I slap my laptop shut, and Roscoe jumps at the sound. Then I press my thumbs into my temples and exhale.
Isabelle Drake is a baby killer.
I know these comments shouldn’t get to me; I know they’re just noise. I’ve experienced firsthand the sick fascination people have with other people’s pain. The way they cling to it like static. The way they interpret every move as the wrong move, as if they could possibly know. As if they could possibly know what they’d do in my shoes. How they would feel.
The morning after Mason was taken, I’ll never forget the way our neighbors poked their noses into our yard, smelling a story. They had seen the police cruisers in our driveway, uniformed cops snooping around our house. They had offered their condolences—genuine concern, at first—their hair tousled and sleep still stuck to the corners of their eyes as they pushed a warm mug of coffee into my hands, whispering words of encouragement in my ear. But as time went by, they started to retreat. They didn’t come into our yard anymore; they stayed at arm’s length, watching from their porches, like someone had erected an invisible fence around our property. Like they were afraid that if they came too close, the violence would come for them, too. Consume their life as it had consumed mine. So they glared as the police tape was cut away; they whispered no longer to me, but about me. Because at first, they had wanted to assume that there was an innocent explanation: He had slipped out in the middle of the night, that’s all. He would be found, of course he would, somewhere in the neighborhood. Lost and confused but entirely unharmed.
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.