During the three days of Ginny’s suspension, Nathan works in his office next to Ginny’s bedroom. He writes but often stops, and then he’s in her doorway. Sometimes he even sits on her bed. He says he wants to talk out problems with her. He says he’s writing a story. He’s drawn to narrative in a way that he’s never been before, but he’s rusty. He hasn’t built a character in years. Ginny pretends that she understands Nathan’s anxieties. She just needs to nod, and then Nathan talks his way into some kind of resolution. He thanks Ginny brightly. Confused, she replies, “No problem.”
On the third day he rushes into her room with an idea. “We should work on this together,” he says. “It should be a collaborative project.”
“About what?” Ginny says, and Nathan says, “About missing. About absence.” When Ginny’s quiet, Nathan adds, “Think it over,” and he’s back in his room, tapping away.
Her father is violent with the keys, and the typing happens in noisy waves. When the typing fades into a silence, Ginny counts to ten, and Nathan’s either calling out or in her room again.
He thinks she’s working on her homework, but for the past day and a half she’s been researching her mother’s past. She copied down Nathan’s credit card number, expiration date, and the three-digit security code on an index card and put it in her desk drawer before returning the credit card to her father. With the numbers she buys a membership to a site that promises to sort through public records on the customer’s behalf. The intended customer is a small business, the site publicizes, but all it needs is $99 for the first year and an address. You can reconnect with childhood friends! the site boasts.
Ginny knows her father doesn’t look at his credit card statements. Nathan drops bills on Marion’s desk in the den without opening them. He’s still doing it even though Marion’s gone. The envelopes are piling up.
The first report is in Ginny’s inbox, and she’s about to open it when her father is in the doorway. “Lunch?” he says. Ginny’s relieved by the interruption. She isn’t ready for her mother to reappear that way.
“Is it okay if I meet Becca after school? She says she has notes for me.”
This is a lie. No one has contacted Ginny from school since she was suspended. They heard that her mother has abandoned her. They don’t know what to say about that.
“Sure. Where?”
“Gino’s, on Ninth.”
“Do you need some money?”
Nathan takes out his wallet and hands Ginny a twenty. She takes it and notices that her father looks upset. He doesn’t want her to leave, but she has to.
After lunch she downloads and opens the report. There is an address.
Marion Cleans an Apartment
The apartment hums with emptiness. There is no clutter. There are vases on all the tables, and when the Russians arrive, Marion assumes, Sveyta will fill them with flowers. A large sectional sofa is in the middle of the living room facing a large television. The furniture is either black leather or glass. Marion believes this is a show apartment. No one could live here.
She settles into a rhythm quickly. She dusts. She sweeps. She scrubs. Her mother taught her how to clean, and how to be livid that Marion’s father wouldn’t help. “You are better at it than me,” he would say with a smile, gesturing to a sink full of dishes. Her father’s laziness was masterful and spectacular. Marion now believes he was correct in his ignorance, so she hasn’t taught her daughters to clean. She demands that they do it but will not instruct them how. A little experiment. She wants to see if they teach themselves or if they convince someone else to do it. She’s hoping it’s the latter. When she read to them, she read Tom Sawyer, hoping to get her message across.
I’ll never find out if it worked, Marion reminds herself, because I am childless. She’s been dreaming of her daughters. They are all of their ages. Sometimes Jane is older than Ginny. Ginny is an infant again and Jane is tying her shoelaces. Sometimes they are the same age. Sometimes they are old, but not Jane and Ginny, just blurry women with their names. She never dreams of one without the other, and one is always touching her, grabbing at her clothes. Nathan is sometimes there. Her mother is sometimes there. Sometimes no one is there but she feels Jane’s skull under her palm. When she looks down at Jane, it is another child grinning up at her, ugly, small, and mean. Then the child splits like a cell and becomes Jane and Ginny again and they are hungry, so hungry they don’t recognize hunger; instead they feel pain and sadness. They are astounded by their hunger because they’ve never been hungry before, not once, and Marion searches her purse for a baggie of fresh carrot sticks.
Floor-to-ceiling windows look out onto the park. Marion needs a step stool to Windex properly, and when she’s up there, she thinks of Jimmy Stewart fainting into Barbara Bel Geddes’s arms. Marion doesn’t have vertigo. She’s not claustrophobic; she has no fear of snakes or spiders. Sometimes as a child she made up phobias when she felt left out, wanting an unexplainable anxiety of her own. Marion tries to open the window but is allowed only eight inches. She lets her left arm and shoulder rest on the ledge. The arm waves in the breeze, as if she’s in a car on an empty highway. Twenty-six stories up, she can see hawks circling over the park, undisturbed by the city below.
Sign Language
In class, on the bus, at the dinner table, Jane’s hands make letter shapes. The missing boy wraps his hand around her hand and in this way they communicate when there are people around, spelling out words in a slow but thoroughly satisfying exercise. Jane can’t decide who in this scenario is Helen Keller and who is Annie. It goes back and forth. The letters are half American sign language—Jane learned the ASL alphabet last year at summer camp—and half joyful shapes. Her fingers twist and contort; she creates new symbols, and the missing boy learns each one, then teaches Jane a few of his own. She can feel his hand in her hand, pressing two fingers against her palm.