The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets

The day following James and Jackson’s unknowing suggestions toward a place where I could reach my mother, I woke early, stepping over the gnarled oak branches and cracks in the sidewalk, although my mother was dead and had no back to break. I quietly opened my front door, ran a bath, used the soap bar of my father’s that left my skin dry and pine scented, braided my hair, listened to the snaps and crackles of my cereal, and packed my mother’s dilapidated messenger bag. The walkie-talkies went in the safest pocket. Next, my father’s fishing pole, poking awkwardly out from beneath the left flap, a roll of tinfoil, and two silver capes James and Jackson had left on my bedroom floor. I remember feeling, then, a rare sense of faith and control derived from both the arranged materials and the magic the boys’ sleep had produced.

James and Jackson had only just woken when I crawled back in their window. Already, Jackson, whose mother liked to say would have gray hairs before she did, was rubbing his eyes and sighing as he resurveyed James’s damage to the circus, demanding when, precisely, his little brother had witnessed a monster at a circus.

The astronaut clock that made satisfying rocket noises on the hour read ten fifteen. By eleven thirty, we were pink faced and moist, trudging down the tracks of the railroad that hadn’t run in years.

Jackson and I walked ahead of James, him lagging behind to poke dead birds and using a found stick as a cane. I did not share my inspiration with Jackson, and he didn’t ask after my strange quiet that day. I slowed my pace as we approached it, and the chalky dust rose around my ankles. I had seen it two weeks before, when my father’s car had started making unsettling pinging noises as we crossed the freeway overpass. He broke into his strange brand of expletives (“Well I could just shit” is one I’ve never been able to explain); I got out of the car to witness the excitement and dramatics, and happened to look down at what majesty the freeway carried us over.

The abandoned railroad trestle I’d seen from safety above now stood in front of us, its up-close reality leaning in too many directions in too many places. The planks were not placed evenly, some had fallen, and the guardrails on either side clung grimly to their name, bending as if to meet the river halfway in compromise. A man slept at the edge of the water, ten feet below us, on a pillow of grocery store bags.

I offered James and Jackson their capes and motioned for them to sit down, placed the contents of my bag in a neat row, and asked Jackson to fasten one walkie-talkie as bait to the fishing line. Next, we tore three large pieces of tinfoil off the roll and set about constructing three crowns. I had no good reason for this, except the hope that it would cast us as more regal, more deserving, more capable of conducting electricity through our small bodies.

We held hands and assumed our positions against one of the rails; I delivered instructions as they stood and gaped at the filthy river. Above us, the highway made the sounds it does, whisking people away and bringing them back.

The fishing pole was too heavy for James on his own, so Jackson helped him lean the middle of it through the second rung of the guardrail. As the fishing line descended, it jerked with the weight of the walkie-talkie radio. James remained a king in his crown, noble and devoted to the good of his country.

At my count, Jackson and I began to sing. Although Jackson didn’t know the implications of this song, I did. Knew them in every part of my breastless, motherless body. As verse moved to chorus, I became louder and more desperate, pressing my lips to the blue plastic. I sang like my father while he tenderly washed brick red plates and worn wooden spoons. It was an old Irish folk song he had taught us, that my mother’s Irish uncles had taught her; because it was about a woman named Mollie, I understood it as written for my mother. The song is about a faraway city and a dead woman, once beloved, who died suddenly, still haunts the streets with a wheelbarrow full of mussels for sale. My father loved it for obvious reasons.

When the song was over, I pressed my ear to the radio, hoping for some sort of aquatic transmission from the ghost I was singing for. Jackson and I took turns listening. I paced up and down the bridge, hoping ghosts got reception three steps northwest. They didn’t.

At five thirty, we stood where we’d started, silent. Even James was disappointed, though he couldn’t tell why. He was the first to step down from the throne, then me, then Jackson.

The crowns bobbed as the river slowly pulled them past the homeless man, who had switched his face away from the bottles of urine.





Their father’s face is clear in my mind from the photographs that surfaced once Jackson and James were “old enough,” but I do not recollect any of the times he showed up on our street to smile and squint at James and Jackson through his thick Buddy Holly–esque glasses.

The pictures of Thomas are of a birdlike man dressed in ill-fitting suits, thin ties, and sharply angled dress shoes. He looks both embarrassed by and friendly toward the camera, and seems always to be leaning: it’s like all the objects of the world constantly presented themselves to him in support. The sun often in his blue eyes, which are so light they seem almost diaphanous. He has the slight smile of a person who is in on a joke you are not.

Jackson later put up a photo of him in our apartment. It came not out of a sentimental place or an effort to miss someone he barely knew, but rather a black humor that most found disturbing but I, as someone who was also parentally ghosted, found hilarious. In it, Thomas is nearly literally dancing on a grave. The background is a Confederate cemetery he stopped by on a road trip at twenty-two or so; he has his hands out on either side of him, a bottle of beer dangling somehow from between the middle and index fingers of his left hand. His right hand is four inches higher, his feet placed one in front of the other. The photo is taken from the back, and the wings of his coat indicate motion; he doesn’t know there’s a picture being taken, but his face is turned just enough to indicate he is smiling.

Jackson had it blown up to a 14-by-16 and hung it between the two windows we frequently kept open despite the weather. The enlargement resulted in a graininess, and friends or acquaintances visiting our apartment for the first time liked to cluck their tongues and remark how striking it was, sometimes even going so far as to assume it was this writer or that artist captured by such and such a photographer. On one occasion, when the asker was particularly thoughtful and mistakenly convinced of her cultural awareness, when she went so far as to insist she knew the image of this obscure poet walking on a graveyard and had seen it in a gallery in London, Jackson and I looked at each other and laughed, inclusively, at length. When we finally calmed down enough to explain that the washed-out image was no poet but rather just the long-dead, drug-addled father of Jackson here, no one thought it was very funny. Many people don’t understand, I suppose, that while respecting the dead is important, it’s not always easy and it’s generally pretty boring.





What we perceived as an enmity between our parents was not quite that—though Julia often sold it that way. There were feuds and sideways looks, snippy comments to us about the other’s parenting that we were meant to deliver. A couple times, when we were younger, our parents had taken battle stances on our respective front porches and hollered. It would always be pretty late when it happened, and the neighbors’ windows would light up, slow and weary, like the sighs they were no doubt emitting in their bed- and living rooms. The fights always concluded with my father more amused than angry, delighted at Julia’s easy female temper, and her, livid, slamming things around in the kitchen pretending to be looking for something—but when Thomas was found dead in a flophouse in Oakland when Jackson was eight and James almost seven, it was my father who took Julia to identify the body and bring her glasses of yellowish water as she cataloged the erratic and strange evidence that her children’s father had left behind. Perhaps my father was remembering that it had been Julia who stayed with him the first hour in our house without my mother, who had made him coffee and sensed he didn’t want to talk and instead put on a Neil Young record she knew (somehow) he liked, soft but not so soft he couldn’t hear the generosity of the words: Will I see you give more than I can take? Will I only harvest some?

It was this never-ending series of owe-you-ones that bound them together even beyond the fact of their children’s hips being attached. Because they’d seen each other at their worst, I think, they felt relieved to leave those moments where they were—bury them in the dirt as opposed to making them a foundation. It was beautiful in the sad, secret way illicit affairs are: relationships that choose what to include, that are shaped only by the circumstances the participants experience together. It allowed, from what I can tell, my father to sustain a picture of himself he more or less liked: jaded and cynical but resilient, always willing to tell or hear a good joke. As for Julia, I can’t say exactly what it gave her, only that the times I secretly glimpsed them drinking coffee at our kitchen table, she seemed to hold herself differently, her shoulders lower, and spoke in soft peals I’d never imagined could come from her and found quite lovely.

They had quite a bit in common, given their dead spouses and the children they’d been left to raise alone in a town that had grown to overflow with nuclear families with two Volvos that escorted their sons and daughters to not only baseball but also piano and art lessons. Only my father had learned to laugh at these people, and Julia secretly envied them; she cursed her shotgun wedding to the man who, with the arrival of the second young, grabby boy, ran off quicker than you could say child support.

“Irony” is a word I hesitate to use. My life has been marked, dyed, twisted, by the unexpected or inconvenient, and any safe patterns I could identify would seem forced. In any case, when my father and Julia essentially united after Jackson and I separated, “irony” certainly seemed to be the word the rest of the world wanted to employ. It was something of a concession on both of their parts, but they seemed oddly happy to make it.

Were they dating? I asked. Not exactly. They had simply decided that officially being on the same team seemed to make sense. Julia put her house on the market (it sold in a matter of days) and moved the few doors down into my old bedroom. My father had been diagnosed with emphysema three years before, and the disease was starting to close in. He took the invasion gracefully and with wonder; he was amazed at the ways his body, of which he was so long the master, started submitting to another owner. Julia supervised his breathing exercises, took walks around the block with him, refilled his prescriptions at the pharmacy, grew to love the finicky, aging cat. They cooked elaborate dinners that they ate before the flickering of the Turner Classic Movies channel; she revived my father’s garden while he watched from a chair set up in the sun. They swapped sections of the newspaper over breakfast, they played Scrabble with my father’s house-sized Oxford English Dictionary open and ready. Julia took on the domestic role wholeheartedly as she’d never done before: she sewed new curtains of panels of sheer pastels for the living room, she painted their mailbox yellow, she wore floppy sun hats and made sun tea. Talking to my father on the telephone was like a three-way conversation, him often repeating to Julia what I’d just said, or me waiting while they laughed their way through a private joke.

I was happy for them, though I couldn’t help but feel strange that after Jackson had cut-and-dry removed himself from our long-woven history, our parents had found a way to enforce it. We had so long kidded about them getting together, but when they actually did, he wasn’t around to balk at the punch line.

It crossed my mind whether it would have happened if we’d stayed together, whether it had been pending awhile but their children being romantically linked had prohibited even the discussion. And if it had, was it better that Jackson and Ida—a dangerous, circuitous affair that had festered too long—had ended, so They could begin? Did the factually old deserve more than those who simply felt too aged for their own good?





Eventually the circus came down in favor of other projects, ones requiring less devotion and planning. Jackson was happy with build-your-own wooden planes and ant farms, and relieved of a good amount of guilt. The circus had remained on the walls through fall and winter, some pieces of the butcher paper curling and estranging themselves from others. Though he had tried, on many occasions, to make progress, the fine markings of his pencil, erased and redrawn, only looked alien and insignificant next to the seven giant chartreuse sharks James had carelessly slopped on in crayon one afternoon. The permanence of the wax frustrated Jackson; the jagged triangular teeth teased the procession of small dogs through a hula hoop he had taken such pains with.

I had tried to help, my hair held back by yellow heart barrettes. I drew a cage around the misshapen sharks, but that black wasn’t thick or powerful enough, only made the beasts seem sort of striped, and that, to Jackson, was even worse. So in the spring, after much deliberation, he admitted defeat.

His mother noticed a certain adultness in the way her son devoured his after-school peanut butter and jelly; when he was finished, he cleared his throat and locked himself in the bedroom. In the hour and a half James was at his swimming lesson, taking immense pleasure in his green goggles and floating, Jackson took the pieces down, one by one, and placed them in a box until he decided what to do with them. He trusted I would come up with something. He looked forward to his brother’s return, expecting screams and sobs, to an expression of passion their project had deserved but James had never provided.

What he got was almost worse. James did not acknowledge the absence, didn’t notice how bare their wall suddenly seemed, how the paint previously beneath their doomed circus was a shade brighter than the rest of it. Instead he flopped onto his bed, demonstrated his perfected breaststroke, and made gurgling sounds into the cowboy sheets. Jackson was furious. That night, he lay awake with a knotted stomach while James dreamed and murmured.

“Everyone … can have the peanut butter,” said James’s sleep, and Jackson began to unknot as he hoped for a brilliant revenge.

Though Jackson was generally very attentive in school, thrilled by mathematical equations and more so by their answers, that Friday he mostly drew circles, over and over until they perforated the paper. On the walk home he stepped on every crack and did not participate in the game of slug bug that James and I played halfheartedly. James, sensing something the matter, wondered amiably what was for dinner to an apathetic Jackson. As he watched us pass, the old man who always sat on his porch in pleated dress pants, puffing at his pipe, was thankful for another spring, especially watching James shoot finger guns at the passing cars. We were encouraged not to speak to strangers, but when the old man asked us how we were on our walk home every day, we smiled in the best way we could think of.

Today, though, Jackson gave no notice.


My father found the Godzilla in the bottom of a box at a yard sale three months before, hidden beneath some children’s books whose illustrations had been edited with crayon, and held it up to James, who shot out his arms in welcome immediately. It wasn’t priced, wasn’t supposed to be there, and the woman with untouched roots in unflattering pink capri pants, whose children were long gone from Madrone Street, shrugged and said she’d take whatever they gave her. My father pulled out a dollar; James found a filthy gumball-machine toy in his pocket, one of those sticky hands made of gel material that flew and stretched with a flick of the wrist, and offered it to the woman, who just smiled morosely at her magazine and told him to keep it.

While my father’s gesture was kind, it only gave Julia more reason to dislike him; nothing in the house was safe from Godzilla. Besides the expected destruction of miniature cities, he devoured the petals from the flowers that sat in a vase by the kitchen window, he tore down shower curtains (despite being only eight inches tall), he tormented the cat, he microwaved earrings, he disrupted the meticulous organization of Jackson’s underwear drawer, he overflowed the bathtub.

“It was Godzilla” became James’s catchphrase, and he went as far as to scorn the toy in front of his mother. She was not fooled: the monster slept with him every night. With time the house grew relatively peaceful again, with only the occasional pile of folded laundry strewn or a splattering of “blood” on the front door. Now Godzilla spent most of his time guarding the beta fish (who were not concerned for their safety either way). Though James’s appetite for destruction had cooled, the Godzilla remained adored and admired; he liked the shadow of the monster cast on his wall by the night-light.

Because Jackson had always been privately jealous of the Godzilla, and played with it in secret, casting the doll as a gentle giant who sang to the smattering of tiny cowboys and Indians and carried hurt G.I. Joes to rescue in its mouth, he knew it well. It was of an older design, its claws likely hand painted, with hard bumps on its plastic to represent gruesome skin. A seam ran down its face, its protruding stomach, down the tail, and up the back.

The task would require a surgeon’s precision, but Jackson was confident and appointed me as his assistant. I watched as Jackson took a pillowcase from the linen cabinet and placed it over the Godzilla, covering its head first. From the kitchen he took a knife his mother used for chopping vegetables and a jar of peanut butter, placed them both in the pillowcase, and we headed out the back door.

I was conflicted, but Jackson was so intent, his eyes so needy, that I agreed to help. We decided my living room had the best light and the most space, and placed lingerie ads and classifieds on the hardwood floor to reduce the likelihood of evidence. I held the monster’s arms down while Jackson considered his best angle, deciding finally that throat to crotch would be the easiest. The first jab required more pressure than he thought, but after a couple tries it came easier; the knife aligned itself to the seam nicely as Jackson sawed in and out of the hard plastic.

“Peanut butter,” said Jackson, who watched hospital dramas with his mother.

“Check.”

“Spoon,” commanded Jackson with a grimace.

“Check.”

A smooth curve of the metal worked initially, but to really pack the monster’s guts, Jackson realized he would have to use his hands. When all the hollow spaces of the stomach were filled, Jackson pressed the seam back together, delighted at what an adhesive the peanut butter had turned out to be. It wasn’t apparent, either, unless you were up close, that the creature had been operated upon. With ten minutes until James returned glowing from backstrokes, Jackson and I hurried back to his house and placed the monster in its original position. The sunlight of four thirty p.m. slanted perfectly in through the window, threatening playfully to ooze the innards of James’s Godzilla.

I was pleased and proud, and I felt the sensation of Us so strongly that I reached for his hand and squeezed it. What I felt were words I didn’t know yet, words like “clammy” and “trembling.” Even when you are so young, seeing a child suppressing his tears, biting his lip, is strange. It is at this age we are allowed to feel generally how we like, and so to be ashamed, to begin to view one’s emotional outpours as events that would be judged, was odd. I let go of Jackson’s hand, shocked, and his quaking gave way to sobbing.

Ultimately, it was Jackson who ended up squeezing the peanut butter out of the monster, Jackson who was made ignoble by something destroyed by his own hand. Remembering him and the splayed-open, exploding figure, it is clear he loved it just as much as his brother had; it is clear he loved it for how much James had loved it, by proxy of loving James; it is clear he hadn’t wanted to hurt anything that amounted to love, that he hadn’t seen the equation clearly.





I know my mother because my father has given her to me. As concession for her not being around, he racked his brain for details that would soothe the lack, that would give me proof beyond photographs that she had existed. As such, they are the closest I have to memories of my mother, and though I cannot attest to witnessing her as an obscenely messy eater, I can smile upon the discovery of ketchup on my blouse and insist happily on its passed-down origin.

There is one story my father could not tell me, so I told it to myself: my mother in a loose nightgown, her hair falling around her, groggy, looking out the window that morning. She opened the refrigerator and noted that like always, milk was low but butter in excess. She was troubled by a dream the contents of which she couldn’t recall, only the unsettling conclusion. I had just learned to crawl and her body was tired from chasing me. There are variables, of course—what, exactly, was different about the way she took her coffee cup down from the cupboard so that her hip rubbed the knob on the oven? How long did it take before she knew, and did she, with a distance she recognized as strange, for a moment find the lapping of the flames beautiful?

The memory I have, which I know is not a memory but rather something my brain horrifically constructed over and over again during my childhood, shows my mother between the stove and counter, a tight space a foot and a half wide, trying to get a better look out the highest window, which was small and situated unusually high. In some versions she is spying on our neighbor, a lonely, funny man named Warren my father later befriended as a solitary man himself; sometimes she is watching our cat’s slow attack of a bird. She turns because she thinks she’s heard me cry out in my sleep, forgetting her proximity to the stove.

The fire travels up the light cotton to the neckline (the material stretched with my tiny hands), catching on its way her hair, which is almost the same color as the flames. Her first reaction is slow; she just looks down and watches as her body grows warmer than it’s ever been, than she ever thought possible. She holds her palms out incredulously, she calls for my father, she notices for the first time that the too-bright yellow they painted the kitchen is something she loves fiercely, not just pleasant but exquisite. She calls for my father, she whirls, she remembers vaguely to drop to the ground but it seems as if the heat is lifting her, she is overwhelmed by the smell her hair is making. The cotton is clinging to her as if another layer of skin; she is impressed by how quickly something foreign has become a part of her. She calls for my father. At this point, I am crying.

She calls for him, but he cannot hear her. His great hands clutch at lilac flannel sheets as if clinging to a rope; the sweet smell of liquor clings to him cloudlike, fermenting. In the kitchen, the flames have reached around to heart and lung. His mouth forms an O, waiting for the dream’s punctuation. It is Warren, our neighbor, who smells the smoke rising from my mother’s flesh and climbs in through the bottom window always left a crack open for the cat and calls 911 and rises my father, whose dreams have left him with an erection that falls promptly while he holds my mother’s limp and growing limper hand.

Since then my father has had difficulty sleeping, no matter how high the dosage of the sleeping pills or whiskey or a brief phase of cheap white wine that I gently teased him about. I grew used to his silhouette in my doorway, his eyes squinting to make out the rising and falling of my chest. Sometimes, I would wake to see him sitting at my desk, tinkering with the loose knob on the third drawer down or straightening my schoolbooks into piles; once, he had opened my algebra textbook and begun solving equations. I pretended to keep sleeping and hoped, for his sake, that he could find n.

When he calls late at night and feigns that there was something he was supposed to tell me but can’t remember just now, I pretend, for his sake. For mine, too.





The fall that followed the circus, the kidnapped girl from around the corner came to me in dreams on a yellow bicycle with a banana seat and streamers of thousands of colors. I was always waiting on the porch for her, feeling the cool stone against the part of my thighs my shorts didn’t cover, but when she came she was anxious and I’d always forgotten to get my bicycle from behind the house where I kept it, or my father began calling me from somewhere inside only to deny it once I’d found him. By the time I was on my bicycle, she was at least a block away, looking back at me with the half smile in the picture on all the missing posters. But in the dreams my calves strained, as if I were riding up a steep incline; there was grit in the air that caught in my throat and settled on my skin, adding pounds. The streets I knew had different names or didn’t intersect like they should, and while I struggled to keep up she weaved effortlessly, waving at the people I didn’t recognize, riding with no hands, showing off.

Within two full days of her disappearance, the case attracted national publicity. I was eye level with the magazine rack in the grocery store, and her face looked back at me from all the magazines; it was hard to understand that these were glossy pages being sold across the country, that any pain or person could exist past the limits of the park at the corner or even the diner on the boulevard with high, spinning seats that took an eternity to drive to. I wondered what it felt like to be a girl everywhere; I thought that if I was in her place, I might feel lucky.

When I told my dad this on the way home from the market, he grew very quiet and turned off the radio. He didn’t even respond when I saw a red Volkswagen pass and punched him in the shoulder. At home he sat me on the couch without even unloading the groceries, and I tried hard to listen and not think of the milk sitting in the trunk growing warmer. Dear heart, my father said, Anna is not lucky.

Did I understand what kidnapping was? A very bad person had taken Anna. He had come into her bedroom with a knife during a slumber party. He had tied her two friends up and put pillowcases over their heads. He had told them to count to a very high number and carried Anna out of the bedroom. Was that lucky? His throat caught and he put his face in his hands.

They weren’t sure where she was now, my father explained. Her mom and dad and the police were looking very, very hard, and so were many other people. There was a candle lit in the window of her house that would stay lit until she returned. We could walk by and see it anytime I wanted. Would I like to bring flowers?

In the days and weeks that followed, I as well as the rest of the children in the neighborhood lost that sense of ownership we’d felt over the summer. FBI agents came knocking at the door, searching for information, holding up the flyer that was everywhere already. We were not allowed to walk home from school alone; I was not to walk to James and Jackson’s without an escort; my bedroom window was to remain closed and locked at absolutely all times; my door was to be left open. We were taught the term “stranger danger.” All vans white or even close to white in color were viewed as ominous—they being the official vehicle of Kidnappers and Bad Men everywhere—and fictional reports of seeing them echoed excitedly before the bell that signaled the start of class.

Anna was four years older and had just begun junior high. Though she was too old to join in on our games, she would sometimes smile encouragingly when she walked or rode past. She was thin and lanky like I was, with unruly brown hair she always wore in unkempt waves and wide red lips that curved over the gap in her slight front teeth. She wore baseball shirts with three-quarter length sleeves; on the few times I was close enough, she smelled to me like soaked-in chlorine and the thick, unpasteurized apple juice my father bought in the spring. I had spoken to her only a handful of times, which I replayed in my head obsessively. On the Fourth of July two months before, I had shared a whole ten minutes near her: she had taken the empty canvas camping chair next to me, placing a soda can in its mesh cup holder and adjusting her fascinating preteen body with little sighs. Eager to impress her, I had mentioned how one time Jackson and I had got our hands on some illegal fireworks from Chinatown in San Francisco, leaving out the fact that Julia had confiscated them almost immediately. Anna had beamed briefly, politely, and emptied her soda can, the last of the cola tinkling as it escaped into her lips. In the middle of the street, my father lit a foot-tall brick and held his beer bottle up triumphantly as it rained its bits of slow, mournful yellow lights twelve feet above.

“As much as I like the fireworks,” Anna said then, “I like the smell afterward,” and sniffed as if to demonstrate. I couldn’t think of any response, and soon after she got up, leaving the aluminum can and a wake of her scent.

It wasn’t just Anna that had been stolen. The drugstores raised their Halloween aisles from wherever they’d been hiding for a year, and our street bore less and less resemblance to the kingdom we’d galloped through laughing and planning wildly. Autumn was decidedly adult: the nuanced colors—muddled oranges and browns, the uncertain gray of the clouds—were much harder to love, to understand, than the sticky pinks of popsicles, the confident thick greens of happy grass and plants, the haughty blue of the sky above it all. I halfheartedly indulged my father’s conversations regarding my costume that year, and on the night when the boys and their mother came over to carve pumpkins on our porch, I was distracted and without my usual grandiose jack-o’-plans. I took pleasure, instead, in making deep, sharp stabs, cutting only sharp lines and extracting simple shapes from the flesh of the pumpkin, and removing its guts in fistfuls.

The man who’d taken Anna had waved a knife at her friends: I wondered if somewhere he was making similar incisions, stealing her flesh in isosceles triangles and parallelograms. In my imagination this was not painful for Anna, only confusing; she would look at her body and watch the light coming through, then behind her at strange shadows she cast. As a child who’d lost her mother, I had developed a morbid and skilled imagination regarding death and human pain that I felt somehow entitled to use.

The candle went on burning in the window of the Martins’ house, and on the night of Halloween her parents sat on the porch with candies of every variety: nougat and fruit-flavored hard candies, peanut butter cups in milk and dark chocolate, lollipops with blue gum inside them. Instead of cauldrons of dry ice, ghoulish motion detectors that cackled on a trick-or-treater’s approach, or an excess of gauze spiderwebs, their stoop was a tribute to the possibility of actual death. The flowers had not stopped coming and the bouquets bled into each other among store-bought sympathy cards and ones made of construction paper in seventh-grade homerooms: WE MISS YOU ANNA. Photographs cataloging twelve years of life were papered to the windows, the same smile replicated in different poses and ages.

Parents had to drag their children up the stairs; some of the littler ones cried. It was strange that her parents had done this; it was courageous or it was insane. Anna’s mother wore a sedated smile, clutching the hands of parents and hungrily eyeing the cowboys and grim reapers; her father distributed candy in businesslike gestures, nodding and drinking out of a red plastic cup. When we approached, my father offered his hand but I shook it off. I maintained eye contact with the mother of the stolen girl until she broke it; I felt Jackson staring from beside me and cast him a look of reprehension.

As per routine, I spent Halloween night in the boys’ bedroom, where we traded caramel apple pops for watermelon Jolly Ranchers. James, with his unusual taste for the unpopular black licorice, gathered a wealth of them in his corner. His plastic pirate sword lay forgotten as he counted and recounted, until finally Julia came in and gave us ten minutes to change and brush our teeth and turn off the lights. From outside came the whoops of teenagers, the sudden acceleration of cars driven by those with new licenses, the wee-woos of a mechanical ghost slowly losing batteries.

The sources of light in their bedroom after dark were of a different frequency: the glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling, the luminous crack from beneath the door that changed in color while Julia watched television, the modest glow of the fish tank, the red of the numbers from the astronaut clock—they were known by few and as such I cherished them as secrets, like the little sighs that issued from James like exclamations as he drifted off : mm, mmph, Mmph!

I couldn’t sleep and whispered to Jackson to see if he was awake. I twisted my body toward him, I dared myself to ask the question that hung over the flowers and cards on the porch of the woman with the lost daughter:

“Where do you think she is?”

“I …” Jackson stuttered with the thought of I, with the thought of an authoritative statement; as children we were rarely asked questions of this gravity.

“I don’t know. Maybe he let her go somewhere. Or maybe he wanted someone to come with him somewhere, and they’re almost there, and then he’ll let her go.”

“Like where?” I tried to imagine Anna and a faceless man in a car, listening to the radio loud and stopping at gas stations so she could get whatever snacks she wanted, but I couldn’t shake my vision of Anna with all the pieces missing, like what is left after the cookies have been cut out of the dough.

“Mexico?” I suggested. I had always liked the sound of Spanish being spoken by the Mexicans who waited around at gas stations for work: it seemed happy, the way it moved like mountains, rolling. There was a postcard from Puerto Vallarta on our fridge that I had memorized, and I imagined Anna in one of the beach lounge chairs, smiling that smile, sending little squirts of lemonade through the gap in her teeth or drawing a picture of the ocean: the reporters sometimes mentioned on television that art and music had been her favorite classes.

“Mexico. Yeah. Like maybe he was gonna go with his friend? But his friend couldn’t? So he took Anna, only it’s long-distance and she doesn’t have the money to call.”

Jackson rolled over and I looked, again, at the neon stars we had stuck to his ceiling, considering Mexico. I liked the idea that she was just on vacation, but why her? It had to be someone who knew her, who admired, like I did, the way her skin stayed brown and friendly all year, the way she tilted her head when she listened. Who maybe had seen her play piano at the band recital, like I had, and watched the way she bent her head way low and sideways, her curls falling even longer while her fingers leaped.

It wasn’t long before James started murmuring, and as always, I was reassured by the sounds. They meant that people were still people when they slept, that these hours void of conscious words and sunlight were still part of the story, if perhaps in parentheses. And what fit between parentheses, I learned later, were often the parts that provided fuller meaning, that sought to include what was overlooked.

“The … the …” James struggled from his sleep, clearly on the verge of a pressing communication.

“THE COWBOY SKITTLES.”

He lashed his head emphatically against the pillow, then reassumed inertia. I waited for Jackson’s reply, but it never came. I cast my head to the astronaut clock, which read 9:17, and watched as the digital numbers changed, the backward and upside-down L becoming two boxes that signified 8. At 9:20, James let out a sharp breath.

“All night,” Jackson said. “Gold.”

“Nightgold,” agreed James, his lips moving over his teeth between words. “All of it.”

The clarity faded. The sleeping words deteriorated into syllables, and the syllables were like marbles scattering, rolling away from the others only to collide again as if happening into the same groove on their shared surface. The effect was that of someone imitating a language he didn’t speak: it was nonsense that was grouped, punctuated.

“Ah za kneeth.” It sounded as if James was pleading.

“Kerr pree, puh hmz.”

“Miss-ing,” sighed Jackson. “Missing missing.”

“Missing,” echoed James.

“Girl not lady.”

“No-nowhere girl.”

Seeing my opportunity, I butted in.

“Anna?” I asked. And then, more insistently, “Anna?”

“Anna,” they breathed in unison.

“Where?” I demanded. “Where?”

“The man,” began Jackson,

“walks bad,” James asserted.

“Walks bad? Talks bad,” Jackson clarified.

And then, in the rhythm of Morse code or telegrams, forms of communication obsolete and so fascinating in their urgency:

“Anna—gone—man—walks so bad—hiding.”

I questioned Jackson the next day before school started. Had he had any dreams about Anna? None that he could remember, he said. And then, seeing the look on my face, his story changed: no, definitely not. But you said her name, I pleaded. He took his homework out of his backpack, put it on his desk, and looked up at the chalkboard. I was on my own.