The goat had opinions about his exam and was making them known.
Bear wrapped both arms around its neck, braced a knee against its flank, and pinned it to the steel table while Lila worked the wound on its shoulder. His phone buzzed against the counter. The screen lit at the edge of his vision, and every muscle in his body went wrong at once.
Solace High.
“I need thirty seconds,” he said.
Lila looked up from the suture. “Hold position.”
He held position. Held it through ninety more seconds while she closed the last of it and started wrapping. The goat had stopped fighting and gone aggrieved, letting out periodic complaints that bounced off the exam room walls. Bear kept his hands where they were. Kept his eyes on the phone.
When Lila reached for the gauze tape, he peeled off his gloves.
“I have to take this.”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He pushed through the exam room door into the hall, pressing call back before it shut behind him.
The secretary’s voice was careful. “Mr. McKenna. Thank you for calling back. We have a situation with your son.”
He only vaguely heard her through the rushing pump of his blood in his ears.
Logan had left the cafeteria during third period. Hadn’t shown for fourth, fifth, or sixth. His backpack was still on the chair. His lunch tray was still on the table.
He hung up, ducked back into the exam room long enough to say “I have to go,” and yanked his jacket off the hook. Lila opened her mouth. He was out the door before she got the word out.
He drove home doing ten over with both hands on the wheel and his jaw locked. The Bitterroots stood white and still against the sky to the west. He glowered at every stoplight, every slow car ahead of him, every mile between the clinic and Maple Street. His mind ran the same loop on repeat.
Logan’s backpack still on the chair.
Logan’s lunch tray still on the table.
He turned onto Maple and screeched to a halt in the driveway, flying out the door before the truck finished rocking.
Inside, he went through the house room by room. Logan’s bedroom first. Star Wars comforter. Paperback face down on the nightstand. Nikes shoved half under the bed frame.
“Logan?”
Bathroom. Empty.
Kitchen, where the cereal box still sat beside the mugs.
“Logan.”
Basement, cold and smelling of old concrete, where he’d been stacking lumber for the porch repair. King padded behind him through every doorway, head swinging, nose working, his big body filling the narrow hall.
He came back through the kitchen and out the front door, phone in his fist.
Think.
Logan had forty-three dollars.
No bag— the backpack was at school. He was wearing his hoodie, the gray one?—
Bear stopped.
The gray hoodie was on the couch. He’d walked past it coming in. Which meant Logan had left without it, in his usual long-sleeved Nirvana shirt and jeans.
It was forty-five degrees out and dropping.
