All the Dangerous Things(14)

But after one day, two days, a week, a month, it became harder and harder to cling to any kind of hope. So without someone to blame, they decided to blame me.

That’s why it’s so hard to do these talks, knowing what half of the audience is thinking. Their eyes on me, scrutinizing. Waiting for me to slip up. They think I killed my baby: another Susan Smith or Casey Anthony, woefully unmaternal. Some of them actually think that I did it—that I smothered him in his sleep, maybe, fingers twitching after one too many restless nights—while others simply say that I was asking for it. That I didn’t do enough to keep him safe.

Either way, it always comes back to me: the mother. It’s always my fault.

I tell myself I don’t care, that their opinions won’t bring Mason back, but I would be lying if a little part of me—somewhere, deep down, the debris of self-preservation floating across the murky depths of my subconscious—wasn’t trying to prove something to them. Wasn’t trying to convince them that I am maternal. I am a good mother.

Or maybe I’m just trying to convince myself.

I look up from the table and glance out the window, the afternoon stretching ahead of me like a prison sentence. I’m practically counting down the hours until the sun sets again, the metaphorical marking of that grim milestone no family of a missing child ever wants to reach.

One year.

It’s almost three o’clock now; Mason’s vigil is downtown at six. Ben and I planned it together, albeit for entirely different reasons. He wanted something to remember—I can’t bring myself to say the word memorial, but that’s really what it is. As for me, I wanted something to draw a crowd. Like sitting on the dock with that string, bobbing the bait and waiting for something to bite.

A trap, of sorts. Like leading a moth to a flame.

I stand up from the table, pushing my chair back with a screech before walking into the kitchen and grabbing my purse. I don’t have it in me right now: sifting through those names, spending another day chasing ghosts. I can’t pass the next three hours in this house, alone. Mason is everywhere here: in the closed door of his nursery, the one room in this house I refuse to step inside. In the child locks still strapped to the cabinets and in his crayon-scribbled drawings still stuck to the fridge.

That’s the thing about a missing child, the thing nobody tells you: They never die. In a way, their goneness makes them immortal—always there, just barely out of view. Forever alive in your mind exactly the way they were when they left you, materializing as that sudden cold spot when you walk down the hallway or a twirling tendril of smoke before evaporating into nothing, leaving behind just the faintest trace of what used to be.

“I’ll be back,” I whisper to Roscoe before slinging my purse over my shoulder and making my way toward the door. Then I step outside and lock it behind me, my eyes stinging in the sudden brightness of outside.





CHAPTER EIGHT


THEN

We pad down the stairs, Margaret carefully placing both feet on each step. Left, then right. Left, then right. I walk with her slowly, her fingers laced in mine.

Going anywhere with Margaret always takes a while; she’s small, after all, and our house is so big. Three stories with wraparound porches on every level. I’m old enough to understand that big is a relative term, actually. I really have no way of knowing if it is big, comparatively speaking, since this is the only place I’ve ever lived. The only place I’ve known. Maybe everyone’s house looks like this—so large that I find myself discovering new nooks and crannies during every game of hide-and-seek, no matter how many times we’ve played; so old that the creaks and pops and snaps of the wood have become like a family member to me, frightening yet familiar—but I don’t think so. I can see the way people stare as they walk past, cameras slung low around their necks as they grip the wrought-iron fence, trying to sneak a peek through the bars. I watch them read the weathered bronze plaque bolted to the brick columns, the inscription providing a little bit of background on our home. I’ve read it so many times myself that I have it memorized now, reciting it out loud like I’m ushering pretend visitors through a gallery exhibit. But I’ll never forget the first time, the way my fingers moved across the cold metal as if I were reading braille.

“Built in 1840, the Hayworth Mansion was abandoned years later during the Great Ske-ske-skedee—”

“Skedaddle,” Dad had said, smiling. “The Great Skedaddle.”

“The Great Skedaddle.”

I had never heard that word before, skedaddle, but I liked it. I liked the way it made my tongue feel, like it was dancing. In learning to read, I was also learning to fall in love with words; I liked how each one was different, unique, like a fingerprint. How some hissed through my teeth while others rolled off my lips, slippery like oil, and others clacked against the roof of my mouth like a verbal gum smack.

Each new word was a new experience, a new sound. A new feeling. And each combination led to a new story to read, a new world to discover.

“Converted into a hospital by Union soldiers,” I continued, “the mansion was later renovated during the—”

I glanced at my dad, eyebrows raised.

“Reconstruction Era,” he said.

“Reconstruction Era.”

After that day, I started to look at our home in a whole new light. It wasn’t just our home anymore; somehow, it seemed to belong to both everyone and no one, like we were living inside my sister’s dollhouse, an identical pillared mansion Mom had gifted her for Christmas, our family nothing more than the collection of plush fabric dolls some invisible hand ushered from room to room, acting out a scene.