At 6:30 the next morning my son came through my bedroom door at a dead run.
“MOM. You have to see this.”
Our front lawn was covered in lunchboxes.
Fifty of them, easily. Dinosaurs, footballs, superheroes, a pink unicorn, two identical Star-patterned ones, a tin one shaped like a school bus. They went from the porch steps almost to the sidewalk in loose rows, and there was dew on all of them, which meant they had been out there for hours.
Milo stood in the doorway in his pajamas with his mouth open.
“Are they all for me?”
I genuinely did not know.
Then he saw the one in the middle.
It was sitting alone with a gap around it, like the others had been placed to leave it room. A big old metal lunchbox, the workman’s kind, dented all down one side, the paint mostly gone to bare steel.
There was an index card taped to the lid.
OPEN THIS ONE FIRST.
He knelt down in the wet grass and undid the clasp.
And then he didn’t move.
Four seconds. Five. My son knelt on our lawn with the lid open and did not move a muscle, and then he scrambled backward on his hands, and when he got to his feet he was shaking.
His face had gone completely white.
“Mom.”
“What. Milo, what—”
“Call the police.”
I got to it and looked in.
And then I understood exactly why he’d said it.
