I’d been around eleven years old when my family had abandoned me overnight, and I still had issues over being left behind.
My heart began racing as the memories of that morning from my childhood began to flood my mind.
I didn’t really remember anything remarkable happening in the weeks leading up to their disappearance. It had seemed like a normal summer. Mom and Dad had worked at their jobs, and I’d been enjoying the freedom that came with being out of school.
My mom was a waitress, Dad was a mechanic. They tended to work opposite shifts, so I never had to be at home alone for long, but I’d noticed recently Dad’s shifts had gotten longer and Mom had looked more and more tired every evening when she got home. We never seemed to have a lot of money, but I thought that was how all families were. I assumed everyone went to the food banks when the paychecks weren’t enough, or took the bus instead of driving, or sometimes went to bed hungry.
For all the things we didn’t have, we did have love. I loved working with my dad out in his garage. He would make extra money restoring old cars he found in junkyards. Dad had wanted to be an engineer when he was younger, and Mom had wanted to be a photographer. Then Mom had gotten pregnant, which meant they’d been forced to get married before either of them got to go to college. I knew Dad loved me, but he made it clear he wanted me to do better than him when I grew up.
“You’re a smart boy, Kaine. Smart enough to get scholarships and be an engineer someday. If you work hard and keep your grades up, you’ll never have to worry about putting food on the table,” he’d said as he wiped the grease from his hands and leaned against his workbench. “You won’t have to spend your life slaving away for other people for scraps.”
I didn’t really realize what he was talking about, because we didn’t eat scraps. I had just shrugged and figured it was an adult thing, and maybe I’d understand it, someday.
Maybe my parents had argued a little bit more than usual that week, or been more tired, but nothing really stood out to me about those last few weeks to warn me what was coming. In the years since, I’d gone over my memories with a fine-tooth comb to try and find clues as to what had happened, or where they had gone. Nothing really stood out to me, I just remembered the last night before they disappeared.
We’d watched my favorite movie together on an old VHS tape, ate popcorn, and done all the silly things you did with your family on a Friday night. Right before bedtime, my mom and dad had stopped in my bedroom and Mom said she had something for me. She looked like she had been crying, but when I asked her what was wrong, she had swiped at her eyes and insisted it was just her allergies. Mom’s “allergies” acted up whenever Dad and I fought about something, or I got in trouble at school, or there wasn’t enough money to pay bills.
I looked at my mother dubiously as she sat next to my bed. The only time I could remember them looking this serious was when we had been forced to move out of our old house and find a new place to live overnight.
“Kaine, I... I want you to have my camera,” my mom said.
“What!” I exclaimed, my eyes opening wide. I’d been begging my mom to give me her old camera for years, but the answer had always been no. “Is... is there something wrong? Did I do something?”
I glanced from my mom to my dad. Dad’s face seemed stiff and his eyes were suspiciously bright.
“No! No, honey, nothing’s wrong! I just think...” she paused to clear her throat, then continued. “We… we think you are old enough now to take care of it properly and we want you to have it.”
I was over the moon. I bounced out of bed and started hugging my parents, so excited that I could barely see straight. I’d loved photography since I was a little kid. When I was little, I’d follow my mom around when she had a shoot and I’d make clicking noises to imitate the shutter on her camera.
It took a little while for me to calm back down, but once I did, Mom tucked me into bed, then pulled something out of her pocket.
She placed two small, white pills in my hand and Dad set a cup of water on the bedside table.
“We… we need you to take these, Kaine,” my Mom said.
“What are they?” I asked, looking at the pills suspiciously. They didn’t look like the chewable vitamins I normally took every night.
“It’s... It’s medicine, baby,” I remembered her saying, refusing to look me in the eye. “We love you, Kaine, and want you to have the opportunity to grow up big and strong, so w-we need you to take them.”
I looked to my dad in confusion.
“But I’m not sick?” I argued. I hated taking pills, they always seemed to get stuck in my throat.
“Just take the medicine, for god’s sake, Kaine,” my father had barked from the doorway, before storming off.
My dad was normally a very quiet man. That, more than just about anything was what made that moment memorable to me. My mom and I had stared at each other for a moment without speaking. Her eyes were shiny when she handed me the glass of water, and I’d taken the pills without further argument.
When I woke up the next day, the first thing I remembered noticing was that it was quiet. Eerily quiet. Our house was always loud—Mom playing music in the kitchen, Dad in the garage working on one of the various cars he took in to earn extra cash, the television playing in the living room. Not today.
The second thing I noticed was that I had to pee, badly. I could tell by the light coming in my windows that it was late in the afternoon, and I was really confused. My parents never let me sleep this late, even on a weekend. I rushed to the bathroom only to come to a screeching halt when I opened my bedroom door.
Except for my bedroom, the entire house was empty. By empty, I meanempty. All the furniture was gone, not that we’d had much to begin with.
“Mom?” I called. Not hearing anything, I slowly opened the door to my parent’s bedroom. “Dad?”
My parents’ room was an echoing void. I looked around in shock. The bed my mom had cuddled me in when I had a bad dream was nothing but a dusty outline on the floor.
I wandered through the empty house, my brain full of fuzzy static as I tried to process their absence. How could they have left me?
