PART 3 — THE POSTCARD
Hannah searched the name Michael Reyes while I sat frozen at the table. The photo that came up was a grown man of twenty-nine. He played guitar. He led worship at a small church in Amarillo. He had Joshuas eyes and Joshuas crooked smile.
We drove the two hours the next morning. I knocked on a blue door. A man opened it, looked at me, and dropped to his knees on the porch. Mama, he said. It was the first time he had said that word in ten years.
Joshua was alive.
On that trip in 2015 he had stumbled onto what a man was really using the mission to move across the border, something evil, and that man found out the boy had seen. Joshuas life was not worth a dollar after that. Reverend Collins made an impossible choice. He let a river take a boy who never drowned, and he hid Joshua under a new name to keep him breathing.
The pastor who wept at my sons empty casket was not burying my child. He was saving him, and carrying that secret all the way to his own grave.
Collins had left a letter with his lawyer too, to be opened when he passed. It named the man and told the whole truth. That man had died in prison years ago on other charges, which is why the pastor had quietly begun letting Joshua reach back toward home.
The seven other young people had each known a piece of it, and carried it in fear all these years. Now they could finally set it down.
My son was terrified of rivers his whole life. He never once went swimming that day. He has been two hours up the road, praying for the moment I would find him. And on a Saturday at an estate sale, through a postcard that was supposed to be burned, I finally did.