Abby’s training route takes her past a playground, and this is where she first spots the child—alone, kicking at a pile of sludge. He kicks with focus. She pauses to tie her shoelace, and as she does, the boy startles and stops kicking, as if remembering something. 

He begins toward the crosswalk in a rushed, bulky way. 

“Wait!” she straightens. “It’s a red light. One sec.” 

“Umm,” he halts, twisting a dirty yellow beanie between his hands, “Umm, okay, I can wait. I wait till the light turns green.” 

He has one of those unnaturally scientific little boy voices, urgent and high-pitched. Surely, though, he is no more than six or seven—much too young, Abby thinks, to be out alone. The park isn’t known to be particularly safe, if any are. The snow has begun to thaw across the rangy soccer fields, exposing cigarette butts and a winter’s worth of glittering trash. The playground itself seems lifted from another time: towering slides, flaking paint, metal jutted at war-like angles. And it has grown late—already, the remaining snow beneath the baseball fields glows as if radioactive. 

“Does your mom know you’re out here?”

“Mm, yeah. I forgot my hat. I forgot it on the slide, and Marsha said I had to run back and get it, Marsha’s my grandma; she lets me call her that. Her house is up there.” 

It would be good, Abby thinks, to take a break and walk. She is three weeks ahead in her training—already far ahead of the co-worker she’d signed up with. Training for a marathon wasn’t hard the way people had made it out to be. On her first long runs, she’d reached the goal mileage—seven, nine, eleven miles—and felt a streak of disappointment pass through her, and so she’d continued, just a mile or two longer, until suddenly she was weeks ahead. She’d posted screenshots of those first few runs to Facebook, her route dotted with a yellow heart. 

The posts had been greeted enthusiastically, praise seeping in from unexpected corners—old coworkers, former classmates, the fathers of ex-boyfriends—before the reactions began to pale and disappear. Progress, it turned out, was not interesting to other people. 

“Well, guess what? I’m going that way, too,” she tells the child. How about we walk together for a bit?”

“Oooh,” the boy warbles, pausing to wipe snot. “No, no thank you. Thanks, but no thanks.” 

*

Abby’s mother, an overworked ICU nurse, had never seemed particularly concerned about stranger danger. Once, in the fourth grade, Abby had tried to stage an intervention. She’d seen the headlines about the kidnapping trials, the children pulled off their purple big wheels; the department stores, the trunks, the duct tape. She was not stupid. 

“Mama,” she’d flipped the television off, turning backward on the couch to face the kitchen, balancing on a pile of pillows. “There was a presentation today, and they said everyone should have a family safe word. Kelsey has one—Yellow Bird. Nobody can pick her up unless they know to say it. If they don’t, she’ll alert a teacher.”

Her mother had let out a soft hoot. She was packing lunches for the next day, stripping green grapes from their stems and sliding them into plastic baggies. She wasn’t wearing pants. After showers, she never did—it was a ritual, to shower and shave and lotion, the house overwhelmed with steam. She’d emerge tropical and piney in a long National Parks t-shirt, legs gleaming, a violet triangle of underwear peeking out. 

“Yellow Bird!” Her mother had said. “Come on. Isn’t the point that other people can’t know the safe word? Sounds like Kelsey has a big mouth.” In Abby’s memory, the conversation had taken place near midnight. She’d violated her bedtime. Eight-thirty. 

*

As they walk toward the stop sign, Abby feels clumsy, neither gentle nor firm nor smart enough to talk to a child. She tries to recall the way her friends speak to their children—whether they ask questions or let the child direct. Even when she herself was young, she’d felt somewhat of a need to monitor the ways other children spoke to each other; how they bargained and teased and moved past moments of shame. 

“I’m Dee, by the way,” she says. “What’s your name?” 

“Okay,” he says, bleakly. “Okay, yeah, I’m Austin, and I left my yellow hat and I already lost my stripey one last week, it wasn’t my fault, it was a field trip and I told my teacher we had to go back and she said no we are running behind and Marsha said if I couldn’t keep track of my hats then maybe she couldn’t keep track of my screen time privileges.”

She lets out a laugh—easy, a relief. “Marsha sounds tough.” 

“Hmmm,” he considers. “No, actually, I think Marsha is nice, actually, she gives me extra screen time privileges sometimes so she can nap, I think Marsha is maybe ninety. But I think she is probably awake now. Yeah, she’s awake and not ninety. Maybe fifty years old or sixty years old.” 

 Abby turns to look behind them. “Where did you say your house was?” They’d passed the stop sign, the houses beyond the stop sign. “I thought it was back there?” 

“I got mixed up,” the child says. “It looked like my house.” 

“It’s okay. I’ll make sure you get home. Even if it’s far.”

“It’s not far. It’s down there. It’s by—hey, I think that’s Marsha.” He jumps up and down, waving his beanie at a figure approaching from a few blocks away. “Hey! Over here, it’s me, Austin!”

Abby waves to the grandmother, too, to let her know that things are OK. 

*

The point Abby’s mother had impressed upon her daughter, if not in exact words then in tone, was that it was unlikely anybody would be particularly interested in kidnapping her. Adult figures came and went: two Kenny’s and an Uncle Tim and a man, a Gulf War vet who swore to Abby that he wasn’t pulling her leg, his real name actually was Buddy, his parents had been big meanies but now he kind of liked it, it was a nice name, it made people trust him. 

The boyfriends were mostly blonde; mostly, they bore buttery tans and worked in lawn care or real estate. Mostly, they seemed to forget that she was there. If she spoke up suddenly from the couch, lowering her book to ask a question, or came padding into the kitchen at night to fetch a glass of water, they startled. Sometimes, remembering her existence, they’d invent special greetings: punching her playfully in the arm or designing complicated high-five routines that were difficult to remember. Head, fist bump, elbow, fist bump; twirl the other way. 

Once, as she stepped out of a carpool van, she saw one of the Kennys waiting for her in the driveway. Her mother was with him—her mother, beautiful, flushed, barefoot, hopping from one foot to the next. The pavement was hot but her mother had smiled and Abby had brightened in return—though she had not yet worked out her new smile, though she had been practicing one ever since she’d walked into a classroom and heard one teacher say to another: have you noticed how Abby smiles, it’s a bit forced, right, makes me feel weird (the teacher had then turned around and seen her and hastened, oh, no, not you, I’m talking about a different Abby—but Abby was not stupid.)

 “Oh, baby!” Her mother said, “Just wait!” Kenny had wheeled the bike carefully out from behind his jeep like something from a game show: a silver, shimmering animal. “Just like you’ve always wanted. Remember?” 

And this much was true, that Abby had longed for a bike, had fantasized about the specific voyages she might set out to take on one. She had imagined slipping a granola bar into her slim tan purse, a purse just big enough for a library book and a snack. Snap the silver clasp. Glide off. This bike, though, was much too small, made for a child much younger. When she sat down on it, her knees jutted awkwardly up to her chest, making it difficult to pedal. 

“Thank you very much, Kenny,” she said, looking up into his honeyed beam.

Buddy had been different from the other boyfriends: quiet, gentle, almost childish. He could make pizza from scratch and called her Dee without ever explaining why, and was genuinely silly, a word she had never before thought to apply to an adult. Some evenings as she watched television, he would slip beside her on the couch and if she was watching a courtroom drama or adult sitcom, he’d say “This is boring, let’s get to the good stuff,” and she’d say “No thanks, Buddy,” and he’d wait a moment and then find a way to wrest the remote from her, anyways, and flip until he got to the good stuff: Looney Tunes, or some other cartoon where the animals looked sly and psychedelic and chased each other in circles. 

Cartoons made Buddy crack up. At first, usually, she’d be too annoyed by the intrusion to join. She’d stare ahead, arms folded. But Buddy’s laugh was hard to ignore. It was like a bird molting: oversized and wheezing and vulnerable. Infectious. In the light of the screen, a dilating pool of color, it felt inevitable, preordained, eventually, to relax. Crack up. 

*

They were nearing the grandmother now, Abby and the boy. At first, the figure appeared to be a woman aging well, but then, as they drew closer, she seemed to be a very young woman, maybe even a teenager, wearing the all-black uniform of a restaurant server. She had orange hair and was wearing a dog collar. From a block away, she shot the pair a look of spiky rage. 

“That doesn’t seem like Marsha,” Abby says doubtfully. 

“Oh, hmmm, I thought it was Marsha, I guess I was wrong, it looked like Marsha from far away, she has orange hair too, she kind of looks like that, but she’s more fatter. Like, fat. But not so so fat.” 

Was this the point where she is supposed to call the police, report a lost child? She takes out her phone and pauses, falling behind him for a moment as he makes meticulous little steps down the sidewalk. He seems so competent, this child, but something isn’t right. More than anything, she does not want to scare him. 

“Austin?” she says, “Sweetheart?”

*

A dozen times, Abby has tried to reference the story of the family safe word to therapists, though it never comes out right—how the word had lived on a paper folded inside her jacket, all during the fourth grade. How she’d finally convinced her mother to memorize it. And how, one day, when it was Buddy’s turn to pick her up, his truck idling in the after-school line, she’d called out, “What’s the word?” She had been in a good mood—this was the memory. Had run out, hopped up and down; asked the question in a silly sing-song voice. 

And Buddy, with the windows rolled down, had made a motion to suggest that he couldn’t remember. But then a relieved light had spread across his face. “Step right in, Molly Ringwald!” 

The part she could never get quite right, in retelling the story, was the meltdown that followed—how for whatever reason, she’d crumpled onto the sidewalk and wept, no, Buddy, the family safe word is SEVENTEEN CANDLES, not sixteen, that’s the whole point, you don’t get it. How later that night, Buddy, a large man, had also wept. The muffled sound came from beyond her bedroom wall: Don’t you see, Buddy said, don’t you see that I can’t even remember a goddamn child’s passcode anymore? Dee needs a real man to make her feel safe, I’m not with it right now; I can’t be. 

And Abby, with her ear pressed to the wall, had heard her mother pleading in a voice she’d never heard: Baby no, you are a real man, the realest, she’s an anxious kid, I’ve read articles, it’s not natural, I’ll take her to a shrink, I’ll read more articles, you’ve got to stay, we need you. Can’t you see I don’t give a shit about a fucking safe word? 

There’d been a long pause: holding her breath, Abby had thought that perhaps the moment had passed, that her mother and Buddy had slipped quietly into bed. But then another sound followed, a scrape like metal shirt hangers being gathered together, and something low—fuck, no, no, I’m really sorry, but I need to leave, baby. I mean it this time. 

*

It has grown colder, the air chapped and sugary. They round the corner of a cul-de-sac, Abby and the boy, and as they do, he breaks off into a sprint—fast, then faster. 

She calls after him and starts to follow, to run, but it happens so fast, he is barrelling across the asphalt with purpose, dropping the beanie along the way and nearly face-planting in the ditch of a small brick house. She can see the shape of an older woman through a storm door and the door opening, and an old woman pulling the child into her arms. Even from far away, his words tumble out clearly: “It’s okay, Grandma, I don’t know the lady, she was following me, I did the right thing, I kept talking, it wasn’t my fault.”

The door closes. 

The thing to do, Abby knows, is to keep on with her run. Nine miles in, four more to go. But she is tired. Her knees are wobbly, her thumbs cold. With rare weakness, she thinks about calling an Uber. She stands in the middle of the cul-de-sac watching the house, trying to formulate an explanation, waiting for something to happen, anything, really, but that door has been slammed, the curtains drawn, and now it actually is dark, the tall suburban firs crowding the moon, a lamp silhouetted in the home window, letting off a kind of tangerine glow, without which it would be hard to tell that, just a moment ago, a house had even been there. She waits and then, after a while, begins walking. Only a few miles left.