Page 5 of First-Time Caller
“I don’t know,” I hear Maya say through the door, her voice hushed. “I’m not sure my mom would be happy with that.” There’s a long pause. “Yeah, I mean. You’re right. She’s not here now. And we’ve come this far.”
Who iswe? They’ve come this far doingwhat? My stomach drops to my toes and panic grabs me by the throat. I’m suddenly faced with every preteen horror story I’ve ever read on the internet. I reach for the door, reduced to a series of fear-inspired chemical reactions. A Mento dropped into a bottle of soda, something terrifying fizzing up. I fling open the door, floating somewhere above my body in a cloud of anxiety. My mug somehow ends up across the room in the soft, squishy chair Maya likes to read in. I’m pretty sure my heart is with it.
Maya screams at the top of her lungs at my sudden appearance, the blanket she’s huddled beneath twisting around her lanky body. She tries to hide her phone beneath it, but I rip the blanket off her and fling it in the same direction as my mug. I am officially more terrifying than the ghost in the linen closet.
“Who are you talking to?” I yell, anxiety clawing at my throat, the sharp edge of fear beneath. I’m channeling approximately zero percent of those gentle parenting books I compulsively checked out of the library when she turned six, but I can’t be bothered.
My daughter is whispering on her cell phone in the middle of the night and she’shidingit. This is how everyDatelineepisode starts.
Maya hides nothing. Every thought that enters that cute little head of hers, she tells me about. Even when I desperately don’t want her to. The only time she has ever lied to me was when she was in the third grade and all her lunch money kept mysteriously disappearing. Apparently, she was buying her entire class soft pretzels. Every day. She called it pretzel party. I told her she had to stop and she wept quietly about it at dinner for close to two weeks.
She’s a good kid. A softhearted kid. She does her homework. Helps out around the house. She puts up with my sometimes odd hours and she doesn’t have hushed, secretive conversations with strangers in the middle of the night.
I reach for her phone and she tilts it out of reach again, cradling it close to her chest. Moss green eyes—a perfect match for mine—widen in fear.
“No,” she whispers. “You can’t.”
I hear the low tones of a voice on the other end of the phone, lilting up at the end like they’ve just asked a question. It’s someone with a deep voice. A man voice.
A man voice that is talking to my underage child on her cell phone in the middle of the night.
“Maya.” I try to breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth. “Give me your phone.”
Her fingers tighten around the case. “It’s not what you think,” she whispers.
“You have no idea what I’m thinking right now.”
“Yes, I do. You have yourDatelineface on. You’re probably thinking that you should have kept a closer eye on my internet use, but I’m telling you it’s not what you think.” She brings the phone slowly to her ear without breaking eye contact with me. I feel like we’re at the climax of one of those wildly violent movies my dad always had on when I was a kid. The villain has a cute, fluffy dog dangling off the edge of a skyscraper. I don’t know if I’m the villain or the dog.
“Give me one second,” Maya says to the man voice on the other end of the phone.
My eye twitches. I’m the villain. I amdefinitelythe villain and this is my origin story.
“You have no seconds. Give me your phone,” I say as calmly as I can manage, which is not calm enough given the flinch Maya darts in my direction. She nods, then shakes her head, then nods again.
“Okay,” she mumbles to herself, still nodding. “Moving along a little faster than I’d like, but I can work with this.”
“Work with what?” I bark.
“This phone call,” Maya says, holding up her phone and shaking it around. The duration of the call is around ten minutes and my heart cartwheels into another panic spiral. She’s been talking to someone forten minuteswhile I’ve been lying in my bed debating the plausibility of laundry ghosts. “It’s for you.”
“What?”
“This phone call. It’s for you,” she repeats calmly.
I talk to exactly four people, and one of them is in this room. “Great. Then give me the phone.”
“I just—” She presses her lips together. “Give it a chance, okay? Have an open mind.”
My mind will be plenty open when my head explodes in the middle of this bedroom.
“Give me the phone.”
“Okay.” She shuffles to the edge of her bed and hands it to me. Like a bomb disposal specialist. “Cool. Thanks, Mom. You’re the best.”
“Don’t suck up,” I say through clenched teeth. She gives me a shaky thumbs-up.
I bring the phone to my ear. I’m breathing like a dragon. Or a serial killer. A dragon serial killer. I keep taking deep, panting breaths to try to regulate my heartbeat, but I don’t think it’s working.
