“Annee!”
“Danny, that’s right. Where is he? Where is Danny?” She talks to him as they go up the stairs and into the small bathroom that always feels damp and cold, black mold blooming on the walls no matter how often she wipes them down with bleach. Cathy runs a shallow bath and helps Scout to put the bubbles in, swirling the water to make foam and trying to ignore the little panicky voice at the back of her mind insisting something terrible has happened to Danny.
An hour later, and Scout is bashing his knife and fork against the tray of his high chair, his face smeared with sauce.
There is a noodle stuck to his cheek and Cathy peels it off, shaking her head as she does so. “You’re filthy. You angling for another bath?”
“Nother baff! Nother baff!”
“Come on, eat up.”
It’s nearly three o’clock. She knows this because she can hear the church bell tolling off the hours. She’s smoked a couple of cigarettes in the yard, watching passively as Scout had rammed his toy trucks together. She’s lost count of how many times she thought she heard the approach of Danny’s skateboard on the road, or his footsteps coming up the path. That feeling of anxiety has intensified now to a low, pulsing hum. Her heart is gunning in her chest so fast it makes her feel a little dizzy. Whereishe? She checks through Danny’s social media pages for the hundredth time but there’s no updates, nothing. It’s like he’s disappeared off the face of the earth.
“Mum-ee!”
“Oh, Scout, no!” He has picked up the bowl of noodles and broccoli and turned it upside down on his lap, grinning at her with his flushed, dimpled cheeks. “What did you do that for?”
“Oodles!”
“Fuck.” Cathy inhales tightly through her nostrils.
“Fuck!” Scout sings, pulling noodles from his forehead. “Fuck!”
“Great. That’s great. You wait here, Scout. I’m going to get you a fresh pair of pajamas.”
Cathy crosses the hallway to Scout’s room, the one with his name on the door in bright wooden letters and the window overlooking the yard. She pulls his favorite onesie out of the drawer, the one with little yellow teddies in sombreros, and feels a cold breeze on her forearm. The broken window has swung open. Just a fraction, no more than an inch or two—if it hadn’t been for that cold breeze, she probably wouldn’t have noticed at all—but as she moves to close it, Cathy notices something on the sill that makes her heart stop.
A boot print.Half a boot print, her pedantic mind supplies in spite of the horror rising in her. The print is slightly smudged bythe rain, just the toes visible, a few wavy lines of tread. Her stomach drops, her head light and very faint, the room pulsing in and out of focus. She holds Scout’s pajamas very close. Cathy has always dismissed the idea of mother’s intuition as nothing more than wishful thinking, but she gets it now, thatknowing, deep in the cave of her chest.
Someone has been inside her son’s room.
Bang!A noise from the kitchen, as though Scout has slipped out of his high chair.Or someone has pulled him out, Cathy thinks, glancing back at that boot print on the sill. She jerks away from the window, running across the hallway with her heart in her mouth and her mind racing. “Scout?” she calls out, panic rising, turning her voice into a hysterical wail. “Sweetie, are you okay? Say something, bab—”
To her horror, there is a stranger in her kitchen, bent over her son’s high chair. For a moment, Cathy sees the dark mop of hair and scruffy stained overalls of the council worker from Belle Vue, and she snatches up a knife from the counter, never mind that it is a butter knife with a rounded end and no sharp edges to speak of.I’ll ram it into his throat anyway, she thinks,you can just bet on that!
“Mum? What the hell are you doing? Jesus!”
“Danny?” Cathy drops the knife. It skitters across the floor to Danny’s feet, where he bends to pick it up. Scout lifts his bowl and bangs it on the high chair tray.Bang! Bang!Not Andrew the council worker, not some madman broken into her home. Just her scruffy eldest son in his hoodie and baggy jeans, helping his little brother eat up his noodles. He still has Scout’s little fork in his hand.
“I—I didn’t hear you come in. You nearly gave me a heart attack, Danny!”
He watches her cautiously as she crosses the room and lifts Scout out of the chair, brushing errant noodles off his grubby clothes. Theonesie is still hung over her shoulder, and now she grabs it and puts it on the table beside her phone.
“I just came back to get some lunch. I’m starving. I didn’t think to call out.” Danny puts the butter knife carefully down on the countertop. “Is everything okay, Mum? You’ve got me worried.”
She looks at him carefully. Sometimes Danny looks so much like his father it’s uncanny. She doesn’t tell him this, however. Danny has no wish to know anything about his absent father, and Cathy respects that. A part of her is even relieved.
“Come outside with me, would you, sweetie? I need to smoke.”
She dresses Scout in his little ski jacket and puts a wool hat on his head, which he instantly snatches off. The snow has settled into heaps and mounds, turning their small outside yard into a surreal plutonian landscape. Their breath bruises the air, the daylight tinted an eerie blue. The wind has a bite, sinking long wintry canines into their exposed skin. She sets Scout on the decking, and he looks up at her with his big liquid eyes, grabbing a fistful of snow and throwing it into the air. He trills, clapping his hands in delight.
“That’s it, kid, go nuts.”
Cathy steps back against the big rhododendron bush and pulls her cigarettes from her pocket. She’d planted these rhododendrons the week that she and Danny moved into this house, the place she had hoped would be their forever home. The garden is small, barely more than a yard, but it’s Cathy’s pride and joy. When they’d arrived, it had been little more than a patch of scruffy bare earth, brown grass. In the years since, Cathy has seeded native wildflowers and built a little decked area surrounded by pots of herbs and theraised beds she grows vegetables in. She’s no Capability Brown, but she’d burst with pride as each new shoot and bud had emerged.
“Can I have one?” Danny looks at her cigarette pleadingly.
She glares at him. “Absolutely not. What kind of mother do you think I am?”