CAROLINE—BEFORE
My mother takes the vase from the bookshelf and hurls it, smashing it to bits by my father’s bare feet. My father doesn’t even step back as the tiny pink and white pieces of ceramic skid past him on the hardwood floor. He just stands there, staring.
“Dylan! Dylan, where are you!” My mother shrieks my brother’s name and collapses into the mess she’s just made.
I’ve never heard my mother yell like this. Like the yell has crawled from the base of her feet and up her spine and forced itself out of her mouth. Like it’s coming from some other planet. Her screams are especially scary because they’re so different from the calm and collected way she behaved just moments ago when the police arrived. They came to say they don’t know anything new. That they don’t have the slightest idea where Dylan might be.
My mother nodded numbly, but as soon as she shut the door after them, she started to scream.
My father crouches down next to her on the floor, but when he tries to put his arms around her, she shrugs him off and spreads herself flat, kicking the pieces of broken vase out behind her with her feet and sending them spinning wildly out in front of her with her hands.
My grandmother and aunt run in from the kitchen, and as the anxious huddle around my mother grows, I slip down the hallway toward my bedroom, even though I don’t understand how my body is managing to move at all.
Since my little brother disappeared four days ago, I’m actually not sure how we’ve all managed to stay alive much less move. My mother isn’t eating, and my father isn’t sleeping. I’ve done a little bit of both, but barely. Now I make it inside my bedroom and shut the door, then crawl into my unmade bed. I’m still dressed in my Violent Femmes T-shirt and butterfly-patterned pajama pants that I’ve been wearing since Saturday. I’ve got on the same underpants from that day, too, if you want to know the truth. My parents haven’t changed clothes either, or brushed their teeth or combed their hair. It’s like we’ve been frozen in that moment when we first realized Dylan was missing. And I mean scary, terrible missing. Not lost in the woods missing, which is bad enough. But taken missing. Kidnapped missing.
Burying my head under my pillow, I decide to count to one hundred and tell myself that by the time I’m finished, we’ll have found Dylan alive.
“One … two … three…” I whisper.
With my whole heart I will the police to call our house or ring our doorbell with good news.
“Four … five … six.”
I imagine some nice lady ordering a pizza and seeing the neon yellow MISSING flyer with Dylan’s picture pasted on the pizza box—the one where he’s wearing his sweet toothy grin and his favorite cartoon space alien T-shirt—and then I imagine her looking out the window and spotting Dylan standing in her front yard, just waiting to be found.
“Seven … eight … nine.”
I fantasize that one of the many made up, hair sprayed, honey-voiced television news reporters who’ve been interviewing my pale, barefooted parents in our family room over and over these past few days runs another story, a story where the right person realizes the right thing and makes the right phone call and my brother, my sweet little brother, comes home safe.
“Ten … eleven … twelve.”
I make it to one hundred, but nothing happens.
Text copyright © 2016 by Jennifer Mathieu
