His questions over whether she’d take him to school faded into a new worry. Maybe she was still mad. Maybe she didn’t want to see him this morning. “Mom?” he called.
After a few moments of waiting, Everett went back inside and moved tentatively around the kitchen. Everything felt too . . . empty. No clinking dishes. No smell of coffee. But there wouldn’t be, would there? The power was out. Still, there wasn’t even a glass or bowl in the sink. His scalp crawled with prickling anxiety.
Where was his mom?
He went to the office and dialed her cell number. One ring. Two. Three.
On the fourth ring, he began to frown. On the sixth ring, he had to swallow past a thickening clog in his throat. When her voicemail answered, he listened hard to her voice and told himself things were fine.
“Mom? Where are you? Am I going to school?”
He hung up. He thought they’d made up yesterday, but maybe she’d gotten angrier and angrier the more she thought about his lying and stealing. He called her again. Then again. There was no answer.
He wasn’t going to freak out this time. He wasn’t going to scream and run and cry wolf. His mom worked here, so she was working. It was that simple. And if the power was out, maybe cell service was too.
This time he decided to search the grounds methodically, quickly moving along the alleys of the storage center, looking for any open doors or signs of tools being used. He’d made it through three sets of buildings and was walking at the edge of the vehicle storage area when he spotted it. Not a clue. Nothing so innocuous. What he saw was a shiny white rectangle tilted into the dead grass under the long end of an old RV.
His mom’s phone.
A strange little hum began around him, and it took Everett a moment to realize he was making the noise, a shaking in his throat, pressing up. A cry wanting to come out, like he was a scared toddler.
Everett crouched down and reached beneath the vehicle to retrieve the phone. When he turned it over, his call notifications still glowed on the screen, and it made him feel like he’d just missed her. That she’d just been right there a few seconds before.
“Mom?” he asked, his voice cracking and breaking in the space of that single syllable. She didn’t respond.
He didn’t feel even a whisper of guilt when he unlocked her phone with a security code he wasn’t supposed to know. No strange texts had come in. He found no phone messages except his. But she had gotten a phone call early this morning.
He looked up, turning in a slow circle. That was when he heard a door open somewhere ahead. The squeak of a spring compressing and releasing. A footstep.
Everett was just about to call out for her when he heard her voice. She was talking to someone.
“It’s not in the apartment!” she said frantically.
Everett frowned.
“I told you I dropped it when you tackled me. It’s here somewhere. Just call it. You’ll see.”
He was confused for a moment. Someone had tackled his mom? Then the phone in his hand buzzed, and a ringtone sang out. Everett looked up, and a man stepped into his sight, dragging Everett’s mom alongside him. Everett noticed the man’s black gloves first and the way one of them gripped his mom’s arm and held it too high.
But then his brain finished clicking through the connections of his memories, and he realized it was just a cop, and everything was fine.
Caught between relief and wariness, Everett stilled and watched for a long moment as the police detective smiled. “Hey, buddy! Checking out a possible theft!” His voice sang with cheer. “Come on over. Your mom is—”
His mom suddenly grew. She expanded, her body uncoiling and launching straight up at the man’s face.
She seemed to move in slow motion, her hands curving into claws as she landed on him. The police detective twisted and stepped back, but he couldn’t catch himself. He landed hard on his back just as Everett heard his mom shout, “Run!” in the loudest roar he’d ever heard, as if those claws had turned her into a beast.
But Everett couldn’t run. He was frozen in place, watching his mom wrestle with the cop, who was already struggling up.
Her face craned toward him, looking over her shoulder with huge, round eyes. “Run, Everett! Run!” He met her gaze, trying to convey that he couldn’t leave her, but she was roaring again. “Run! Call 911! Hide and don’t come back!”
“Shut the fuck up,” the cop wheezed as he raised up enough to dump his mom off him. His face was bleeding from a long scratch.
Everett saw the gun in a leather holster against the man’s side, so he squeezed the phone hard in his hand and he did exactly what his mom had yelled. He ran.