Then came a Tuesday in March. My landline screamed at two in the morning.
I drove the forty minutes back to Willow Creek with a cold dread coiling in my gut. When I pushed through the front door, the house was suffocatingly silent. Rita was anchored to the kitchen table, staring blankly at a mug of chamomile tea that had stopped steaming an hour ago. Gerald stood paralyzed by the refrigerator, his arms crossed, his gaze drilled into a scuff mark on the linoleum. From the floor above, I could hear the muffled, rhythmic sound of Vanessa sobbing into her mattress.
Rita didn’t lift her eyes when I pulled out a chair. Her hand, trembling slightly, slid a crumpled piece of thermal paper across the polished wood.
An ultrasound printout.
Four months. My sixteen-year-old sister had been carrying a secret for a third of a year, entirely alone. Tyler, I would later learn, had already peeled his Mustang out of her life the moment the plastic wand showed two pink lines.
But my mother’s first words weren’t about Vanessa’s terror. They weren’t about the baby’s health or the boy who had vanished.
“The neighbors cannot know,” Rita whispered, her voice brittle as dry leaves.
I remember the oppressive ticking of the wall clock. It was exactly eleven minutes past two. The neighbors. Rita laid out her battle plan with the cold precision of a military tactician. Adoption was the logical route, she mused, but an agency required legal filings, home visits, a paper trail. A paper trail meant whispers at the Methodist church. Keeping the infant was out of the question.
