What Burns Away by Melissa Falcon Field

Author:Melissa Falcon Field
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc
Published: 2014-10-30T22:09:17+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

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When he got home, I told Miles that I didn’t feel well, that I couldn’t go to the party.

“You’re not one to miss a party,” he said. He put his hand to my forehead. “You’re feeling pretty bad?”

I pressed my head against his palm, wishing Miles could somehow enchant me, the way I felt driving beside Dean, and I hated myself for all of it.

“Sorry,” I said. “I was looking forward to meeting everyone.”

Miles moved his hand to my cheek, and I let my head fall against his chest.

He said, “You don’t feel warm.”

“Stomach,” I whispered.

But in reality, I was drained. And as much as I wanted to stop myself, I couldn’t keep my mind from turning over Dean’s invitation, the pull of the ocean, the familiar things there. And despite the immediacy of my refusal, it hadn’t sounded convincing, even to me, when on the drive back toward the YWCA, Dean had smiled at the silence between us as if he were recalling some fond memory.

While I was linking the cuffs of Miles’s sleeves and straightening out his bow tie, that silence was all I could think about.

Beside us, Jonah steered a tiny train across Miles’s dress shoe and over the hardwood floor of the bedroom, the television behind him declaring an Amber Alert for a little girl missing somewhere outside Milwaukee.

Miles and I looked at each other, acknowledging the same parental fear. My husband shook his head gravely, making it a point to touch my shoulder before he turned off the TV and kneeled down next to our boy. “If you go anywhere tonight with Jonah,” he told me, “promise me you’ll be vigilant. You’ve been preoccupied, and I worry about you guys too, you know, about something happening here when I’m gone.”

As he said this, I imagined rummaging through the baby book to choose a photo for media outlets if our son was ever taken from us. It’s the fear I fought throughout my pregnancy—a constant worry that my child might go missing. Maybe it was anxiety grown out of my own youth, when as kids, during the days following my parents’ separation, we spent our few hours with our mother collecting provisions for the school week, always lagging in the dairy section among the milk cartons that created a billboard of missing children.

There, Mom pulled Kara and me into a huddle, saying, “Check and see if you recognize any of them.” We watched her turn all the faces toward the aisle as she retold the story of Gretchen Carlota, the little girl who was stolen from Hartford Hospital during Mom’s shift, shortly after Mom moved in with her boyfriend.

“We were so understaffed and I was so distracted,” she explained again and again, “and one night some sicko went into the little girl’s room and walked her right out the door.” She squeezed us tight. “I’d die without you girls,” she said, yet she had chosen to leave us all the same.

Miles ushered me to bed. “Go up to rest.

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