In the weeks since she’d gone missing, he’d taken a leave of absence from work: he stayed home with Lisa, calling everyone he could think to call, asking if they’d heard from Irene. He called the local police of every nearby town, alerting them to the existence of the missing-person report he’d filed on the third day of her absence. Then he’d called them all again, one by one, to remind them: first on the next day, and thereafter at least twice a week.
Pastor Brian at Church of the Redeemer told him what little he knew about the Michael Christopher group (“I heard about a traveling preacher, but they get those types coming through Omaha all year. This one brought his church with him, I guess. They all dressed more or less the same. Like ragamuffins”), and he tried to give comfort, to be helpful. He passed along a few names, pastors from bigger churches in Council Bluffs or Omaha. “They’d know better than I would, I guess,” he said, shaking Peter’s hand at the church office’s door. “I know Irene loves the Lord. She knows the Lord’s plan for her life is with her family, I just know it.”
“She loves coming here,” said Peter. He’d slept badly every night since first waking up alone.
“Well, now,” said the pastor. “There’s got to be a good answer to this. Everyone here is praying for her.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” said Peter.
“We have to be patient, especially when it’s hard to be patient,” said Pastor Brian. “I know the answer will come in time.”
“I don’t—” Peter stopped. The thought was terminal, inconsequential. There wasn’t anything on the other side of it. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
*
The school in Crescent was very small and when the children came back after winter break everybody knew. Peter walked in with Lisa and called Mrs. Rethmeier aside on the first day back. “Most of them probably know already,” he said. She nodded sympathetically. There was no one in town who didn’t know about Irene Sample by now. Everybody had an opinion.
At school that day and through the weeks that followed, Mary Rethmeier kept an unobtrusive eye on Lisa; she’d been a teacher for many years and knew how to watch without being seen. At recess, everything seemed fine: Lisa and Sharon and Gail and Liz all jumped rope together in the auditorium, or, after the snow had melted, swung from the jungle gym bars out on the playground. Lisa did not look like a little girl whose mother had suddenly disappeared just after Christmas, and of whom no trace had been seen since.
In class she seemed distracted. She began to draw in the margins of her addition notebook, lines connecting to one another in different colors, suggestive of shapes but never fully relaxing into a single picture. The line segments followed one another out into the middle of the page: chain links and spirals morphing gradually into kidney or heart shapes, ballooning. Between segments she traded crayons, alternating colors, crossing the page from right to left and back again and then looping around to the reverse, dropping dragons over both sides of the paper until they covered the entire assignment.
If you work with or around children, you often hear a lot about how resilient they are. It’s true; I’ve met children who’ve been through things that would drive most adults to the brink. They look and act, most of the time, like any other children. In this sense—that they don’t succumb to despair, that they don’t demand a space for their pain—it’s very true that children are resilient.
But resiliency only means that a thing retains its shape. That it doesn’t break, or lose its ability to function. It doesn’t mean a child forgets the time she shared in the backyard with her mother gardening, or the fun they had together watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks at the Astro. It just means she learns to bear it. The mechanism that allowed Lisa Sample to keep her head above water in the wake of her mother’s departure has not been described or cataloged by scientists. It’s efficient, and flexible, and probably transferable from one person to another should they catch the scent on each other. But the rest of the details about it aren’t observable from the outside. You have to be closer than you really want to get to see how it works.
PART THREE
1
“Oh, my God,” Sarah Jane said when she answered the knock at Lisa Sample’s door. Jeremy was standing on the porch looking dazed. His shirt was covered with blood.
“Sorry,” he said reflexively.
“No, no,” she said. She put her arm over his shoulder and led him inside. “Are you all right?”
“It’s not me, it’s Ezra.”
“Oh, my God,” she said again. “Where is he? Where is he?”
Jeremy turned halfway back toward the door he’d just come through and nodded stiffly in the direction of the highway. “Paramedics,” he said. “I didn’t know where else to go.”
Sarah Jane grabbed a remote from an end table and turned off the television in the living room. “Didn’t they offer you a ride?” she asked, trying not to sound irritated; in the absence of details she’d begun stitching a story together, something that would explain both why Jeremy’d happened to set out for Collins and how he’d done so just in time to find Ezra in the road, his errand interrupted, the remnants of its purpose surrounding the wreck in broken plastic pieces and shiny lengths of unspooling tape.