Jane is caught talking to the missing boy with her hand by a classmate during math. “What are you doing?” the girl asks loudly. “Fractions,” Jane says. “No. What are you doing with your hand?” “Fractions,” Jane says. Ginny would be proud of Jane’s attempt to fit in, but it’s not working, the girl won’t accept, and at recess boys and girls mimic Jane’s frenetic hand gestures and mutterings, because Jane didn’t know that as she was signing, she was also mouthing the letters. Sometimes even a sound came out.
After recess, during her vocabulary quiz, Jane raises her hand and asks, “May I go to the bathroom?” Her teacher says, “You may.” In the hallway, she smiles at her small lie. She didn’t need to use the bathroom; she just wanted to be alone in the corridor. She listens to other lessons being taught, and it’s amazing to her that the rooms are filled with people, all having their own thoughts, while she is in the corridor, apart. She walks down the corridor, she doesn’t run, but she’s on her way. In her mouth a tooth wiggles, one that should not move, then comes an ache, a thump, rolling waves of nausea. Jane believes her hair is falling out too.
Her mother worked in the basement. Sometimes Jane would ask to go to the bathroom but would go to her mother’s office instead. She would have to be brought back for a time-out in the cloakroom, but it was worth it. She liked to see her mother behind her desk.
She’s looking into other rooms for her mother. She puts her hand into her jean jacket pocket, the jean jacket with the rhinestones on the collar, and she holds the missing boy’s hand.
Ask her what the boy’s doing and Jane could fill you in. But first you have to learn that he exists, and Jane’s dying to tell you but can’t. That’s the agreement. Jane is on the fifth floor. She’s found the dark art room with the ceiling fans. She discovers a table of crude clay figurines, painted wrong, waiting for the kiln. Jane and the missing boy dismember the figurines and return them to their original clumps of clay.
Denise and Jane
Nathan hears the front door shut. He’s in the kitchen, drinking flavored seltzer from a can, and Ginny has left. Jane will be home soon. Just another forty-five minutes. Before Marion left, he would have appreciated this time alone, but now he can’t find anything to occupy himself. Besides, it was a good day of work. He wants to celebrate. He texts Denise. Come over, he says. I’ve got the house to myself.
She doesn’t text back, so he calls her. In the middle of the second ring he’s sent to Denise’s outgoing voicemail message. It’s brusque, low, and uncharming, yet he is charmed by it. He tells Denise’s voicemail that he has the house for the next forty-five, no, forty minutes. He’d like to see her.
Nathan spends thirty-five minutes checking all his screens, all modes of communication, one after another, waiting for a reply. None comes, but at least Jane will be home soon. In the kitchen he plates a snack for his daughter. Celery sticks with peanut butter and two home-baked chocolate chip cookies. He even pours her a glass of milk. He takes a picture of the meal in the slanting autumn sunlight of the afternoon. The doorbell goes at 3:40 and he thinks that she is a little early, so he opens the door happily and it is Denise, not Jane. She doesn’t take her sunglasses off. Nathan sees the small yellow school bus inching down the street.
“It’s too late. You can’t be here right now,” he says.
“I don’t appreciate your messages. They don’t make me feel good about myself,” she says.
“So why did you come?”
“To prove a point.”
Denise walks into the house and settles herself on the couch in the living room. It’s the darkest room of the house, but the sunglasses stay on. Black jeans, worn T-shirt hanging from her shoulder blades. Her hair swept forward onto her face. Nathan thinks of her angular hips digging into his pelvic bone. Bone to bone. They are not matched. At first Nathan can’t place what is different, and then he registers the shoes. She’s wearing motorcycle boots. She’s usually in the same beat-up pair of blue Sauconys that she’s been wearing since high school. Denise is in costume, and Nathan believes it’s to scare him, or scare his daughter. He still can’t understand her point.
The doorbell rings again, and Nathan leaves Denise in the living room. His daughter on the stoop looks down the street with a faraway look on her face. She enters with a small “Hello, Daddy.” He waves to the bus driver, whom he seems to have been winning back to his side, and takes his daughter’s backpack from her, and her lunchbox. “I made you a snack—it’s in the kitchen.” She heads to the back of the house and doesn’t look into the living room, doesn’t see the frightening woman on the Pottery Barn couch. Nathan trails after her, and they eat the snack together. When Nathan returns to the living room alone, Denise is gone. She must have let herself out.
Nathan will compose an email to Denise and fix what just happened. He tells her what she means to him and what she’s been to him since Marion left. Come back, and let’s talk. I could be a better boyfriend (ha ha ha). He almost deletes the part about being a boyfriend and doesn’t, because he wants to be honest.
He sends the email. His heart pounds at having opened himself up to Denise’s antipathy, scorn, and laughter. He checks his email on his phone. Nothing’s new, nothing’s new. Another email. He watches his phone as it uploads. It’s a newsletter from the co-op. He deletes it. Another. The subject line is Hey, asshole.
You owe us money, the email says. You and your cunt wife. Nathan deletes the email. He’s certain it’s a joke.
Sheepshead Bay
Ginny has found the Q. She’s never taken this train before, and she tries to make her face a blank so it won’t betray her discomfort. When the train rises aboveground, she believes she’s lost. She checks her phone again and again to confirm her location, that she’s on the same island and not as far from home as she feels.
Leaning forward with her brow furrowed, Ginny Palm bolts off the train at her mother’s old stop. She checks her phone to make sure this is the right direction. She passes Laundromats, fruit stands, a Hallmark store, shops with strange lettering. She believes that people stare at her as she passes, and she might be right. She looks lost, even if she knows exactly where she’s going.
A bridal shop. A ninety-nine-cent store. An optometrist. Another fruit stand. She turns off this thoroughfare to a residential block. The houses are red brick with small stoops, and each house has a driveway. Some have gardens in front, others pavement. The front door is on the right, and three or four windows are on the left. The houses have three floors, but the window on the top is small, so the space behind it might be an attic and not a room. Still, Ginny Palm imagines this is her mother’s childhood bedroom.
She finds her mother’s old house, and it looks like all the rest. It has a small lawn in the front, no flowers, only grass, and it’s bordered by a low white cast iron fence. A car is parked in the driveway. Unlike the avenue, this street is empty of people and very quiet.