At recess Jane observes her classmates playing a game she doesn’t understand. They take turns looking slack-jawed and stupid; they make guttural noises and keep their arms crooked, the hands dangling, thwapping themselves on the chest, heads hanging to the side. They sway in place. The other children laugh at the rotating display of retardation. It’s not until Jane gets closer that she realizes they are making a show of her friend, the missing boy. They’ve seen the posters too and have been, like Jane, inspired.
Jane steps into the middle of the game, and she’s going to slap the boy who is currently mimicking her friend, but her open palm tightens into a fist, and she swings her arm back, keeps her feet planted, and throws her weight into the impact, and when the fist and face connect, it is an explosion of pain in her hand. Both the boy and Jane drop to the ground; Jane holds her fist, the boy his nose.
Teachers fly into the center of the courtyard where the children staged their game. Jane and the boy are separated from one another. The boy has conceded—he’s hiding his nose, which is bleeding—but Jane isn’t finished yet. Jane still wants to fight.
Rubles
A computer in the couch. There’s a computer in the couch. Slipped in between two seat cushions, a razor-thin laptop. The family has just left for a weekend stay on an island, and one of the leggy daughters has forgotten her computer in the couch.
Marion opens the laptop, brushes her fingertips over the silver edges and the soft black keys, and it whirs to life. She kneels in front of the couch to peer into the laptop for answers. Un-password-protected, this is a gift.
The daughter and two similar-looking friends (perhaps relatives) pout in the background, limbs twisted. A window of the girl’s email pops up, and Marian is quickly searching for numbers: addresses, credit cards, bank accounts. She sinks to the floor, her bucket of cleaning supplies beside her, forgotten. She is both herself and the teenage Russian. She admires the Cyrillic. She spies on her husband.
She reads the news. A Queens city councilman’s mother has been embezzling for years and funded her son’s first campaign with her ill-gotten gains. She sheltered him, fed him, allowed him his pursuit of happiness. Meanwhile she embezzled over $1 million from the nonprofit she managed. The politician is expressing a kind of contrition to the press, but his mother looks unapologetic in the photos. She wears a pink suit and her hair is done.
Marion is mortified by the sum the politician’s mother took. The woman simply wrote checks to herself, and no one noticed. The theft would have gone undetected if the councilman hadn’t started talking about campaign finance reform. Marion is envious and insecure. Why didn’t she take more from her daughters’ school? She was hesitant, thoroughly female in her timidity and limited ambitions.
She stands regally and moves to the head of the dining room table, which has service for twelve. She places the laptop at the head of the table. She thinks she’s hungry, but when she enters the kitchen, she realizes she is thirsty instead. She chooses a bottle from the wine refrigerator and opens it without resting it on the counter. The cork pops, and with one hand behind her back, Marion pours the wine into a thin-stemmed glass. She removes her tunic.
Sitting at the table in her bra and polyester pants, she easily gains access to the Russian girl’s bank account; the girl keeps all her passwords in a file named, in Russian, Passwords. With a swift click, Marion translates the page and sees that the girl has over 50,000 rubles in her checking account. Marion tastes the wine. Another click, a currency conversion, reveals this to be $10,000. It’s hers. It’s hers.
Missing Persons
The detective is going to initiate an official investigation into the disappearance of Marion Palm, after talking with Daniel into the night, both on their personal landlines. Daniel can’t take a full breath; he’s been using his inhaler too often. The school dismisses him and his worry, but Daniel persists. “I can’t do this alone,” he tells the detective. “Everything is going wrong. Everyone yells at me.” Daniel whispers that he thinks Marion Palm could be dead. Or he thinks she’s done something very wrong. Or Nathan has done something to Marion.
The detective asks, “Are you sure about this?”
Daniel asks, “Why is this happening to me?”
It was another day of hopelessness for the missing boy. The detective is returning from the mother’s apartment, having sat with her and repeated the same bad news about her son. He’s on the Q heading back to the precinct. He was offered a lift, but the detective made an excuse. He needs to be anonymous for a while. The mother didn’t say one word. Not hello. Not goodbye.
Daniel’s whispered allegations of foul play are enough for an investigation. It’s enough for a search warrant of the Palm residence, where something secret lurks, the detective knows. This is a far-reaching conspiracy, Daniel concluded. Daniel knows nothing about the embezzlement, but he’s hurt by the lack of faith in him the school has shown. His imagination responds to the hurt and to the faithless school and he spends his commutes fantasizing about what might have happened to Marion Palm. These fantasies are gruesome and violent and what he communicates to the detective in the night. The detective doesn’t believe anything Daniel says but can use his hysteria to open the case officially.
The detective stands before the sliding doors as the train pulls into the station. He looks at his reflection and readjusts his belt as he waits for the train to stop and for the doors to open. Another train is arriving from the opposite direction. The train doors both open at once, and the detective looks into the other car. There sits Marion Palm, in strange sunglasses, with red hair.
“Marion?” the detective shouts, crossing the platform. “Marion Palm!”
The doors close, and both trains leave the station. The detective is left alone on the platform. He can’t be sure, but he believes: when he shouted Marion, the woman looked at him. He swears she even smiled.
How can he be sure? He’s been spending too much time with her photo. The detective may have conjured up Marion because he’s looking for her. And perhaps the woman smiled because his behavior was odd, his movements uncoordinated.
He cannot open an investigation, because Marion Palm may not be dead. Unless Marion Palm is the victim of a crime, his hands are tied. No one can give him a good reason to look for Marion Palm.
But he also can’t, in good faith, let the Palm family know that Marion Palm is safe, because that might not have been Marion Palm. He returns to the precinct and initiates nothing.
Nathan Starts a Blog
Even though his book is gone, Nathan still feels like he has something to say, only it’s about parenting. He feels like he’s getting better at it. And his house: he understands it more with Marion gone. He’s taking time to make it into a true and good home. He’s conceptualizing a platform that will bridge these two topics as well as generate projects. He’s going to start a blog.