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Date Posted: Wednesday, October 11, 09:23:17pm
Author: BetsyG
Subject: One _Here You Come Again
In reply to: BetsyG 's message, "Need some help--anyone feel like reading?" on Wednesday, October 11, 04:39:48pm

This has a few formatting problems. I appreciate this.


Here You Come Again



“George wasn’t hiding in the bushes. Mommy, I looked twice, really hard. Now I have a headache from staring,” my daughter complained. She widened her already huge brown eyes for emphasis. I might normally have laughed, but I couldn’t today. I couldn’t fake a smile, even for her sake. George was gone.
My ten-year-old son had been missing maybe five minutes, but it felt like eternity. We’d turned the area upside down in that short time. I shoved my rain dampened hair behind my ears with shaky fingers, uncovering a petrified moth in the matted strands. My heart gave a sickening bump. I hate moths. Moths gross me out on a good day. I’d been able to hold it together for a while, for Gemma’s sake, but I was on the verge of panic. The panting, insensible kind.
“You think someone kidnapped him, Mom?” Gemma asked, sounding inspired about the idea of her twin brother being abducted. “Are you going to call the police?”
Unable to speak, having had my wildest fears echoed by a child, my eyes scanned the area, searching for George; I saw a blur of strangers and dogs walking by, multi-hued umbrellas bobbing against drizzle washed sky, sea and rock, the meandering stone path of the seawall,the waves scouring the beach. Through rain-spattered glasses I could make out the peanut and popcorn vendor at my left side and the Hobbit-like hillock of grass covering the washrooms
where we’d searched and searched again on my upper right. No sign of a gangly little boy carrying a neon-green dragon umbrella, an item meant for a much younger child. Gemma had
tried to talk him out of buying the silly thing in Chinatown that morning, knowing he was going to get laughed at, telling him so. “Sometimes I hate you, you big baby," she’d said. Gemma and I had words over it. She got in the last ones: It’s not my fault he’s a weirdo.
I willed him to appear, to dawdle up the walk in that way he has, looking for the key to the universe, but more likely useless crap that would lodge in the washing machine, but of course he didn’t come.
“George!” I called, whirling full circle, cupping my hands to my mouth. “Georgie, come here! George!” My voice broke on the last cry.
He didn’t come. I wiped my face on my woolen coat sleeve, the smell of wet lanolin choking me. I looked down at my daughter and then over at the teenaged girl I’d trusted to look after George for a mere five minutes while Gemma and I used the bathroom. George was getting far to big to use the ladies room. Ladies looked at him funny when I took him in. He was tall for his age, almost five feet.
I tried to compose my face, to paralyze that part of me needing to scream and flap around like a deranged mother robin after some crow had swept in and stolen her baby. “Maybe he’s up on that hill at the popcorn stand,” I said, my voice unfamiliar to my own ears. “Maybe he’s
climbed down the seawall to the beach.” I hoped that wasn’t so. “You know how he is.” God,yes. I knew. She knew. We both knew this was unthinkable.
“Are you going to call the police now, Mom?” my daughter asked, tugging my jacket.
I called for Georgie again, my voice hoarse, the sea wind swallowing the sound. Some people stared at me in what I assumed was sympathy, not yet offering to help. Oh, God. I felt helpless, lame. I felt no more than my daughter’s age. I looked down at her, trying to breathe.
What would I say? What would I tell them?
I pulled my cell phone out of my purse. It was tangled up with soggy tissues and one of George’s recent finds, a broken orange shoelace tied onto a smelly dead starfish. I looked down at the mess, suddenly blanking on how to turn on the damned phone. Green button or red? Green
should be go. By rights green’s go, but on a cell it wasn’t, was it?
Panicked, I jabbed at buttons--like in those dreams where phones don’t work properly and I’m desperate to get word home that I’m late--then pulled Gem by the arm, heading in the direction of Amber and the skater boys who’d homed in on her like lambs to the slaughter. My feet were lead, my heart as heavy. “Amber!” I called. “Why aren’t you looking for George?”
Amber, the stepdaughter of the man I’ve lately gotten serious about, after ten years of saying I’d never love any man ever again, gave me a sullen look through kohl-rimmed blue eyes.I hadn’t really expected this girl--with a stripper’s name and wearing what Paris Hilton would wear if she’d gone Goth punk--to be associated with the ever-meticulous Paul. I’d been all too willing to give her the benefit of the doubt last week when she’d arrived here from Paris with her mother, Paul’s ex-wife. I discovered I hated her. I hated every living, breathing molecule of her.
“Amber, he’s gone. You were supposed to watch him.”
“I did,” she argued.
“Um, no. Sorry. You didn’t watch him, but why can’t you concentrate on finding him? Get them to help, if they’re man enough.”
The boys looked at one another and blushed. She glared at me again, harder. “He’s around here. He’s probably hiding. He’s such a little dork.”
He could have been swept out to sea by this time. If someone had taken him, they could be deep in the park. Over the bridge into North Vancouver, anywhere. “He’s not here. Help me look, dammit.” I wanted to scream something horrible at her but the phone I was holding lit up and hissed, distracting me. I almost dropped it, did the hot potato game with it for a moment. I’d seen a cell phone hiss and light up during a thunderstorm power surge once. It had been plugged into the charger, though. There was no thunder this afternoon. The sky was misty and the wind
was strong but it wasn’t storm season. I could see the sun breaking through the clouds beyond the bright yellow sulphur piles on the other side of the sound.
The phone gave a shrill shriek, a deafening sound, not my usual vintage eighties tune. I almost dropped it again. I looked at the call display. NO DATA, it said. Then three little question marks showed up, like soldiers in a row. I opened it and held it to my ear. “Hello. Yes?” The
sound of static deafened me. I yanked it away from my ear. Then I thought I heard a voice, faint in the distance. “Hullo,” the voice said. It was low, decidedly masculine, the slightest trace of a foreign accent. “Emily, can you hear me?”
“Yes?” My heart was now whammer-jammering in my chest, impeding my breathing so badly, I thought I’d have to sit down. “Wh-who is this?”
“The boy’s on the statue.”
He was what? On a statue? How the hell did he get there? On a statue? “Statue? What statue?”
“The little beauty on the rocks. She has a mirror on her head. Maybe it’s a tray.”
A tray? “A what?” There was a diver statue. A girl with flippers and a diving mask pushed up onto her head. Almost a famous as The Little Mermaid in Copenhagen. She was
poised on a rocky outcrop twenty feet from the shore. It was impossible. George was out there? That was maybe a half a mile away from where I was at the moment. “What do you mean, you can see my boy on the statue?”
“He’s out there. He’s safe for now.”
“Who is this?” I screamed. Gem looked up at me, shocked. Curious. “Who the hell is this? Why did you take George? Why?” I swallowed hard on the bile that rose up. I knew in that moment the men in the white coats were coming around the corner.
“Don’t be a wretched idiot. I didn’t take George. He followed a mermaid.”
“What?”
“Listen, they can be rather sneaky bitches–”
“Who the hell is this?”
“Listen to me. You never listen to me, Emily. You’re too bloody headstrong--”
The line buzzed and went dead. I did what the voice said to do. I didn’t think after that,just started running, dragging Gemma by the hand. Her shoes slapped and slid on the paving stones and her eyes bulged with awe.
Couldn’t be, I thought. Could never be.

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