the front row of church and not hear a God damn thing?”
“I hear more than you think,” Mrs. Collins said.
After another tense minute of “she said, she said,” all the mothers were led to the nurse’s office to collect their young and take them home. When Kate saw Mrs. Collins drag her son Brady out to the parking lot, her insides tightened. She was used to hating little snot-nose kids who picked on Christopher, but this was a different feeling. What she saw was a violent, angry kid being shoved into his mother’s Mercedes by an exasperated, angry woman.
“You get in there, God dammit,” Mrs. Collins said.
“Mom…they started it. I swear to God,” Brady said.
And by God, if Kate didn’t know better, she would have believed him. Of course, she knew that Brady was too small and Sunday-school charming to do any real damage now. But God help the deli line of cute girls who would climb into the backseat of Brady Collins’ car in high school. Girls like Jenny Hertzog in her stepbrother’s pickup truck. Girls who see something worth saving and never stop to notice that the boy doesn’t want to be saved. Girls who never admit that some boys are perfectly happy treating them like shit because they seem to be perfectly happy taking it. She once saw Jerry’s picture when he was little. Jerry had a cute innocent-boy look. And that cute little boy grew up and just had this thing for punching things that were smaller than him. Kate Reese shivered when she realized the sad truth: Even monsters are adorable when they’re little.
Kate turned back to Christopher, who covered his corduroy pants with her jacket and his bandaged neck with his turtleneck like he did when he was little and afraid of vampires. They told her he had fallen asleep after the state exam and had such a terrible nightmare, he had wet his pants and tore up his own neck with his fingernails.
Just like he did after his father died.
Back then, it wasn’t just his neck. It was a bruise on the arm. Or sleepwalking into a wall and sending himself to the ER. Kate managed to scrape together enough money to take him to a few different psychologists. The doctors had different approaches, but the bottom line was that Christopher needed time to work through the trauma of his father’s death.
After all, Christopher found the body.
It took a while, but eventually, the nightmares had stopped. And with them, the self-harm. She had no idea why it was all coming back now. And every attempt she made to get a straight answer from him was met by a monosyllabic answer. Occasionally, she would get three syllables:
“I don’t know.”
Kate Reese had a million questions, but she had to work. And her son didn’t look like he could handle the third degree right now. So, she made the strategic decision to give him space and ask him the only question she knew he wanted to answer.
“Hey…before I go back to work…you want to get some ice cream?”
His smile almost broke her heart.
Christopher didn’t know it, but his mother had already done many things to try to figure out what was happening to him. Including some things she’d promised herself she would never do. She’d snooped around his room for clues. A drawing. A letter. A diary. Anything. But all she found was the picture of his father on the bookshelf with duck wallpaper and the books that looked like her son had already read several times over.
When everything in his room proved fruitless, Kate Reese threw on a jacket and went outside. She walked through the backyard and stood on the edge of the Mission Street Woods. She stared at the trees. Watching the breeze kiss the branches.
Kate Reese walked into the woods. She did not stumble. She knew exactly where she was going. She wasn’t sure why it had taken her this long to do it. Maybe fear. Maybe focus. After all, the sheriff assured her the woods were safe. He said what happened to Ambrose’s brother was an unspeakable tragedy, but it happened a long time ago.
But that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen again.
It didn’t take long for her feet to find the path. She passed the billy goat bridge and the hollow log until she found herself in the heart of the woods.
The clearing.
The tree.
The tree house.
She was astonished. When her son had told her that he built a tree house, she