The Last Child

He didn’t know what to say, could not explain how it felt to know that it hurt her to look at him. He shrugged. “It’s okay.”

He felt her look for the right words. She failed in that, too. “You missed the bus,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does to the school.”

“I make perfect grades. Nobody cares if I’m there or not.”

“Are you still seeing the school counselor?”

He studied her with an unforgiving eye. “Not for six months now.”

“Oh.”

Joh

Joh

“You keep looking up the road. You do it all the time, like you expect to see him walking over the hilltop.” Joh

“You don’t know that.”

“I’m just trying-”

“You don’t know that!”

Joh

She started to stand. Her lips softened and her face slipped into a look of pained understanding, the kind of expression grown-ups gave to kids who didn’t quite get how the world worked. But Joh

“You should have never said the things you said.”

“Joh

“It wasn’t his fault that she got taken. You should have never told him that.” She stepped toward him. Joh

She stopped midstride and ice snapped in her voice. The sympathetic twist fell from her lips. “It was his fault,” she said. “His fault and nobody else’s. Now she’s gone, and I’ve got nothing.”

Joh

She straightened and started to turn. “You always take his side,” she said, and then was gone, into the house, away from the world and her last child’s place in it.

Joh

CHAPTER TWO

The Vicodin bottle sat open on the bathroom counter; the door to his mother’s room was closed. Joh

The suitcase under his bed showed cracks in the leather and a black tarnish on the hinges. One of the leather straps had broken off, but Joh

He dragged the case out, got it up on the bed, and unfastened the last buckle. The top swung up clumsily and settled against the wall. On the inside curve of the lid were a dozen photographs, a collage. Most showed his sister, but two were of them together, looking very much like twins and sharing the same smile. He touched one of the pictures briefly, then looked at the other photos, those of his father. Spencer Merrimon was a big man with square teeth and an easy smile, a builder, with rough hands, quiet confidence, and a moral certainty that had always made Joh

Right up to the end, when his father walked away.

Now Joh

But that’s the way it was. What had been concrete one day proved sand the next; strength was illusion; faith meant shit. So what? So his once-bright world had devolved to cold, wet fog. That was life, the new order. Joh

He studied the pictures of his father: one behind the wheel of a pickup, sunglasses on and smiling; one standing lightly at the peak of a roof, tool belt angled low on one side. He looked strong: the jaw, the shoulders, the heavy whiskers. Joh

He was strong.

He said it to himself: I will be strong.

The rest was harder to admit, so he did not. He ignored the small voice in the back of his mind, the child’s voice. He clenched his jaw and touched the pictures one last time; then he closed his eyes, and when he opened them, the emotion was gone.

He was not lonesome.

Inside the case were all of the things Alyssa would miss the most, the things she’d want when she came home. He began lifting them out: her diary, unread; two stuffed animals she’d had forever; three photo albums; her school yearbooks; favorite CDs; a small chest of notes she’d passed in school and collected like treasure.

More than once, his mother had asked about the things in the case, but Joh

On the bottom of the case was a green file folder. Inside the folder was a thin stack of maps and an eight-by-ten photo of Alyssa. Joh