Page 35 of Middlegame

“Who is this?” There’s rage in Professor Cheswich’s voice, yes, but there’s also fear; enough fear that this may work after all.

“A friend. Please. I know you don’t want to believe me, I know this sounds insane, but for Dodger’s sake, you need to go home as fast as you can. You need to save her. You need to go home, and you need to save her.”

Professor Cheswich is sputtering and demanding more details when Roger gently sets the receiver back in its cradle. That’s all; he’s done what he could do. He’s tried. He has reached the end of his endurance, and he has tried.

“How many times we gonna do this, Dodge?” he mumbles. His words are soft around the edges, mushy, like they’re crumbling away. She can’t hear him. There’s no sense of connection, nothing to indicate the door is even still there. That’s okay. That’s okay. He tried. He tried to . . . to . . .

The third seizure pushes forward, and it’s bigger than the world. Everything else goes away, and then he goes away, and that’s okay. That’s okay. He tried.

He tried.

RESCUE

Timeline: 7:51 PST, September 5th, 2003 (same day same day same day).

Peter Cheswich is not easily frightened. He never has been. He watches horror movies with his daughter, laughing at the rubber monsters and over-the-top violence; he reads the news with mounting disgust, but not with fear. Fear has always been for other people, not for him.

The flashing lights of the police cars parked outside his house when he comes racing around the corner are almost enough to stop his heart.

They have the driveway blocked, so he slams his car into the first open spot he sees, front wheel humping up onto the curb. He doesn’t care. He’s already out of the car, running for the front door, and when a police officer steps into his way, he howls, “I’m her father!” with such passionate despair that the man steps to the side, not arguing, not asking him to calm down.

It’s bad. He knew it was bad when that boy with the New England accent hung up on him (he’ll be tracking that boy down, oh yes he will, first to thank him and then to punch him so hard he cracks a tooth, because that boy knew, he knew, and he didn’t call until it was already too late). He knew it was bad when he called home and Heather didn’t know where Dodger was, only that she’d left for school early after kissing her mother goodbye, which wasn’t something Dodger did anymore, was something she hadn’t done since the eighth grade. Every single signpost on the road that started when his phone began to ring has told him it was bad, and he’s believed them all.

He just didn’t believe it was this bad. Not the kind of bad that has three police officers in his yard; not the kind of bad that has a conspicuous open spot where the ambulance must have been. How quickly did they remove her? Did they remove her, or did they remove a body, something empty and abandoned and useless? She’s an organ donor. Has been since she was old enough to make choices about bodily autonomy. They’d want to get her to the hospital as fast as possible, whether she’s alive or dead.

The thought of his daughter’s heart beating in someone else’s chest makes him stagger, catching himself against the doorframe while the officers look sympathetically on. Not one of them moves to help him. It’s bad. It’s so, so bad.

Heather has waited for him, rather than allowing herself to be bundled into the ambulance. She’s in the kitchen, her hands empty, a coffee mug smashed on the floor. She’s looking at it in dull puzzlement, like she can’t understand how it got there; gravity should have been suspended, says her face, all the essential functions of the universe should have been turned off the second this began. The universe should have warned her. Somehow, somehow, the universe should have warned her.

There’s another officer here. He holds the twin of Heather’s broken mug, looking at the silent, shaking woman with the wary poise of a man who has seen grief do a lot of strange things. He’ll be here as long as he needs to be, but he doesn’t want to.

“Heather.” Peter stops shy of the mess on the kitchen floor. His wife continues staring at it, seemingly deaf to the sound of his voice. “Heather,” he says again, louder.

She looks up. She had time to put her makeup on this morning before he called, screaming for her to go out back and find their daughter; her mascara has run down her cheeks in great muddy lines. She hasn’t even tried to wipe them away. What would be the point?

“Is she alive?”

Still the blank stare, the mascara-streaked cheeks, the silence.

“Is Dodger alive?”

“Yes,” her voice is a cracked whisper. It seems to surprise her; she shies back, away from it. Then she repeats herself: “Yes.”

“Oh thank God.” Peter is not a religious man, but he has to fight the urge to kneel. Instead, he turns to the officer, and asks, “Where did they take my little girl?”

“Mr. Cheswich?” asks the officer. Peter nods, and the officer puts his coffee mug down on the counter, safely away from the edge. “Your daughter sustained severe injuries, apparently self-inflicted. Has she been depressed lately? Has she said anything about fights at school or experienced any unexpected setbacks?”

“Not a word.” But she had said something, hadn’t she? To that boy who’d called the office. The one who might have saved her life.

The boy who’d never given his name.

“How sure are you that her injuries were self-inflicted?” he asks slowly, feeling his way through that minefield of a sentence like it might explode and kill them all.

The officer’s expression sharpens. “Why do you ask?”

Haltingly, Peter explains the call he received, the one from the boy with the New England accent. The boy he’d never heard of before, but who seemed to know Dodger was in trouble, who was so sure of her location, even after he’d told Patty that he was at the school.

When he finishes, the officer’s face is unreadable.