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  “Lainey, I have no idea. Does that even matter?”

  “Yes, it matters. It really, really matters.”

  Tim hung up on me and was headed straight to the airport. We had to find George before Tim arrived. We had to find him now. But hours passed, and I held to Daisy and listened to the squawks of the police radios and ate nothing and drank coffee with powdered creamer, and shook with fear. I started to mutter his name over and over, a mantra to bring him home.

  George.

  George.

  George.

  In silence we ate the warm chocolate chip cookies that Mrs. Moreland had made and it didn’t cure anything at all. Fear hung over us like a diseased cloud. Finally, Owen, Bonny and I went back to the bedroom because they told us to try to sleep. To just try. Bonny’s little brother, Percy, was already asleep in his little nook, completely unaware of what had happened or why. I was jealous of him, of his unawareness. I wished I didn’t know . . .

  In the middle of the dark night, Dad arrived home with Mom, and when I tried to go out to the living room to see her, to rush to her, Owen and Bonny held me back. “No.”

  Mom and Dad screamed at each other, the broken sounds of blame and leftover rage. Earlier that week, Dad had found our notebook and leafed through it, discovered our notes about the blue pills, about the bottles hidden under the mattresses and couch cushions. He read our words out loud to her—a deafening accusation.

  “The children, Clara. They watched this. They know. And worse, even worse than this? When I thought there couldn’t be something worse—you could have killed them, Clara. Killed them. Not just a dog but my children.”

  A low mewl escaped my throat and Bonny pulled me closer. We curled on the bed like seahorses. “The dog,” I said. “The little dog.”

  “They are my children, too,” Mom’s voice wailed. “I would never hurt them. Ever. They are mine . . .”

  “Not for much longer,” Dad hollered in an animal voice, a growl of words.

  “Don’t say mean things like that, Bob. I can’t bear it.”

  “I’m not saying mean things anymore, Clara. I’m saying true things. You will never see them again. You are an unfit mother and we’ll all be better off without you. All of us. Every fucking single one of us. First you’ll spend a little time in jail, and then you’ll lose everything. You hear me through your haze of Valium, right? Everything. This was the last time.”

  Mom wailed in a cry so awful and shattered that I held my hands over my ears.

  It was Mrs. Moreland who stopped the screaming with two words. “The children.”

  “Yes,” my dad said. “The children.”

  Owen. Had Mimi found him?

  The bookstore buzzed with activity and I finally worked my way from the back room into the crowd and asked how I could help. I needed to do something other than sit with Daisy and hear my own fear tapping out worst-case scenarios. It was just then that Owen burst through the door, his face full of the same leftover fear of that other night nearly forty years ago. I fully expected to see a cast on his arm, a dazed expression.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  I told him the facts. “We will find him. We will not lose him. I’m sorry I just listened to Mimi’s message—I didn’t recognize her number so I didn’t answer and I went to the house and found it empty . . . I’ve been waiting there.”

  I stepped back to gaze at him. This was what I’d wanted—my brother at my side—but not this way, not for this reason. Not because another one of us had disappeared in Watersend.

  “We will find him,” Owen repeated.

  Sometime during the night Bonny crawled into bed with Owen; when I awoke and saw them curled together, I felt safer. Mom came in and kissed us each on the forehead with a soft murmur of love. We were all one family now and Mom was home, stoned and half-asleep, already murmuring her apologies and probably set to sleep through the next day.

  But at dawn, when the softer light of morning hadn’t yet given way to the slicing light that hurt my eyes, Bonny’s dad stood in the living room to inform us that Mom had left a note saying she was leaving for good and, although they were sure she was okay, she had packed her things and gone. It had all been a terrible mistake. She hadn’t meant to leave. She would come back or we would find her. But children know when their parents are lying and we kept quiet because we needed to believe what we were told.

  I glanced around the living room, where the parents were assuring us of a good outcome, and panic bloomed. All night, I’d slept shallowly and fitfully, seeing Mom floating in the water and being eaten by small fish as they nibbled at her toes and fingers. So I knew my mom was gone, and Bonny’s handsome dad was a liar and my brother, Owen, a fool for believing him.

  “You made her leave,” I screamed at my dad and lurched toward him, my hands out in claws. “You made her leave.”

  “I made her leave?” he asked and gently wound my hands together while I kicked at him uselessly.

  “Yes, you.”

  Search crews spent days all around Watersend, and on the water. Dead or alive, they were determined to find her. But I believed she walked into the sea. “There’s more ocean in the world than land,” Bonny said. But it was Bonny’s mom who told us, “Everyone knows she didn’t want to die; she’s just scared. She’ll come back. We will find her.”

  chapter 30

  BONNY BLANKENSHIP

  The town mobilized so quickly that I found myself wondering if they’d been waiting for a moment such as this. I made photocopies of George’s face from a photo in Lainey’s cell phone. We dialed frantically to gather more people and hung a map of the town and the beach to show what areas needed to be covered and where others were already searching.

  If I’d believed the worst pain I could feel was for my mistake in the emergency room, I was wrong. I was hollowed out with fear for George, for Lainey and for Piper, who scoured the beach searching for a child she was meant to protect.

  Lainey and Daisy sat on a chair in the far corner of the bookshop. Lainey refused to let her daughter loose, and she held a tiny Matchbox truck in her hand. She rocked Daisy back and forth and read to her from books scattered around the chair. She refused food. They were sealed together—mother and daughter.

  During the last weeks of waiting for my own verdict, I’d often thought that unknowing was the most intolerable of all the emotions, and I was right. Not knowing where George was, or if he was at all, felt like a hole in the universe had opened and we couldn’t see an inch inside. Every few seconds people checked their phones, wanting the one text or call that we all waited for: We have him.

  I knew Piper would be unable to bear this loss, if it turned out to be such a terrible thing as that. Fear clenched at my belly, turned my limbs wobbly. It was a nightmare repeating itself, an echo from the past, a body gone and not found. I wound my way to the back of the store and to Lainey. “What can I get you?” I asked.

  “My son,” she said.

  “We will. We will. He’s . . .”

  Lainey’s swollen eyes spilled with tears; her mouth contorted with the pain and the wondering. “This is the worst thing that could ever happen. I should have never come here. I . . .” She pulled her sleeping daughter to her chest and mumbled into her hair. “I can’t live without him.”

  “You won’t have to,” I said.

  Lainey lifted her face again to mine. “I should have left last night when I wanted to. This place is cursed. I shouldn’t have come back.”

  Maybe she was right. God, maybe she was right, but I didn’t want that to be true. I wanted the opposite. “Lainey, I wanted it to be different.”

  “What you want and what you get don’t seem to be the same thing.”

  “I know.” I sank to the floor and knelt at the side of her chair. “We will find him.”

  “Don’t say things you can’t make co
me true, Bonny. You don’t have the power to do that. Just stop.”

  A sob ripped from the insides of my chest and let loose, waking Daisy with a startle.

  “Mommy?” she asked in a cracked voice.

  “I’m here,” Lainey said and pulled her daughter closer, if closer was even possible.

  I stood and placed my hand over my mouth to stifle my cry and made my way back to the front of the bookshop. Mimi stood within a circle of people handing out maps with small markings of where others had already searched. The worst part was the boat crews that had been sent out, teenagers in their johnboats, men in their fishing boats, to jog up and down the beach, looking . . . God, looking for a floating child.

  My phone buzzed and a small little hope burst inside my chest. But instead of good news I saw the number to MUSC, the hospital, my hospital. This would be the verdict I’d waited for, the verdict that would determine my life in so many ways hereafter. The call that meant tests had been run; papers had been reviewed; an autopsy had been performed; meetings had been held.

  But I didn’t answer the phone, and I didn’t check the message. Right at that moment it didn’t matter whether I’d been right or wrong, that I might be accused or recused. Only finding George mattered.

  The clock on the far wall told us that four hours had passed. A hundred years had passed. I found Mimi behind the desk, her face weary, and told her, “I’m going to go out and search, too. I can’t just stay here doing nothing.”

  “You aren’t doing nothing. We aren’t doing nothing.” She pointed to the map I’d set up in the middle of the room on an easel. “You did that—and whatever that group-messaging text is—GroupMe?—that lets everyone know everything at the same time. I didn’t even know something like that existed. You did that.”

  “Well, now I’m going out to look.”

  “Where?”

  “The beach. Backyards along our house. This little boy is obsessed with fishing and netting shrimp.”

  “It’s been covered,” Mimi said.

  “Then I’ll cover it again.” I stood and grabbed a bottle of water from a pile of them, which the Market had donated along with fruit and snacks.

  The street was hushed in reverence. The few people outside whispered quietly and moved slowly. A small group of teenagers were knit into a circle with a man in a clerical collar. They held hands and took turns praying one by one. I didn’t want to listen, but I heard—the man began praying that this group, about to head out to the marshes, would find George, find a tired but fine little boy. My prayer, over and over, didn’t need to be spoken out loud because if it was, only sobs would be heard, with a mantra of Find him Find him Find him Find him, as a never-ending prayer twisting around and around.

  I reached for my phone and texted Piper. Where are you now?

  But it came back as undelivered, which meant she was either in a no-service zone or she’d run out of battery. I didn’t have Fletch’s number and wave upon wave of panic consumed me, obliterating my thoughts. I stood in the middle of the street, not knowing where to turn or how to move, when Owen came from the inside of the store and ran to me. I hadn’t seen him go in.

  “Oh, God, say they found him,” I said.

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “How did you know? I thought you were gone . . .”

  “No. I told you I wasn’t leaving.” He pulled at me. “Let’s go find him. Let’s go.”

  “You saw it. There’s a whole system in there.” I pointed at the bookshop. “Areas that have been covered and areas that haven’t. There are police and groups and . . .”

  “I don’t care. Let’s just start somewhere. Anywhere. We have to do something.” His voice broke.

  “Piper lost him,” I said.

  He stopped in his forward movement, abruptly, and almost tripped over his own feet. “Oh, God.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “We are going to find George.”

  “Okay.” I followed him and then climbed into the passenger seat of his truck. “I keep thinking I can’t stand this, that I can’t move another step, that I can’t take another breath unless we find him,” I said. “And then I do.”

  Owen started the car and backed up.

  “Let’s start in the backyards,” I said. “That’s where he always goes, although it’s already been checked. Or we can go to the docks. He’s always going to the dock to throw in a line or crawl into the mud or dig out an oyster shell.”

  “He’s probably sound asleep in the hull of some boat with a shrimp net for a pillow,” Owen said.

  “I hope you’re right. Let’s go back to Sea La Vie and start there . . . Maybe he’s made his way back by now.”

  Owen drove too fast, but who would stop us? We arrived at the house and ran out to the backyard, where we again called George’s name. We wandered from backyard to backyard along the river. Whatever brokenness there was between us fell away in a single motive: find George.

  Time elongated and pulled back, stretched and shrank. My mind spun out and out, trying to think where George would go or what he’d do.

  Our conversation took place in fragments. “The hospital called,” I told him as I peered into another johnboat at the edge of a dock.

  “What did they say?” Owen came next to me and we both sighed with disappointment that the boat was empty.

  “I haven’t listened to the message.”

  Then silence and another conversation just as quick. “It’s like the night we lost Mom. Where could she be? That’s all we asked,” Owen said.

  “I know.”

  “How could she have left her children?”

  “She was scared, Owen. So scared.”

  We never finished a full conversation and the words always morphed into George’s name.

  We wound our way to the backyard of another anonymous cedar shake river house empty with possibility. Owen stopped in front of an upside-down canoe and lifted it, peered under and then placed it back. “Shit.” He spun around to me. “I came here because I love you, not to make things worse. I didn’t mean to . . .”

  “You love me?” I spat out the question with such vehemence I didn’t recognize my own voice. Somehow in losing all I’d lost the past weeks, and now George, I wanted to know what it was that kept him coming back again and again and again. “Is it because I love you so desperately? Is it so you can come here and see me and make sure I still love you before you head out into the world again? Like you need me as a ballast to make it out there? Why?” My voice climbed higher and higher, my arms flying around me as if I were in a tribal dance that only I could know.

  “A ballast?” He froze where he stood, one leg in front of the other like the freeze tag we played so long ago. “Are you kidding? I don’t know why I love you. It’s not something I can define like one of your medical diagnoses. It’s not a sickness or a disease. I just love you. I always have.” He then set himself in motion, taking two large steps to me and grabbing each shoulder. “I do love you. I hate that I haven’t been able to be the man we both need me to be. But I don’t need reasons to love. I don’t need a list. It just is.” He kissed me and pulled me hard and close.

  I took both my hands and rested them on his chest and, with great sheer will, I shoved him away. “I lost the job at Emory.”

  “I know you blame me for that. I will take the blame for everything: for the job loss, for George, for your broken heart. I will carry it, but it doesn’t change that I love you.”

  “I don’t blame you. I blame me. And my obsession with you. But none of that matters now. Only George matters.”

  I twisted away from him so quickly that my ankle caught in the thick grass. I stumbled and yelped as my ankle torqued. Owen grabbed and steadied me. “I love you because you care as much about others as you do about yourself. I love when you get angry and then trip over your own feet. I
love how you stare at the sky and get lost in it. I love how you drop your voice when you’re saying something that matters. I love . . .”

  Tears sprung high into my throat and I rested my hand on my chest. “Stop. I only want to find George. I only . . .” My phone buzzed in my back pocket and I lifted it to see a text from Piper: We found him. He’s okay.

  I grabbed Owen’s arm and lifted my phone to show him. “Thank God,” he said. “Now you can check the message from the hospital.” He ran his hand through my hair.

  Part of me knew that he needed to absolve himself for what he saw as his own part in it—as misguided as that was—as I did, for myself, and that was why he wanted me to check.

  “No. Not now. This is too much already. I do not want this to be the place I find out.”

  “I just know that all this unknowing has made you crazy, and here, right here, you can find out.”

  “Not now.”

  chapter 31

  LAINEY MCKAY

  I’d already died inside, wondering how I would live with two great disappearances. How I would ever take another breath. My head rested on top of Daisy’s and my eyes were closed when Piper called to say she’d found him.

  The broken weep that came from me must have scared her on the other end. “Where?”

  Piper was crying in the same jagged sobs. “A friend’s house. I’d taken him here before to play. We’re on our way back.”

  Sirens squealed in the background and I knew they were in a police car. “George has always wanted to ride in a police car,” I said so foolishly, with such abandon.

  “Loretta had already called them before we got there,” Piper said.

  “Loretta?”

  “The house he wandered to . . .” Piper’s voice trailed off with a sob.

  “Let me talk to him,” I said and then I heard his voice, his precious voice.