Chương 6
My signature looked like someone else had written it.
Karen sat beside me after the forms were done.
“You should eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“That’s not what I said.”
I looked at her.
She shrugged.
“I work with parents.”
It annoyed me enough to make me obey.
The cafeteria had oatmeal that tasted like wallpaper paste and coffee better than Ruiz’s.
I ate six spoonfuls standing beside a window overlooking a parking garage.
A man in scrubs argued on the phone about replacing a water heater.
Two women in matching hospital badges split a muffin.
Someone outside had tied a silver balloon to the antenna of a car.
Ordinary problems continued happening with insulting confidence.
When I returned upstairs, Noah was awake.
He was watching a cartoon with the volume barely audible.
A green animated dragon was trying to make pancakes and setting everything on fire.
“You missed breakfast,” I told him.
“I had Jell-O.”
“What color?”
“Red.”
“That’s not breakfast.”
“It is here.”
He sounded almost pleased about winning.
I pulled the chair closer.
He watched the cartoon for another minute.
“Is Ava dead?”
The question came without warning.
“No.”
His eyes stayed on the television.
“She’s at another hospital.”
“Did she get away?”
“She got out.”
That was the safest version of the truth I had.
Noah nodded.
The dragon exploded a bowl of batter.
He smiled faintly.
Then he said, “Grandma said she would send Ava back.”
My attention sharpened.
“Back where?”
He shrugged carefully because one side of his chest hurt.
“I don’t know.”
“Did Ava know?”
“Maybe.”
“What did she say?”
Noah pulled at a loose thread on the sheet.
“She said the bad house.”
I stopped myself from asking more.
Karen’s warning about repeated questioning sat in the back of my mind.
I changed the subject and asked whether he wanted apple juice.
He said grape.
Hospitals apparently changed his personality.
I went to find it.
When I came back, Ruiz was waiting in the hallway.
He looked worse than before.
“What happened?”
“We identified Ava.”
My pulse jumped.
“Who is she?”
“Ava Morales.”
He lowered his voice.
“She’s eleven.”
“Does she have parents?”
“Yes.”
“Do they know?”
“They do now.”
Something in his face told me there was more.
“What?”
“She was reported missing fourteen months ago in San Antonio.”
I leaned against the wall.
Fourteen months.
Noah had spent two nights in that house and come away broken.
I could not imagine fourteen months.
“How did she end up with my mother?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“You keep saying that.”
“I know.”
His patience irritated me because it remained intact.
“Her parents thought she ran away?”
“Initially.”
“Why?”
“She left school during lunch and never came home.”
“Eleven-year-olds don’t just disappear.”
“No.”
“Someone took her.”
“That’s what we’re investigating.”
I looked through the glass at Noah.
“He said there were bad noises before this trip.”
Ruiz turned toward me.
“When?”
“He mentioned the shed once.”
“How long ago?”
I searched my memory.
The moment arrived in pieces.
A Sunday afternoon.
My mother cutting strawberries at the kitchen counter.
Noah building something on the floor with plastic blocks.
He had asked why Grandma’s shed made bad noises.
My mother said raccoons got under the floor.
I had laughed because Noah was convinced raccoons held meetings at night.
“How long?” Ruiz asked again.
“Maybe three months.”
His face hardened.
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“I forgot.”
The shame came quickly.
“I forgot because she said raccoons.”
“That matters.”
“I know it matters.”
My voice rose.
A nurse at the station glanced toward us.
I lowered it.
“I know.”
Ruiz did not rescue me from the feeling.
I respected him for that and hated him a little for it.
“Anything else that seemed strange?”
I closed my eyes.
Once, my mother had stopped me from using the downstairs bathroom because the plumbing was supposedly broken.
Another time, Madison had carried groceries straight to the backyard instead of the kitchen.
There had been extra bottled water stacked in the laundry room.
Small things.
Normal things.
Things that became monstrous only after you learned where to place them.
I told Ruiz.
He wrote everything down.
At noon, a detective from San Antonio called.
Ruiz put the phone on speaker with my permission.
Her name was Celeste Harper.
She had been assigned to Ava’s missing-person case eight months after the original detective transferred units.
Her voice sounded tired and precise.
“We had no indication she was in Dallas.”
“Was there a suspect?” I asked.
“A man named Leon Vance came up in the early stages.”
Ruiz stopped writing.
“Why?”
“He worked maintenance at the middle school.”
My stomach turned.
“He took her?”
“We never established that.”
Harper continued carefully.
“Vance quit six days after Ava disappeared.”
“Where is he now?”
“We’ve been trying to locate him since this morning.”
Ruiz asked, “Any connection to Margaret Carter?”
“That’s what I was about to ask you.”
My mother’s name in a stranger’s voice felt wrong.
Harper said they had found an old emergency contact form connected to Vance.
The address listed for his sister was in Dallas.
The sister’s first name was Margaret.
I stared at Ruiz.
“My mother’s maiden name is Vance.”
The room went silent.
Harper spoke first.
“Leon is your uncle?”
“I don’t have an uncle Leon.”
Even as I said it, I knew how childish it sounded.
People existed whether families mentioned them or not.
“My mother had one brother.”
“What was his name?”
“Michael.”
“Could Michael be a middle name?”
“I don’t know.”
Ruiz asked, “Is he alive?”
“My mother said he died before I was born.”
Harper’s voice flattened.
“Leon Vance is fifty-eight.”
My mother was sixty-two.
The ages fit too easily.
I sat down.
There had been no photographs of an uncle in our house.
No stories.
No grave visits.
Only one family rule around my mother’s childhood.
We did not ask.
“My grandmother might know.”
Ruiz looked up.
“She’s alive?”
May you like
“Yes.”
“Where?”
