6:03 a.m.
Pasadena, California ~ Sunday, August 17, 2014
I was still awake.
Still in the living room.
Nothing had changed in the past six hours except, perhaps, the intensity of my prayers and the violence of my tears.
I kept thinking about my mother. How many times must she have done exactly this same thing? How many nights must she have stayed up—alternating her pleas to God with piteous weeping—after Gideon went missing? No wonder she’d looked and acted like a zombie.
It could happen so quickly, couldn’t it? Here I was, already following in her wretched footsteps. Already on the verge of becoming one of the walking undead.
Deep in my heart, I renewed a promise I’d once made to her. Never had I had such a strong desire to fulfill it. Never would I have imagined I’d understand her request—as I did now.
The clock in the kitchen ticked mercilessly, reminding me of all the seconds my son had been gone. Seconds that were turning into minutes...into hours...into days.
I’d been greatly affected by my brother’s disappearance, yes. But I was just his sister. Just a teen. And, what was worse, I was an intellectually capable one with no excuse for my streak of arrogance and my exasperating lack of concern for my own mortality—at least until Donovan got hurt.
My attitude changed then...but just think of what had to happen before it did?
Charlie hadn’t had many seriously close calls in his life. There was that car accident on the freeway. There was the time he had to get twenty-three stitches in high school after Nick Bellamy “dared him” to jump off his father’s tool shed. There was the bad pneumonia incident a couple of years back that landed him in the hospital overnight. Nothing, though, that might impress upon my son the grave need for averting danger...or even simply using caution as a means of tempering his tendency toward adventurousness.
I understood this completely and with a sense of alarm that was rapidly transitioning into hysteria.
Being the mother in the equation, even of an adult child, made a rather significant difference in my mindset, I’d discovered. All those years ago, I’d been so intent on solving “the mystery.” That had mattered to me. And I still remembered how fervently I’d felt about it. How I’d needed to solve it.
Well, I didn’t need to solve Charlie’s disappearance. I just needed my son back.
“If I can just have him returned, home safe—” I pleaded aloud. Again, bargaining with God in between sobbing jags. “I won’t give a damn about any of the hows or whys. I don’t care. You can keep the mystery. No questions, no curiosity. I promise. Just bring my little boy back to me, okay? Please?”
There was no immediate answer.