The Whole Point
Ihad been asleep for maybe forty minutes when the phone lit up the nightstand like a flare. At sixty three, rest does not arrive the way it used to. It comes in careful pieces, cautious as a guest who is not sure of the welcome.
For those forty minutes I had managed to sink all the way under, the deep and dreamless kind that only comes after a week that has wrung you down to the last thread. Then the white light cut through the dark of my bedroom in Decatur, Georgia, and my body reacted before my mind did. Thirty one years as a family attorney will train that into you, the fear of late night calls the way a soldier fears a sudden sound in a quiet street.
Nothing good comes after midnight. I reached for my glasses, settled them on my face, and looked at the screen. Skyla.
My granddaughter. I answered before the second ring. “Skyla, baby, what’s wrong?”
For a moment, nothing.
Just breathing. Not even crying. Something worse than crying.
The sound a child makes after she has already cried herself empty, those small, dry, shaking breaths that come when the tears are gone and all that remains is the ache itself. Then, in a voice so thin it seemed to come apart as she used it: “Grandpa.”
I was sitting up before I knew it. Feet on the floor.
Heart pounding hard enough to make my fingertips cold. “I’m here. Right here.
Tell me what happened.”
Another shaky breath. “They left.”
I thought I had heard her wrong. “Who left, sweetheart?”
“Daddy and Mama and Alex.”
I stood up.
The room swayed slightly in the dark as my brain worked to catch up to the words. Anthony. Natalie.
Alex. Her father, her stepmother, and her half brother. I gripped the phone until my knuckles ached.
“Say that again.”
“They went to Disney World.” Her voice cracked on the last word. “They went to Florida.”
I do not remember breathing for several seconds. I remember standing barefoot on the hardwood.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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