Things We Didn't Say

Chapter 13

Casey



How dare you put this on me?” I shout, sinking into the futility, in fact knowing that every time I shout at Mallory, Angel hates me just that much more.

“I just can’t believe that I was supposedly such a terrible parent that I couldn’t have my children and yet here you are, someone I don’t even know, getting to live with them, and then my son gets involved with some stranger on the Internet and runs off, and you! You’re a computer person even, and you just sat back and let it happen! Because you’re an idiot who knows nothing about children!”

“I was respecting his privacy!”

“He’ll have all the privacy he wants if we never see him again!”

I clench my fists. It’s not my fault. It’s not. “Stop with the melodrama, you’re scaring the kids.”

“I didn’t know Jewel was on the steps. And Angel is not a child anymore, she deserves to know what’s going on. And listen to you: melodrama. My child is missing, and you call this melodrama? I’ll show you drama.” She picks up a candy bowl from the counter, an earthenware thing that Angel had made in school years ago when she was young enough to be doing arts and crafts. She heaves it up over her head and stares me down.

I’m lifting my arm to protect my face when the phone rings. She plunks down the bowl and seizes the phone.

“Yes! Yes, Detective, this is Mallory Turner. Thank you so much for calling. I’m really worried.”

Angel stares at me as she backs away toward the stairs. “Just what we needed right now. A fight with the girlfriend.”

She turns and stomps her way up.

Mallory takes the cordless phone downstairs to the computer, and I’m all alone in the kitchen as fear wells up in my chest that Mallory might be right, that I respected him right out of the house and out into the dangerous world.

But it’s the only way I could connect with him. I learned quickly not to ask him how school was. He’d say “Fine,” or not reply at all. But in the evening, in breaks from practicing his sax, he’d volunteer an anecdote. And if I limited my responses to neutral signs that I was listening—Really? Huh, weird, wow—he’d tell me more. From this I learned about his first crush, a flute player named Emily who’d just gotten promoted to first chair in her section. But if I sounded too interested, he’d turn his eyes back to his music and bring the sax back to his lips and let the music do the talking.

Maybe this is what comes from living with a reporter for a father and Mallory for a mother. I get the impression that when they all lived together, Mallory wanted to know every detail of their lives, down to which snack they bought from the vending machine. I sensed something like relief from him when we were together. He gradually laughed more often. Smiled at me.

These things meant more to me than any gooey declaration of affection. It was his way of skywriting “I like you.” I even imagined he might love me, in a certain way.

Until he stopped asking me to join him during his practice. About the same time he started getting the mail every day.

Maybe I am stupid about kids.

My phone rings in my pocket, and I almost shut it off, but the area code is unfamiliar, so I answer.

“Hi,” is all he says.

“Dylan?” I try to keep myself from shouting, screaming. I grip the kitchen counter for support as I tremble where I stand. “We’re worried about you, pal. What’s going on?”

“I’m okay. I wanted to tell you.”

There’s a loudspeaker. What’s it saying? I can’t make it out. Voices, shuffling. “Are you okay?”

I bite my lip so I don’t pepper him with questions.

“Yeah, that’s what I s-said.” He’s testy. I can almost see him tensing on the phone, getting ready to hang up.

“Where are you, buddy?”

“I’m . . . I’m . . .”

A blur from my peripheral vision becomes Mallory inches from my face, shouting, “Gimme that phone!”

I hunch my shoulders and turn away, trying to listen for clues, to his voice, for his answer.

Her fingers dig into my shoulders as she whips me back around to face her. One hand seizes my phone and the other shoves me down hard.

“Dylan!” she shrieks into the phone. “Dylan?”

Then she starts sobbing his name over and over, slumped on the kitchen counter and mumbling about the dropped call.

I pick myself up off the floor as Michael comes running down the stairs. I wipe the blood from my face from where I bit my lip hard in the fall, and allow myself a bittersweet recognition that when Dylan decided to call home, he called me.