He held the forms out to her, like an offering.
“We have to have standards,” she said.
Ralph didn’t know whether to laugh or scream at that. Instead, he let the papers go. The ocean wind took them and blew them into the woods.
It was very late, and Martha was locking the front door behind her. Her head was swimming with tiredness. She was looking forward to a hot bath and the soft bed in her house up the coast.
When she was younger, she could pull twelve-hour days. She had run off pure excitement, the full-steam-ahead feeling of knowing she was at the cutting edge of a brand-new treatment destined to save lives. She had felt satisfaction, as if she were fixing some great wrong that had been done.
Now such long days exhausted her. Her knees hurt, just from kneeling beside boy after boy. Maybe she needed to put down more rugs. Butshe knew it wasn’t just that. It was the mind ache of so many children. Their distressed cries filled her ears, and sometimes she had a hard time keeping their names straight.
She made it to her car, then turned around. This was not her car. It was the night watchman’s car. It looked nothing like her car.
Funny. How tired she was. The boys were strong. Maybe it was the salt air, or all the good food. They fought. You wouldn’t think they would be so strong, but they were. They were like wire.
Shaking her head at herself, swinging it wildly in the cold night air to wake herself up, she found the right car. She drove slowly down the dark mountain road, the car’s headlights piercing the darkness.
All the way home, she kept thinking she had forgotten something.
In the still of the night, a boy named Steven lay wrapped in a rug. He had been left there, in the soundproof room. Martha had said she was going for a break and would be back—maybe by then he would be willing to let go of the sickness inside him.
He had long since wet himself. The cold, wet rug was wrapped very tightly around him. Martha had taped it shut with long pieces of strong tape. Sometimes, when he was most resistant, she taped the ends shut too. Then all was darkness. Like in the womb, Martha said. But for Steven, thirteen years old and diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder as well as homosexuality, the howling darkness was more like being trapped inside a narrow pipe. He could not wiggle free. He struggled to breathe. It had been hours, he thought. His ribs hurt. His lungs ached.
Weakly, he began to fight back again, inside the thick wool.
The hours passed. Back in her rental home, Martha slept like a child, with her hands folded between her soft thighs. It was funny, she was thinking in her sleep, how she didn’t even like the top sheet tucked in. Martha King hated to be restrained. She hated the feeling of anyoneon top of her. Which was odd, she thought as she spiraled deeper into sleep; the part of therapy she liked the most was when she lay on top of the boys and pressed, to let them know adults were always in charge.
Steven breathed shallowly. The air inside him had grown very warm. Stars danced in his eyes. Little by little, he felt his body grow cold. It started with his feet, narrow and bony in the rug. His hands, trapped next to his sides, went next. The coldness crept up until it encased his heart. He struggled harder, then, as if he knew what was coming. In his fevered coldness, shot through with silver and pain and darkness, he was trying mightily to escape a monster, and the monster was coming for him. His heart expanded in terror. He could not run. He could not hide. He was darting through the woods. He was stuffed under a culvert, and, dear God, he was being buried alive. The dirt was falling on him. He was everything and nothing all at once.
His heart, unable to bear the strain, stopped. His final breath, a tiny little squeak, escaped.
At that very moment, warm in her own bed in her nice home, Martha awoke with a start.
She was suddenly quite sure of what she had forgotten.
21
“No sign of those runaways,” Larry said, looking up from his computer. He was sitting at his kitchen table after supper the following day, while Amanda rested in front of the fire. She looked tired. She opened one eye.
“I looked too,” she said.
“Ditto Ralph Higgins. My friend in the bureau hasn’t found any sign of him.”
Amanda was drowsing, thinking of bears, ice, and dens. She wished her brother had known a safe place. He wouldn’t have gone in the ocean then.
“What do you think happened to them, Larry?”
“The boys? They could have gotten lost in the woods. It happens.”
It sounded like he didn’t believe it.
“Or?” She was staring into the flames.
“What Patty told me, about the unmissing, got me thinking. Someone could kidnap or murder kids from foster care and no one would be the wiser.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Lots of reasons,” Larry said, thinking of them.
