Chapter 38
SCOTT: WELCOME TO THE BLACK PARADE
Before Jake was taken, I used to start my days in the ocean.
Surfing was my meditation. I’d paddle out before sunrise, catch a few waves, rinse off at the beach showers, pull on my postman blues, and clock in like a full-grown adult.
Sometimes I brought the boys. Keith, Jake, Kyle, and occasionally even Quinn, if Michelle allowed.
They’d trail behind me like ducklings, boards too big, wetsuits half-zipped, all tan limbs and big attitudes. Best part of my day.
After Jake went missing, the ocean might as well have been on another planet. And after he came home…, I didn’t dare. I wasn’t leaving Michelle alone with the weight of keeping our son alive, not even for an hour. Especially not for something as selfish as peace.
But this morning, I went. Just once. Just enough to remember how to breathe on my own.
I showed up to work with my hair still damp, sand clinging to my calves, and salt crusted into my eyebrows.
I hadn’t even realized how obvious it was until I stepped inside and the normally buzzing workroom came to a halt.
Dana stopped sorting mail and squinted up at me. “Is that… sand?”
I shrugged. “Don’t make a big deal out of it.”
“Oh, it’s a big deal,” she said. “We thought you were done with joy.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I filed an appeal.”
That’s when Ned came in, something fleshy and hairy swinging between the clamps of his long wrench. “Got it!” he announced, then his eyes dropped straight to my legs. “You surfed.”
“How is my surfing a bigger deal than that corpse you’re carrying?”
“Not bigger, but equal billing,” Carlos said. “We just figured, you know, that Hotmail had gone permanently offline.”
I smiled. I’d missed this. The easy joking. The normalcy. My coworkers had come in clutch during the lowest point in my life—pooling vacation days to keep me home as long as they could, setting up fundraisers and an online page for donations. It bought us some time. But it didn’t buy us forever.
So, a few weeks back, I’d clocked in again.
I sorted mail, walked my route, smiled at people who didn’t know what to say, and pretended everything was fine.
Even my closest friends here, like Carlos, Ned, and Dana, had kept their distance, maybe waiting for a sign that I was back online.
Apparently, that sign was the sand on my legs.
“Eyes up, people,” I said, spreading my arms. “This is a government facility. Besides, the real star here is that ball of flesh dangling between… Ned’s wrench.”
The room cracked open with laughter.
I leaned in for a closer look. “Please tell me that’s not what I think it is.”
“I have no idea what you think it is, McKallister, but it’s a mouse,” Ned said. “Pulled it out of my engine.”
“Oh, that’s actually exactly what I thought it was,” I said, giving him and Mickey a wide berth. “Why are you giving it a parade?”
“I’m not. I’m documenting my victory. You’re not going to help me dispose of it?”
“Nope.” I laughed. “Absolutely not. That’s between you and whatever god you pray to.”
Getting back into a routine was a relief. I’d rather work my fingers to the bone than sit still with what we’d been through. What we were still going through. You don’t tramp through hell and come out unscathed. We all carried scars, but Jake… yeah. He’d come home in pieces.
The knee was the obvious one. It had been shattered with a blunt object Jake refused to name. Surgeons rebuilt it with metal and screws, but the pain never left him alone. It lived right under his skin as a constant reminder, and he moved like every step was a flashback to his basement prison.
But it wasn’t just the physical damage we were dealing with.
It was how the abuse had trained him to expect pain before kindness.
He flinched when someone lifted a hand too fast, and even a simple question—You want water?
—could knock him flat. The nightmares rattled our walls and dragged the whole house awake with them, yet none of that was the worst part.
Those weren’t the things that kept me up at night.
What did was knowing Jake wanted the pain to stop more than he wanted to live.
Our house went into lockdown, and precautions became routine.
One by one, ordinary things disappeared until the place felt stripped down to the bones.
The knives went first, then the medication, then the belts, cords, and sheets.
We removed the locks from the bathroom doors and left our own doors open at night, listening for anything that felt wrong.
We tried to talk to him. God, did we try!
We started gently, then spoke more directly, and finally became desperately careful, weighing every word as if it might be the one that tipped him over—or pulled him back.
But Jake didn’t threaten or rage or ask to be saved.
He just shut down when the pain spiked and when the memories closed in too fast, like letting go took less effort than staying.
Once you saw that in your child, you stopped living normally.
You adjusted, you adapted, and you learned how to live on watch.
“Everything good?” Carlos asked as we walked toward our trucks.
“Great,” I said automatically, but it came out too fast. Too cheerful.
He raised an eyebrow.
I nodded while shaking my head. “Great.”
Carlos shrugged. “Okay, then. As long as it’s great.”
I turned into our driveway and slammed on the brakes to avoid running over a reporter.
Not a metaphor; an actual person, standing where my trash cans usually did.
Jake’s kidnapping, his escape, and the brutal way it ended had turned him into one of the biggest news stories in the world.
And no matter how fiercely Michelle and I tried to shield him, Jake had a price on his head now.
One photo meant a paycheck, and that alone was worth the risk of getting run over in my driveway.
In the weeks after the kidnapping, cameras parked on our lawn, vans idled at the curb, and reporters rotated in shifts on the off chance Jake might step outside.
They wanted footage. Statements. Tears. They wanted the miracle boy and the monster story that came with him.
But they’d have to wait in line, because Jake wasn’t talking.
Not to us, not to the psychologist, and certainly not to the sensationalists camped out on our front lawn.
“Scott,” one of them called out while my tires were still rolling. “Can you give us an update on Jake? How long do you plan to keep him out of school?”
I killed the engine and sat there for a second, my hands still on the wheel, reminding myself that I was a grown man and vehicular manslaughter would really complicate my week. I opened the car door and stepped out.
“You need to stay on the sidewalk,” I said. “This is private property.”
They nodded. All of them. Like that meant something.
Every step I took, they stepped with me, lifting their cameras. There were only five of them today. A light crowd. We were approaching three months since Jake had returned from the hospital, and the numbers had thinned considerably, but they never hit zero.
“Aren’t you worried Jake will fall behind academically?”
Honestly, I was more concerned about him surviving the night than getting straight A’s. Not that I was going to tell them that.
I pointed away from my house. “I said the sidewalk.”
No one moved.
“Has the school expressed concern about his absence?”
I studied them for a bit, having discovered a few things about the media through my daily contact. The questions they asked were meant to provoke, to get you to drop your guard and maybe reveal something you hadn’t meant to. Today’s prompt: bad parenting.
Today’s response: shower thoughts. “To smithereens has to be the worst way to be blown up, don’t you think?”
They blinked.
“Do they ever actually find all the smithereens? Or do some of them just stay lost?”
They traded confused looks, then immediately refocused. A camera whirred.
“Can we ask Jake how he feels about being confined to the house?”
My lips pressed tight. “He’s not available for comment. And you’re still on my property.”
I went inside and locked the door, only to find Keith standing there waiting.
“Smithereens? Really?” he said. “What happened to not engaging with them?”
“You can’t engage,” I said. “There’s no rule that says I can’t mess with them.”
I did a quick sweep of the house. “How did it go today?”
Keith scratched the back of his neck. “Uh… you know. No one died.”
“I’ll take it,” I said, clapping a hand on his shoulder.
Keith had come back once Jake did. Whatever demons he’d been wrestling with stayed put after that, replaced by something steadier.
He became a calming presence in Jake’s life and one of the few who could pull him out of himself.
In the hospital, Keith had been the one to break through Jake’s near-catatonic fog.
Maybe that was the moment he realized he needed to get his shit together.
And for the most part, he had. Yes, I still occasionally caught him smoking out back in the shed, but at least it wasn’t in far-off places with shithead acquaintances.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“Watching TV.”
“Mom too?”
He shrugged. “Haven’t seen her.”
A quick turn around the corner revealed two-thirds of my family, right where Keith said they’d be, watching TV.
“iCarly” was one of those special shows that united all ages of the McKallister kids.
Grace and Quinn, sitting on the floor with their backs against the couch, were technically too young for the content, but after the age-inappropriate months they’d just lived through—who cared?