“The boy you buried isn’t Jonas.”
Captain Moeller’s words hang in the air; I can almost see them floating there. No one speaks. No one moves. When I can’t take the tension anymore, I ask the totally irrelevant question: “Who was it?”
“A Baby Doe, probably from another state. He wasn’t in our missing children database.”
Finally, sound comes from my mother’s mouth in the form of a gasp.
“I know, it’s terrible,” Captain Moeller says to my mom.
“So what’s next?” she asks through the fingers over her mouth.
“We reopen the search for Jonas,” Captain Moeller says.
My mom looks a little like she’s in shock. She doesn’t reply, so the captain keeps going.
“I took the liberty of having the team use the aging software on the old photo we had of Jonas. We can put that image out over the wire and get people in the area on lookout.”
“What if he’s not in the area?” I ask.
“We’ll distribute it nationally, too,” he says to me.
“Can I see it?” I ask.
“Of course,” he says. The captain rifles around on his desk for a bit and unearths a thick, worn file. I wonder how many times it’s been opened over the past decade.
Captain Moeller pages through the file and pulls out an eight-by-ten photo.
“Here you go,” he says, sliding it across the desk. My mom leans in to see but doesn’t touch. Tears silently flow down her cheeks; she’s so quiet I barely know she’s there.
Captain Moeller hands her a tissue and leaves us alone. When he’s gone, I pick up the photo for a closer look.
For some reason, a strange calm washes over me at the sight of him: my brother. My shoulders loosen and I exhale slowly.
It feels right.
He seems familiar.
“Do you remember him? From the future?” my mom asks in a voice so weak it’s like she’s a mouse.
Excited for a moment, I rack my brain for a memory of my brother—any memory other than the horrific one of him being taken.
“No, Mom, I don’t,” I say. It causes her tears to flow faster. Instead of comforting her, I continue to stare.
There’s nothing there, and yet…
There’s something.
Like that punch line of a joke you forget by the end, there’s something.
And to me, right now, something is just fine.
47
Luke parks directly in front of a NO TRESPASSING sign on the barbed-wire fence that keeps us from driving off the incline. He kills the engine and the headlights along with it.
The town twinkles below, and I inhale the warm evening through the open windows.
“Did you bring me here to kill me?” I tease.