Things We Didn't Say - By Kristina Riggle Page 0,18

throws a dishcloth at me.” She gestures to her damp shirt. I must have splashed her.

“I didn’t throw it.” I know I should be cool about this, not hyper her up, as Michael says, but my anger leaches out in my words. “And not at her. I dropped it in the sink.”

Michael pinches the bridge of his nose. “Please. Not now.”

I don’t know which one of us he’s talking to.

Mallory points a long finger at me. “Threw, dropped, whatever. She’s behaving like a pouty kid. When our child’s life is at stake.”

Michael squeezes Angel’s shoulders as she gives a little gasp. “His life is not at stake, we just don’t know his exact location right this minute. Let’s not borrow trouble, here.”

“Yes, we’ve got plenty already,” Mallory says, her voice pitching higher. She aims a long finger at me. “The lady of the house is with Dylan all this time and never bothers to find out what’s going on in his head. She obviously doesn’t understand what it’s like to worry about your own children.”

I retort, “I’m worried, too! But Dylan values his privacy.”

“And so do you,” spits out Angel.

The skin on my neck prickles, but then I remember my journal is stowed at the bottom of my duffle bag, which I threw in the back of the closet.

Michael rubs his temple with his free hand. “Mallory, I’m his father. If anyone should have known, it would be me. And if he trusted us so much, he wouldn’t have disappeared without responding to our calls.”

“Unless he didn’t disappear of his own free will!” Mallory starts to shake in place, visibly. Her hands, in particular, seem like they have been struck by a palsy as she kneads her fingers.

Angel starts in again on her thumbnail. Michael squeezes her hand, then slowly stands up and crosses the room to Mallory. He holds her in his arms, and she falls onto his shoulder.

Trying not to react. I swear I can feel Angel watching me.

Michael says, but his voice sounds effortful, “He’s not a helpless little boy. He can’t be just . . . snatched off the street . . .”

Angel whimpers again, and Michael unwinds himself from Mallory, then pulls her along by the hand to the couch, where he tucks each of them in on either side of him.

“To me it’s clear he went willingly. He shut off his phone. Not to silent mode, like he usually does at school, but completely off. That’s deliberate.”

“Maybe it’s out of power,” I say, struck by this sudden thought. Or he’s not the one who shut it off. This part I’m smart enough to keep to myself.

Michael soldiers on. “It was on this morning, at breakfast, remember? Look, no one dragged an unwilling teenager from a small, crowded school without anyone noticing. So, as I said, he left the school on his own. He’s not old enough to drive, and none of his friends have seen him who might have driven him someplace. So he’s hiding out somewhere, for some reason. That’s bad and upsetting, but it doesn’t mean anything like what those kids have been saying at school, Angel.”

He could have hitchhiked, it occurs to me. If he wanted to leave, he could have stuck out his thumb, and a trucker could have picked him up. With going on seven hours since this morning, he could be two states away by now.

I have a desperate urge to be valuable in this moment, to show Michael that I matter. “I remembered this: he’s been religiously getting the mail every day. Maybe he was waiting for something.”

Mallory leaps to a standing position, fists clenched. “And you didn’t pursue that, did you?” She arranges her face in a parody of an empty-headed ninny. “You just went la-di-da, about your business being the happy homemaker.” Back to sneering now, she advances on me. “I can’t believe you would let this happen to my son!”

She seizes my arms, and her force surprises me so much that I don’t realize for a moment or two that she’s wheeling me backward, my feet scrambling under me.

Michael wrenches her away, yelling her name, yelling to stop. My shoulders sting from the dented impressions of her fingers and ragged nails. From the corner of my eye, Angel is balled up on the couch now, face hidden under a curtain of hair.

“Ouch!” Mallory cries, stroking her forearm where Michael must have grabbed her, but he’s walking with me out of the room now, shouting