I notice something shiny on his eyebrow, visible even in the fading afternoon light of the room. I squint—a piercing? For a moment, I wonder if this is someone else. Maybe Mom finally lost her mind and grabbed this random kid off the street and won’t let go of him, and that is why the police are here. It would almost make more sense.
“Sam,” I say, barely croaking it out.
His eyes open. He lifts his head from Mom’s shoulder, his eyes widening now, his mouth forming an oval, as if I’m the one who’s suddenly reappeared.
He looks the same, but not the same. He’s older of course. Gaunt but also muscular, filled out. His face thin and angular, a more pronounced jaw, and bulging Adam’s apple. And yes, his eyebrow is pierced, and so is his lip, the right bottom corner. It hurts to look at it.
“Beth,” he says. His voice is deeper than the last time I heard him. It sounds so strange. And it all happens so fast: He stands and staggers over and hugs me, and I hug him back, resting my head on his shoulder because that seems the natural thing to do. He’s tall now, taller than me. I can feel the broadness of him. “Beth,” he whispers. “Beth.” I hold on to him, maybe a little too tightly, but it’s like I have to make up for all the years that have gone by, all the hugs I’ve missed.
Finally, he pulls back gently and just stares at me, his dark brown eyes glassy. He’s wearing a checked flannel shirt, unbuttoned, over a black T-shirt. He has on ratty jeans, sneakers.
Someone bought him these things, I realize.
Mom stands and comes over to us and pulls us all into an embrace, a clump of three. And soon I feel another hand on my shoulder—Earl’s. I think I might suffocate, held in this group hug.
Once we all break apart, Mom looks at me with that relaxed expression and says, “I told you he’d come back to us,” like I was so silly to ever doubt that.
Mom had spent almost all of her waking moments searching for him, even after the years went by. She started a website. She made calls. She focused almost all of her energy on this hope that he was out there.
She was right all along. And I was wrong. A cold kind of shame creeps through my body.
“The news conference will start in about twenty minutes,” the man with the thick black hair says. “So we might want to get going.”
“The what?” I ask.
“News conference,” Earl says.
“About Sam?”
Earl grabs my hand, gently but with certainty, and walks us into the living room, away from everyone else. “Sam’s been through a lot, Beth.”
“But what? Where has he been? What—”
“We’ll talk about this later. Right now we have to go to this news conference. The police and sheriffs want us to speak to reporters, before the story leaks out on its own. They want us to give a few statements, for the media.”
I’m about to ask another question—I have about a thousand—but he puts his hand on my shoulder. “Later. I promise.”
And just like that we’re out of the door and into Mom’s car. Earl sits up front and drives, and Mom crawls in the back with Sam. She doesn’t want to let go of him. I’m about to sit up front, but Sam holds the backseat door open. “Beth, come back here. Please?”
I really don’t want to, but I look at Earl and he nods, so I crowd into the backseat, Sam in the middle. He clutches my hand, tightly, as Earl starts to drive, following the police car and the sedan to wherever it is we’re headed.
No one says anything. Sam is trembling next to me. I grip his hand more tightly, like that might help. And it does, I think. I can feel his trembling wind down.
My mind goes back to one night when he was just a baby. God, fourteen years ago. This same shaking person next to me. I remember the night so clearly. I woke up, and I could hear him in his room, crying like crazy, worse than usual. I climbed out of my bed or whatever it was I slept in at that age. I wandered into his room, where Mom and Dad were trying to calm him. Mom paced back and forth and patted his back, while Dad looked on, smiling like it was all a ridiculous joke.
Mom must have said, “Beth, go back to bed.” But I stood there, gawking. How could I sleep with all this shrieking?
Mom sat down on a chair in the corner of the room, with the crying Sam on her lap. I wanted to cup a hand over his mouth to make the noise stop. But instead, his tiny fingers closed on mine, and he looked up at me. I can see it, his ugly pinched face, the streaks of dark brown hair pasted on his little mushy head, those big brown eyes. He hiccupped into silence, squeezing my hand with his little fingers, his eyes looking into mine like he’d never seen me before and was mesmerized. And maybe before that moment he really hadn’t truly seen me. Maybe, all of a sudden, he realized who I was. His sister.
“Will you look at that,” Dad had said.
Whispering, as if worried she might break the spell, Mom said, “Beth’s got the magic touch.”
I felt a glow inside. Sam gurgled and held my hand till his eyes got heavy and his little head drifted back to Mom’s shoulder. For the first time, I loved him.
But sitting here now in the car, holding Sam’s hand, the tightness still in my chest, I feel something hovering about the air, something—I don’t know? Something not quite right. Something that tempers the elation and happiness and the ecstatic shock we’re all feeling. I think of those questions again, those questions that can’t be ignored: Where has Sam been? What has happened to him? Three years. Three years of what?
The police car turns down a street and Earl follows, and I see that we’re headed to Pine Forest Elementary. Where Sam went to school before all this happened. The parking lot is full of cars and news vans. It’s crazy, but it dawns on me: Sam’s reappearance is a huge story. Not just for my family, but also for everyone else.
I feel Sam’s fingers tighten on mine, and I sense him turning to look at me. But I stare straight ahead. I can’t look into his eyes. Those eyes that hold the secrets of where he’s been for over three years. Of what he might have gone through. I just try to breathe. Because if I take slow breaths then I can probably keep the tight ache in my chest from erupting.
CHAPTER 2
The White Truck
Josh
Nick and I are practicing crosscourt forehands. Back and forth, back and forth, a nice rhythm. Everyone else on the team has left for the day, but we’re still going at it.
“You two are workhorses,” Coach Runyon said once, and by his tone and the big smile on his face I could tell that he appreciated our hard work. That day, I told Nick that we had to keep it up and push ourselves harder than the others. Nick and I, we’re just freshmen, but there’s a good chance we’ll play varsity tennis this coming spring. We’re pretty good. Not just for our age, but for any age. Our team lost a lot of seniors, and to be honest the older guys on the team aren’t as solid. We really have a shot at this.