My name is Ellen Parker. I was fifty-one years old that January.
Lucas was my only child. My husband, Tom, and I tried for years to have kids. Doctors. Tests. Treatments. Nothing worked. We’d almost given up when I found out I was pregnant at thirty-three.
Tom cried in the doctor’s office. He was a big man, a contractor, with hands like shovels and a beard he never trimmed properly. I’d never seen him cry before. He sat in that little plastic chair and put his face in his hands and sobbed.
“We did it, Ellie,” he kept saying. “We did it.”
Lucas was born in March. Seven pounds, eight ounces. He had a full head of dark hair and the loudest cry in the maternity ward. Tom held him for the first time and said, “Hey, little bug. I’m your dad.” And from then on, that’s what we called him. Bug.
Tom died when Lucas was twelve.
A heart attack. On a job site. He was carrying a load of drywall up a ladder, and he just stopped. His foreman said he looked surprised. Then he fell. He was gone before the ambulance got there.
After that, it was just Lucas and me.
We were close. Closer than most mothers and sons, I think. We had to be. There was nobody else. My parents were gone. Tom’s family lived in Oregon and we never saw them. It was just the two of us in our little gray house on Maple Street, with the porch swing Tom built and the oak tree in the front yard that dropped acorns all over the driveway every fall.
We ate dinner together every night. We watched terrible movies together on Friday nights and argued about the endings. He taught me how to use my phone. I taught him how to do laundry. Badly. He still turned everything pink at least once a month.
When he got his driver’s license at sixteen, I sat in the passenger seat of his beat-up blue Honda gripping the door handle while he drove around the empty high school parking lot.
“Mom, you can let go of the handle.”
“I’m not holding the handle.”
“Your knuckles are white.”
“It’s cold in here.”
“It’s August.”
He was a good kid. I need you to understand that. Whatever came after, he was a good kid. He was funny and kind and he held doors for old ladies at the grocery store. He played football. He was a wide receiver, and he was fast. He wanted to study engineering, like his dad always wanted to. He’d gotten into the state university. He was supposed to start in the fall.
He had his whole life ahead of him.
That Tuesday night, Lucas didn’t come home.
At first, I wasn’t worried. He’d texted me at lunch, like he usually did. *Mr. Hendricks didn’t kill me. Pizza for dinner?* I’d texted back, *Sure. Be home by 6.*
At six-thirty, I called him. It went to voicemail.
At seven, I called again. Voicemail.
At eight, I called his best friend, Owen. Owen said he hadn’t seen Lucas since fifth period. He thought Lucas had gone home early. He’d said he had a headache.
At nine, I drove to the high school and circled the empty parking lot. His car wasn’t there. I drove to the park where he sometimes went to shoot hoops. To the diner on Route 9 where the football team hung out. To Owen’s house. To his ex-girlfriend’s house.
Nothing.
At eleven o’clock, I called the police.
They told me he was eighteen. An adult. That most of the time, when an eighteen-year-old doesn’t come home, it’s because he doesn’t want to. That he was probably at a friend’s house. A girlfriend’s house. A party. That I should wait until morning.
I didn’t sleep. 