Donal sits up and I stare over at him and that’s when I realize that I’m not dreaming all of this. “I have to go.” I don’t say good-bye or hug him or anything. I grab my stuff and rush out of his house into the overcast October day. It’s not cold, but I’m shivering when I take out my car keys. I can hear Donal shouting my name from the front door of his house, but I don’t look back. I steady my hand and get in my car and drive. I manage to obey traffic laws. I manage to get back to the southern side of the city, where we live in Pine Forest Estates, in the same house we lived in back when Sam went missing.
My stepdad, Earl, had wanted to move. But Mom was adamant that we stay. What if he comes back and doesn’t find us? How will he be able to find us if we move? Ridiculous. Earl thought so, too. Ridiculous that she could even think that might happen, as if Sam were some stray dog who had simply lost his way.
But now we’re the ridiculous ones.
Sam. I can see him. Brown hair, brown eyes, stubby little nose, sharp dimples. A classically cute kid. And he knew it. Even at that young age, he had the cockiness of a good-looking older boy. Mom always said he was going to grow up to be a heartbreaker. He’s eleven in my mind. Always eleven. But of course he’d be fourteen now, wouldn’t he? He is fourteen now.
I’m driving, getting closer and closer to our neighborhood, approaching a future I never knew existed.
===
That day in July was hot and sticky. A day when you just wanted to stay inside, which is what I was doing the day Sam disappeared. The AC was on, but Earl was tight with money, and he didn’t like us to run it too low. So basically we all suffered, with useless ceiling fans blowing the stuffy air around. At least my room faced the backyard, which was mostly shaded by a big oak tree. So it was a little cooler in there. But I remember the heat, because it became one more unpleasant thing about that day.
Mom and Earl were at work. We’d been fighting a lot back then—Earl and I. About the AC, about how late I stayed up, too late, about how I talked to Mom (“Don’t be smart,” he’d always say). She had married him the year before. He was fine, but I still didn’t know him that well. Like, who was this guy living in my house and telling me what to do, pretending to be my real dad?
On that day, Sam pushed open my bedroom door, around two in the afternoon.
“What?” I said.
He was always barging in, which I hated. Normally I locked my door but that day I must have forgotten.
“What do you want?”
Let me pause to take in Sam that day: He was tall for his age. He played soccer, basketball, sometimes football, so I guess you can say he was an athletic kid, but he was too young to be muscular. He rode his bike, played video games. He was active, loud, energetic—a boy. That day he was wearing cargo shorts and a Superman T-shirt, looking flush, his dark hair slightly sweaty and stuck to his forehead.
“Josh and I are going to the mall.” Josh Keller was our neighbor, a kid Sam’s age. “We’re gonna ride our bikes.”
“You’re kidding?” The nearest mall was two miles away along a busy road. It was a dying, crappy mall. And it was hot as hell out. “Why doesn’t Mrs. Keller drive you?”
“She’s too busy studying or something. We want to buy some new video games.”
“Mom will kill you if she finds out.”
“But she won’t find out,” he said, smiling that dimpled smile. He knew he could get away with anything. “You want to go with us?” he asked. Maybe he was trying to rope me in so we’d both get in trouble.
“No way,” I said. The idea of riding a bike with two eleven-year-old boys, all the way down Skyland Boulevard as cars zoomed by, was too embarrassing to contemplate.
“I wish you could drive,” he said.
I was fourteen, but turning fifteen that September, and I could get my learner’s permit then. “Me too,” I said.
“If I’m not back by the time Mom gets home, will you cover for me?”
I rolled my eyes and he gave me a pleading, innocent look—always performing, hamming it up. I have to admit, sometimes he was hard to say no to. We were brother and sister, after all. Even if he bugged me, we still had some kind of pact. Especially after Dad had left, when Mom’s bad moods could strike us like thunder.
I sighed. “Fine.”
He cracked his impish grin and gave me a thumbs-up. Then he shut my door.
I almost yelled, “Be careful!” or something like that. But I didn’t say anything.
That was the last time I saw him.
===
Two or three hours later, I was still in my room. I’d fallen asleep while reading Forever for the millionth time. I’d been trying to read My Antonia, because it was on our summer reading list—this was the summer before I started high school—but, sorry, it was too hot for fine literature. It was the knock on the door that roused me, the sound of it whooshing open.
“Where’s your brother?” Mom asked from the doorway. She was in her work clothes, but her hair—light brown like mine, but with gray roots because she wasn’t good about coloring it—was sort of messy and wilted.
“I don’t know,” I said, feeling groggy. I rubbed my eyes and was almost surprised to find her still standing there. “He’s probably at Josh’s house.” I looked at the little pink digital clock on my bedside table. It was just after five.
“I just saw Josh. He was riding his bike around. I didn’t see Sam.”
I thought about what Sam had said earlier, about how I should cover for him. If Mom found out he was riding his bike out of the neighborhood—one of many things that was strictly forbidden—then he was toast. Part of me wanted to rat him out right then and there. Precious Sam disobeyed you. But he always broke the rules, and it never mattered. Plus, if he got grounded he’d be in my hair a lot more than he already was. So I decided to play dumb. Let Mom figure it out on her own.
Besides, I didn’t think anything was wrong. Bad things didn’t happen to Sam. He’d fallen off his bike once, flipped and rolled, and all he had was a scraped elbow. When most of the kids in his third-grade class got the flu one winter, Sam was fine, not even a sniffle. He seemed invincible.
“Call his cell,” I said. Mom had given us cell phones, but they were meant only for “emergencies.”
“His phone’s in his room. I checked.”
“I don’t know then.”
Mom stared at me, folding her arms across her chest, which is what she always did when she meant business. “You’re supposed to watch your brother,” she said.
“He’s not a baby.”
Mom shook her head and walked out of my room without even bothering to pull my door shut.
A few seconds later I heard the front door slam. I went down the hall to the living room—the room we never used, with its white carpet and fancy furnishings—and looked outside and saw Mom marching across the street to the Kellers’ house. Josh was riding his bike around his driveway in tight circles, but he stopped when he saw Mom approach. Josh was Sam’s friend, but I knew Sam kind of thought he was a tool. A sissy. He had sandy blond hair and fair skin that freckled in the summer. He looked delicate, not like the rough-and-tumble type of boy that Sam was. He was quiet, polite, careful. Josh was the only kid who was Sam’s age in the neighborhood. They were friends of convenience more than anything else.
“Josh hasn’t seen Sam for hours,” Mom said when she came back into the house. “He said they rode their bikes on the trails in the woods, but he went home and Sam stayed there.”