The Hiding Place

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What do you remember from that day, Janet?

Janet remembered the heat. The way it shimmered in waves in the distance, making the edges of the trees, the cars in the parking lot blurry and indistinct. Wherever she stepped, the grass crackled or the dirt puffed. The heat rose from the ground and scorched her feet through the soles of her cheap plastic shoes.

She was seven years old and in charge of her baby brother for the first time ever.

Janet watched Justin. She thought of him as a dumb four-year-old, a silly kid with a bowl of blond hair and a goofy smile. He sat with the other kids in the sandbox, scooping piles of sand into mounds with his hands, then smoothing them over. Back and forth like that. Sand up, sand down. Dumb and pointless. Something little kids would do. She watched him. Carefully.

But no, that wasn’t right. That wasn’t right at all…

Justin wasn’t silly. And he didn’t smile all the time. He was a quiet kid. A loner. He sat in the sandbox alone that day. And he didn’t smile much. Not much at all. No one in her family smiled much, not when she looked back on her childhood…or even her life now.

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