I kept my phone in my hand after Denise and I stopped talking.
I wasn't ready to put it down.
Every few seconds, I checked Nathan's messages to see whether he had opened the one I had sent.
Nothing changed.
I tried calling him again.
Voicemail.
I waited a moment and tried once more.
The same result.
I wanted to believe he had left his phone somewhere.
That would have been an ordinary explanation.
Sixteen-year-old boys forgot things.
They left chargers behind, misplaced their keys, and ignored calls when they were busy.
I had spent years telling Nathan to answer his phone.
I had also spent years accepting that he sometimes didn't.
But this wasn't one unanswered call.
This was weeks of missing information.
And now both mothers were trying to reach both sons without knowing where either of them was.
I called Denise back when our first conversation ended.
Neither of us had anything new to say, but I needed to hear another adult's voice.
She was trying Cole again.
I could hear her frustration every time the call failed.
"I don't understand," she said.
Neither did I.
I looked at the message from Nathan again.
He had said he was with Cole.
There was no hesitation in the wording.
No complicated story.
No explanation that might have invited questions.
Just a normal message from a son to his mother.
I had read it as proof that everything was fine.
Now it was proof of something else.
He had wanted me to believe he was somewhere he wasn't.
I didn't know why.
That question kept circling in my head.
Why would he lie about something as ordinary as a weekend?
What could he possibly need to hide from me?
I tried to remember whether I had asked him what he and Cole planned to do.
I was sure I had.
I could almost hear myself asking whether he would be home for dinner, or whether I should expect him the following morning.
But I couldn't remember his exact answer.
That was the problem with ordinary routines.
You stopped paying attention to the words because you believed you already knew what they meant.
I had thought Nathan was safe because I knew where he was supposed to be.
I had never considered that knowing the plan was not the same as knowing the truth.
I called some of the boys' friends.
I started with the people whose names I recognized from school and from the occasional conversation at home.
I kept my questions direct.
Had they seen Nathan recently?
Did they know where he had been spending his weekends?
Had he mentioned making different plans?
The answers came back in fragments.
No.
Not really.
I don't know.
Nobody could give me a location.
Nobody could tell me where Nathan was.
I didn't blame them.
Teenagers didn't necessarily know every detail of one another's lives, and I couldn't expect them to understand how frightened I was becoming.
Still, each unanswered question left me with less to hold on to.
I moved from one contact to another.
Some calls went unanswered.
Some people responded but had nothing useful to tell me.
I kept trying because stopping felt too much like accepting that I had no idea what to do.
Denise was doing the same thing.
She was contacting people who might have seen Cole.
She was asking questions about places he usually visited.
She was trying to find something familiar that could lead us toward an answer.
We had raised our boys together, in a way.
We had known one another since the children were little.
We had shared the small responsibilities of watching them grow.
When they were younger, knowing where they were had been easy.
A birthday party had an address.
A school event had a time.
A friend's house had a parent who could answer the phone.
We had built our trust around those simple things.
Now the same trust was making it harder to understand what had happened.
For eight weekends, we had each accepted the other household as the destination.
Neither of us had checked.
Neither of us had asked for confirmation.
We had assumed the boys were where they said they would be because we believed they had no reason to lie.
I remembered how often I had been grateful that Nathan had such a close friend.
There were things I couldn't give him.
I couldn't be another sixteen-year-old boy.
I couldn't understand every joke or every conversation that mattered to him.
But Cole could.
They had been friends since kindergarten, long before either of them had started worrying about becoming adults.
I had watched their friendship survive the ordinary changes of growing up.
That history had reassured me.
I had believed it was a good thing for Nathan to have someone his own age whom he could trust.
I still believed that.
But now I was asking myself what I had missed.
Had Nathan been unhappy?
Had he needed something and decided he couldn't tell me?
Had I made it too easy for him to believe he had to handle whatever was happening on his own?
I couldn't answer any of those questions.
And I hated myself for asking them because I was afraid the answers might be my fault.
There was no evidence of that.
There was also no evidence that it wasn't.
I had to remind myself that a frightened mind could turn every memory into an accusation.
I couldn't solve anything by deciding I had failed him before I knew what had happened.
So I kept calling.
I kept asking.
And I kept checking the screen for his reply.
The message remained delivered but unread.
I began to hate those words.
They were small and ordinary.
They didn't tell me whether Nathan had seen the notification.
They didn't tell me whether his phone was beside him.
They didn't tell me whether he was safe.
They only told me that my message had reached a device.
That was all.
I thought of the last time Nathan had left for one of those weekends.
I could picture him preparing to go.
I remembered how little I had thought about it.
He had told me he was going to Cole's, and I had accepted the answer because it fit the routine we had established.
I hadn't asked Denise whether she would be home.
I hadn't needed to, I thought.
The boys had spent so much time together that their plans seemed almost automatic.
I could not remember whether I had looked at Nathan closely before he left.
That bothered me.
I wanted to remember the expression on his face.
I wanted some small clue that might have told me something was wrong.
Instead, I remembered the same ordinary things I had seen a hundred times before.
A teenager getting ready to leave.
A mother assuming he would return.
A weekend that seemed no different from the ones before it.
I was trying to find a warning in a moment when I hadn't believed there was anything to warn me about.
Denise called again.
She had no news.
I had none either.
We talked about the calls we had made and the people we had contacted.
Neither of us could explain where the boys might be.
We kept returning to the same question, as if saying it differently might make an answer appear.
Where had they gone?
We didn't know.
What had they been doing?
We didn't know that either.
Why had they both lied?
That was the question I couldn't bear to consider for long.
I tried to picture Nathan sitting somewhere with his phone in his hand, reading my message and deciding not to answer.
I couldn't make the image feel real.
My son knew me.
He knew I would worry if he disappeared.
He knew I would call if I couldn't reach him.
He knew that if he needed help, I would want him to come to me.
At least, I had always believed he knew those things.
Maybe he did.
Maybe there was something I didn't understand.
I didn't want to confuse his silence with a decision he had made.
But I couldn't ignore the silence either.
I checked the time.
The day was moving forward, and we were no closer to finding either boy.
I had stopped thinking about the coffee I had left on the counter.
I had stopped thinking about the ordinary things I had planned to do.
All I could think about was the space between what Nathan had told me and what I now knew.
I had trusted him to tell me where he was going.
He had given me an answer.
I had trusted the answer.
And for eight weekends, that had been enough for me.
It wasn't enough anymore.
Click here to continue reading: PART 3: By Midnight, Two Mothers Sat Beneath the Kitchen Light With Their Phones in Front of Them and No Honest Answer to Hold On To
Eight Weekends of Ordinary Goodbyes, Two Mothers Who Trusted Their Sons, and One Phone Call That Changed Everything
Part 2 of 5
