“Where in the neighborhood?”
I’m quiet, sticking my finger in the glass and swiping at a speck of sediment stuck to the rim.
“On the banks of the marsh,” I say finally. “In the mud.”
“I’m assuming they searched the marsh, though, right? For any other clues? Or…”
“Helicopters, divers,” I say, answering his question preemptively so he doesn’t have to say what I know he’s thinking: a body. Him. “They didn’t find anything else—though, of course, with the falling tide, any of his other belongings could have been pulled into the ocean, so we may never know.”
“Do you have any theories?” he asks at last. “What do you think happened?”
I sigh, picturing all those articles on my dining room wall; the lists of names that I scour through, night after night, hoping against hope that something important might finally leap from the shadows and make itself known.
“I have no idea,” I say at last, and that’s the ugly truth of it. No matter how many nights I’ve spent awake, poring over his case file or pounding on doors or scrubbing the internet for some subtle clue, I still have no idea what happened to my son.
I have no idea where he is.
“None of it makes any sense,” I continue. “You have no idea how many times I’ve retraced my footsteps of that night, tried to remember some detail that might be the key to it all. Some tiny little thing that was out of place—”
“Maybe you need to stop retracing your footsteps,” Waylon interrupts, his eyes on the side of my face. “Maybe you need to try a new path.”
I turn and look at him, my eyes flickering over his features in the dark.
“Maybe.” I shrug, turning back toward the bar. “That’s why I emailed you.”
We’re both still as the bartender walks toward us, taking a little too long to clean the inside of a highball glass. I can see his eyes flitter over to us a few times, and I wonder if he recognizes me. I wonder how much he’s heard. Finally, another patron flags him down, and he’s forced to move on.
“Didn’t you have a baby monitor?” Waylon asks, as if it suddenly occurred to him that the entire thing might have been caught on camera. It feels accusatory, the way he says it, but I could be projecting.
I close my eyes, bow my head. It takes a few seconds for me to work up the courage to answer this one, and when I do, I can hear my voice crack.
“Yes,” I say. “We do. We did. It was wireless, but the batteries were dead, so it wasn’t recording.”
Waylon is quiet. He’s thinking, I’m sure, about all the little ways this should have gone so differently. About how I should have double-checked that the window was closed, maybe even locked it. About how I should have been sleeping with one ear open, ready to run to him if he called out. About how I should have checked on him as soon as I had woken up, called the police at six instead of eight, or how I should have changed the batteries in the baby monitor the second I realized they were dead instead of waiting until it was convenient for me to run to the store.
“It’s not your fault,” he says instead, downing the last of the tawny liquid at the bottom of his glass. “You know that, right?”
I feel the sting of tears in my eyes, so I squeeze them shut, swallowing the rock I feel lodged in my throat. I’m not used to hearing that. Then I rub a rogue tear away from my cheek with the back of my hand and nod, smile, thank him for his words. Because I don’t want to tell him that somewhere, deep down, it seems like it is. And I’m not just talking about mom guilt, that secret society reserved for mothers that batters one single notion into our brains over and over and over again: That no matter what we do, no matter how hard we try, we’re doing it all wrong. That every little thing is our fault; that we’re unfit, unworthy. That our shortcomings are the cause of every scream and tear and trembling lip.
This is something more than that.
It’s that feeling again, the one my own mother warned me about. That feeling that someone, somewhere, is trying to tell me something. That I’m missing something—something big.
That I know something. But I can’t, for the life of me, remember what it is.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It’s late when I get home, after midnight. Maybe I can blame it on the Sancerre, or the dim lights that made it hard to discern how much time had passed, or the knowledge that there was nothing waiting for me back home other than an empty house and another long, dark stretch of quiet. Another perpetual waiting for those first little glimmers of normal life that only emerged with the sun.