PART 2
I got to the overpass in four minutes.
Hector’s delivery truck was parked on the shoulder with its hazards flashing. My son’s red bike, my father’s old one from the garage, was lying in the gravel. His red hoodie was tied to the guardrail by the sleeves. “Gabe!” I screamed into the rain. “GABE!”
Hector pointed his flashlight down the steep, grassy embankment below the overpass.
There, under the concrete bridge, out of the rain, a small boy in a gray T-shirt was sitting with his knees pulled up to his chest.
I slid down that hill so fast I lost a shoe.
He looked up at me with huge, swollen eyes. He was soaked and shaking.
“Mommy?”
He touched my face with both hands. Like he wasn’t sure.
“You’re not dead?”
“No, baby. I’m right here. I’m right here.”
He threw his arms around my neck and sobbed so hard he couldn’t breathe.
Later, in the warm cab of Hector’s truck, he told me everything.
He thought if he found the crash, he could help me. He rode his grandpa’s bike toward the highway because Uncle Chet said “on the highway.” When he got to the overpass, he didn’t see any crash. He didn’t know which way to go.
“So I did what you taught me,” he said. “If I’m ever lost, stay in one place. Put something bright where people can see it. So I tied my hoodie up there. And I waited for you.”
He’d been waiting under that bridge for almost two hours.
A state trooper arrived a few minutes later and checked him over. Cold, wet, scared. But okay.
When I got back to my mother’s house to get Gabe’s backpack, my family was sitting in the living room.
Chet stood up. “See? He’s fine. Everybody overreacted.”
I held up my phone.
“I sent your video to the police, Chet. And to Child Protective Services.”
My mother gasped. “Robyn! Over a joke?”
“You told a child whose father died in a car crash that his mother died in a car crash,” I said. “Then you laughed while he screamed. Then you left him alone upstairs for three hours with an open window. That’s not a joke. That’s neglect.”
The police said the prank itself wasn’t a crime. But Child Protective Services opened a case against my mother for leaving a ten-year-old unsupervised in that state for three hours. She was no longer allowed to babysit him.
Chet’s video got out. Someone in the family group chat sent it to a friend, who sent it to another. People were furious. He lost his job at a car dealership a week later.
I haven’t spoken to my family since.
Gabe started seeing a grief counselor, the same one he saw after his dad died. He’s doing better. He still sleeps with the lamp on.
Hector and his wife bring us dinner sometimes.
This April 1st, I woke up to the smell of pancakes.
Gabe was standing in the kitchen in his pajamas, holding a plate stacked high, covered in rainbow sprinkles.
“April Fool’s,” he said, grinning.
“What’s the prank?”
“There isn’t one,” he said. “That’s the prank.”
THE END.
