Free The Boy by Betty Jane Hegerat

the side yard, she drags pieces of flannel onto the floor. Kicks them across the room, and sinks onto the chair, staring out into the back yard. Nothing out there but the vegetable patch in need of water, and the garage wall.
    Then she notices the protruding handlebar. He’s come back. She wasn’t supposed to let him ride his bike, not after he went missing last night, Jake almost crazy with worry when he finally found him after midnight, pedaling down a dark road two miles away, but coming home, he said.
    â€œDanny!”
    No sound but the raspy song of grasshoppers. The field behind the house is alive with them. When they walk there in the evening, Louise leaning on Jake, the grasshoppers dance off their legs.
    â€œDaniel Peters!”
    Why does she bother? This boy never comes when she calls. He makes a point of waiting, and then appearing from some other direction as though he’s come of his own accord.
    She should go back to the sewing machine, finish hemming the receiving blankets. She should do the lunch dishes, scrub the frying pan scorched from the grilled cheese sandwich she forgot when Jake’s cousin phoned. She wishes she hadn’t told Phyllis about the toxemia. Now she phones twice a day to tell Louise to put her feet up. She should tidy the living room, mix the hamburger for supper. She should pee. These days the urge is constant, she never knows if she really needs to go.
    The bathroom makes her cringe. She keeps asking Jake to give Danny some instruction so it doesn’t look as though he is standing in the doorway and pissing in the general direction of the toilet. She takes a cloth and a can of Comet out of the cupboard and begins to do a clean-up. When she straightens after putting the supplies away, the baby gives a sharp nudge just under her ribcage, and she draws a deep breath. She has her baggy cotton slacks around her knees, is lowering herself cautiously to the toilet, when there is a scrape of sound outside the window, like something, someone pulling themselves up the wall. She is looking at that square of screen when the top of Danny’s head appears, and for maybe ten seconds the two of them stare. Then she grabs a towel and heaves it at the window, hears him scramble away.
    The roaring in her ears is so loud she doesn’t hear the phone until she’s back in the living room. She races to the kitchen, snatches the receiver off the hook and as soon as she hears Jake’s voice, she screams at him. “You come home right now!”
    When she looks out the window, the bike is gone, and God help her, just as she did last night when he disappeared, she hopes that Danny will never come back.
    Whoa! It’s no wonder the baby’s so still. He’s afraid too! And what are those newspaper clippings doing in my story?
    I’m still amazed that I placed them there.
    You mean you don’t want to write the Cook story? I’ve been waiting for weeks for you to either get over it or admit that there might be a book of non-fiction in your future after all.
    Really? I thought you were nagging me to finish your story.
    Of course. But now you’re crossing wires. Are you dragging Daisy into my story, or me into Daisy’s?
    Neither. Shall we rewrite this last chapter?
    No, don’t do that. Daisy deserves the attention. I’m willing to give her some space.

Roads Back
    Every time I stepped back to 1959, I wanted to open the door of that clapboard bungalow in Stettler, walk into the kitchen and imagine the evening of Thursday, June 25, when Bobby Cook came home from prison. I wanted to imagine Daisy, and what she was thinking, and what was said. I began to write those imaginings, and then I was torn with the sense that I was trespassing, arrogantly assuming the right to impose thoughts and words on someone who had lived a real life. I struggled with my fiction-writing sensibilities. It came like breathing to me to create scenes, and assign motive. To