However, Jane is still preoccupied by injustice. She believes it unfair that other kids have their mothers while hers is lost.
Her father and her sister have dismissed all her ideas to get her mother back. She recommended fliers first, even volunteered to post them. Her suggestion was met with clipped sarcasm from her sister and a shake of the head from her father. They weren’t listening to her because she was eight and the youngest. If she had been the oldest, they might have done it.
Next she thought it would be good to go on television. They did it for the missing boy. There were segments on the news, and they made his family seem close and real. This could also be a useful strategy. Jane asked over dinner how difficult it was to get on television. Her father’s response: Very.
Jane at thirty will look back and think, actually, those weren’t bad ideas. It still astounds her that as a family they collectively did nothing. It must have been hard to do so little. It had to be. Jane at thirty has a face that people tell things to. She’s heard about abortions by the water cooler, addictions to online gambling on airport shuttles, cancer from the checkout girl at the mall. It’s her face that invites these tales of misery, she tells herself, but maybe not. Maybe humans are naturally inclined to share their pain. And maybe, because of her mother, Jane is not allowed to judge.
Why didn’t her family want to talk? Maybe her father knew. Maybe her sister suspected. This would mean she was the only one in the family who had a missing family member. Her sister and her father had someone to protect, and Marion was safer for everyone as a missing person.
Jane the adult sympathizes with Jane the child. And that’s good, she supposes, but it’s hard to think about Jane the child asking at the dinner table what’s so wrong with her ideas. Do they have better ones? Someone should do something.
Jane the child places the missing boy next to her at the table, and she looks at him for support, and he winks, meaning, Those are good ideas. How smart you are, he says.
Missing Persons
Walter’s in the backseat throwing up while the detective navigates downtown Brooklyn traffic. The only opening the vet and Walter shared was during peak rush hour. The detective looks at the caged Walter in the rearview mirror. He sometimes thinks the cat is saying “Kill me.” Other times the cat is saying “Never let me die.”
The detective had hoped that a follow-up interview with Nathan would subdue his curiosity, and for a while it looked like it would. Nathan spoke about his wife in a more conventional way, and the detective was able to draw a picture of a woman who never wanted to be a mother and who hated her job. If Marion was a man, the detective found himself thinking, I doubt I would be interested.
The detective imagines that the Palm marriage was a peculiar one from the beginning. He thinks about the picture of Marion that Nathan gave him. There weren’t many to choose from, Nathan admitted, but this was the most recent. Marion Palm wears what looks like a maternity dress, but she is not pregnant. She’s smiling, but the smile could be taken for a grimace. She’s at a backyard barbecue and holds a glass of wine in her left hand, and that hand is the only part of her that seems relaxed. Her shoulders are nearly touching her ears. Nathan Palm, next to her, is midlaugh, arms crossed, bending slightly forward toward the camera with locked knees. The couple is not touching; in fact, they seem to be in different photos, or even different backyards. The detective looks more closely at Marion and thinks that she could have been attractive once.
The Marion Palm disappearance was on its way to seeming sad but expected, and then the detective spoke to Ginny. Ginny Palm wanted her mother back but didn’t seem at all sure that her mother should come back. She admitted that she felt responsible. The detective reassured her that it wasn’t her fault, and she scoffed. She said, “I don’t mean me, I mean all of us. My father, my sister, and me. If someone runs away from a group of people, most likely that group of people was the reason. It’s not like my mother had anything to run toward.”
The detective feels that most of the time people do run toward something—a person, a place, a feeling, an idea—unless they are desperate. He believes it takes desperation to get a person running. Was Marion’s marriage that bad? And what about her children? What would make her leave them? What kind of mother does that?
Walter howls, then gags. The detective sits and watches the light go from red to green to red again. He considers putting Walter out on the curb and opening his cage door. He believes that Walter would be fine, would thrive, would live forever.
Marion Palm is not a vulnerable adult, and the detective cannot prove she was the victim of a crime. We don’t hunt people down in America unless they owe us something, and Marion Palm paid her bills before she left. If she were pretty and blond, it might be a different matter, but Marion Palm is not, to put it lightly, photogenic. But her coworker Daniel seemed more interested in finding Marion than her husband did. The detective briefly considers an affair between Daniel and Marion, but that feels wrong. Daniel is overwhelmed, not by grief but by a new workload.
The detective calls Daniel on his cell. He needs a few more details about Marion, if Daniel doesn’t mind. Daniel stammers, says something about a meeting, but the detective urges him on. He cajoles; he won’t let Daniel go without an explanation. Daniel confesses. “I’m not supposed to be talking to you,” he says, and hangs up.
The detective makes it to the vet, and Walter is given another week of precious domesticated life.
Women Who Cheat
A new woman has cheated at marathon racing in St. Louis. Marion reads about it in a free newspaper she took from a man wearing a red smock. The cheater appeared from nowhere, members of the crowd say, to fly across the finish line and earn herself a record time. She’d pinned her bib to her shorts and had to lift her shirt for someone to see it. She said she had removed the time tracker. She seemed embarrassed at the finish line and not very sweaty. She stood behind a large banner declaring her the winner and looked to the left of the photographer.
Marion enjoys the woman’s face and the article. The medal is given to the actual winner and the cheating woman is banned from all future races. Marion is curious about how it will be for this cheating woman at work on Monday. She imagines her driving a Hyundai to an office outside St. Louis, hair neatly pulled back into a ponytail, her tight young body shrouded in a J. Crew cardigan and skirt. She wears sensible shoes. She hates her life. The only reason to cheat so publicly, to take that risk, is to hate. Without the hate and also the entitlement, it wouldn’t be worth it.