Everything I owned, all eighteen years of it, was packed into the backseat of a 2007 Honda Civic, parked at the curb with the dome light off.I had carried it all down in my socks. Three hours and twenty minutes of trips up and down the stairs, stepping over the fourth step from the bottom because it creaked, moving through my own house like a burglar, which in a way I was.
I was stealing the only thing in that house that had ever belonged to me. Me.
On the bare mattress, dead center, I set a single white envelope. No name on the front. They’d know who it was for.
Inside was one sentence. Twelve words I had been writing in my head since I was ten years old.
I looked at that empty room one last time, the room that had waited for me every September like a kennel. Then I walked down the stairs, past the wall of family photos I wasn’t in, out the front door, and I drove east toward the sunrise with my hands steady at ten and two.
To explain that envelope, and why three days later a police sergeant would be telling my mother there was nothing she could do about it, I have to take you back to the summer I was eight. The summer the blue suitcase came out of the hall closet for the first time.Some background so you understand exactly what kind of family this was, because from the outside we looked great. That was the whole point of us.
My dad, Greg, was a project manager for a commercial construction firm. He was the kind of man who was never fully anywhere. Half of him was always inside his laptop and the other half was waiting for the laptop to need him back.
My mom, Diane, worked front office at a real estate brokerage and treated our family like a listing. Fresh flowers when guests came. Coordinated pajamas at Christmas. A Facebook page that ran like a marketing campaign.And then there was Ethan, my little brother, four years younger, the undisputed center of the household solar system.
