CAROLINE — BEFORE

My mother takes the vase from the bookshelf and hurls it, smashing it to bits by my father's bare feet. My father doesn't even step back as the tiny pink and white pieces of ceramic skid past him on the hardwood floor. He just stands there, staring.

"Dylan! Dylan, where are you!" My mother shrieks my brother's name and collapses into the mess she's just made.

I've never heard my mother yell like this. Like the yell has crawled from the base of her feet and up her spine and forced itself out of her mouth. Like it's coming from some other planet. Her screams are especially scary because they're so different from the calm and collected way she behaved just moments ago when the police arrived. They came to say they don't know anything new. That they don't have the slightest idea where Dylan might be.

My mother nodded numbly, but as soon as she shut the door after them, she started to scream.

My father crouches down next to her on the floor, but when he tries to put his arms around her, she shrugs him off and spreads herself flat, kicking the pieces of broken vase out behind her with her feet and sending them spinning wildly out in front of her with her hands.

My grandmother and aunt run in from the kitchen, and as the anxious huddle around my mother grows, I slip down the hallway toward my bedroom, even though I don't understand how my body is managing to move at all.

Since my little brother disappeared four days ago, I'm actually not sure how we've all managed to stay alive much less move. My mother isn't eating, and my father isn't sleeping. I've done a little bit of both, but barely. Now I make it inside my bedroom and shut the door, then crawl into my unmade bed. I'm still dressed in my Violent Femmes T-shirt and butterfly-patterned pajama pants that I've been wearing since Saturday. I've got on the same underpants from that day, too, if you want to know the truth. My parents haven't changed clothes either, or brushed their teeth or combed their hair. It's like we've been frozen in that moment when we first realized Dylan was missing. And I mean scary, terrible missing. Not lost in the woods missing, which is bad enough. But taken missing. Kidnapped missing.

Burying my head under my pillow, I decide to count to one hundred and tell myself that by the time I'm finished, we'll have found Dylan alive.

"One ... two ... three ..." I whisper.

With my whole heart I will the police to call our house or ring our doorbell with good news.

"Four ... five ... six."

I imagine some nice lady ordering a pizza and seeing the neon yellow MISSING flyer with Dylan's picture pasted on the pizza box — the one where he's wearing his sweet toothy grin and his favorite cartoon space alien T-shirt — and then I imagine her looking out the window and spotting Dylan standing in her front yard, just waiting to be found.

"Seven ... eight ... nine."

I fantasize that one of the many made up, hair sprayed, honey-voiced television news reporters who've been interviewing my pale, barefooted parents in our family room over and over these past few days runs another story, a story where the right person realizes the right thing and makes the right phone call and my brother, my sweet little brother, comes home safe.

"Ten ... eleven ... twelve."

I make it to one hundred, but nothing happens.

ETHAN — BEFORE

All it takes is someone who isn't Marty opening the door of the apartment. In the end, it's as simple as that.

Simple. Yeah.

It's not one police officer who shows up but four or five. They have their guns up like on television and in the movies, and the little kid whose name I don't know and who is sitting next to me on the couch watching me play video games wets himself when they bust in. It's the third time he's pissed himself since Marty brought him here, and the first two times Marty swore and I scrubbed out the kid's pants in the kitchen sink and the kid just walked around making circles with his feet and whimpering.

But this time when he wets himself, I don't move to help him. I don't move at all. Because now the police are here, and they're shouting and asking us who we are, and the little kid is wet and crying and he gets up and runs to the door, and one officer takes him outside and for a split second I'm jealous. Because I don't know if I'm going to get to go, too. And I sit there, my game console still in my hands, the bleeps of the video game speeding up. They're going as fast as my heart is pounding. Suddenly, the electronic beats explode into a sad tune and I die on the screen, but my real heart — the heart inside of me — it's still pumping. I glance at the television and I look at the officers and I don't know what's up or what's down, what's real or what's not.

But my heart is beating, so I've got to be alive.

"What's your name, son?" says one officer. She's a girl. A woman, I mean, with dark hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. There hasn't been a woman in this apartment in all the time I've been here.

I'm trying to catch my breath. I'm trying to speak. Without even realizing I'm doing it, my eyes go to the closet in the corner of the room. The one with the Master Lock on the outside. My tongue fills up my mouth, and I can't answer.

"Son?" she says. Her voice gets a little softer, and I look at her again.

The other officers are racing around the apartment, opening doors, yelling at each other.

"What's your name, sweetheart?"

It's the way she says sweetheart. That's what works.

"I'm Ethan," I tell her.

May 25,...