AT 2:00 A.M., MY EIGHT-YEAR-OLD GRANDDAUGHTER CALLED ME SOBBING BECAUSE HER PARENTS HAD TAKEN HER BROTHER TO DISNEY WORLD AND LEFT HER BEHIND LIKE AN AFTERTHOUGHT, SO I GOT ON THE FIRST FLIGHT TO GEORGIA, WALKED INTO A HOUSE WHERE ELEVEN FAMILY PHOTOS MADE IT PAINFULLY CLEAR SHE’D NEVER REALLY BEEN TREATED AS ONE OF THEM, AND STARTED DOCUMENTING EVERYTHING—THE EMPTY SCHOOL PLAY SEAT, THE CHEAP CAKE BIRTHDAY, THE BLUE SWEATER IN THE MATCHING CHRISTMAS PORTRAIT—THEN I WAITED UNTIL HER PARENTS CAME HOME SUNBURNED, SMILING, AND STILL WEARING THEIR MICKEY EARS… BEFORE HANDING THEM THE ONE ENVELOPE THAT MADE MY SON DROP TO THE FLOOR IN HIS OWN HALLWAY…
I had been asleep for maybe forty minutes when my phone lit up the nightstand like a flare. Not the light, exactly.
The violence of it.
At sixty-three, after thirty-one years as a family attorney, my body still reacts to unexpected phone calls the way some soldiers react to fireworks. I do not trust ringing in the dark. Nothing good arrives through a telephone at two in the morning. Births don’t call at two in the morning. Promotions don’t call at two in the morning. Reconciliations, in my experience, barely call at all.
Loss calls at two in the morning.
Fear calls at two in the morning.
Children who have run out of adults call at two in the morning.
I rolled over, already reaching for my glasses before my brain had finished waking, and the name on the screen stopped my heart for exactly one beat.
Skyla.
Not Anthony, my son.
Not Natalie, his wife.
Not the police, not a hospital, not one of the automated systems modern life uses to inform you that disaster has been professionally documented.
My granddaughter.
Eight years old.
Calling me from Marietta, Georgia, while I was in Decatur, six hours away by car and just under an hour away by plane if the airline gods were feeling merciful.
I answered before the second ring.
“Skyla, baby? What’s wrong?”
The sound she made was not exactly crying.
It was the sound that comes after crying. The dry-breathed, fraying sound children make when they have exhausted the wet part and are now operating on some deeper system of hurt. A hitching inhale. A little mechanical shudder between words.
“Grandpa,” she said.
Just that.
She said my name like it was the last handle left in a room filling with water.
I was sitting up by then, glasses on, lamp on, already doing the sort of calculations I no longer admit to doing because retirement is supposed to have softened me and, if anything, it has only made me more honest about which parts of me are permanent.
Distance.
Time.
Routes.
Legal exposure.
What if the child is alone?
What if the child is not alone but unsafe?
What do I know?
What don’t I know?
What can be established?
What must be assumed for the next three minutes to keep panic from becoming useless?
“I’m here,” I said. “I’m right here. Just breathe for me. Tell me what happened.”
“They left.”
Two words.
Two tiny words that took a second to arrange themselves into meaning.
“Who left, sweetheart?”
“Daddy and Mama and Alex.”
Her little voice cracked on Alex, and that was the first sign that what I was hearing was not ordinary.
Children don’t emphasize the wrong sibling by accident.
I stood up.
“When did they leave?”
“Yesterday. No—” she sniffed, trying to think through grief. “Yesterday morning. For Disney.”
I stopped moving.
I have heard admissions of fraud in nicer tones than she used.
“What?”
“They went to Disney World,” she said, softer now, like saying it out loud made it more humiliating. “They said I had school Monday and it didn’t make sense to take me. But Alex doesn’t have school either. And… and…” Her breath snagged. “Why didn’t they take me too?”
Here is what I need you to understand about me before I go any further.
I am not a theatrical man.
I have spent three decades in courtrooms where the person who loses control first usually loses more than the argument. I once cross-examined a county judge’s brother in a packed hearing room without raising my voice above conversational level. I have told mothers that they were about to lose custody and fathers that the law had run out of patience for them and children that no, not today, not yet, not until the paperwork cleared, no matter how much I wanted to hand them back to whoever they loved.
I know how to keep my face still when my insides are on fire.
But when my granddaughter asked me why her parents had taken her brother to Disney World and left her behind, I had to press my fist against my mouth to keep from saying every single thing I was thinking.
