Girl, 11 by Amy Clarke (grave mercy TXT) 📗

Ms. Turner’s house was only ten blocks away, and every time Elle had been there to pick Natalie up before, the whole two-story had been ablaze with light. The elderly woman lived alone and was afraid of the dark, so she kept all the lights on, no matter which room she was in. When Elle pulled up outside, a stab of foreboding knocked the breath out of her. The house was gray in the fading sun, the shades drawn, as if the place was abandoned. She ran up the path and knocked anyway, but she wasn’t surprised when no one came to the door. The phone rang inside the house when Elle called from her cell, but no one answered. After ten rings, she finally gave up.

She tried to imagine what had happened. Maybe Ms. Turner went out of town and forgot to tell Sash. Then Natalie came for her lesson and called Elle when she realized Ms. Turner wasn’t home, which was why the missed calls and texts started sooner than they should have. Maybe Ms. Turner had taken Natalie someplace special, and the calls were just to let her know about the change of plans. But that didn’t explain Natalie’s frantic where-are-you messages.

Elle growled in frustration and ran back down the icy sidewalk, forgetting to be careful and nearly falling twice on her way to the car. She forced herself to drive toward home at a crawl as her eyes searched the sidewalks for any sign of movement. If Natalie left an hour ago, she should have gotten home way before now, but maybe she was still walking, playing in the snow or something. She liked to climb the large drifts piled up in the gas station parking lot that sat about halfway between Ms. Turner’s house and the Castillos’. Maybe she had stopped there and Elle had just missed her on the drive. Her eyes were so focused out the window as she passed the station, she almost rear-ended a car at the stop sign. She hit the brakes just in time and craned her neck to study the mountains of snow, but Natalie was nowhere to be seen.

“You’re being paranoid,” she said aloud. A long, deep breath did nothing to calm the nerves ricocheting around her body. She remembered the first time she got angry with Natalie. It was about a year ago, and the nine-year-old had been in one of her passion-project modes about homelessness in Minnesota. Without telling anyone, she took the bus to downtown Minneapolis and visited a group of people who camped near the bridge over the Mississippi. Sash had used an app on her phone to track Natalie’s phone’s GPS, and they’d finally found her an hour later. While Sash had been frustrated and concerned, Elle had gone from panicked to irate. She’d screamed at Natalie for the first and only time, and it had taken the girl three weeks to speak to her again.

That was when Elle realized how attached to Natalie she had become—when she started to panic about all the hypothetical scenarios that could play out to take her away. Little things that used to be inconsequential now felt rife with danger. Going to birthday parties. Attending field trips. Walking home.

When Elle was a kid, she and her friends used to roam the neighborhood together, doing stupid things like rollerblading down giant hills and riding their bicycles “no hands.” Growing up, she usually left the house with a couple of the neighbor kids after breakfast in the summer, came back for a quick lunch, and then didn’t return again until the sun went down. She didn’t even remember what they did to pass all that time. Goof around, mostly. Head over to the local park, swing and slide for hours. Climb the jungle gym. Try to be acrobatic on the monkey bars. That was back when playgrounds were a risky adventure, constructed of metal and rubber. Swings were held up by chains that could pinch your fingers, and monkey bars gave you bright red calluses on your palms. Whatever they did, wherever they went, they always knew exactly where those invisible boundary lines were between their neighborhood and Too Far to Hear Mom. Their parents left them alone, and no one cared.

They just couldn’t do that anymore.

It didn’t matter that the danger was no greater now than it was then; the societal pressure was different. People expected you to know where your kids were at all times, to be able to reach them at the push of a button.

Sash gave Natalie a cell phone to use between school and home, and she was always, always supposed to answer when an adult called. Still driving at a crawl, Elle called the number again. No answer.

Her phone lit up and Elle looked at it eagerly. Martín. She answered, but her greeting came out too breathless to be a word.

“Hello, dormilona.”

“Did you pick up Natalie?” Her voice sounded very high.

“Uh, no. I thought you were picking her up.”

“I did.” Elle’s hands were trembling, numb. A sob burst from her lips. “I mean, I tried. I fell asleep, and I was late, Martín. She wasn’t at Ms. Turner’s. No one was. And she’s not answering her phone.”

There was silence on the other end. They had both seen too much to not immediately imagine the worst.

“Where are you?”

Elle wanted the release of crying, but no tears would come. “I’m just about home. I drove back slowly, but she wasn’t walking next to the road. I didn’t see her on the way to Ms. Turner’s either. It’s only ten blocks. Where could she be?”

“All right, mi vida, cálmate.”

“Do not tell me to calm down. You know how much I hate that.”

“Right. Sorry. Just . . . I don’t know.” There was a shuffling sound on Martín’s end, and then he spoke again. “I’ll come home. Have you gone to her house? Maybe Sash got home early or something.”

“She’s not