Heartbreaking, cleanly-written, unsentimental flash. This one stayed with me.
They never knew who took him, this ordinary fourteen-year-old kid made iconic by the simple fact of his vanishing.
His mother went on the local news, blinking under the TV lights, to plead for his return. During that first week, she haunted his room, savoring even the rank stench of his sneakers, his gym socks, his sweaty T-shirts.
He had disappeared from the stretch of Route 21 that ran from Nick's Burgers to Flora Road. He'd left the burger place, where his friend Keith worked, around nine at night. He never made it home. His mother picked over these facts, searching for some previously undiscovered clue. She kept calling Keith even after the police had finished with him, questioning him about every detail, begging him to remember more.
That stretch of Route 21, bordered by woods, had few streetlights. After the police had combed the woods, their dogs sniffing fruitlessly for the rotting meat of a corpse, they concluded that a car must have picked him up along Route 21. Over and over, his mother mentally traced the route he should have taken: down Route 21, turn onto Flora Road. Down, turn. Not even a mile's walk, nothing tricky about it. She closed her eyes and traced the route, awaiting a vision. She didn't believe that flesh so intimately related to her could be so utterly lost, sending her not even the faintest signal.
She saw him everywhere, especially in crowds: the side of his face, his slouch, his walk, the way he used to dip his head and peer up at her through his hair. But always, when she got closer, or when she looked twice (that double-take, that snap of her neck), it was someone else, not him.
On TV, thankful parents of a girl kidnapped on the other side of the country smiled through their tears and celebrated their daughter's return. "God heard us; God answered our prayers," they said. His mother threw a can of furniture spray at the screen, screaming, "Do you think I don't pray?" The smiles of those parents seared her in the same way as Keith's ignorance, the impotence of the police, the loud silence of the telephone. All of it seemed to hold a smugness, as if everything conspired to keep the secret of where her son had gone, the day he'd become invisible.
Jennifer R. Hubbard's writing has appeared in AMC Outdoors, Willow Review, the North American Review, and other publications. Viking will publish her first book, a young-adult novel.