with him. “I… You can stay if you want. I just…I’m not sure why you’d want to. It’s late. You have to be tired.”

“I wouldn’t sleep if I went home. I’d be thinking about you and your son. Wondering if you’d had any news.”

“You don’t even know Sammie. And I’m just a student… .”

“It wouldn’t matter to me if you were a stranger, Morgan, I’d still want to help if I could. But you are far from a stranger. I’ve been reading your essays for four years. I got to know you through them. And…I’ve enjoyed our recent conversations. I’d like to help if I can.”

“Don’t you have someone at home waiting for you?” she asked, looking down the street in one direction and then the other before glancing back at him.

“A Mrs. Whittier, you mean?” Had she been hoping she’d see Sammie walking up the street toward them? He’d been looking for that very thing all night long.

“No, everyone knows you’re single. But that doesn’t mean you live alone.”

“I live with my father. He knows where I am and why.”

“Oh.”

He’d never felt such an urge to talk. To share. And just as compelling was the reticence that had become a natural part of him.

“I…we…knew someone once. A woman in the town where we lived. Her child was taken. It’s not something you ever forget.”

“Did you know her well?”

Thinking of Rose Sanderson, of things the woman had done and said, he told the complete truth. “No.”

“How old was her child?”

“Two.” He wanted Morgan to know that she wasn’t alone. That other people knew exactly what she was feeling.

“A boy or a girl?”

“A girl.”

Her eyes filled with a painful mixture of compassion and fear and too late he knew what the next question was going to be.

“Did they find her?” Was the child returned safely to her mother’s waiting arms?

“No.” With a finger under Morgan’s chin, he held her face gently aloft, looking her straight in the eye, and said, “Of those eight hundred thousand kids that go missing each year, only one hundred and fifteen of them are stranger abductions and less than a hundred of them are victims of homicide.”

“Says who?”

“Washington, D.C.—the U.S. Department of Justice.”

She looked at him—and kept looking—as though the connection of their gazes was holding her upright.

She wasn’t Rose Sanderson. And this time he might be able to help.

* * *