“Mrs. Bannerman? April, is that you?”
It is the principal, Mr. Johnston, and the casual tone of his voice severs the thin strand of my hope. He obviously did not expect me; he has no idea why I am here, kneeling in the grass, pawing through the remains of my child’s lunch. For a second—a heartbeat that brushes into eternity—I cannot look at him. When at last I do find the courage to turn, to lift my chin, my eyes are burning and coated with tears. “Bradley…” I whisper his name, hearing the hopelessness echoing in my voice. “Is he here?”
“Bradley? Didn’t he come home? I saw him standing in line for the bus.”
Through my tears I stare down at the leftover lunch. I clutch the half-eaten sandwich, bringing the baggie to my nose. The peanut butter smell is strong, even through the plastic. It is the smell of little boys everywhere. I allow myself a memory—peanut butter smeared in his hair, on his cheeks, on the scratched metal tray of his high chair. I remember laughing at the mess as I swept him into my arms and carried him to the bathtub. It was four years ago, that day, when he was just learning that food was for eating, not for playing with.
Four years ago… yesterday.
I think for a second that I can’t take the pain, that this heart of mine will simply stop beating—for how can it beat when my son is missing?
“Come on, April,” the principal says quietly. “We should call the police. The longer we wait…” Thankfully, his words trail off.
Like mothers have done for centuries, I get up, I go on. I do what I have to do. “Yes,” I answer, and though my voice is a frayed remnant of itself, it is a triumph. For already, before this tragedy has truly begun, I can imagine the end. I am an old, old lady. My eyes are wild and I live in a box under the freeway. I haven’t spoken in fifty years. Not from this moment on.
The last word I ever spoke was to the police when Mr. Johnston handed me the phone.
“My son, Bradley, is missing,” I said. “He is six years old.”
I AM sitting on the front porch when Ryan gets home. Already the house is swarming with well-meaning police officers. They are poking through my son’s room, picking up toys and opening drawers. I cannot watch. They act as if the secret to his disappearance is here, in the one place on earth where he was safe. In my arms is Teddy, the tiny patchwork bear Bradley sleeps with.
Ryan stops in front of me. It takes forever, but I manage to lift my head and look at him. His beautiful blue eyes are filled with tears, and I realize that I have never seen him cry before. I ache to join him, to feel the relief of tears, but I am dried up inside, the tears a hard knot in my chest. It is all too real now; my husband is here, and I have to tell him everything that has happened, and when the words leave my mouth, I know I will fall apart.
Behind Ryan, a roving red police light throbs from its static place on the top of the patrol car, slicing through my yard in surreal bursts.
I force the enormity of my fear into tiny compartments. Details. These I can handle. “I called Susan. She’ll pick up Bonnie and Billy after school. We’ll have to tell them, or course. But I thought… not yet.”
Ryan kneels before me, his big hand caresses my face, then curls protectively around my chin. He is crying openly now, my strong, silent, honorable husband, and his pain breaks what little bit of my heart remains.
“We’ll find him,” he says to me in a voice I barely recognize.
In that instant, I love him so much it is a dull pain in my chest. “Yes.”
He moves around and sits beside me on the porch, pulling me close. Together we stare out at the yard—at the lawn that always needs mowing and the flower beds that always need weeding. I think of how often I have bitched about the lawn. How could I have missed the obvious?
This backyard of ours needs only one thing. Children. Children playing and laughing and drinking water from the green garden hose on a hot summer’s day. I close my eyes in shame, wondering when I let things get so tangled. Was it only a few hours ago when I thought my life was unfinished and unformed? It feels like forever; the idle thoughts of a selfish child.
I lean against my husband, gathering strength and courage from him. Time falls away from us; I have no idea how long it has been when a police car pulls up in front of the house. A uniformed man gets out and slams his door, walking purposefully toward us.
Ryan’s arm tightens around me, and I know he is feeling it, too, this sudden, numbing rush of terror. I stare at the policeman’s emotionless face, thinking the same thing over and over again. Don’t say you’re sorry.
A tiny sound, a moan, escapes me. I can’t hold it all in.
The policeman stops and gives us a gentle smile. The gentleness of it is almost more than I can bear. “Mr. and Mrs. Bannerman?”
“Yes,” Ryan answers.
“We need a photograph of Bradley… to put out over the wires.”
I deflate, relieved momentarily. A photograph.
I think of Bradley’s T-ball picture, tacked to the wall in the kitchen, the one where he is wearing a black batting glove and a toothless smile. I think of all the times he missed the ball and all the times I said, “Don’t worry, pal. You’ll be as good as Billy one day.”
“Mrs. Bannerman?” the policeman says.
Wordlessly, Ryan gets to his feet. I know I should go with him, find the photograph for my husband, who can’t find the carton of milk in our refrigerator, but I can’t move. I stare helplessly at the policeman, trying awkwardly to smile. In seconds Ryan is back with the baseball picture. The policeman nods stiffly, tucks the small picture in a manila envelope, and leaves us alone again.
Ryan sits beside me, and the tiny patch of concrete between us seems to span continents. All I can think about is this morning, my last moment with my son. I zipped up his backpack and sent him off to school. Had I told him how much I loved him then? Or had I been my normal frazzled self, thinking of the hundreds of chores to be done after he left? I can’t remember.
“I don’t know if I can make it through this.” At the admission, control rips away like a damp tissue, and I am crying. Ryan takes my hands in his, cold flesh against cold flesh.
“We’ll get him back,” he says.
I can’t answer. Suddenly I am missing both my son and my mother. Of all the people who have passed through my life, she is the one I need now. I want to curl into her arms and be held. I want to smell her Pert shampoo and Estée Lauder perfume. I want her to tell me that Bradley is okay, that we’ll find him. She is the only one I will believe.
IT IS ALMOST NIGHTFALL—four hours since Bradley disappeared. A light rain has begun to fall. Is he warm enough, my baby who is out in the night all alone? Did I remember to put a coat in his backpack?
I am standing at the picket fence, staring out onto the street that yesterday was as familiar as the back of my hand and now looks as foreign and frightening as the lunar surface.
Two hundred forty minutes since we were plunged into the nightmare. I am broken now, utterly lost. Ryan is in the house, talking to the police. He feels better if he is doing something, trying to help. Me… there is nothing that will make me feel better, and trying only reminds me that my child is gone.
A breeze rushes along the street, slanting the rain across my face. It smells oddly of apple pie and carries with it a picture of my mother rolling out dough, then wiping her hands on her apron and coming toward me. Then crying, in that soft, unassuming way of hers, almost as if she had no right to weep at all. Oh, April… I wanted so much for you.
The words have a resonance tonight, a sad wistfulness I never noticed before; perhaps I wasn’t ready to see until now, this very moment. The disappointment was about my mother’s life, not mine, an expression of her dissatisfaction with her own life.
“I still love him, Mom,” I say quietly, tasting the salty moisture of my own tears. And it is true. After all these years—because of them and in spite of them—I still love my husband. Not in the starry-eyed teenaged way of long ago, but fully, deeply
My mother could never have said that about her husband. That’s why she wanted me to be an astronaut or a surgeon. My father ran out on us early, and so my mom lived her whole life in Mocipsee, in a rented white house on a shaggy lot at the edge of town. She wanted more for me because she wanted more for herself.
I stare out at the sparkly street. Something glimmers at me, a knowledge that I’ve been seeking for most of my life, and I know all at once what it is. For years I have kept my mother’s memories in a glass case, thinking that they were too fragile to touch. But now I have to examine them, dissect them, and understand what part she played in who I am and how I feel about my life.
She led me wrong; I see that now. My loving, much-loved mother made me believe that happiness couldn’t happen in Mocipsee, that I was wrong to want Ryan and my children and my home.
It saddens me to realize how much her hopes and dreams hurt both of us. For most of my life I have been caught up in missing what I didn’t have, and so I didn’t see what was right in front of me. “I love the life I have, Mom. I’m happy. I’m sorry—so sorry—if it wasn’t enough for you, but it’s enough for me. As long as I’ve got Ryan and…” I can’t get the words out; I am crying too hard. And my babies, Mom. All I need are Ryan and my babies.
I stand there, sobbing, until the rain begins to slow. In the sudden quiet I hear the uneven rhythm of my heartbeat. Help him get home, Mom. Please…
The wind moans softly, and in the sound I hear footsteps. I know it is my husband, come to rescue me with a kiss. As usual, he knows when I am most vulnerable, and he is there. My handsome quarterback husband who now coaches Little League and sells toaster ovens.
His arms curl around me. I lean back against him, comforted by his embrace. Though I have an ocean of tears left inside, I put them aside, leaving them for another time. I turn and look up at my husband through moist, stinging eyes. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
I start to say something else, to reveal all that I have learned about my life in the last few moments, when I see a shadow across the street, small and insignificant, huddled at the dark post of a streetlight. Before I know why, I am moving, then running.
The light flickers in the rain, and I see him.
It is our Bradley, standing all alone, shivering with cold, clutching the slick canvas of his backpack. His rosy cheeks are streaked with dirt and dried tears.
I scoop him into my arms, holding him tightly, crying into the damp tangle of his little-boy hair. Ryan wraps his arms around both of us. The rain begins anew.
Brad hooks his legs around my waist and leans back in my arms, looking worriedly at us. “I missed the bus.”
I set him down on the ground and kneel in front of him. Sniffing hard, I swipe at my tears with my sleeve and draw a deep breath, trying to look grown-up. But the terror has left its mark deep, deep inside. I can’t seem to stop shaking. “I went to the school. I found—” It wells up again in my throat. All I can see is that lunch box, abandoned in the grass. I know it will be with me always, that horrible memory. With a supreme effort, I force myself to finish. “I found your lunchbox.”
“I musta dwopped it. I was following a cwow. He was eatin’ my lunch. When I looked up, the buses were gone. I knew I was in big twouble.”
Ryan is staring at him, unsmiling. “You should have gone into the office and told Mrs. Freemont.”
Brad’s eyes fill slowly, heartbreakingly, with tears. “I know.”
“How did you get home?” I ask quietly.
“I don’t wanna tell you.”
Ryan touches Brad’s shoulder. “Come on, son.” It is his best dad’s voice, infused with gentle steel.
Tears streak down my son’s apple cheeks, and each one seems to scald me. “Billy and Bonnie walk home from school every day.”
He walked home alone, my baby who has never been allowed out of the yard by himself. I squeeze my eyes shut, but this darkness is worse. All I can think is, What if?
Beside me, Ryan kneels. His knees pop at the movement, then thump onto the sidewalk. “All this time, while your mom and I have been…” His voice breaks, and for a second he is only mine, not a grown-up father talking to his son about something important, but my husband, my lover, who has just tasted his first helping of fear. Like me, he will never be the same again. Then he recovers. “You made it home all by yourself?”
I think: Bless him. Bless this man who has exchanged his boyhood dreams for a Wal-Mart register and full medical benefits. Bless him for finding his voice when mine is tangled somewhere so deep inside of me that I can’t even find the horse, ragged start of it.
It takes me a second to realize that Bradley hasn’t answered. I glance at Ryan and know instantly that he has noticed the silence.
“Bradley?” Ryan says. “You have to tell us what happened.”
Brad flinches, blinks back another bulbous tear. “Mommy—” He reaches for me.
I draw back from his tiny hands. As much as I want to hold and comfort him, this is a time for answers. “Bradley, how did you get home?”
His voice is tiny, a reversion to the baby talk he abandoned years ago. “She said she knew you.”
A stranger. He is talking about a stranger.
“Who said that?” It is Ryan’s voice, not mine. Mine is lost again.
“Alice,” Bradley says.
“Alice?”
“Like Alice in Wonderland. She found me. I walked for a long time… then I got scared. It started to rain, and it got dark out. I din’t know where I was. I sat down on the curb all by myself, and then she was there, sittin’ beside me.”
“What did Alice do?” Ryan asks in a thin voice.
“She said, ‘I been waitin’ a long time to meet you, Bradley.’ I told her I wasn’t allowed to talk to strangers, but she laughed and said she most certainly wasn’t a stranger. She said she knew my mommy and daddy.”
“Then what?”
Bradley sniffles and blinks away his tears. “She brung me home. I tried to get her to come into the house, but she said she couldn’t go no further. I told her my mommy would want to talk to her.”
“What did she say to that?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I think it made her sad, ’cause she started to cry. Then she said to give this to Mom.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls something out.
I stare down at the object in my son’s hand and feel suddenly as if I am falling. Behind me, I hear cars rolling down the street, the tires squealing on the slick pavement. But it seems light-years away as I stare at the tiny misshapen pottery heart in my son’s tiny palm. I can see the thumbprint, still as clear as day, made so many years ago in art class.
Remember? A voice whispers inside me. Remember how little your thumb was? And suddenly I can smell it, a whiff of Pert shampoo and Estée Lauder perfume. In the leaves overhead I hear a rustle of sound, and it sounds achingly like my mother’s laugh.
“What in the—”
I cut Ryan off. “Did she say anything else?”
Bradley gives me a shrug. “No—oh, yeah. She said to tell you that she got to hold my hand.”
“April?” Ryan asks, touching my shoulder.
I stand up and look around, down the rain-slicked streets, searching the shadows for one that is familiar. Mom? When I see nothing, I close my eyes and draw up images, the ones I’ve kept inside glass for so long. Surprisingly, they don’t shatter and break and cut me with their sharp edges. The one that is clearest is of my thirteenth birthday party, when she carried a pink cake into the dining room. The other, darker images of her last days feel as far away as another continent.
I love you, Mom.
The leaves answer me, a whisper-soft sound that will stay with me for the rest of my life. In their sandpapery dry echo, I hear her voice, the voice I’ve longed to hear for years. I only wanted you to be happy.
I know.
“April?” Ryan says my name softly, but I can’t answer, not now when I am laughing and crying at the same time. I hold on to their hands, my husband’s and my son’s, and in the warm press of their flesh, I feel connected and complete. I am a twenty-seven-year-old housewife with no formal education, living in a house that was put together in a factory somewhere, and yet I know now that it is more than enough. It is everything.
St. Martin’s Press
THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. ALL OF THE CHARACTERS, ORGANIZATIONS, AND EVENTS PORTRAYED IN THIS STORY ARE EITHER PRODUCTS OF THE AUTHOR’S IMAGINATION OR ARE USED FICTITIOUSLY.
“The Glass Case.”
Copyright © 1998 by Kristin Hannah.
First published by Signet, an imprint of Dutton NAL, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. in MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS, Celebrating the Gift of Love with 12 New Stories. Copyright @ Jill Morgan, Martin H. Greenberg, and Robert Weinberg, 1998.
All rights reserved. No part of this story may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-0314-5
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