Off the Deep End (43)

That’s what I told Mark. I pitched his hospital visits like messed-up volunteer work that would look good on his college applications. We never would’ve known about it if the school hadn’t called and busted him.

“Hi, Mrs. Greer, this is Beth calling from Falcon Lake High School, and I just wanted to check in with you about Isaac’s absences,” the guidance counselor had said after we’d given our customary hellos and made comments about the weather.

“His absences?”

“His absences,” she said again, implying that I should obviously know what she was talking about.

“I’m sorry, it’s been a really busy week, and I’m not sure what you’re referring to.” Isaac was supposed to have been at school every day from 8:15 a.m. until 3:45 p.m. As far as I knew, he had been.

“He’s been signing himself out for the last two periods most days this week. The sign-out sheet says you pick him up and that he goes home. I just want to make sure he’s going home.” Mark and I had had numerous discussions with the principal and guidance counselor before sending Isaac back to school. We’d stressed that they should alert us if there were any changes in his behavior or anything we needed to know about. I appreciated her doing her job and following through on what we’d agreed on.

“Yes, he comes home,” I said, knowing full well he was at school for pickup every day at 3:45 like he’d been there the entire time.

“And why haven’t you notified us?” There was a hint of annoyance in her voice. I couldn’t blame her. I was the one who’d said there needed to be open lines of communication about everything happening with Isaac and that I wanted us to check in if anything changed or was out of the ordinary. Skipping the last two periods certainly qualified under the rules I’d established when he’d first gone back to school.

“Honestly, I was hoping that it was just going to be temporary and within a few more days, he’d be able to work it out. If it looked like it was going to become permanent, I would’ve told you.”

She was irked. I could tell, but it didn’t faze me. I was happy, which was definitely the wrong parental response to have when you found out your teenage son had been skipping school, but how could I not be? Not because of the missing school, but for the first time since the accident, Isaac had done something completely age appropriate. He’d acted like a regular teenager.

Mark wasn’t nearly as pleased or excited about the idea as I was when he found out Isaac had been skipping school.

“I can’t believe you lied to the school about it,” he said that night after he’d gotten home from work and I’d filled him in on all the details.

I shrugged. “I don’t know, I just did. The lie popped out of my mouth without me even thinking about it.” I hadn’t lied to cover up for him. The agreement had simply rolled off my tongue without me thinking. “Where do you think he’s going?” I asked, still thrilled over it even though I was trying to pretend like I wasn’t. Maybe he had a girlfriend. That would do it. His first girlfriend would definitely pull him out of the dark hole he’d buried himself in.

It never occurred to me that he’d been going anywhere sinister.

Mark was the one who concocted the plan to figure out where Isaac was going and what he was doing when he left school early. Mark liked to put all the blame and responsibility on me for how things turned out with Isaac, but he’d been plenty involved in all this too.

“Let’s not tell him that we know he’s skipping school,” he said the next morning over breakfast. We were still trying to figure out how we’d approach him and what we’d do depending on his response afterward.

“That seems a bit dishonest,” I pointed out. I wanted to throw it in his face that he’d spent the first part of our conversation last night berating me about lying to the school, but not telling Isaac about the phone call with the school and that we knew he was lying to us seemed like more of the same—lying. Once again, he was mad at me for the exact same things he was doing. How did he not see what a hypocrite he was?

Nonetheless, I agreed not to say anything to Isaac when I picked him up from school that afternoon, and I did everything to act normal, but it was hard. I couldn’t stop sneaking glances at him out of the corner of my eye while I drove. Nothing about him looked any different. He dragged himself into the passenger seat and plopped himself down like he always did. After a quick mumbled hello, he pulled his hoodie over his head, popped in his AirPods, and listened to his music while staring out the window. He’d never been one to talk about things when you picked him up from school, and adolescence had pretty much stolen away any chance of that ever happening.

I was quiet and agreeable. Just like I was when Mark told me about his plan that night. About how we needed to start stalking our fifteen-year-old. It started with him sneaking into Isaac’s room and turning on location services on his phone. He was always turning it off so we couldn’t track him on his phone. It was one of the things we found over and over again when we checked our kids’ phones. They liked disabling the feature so we couldn’t find them. They’d both been grounded for it more than once.

Mark spent the next two days monitoring Isaac’s activity like he was training to be a private investigator. He tracked him everywhere. And it was the most boring trail you’d ever do because Isaac didn’t do anything or go anywhere except home and school every day. Not until the following Tuesday. That’s when his spot on the Life360 app started moving. It moved out of the high school down to Main Street and across Fifth Avenue, where it stopped for seven minutes. Seven long minutes until he started moving again. By bus? Uber? There was no way to tell.