“Me too,” I said, and then she took herself to the edge and pushed herself over.
“Come on!” I heard Annika whisper-yell from the tunnel below.
I peered over the edge, and Ryan was looking back up, like he could read the indecision on my face. The door behind me, the pipe below. Out there were answers. On the other side of the wall were the only people who knew what had happened to my mother. The only constant in my life. The person who had promised to keep me safe—and always had.
He reached up a hand, like he understood. “Kelsey,” he said, and his voice wavered. “I would never forgive myself. Please.”
Impossible choices, and I had to start making them.
Little trades, like chips at your morality—strip away what you think you’re supposed to do, what you’re told you’re supposed to do—and keep chipping in the dark, until all that’s left is you.
I wanted my mother, I wanted to help her. But more than that, I wanted to be free.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to the empty room.
I lowered my two feet into the hole, and I fell.
—
Ryan caught me around the waist as I slid to the bottom. His arms shaking, his mouth slightly open, he was staring into my eyes like he knew exactly what I had been thinking.
“I’m here,” I said. But I had to say it again before he released me.
It was dark and cold and musty, and the tunnel before us was darker and colder. We’d have to crawl. Cole was leaning against Annika in the space beyond.
Ryan shined the flashlight down the pipe, but all we could see were a few areas of standing water—no light at the end.
Annika put a hand to her mouth. “I can’t do it,” she said.
It was narrow, and we didn’t know where it ended, but it was better than standing still and waiting again. Act before the fear.
“I’ll go first,” I said. “Just follow me. Close your eyes if you need to.”
Ryan handed me the flashlight, but it clanged off the base of the pipe as I crawled, and I worried someone would hear us. So I tucked it into my waistband and moved in the dark. I felt Annika periodically brush against my leg, and I heard breathing, but I didn’t call out or check in on anyone. Didn’t want our voices to carry. Didn’t want to be found.
We kept moving. We could’ve been crawling deeper into the earth, or through the mountains, but we kept going. And then I heard a steady drip, just before I saw a faint light. I started moving faster, and eventually when I looked up, I saw the moon through the sewer grate bars above. Like the black iron gates at home, shadows against the night.
I waited for everyone to catch up. “We’re at a road,” I said, my body trembling, from the cold and the wet and the fear. We were caged animals. Savage creatures living in darkness. With the water and the dark, the blood and the sweat, we were unrecognizable.
And then I climbed, pushing open the grate, stumbling into the ditch on the side of the dark mountain road.
The mountains seemed closer in the night, their shadows stretching ominously in the moonlight. The dying leaves rustling on the tree branches. I pictured that leaf in my lap, from when we were hanging over the car. Slowly curling, slowly dying. And I felt the vastness, as my mother called it. Everything and anything that could possibly happen, just a blink away.
I felt it like a rush of air, coming from nowhere. Felt it like me, running full-speed and free through the cold night.
The four of us lay flat in a ditch on the side of the road as Ryan made contact with his cell. “Help,” he said. “We need help. This is Ryan Baker, and there’s a home invasion going on at Blackbird Court in Sterling Cross. They’re armed, and we’ve escaped. There’s a gunshot injury.” The words poured out of him, and I knew there was finally, finally someone on the other end.
I crawled across Annika to get to Cole, who was lying too still, no longer pressing a hand to his side, and I listened to our breathing as Ryan continued. “I don’t know where we are. We’re on the side of a road somewhere near Blackbird Court. I think.” A pause. “I see trees. Just trees.”
I heard wheels on the road, saw him debating standing up, gripping the grass. Saw him change his mind, lowering his head out of sight. The headlights lit up the trees behind us as they passed, and I squinted from the sudden brightness.
“We’re not moving,” he said. “Not until the police arrive.”
He joined me in the grass beside Cole, nodded as he saw that I already had my hands over his side, pressing on his bandage. The movement and adrenaline had made him worse. His skin was cold, his eyes unfocused, staring off into the night sky.
“Hey, we made it,” I said.
His chest rose and fell, and he placed a hand over mine, on his side. But it was weak and cold, and it slid off just as quickly as it had appeared.
“They’re coming,” I said. I pressed myself close to his body, my mouth to his ear. “We’re okay,” I said as I rested my forehead against his shoulder. And I thought how unlikely that I should feel closer than ever to someone only as they were slipping. That it was only as they were drifting away that I wanted them to stay.
We lay that way until we heard sirens, and Ryan spoke into the phone, and then he stood on the edge of the road, his arms waving, until red and blue lit up the sky and the road and our faces.
—
The EMTs pushed me aside and took over, assessing Cole’s injuries. Cole winced as they moved him, which I took as a good sign.
“My mother,” I told them, gasping. “My mother was taken.”
One of them swung a head in my direction. “By who?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t know, she’s just gone.”
“We’ve got officers heading to the house now.” He looked me over, blocking my view of Cole. “Where are you hurt?” he asked.
I arched my neck to see over his shoulder. “I’m not,” I said.
His gaze lingered on my arms. “You’re covered in blood.”
I looked down, saw it crusted into my jeans and my shirt. Felt it under my nails, thick and congealed. “Not mine,” I whispered.
I wiped my hands on my pants, but nothing happened. It clung to the creases of my palm, the ridges of my fingerprints. Blood on my hands. “He’s going to be okay, right?”
He placed a hand on my upper back, led me toward the road. “Come on,” he said.
Ryan and Annika were up on the road, speaking to a police officer. But all the words sounded too far away, out in the vastness. The flashing lights turned our faces garish and unnatural. So when the police officer gestured to the back of his vehicle, I happily obeyed. I wanted to crawl inside his car and never leave. Annika climbed in after me, followed by Ryan, and we were silent and stiff the whole way to the station. I imagined we were all repeating the same type of thing in our heads, like a prayer: This is over, this is over, you’re safe. You’re safe.
—
An hour later, and Ryan, Annika, and I still sat in an office across from two plainclothes officers—one sitting at the desk, the other standing behind it. “Once more,” the one sitting said. His desk plaque said DETECTIVE MAHONEY. “From the beginning.”
Ryan let out an annoyed breath. Annika checked over her shoulder out the glass office windows again. The man standing behind the desk looked at me with a mixture of sympathy and compassion, but Detective Mahoney was all business.
Detective Mahoney held out his hands, palms up. “I know, I’m sorry. The more we can get right now, the more help this will be going forward. Even by tomorrow, things will start to fade.”
I thought of my mother, fading away too.
I closed my eyes, started again. “We got there, and the alarms were turned off,” I said.
“And what did you first notice that let you know your mother was missing?”
I thought of the feeling in the house. The emptiness. “I knew right away,” I said. “The door was unlocked, and the lights were on, and I heard the emptiness.”