Those That Wake

Those That Wake - By Jesse Karp


PART 1





MAL

MAL LOOKED IN THE MIRROR and saw a road map of mistakes. Scars traced a fractured route down his face, splintering across his torso. The worn paths were interrupted by fresh welts and discolorations, the result of his most recent misstep: three rounds, bare knuckles, with a guy who had ten years’ experience on him. That was good for the deep yellow around the eye and the welt on the forehead. But it had been a sorry-looking mug to begin with, scarred across the bridge of the nose and along the cheekbone, crowned by dark, somber eyes. It fit poorly over the seventeen-year-old face; instead of lending it wisdom, it robbed it of something vital. Beneath the blue veins riding up his arms in relief and the taut flesh of his chest, the muscles were tight, but they ached with the echo of fierce impact. It wasn’t a promising picture, so he smiled at it, showing teeth over his hard jaw.

A crack ran through the reflected smile, making it into two dislocated halves of good spirit sloppily sewn together by some depraved surgeon. The mirror hadn’t had a crack when he left just a few hours ago. It was just the mirror’s time, he supposed. Like the glass, his smile cracked and then fell away.

He touched the tender spots on his torso, figured he’d wrap his ribs with medical tape. He slipped from the gloomy little bathroom, down the short hallway. The limp he had just acquired did not help much in keeping quiet past the door of his foster parents’ room. Were they light sleepers? He hadn’t been with them long enough to know. His foster parents, who were named Gil and Janet Foster. It was ridiculous, but of all the foster parents in all the world, some of them had to be named the Fosters, didn’t they?

He made it into his own claustrophobic little cubbyhole without incident. He pulled the first aid kit out of his bag, but found he just didn’t have the strength for it. He put it back in and dropped himself into bed.

Sleep, ornery and evasive, eluded him. It was in the second hour of shifting position in the darkness that he turned and saw the message LED blinking on his forsaken cell phone. Already an ancient model at two years old, he had never bothered to learn how to employ most of its features, thus didn’t have the cool, polite female voice to inform him that he had a message waiting. He’d slipped out of the apartment for the gym at 11:30 and never carried the phone with him to a fight. The call had come between then and his return at two a.m. No one called that late unless something awful had happened.

He reached out and keyed for the message.

“Uh, hey.” A face he didn’t recognize flickered onto the screen. “It’s Tommy.” Mal sat up straight in his bed. Tommy. His brother. Whose face he no longer even recognized. “Where are you at one o’clock?” Tommy paused for a long stretch, uncertain. There was the sound of strong wind, or something rushing, maybe water, but the image on the small screen was grainy and dark behind the face. “What am I doing calling at one o’clock, right? Maybe … ah … maybe you could call me when you get this? Doesn’t matter what time it is. Okay, so … you can give me a call.” There was another long pause, but instead of a goodbye, the image flickered out and the cell voice informed him that the call had come in at “One. Twenty. Two. A. M.”

The geolocator app was being blocked from Tommy’s end, which left no way to see where the call had come from. He dialed the number that showed on his screen and let it ring twelve maddening times before he keyed off and dialed again, this time giving it only six rings.

He stared out the grimy window and listened to a garbage truck rumble away down the dark, dirty street. Far in the distance across the water, a large insectlike shape blotted a small part of Manhattan’s silhouette of glittering lights. There was only one person who would know how to get hold of Tommy. So he got back in bed, because he wouldn’t call anyone else at three in the morning. And he wouldn’t call her anyway. Tommy hadn’t seen Mal in over two years, had done just fine without him for a lot longer than that. Tommy would do just fine without him now.

But if that was so, then how much trouble must Tommy be in to call a brother he hadn’t seen for so long now, in the middle of the night?

Mal sat up again and picked up the cell and stared at it. He gripped it so hard that his fingers and knuckles turned white, bringing the dozens of nicks and scars into wiry relief. He keyed the goddamned number. It rang twice and he closed his eyes tight when it picked up, the small screen lighting with a man’s surprised and disheveled face.

“Hello?” The face was dulled by sleep and the voice was thick and rough.

“George, it’s Mal,” he whispered, for fear of rousing the Fosters, just a slim wall away.

“What? Who is this?” George was squinting angrily into the screen.

“It’s Mal,” he said stiffly. “I need to speak to Sharon.”

George’s face gaped exhaustion, then shook in disbelief and moved offscreen. There was heavy breathing and then shifting and muffled voices. An ad for a sleeping pill, now available in extra-strength form, scrolled along the side of the screen.

“Mal.” Her face was heavy with more than just fatigue. Her voice was hoarse and he couldn’t help wondering, despite the hour, if she was exhausted or hung over. Whatever the case, the syllable of his name came out with the same old mixture of impatience and barely contained disappointment.

“I need to find Tommy and I don’t have his number,” he said without preamble.

“You need to find Tommy at three in the morning?” Even pulled from sleep, her disgust with him was evident.

“He called me up and asked me to get back to him as soon as I could, but he’s not answering at the number he called from.”

She glared at him. He could see numerous responses cross her features.

“Hold on,” she finally said. Her attention shifted downward while she searched the cell for the information. George asked her something and her face turned. They went back and forth for a moment and his final comment was loud and wheedling. Mal watched as the advertisement shifted, now offering medicated bandages that “soothed as they healed.” There was more movement, and then she was back. “I have his number here.” She gave it to him.

“That’s the number he left me,” Mal said. “But he isn’t there.”

“Well, that’s the number I’ve got.”

“Have you spoken to him lately? Is he okay?”

“I haven’t spoken to him in months.”

“Months?” He hadn’t meant to sound incredulous; certainly not, considering how long it had been since he’d spoken to Tommy himself.

“He and George…” She sounded more tired now, in simply pausing, than she had when she first got on the line. “He and George had some trouble. He left, and I haven’t heard from him but twice since then. Once to give me his new number and address and once to tell me that he was going to come by work and see me, but he didn’t.” She didn’t seem very impressed with Tommy or, for that matter, with George.

“He left?” Mal’s voice was hard and accusatory, and he didn’t bother trying to hide it.

“Yes, Mal. He left. Figured he could do it all on his own, just like his brother.”

They stared into the screens at each other, far more distant than the miles of space that separated them.

“Give me his address,” he said.

“You’re going to go there now?”

“No. In the morning. I’m sure he’s fine.”

“Sure. He’s always fine.” She gave him the address, and they didn’t bother with goodbyes.

He slammed the phone down, punching it into the bed as hard as he could. He got dressed in the same jeans and hooded sweatshirt he had worn to go fight. Sneaking out of a foster home twice in the same night was no record for him, not even close. Now he was bone tired, of course. If he closed his eyes, he’d be out in a second. He took off.


Getting to the address cost a long subway ride deeper into Brooklyn, but when Mal walked out onto the sidewalk again, there still wasn’t a hint of light in the sky. It was a crumbling neighborhood of intermittent lighting and staccato bursts of human sounds from a doorway, around a corner, down a shadowed block. He kept his head up and walked as if he knew exactly where he was going; not a stranger, not out of place, not prey.

The building was a wreck, and the lock on the gray metal door had been ruined long ago. The hallway was dirty; not heaped with junk, just dusty, grimy, not looked after. There were no bodies in it, though, no homeless wanderers who had lucked upon an open door and a night’s refuge.

Mal walked up the stairs, his feet whanging with uncomfortable volume from the thin metal planks. His thighs ached fiercely from the fight a few hours ago. Down the hall, lit by two dim bulbs, were three figures standing before a door that would surely turn out to be Tommy’s. They saw him arrive and followed him with their attention as he walked over, making a cursory check at the other apartment numbers on the chance, the one-in-a-million, cut-me-a-break chance that they weren’t standing at Tommy’s door.

He came to them, looked between their heads, and saw the number in fading black on the door: 302. Tommy’s apartment.

“Hey,” he said.

They were younger than Mal, dressed in massively baggy jeans and shirts that came down to their knees and jackets that swelled their bodies to three times their actual size.

Mal noted how the wood near the doorknob looked rough and splintery, and his eyes shifted around to their faces. They looked back at him, committing to nothing.

They watched him with an unnatural stillness. Mal knew guys like these, went to school with them, trained with them, fought them. Even sitting in a corner looking sullen, their aggression usually burned like hot coal. But not here, not now.

They looked at him, not aggressive, not even curious.

“Well,” he said, “don’t let me break it up, I just need to get inside three oh two there.” He gestured at the door.

“You can’t,” said the spokesman in a voice of quiet authority. No challenge, no verbal shove, nothing characteristic of his appearance. Just final, certain refusal.

“Oh. So, you live here?”

“No.”

Mal pushed out heavy air. He was bigger than they were, but there were three of them, and who the hell knew what they were hiding inside the vast clothes they were buried in? His knuckles, crosshatched with scars, were still red from earlier tonight. There were no sounds coming from inside the apartment—calls for help, clatter of a fight—but something in there was important enough to post three guards at the door.

“I have to get in there,” Mal said, tired of analyzing his odds.

“You have to?” the spokesman asked, his features still indifferent, but his body coming to attention. His two companions shifted at the announcement. The hallway felt different now. Inexplicably changed from quiet, dim squalor into something… imminent.

The door to 302 opened then, and Mal flinched at its suddenness. The dark apartment produced another guy, his scalp covered in a tight cloth. His stark white eyes passed over Mal with no particular interest, and he stepped aside, clearing the doorway.

Mal nodded, stepping carefully between the four of them and into the apartment.

“‘Scuse me,” he said, closing the door on them harder than a peaceful man would have. He stood on the other side, unmoving, wanting to hear their footsteps recede down the hall. After a moment, hearing nothing, he leaned up to the eyehole and looked through.

All four of them stood in front of the door, staring at it. Staring at the eyehole.

Mal pulled his head back.

“Jesus,” he whispered to himself. “What the hell?”

A minute of silence passed. The lock fixture had been decimated, and without being able to lock them out, he felt like a hostage in this small place. He turned, gave up the door, and addressed his prison.

It was a tiny place. There was a kitchen alcove, a sink piled high with dishes, and a refrigerator filled with cans of beer and soda. One corner of the apartment had a table with two chairs, and another held a bed with a lit lamp near it and a window with a spider web of cracks in it. Tommy’s apartment, his own apartment where he lived by himself; no Sharon, no George, no Fosters. A fleeting squeeze of jealousy tightened Mal’s heart.

The last Mal knew of Tommy, he was charged with anger and it kept tripping him up. Tommy could always push things too far, but he could never stick with them; could always pick a fight, but always backed down when trouble really started. Mal was frankly surprised that Tommy could get it together to find and keep a place of his own.

Tommy was not here to explain it, but a picture of him with his arm around a pretty girl at the beach was propped near the lamp. When Mal came to it, he couldn’t take his eyes off it. At eighteen, Tommy was barely a year older than Mal, and he had Mal’s young face, but without the mask of scars over it. Tommy’s wounds were inside his head. He had Mal’s dark hair, too, though it was long and shaggy on the older boy. But he’d never had Mal’s ability to contain his anger and use it. Even without the scars, even with the boyish hair, Tommy’s face looked hard, challenging, even in that moment, which must have been a happy one.

The place wasn’t exactly tidy, but it wasn’t trashed, either. No one had overturned furniture or plowed through drawers. It meant those guys hadn’t been looking for something Tommy had or something he owed them; they were looking for Tommy himself. This, in turn, meant that it was good Tommy wasn’t here after all. Imagine, Mal thought, just imagine coming in and finding Tommy’s ruined body. Mal’s face grew hot, thinking about that.

He stormed back to the door, pulled it open hard, clenching his fists. But the hall was empty, and in their wake they had left only the quiet squalor.

He could go after them, see what they wanted with Tommy. But that would just get him into the fight he’d managed to avoid in the first place. He was here for Tommy, but all it took was a tick of the imagination and he was ready to throw down; eager to, even. And what good would that do Tommy? What good would it do Mal? Less than none, considering his condition.

He closed the door, went back, and sat down on the bed a minute to think about it. He could wait here; maybe Tommy would turn up. Maybe that would mean not being back when his foster parents woke up. Go looking for Tommy now? Where did he hang out? Where did he feel safe?

Mal hadn’t seen him in two years, hadn’t even really known him long before that. He couldn’t answer those questions any better than he could come up with the name of the pretty girl in the picture. He looked back at the picture and smiled at her and Tommy. She was a nice girl, he would bet. Maybe she was what kept Tommy together, if he still couldn’t manage it himself.

He pulled his aching body off the bed and went back to the Fosters’ house, where the guilt could eat him alive in peace.


LAURA

WHEN LAURA’S EYES OPENED, they were looking at the small pink clock on the table by the side of the bed. The hands of the clock said it was 4:20, though light streamed through the shades and lit the corner of the room behind the clock. If it was 4:20 p.m., then she had slept something like sixteen and a half hours. If it was 4:20 a.m., then—

She shot bolt upright, crawled over the bed to the dresser, and grabbed her watch from the top of it. Her clock had broken at 4:20 a.m. Her watch told her it was 9:35.

She was showered and dressed by 9:50, and only four minutes after that she was in the family car, speeding down the highway faster than her parents would ever have allowed. This left her one remaining minute to cover ten miles, find the right street, then the right address, and report for her interview.

It took her twenty-five minutes before she stepped into the dry, climate-controlled outer office. The lady behind the desk was sour, aged beyond her years, dried out by the artificial, regulated air.

“You’re late,” the lady said. “You’re going to have to wait for the next slot.”

“Of course. I’m so sorry.” Laura bowed her head low as she said it. You old bag was how that sentence ended in her head. She didn’t bother making excuses; this wasn’t the person to make them to anyway, and excuses to the receptionist would just make her appear tense.

It wasn’t as though her entire college career, and thus her entire future, rested on this interview. It wasn’t as if her parents had chosen the worst possible time to take their annual long weekend in the city. It wasn’t like if her mother had been at home this morning she would have been certain to rouse her on time. Come to think of it, had she slept through her parents’ good-luck phone call? If not, this would mark the first time in her life that her parents had not kept their full focus on her until the very last second before an important event. And strange timing, if they had chosen this moment to ratchet up her independence: just when she didn’t want them to.

Laura sat down and did what she could with her hair in the camera app of her cell. The receptionist let two others in while Laura stewed and shuffled through the files on her cell: high-school transcript, application form, recommendation letters. Attached to one of them, on the Post-it app her father used for these small surprises, a message: “Don’t forget to tell them about the college courses!” A little more than half an hour later, the receptionist deigned to look her way again.

“Laura Westlake,” she said, “you can go in.”

Laura rose, absently touching her hair, and went into the office. It was larger and brighter and greener than the reception area, thanks to the lime carpeting and matching trim. The man behind the desk was as slim and sharp as a razor, polished with a cold fastidiousness, right to the stiffness in his collar. It was just plain remarkable, she thought as she took a seat across his desk, that some people looked exactly like the part they played in life. The plaque on his desk said he was “Martin Stett.”

“Ms. Westlake,” he said, fingering the touchpad of the screen on his desk that contained all the information Laura had sent along. He looked at the screen with his eyes but didn’t turn his head toward it.

“Yes, sir.” She smiled, willing her already bright blue eyes to light up even more.

“I like your grades and extracurricular activities,” he said, clearly scanning them for the first time. His eyes found her suddenly. “You know, our last intern was a young man.”

She looked back at him, more surprised that he paused after the statement, waiting for some kind of response, than she was surprised at the statement itself. Well, a man will do in a pinch. She almost said it.

“That’s interesting,” came out instead.

“Mmm.” His eyes flicked back down to the file.

He was quiet long enough that she began to tussle with the idea of offering an excuse for her tardiness. She opened her mouth with the first word of it just as he looked up and spoke. As they interrupted each other, he stopped and actually scowled at her.

“I’m sorry.” She motioned with her hand for him to continue.

“I see you’ve applied to Yale,” he said. “My son attends the law school. Why Yale?”

“Their psychology program is ranked among the ten best in the country, and I’m very serious about pursuing psychology as a career.” Did she sound too proud about it? How could she soften it a bit? “It’s also just a few hours away from home.”

“Yes, I hear it’s an excellent program. Do you suppose they particularly mind if you’re thirty minutes late for all your classes? Or, later, when you have a private practice, do you think your patients will mind if you show up after half their sessions are through?”

Shocked by his unpleasantness, she blinked very slowly and reigned in the response held just behind her lips.

“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Stett.” It sounded just a little tight. “My father is out of town, and my mother came down with something very harsh last night and I had to get her to the doctor rather unexpectedly.” Too many details, she scolded herself. Cramming in details always weakened a lie. “I’m really never, never late like this.”

“Well,” he said, taking his eyes off her once again, “that’s provably false, isn’t it?”

She held her tongue for a moment longer, debating whether or not her entire future actually did rest on this interview.

“You understand this is a six-month internship,” he said, “specifically for our hospital statistics study. What do you think you could contribute to this study?”

“I’ve done three years of advanced placement work in psychology,” she said without preamble, prepared to move on if he was, “and last summer I took a psychological statistics course at SUNY Stony Brook.”

His eyes began to wander as she spoke, to a note on his desk, a picture on the wall.

“I’ve been a volunteer at the Stony Brook Medical Center for three years, too,” she soldiered on, “and I know they figure prominently in your study. And I believe very strongly in the purpose of your research.” He was through. He didn’t want her from the beginning, either because she was late or because she wasn’t a young man. It was plain now as he considered her flawless qualifications with squinting unkindness.

“I don’t think so, Ms. Westlake.” He finished it like a hit man firing a bullet into the back of a head, quick and cold and without a glimmer of remorse. “We’re looking for someone with a more dynamic variety of interests.”

“More dynamic. I see,” she said to that stream of nonsense. She stood, but rather than strolling casually out, held her position.

He stared silently, waiting for her to disappear and the world to resume its natural order. She had so much to say to him. She could feel it bubbling in her stomach and trembling at her jaw.

“Was there something else?” he asked, begging her, begging her to say it.

She didn’t.

Sitting in the car, numb, she called her parents. She was shocked to have the call go straight to her mother’s voicemail. They knew exactly when her interview was. Why would their cells be off now? Why, in fact, had there not been a message from them waiting on her own cell?

But it was their long weekend, and if that was more important than her interview, Laura could grudgingly, albeit confusedly, grant them that. She voice-texted something artfully vague and drove herself home.


Mookie bounced around manically as she came into the house. In Laura’s rush this morning, she had failed to feed him, and now she paid the price as he whined and slobbered at her feet. She stripped off her nice clothes and stuffed them angrily into the hamper, then pulled on the frumpiest sweatpants and sweatshirt she had. Then, and only then, did she saunter into the kitchen and unload a can of the meat slop Mookie favored into his bowl.

Standing in the kitchen, she began to fume again. Despite wanting to yell at Mookie for no reason, to scream at her parents for good reason, to jump up and down and throw a fit, her reputation as the calming voice of reason and harmony among friends and family haunted her even when she was alone. She pulled out the soothing peach tea instead and opened the cabinet to fetch her mug. As she pulled it out, her eyes caught on the long jagged crack that had formed, spontaneously it seemed, down its side. The mug, shaped into a lumpy surface by her own eight-year-old fingers once upon a time, had the words “I LOVE YOU MOMMY,” with hearts standing in for all the Os, carved into its rusty brown surface beneath a shiny glaze. She had created it in art class as a gift for her mother, but by the time she got home and spent a month hiding it, it became clear that it had to be her own. Finally, tearfully, she confessed her terrible secret. Since then, it had been holding her milk, orange juice, and tea every day of the intervening nine years. But not anymore. The crack was so deep, she could see light through it if she angled it properly. The glaze was flaking away around it, and shards of hard clay were already crumbling from the surface.

So Laura cried it out, leaning over the sink, the poor maimed mug hanging shakily off her finger, with Mookie dumbly munching away by her feet.

If her parents had been here, this would not have happened, that was for goddamned sure. Even her mug would probably be okay if her parents had been here, because then she would have been up on time and had orange juice this morning and that would somehow have saved her mug; it wouldn’t have felt abandoned, forlorn, and thus given up the ghost.

Of course, didn’t her parents always take this long weekend on their anniversary every year? Hadn’t they, in fact, had their reservations long before the appointment for this interview had even been a possibility? Had it not been Laura herself who insisted they keep their date when they realized it would mean their absence during the interview? It had been a mad push for the independence they sometimes seemed so reluctant to give her that had now blown up in her face.

And what was more frustrating, really: that her parents weren’t here or that she so desperately wanted them? It was as if no accomplishment was real until they had acknowledged it; no failure could be confronted without them to hold her hand. All this talk about giving her the independence to make her own way … when was she going to learn how to forge that path?

As the last tears began to dry on Laura’s face, Mookie started thumping against her shin with his shaggy head.

She knelt down and rested her forehead on his and rubbed the sides of his belly.

“Sorry, dude. Just because the rest of the world is filled with a*sholes doesn’t mean you have to live with one.”

She got his leash and put on sneakers and let him lead her, racing, out of the house and onto the road.

She called her parents again while she was being tugged along, and though the phone was clearly on, because it rang several times before the message this time, she still got no answer. Amid the shadowed trees, the familiar houses snug behind their neat lawns were a hallmark of the quiet affluence and security of her life. She passed them by unnoticed as she checked her own messages and found not only that her parents hadn’t replied to her text, but that there were no messages from Rachel or Cheryl, either, who both knew she’d had the interview this morning, though they at least had the excuse of being in school today. Laura had taken the day off as one of her allotted college days, with the assumption that it would be noticed by her interviewer as a sign of her commitment. So Rachel and Cheryl would be at the end of pre-calc now. She could voice-text them, or wait the ten minutes until lunch and call them. But she felt hollow at the idea of talking to them before talking to her parents about this. For all their double-checking, their last-second notes, their wholesale and often frustrating investment in practically every step she took, wasn’t this exactly what parents were for? She didn’t need them to tell her how to do everything right; she just wanted them there when things went particularly wrong. Which, as she recalled, was where they had always been until now.

Back at home, she took a real shower, dressed in a tight light-blue T-shirt and her jeans skirt, and put her black hair in a ponytail, tugging her father’s old Mets cap around it. She sat at her dad’s desk and unfolded the cell screen to its largest size. She enlarged the touchpad and spent the next hour web-numbing her brain.

By the time she was bleary-eyed and bored, her parents hadn’t called back in three hours, and it was surely enough to worry a person. Given that her mother still told her to put her seat belt on every time she got into the car, was it any wonder that dreadful thoughts would spring to Laura’s mind? Not that the other explanations were so wonderful, either: that they had forgotten her interview was today (not possible, given how long she had been blathering on about it) or that they didn’t care (not possible, given how long they had been blathering on about it).

What the hell was it about New York, anyway? After all the crap that had been heaped on that place, why would two people want to spend a vacation there?

“Screw this,” she said out loud.

She turned music up louder than ever would have been permitted in a parentally supervised house, cleared her mind of this useless nonsense, and got down to work.

Just because the internship she’d been planning on—had, in fact, assumed she’d be getting, given her much-vaunted credentials—had fallen through didn’t mean there weren’t a thousand others waiting for her elsewhere. She started looking and found that, in not having bothered to look around, she had missed others that interested her just as much. Two of them were even through the Medical Center, where she already knew people who would, she assumed again, be happy to help her out.

Her eyes wandered to the message indicator.

Still no call.

She put the music back on louder still, too loud for Mookie, anyway, who darted out of the house through his dog door and started rooting in the yard. She retreated to the laundry room and ironed what was waiting in the dryer while the next load was going, then ironed the new stuff. She folded it and brought it to its proper places and had the knob of one of her dresser drawers crack off in her hand as she slid it open. Like the mug, it was done, but unlike the mug, it could be replaced.

Still no call.

With a high-pitched shriek of frustration, she gave in, snatched up her cell, and keyed her parents. Expecting to be frustrated once again, and not sure whether to present herself as happy or furious if she did get a response, she was immediately surprised to have the screen brighten with her mother’s face after one ring.

“Hello?” Claire Westlake said, looking quizzically at the screen.

“Mom!”

“I’m sorry?” her mother said. She was focused right on the screen, and Laura could see the generic décor of a hotel room behind her, so the cell was clearly working properly.

“Mom, it’s me.” She took off the Mets cap; though, if anything, the hat should have made her more recognizable.

“I’m sorry,” her mother said. “Who’s ‘me’?”

This whole day of not calling and refusing to answer in service of some half-assed joke? That was not like her mother, and it was definitely not like her father.

“Mom, what are you doing?”

“I’m sorry, young lady, but I don’t know you. Have you”—her mother stumbled, obviously troubled by this exchange herself—”have you checked the number you’re dialing?”

“What’s wrong, Claire?” her father’s voice came from off the screen, and her mother shook her head without looking away.

“Mom,” Laura said again, because, really, what else was there to say? “It’s me. Laura.”

“I’m sorry, Laura,” her mother said. “You seem to have the wrong number.”

“I…”Laura’s voice trailed away, her mind suddenly stupid and her fingers numb.

“Try again,” said her mother, not unkindly. “I’m sure you’ll get who you’re looking for.” She looked at the screen quizzically for one more moment, then keyed off, leaving behind a scrolling ad for reduced train fares to New York.

Laura stood immobile in the middle of the living room, her body stiff and her eyes dizzy. Dazed, she looked down at the empty screen.

“Mom?”