*
When the plane was safely aloft and Noah had finally exhausted himself, crashing into a fitful sleep, Janie reached under the seat in front of her and pulled out the pages that Anderson had printed out the night before. Copies of newspaper articles from the Millerton Journal and Dayton Daily News about Tommy Crawford, who lived on Asheville Road and was nine when he’d gone missing. He was a student at McKinley Elementary, where his mother was a schoolteacher.
The photograph in the newspaper article was from school picture day. American flag on one side, cheesy rainbow backdrop against a fake blue sky. You could almost hear the photographer urging: Smile wide, now. Smile big. Could be any boy, really. His skin was a light brown. He was African American. She didn’t know why this should be surprising to her. He grinned up at her. He had a nice smile.
“AUTHORITIES CALL OFF SEARCH FOR MISSING BOY”
The Greene County police force called off the search today for Tommy Crawford, nine, of 81 Asheville Road, who disappeared from his Oak Heights neighborhood on June 14. Though the child is feared to be dead, Detective James Ludden, who had been leading the search effort, stated that “as far as I’m concerned, this case isn’t over until we find the boy, one way or another.”
Crawford, who attended McKinley Elementary School, is by all accounts a bright and popular boy. His parents describe a cheerful child who loves baseball and is a devoted older brother to Charles, eight. “Charlie misses his big brother,” his parents, Denise and Henry Crawford, said in a statement. “We miss our beloved boy. If you have Tommy with you or know where he is, please, please call—”
She looked away. There was too much pain in this piece of paper.
They were in the clouds now, on their way to a place she’d never been. She was flying on instinct, a mystery even to herself.
Janie believed in consistency. It was something she took pride in. She said, “No crackers before bedtime,” and then she stuck with it. She had been even-tempered (mostly); she had been constant (as much as possible). Kids needed that.
She had tried to create order in Noah’s life the way her mother had created order in her own, after the chaos of living with her father. She didn’t remember much of the time before her father had left them. There was a memory of sitting high up on his shoulders at the state fair—but was that a real memory or something she made up from a picture she had? There was the time the two of them went to the mall on some errand and he had spontaneously bought a huge stuffed polar bear for her, far too big for any room but the living room, and her mother had objected but then laughed and let her keep it there beside the TV. There was the smell of his pipe and his scotch, and the sound of him banging on the door all night long when he drank and her mother wouldn’t let him in. There was her mother holding a water glass filled with red wine (the first and only time Janie had seen her drink), telling her in the matter-of-fact voice she always had that she had asked him to leave and he wasn’t ever coming back, and she was right; he didn’t. Janie was ten then. She remembered that day perfectly, the startling sight of her mother drinking in the afternoon, the way the wine had splashed as her mother talked and Janie had been nervous it would spill over.
After that, her mother had gone back to work as a nurse and they got into a regular rhythm. She started working nights when Janie was thirteen, but she was home to oversee schoolwork, and always made sure there were healthful dinners in the house for her to warm in the microwave and clean pressed clothes for her to put on in the morning before school. And when those nights got a little lonely, Janie retreated to her room, where everything was exactly the way she wanted it to be. She opened the door and saw her framed posters of foggy European castles and horses; her furniture hand-painted in cheerful primary colors; her closets organized by color scheme; her color-coded world.
A lifetime of creating orderly spaces had followed, and what good had it done? When the world was not orderly.