Sasha Hathaway, 2

I didn’t expect to hear from Sasha ever again in my entire life. But she showed up knocking at my door the very next night. My mom answered the door and called me down and there was Sasha, her cheeks pale and her eyes outlined in red.

“My Dad is missing,” she said. Her father had looked worse and worse as the days passed and the tests mounted—rings growing dark around his eyes, mouth sagging into a worried frown. Since being laid-off, he mostly sat around the house in plaid shirts and read conspiracy theories on the Internet—so his being gone from the house for hours was strange.

“The phone rang,” Sasha said. “He looked like he was about to crumple into a ball. Then he hung up and left and he hasn’t been back since.” I looked across the street. The car was missing from the driveway. “He ran away. Just like mom.”

I told my mom we were going out for a bit. The streetlights were just coming on as we grabbed our bikes and set off. I tried to question Sasha about the phone call but she knew nothing. We stopped at all his favorite hangouts: the coffehouses and parks of our neighborhood, the pool halls, arcades, and bars around the docks. The sky grew darker with each stop, the air grew colder. No one had seen him.

We walked our bikes along the docks, our breath steaming into the air, the city lights pooling together on the surface of the bay.

“I give up,” she said. “I’ll live as an orphan.”

“You can live with us,” I said. “In the basement.”

“The basement? Yuck.”

“Ok, you can stay in my room.”

“Where will you stay, Andy?”

“The basement.”

“Yuck! No, we can share your room.”

I smiled. We were walking by the place where her dad used to work in better times, when he still managed the stevedores and smoked cigars as he watched the ships come in from far-off foreign ports—riding low in the water because of the weight of exotic goods—and watched them leave again for those same ports almost empty. Back when he came home every night to a wife and a healthy baby girl.

“Is that our car?” said Sasha, pointing into the gloom of an open warehouse. Sticking out of the shadows was the beige nose of the car I’d seen parked in Sasha’s driveway day after day. The engine was running. We checked the car and the dark warehouse and found that they were both empty. We heard a noise coming from the outside. The city lights reflected off the water like spirits, and we could see a man outlined in that dazzling light. He was sitting at the end of the pier, hunched over with his head in his hands.

We crept closer, careful not to let the boards of the pier creak. When we got close enough, we could see it was Mr. Hathaway.

“Sasha,” I whispered, pulling her sleeve. “Let’s go.”

She moved closer, looked she like she was about to speak to him but stopped. The noise we’d heard was clearer now, but still distant. It was sobbing. He wiped his eyes on the back of his hands, looked up at the moon, and told it he was sorry.