Five Days in Summer

been there she saw the corn man. And it wasn’t him.
    She felt her body stiffening. Her lungs filling with stone.
    The man sitting behind her son was a total stranger,even to her imagination. This monster who had kept her at the bottom of his boat like a dying eel. This freak who had hunted her child.
    Sam’s eyes shot off her face, up to the man just behind him. The man looked down and shook his head. For the first time she heard his voice, nasal, almost cranky.
    “Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to talk to strangers?”
    Her body was racked with anger, pure hatred.
    Sam’s eyes slammed shut. So quiet, afraid. He was a single stone, sending shivers through a body of water larger than any imagination. One stone, sinking. Gone.
    Every piece of her cascaded out of place.
    The man shook his head at Sam like he was misbehaving and she would kill him she would destroy this monster with her bare hands. He looked at her and tilted his forehead to the side like he was wondering how to punish them.
    “Let’s take away his Pokemon cards, should we?”
    She would obliterate him with her eyes.
    “Games for Sam, books for David.”
    He knew their names.
    “What about Mommy’s favorite pastime?”
    He got up, walked across the room, took something from a drawer and returned to sit back down in the same position. In the flat of his palm sat a strawberry pincushion pierced equidistantly by hundreds of straight pins.
    The man’s face was still and dead. He watched her.
    All the fluids left in her body boiled, then froze.
    The monster stared into her eyes.
    “There’s still time,” the monster said in a strangely placid voice. “There’s no rush.” He stood and walked to the hatch. When he pulled it open, light rushed inand she was blinded. She heard his footsteps moving slowly up the ladder, the sound of the hatch closing, and his steps as he walked off the boat.
    She blinked her eyes and struggled to grab Sammie with her vision, to focus into him. My baby, let me hold you. Come safely into my eyes.

Chapter 30
    In Manhattan the world was a grid and all you needed was second-grade math to get yourself around. But here it was like a universe filled with crisscrossed threads. David didn’t know where he was and now he was starting to wonder if Sam had been the smart one to stay behind. David was starting to think he should have planned it out a little better. Hidden himself a bicycle, taken along a backpack with supplies. It was hot and he was thirsty, getting hungry now too. At least he’d been sane enough to grab some of Dad’s cash.
    Dad would be ballistic just about now. David wondered what his punishment would be when he got home. If he ever got home. Maybe Dad and Grandma would take Sam and Maxi back to the city without him. Maybe they’d leave David and his mother here alone. Maybe he really would. David stopped a minute and sat on the grass at the side of the road and knew he’d made a big mistake. Dad would never leave the Cape without him. Dad would kill himself looking for him. It would be all David’s fault, and they’d have no parents, and they’d have to live with Grandma, who couldn’t even remember to give Maxi her medicine. They would become orphans all because David hadbeen stupid enough to think he could find their mother better than Dad or the police or the FBI. Like some eleven-year-old kid could find someone who all the grown-ups put together couldn’t even find. He had learned a lot in aikido about confidence and strength and fighting and not fighting and he had his brown belt but he hadn’t learned how to be smart. Now everyone would know what an idiot he was. Dad knew. Grandma knew. Sam knew. Someday Maxi would know. Would Mom ever know?
    His big plan had been to get to Stop & Shop and start looking for her there. He knew it was somewhere off Route 151 but that road ended an hour ago, then turned into Route 28, two 28s actually off a big rotary that was like a spinning wheel collecting up all the threads, spewing them out into more nowheres. David hadn’t so much made a choice at that crazy intersection as kept going. Then 28 went on so long it started to look like it would never turn back into 151. And he was so hot and so thirsty.
    Maybe it was the coolness of the breeze but when he sensed water he turned off onto the nearest road. Quinaquisset Avenue. He couldn’t even pronounce it and that irritated him. He lost the breeze pretty quickly, and didn’t like all the traffic