Torn

God help me, what I fear most is that Noah will make himself the center of attention. Which is what he tends to do when he’s unhappy or under stress. He tries to relieve the tension by doing something silly. Which would be exactly the wrong thing to do around a violent, insane individual.

Please, Noah, don’t make a joke. Don’t hang erasers on your ears, or scratch under your arms like a monkey. For once in your life blend into the background. Be invisible. Your mother is begging you.

That’s just about when the smoke starts coming out from under the doors. At first just a whiff, barely there. But smoke, definitely. Was anybody else seeing it? Are my exhausted eyes playing tricks?

Beside me, Helen mutters, “Oh, no,” and then covers her mouth with her hand, her eyes bright with fear.

“Oh my god, there’s a fire!” someone shrieks. “He’s lit the school on fire!”

The crowd begins to keen. Even Helen, my rock, is crying. And me, I’m running through the barricade, spinning away from outstretched hands, with a single purpose in mind. I’m going to smash open an exit door with my own body and get inside.

As it happens, Helen’s nephew Tommy and his fellow state troopers are way ahead of me. They know what smoke means, too. Before I get anywhere near an exit door a couple of big guys smash through with a battering ram and a moment later about a dozen tactical officers run into the smoke wearing headgear and full-face masks.

Then I’m down, tackled and held by the ankles; all I can do is watch as great billows of black smoke pour from the opening. Behind me the whole crowd is screaming and shouting, but it sounds like background noise because all of my attention is focused on the exit door. On wanting Noah to come racing out of the smoke.

There are a few popping noises. Gunshots. Just a few. Maybe they got the guy and it’s over. Or maybe it wasn’t a gunshot. Maybe something exploded in the fire.

They breach another pair of doors and firefighters race into the smoke dragging hoses. Shouting orders, directing the rescue efforts—Over here! Pressure up! Full maskSCBAs! Bring in the air caddys!

The smoking doorways are thick with emergency responders. All of them diving into the dark, no hesitation. Doing all that can be done, that’s obvious even to a desperate, overwrought mom like me.

Please, God, please. Let Noah be safe. Let all of them be safe.

An eternity passes and then suddenly, miraculously, children begin to pour out of the building. They come through the smoke like little football players ripping apart a dark, billowing banner, eager for a game. Or eager to find their mothers, their fathers.

Child after child emerges from the smoke.

Whoever has me by the ankles finally relents and I’m up, staggering to the gym with all the other parents—there’s no holding us back now—and child after child is swept up into loving arms. Most of the kids are crying and some of them are coughing, but the smoke, for all its ropy thickness, doesn’t seem to be all that bad. Worse on the eyes than the throat. And it doesn’t smell of fire, which is strange.

I’m calling out for Noah. At the top of my lungs, I don’t doubt. But I might as well be shouting into a raging hurricane because my voice can’t rise above the din. Noah! Noah! Noah!

Watching as the kids, by some amazing instinct, seem to gravitate like little iron filings to the magnet of their mothers’ arms. Like all the others, I have my arms out, waiting for them to be filled with my little boy.

I wait and wait and wait and still he does not come. The only people still coming out of the gym are firefighters and cops. Have I somehow missed him? Is he back there in the parking lot, absorbed into the joyous crowd?

“My son!” I scream at a startled firefighter. “Where is my son?”

He rips off his mask, tells me the gym is clear. “We got them all,” he assures me. “There isn’t any fire, just a smoke device of some kind. Not even toxic,” he adds. “So he’s got to be out here somewhere. Come on, let’s find him, you and me. It’ll be okay. I promise.”

A young, earnest fireman with a farm-boy face, anxious to help and pumped because the rescue went off like clockwork. All that training paid off. He seems so assured, so certain that all the children were rescued, that I let him steer me away from the exit doors, heading back to the crowd.

We’re thirty yards or so from the gym when it explodes in a ball of fire, blasting me into darkness.

Part II

Mad Mom

1. Six Weeks Later

The bank teller thinks I’m nuts. It’s there in her eyes. Which means she’s heard about me. The crazy mom from Humble, the one whose son got blown up in the school. The one who won’t accept reality, who keeps handing out pictures to strangers. The one folks will cross the street to avoid, if at all possible.

“How would you like this, Mrs. Corbin?”

“A bank check would be fine,” I tell her.

She doesn’t want to make eye contact. As if looking me in the eye might somehow be dangerous. As if crazy is catching. “Who should I make it out to?” she asks warily.

“Make it out to ‘cash.’”

“Cash? That, uh, that means anyone can endorse it.”

“I know what it means.”

She’s troubled by the transaction and goes off to confer with her supervisor. Who glances over at me and shrugs. I’m no lip reader, but it’s pretty obvious what she says to the nervous teller: It’s her money.

Two minutes later I’m out of there, check in my purse. Which leaves me plenty of time for the twenty-three-mile drive back home. Plenty of time for me to think about what I’m going to say to the man after giving him the check.

Wondering how much time ten thousand dollars will buy me.

He’s expected, having called not ten minutes ago, looking for directions. But still the doorbell makes me jump. Everything makes me jump these days—cars backfiring, thunderclaps, loud whistles, whatever.

A glance in the peephole confirms my visitor’s identity. Randall Shane, retired Special Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, now working as a civilian consultant, if you can get him. Type missing child hopeless case into Google and up pops Mr. Shane. Legendary in law enforcement circles, supposedly. Gets results when no one else can. A blurry head shot on a Web site gave me a vague idea of what he looks like, but nothing has prepared me for the man on my front porch pressing the bell.

He’s huge. Lean but large.

When I crack open the door he introduces himself and then says, “You must be Haley Corbin. If I’ve got the right place.”

“You’ve got the right place…. Come in.”

He ducks his head as he comes through the doorway. The farmhouse ceilings are low and he doesn’t clear the old fir beams by all that much.

“Good thing you’ve got a crew cut,” I tell him. “Another inch you’d be bumping your head.”

Startled, he looks up and touches a big hand to a beam. “Nah,” he says gently, “plenty of room. You’ve got seven feet at least. That leaves me five or six inches. All the room in the world.”

“It might be better if you sit down,” I suggest, indicating a pumpkin-pine leaf table in the kitchen. “Coffee?”

“Coffee would be great.”

I get busy with the coffeemaker. “Was it a long drive?”

“Not so bad,” he says, carefully settling onto a spindle-back chair as if he’s afraid it might collapse under him.

“Must have been six hours, if you came up through Binghamton.”

“Seven,” he says, touching a hand to a neatly trimmed Vandyke that’s delicately streaked with gray. “I stopped for lunch. More like a late breakfast, actually. They have a nice diner there, in Binghamton. Danny’s Diner, on Main Street. It’s an old Sterling.”

“Excuse me?”