The Passenger

THE AFFAIR FELT RIGHT. LIKE SHE'D EARNED IT. SHE HAD ND PLANS TD TELL HER HUSBAND.

UNTIL SHE SAW SOMEONE ELSE WHO WAS SOMEWHERE SHE SHOOLDN'T HAVE BEEN-

FAR FROM HOME, HOLDING THE HAND

OF HONG MAN

was waiting for takeoff, lying to my husband on the phone, when I saw you. The plane was bound for San Francisco, routed through Minneapolis, and I'd put my palm over the phone when the flight attendant announced our destination and fly­ing time. Paul thought I was going to Delaware, because that's where I always told him I was going. I don't know why I picked Delaware. It was a joke, I suppose, intended to make him pity me for the unromantic demands of my job. Or maybe it was a sort of silent taunt: Catch me. I dare you. Or maybe it was just a failure of imagination.

One thing I'd like to state up front is that I loved James. I loved him with the kind of lurching, adolescent love that mar­vels over minor physical imperfections. James had a crater under his breastbone, for example, that I spent hours congratulating him on: To me it was the indentation of some interstellar comet, a mysti­cal cleft the size of an absent palm or heart. Now I recognize that as sentimentality; it was just a flaw in his engineering, and I think they have surgery to correct it. But the point is, I loved him with the kind of love that makes everybody else uncomfortable if you talk about it, which I never did. I never did.

If you'd grown up, you would have understood.

I removed my palm from the phone and heard Paul saying, "What,

Alice? What?"

"Nothing," I said. "I was just saying they bumped me up to first class."

This was true. It was a promotion due to multiple cancellations. Even I am not so callous that I treat myself to first class for adultery.

"Did you get the insurance thing resolved?" I asked and then held the phone at a slight distance from my ear. I knew Paul would take a long time answering, and I wanted to think about James. At the time, this affair felt absolutely essential. I know now that it wasn't. If I'd lost James, I would have gone on with my job, my marriage, my children. I would have blow-dried my hair, I would have recycled. I'm a multi-tasker and a modern woman. If I'd lost my entire soul, I don't think anybody else would have even noticed.

Underneath me, the engines began to thrum. I swung my knees forward, just because I could. There was a del­icate flute of orange juice before me. The cramped and haggard pedestrian class filed past me, pale and resentful. I tapped the phone back to my ear just as Paul was winding down, just when I knew the circularities of his speech would be drifting into ellipses. I'd spent years paying attention to Paul. It was the only way I got away with everything for so long.

"Hey," I said. "I think they're going to make us turn off our phones in a second."

There was a fresh influx of passen­gers boarding the plane. They jostled their laptops; they squeezed their heft sideways to avoid confrontation. They cast glazed expressions around the first-class cabin. Paul said, "Okay, Alice." There was a silence and a click, yielding to a deeper silence. And that's when I saw you.

I can say that now: I saw you. You know it's true because it cost me every­thing to finally say so.

You were a forward on the girls' soc­cer team, six years old, and I knew you mostly in motion: whirring ponytail and legs, lunging through the mud toward a checkered ball or a vat of orange Gatorade. You had a mother who sat wrapped in coats even in the spring­time, who huddled over her coffee, who

never cheered. You were better at soccer than my girls, and I could tell already— even in passing, even casually—that you were a different genus of child than they were: My daughters were bookish, in their prclitcrate way, deferential to grown-ups and to other girls, eager to please and to be understood. You were unafraid of cleats and second-graders, you pinched occasionally, you didn't always answer direct questions. I've spent a lot of time—more time than is probably healthy—imagining your adult life, and I think you would have been spontaneous, moderately rebellious, sex­ually assertive. You would have chosen a pragmatic college major, like inter­national finance; you would have been beautiful, fourth-wave feminist, confi­dent, quick to anger, quick to forgive, oriented toward the present. You would have been the kind of woman who can't remember exactly what order the events in her life were in. You would never have kept in touch with ex-boyfriends. You would have traveled to Namibia in your middle age, initiated your own divorce, kept your hair dyed blonde and then brown and then red, even into your 70s. You would never have apologized to anyone for anything, even when you probably should have.

But as well as I know you now, at the time you were just one of the count­less little girls who shifted in and out of my daughters' orbit. If I felt anything toward you, it was the vague overarch­ing protectiveness that extends toward all children—maybe punctuated by a sense that you were the one to get wild if fed too much sugar at birthday par­ties. And because you were so quick on the soccer field, because your mild Nordic features were shared by so many others, because your tiny voice was only one element of a multiphonic chorus of ambient shrieking and gig­gling and plotting, I couldn't be sure, when you passed by me on the air­plane, that it was you.

You were holding the hand of a man in sunglasses—but already I'm saying things that I don't know. Were you holding his hand, or was he holding yours? Was his other hand on your elbow menacingly or protectively? I glimpsed you and felt a momentary disorientation, a minor

dissonant chord of confusion, before looking back again. You were wearing pink, I'm almost sure—although this, too, could be wrong, my mind retroac­tively coloring your shirt to make you match the police description. When I turned back, you'd moved past. You were obscured by the gathering shapes of lug­gage, the impatient throbbing of people at their worst. You were still a little girl, but from the back, you could have been anyone's little girl. You could have easily been that man's little girl.

And there is the context to consider: We were filing into a plane bound for San Francisco, leaving from Minne­apolis, when you lived in Arlington, Massachusetts. You were not scream­ing. The man was holding your hand, and I had never met your father. I saw you from the front for a fraction of a second—less than the length of a car crash or an orgasm. From behind, you had the dimensions and coloring and uniform of any child in America. By the time I turned all the way around, you were gone.

Maybe you had the same sort of think­ing, if you saw me. Did you recognize me and then talk yourself out of the recognition, in your child way, as you disappeared toward the back of the airplane, the upholstery scraping your knees as you climbed into your seat, the airplane heaving itself into the air, the man beside you taking your hand and the landscape becoming the inky etching of a child's handprint on a wall? Did you think to yell to me for help? Because I would have helped you. Whatever you might think now, however it might look. I would have.

At the time, I thought about it enough to think: That girl looks like Sarah. It was notable how much you looked like Sarah. But I did not think: That is Sarah. If I did, if there was a judder of absolute prelingual certainty, it was like knowledge of the universe imparted by a hallucination or an acid trip or a nightmare: It disappeared as soon as it was subject to memory, to context. Any thought that ticker-taped through my mind at the time went like this: That girl looks like Sarah. You can roll back the tape. You can check the records. (continued on page 107)

THE PASSENGER

(continued from page 56) And if there was a slight queasiness behind my heart for the beginning of the trip, I chalked it up to my general nervous­ness about flying that's only grown worse as I've gotten older. Something about taking airplanes to commit deadly sin seems like asking for trouble, even to a lapsed Catho­lic. I held my breath and waited, as I always do, for the plane to explode during takeoff; when it didn't, and we'd risen through the cloud wisps, and the ground below us had turned to cells on a slide, I fell asleep. At some point, I considered going back to the bathroom in coach—to say hello to you, if it was you—but then I remembered that there was a better bathroom in first class, and the

thought of tripping over a hundred tired travelers to get back to yours made my little mystery seem dreamy and ridicu­lous. I worried about plane crashes, after all. I took the girls to the doctor for poi­son ivy.

James met me at the exit and we whirred into our weekend. San Fran­cisco glinted before us. We crested hills and let the car drive itself on inertia, on gravity. We kissed at lights like teenagers, like idiot children who don't know what they're doing.

I'm convinced now that marriage is a doomed institution. It doesn't matter how interesting a person is when you get married; by the end,the two of you are melded into an autonomic nervous system that squirms and flinches as one.

Paul tolerated me, humored me and proba­bly loved me, by any conventional definition of the word. But he'd long since stopped trying to get to know me any better—¦ which I realize sounds ridiculous. After 11 years of marriage, what more could he want to know? What kind of an ego would demand further scrutiny? But what I mean is, James assumed I was still learning, that I had opinions worth uncovering and challenging, that I was unfinished. 1 know that, in a marriage, James's interest in me would have retreated and slipped over the horizon; our great arguments and conver­sations would have shrunk to a technical, military shorthand; the space between us would have shifted to become unendur-ably small and also unbridgeable. But as it was, we weren't married. And in those

days—although it's hard for me to remem­ber now—I was still attractive. My husband wasn't blind to miss this. But to notice me consistently would have been like marveling daily over the mechanical accomplishments of your own eyeball.

So that last weekend in San Francisco marked the end of many things for me: the bigger, more dramatic things, of course, but also the small thing of being asked a question by a man who was actually listen­ing to the answer.

"What's the worst thing you've ever done?" James asked me that last weekend. We were still in the time of these cerebral, sophomoric questions, and maybe I should be grateful, always, that we never got much further. We had gone to see the sea lions bark at us down near the water, I remem-

ber; we watched their elephantine shapes cast feral shadows on the ground. "This," I said. "Of course." The sea lions made ama­teur oboe sounds and sprayed oceanic mist out of their whiskers. James threaded his fingers through mine and we walked back to his apartment, where we had sex on the kitchen floor. I put my hand on the half-moon on his chest and felt grateful for the gaps between us, for the space that made space travel possible.

I didn't think about you that week­end until I was back on the airplane on Sunday afternoon, squinting against the light coming off the runway. In the beleaguered churn of passengers I sud­denly remembered your pink sweater, the dappled trill of your bouncing blonde ponytail. And I remembered the man,

too, and thought for the first time that his hair was dark and yours was light. But then I thought of recessive genes, of statistics, of sanity, and I turned my atten­tion to my book. The plane rumbled and rose and we threw ourselves at the mercy of fate and mechanics. We landed in Bos­ton 30 minutes early, and I was home in time to wash the girls' uniforms.

It was Wednesday night, the day before your soccer practice, that we got the call. It was Ellen Larson who called—it would be her, of course: She was one of these miraculous women who manage to work, reproduce at a breathtaking rate, do cutesy domes­tic crafts and involve themselves heavily in other people's lives, all at the same time—

ana sne spoice to Paul. I was working on briefs in the study. It was a short call and not too late at night, but something about the ring of the phone made me jump. When Paul came into the study and closed the door behind him, I refused to look at him. I pretended to be finishing a sen­tence, but I wasn't writing anything. I could feel my rib cage come unhinged, I could hear my heart flap sloppily away. I hadn't thought about you that week, not consciously, not in language that could be recorded or remembered. But when Paul came into my study, look­ing gray-faced and rational, I knew. I am telling you now: I knew.

"What's wrong?" I said, because there was no point in pre­tending something wasn't wrong.

He took a stack

of my papers off the footrest and placed them carefully on the floor—and there was more ominous foreshadowing in that gesture as in anything I've ever seen. Paul's not generally a careful placer of things, and I've found that, in messy peo­ple, attention to detail arises mostly in times of biblical catastrophe.

"Paul," I said. "What's happened?" "You know Sarah Neelan, from the girls' soccer," he said. I'm not sure if it was said as a question or a statement, because when he said your name there was a bridge collapse inside my skull—cars were sucked into rush­ing water, things caught fire and feathery ashes flew like bats through the night air.

"Yes," I said. "What?" I saw your split-second face. I saw the turn of your anonymous shoulder.

"She's gone missing," he said, and there was an apology in his voice—both for the horror of the news but also for the drama of the statement: Television has left us with no language for disaster that doesn't feel a little cheesy, a little canned. Paul winced. "She's been gone since Friday morning, Ellen Larson said."

"Why didn't they tell us earlier?" It's fair to say I wailed this. Paul looked startled and adjusted his glasses.

"Well," he said. "Ellen says there's some messy domestic situation. The parents are divorced, and there was talk it might have been the father. It probably is the father. But they haven't found him yet, and they thought they would by now, so—they decided to sound the alarm. You know. Just in case." Paul closed his eyes for a moment. I knew he was thinking about what just in case might entail. I knew he was thinking about our daughters, about swing sets into dusk, about all the just-in-case precautions we'd probably overlooked and skipped in our safe neighborhood, in our untroubled lives.

My vision started disappearing from the outside in and Paul's voice became a dull buzz, and I remarked with some detachment that I was probably starting to pass out.

When I came to, Paul had water and a look of mild concern. I knew he was thinking that this news was too much for me—that the idea of a harmed child had made me short-circuit and that I was more fragile and fearful in my advancing age than he'd origi­nally thought. I let him think so.

"Alice," he said. He leaned forward. "We shouldn't tell the girls yet."

"I know," I said. I thought about standing up but didn't. Paul squeezed my hand dryly. A lesser man might have said that everything would be okay.

That night, I paced furiously and thought. I tried to gauge how much I thought, really, that the girl I'd seen had been you. I tried to re-remember the face of the girl I'd seen on the plane, but you'd dissolved by then into your discrete components: I could attest that the girl on the plane had been a blonde, soft-featured, five or six or seven, with a gen­eral appearance of upkeep and nourishment and middle-class attention. When I tried to see your actual face, though, all that came back at me was hallucination. Either the photo image of Sarah Neelan in her soc­cer uniform superimposed itself over the

face of the girl on the plane or the girl on the plane's face disappeared into a surreal­istic vagueness. I could not reconjure the image of the actual girl no matter how hard I tried, no matter how hard I squinted my eyes and clawed at the cobwebs in my mind. You were gone.

So then I tried to remember what I'd thought at the time. If I'd really thought it was you at the time, I would have done something. I'm a good and sane person. If I'd seen you, I would have gone back to you to investigate.

On the other side of the ledger, unarticu-lated and unconscious, was this: I wasn't on a plane to San Francisco. I was on a plane to Delaware. Being on a plane to San Fran­cisco is the end of my marriage, the end of my family. And also, I inferred disas­ter from missed phone calls, from chronic headaches, from turbulence. And also, if you were with your father, you were safe. And also, if you were not with your father, it was probably too late.

I didn't think these things out loud, not even in my own head. But I know they were there, squatting darkly on the scale. The price of having seen you and say­ing nothing was monstrous, cataclysmic, unthinkable and unforgivable. But there was a price, too, of not having seen you and saying something.

I resolved that if you were not back by the next day, I would say something. I would go to whoever kept track of these things and say, Look. I don't know if I saw her, but I might have seen her, and this is where. Take my marriage, take my children. Take my whole life. I would. It was worth it. No matter the cost, no matter the disaster. I was going to tell. I was. I was.

But I didn't, and this is why: They found your father.

It was Thursday, six days after the day I saw you, maybe, on the plane. I drove the girls to camp and I remember the morning as feeling almost apocalyptically beautiful. It was muggy and pre-thunderstorm; the trees cast wheeling green shadows on the ground. I felt a sort of frantic joy under­neath my horror. It seemed to be the last morning of the world, and suddenly pre­viously unseen beauties were appearing, hemorrhaging and flying away.

Natalie was four and had little legs that kicked endlessly at the seat of whoever was unlucky enough to sit in front of her. Sam was six and engaged in tuneless, low-grade humming whenever she wasn't speaking. She hummed through questions, and that morning I insisted on asking the girls a series of horrible, escalating questions— hoping, I guess, that they would reveal something that would absolve me.

"Hey, Sam," I said. "You know that friend of yours? Sarah N. from soccer?" Sam was humming the theme from Winnie the Pooh. Natalie was kicking in arrhythmic, exuberant bursts. "Nat," I said. "Please stop kicking."

"She's not our friend," said Sam, taking a breath. "She pinches," said Natalie. "She pinches and she doesn't pass in soccer."

"She doesn't pass to you," said Sam. "She

doesn't pass to you because you're a baby and you score in the wrong goal."

"Only once," said Natalie, although it had happened more than once. She gave the felt of the seat a savage, unrelenting kick. Sam resumed her artless humming. "Anyway," said Natalie. "I think she stopped soccer."

"I'm glad," said Sam.

"Stop it," I said suddenly. I knew my voice had taken on the curdled, terrifying quality of an adult who is too upset to yell. In the rearview mirror, the girls looked stricken. "You girls need to be nice," I croaked.

"Okay, Mom," they chimed. They were so obliging, my girls, so eager to make things right.

"I need to ask you girls something," I said, while I had their attention and fear.

"Okay," they whispered.

"Have you girls ever seen Sarah N.'s dad? Has he ever come to your soccer games?"

They were silent for a moment. Nat issued a thoughtful, reflective tap to the seat.

"No," said Sam.

"No?" I said. "Think, guys. Has a man ever come to watch her? Pick her up?"

"I don't think so," said Sam, sounding less sure.

"Yes," said Natalie. "Remember, Sam? He brought balloons."

"No," said Sam. "That wasn't her dad. He just gave her a balloon."

"I think it was her dad," said Natalie confidently.

"I think it was Alyssa's dad," said Sam.

"Alyssa already has a dad," said Natalie.

"It was her other dad," said Sam.

"Ladies," I said. "Do you know where Sarah N.'s dad lives? Like, has she ever mentioned going to California to visit him, maybe?"

They were quiet again. "California, Mom?" said Nat in a small voice. "Is that in Massachusetts?"

"No, dummy," said Sam. "It's another state, on another ocean. Don't you know anything?"

"Samantha," I said. She hummed defi­antly. "Cut it out."

"We don't know about her dad, Mom," said Sam. "Why?"

We turned down the gravel road to their camp, the car wheels making flinty crunch­ing on the ground. The wind was starting to pick up.

"It's gonna rain, guys," I said. "Wear your coats."

"Mom," said Sam sharply. "Why are you asking?"

"Go on," I said. "You're going to be late

to camp." And so Sam cast me a dark look and Nat gave me a wet kiss and they were out, their little shapes becoming anony­mous and so, so small as they disappeared down the lane.

At work that day I ignored my meetings and waited for them to find or not find you. I sent all my calls to voice mail, which I then checked frantically. I didn't open the door. I didn't go to lunch. What I did was take out Q-tips and clean the dust out from between the keys of my computer. Then I took Kleenex to the molding along the wall. Then 1 sat under my desk and tried to think about how it had come to this.

The great silences between Paul and me had probably begun when Sam was a toddler, when it was easy not to notice—-between the tantrums and the giggle fits and the miraculous acquisition of language and the careful video documentation of it all—that there were days, weeks, with­out adult conversation, without moments of honesty or sexuality or illumination. When Nat was born, Paul and I officially became co-ringleaders of a small domes­tic circus. We threw cues to each other, trusted each other with the nets and the trapdoors and the trick coffins. But after our work was done, we wanted nothing more than to retreat to separate tents. Leaving the other alone was the great­est kindness, the greatest act of love, that either of us could muster.

I met James at a coffee shop—on the heels of some pickup line that's too predict­able to think about now but at the time felt like the height of romantic intrigue—and, as one does, I told myself that it would only be the once. The fissures between Paul and me were so great that I didn't think I was breaking anything intact. But I respected our marriage as a social institution, as a child-rearing unit. I told myself I didn't want something ongoing and corrosive, something that could make Paul hate me and make our children know it.

But then, I told myself lots of things.

I kept seeing James, and the rest is just cliche, I suppose. But whatever you're imagining, be a little more charitable. There was the marriage, yes—but clearly that isn't my biggest problem, my greatest moral offense. I was just being pragmatic, trying to live with my obligations and have a small, secret happiness and avoid creating massive disruption or pain. It was utilitar­ian, it was modern and it was very, very common. When it's done by powerful men, it's almost charming, it's almost humaniz­ing. We all agree that we were a classier and better people when we let it go with­out media scrutiny.

If you want to know the truth, then, there are times I'm mad at you. That sounds ter­rible, I know, and that's because it is. But sometimes, I can't help it; I can't help think­ing that if you'd been different—if you'd been more like my girls, for example, and you'd actually listened to your mother, and you'd actually followed the rules—this never would have happened to us.

When I blinked, you were inside my eyelids. You lived there, perpetually

half turning away from me; your pony-tail bobbed, your sweater flashed bright through the thicket of dun-colored adult clothing. From what I'd seen of you on the plane, I told myself, I couldn't have picked you out of a lineup. I couldn't have recog­nized you in a yearbook picture. I couldn't have identified your body.

When Paul called, I called him back so quickly I interrupted his voice mail to me. "What is it?" I said desperately, as though he'd just woken me up for the sixth time in a row to tell me about his dreams.

"Alice," Paul said. Even though the chil­dren were at camp, he was whispering. "They found Sarah's father."

Suddenly, I was seized with a lunging, childish hope. It was the kind of hope that kept Sam believing in Santa Claus even after

she d caught us put­ting out the toys; it was the kind of hope that prompted Nat to keep looking for our disappeared, defi­nitely dead cat a year after he'd gone miss­ing. "Okay," I said.

"He's being es­corted back here by the cops. He says he doesn't know any­thing about it but, you know. He's probably got her with relatives or something."

"Okay."

"This whole thing's really got you shaken up, huh?" Paul's voice had dropped a regis­ter. He had adopted the competent com­passion he used on the children, the kind that led him to fur­row under their beds looking for monsters and to catch small spiders in his bare hands. He would always make Nat and Sam look for the monsters along with him, because, as he said, any monster technically belongs to

the girl whose bed it lives under. He'd make them look at the spiders in the light, under magnifying glasses, until the girls would stop seeing terror and start seeing evolution.

"I guess," I said. "It's just so shocking." That was the worst part, maybe: lying to Paul about it. I don't know why that got me; lying to Paul was like a hobby, like a Tourettic tic. Maybe it was the use of the word shocking. That wasn't like me—it was so shrill and tinged with secret fascination. It was like turning my head away from you all over again.

"Well," said Paul, and I could see him adjusting his glasses and straightening up. "We don't know anything for sure, but I bet everything will be okay."

Paul. He always hedged his bets. He was a man of modest expectations, of reasonable

hopes for his life and mine. He didn't want so wildly much in life that he shouldn't have gotten it.

But I said something wrong earlier, and you probably already know it. Lying to Paul was not the worst part.

They already had a search under way, in the woods out behind the soccer field. People were going through it arm in arm with flashlights and cadaver dogs. There were police. There were volunteers. The men of the community were there, united in the grim satisfaction of rising to meet a horrific challenge. The women were out with sandwiches and coffees. They'd wrapped your mother in a blanket, and she sat shaking and shaking until she

spilled her coffee all over her blanket. That made everybody feel better, because it gave the women something to do—find a new coffee, find a new blanket—and that was a good thing. When they found your father they called off the search for the night, since it was almost dusk, and when you are looking for a person in a field there is not as much of a hurry to find them there.

I went over to her, your mother. I wanted to see if I could see you in her, if her face would unlock some certainty in me that I couldn't provoke by myself. She looked wan. She looked shattered. She did not look like the little girl on the plane, or any little girl, for that matter.

I put my hand on her shoulder, which felt unnatural. There was no relationship

between my hand and her shoulder; my hand was not doing her shoulder any good. It hung there, strange and intrusive, limp with its own uselessness.

"Susan," I said. "I am so, I am so, so sorry."

Your mother and I, we had not been friends, if you want the truth. We'd chap­eroned you all together a few times, and we quickly understood that we would never really like each other. There was a brief dispute on politics—so archaic now, so pointless—but it was the kind of dispute that leaves you civil and agreeing to dis­agree and glad to live in a democracy but knowing that there is no possible universe in which you and this new opponent will ever, ever be friends. Your worlds exist on different planes, your moral schemas

are fundamentally at odds. You do not share the premises that would lead to constructive engage­ment. The one thing I liked about your mother is that she saw this as clearly as I did, and afterward we were always as polite as the circum­stances demanded and as distant as the circumstances allowed.

But still: This was different. This was what counted.

"I'm sorry," I said again, and this time she seemed to hear me.

"Sorry?" Her eyes were large and seemed to quiver slightly in their sock­ets. "What are you sorry for?" Her voice was tight and high.

"I'm just— I'm sorry that—this is happening," I said. There was a moment, maybe, when I thought that she might have guessed—that she'd looked through me

somehow and seen the worst thing inside that there was to see. But then the feel­ing scaled back, and I felt the marginal calm that comes from temporary escape— even if you're still erasing your footprints in the river, even if you're still running. Of course she hadn't seen. Of course she didn't know.

"I just can't imagine," I said. Although I could. I had.

"It's fine. They're going to find her," she said. "It's fine."

"Yes," I said. "Of course."

Just so you know, here are some things I would have traded in to tell about you: my life's savings, my bone marrow, my kid­ney, both my degrees, a decade of my life, assuming a normal life expectancy. For these, if these were on the table, I would

have told about you. Even if I wasn't sure. Even if I was wrong.

"They will," your mother said. "It's my fucking ex. This is a custody stunt. It's embarrassing."

"Is it? It is?" I said it greedily, wanting to hear more. I wished I'd agreed with her on guns, on abortion, on apocalyptic sinning of the gays, just so that she would take me into her confidence right now and tell me with certainty that this was, in fact, the work of her fucking ex.

"It is," she said. 'Just between you and me"—she leaned in, and this was how I knew her judgment was compromised, that she wanted to posit anything, just between her and me—"all this is just for show." She waved her arms at the stands of white pines, the men muttering in dense clumps, the women packing up the orange travel mugs. "All this is just to let him know I'm fucking serious. That he can't dick with me on this, you know?"

"Yeah," I said, "I know." And then there were women descending upon her again, swaddling her in further layers

of donated blankets—blue 1970s-style afghans and hand-me-down quilts and purple fleece blankets purchased from outdoor-living magazines, suitable for arctic camping—and she stood up, her face breaking, and she started to cry.

I called James that night, from the bath­room off my study. I turned on the water in the bathtub all the way, let it gallop in environmentally irresponsible cascades. I had been putting off calling him because I knew what he would say.

"I saw a girl who went missing," I said, as soon as he picked up the phone.

"What? Alice? You what?"

"There was a girl on the plane out to San Francisco. I saw her. It was a girl my girls know. Now she's missing. James, I'm saying, I saw her on the plane."

There was a pause for translation.

"You're sure?" said James.

"No," I said. "No." All of a sudden I felt crazily angry. This was like asking a can­cer patient if there was any chance—any

chance—that the tumor on the slide was a trick, of photography. It was like asking if some soldier missing in Vietnam might be still wandering the jungles and drink­ing the rain.

"No, I'm not fucking sure," I said. "How can you be sure about something like that?"

There was another pause, and I knew that James was using a trick on me I've seen him use on other people: pausing to make them hear themselves if he thinks they've said something asinine.

"Well," he said. "Did you see her or not?"

"I don't know," I said miserably. "It was a girl who looked like her. I remember think­ing how much it looked like her."

"Did you say anything to her at the time?"

"No," I said. "I told myself it wasn't her."

"Alice," said James, and his voice adopted a faint patronizing sheen. "I'm sure if you'd really seen her, you would have noticed."

Some men think women don't hear condescension, like dogs don't see color. In retrospect, I suspect that this is when I lost him.

"You're just shaken up," he said. "You're just worried about your own kids. You prob­ably need some rest."

"I have to go," I said. "I'm wasting the water." But in fact I kept sitting there on the side of the bathtub, letting the water fill up the tub faster than it could drain, contemplating the costs of flooding the whole house.

Afterward I went and sat at the foot of the girls' beds. They looked so different, sleeping. With their eyes closed and their hair tossed frenziedly around and their lit­tle mouths hanging half open, with their inward expressions and shadowed features, they weren't quite their waking selves. They were symbolic of my children. They were nocturnal stand-ins.

In their worst nightmares, the ones that woke them up and brought them weeping into our bed, there were bears in the back­yard, snakes in the living room.

I sat up all night and waited for the call saying that your father didn't really have you, that that theory had been a mistake. It came in the early morning, before the girls were up. The morning light was the wretched color it always is when it comes before you've managed to sleep. Reams of mist came hissing up from the ground, as though all the long-dead ghosts had decided together to give a standing ovation.

It was Ellen Larson—again—and Paul picked up first—again—but I sat with the phone in the study, shivering in my nightgown, and heard Ellen Larson say that camp was canceled and soccer was canceled and most civic activities of the day were canceled because they'd found security videotape of Sarah Neelan with a strange man at Logan Airport from last Friday. I hung up.

I put on my shoes, and I put on a bra and jeans, and I left on the nightgown, and I put on a fleece to cover it up. It was cold even though it was summer; winter couldn't stand to let you forget that it would some­day be back to try to kill you. I took out frozen waffles for the girls and left them

on the counter. Paul could toast them later, when the girls woke up.

I drove down Route Two, watching Bos­ton materialize in the distance—its arcs and humps and jagged edges making it look first like a beached whale and then a modest spaceship and then a city. I turned offat the Arlington police station, I left the car running and I walked in through the front door with my nightgown hanging halfway out the back of my jeans.

The police station was quiet, the wait­ing area leaking enfeebled light. The front room was spackled with a few listless indi­viduals in moments of bad luck and poor decisions, although I couldn't help but think that none of them—not the drunks or the drug users or the petty thieves—-had had worse luck, had made worse decisions, than I had. I walked up to the front desk where a woman sat chewing gum aggressively.

"Ma'am," she said. "Can I help you?"

"I saw her," I said. "I saw Sarah Neelan."

The woman raised her eyebrows. She knew who Sarah Neelan was. Sarah Nee­lan had been the biggest thing to happen to the Arlington Police Department since the midnight arrival of the British. The woman snapped her gum.

"And where did you see Sarah Neelan?" she said.

"I saw her on a plane to San Francisco."

I could have said I saw her at Logan, I realize. But then they wouldn't have known where to look for what was left.

"And when was this?"

"Last Friday," I said. "On a plane to San Francisco last Friday."

The woman disappeared for a moment and returned with another cop—this one with a frown-shaped mustache and an enor­mous barrel chest—who led me into a room. The woman stayed standing. The man sat down and passed me a cup of water.

"So," the man said mildly, as though we were discussing events that had happened a

long time ago and were of no immediate con­sequence. "You say you saw Sarah Neelan?"

"I think I did," I said. The floor went sideways and the man's face started to fade, but all of a sudden I could see you more clearly than I ever had before: your partic­ular arrangement of features, the specificity that makes us know a person from a dis­tance, or out of context, or many years later, that makes us know it when we run into our college roommate in South America or our kindergarten teacher at a strip club. I hadn't seen you clearly, maybe, not exactly. But I'd known you, and I'd known I'd known you, and now I would have to live with it.

"I think I did," I said. "Oh my God. I really think I did."

Imagination is like memory. We can't know for sure, but we can guess.

You were taken on your way home from soccer, since your mother was late picking you up, and you were mad at her for being late, and you lived two blocks away. You ran away in your cleats while the coaches were dealing with a bee sting.

He was driving by on the empty gravel road. He'd been doing business in the city. That much we know. We don't think he had ever done this before. There is no evi­dence that he had. It was just something he'd always been meaning to do. That's why he took you with him on the plane, which was reckless on his part. After all, somebody could have seen you.

You were mad at your mother, and you were looking for an adventure. If you'd grown older, you would have hiked the Appalachian Trail by yourself.

You landed in San Francisco, and you filed out with the man beside you—after the security guards had waved me away and I'd already started defiling my mar­riage in a rental car.

You were taken to a house and then a basement. Evil things were done to you,

and they think some of them were done to you before you were killed. You don't need me to go into details. You don't need me to remind you.

Afterward you were thrown in a field. He threw himself off the Golden Gate Bridge, which was another thing he'd always been meaning to do.

They found him weeks later, bloated and distorted, a soggy and inarticulate note in his pocket. The relevant message was: I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

They had already found and identi­fied you—matching your baby teeth to the records from your pediatric dentist. You were on your way home the day after I stag­gered into the police station.

It was resolved fairly quickly after that, but I did have to go in a few more times to issue formal statements. Your mother knew the details, of course, and then Ellen Lar­son knew the details, and so Paul would have known the details even if I hadn't decided to tell him. But I did tell him—I told him everything—and I expected him to scream at me, throw a plate at me, divorce me. I expected him to ask me how I could have done such a thing. But now I look back, and I realize that he already had his answer.

He stayed. He made coffee every morning. He said nothing. Except that every day for the rest of our marriage, everything—every look, every gesture— said this: I am doing the right thing.

My girls got older. They went away to college. They grew up into women who are smart and morally self-righteous and curt with me on the telephone. You, of course, stayed six forever, and you are the only one who still listens to me.

Once the girls left, I went out to San Francisco. I didn't go to be with James. No person could be worth the sacrifice I'd made for this person. But I liked the city, and I liked being where you last were, and I liked being where I last was, too—because in a way, it felt as though we'd both been dismembered here and rendered unrecog­nizable to ourselves. This is where we last stood upright and walked whole.

I wrote a letter to your mother, but it came back unread. It was a mess of a letter anyway—digressive, self-pitying, self-rationalizing. But the relevant message was: I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

I volunteer here and donate canned goods and give blood every eight weeks, but I'm not trying to make it up to you. I wouldn't presume to try.

Eventually, in your long life, you would have come here—on business, maybe, or with a man you loved—and you would have gone down to the water, like everyone does. I stand there sometimes and wait for you. The ocean turns colors. The sea lions honk and rear. And I think about how these are different sea lions from the ones I watched with James all those years ago—those sea lions are dead now, breaking apart deep in the ocean, bleeding into salt—but you'd never be able to tell the difference.

BECAUSE I WOULD HffE HELPED YOU. WHATEVER YOU MIG HOWEVER IT MIGHT [

WOULD