By 6:42, Eli had already lost his dinosaur.
It was not a loss in Mara’s sense of the word. Nothing had disappeared. The palm-sized green stegosaurus was somewhere in the apartment, and Eli knew exactly where. He had simply decided his mother must find it before the toast popped up.
“No questions,” he said, placing a sheet on the table. “Follow the map.”
The sheet came from a prescription pad Dan had forgotten after a hospital shift. Eli had crossed out the heading in black marker. Beneath it he had drawn their Jamaica Plain apartment with a child’s geometric conviction: every room the same size, kitchen touching bathroom, corridor making three right-angle turns where it made only one. A red X occupied an unnamed rectangle. Beside it he had added three teeth and an arrow.
Mara set down her cup, still too hot to drink. Her T-shirt sleeve exposed the small white star-shaped mark inside her right wrist.
“What are the three teeth?”
“No questions.”
“Then it’s a bad map.”
“It’s a very good map.”
The toaster snapped. Eli jumped despite himself, then immediately resumed his role as the architect of a covert operation. He was eight, with a seriousness that appeared only when inventing rules. His hair obeyed nothing. A brown lock stuck to his forehead with maple syrup.
Mara looked at the X, the three teeth, the rectangle. She could have gone through the rooms in order. That was what he asked. But she knew his hiding places: behind the shower curtain when he wanted the game to last, in the laundry basket when he wanted a quick discovery, beneath the couch when he decided adults were too slow to deserve better.
She stood, bent down in the living room, and slipped two fingers beneath the couch.
Plastic scraped against the floor.
“Found it.”
End of excerpt. Discover the other stories in this universe.