My fifteen-year-old son left for school on a Thursday and never came home, and the officer I called said, “Boys his age run off and come back when they’re hungry.” Nine days later his history teacher phoned about a notebook he’d handed in, and what he’d written across the cover is why I’m still shaking.
Carson had never broken a curfew in his life.
He texted me from the bathroom at sleepovers just to say he was alive.
That first night Nate and I drove every road out of Oskaloosa, yelling his name.
We knocked on the doors of boys I’d driven to soccer for six years. We stapled his picture to every pole on Main Street.
His phone went straight to voicemail.
The school camera had him going out the side doors at 3:10 with everybody else, earbuds in. Then nothing.
Nobody here even locks a screen door.
Kids don’t vanish from a town like ours, and half the county came out with flashlights to prove it.
NINE days. Not one word.
Then on Tuesday, a little after ten, my phone lit up with a number I didn’t know.
It was Evelyn Petrakis, his American history teacher.
“I don’t even know how to say this,” she said. “They turn in journals every Friday, into a crate on my desk, and his was in there.”
I asked her how. I asked again, louder.
She talked right over me.
“I have no idea how it got in the stack, Dianna. But he wrote something across the front. ‘Mom, this is everything I couldn’t say out loud.'”
I drove there so hard my palms kept slipping off the wheel.
She was waiting at the side door, a little rubber pickle hanging off her lanyard.
She held it out with both hands. A black-and-white composition notebook, his name on the spine.
I didn’t make it to a chair.
I opened it standing between two desks.
My legs went soft.
The first page was all capitals, pressed so hard the pen had come through:
“MOM, HIDE THIS FROM DAD UNTIL THE LAST PAGE.” ⬇️
Between two desks
I turned the page because he told me to, and because my hands needed something to do.
Page two was his regular writing. Small, slanted left, the way it’s been since second grade when the teacher gave up on fixing it.
I’m not hurt. Nobody grabbed me. I walked to the car on my own. Read it in order, Mom. Please don’t skip to the end.
I read that four times.
He was alive when he wrote it. He wasn’t in a ditch on Highway 63, which is where I’d put him every night for nine nights, around two in the morning, when Nate was finally asleep.
Evelyn stood by the door with her arms crossed over that lanyard. She didn’t come closer.
“I didn’t open it,” she said. “I read the cover and I called you. That’s all.”
“When did you get it?”
“It was in Friday’s crate. I grade them Monday nights, but I had my granddaughter last night, so I got to them this morning.” She shook her head. “I should have done them Monday.”
I flipped back to the front of the notebook. The first pages were real homework. September eighth, the Mormon Trail crossing Iowa, two pages, a check mark in green pen at the bottom. September fifteenth, something about the Des Moines River and steamboats. Every entry had her green check.
Then a gap. Then a page dated the Wednesday before he left, and the handwriting got bigger and harder, like he was writing on his knee.
Read it in order.
I hadn’t asked myself yet who was driving that car.
The PO box
You have to understand Nate.
Nate is the man who coached the under-twelves for four seasons with a whistle he bought at Fleet Farm and never once blew. He’s the man who shovels the widow’s walk two doors down before he does ours. When the plow took out our mailbox in the winter of 2019, he said we’d just get a box at the post office, and he’d swing by on his way home from the shop.
“You’ve got enough on your plate, Di,” he said. “I’ll do the bills.”
So he did the bills. For six years. The PO box key lived on his ring, next to the truck key and a bottle opener shaped like a fish. I never once went to that box. I didn’t know the number.
That’s how we were. He handled the paper. I handled Carson.
And Carson was easy to handle. He saved his mowing money in a coffee can over the dryer. He told me when he got a B. He was the kind of kid who texted me alive from Jessie Cobb’s bathroom at one in the morning because he knew I’d be lying there doing math about it.
The night he didn’t come home, Nate got in from work around seven. Later than usual. He said there was a pump down at the shop.
I’d already called the police. I’d called at six-fifteen, when Carson wasn’t home and wasn’t answering, and Officer Dunne came out at eight and stood in our kitchen with his thumbs in his belt and told me about boys and hunger.
Nate shook his hand. Nate said, “Thank you for coming out, we know you’re busy.”
Then we drove. That part was real, I thought. Nate drove and I hung out the window. When we pulled up at the Elizondos’, Arturo came to the door in his socks and said Tremaine was asleep. There was a light on upstairs. I remember thinking Tremaine must be scared for his friend.
The next morning the Ottumwa TV station called about putting Carson’s picture on the six o’clock news.
Nate took the phone out of my hand.
“He’ll be humiliated when he comes back,” he said. “Let’s keep it local. Let’s give him till Monday.”
And every Sunday after that, Nate went out searching on his own. South, toward the lake roads. He took the blue cooler. He said a man gets thirsty.
Standing in that classroom, I could hear Evelyn’s wall clock.
She said, “Should I call your husband?”
“No,” I said.
Prairie Ridge Savings
The Wednesday entry didn’t start with Mom. It started like he was talking to himself.
Dad asked me to find the jumper cables in the garage. They weren’t where he said. They were in the tax box under the workbench, and so were the letters.
He’d listed them. Of course he had. That’s Carson.
A home equity line from Prairie Ridge Savings, opened March of last year, against our house. Sixty-one thousand, four hundred dollars drawn. Payments late since June. A letter from August with a word in bold that he’d copied out exactly: DEFAULT.
The college account my mother left him. Twenty-two thousand. Closed.
And on the next page, taped in with Scotch tape that had gone a little yellow already, a photocopy. He must have run it through the printer in Nate’s office while we were downstairs watching TV.
It was the signature page of the loan.
Nathan J. Szabo. And under it, Dianna M. Szabo.
That was my name, in somebody’s careful idea of my handwriting. The D was wrong. I make my D like a bowl tipped over. This one was a nice round D, the kind you’d make if you’d seen mine a thousand times on birthday cards and never really looked.
I sat down then. Finally. In a desk built for a fifteen-year-old, with my knees up against the bottom of it.
Under the photocopy he’d written: Dad came in while I was reading these.
My phone buzzed on the desk. Nate.
Where are you. Dunne wants to stop by at noon. Says he has an update.
Evelyn saw my face. She walked over and turned the lock on the classroom door, the little thumb latch, and she pulled the blinds on the hallway window halfway down.
“You don’t have to tell me anything,” she said. “But I’m not letting anybody in here until you’re done.”
I texted Nate back that I was at the pharmacy. First lie I’d told him in nineteen years. My thumbs were shaking so bad it took three tries to spell pharmacy.
Then I did the thing I’d been told not to do. I tried to cheat.
I flipped to the back of the notebook to find the last page.
It was gone. Not torn out. Folded. The last sheet had been folded in half and stapled to itself along the open edge, six staples, like a kid sealing an envelope with the only tool in the house.
Read it in order, Mom.
And between the Wednesday entry and that stapled page there were nine more pages, and the first one started with the name of a boy I’d driven to soccer for six years.
Tremaine
I’m giving this to Tremaine, it said. He won’t read it. He’ll turn it in when I tell him to.
I asked Evelyn if she knew who’d put things in the crate Friday.
She did better than know. She pulled a clipboard off the hook behind her desk. Every Friday the kids initial a sheet when they drop their journal, because two years ago somebody claimed she’d lost his and she was sick of that conversation.
Friday’s sheet had twenty-six sets of initials. Halfway down, T.E. twice. Same pen. Same line squeezed in.
“Tremaine Elizondo,” she said. “He sits by the window. He hasn’t said a word in my class since Carson’s been gone. I thought he was just sad.”
I left her the classroom and took the notebook.
The Elizondos live on the north side, by the water tower. Arturo answered again. This time he had his boots on, like he’d been waiting nine days to have to go somewhere.
“Dianna,” he said. “He’s not feeling good.”
“His light was on,” I said. “The first night. His light was on and you told me he was asleep.”
Arturo looked at the notebook in my hand. He looked at it a long time.
“He told me Thursday night his friend was okay,” he said. “He swore it. He said Carson made him promise not to tell anybody for a week, and Carson was safe, and if I made him break it he’d never forgive me. I’ve got four kids, Dianna. I thought, a week. I thought it was a girl, or a fight. I thought Nate knew.”
“Why would Nate know?”
He didn’t answer that. He turned around and yelled up the stairs.
Tremaine came down in a hoodie with the hood up. He’s a head taller than Carson now. He used to throw up in my back seat before every away game. He stood on the bottom stair with one hand on the rail.
“I didn’t read it,” he said. “I swear to God, Mrs. Szabo.”
“I know you didn’t.”
“He gave it to me at the side doors. At 3:10. He said if he wasn’t back by the second Friday, put it in Petrakis’s crate, and she’d find it Monday and call you, and it’d be okay by then, it’d just be, like, backup. He said his dad was handling it.”
“Handling what?”
“I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me.” Tremaine pulled the strings on his hood tight. “I walked out with him. He went across the bus lane to the lot by the tennis courts, where nobody parks. He got in.”
“Got in what, honey.”
He looked at his father. Arturo nodded at him.
“Your husband’s truck, Mrs. Szabo. The gray Silverado. He waved at me.”
Lot 14
I read the rest sitting in my car in the Elizondos’ driveway, with the engine running because I couldn’t remember how to turn it off.
The nine pages were Wednesday night. All of it was Wednesday night. Nate catching him in the garage. Nate sitting down on the cooler and putting his face in his hands. Nate saying he’d been trying to win it back, a little at a time, on his phone, the way some guys do, and it had gotten away from him. Nate saying the word fix eleven times. Carson counted.
He says if you find out before he fixes it you’ll leave and the house is gone and it’ll be my fault for snooping. I told him I’m telling you Friday. He said give him one week. He said I can stay at Grandpa Peter’s trailer at Red Rock and he’ll tell you I’m on the church trip to Kansas City so you don’t worry.
I don’t want to lie to you to your face, Mom. I can’t. So I’ll go. That way I’m not lying. I’m just not there.
He says he’ll tell you where I am. He PROMISED.
Then I got to the staples.
I pulled them with my car key. Six of them. One went into my thumb.
The last page was short.
If Dad told you where I am, throw this away and don’t be mad at Tremaine.
If he didn’t tell you, he lied to one of us.
Lot 14. Key under the propane tank. I have the coffee can money.
Red Rock is forty minutes from our house if you drive it like a person. I don’t know how long it took me.
Grandpa Peter’s trailer is the green one at the end, past the bait shop that’s closed for the season. Peter’s been dead six years. Nate keeps the lot rent paid every spring and we never go. There’s a picnic table out front with a rusted-out grill chained to it.
Nate’s truck had been there. You could see the tracks in the gravel, the wide tires, coming and going.
Carson was on the step in his green hoodie, eating peanut butter off a spoon out of the jar.
He saw my car and stood up so fast he dropped the spoon in the gravel.
I don’t remember getting out. I remember having him. He smelled like lake water and that cheap bar soap from the dollar store. He’s taller than me since summer, and he bent down so his face was in my neck, the way he did when he was four.
Then he pulled back. And he looked at me like he was scared of me.
“You came,” he said. “Dad said you didn’t want to see me yet.”
“What?”
“Every Sunday. He brought groceries in the blue cooler. He said you were really mad, and you needed time, and you’d come when you were ready.” His voice cracked on ready. “I asked him to bring my phone so I could call you. He said you asked him not to.”
There was a grocery receipt in the trash can by the step. Hy-Vee, Knoxville. Sunday. Two loaves of bread, a jar of peanut butter, a twelve-pack of the orange Gatorade only Carson drinks.
I’d been in the passenger seat every one of those nights, yelling his name out the window.
I held the receipt up.
“Carson,” I said. “There were flyers on every pole on Main Street.”
The kitchen table
I didn’t take him home first.
I called Officer Dunne from the gravel at Lot 14 and told him we’d found Carson, and he was fine, and I needed him at my house at four, and I needed him to come in the back door and stand in the laundry room until I said his name. He started to say something about boys and hunger. I said, “Four o’clock,” and hung up.
Carson sat in the car while I went in. I’d asked him to. He didn’t argue. He’d done enough for this family.
Nate was at the kitchen table with the laptop. He closed it when I came in.
“Pharmacy, huh?” he said. “Dunne never showed. I called him twice.”
I put the notebook on the table. Cover side up. Mom, this is everything I couldn’t say out loud.
He looked at it. He didn’t touch it.
“Where’d you get that?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Di. Where did you get that.” He stood up. “Okay. Okay, listen to me. Before you start. Whatever he wrote, he’s fifteen, he’s seeing it from one side. He found some paperwork, he got scared, he ran, and I didn’t want to—I was going to bring him home. I was always going to bring him home. You think I’d let anything happen to my own kid? He had food. He had a roof. That trailer’s warmer than this house.”
“You told him I didn’t want to see him.”
“Because he’d have called you! He’d have called you crying and you’d have gotten it out of him in two minutes, and then where are we? Huh? Then we’re on the street. You think I wanted this? I had it handled. I had it handled, Di.”
He picked up the laptop and turned it around so I could see. Like it was going to help him.
A closing statement. Our address. A buyer out of Pella. Signing Friday, nine a.m., at a title office in Knoxville.
“That’s the fix,” he said. “Friday it closes, the line gets paid off, there’s even something left over. Then I bring him home, we tell everybody he was at his uncle’s, we rent for a while, nobody has to know any of it. He just had to sit tight one more week. You just had to not find out one more week. Three more days. Three goddamn days, Dianna.”
“Whose name is on the seller line?”
He didn’t answer.
He didn’t have to. I could see it from where I stood. Nathan J. Szabo. Dianna M. Szabo. The round D.
“You were going to sell the house,” I said. “With my name.”
“It’s our house.” He came around the table. “And you’ve never once in nineteen years asked to see a bill, so don’t stand in my kitchen like—”
“Officer Dunne,” I said.
The laundry room door opened.
Dunne stepped out with his hat in his hand. He’d been there since five till. He’d heard the whole thing, the trailer and the cooler and the three days and the D.
Nate sat back down. All the way down, the way you sit when your legs pick it for you.
“Ma’am, I’m going to need that notebook,” Dunne said.
That was the part I hadn’t planned for. Carson’s notebook. His September entries and the Mormon Trail and the green check marks and I don’t want to lie to you to your face. In a plastic bag. In a file. Read by a county prosecutor and maybe by a judge and maybe out loud.
I slid it across the table to him.
Nate watched it go. Then he looked out the window at my car, where Carson was sitting in the passenger seat with his hood down, looking back at him.
“He’s never going to talk to me again,” Nate said. “You know that? You did that.”
Side doors, 3:10
It’s November now.
The bank has the house through the end of the year, and then it doesn’t. We’re in two rooms over the hardware store on A Avenue until we figure out the rest. The coffee can is on top of the fridge there. Carson put the money back in it, all of it, and told me it was for the security deposit, and I let him.
Nate’s lawyer says it’ll plead out. Mine says the forged line comes off me and the debt mostly doesn’t. I’m forty-two. I’ll be paying for Nate’s phone until I’m fifty.
Some of the staples are still in the poles on Main Street. Little rusty squares where the corners of his face used to be. I see them every time I go to the post office, where I have my own box now, and my own key.
I drove him to school this morning. A Thursday.
At 3:10 I was parked in the bus lane, facing the side doors, like I am every day.
He came out with everybody else, earbuds in. Tremaine was next to him. Evelyn Petrakis stood in the doorway behind them with that pickle on her lanyard, and she lifted her hand to me, and I lifted mine back.
Carson took one earbud out and got in the car.
“You don’t have to wait at the door every single day,” he said.
“I know,” I said, and put it in drive.
If this one sat with you, pass it to somebody who’s raising a kid who’d rather disappear than lie to them.
For more family drama and betrayals, read about a son-in-law making a shocking claim to a $5.48 million fortune and a son who put a $46,500 supper-club bill on his parent’s account. There’s also the unsettling story of an ex’s mother arriving at dawn with a power of attorney.
