The chimney bellowed out clouds that disappeared among the tall oaks and pines. Parked next to the camp was Mom’s white Toyota.

“Found her,” Frick said, and when he parked his truck he rubbed his eyes. “Shit,” he said.

When I got out of the truck, so did Frick. He put his hands on his waist, waiting. The camp door opened, and Mom looked at Frick.

She held square Kodak pictures. “What are these?”

“None of your business,” Frick said. “Put them back, take your son, and go.”

Mom stepped down on the blue bucket and then onto the ground. “Who is this?” Mom said. She pointed at the picture. It was a girl, no older than I was. A shawl was draped over her shoulders. She was dancing.

Frick stepped closer to Mom, grabbed her wrist, and twisted.

I yelled louder than Mom, and then I ran full force to try and shove Frick, but he used my momentum and pulled me past him so I flew onto the ground.

Mom got up, and then got me up. She pulled me to the car.

Frick picked the pictures up off the ground, wiped them, and then stepped up onto the bucket and went into the camp.

“It’s my daughter,” Frick said, and he shut the camp door.

. . .

Mom drove fast over the bumpy dirt road.

“I’m sorry I left you,” she said.

“It’s okay,” I said, even though it wasn’t. “Where’d you go?”

Mom was silent, which meant she didn’t want me to know.

“He helped me look for you,” I said. “I didn’t know where else to go, so I went to the garage. He helped me look for you.”

“Nice of him,” Mom said. She drove with her knee and rubbed her wrist.

When we finally got to the end of the camp road, Mom pulled a U-turn on Route 1 and pulled back onto the road we’d just left. “He’s going to talk,” Mom said, not to me, not to anybody. “Yeah, he’s going to talk.”

Mom parked behind Frick’s truck. She told me to stay. She balanced on the blue bucket while she shimmied her food stamp card in between the latch and doorframe, and when the door swung open Frick was right there and he pulled her in. But there was no noise. Neither screamed or yelled. I rolled down the window, the cool creeping in, and I tried to listen for their fighting. Nothing, so I got out of the car and sat on the hood. The faint smell of rotting guts rolled out from the small shed where Frick skinned his kills. I turned away, and no noise came from the camp. Nothing was banging, rattling, smashing in the way Mom sometimes got. And Frick wasn’t saying his, “Come on, now! Come on!” There was none of that. Crows cawed somewhere off in the trees. The little stream down past the camp dripped by. The hood under which I sat dinged. The immense quiet was uncomfortable, and I wished that they would yell, or that something would crash.