Off the Deep End (17)
But we couldn’t keep our children locked up. What were we supposed to do? Make all teenage boys in the tristate area come inside after dark? We couldn’t live our lives in fear. That wasn’t any kind of life to live. And besides, the reality was that kids disappeared and went missing every day, and if we thought about the reality of those statistics—the danger kids were always in—we’d never let them out of our sights.
None of that mattered to me, though, because the Dog Snatcher hadn’t kidnapped Isaac. If he’d grabbed Isaac, Isaac would’ve gotten away just like Billy. There was no doubt in my mind. I’d made him take the same self-defense classes Billy took. He got certified, too, and I even made him carry the same brand of pepper spray. I did the exact same things with Katie. She was by his side through it all. They used to practice their holds together in the backyard, trying to see if they could get away from the other. They knew what to expect, but most importantly, they knew how to react if, God forbid, the situation presented itself.
That’s why I knew the Dog Snatcher didn’t have Isaac despite what it looked like—and it didn’t look good. I wasn’t delusional. I could see exactly how it looked. The similarities. The evidence. All of it. I was a smart woman. A smart woman and a mother who knew two things: people copied serial killers all the time, and my mother’s intuition that told me the Dog Snatcher didn’t have my boy and there was still a chance to save him from the person who did.
FIVE
AMBER GREER
I slid out from underneath the covers after realizing I didn’t have to do this tonight. I couldn’t sleep at night with Isaac gone, but I hadn’t been able to get out of bed because of Katie sleeping next to me. Any sound or slight movement on my part startled her, and she woke up immediately. Mark took two Xanax and a shot of whiskey every night before brushing his teeth, and that seemed to work for him, but I couldn’t bring myself to use any of that stuff even though the doctor had called in a prescription for Xanax for me too. He probably would’ve called in heroin if we’d asked.
I eased my feet into my slippers and quietly plodded my way out of our bedroom and down the hall to Isaac’s room. It was exactly as it looked the night he’d left. The book he’d been in the middle of reading lay open on his nightstand. The clothes he’d worn to school that day crumpled in a pile on the floor a few steps from his closet. I’d expected his room to be trashed after the police went through it in their search, but nothing was upturned or messy. You couldn’t even tell they’d scavenged through it. They’d been delicate and easy with all his things, picking them up and carefully placing them back where they’d found them, but I didn’t like that they’d put their fingerprints all over his stuff. That their hands—not his—were the last ones to touch his things. As quick as that thought hit, I shoved it away. I wouldn’t allow myself to think about him in ways that implied he was permanently gone despite what my family thought.
They weren’t alone. Everyone assumed Isaac was another one of the Dog Snatcher’s victims. He went missing just like they did, and Mark was right, finding his phone the way they had wasn’t a good sign. If things followed the same pattern as the others, tomorrow his clothes would show up in a local park somewhere in a tightly sealed box.
I walked over to Isaac’s desk and fingered his papers and books, remembering the first night I’d found him suffering in his bedroom after the accident. The only thing he’d asked for after he got out of the hospital was the box from the attic with all his stuffed animals from childhood—the ones he’d slept with until the summer he was twelve. Mark had gladly gotten them for him, and I’d found Isaac curled up in the fetal position on his bed a few nights later with his favorite teddy bear clutched against his chest and the other stuffed animals surrounding him. I’d never seen him look so innocent and broken. Like a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest and been trampled on.
I held myself back from rushing over to him and throwing my arms around him. I took tentative steps to the bed instead. Before the accident, I wouldn’t have thought twice about holding him until he felt better, and he would’ve gladly accepted my comfort. Isaac was no stranger to bad days, especially when it came to the kids at school, and he’d been saying since kindergarten that my hugs held magic juice to make things better. But those days were gone. He’d turned into a feral cat overnight. He recoiled from my touch like it physically hurt him. I explained that to his grief counselor, Theresa, each time we spoke after their sessions and told her how troubling it was, how worried it made me. She said the same thing she always said whenever I expressed my concerns about what a hard time Isaac was having coping.
“He’s still in shock,” she’d say, like that explained every difficulty no matter what it was. “Everyone processes trauma differently and in their own time. You have to be patient. Give him time.”
She was supposed to be an expert, so I believed her in the beginning, but that changed the more time went on and Isaac didn’t show any signs of getting better or being okay. He still hadn’t. He’d only gotten worse—not better. That was troubling. I couldn’t let it go because it just didn’t make sense.
Yes, Isaac was in a terrible accident ten months ago, and someone on his basketball team had died, but the reality was that he wasn’t that close to Gabe even though they’d grown up around each other since they were babies. They didn’t hang in the same circles. They never had. In fact, Gabe had always been kind of mean to Isaac ever since elementary school. Lots of the kids were. For some reason, Isaac had always been a target of their teasing. I tried to avoid playdates or places where Gabe might have been because of how he treated Isaac. It was somehow worse with him because he tolerated Isaac if they were alone, and there were even times he was nice to him, but he was mean to him at school and didn’t stand up for him or defend him when he was being picked on. I never talked to anyone about that part because there was no way I’d speak ill of the dead, but it was the truth—Gabe wasn’t nice to Isaac. The two of them didn’t even like each other.