Quinn is cold and sweating. After hours of searching, she’s back home; she kept thinking maybe Maddie’d gone back home, was stuck outside at the door. She kept thinking maybe someone called the cops. She thinks her only option is to call Alice to come help her. If they take Maddie from her this time, Quinn feels certain, they will not ever give her back. She does not deserve to be a mother, Quinn thinks. She should have called someone as soon as Maddie went missing. She’s scared, and Maddie’s alone, probably cold and hungry. But there’s no one she can call who won’t also threaten, once they’ve found her, to take her from her. Alice might well do this too.
She drafts eleven text messages before she settles on the one she thinks she’ll send to Alice. She almost presses send, then walks through the house one more time and finds Maddie’s phone under her bed. She sees, there, a text from Alice of a Christmas tree. It’s perfect, big and full and gorgeous, and Quinn feels the fury rise up in her. Bitch, she whispers. She sits on her daughter’s bed and throws the phone against the wall.
“Maddie?” says Alice, hardly thinking. It’s early morning. Her phone rang, and Maddie’s face popped up, and she answered, excited, then embarrassed by how quickly she’d picked up.
“It’s me,” says Quinn, her voice shaking.
“What’s wrong?”
Alice waits, her upper back and shoulders tensing, as she hears Quinn start to cry.
“You okay?” Tess asks Alice, still sweating, just back from her run. Kate comes up into the kitchen, sleeves rolled from putting the turkey in the basement oven. The kids and husbands—besides Henry who’s in the barn, working—are still in bed.
Alice sets the phone down on the counter, places both her hands on the back of a close-by chair. “Maddie,” she says.
“Who?” Tess says.
“My . . .” starts Alice. “A girl. A case of mine. She’s missing. Since last night.”
“Is something wrong?” asks Martin from the entrance to the kitchen.
“Her child,” Kate says, then reddens. She turns to the stove, starts making breakfast.
“A client of mine is gone,” Alice says.
“Do they live close by?” Tess says.
“About three miles,” Alice says, her voice steady. “In the condos close to town.”
Kate holds her hand over the pan, waiting for it to heat up.
“Do you . . .” Tess starts. “Is it possible she’s with the dad?”
“There is no father,” Alice says. “I mean—there was, I guess, but he’s not around.”
“Is there any reason she would run away?”
“I can’t . . .” says Alice. “I can’t imagine where she’d go.” Alice thinks briefly, abashed, that if Maddie ran away she’d run to Alice. She knows better than to say this. But her eyes wander toward the backyard, thinking maybe, any minute, she’ll see Maddie bounding toward the door.
Kate looks outside. “It’s warmer,” she says, “than it could be.”
“She’s been gone almost six hours,” says Alice. “I should call the police. Quinn should have called the police.”
Josh is downstairs now too and looks at his wife, then Alice. “One of us should call the police right now.”
“But if I call the cops,” says Alice, “she’ll lose custody.”
What no one talks about but everybody knows—in the ways that families know things, in this case because of Helen (who would have never known if not for Henry, who called and told her), who called and told the rest of them, who took Alice aside more than once and tried to reassure her it was not her fault—everyone knows that a year ago Alice reported a mother for leaving her kid alone while she was at work. Alice was supposed to do this—report people who left their children, even if they were going to work—and the mother lost the kid. The system, Alice did and still does mutter to herself when she thinks about it: it is not meant for sustenance or maintenance, not meant to keep children with their parents; it is punitive and unfair. She thinks about this each time the job proves again how limited her ability to help is. These are the few times she thinks she might want to burrow back into art and not be so exposed every day. Three days after the state took her son from her, the mother killed herself.
“We need to help her,” Kate says, whisking the eggs.
“Yes,” Tess says, annoyed she wasn’t the one to say this. “We should help her look.”
“I’ll take you,” Henry says to Alice. He’s come in from outside in just his jeans and T-shirt. Martin must have gone and told him.
“I’ll come,” Josh says. “I have a headlamp in my car.”
“It isn’t dark,” Tess snaps.
Kate looks at her. “Tess and I will stay back with the kids.”
Josh and Martin go upstairs to get socks and sweaters. It’s so gendered, all of a sudden, the Men going out to find, maybe to save, this little girl. Tess cuts thick slices of bread, eyes angled toward the children; Kate rolls the eggs slowly in the pan.
Alice is grateful no one stops to think more. If she just keeps all of them moving, acting, doing, maybe no one will bring up calling the cops again.
“It’s going to hail soon,” Josh says.
“We’ll pack coats,” says Henry. “I have a stack of umbrellas in the car.”
“Scary,” Kate says.
Tess jumps and almost says she’s sorry, but then instead they both pretend she didn’t jump. She resents the men, as they pull on their coats and boots. It’s self-delusion passed to them not just structurally but chemically: entitlement so deeply embedded they believe they can help solve any crisis. Their boots bound loudly out the door, keys and phones and wallets shoved in hands and pockets. Tess butters toast, then puts on jelly, puts it onto plates, and passes them to Kate to spoon the eggs over.
They pile into Henry’s truck, and Alice can’t figure out why Josh and Martin won’t stop talking. She hates how thrilled they seem, invigorated, while she can hardly breathe. Maddie’s missing, she wants to scream in each of their faces. But they don’t know her, this girl Alice loves but cannot talk about because she’s not hers.
“I can’t imagine it,” Tess says.
They both stay quiet, watching Colin grab his plate, then the twins. They both know, of course—yesterday morning, with Colin; every time at the playground when they couldn’t see them; those times the sitter did not immediately text back; sitting in the chair at the dentist, phone far away in their bag; running an errand, accidentally leaving the phone on the counter, reaching a hand in an empty pocket the whole time—both of them have spent every second that their kids have been alive imagining this type of loss.
Henry’s mostly quiet, driving. He looks at Alice a few times; she looks down, hot-faced, as if he knows, all of a sudden, that she loves Maddie more than she loves him. Josh goes on and on about establishing a perimeter. Alice feels certain that all the language he’s throwing out is straight from the hours she knows he spends—instead of helping with the children—unwinding from work, watching Law and Order: SVU.
The roads all wind, and Alice feels nauseous. She’s prone to car sickness, and usually when she and Henry drive together she’s the one to drive. She’s still not used to all the trees, the quiet, the looming mountains. When they started telling people they were moving up here, all anyone said was, It’s beautiful, or, It’s so quiet. When had everyone gotten together and decided these two things were valuable, necessary? If this were the city, and Maddie had gone missing, someone would already have found her, some kindly MTA employee would be waiting with her until Quinn arrived. Out here there’s no end to what might happen, what might snatch her, sting her, maul her, what she might have fallen from.
The kids all eat their breakfast, hardly talking. Tess keeps looking outside toward the woods, the barn, the street, where cars are coming one after the other. She looks at Kate, who looks at the children, down at her plate, her inert phone.
The sun is rising higher in the air when Josh, Henry, Martin, and Alice all file out of the truck. Quinn comes toward them. She looks small and young. Alice is twenty years her senior; Alice could, in fact, be Quinn’s mother. She wants to help her, make all of it better. Also, though, she wants to hold her by her shoulders and scream in her face, What did you do?
“It’s okay,” she says, as Quinn crumples into her. “We’ll find her.” She feels the men’s eyes on her, wondering, she thinks, why she’d make this promise. Why she’d say this thing that might turn out not to be true.
Quinn stiffens and backs away. “She took her coat,” she says. She’s stopped crying and is staring, clear-eyed, at Alice, eyes darting briefly to the men. “I thought for the first few hours that she had her phone. I have it, though. She left it here.”
Alice keeps her eyes toward the floor, thinking briefly, shamefacedly, of all the texts she’s sent.
Tess and Kate bundle the children up and take them outside. Tess is terrible at this part of parenting, the less clear, less structured parts: going outside to have fun. The boys immediately begin to fight, something about a shovel someone’s found that they all want to use, and Tess feels unmoored, unsure how to referee or who to take aside to talk to sternly, but Kate calls to them all that she has come up with a game: the older kids can be the sled dogs, she will be the sled; Jamie and Jack can be the drivers and ride on her back. Of course, the boys want to be dogs as well, and all five children mush and trudge on through the snow, howling and barking, happy, and Tess watches the strength and heft of Kate’s body, the way she bounds through the snow and the kids pile on her, and thinks she seems so much more capable, more powerful than Tess has ever been.
Quinn thinks, for the first time in a million years, that maybe she should have called her mother. These people cannot help her. She thinks of all the times she’s opened up her phone and scrolled in search of someone who might help.
A plan is hatched somehow. The men ask questions. Henry looks back and forth between Alice and Quinn. Alice stands close to Quinn and touches her three times—once her shoulder, twice her arm by her wrist. Quinn flinches only the first and second time. She stands separate from them and says Maddie likes the woods and this is where she thinks she went but this is also where she’s spent the whole night looking for her. There is no naming of the Hudson, which is so close Quinn thinks that she can smell it, though she would not be able to say what the smell is. Soot, wet dirt, whatever fish smell like when they’re frozen under for the winter; maybe, also, what she smells is fear. Everybody’s phone is charged, the men say, and Josh and Martin will go in opposite directions in the woods on trails out toward the water; Henry will go up the mountain that’s part of a state park. Quinn and Alice will walk Main Street; most stores are still open, and they’ll look for Maddie subtly, not wanting to attract attention. They’ll climb the hill on the other side of town, will walk to the woods behind the school that also connects up, three miles straight through, to Alice and Henry’s house. The plan is that they’ll check in via text message every half hour, to report on their progress, any leads (Josh’s word), and, regardless, they’ll meet back here before dark.
Henry hands each of them a big umbrella.
“Might be a storm,” says Josh.
Quinn crosses her arms over her chest and feels Alice watch her: “Do you want . . .” Alice says, starting to take off her scarf.
“I’m fine,” Quinn says.
Kate takes Bea to pick up a few remaining extra groceries at the Food Town.
“I always forget how many eggs I need,” she said to Tess, then she looked sorry. “I’m awful,” she said. “Still fussing about my precious dinner.”
“We still have to eat,” Tess said.
Tess takes over with the children. She figures after a couple more hours in the snow they’ll be worn out enough to sit in front of the TV until this other child’s found. They’ve started their own game, and though it’s much warmer than the day before, the sky is gray and getting darker. The kids all laugh and run and pile over top of one another, and Tess tries not to think about how much time they have left until the storm. A whole half day will pass, and then she’ll bathe them all together; they’ll get dressed in the clothes Kate brought so she can get her picture; they’ll get dressed in the pajamas she sent a couple weeks ago. It was Helen who used to send the holiday pajamas, every year after Thanksgiving.
When all the kids are in their holiday pajamas, Tess will turn on an especially long movie and help chop things for Kate while they split a bottle of wine and pretend to like each other more than they do. Tess will try very hard not to bring up the house. As soon as they find this missing girl—because Tess has chosen to believe completely that this girl will be found—they’ll all celebrate and toast each other, toast the small ways they can still care for and love one another, no matter how awful at it all of them are.
Alice can’t think of what to ask Quinn. What were you thinking will not work, nor will it help find Maddie. She’ll be okay, she wants to say, but can’t.
“I shouldn’t be allowed to be a mother,” Quinn says. “They were probably right to take her from me when they did.”
“She loves you,” Alice says.
“Why’d she leave, then?”
Alice has no answer for that. She looks straight ahead and tries to visualize what finding Maddie will feel like. She tries imagining the feel of Maddie close to her again.
“I love her,” Quinn says, and now Alice sees that Quinn is crying. “She’s all I have.”
Alice thinks that she should pull her to her, that she should hold her arms and tell her that they’ll find her, but she doesn’t. They’re all implicated, Alice thinks, in whatever happens to Maddie now.
Up close, Tess likes Kate’s children better. Colin has so much fun, really, when his cousins are around. Stella gets annoyed with Bea and comes to sit with her. She’s too big to sit on Tess’s lap, but Tess pulls her up. Their coats swish and smush as Stella settles in.
“What’s happening?” Stella whispers.
“It’s almost Christmas,” Tess says. “We’re all together.”
“But something’s happening. Daddy and Uncle Henry left because something’s wrong.”
Colin falls, and both twins pile over top of him. Close by, the igloo sits untouched. Tess considers daring the boys to try and push it over, cave it in.
“Boys,” she calls instead, not loud enough.
“You were asleep?” Alice says. “When she left?”
“I never—” Quinn starts. Then she stops, pauses. “I left,” she says, not looking at Alice. “I put her to bed; she reads all night. I went out for half an hour.”
Alice clenches both fists in the pockets of her coat.
“I was—” Quinn says. “She had that phone.”
Maddie was one of Alice’s first cases. Quinn had just been hospitalized, Maddie had just been removed from the home. She was living in a foster home, and the first time she met Alice she told her a joke: Why should you never play cards in the jungle?
I don’t know, Alice answered.
Too many cheetahs, Maddie said.
Alice had laughed out loud.
With Quinn, it’s been less easy—Quinn, who clearly loves her child but seems sometimes ill-equipped, so young. Alice knows that there is no father in the picture, that Quinn is not in contact with her family. She knows how very lonely, even with Maddie, Quinn must be. How very lonely—even having Henry, her mother calling, Tess texting, so much more time and space and safety—Alice has been too.
She thinks: if it were her, if Maddie were hers, she would never have left her by herself.
The twins are squealing and yelling, and Tess can’t see Colin anymore beneath the snow. She sets Stella down and tries not to run or yell as she pulls them off and lifts Colin out from under them.
“Stop it,” he says, angry.
“You can’t be in the snow like that.”
“We’re playing.”
“Play something else.”
“Bitch,” her son whispers. The twins both titter, shocked, their faces at first thrilled, then, as she stares at them, red and still.
She turns back to her son, grabs his face and holds it close to hers. He looks scared and she whispers to him: “Just know whatever you put into the world you can’t take back.”
The town is a single street, and many of the shops are closed. Alice doesn’t spend much time here. There are four antique shops, a coffee shop, a restaurant she’s never been inside with a purple sign and a poor approximation of vines that she thinks are meant to suggest Italy. There’s snow, hard and gray and stepped in, packed against the curbs and on the edges of the sidewalk. In summer, the place fills up with tourists from the city and there’s another restaurant, with a small porch built onto the sidewalk, that serves passable omelets and frittatas and has a line out the door from April until after the first snow. It’s all empty now, most of the shops closed. They pass the only bar: the flash of TV through the dark window, the smell of cigarettes and beer.
They walk another block and pass the gas station and are already mostly out of town. The elementary school is another block up a steep hill, and the plan is to check the yard behind it; behind that is a graveyard and then acres of parks that they’ll trudge through toward Alice’s. The terrain back there is rocky and uneven, ridges that jut up and out. When Alice and Henry have gone for hikes, they’ve had to take breaks, find sticks to reallocate their weight and steady themselves on their way down. Maddie’s sturdy, though, and her center of gravity is lower. Both Alice and Henry are tall.
The school looks sad and empty, red brick with big, square windows. It’s the middle and the high school too. Alice and Quinn climb the steps on the side of the school and walk through a small garden that Alice knows the town raised money to help build. They pass the basketball court, covered in snow, and arrive at the playground. They each hold one side of the metal railing. Alice looks down and sees that Quinn’s shoes aren’t waterproof.
The kids are sweating, and Tess brings them back inside, all of them, hot and damp underneath their coats and sweaters. It’s been hours, she thinks, should be dark soon, but she checks her phone and sees it’s not yet noon. Kate comes in with Bea, and they unload the groceries. Tess turns on the TV and the kids sit in front of it, splayed: Colin upside down, his head hanging off the couch, Jack’s legs stretched across his brother’s lap.
“Any word?” asks Kate, as if she didn’t have her phone with her, as if somehow, a signal would have been sent back only to Tess.
“Nothing,” Tess says.
“I guess it hasn’t been that long.”
“She’s been missing since last night.”
“Who?” Bea asks.
“Go watch the movie, duck,” Kate says.
“Who’s missing?” Bea says.
“No one, ducky.” Kate looks at Tess as if she’ll have an answer.
“Aunt Alice had to go look after one of the kids she helps,” Tess says.
“Why did Dad go with her?”
“To be helpful.”
“Where are her parents?”
“Her mom just needed help,” Tess says.
“Go watch the show,” Kate says.
“It’s stupid,” Bea says.
“Bea,” Kate says, more sternly.
“Kate,” says Bea.
Tess looks away, flinching.
“Bea,” Kate says again. She pulls her daughter to her, then holds Bea’s shoulders and pushes her away. “Don’t be a brat.”
Bea walks out.
The men stand by the water.
“If she’s out there,” Josh says.
Martin holds up his hand. He needs Josh not to say it. If she’s out there, there is no going in to get her. If she’s out there, she won’t ever be found.
Josh and Martin have been walking mostly silently, Josh reading his compass, checking the incoming storm on the radar on his phone. Josh looks more competent out here than he does in the kitchen. Martin thinks Tess is so much better, generally, at executing whatever needs to be executed; he wonders if she should be here instead. He thinks the only reason she and Kate sent them was because they didn’t trust them alone with their own children. Tess leaves him alone plenty with the children, but she’d never let them be alone with Josh.
For a long time, after their dad died, Martin had felt separate from Henry and Kate and Helen, if only because he’d felt like it was his job to take charge. This was wrong, of course, because it was Helen, not him, who’d taken over, but Martin, as the eldest, had felt at least as if he should try. He didn’t cry like his siblings at the funeral; he didn’t let their mother take him in for months as she had Kate.
For years, Martin smoked cigarettes because it was one sure thing that could make Helen angry. He was petulant like that, could be, and he wondered if it was catching up to him now. Now he looks at his family and sees them as a small good gift. They aren’t perfect: they fight, and maybe none of them would have become friends if they’d not been forced their whole lives to be together as a family. But they love each other and they like each other well enough.
“We’ll take another trail back to town,” says Martin. “In case . . .”
“The mother should have called someone,” Josh says. They’ve known each other twenty years, and Martin can’t remember now a single thing he knows about Josh that he didn’t learn from Kate or Helen.
“She called us,” Martin says.
The twins fall asleep, which might mean trouble later; Stella and Colin and Bea lie worn out and crooked on the couch. Tess cuts apples, and Kate rolls out the pie dough.
“You think she’s okay?” Kate says.
“I don’t know,” Tess says. “It was cold last night.”
“Why do you think she’d leave?” Kate asks. “Did Alice say before this . . .”
“I don’t think Alice goes in unless something’s wrong.”
“You think the mom . . . ?”
Tess doesn’t answer. She pours the apples into a bowl and mixes flour and butter and sugar.
Kate says: “Isn’t there always something wrong?”
Two months ago, Kate had called Tess crying. I miss her, she said. I know, said Tess. Are you okay? I miss her, Kate repeated. I can’t. Tess was walking into court, had files in her arms, a client beside her. Kate? she said. Honey? I need to call you back. She thought maybe she would tell the client the call had been from one of her kids. Tess had called back, on her walk home from the subway, but Kate hadn’t answered. She’d called again the next day: still no answer. Neither of them had brought up the crying the next time they talked.
Any luck? Alice texts Henry. She knows, of course, he would have called her. But she needs affirmation they’re still out there. She wants to be reminded that more people are looking to find Maddie than just her and Quinn.
No sign. I’m almost to the river.
You think that means she wasn’t out there?
I have no idea.
“What’d they say?” Quinn says, peeking through Alice’s armpit at the phone.
“No sign,” Alice says.
“Where the fuck,” Quinn says, “could she have gone?”
“How are the kids liking school?” Tess asks. Kate knows Tess knows already that Jack has always had a hard time, that Jamie is fine, a strong reader, that Bea is, perhaps, a prodigy in math. She knows about the switch to Montessori because Helen told her, and then Kate yelled at Helen. Kate knows that Tess is trying not to talk about the house.
The pie is in the oven; the turkey, bought from a local farmer, has been cooking in the basement oven since Kate went down to put it in at five. The house feels warm and smells like Christmas, the Christmas Kate’s known her whole life and wants so much to give her kids.
“We separated the boys this year,” she says.
“Seems smart,” Tess says. She slices the potatoes and lays them in a pan with cheese and egg and breadcrumbs, not how Kate would do it, but not awful.
“Bea doesn’t have a lot of friends,” Kate says. “I worry about that.”
“We worry,” Tess says. “It’s our job.”
“She’s not interested in other people. It feels sad or something. A little creepy sometimes.” Kate feels bad for saying this last part out loud.
Tess brushes the stray breadcrumbs into the trash.
“She just disappears when she’s right there.” Kate picks a piece of cheese up off the cutting board and eats it. She still has sugar on her fingers, and the flavors mix. “She throws tantrums, too, and I think she’s too old to throw tantrums.”
“Your brother still throws tantrums.”
Kate looks at her and laughs, thinking: not like Josh’s. “The kids are big but they’re not big really. I feel like they’re at this strange, hard stage where they only need more of me, except their needs are more well hidden, so it’s harder for me to know how to help.”
Tess nods. “I think that all the time—like, if I could just stay with Colin to remind him to pay attention and to be kind. If I could just have tattooed on Stella’s arm that not everything’s her fault.”
Kate gets a bottle of wine from the fridge and uncorks it. “I need it for the gravy,” she says, half apologetically. “But not all of it.”
Tess gets two wine glasses, and Kate fills them up.
Alice and Quinn walk a path past the graveyard. It’s an acre lot, no more. Old stones lean back and sideways. All the trees around are bare. They enter the marked trail, where the snow is deeper.
“Blue diamonds,” Quinn says. “When we come up here we do the blue diamond trail.”
Alice isn’t sure if this means they should stay on it or avoid it. It’s white and gray around them. The sun’s higher in the sky, but the sky’s filled up with clouds, and the whole world looks blank and sad.
“Mom?!?” they hear from the main room.
“Yes,” both Kate and Tess say, not sure whose kid it was.
“We’re hungry.”
“We’ll eat soon.”
“We’re hungry now.”
“You just had breakfast.”
“We’re growing kids,” Bea says.
“Who knows how long they’ll be,” Kate says, nodding toward the window.
“Come in here,” Tess says. “I’ll cut you up some—”
“I don’t want fruit,” says Colin.
“Just come in here,” Tess says.
The white of the snow and the gray brown of the bare tree branches, the sound of boots and shoes in snow: Alice thinks all of a sudden that maybe she should paint this. That one day, when all of this is over, she’ll make a small charcoal of this scene; she’ll give it to Maddie. She thinks maybe, when this is over, she’ll take Maddie home with her; how could Quinn think, really, after this, that she should be in charge. Immediately, Alice feels sick and sad for thinking this, but also, it niggles in her body, in her brain, as she walks next to Quinn.
“You were smart to not become a mother,” Quinn says.
Alice thinks that if she buries her, right here in the snow, no one will know; no one will look for her. She’ll find Maddie by herself.
The kids have two bags of chips Tess found in the pantry. Stella has a peanut butter sandwich—she never gets peanut butter at home because Colin is allergic and Tess won’t allow it, and she’s only let her have it now because she’s in a chair across the room and promised promised promised that she’ll wash her face and hands as soon as she’s done—and Bea has a bowl of the leftover apples cut up for the pie.
“My life is mostly making snacks,” Kate says.
Tess laughs.
“I envy you, though,” Kate says. “Having a place to go, a reason to put on a bra.”
“I envy you all the time you get with them,” Tess says.
They’re both lying. Kate knows Tess often misses bedtime. Tess can’t fathom what she’d do at home all of the time. Once, before she had kids, at a firm dinner with one other female lawyer and three of the male partners and their wives, one of the wives told Tess she was thinking of going back to work as a teacher. She said: You can only unload the dishwasher so many times. Tess has friends who stay home, and they do lots of other things that maybe she’d do also: they cook and meet for coffee, go to museums, write postcards to politicians. She thinks she might go crazy if she had to be alone with herself that much.
The path flattens out, and the trees have gotten thicker. The air’s so sharp, it feels cleaner, fresher; the wind has picked up, branches crack and bristle. Every ten-ish minutes, Quinn hears the far-off sound of a car whooshing past.
“I wanted to be a mother,” Alice says.
Quinn stays quiet. She’s dumb, she thinks. Always assuming. Almost every time she talks when she’s with Alice, she thinks later she would like to take it back.
“I wanted to be a mother,” Alice repeats. “But I couldn’t.”
“I’m sorry,” Quinn says. Stupid, pithy. Quinn’s the one whose kid is missing.
“All I wanted was to be a mother for a long time, and now I feel like maybe I’m just nothing since I’m not.”
“You helped us,” Quinn says. She feels silly saying this, annoyed she still feels obligated to be nice.
“Of course,” Alice says.
They’ve reached the top of a hill and can see bare trees and snow but no Maddie.
Where the fuck is Maddie? Quinn thinks; she feels so close all of a sudden to crying, or to falling, the not knowing, all the blank where Maddie could be stretched out and white and gray, and Quinn is scared. She can see Maddie’s tiny body, how it looks solid even up close—stout legs and arms, that perfect belly. But also, how little she still is.
Quinn grabs hold of Alice’s arm without thinking, feels Alice loop her arm in Quinn’s.
“We want to go outside,” says Colin.
He smells grown-up, sweat and chip grease.
“We’re trying to make dinner,” Tess says.
“We’re bored,” he says.
“We can watch them out the window,” Kate says.
Tess feels her body clench, but the kids are already piling toward the mudroom to get their coats and boots.
The clouds have gotten heavier and darker. Tess opens the mudroom door and feels a gust of wind come through. “I don’t know,” she says.
“Come on, Tess,” Kate says. “It’s the backyard. Just let them go.”
Tess holds tight to her wine and drinks what’s left while watching the kids pile out the door, the clouds blue and gray and purple. Behind her, Kate goes back in the kitchen toward the stove.
“I need . . .”
Alice wants to ask Quinn not to ask her. She wants to say without saying that she’ll protect her, that she won’t report her. She wants not to say it in case later she decides she wants to take it back. She wants to be good at her job, to see through to another side in which Maddie and Quinn are people that she serves, a family that she helps, and not something that she wishes she could keep for herself. She thinks again of Laurie, the other mother whose kid she took from her, the way her hands were folded in front of her chest, pleading, desperate, the way they fell, limp and helpless, to her side when Alice told her she’d have to remove her son.
“I love her,” Quinn says.
“I know you do.”
What Alice doesn’t say but thinks: What if you’re still not enough?
“What is it?” Kate says. The prep is done, and they sit now together in the kitchen, perched on stools, their elbows resting on the wood-block island. Kate pours them both another glass of wine. “What makes you so scared?”
“What do you mean?” Tess says.
“You’re so on them.” Kate takes two gulps of wine.
“You’re saying this while a little girl is missing.”
“She’s Alice’s charge for a reason.”
“So then it’s this woman’s fault? That her little girl is gone?”
“Of course not. This isn’t that. I’m just saying, if your kids skip a bath, they won’t die.”
“Kids need structure,” Tess says.
“Sure. I just . . . kids need independence also. It doesn’t always have to be so hard.”
“It’s different,” Tess says. “When both parents have jobs.”
Oh, fuck you, thinks Kate.
Quinn should have seen it coming. Their arms are no longer looped, and there’s a layer of ice under the snow, and when Alice slips she falls out of Quinn’s grasp before Quinn knows her feet have lost hold. The upper right side of Alice’s head catches on a low-hanging branch, and the skin on her forehead rips, is broken open. There are stark red blotches on the snow, blood from her head, before she’s even fully planted there.
“Fuck,” says Quinn. “Alice.” She doesn’t want to have to be the grown-up. “Alice, are you okay?”
“Fuck,” says Alice, her hands in the snow, staring down at the bright red.
“What are your parents doing for Christmas?” Kate asks, which is a way to hurt Tess that can’t be held against her later on.
“They’re with my sisters, I guess,” says Tess.
This always shocks Kate, to remember that Tess has sisters, when she’s obviously so bad at it.
“Annie puts them all up at her place,” Tess adds. “My mom loves it. Annie’s so rich.”
But you’re rich, Kate wants to say, though Tess won’t admit it; Tess is one of those rich people who likes to say she’s middle class. Kate blames New York for this—no matter how rich you are, there are plenty of people in the city who are richer.
“How’s Colin this year?” Kate asks, which is another dig, subtler, but also, she likes Colin and she hopes he’s doing better.
“They want us to medicate him,” Tess says.
Kate nods. She has thought before, if she just waits to see what Tess does, what the doctors tell her she should do with Colin, maybe then she’ll know how to help Jack.
“I’m just afraid,” Tess says. “If you read all the books, everyone is sure except for you. Like, one guy says it’s abuse not to medicate him; another says it’s administering amphetamines to children—which it is—which a lot of people get addicted to. Some say it’s the beginning of the ride to opioid abuse. I read this book that said that kids in West Virginia and Virginia, all the kids addicted to opioids, they were taught at a young age that drugs were the answer, so then they just took other ones when the ones the doctors gave them didn’t work. Maybe it’s capitalist bullshit, but then, these are the systems that we’re stuck with. I’m capitalist bullshit. I can’t just wait for him to fail, you know?”
“What do you think, though?”
“I’m not a doctor.”
“You’re his mother.”
“I think the only way to actually keep him safe is to never let him out into the world.”
“Are you okay?” Quinn asks again. Her face is so much like Maddie’s.
Alice’s forehead stings, her whole head aches. It’s a strange sensation, watching the blood drip from her head; it’s bright and vivid. Her wrists feel sore; they twisted as she fell and they’re raw from the snow. She reaches up again to touch the blood.
She hates her body, she remembers briefly. Her body is a failure, and this is only further proof of that. She’s the one with the good shoes. The grown-up. But then here she is: on the ground. As if the fact that she’s older, trained to provide comfort and safety to other humans in moments of extreme duress, is worthless, really, in the face of a patch of ice and this small branch.
You’re going to get wet, she thinks, staring at Quinn. She thinks maybe she should scold her. If she scolds her, she’ll feel more like she’s in charge again.
“We went to Starbucks, the other day,” Kate says. She feels bad now. She shouldn’t have brought up Tess’s family, Colin’s medication. They’re on their third glass of wine.
“The drive-thru wasn’t working,” she says. “I drive half an hour out of the way to go to the Starbucks with a drive-thru so I don’t have to get them all out of the car. I spent hours driving around when they were little, did you know that? They only ever slept in the car, and I would drive for hours. It was the only time of day I really liked. I’d treat myself to a latte, sometimes a cookie; I’d listen to music, drive till they woke up. But anyway, the other day, I took them to my old favorite Starbucks, and they were awake but they were strapped in at least, and it felt like a break. Josh is so freaked out about screen time. I told them we were doing errands, which means nothing to them except that probably we’ll drive a while, and I decided to treat myself to a latte like old times. But the fucking drive-thru was closed—who even closes a drive-thru? I guess it was broken or something. So we had to go inside. Bea’s in a booster now, and she got out on her own while I climbed into the back to get Jack, who sits in the third row because otherwise he kicks the other two. So I got them all out, and no one got hit by a car, and I was relieved but also I was yelling the whole time. A young couple gawked at me—you know the way people do when they don’t have kids yet, and they look so certain that they’ll do it better when it’s them? We went in, and of course there was a line, and I almost walked right back out, but the night before Jack had wet his bed, and I hadn’t been able to get back to sleep after, so I was beat and I was desperate for a coffee. So I bribed them. I told them that if they behaved they’d all get a treat. I use food too much probably. But maybe food’s emotional regardless. So I said, if you behave for this ten minutes that we have to stay in line, I’ll get you a cake pop when we get to the front. Bea’s on it, you know? She loves the double chocolate. But the twins forget within seconds, and Jamie knocks over a coffee mug, which mercifully doesn’t break, and Jack keeps running into the guy in front of us, and I grab hold of both of them and threaten that they’re about to lose the treat, except I can’t actually take the treat away because then they’ll scream and, also, there’s still so much line left. And then Jack has to go to the bathroom, and so we lose our place in line, and the fucker in front of us, who Jack really only tapped but who clearly either doesn’t have kids or just doesn’t parent them, looks so obviously relieved. So I get them all on the toilet and off and wash their hands, and they all manage to touch the garbage can before we leave the bathroom, and I’m sweating in my coat and now I have to pee but I don’t because I don’t think all three of them can keep their hands off everything for the thirty seconds it will take me, but then at the last minute I decide to, and then Jack opens the door and this older woman is standing waiting for the bathroom and I just stare at her, my pants down and grabbing for Jack and almost peeing on myself. The point is—you know. Parenting. So we get back in the line, and the baristas all look like they’re about to cry, and someone’s yelling because their kid’s hot chocolate is too hot, and then the boys hear that there’s hot chocolate and they want that in addition to the treat they shouldn’t even have, and we finally get to the front and they hit each other and I’m still threatening them with not getting a treat even though I’ve ordered them already, and I’m paying and the barista’s gone to make my drink, and, Jack—I’m not looking, but I also see him, you know, because I have to, he’s not a kid that you can ever stop at least partially knowing where he is—I don’t think I fully register it until later, but I do in fact see him slip two chocolate milks in my bag as I pull my card out of the machine and the barista comes back with my latte, but no one else has seen him, and I’m so fucking tired, and I don’t want him to start screaming, and I just want to get the fuck out of there because everyone is looking at us, so we just leave.”
Kate’s face is hot now, and she can’t believe how long she’s been talking. The sun is lost behind the clouds, which are thick and white and blank. The kids keep running, playing, jumping; she’s counted them at least a hundred times while she’s been talking. Three, four, five, she thinks, scanning small heads over and over. One, two, three, four, five.
“I stole them,” she says. “I just let him steal them. I am a constant, total shit show of a mother. I didn’t give them to him. But I also didn’t say anything to him. I let them sit in my purse all day and then I threw them away.”
They use Alice’s scarf to stop the bleeding. It’s still bleeding, but it’s no longer a gush. It has to clot, Quinn thinks, though she can’t say how she knows this. They’re both still seated in the snow, and it’s only now that Quinn realizes they’re both soaking wet. It’s started to rain. Quinn’s fingers are so cold.
“You okay?” Quinn asks, which is the only thing that she seems capable of asking.
Neither of them opens their umbrellas.
“We have to move,” Alice says.
Quinn’s jeans are wet straight through, and her skin has gone from wet and cold to sharp and stung. Alice is also wearing jeans and she looks just as cold. Quinn thinks briefly that she should google frostbite, hypothermia, how to keep warm when you’re soaking wet in cold and snow. But they don’t have any other clothes, and whatever their phones tell them will not help. It’s warmer than it could be, warm enough that the rain isn’t ice but wet.
She thinks of Maddie, hypothermia and frostbite. They have to walk, one foot then the next.
Alice’s hand is on her scarf, stopping the blood. Quinn stuffs hers deep in her coat pockets to get warm. She tells herself they just have to get back to the house and hope that somehow in the meantime Maddie’s found. That she’s okay, that, even though this woman tasked with taking care of both of them has fallen, is hurt, that Maddie’s somewhere out there and she’s fine. She’s dry and safe and warm.
Tess thinks that she should touch Kate, hold her. She wants to tell her that she, Tess, is a cold, withholding asshole and that’s the only reason they aren’t closer, that it is absolutely not Kate’s fault that Tess is mostly too closed off to feel close to anyone.
Quinn tries not to let Alice see Quinn looking at her. Alice’s face is drained. Her arm holding the scarf up to her head looks thin and limp beneath her coat. Quinn’s not sure how far they are from Alice’s, though she’s driven slowly past it. She found Alice’s address online, and it felt only fair.
“Why would she have left?” Quinn says. What she is thinking is that it’s raining, and they can’t see well through the rain. If Maddie is out here and wet, if she fell like Alice did, what will happen to her then?
“What were you guys talking about yesterday?” Alice asks.
Quinn thinks briefly of her mom. “Space,” she says.
Alice checks her scarf, which is soaked now, takes off her gloves.
“We’re not going to find her,” Quinn says.
Alice stays quiet while she holds the scarf back up to her head. “We’re close to my house,” she says, finally. “The rain will stop.”
“This girl I know,” Tess says. The wind picks up again, and they watch the kids watch it. The wetness in the air has raised the temperature, and Colin and Bea have both taken off their coats. It’s started to rain, but neither Tess nor Kate has gone outside to tell them to put the coats back on. Tess hopes the little girl is somewhere warm.
“I don’t even know her,” Tess says. “We went to high school together, and she was much cooler than me. This woman, not girl. Her baby died. I saw it on the internet. I don’t ever go on Facebook, and then one night I couldn’t sleep and went on Facebook, and there were all these posts. Like there was some alert because of how many reactions or comments or whatever. It was a car accident. You don’t actually think about car accidents. Or I don’t. We hardly ever drive. I’m so scared to fly but I never think about the car as dangerous. We spend so much time pretending that they’re safe, but they aren’t. The fucking world is burning, and we spend all of our time worrying about whether our kids will get into the right schools, summer camps, whatever. We spend so much time worried that something awful that we can’t name will happen, but then we mostly ignore all the very real things that are everywhere, that we know are just in front of us. All those times I was texting in the car. Those fevers they had that went too high, but it was the middle of the night and I didn’t want to bring them to the doctor, I was too tired to go to the ER. When they fall and hit their heads and you just hope—you read that shit about how, actually, concussions aren’t as specific or as consequential as they sound. Anyway, this girl I know, she was a cheerleader in high school. It doesn’t matter, but we weren’t friends. We’re in our forties; I haven’t known her since we were seventeen. We’ve probably had five or ten conversations in our lives, and we’re Facebook friends. And then her baby died, and she was posting all this stuff about her grief on the internet. Going through it for everyone to see. It fucked me up, I guess. I had to stare at it all the time—at work, at home, making dinner. Stell and Colin would be right there in front of me, alive, completely fine, and I’d be scrolling through the condolences people had written to this woman for a kid I’d never even seen, and sometimes I’d start to cry. I’d grab hold of the children—I probably scared them. I’d tell them I loved them. And they’d look at me like kids look, you know, when they think you’re acting strange. Sure, Mom. Colin has gotten pretty masterful at rolling his eyes. I looked at this little girl over and over. She was twenty-nine months old. I thought about what that might be like, tried to imagine each of those months, all the months and years after. I looked at the dad’s Facebook and the aunts’ and uncles’. Grandparents’. I envied this girl, in that vague way all girls envy girls like her in high school. Small and thin and pretty, you know? Her husband was driving when it happened, and I watched a whole year wondering if she’d leave him. They had an older child, another girl. The mother posted about her grief for months and then suddenly she went quiet, and then when she came back she started posting about all the ways that her baby was with her—in a cloud or rainbow, you know, stuff I don’t believe in. But I wanted to believe that she believed it. I was addicted to it. Until I guess I wasn’t any longer. I haven’t looked at it in months. It was all I thought about, and then work got busy. Summer started. Kids, life, blah blah. It wasn’t quite real—and yet . . .”
She picks up her phone again as if maybe she’ll check on this woman right now. She thinks of Alice and Martin, Josh and Henry, out there, but no one’s called or texted; her screen is an old picture of the children, two years younger, hugging one another, making faces. She sets the phone back down.
Kate passes her the wine bottle.
Tess pours her glass full, and they both stare out the window at the children. Bodies piled over bodies. They can’t hear them, but their mouths move, laughing, squealing, maybe screaming.
“It’s luck,” Tess says, her eyes set on the flush of one of the twins’ cheeks as he runs close to the window. “The whole thing. Dumb fucking luck.”
“I’m golden, with a purple mane and tail and a horn that shoots lightning,” says Stella. It’s raining, but the kids don’t care.
“I’m that too,” says Jamie.
“No copying!”
“I breathe fire,” says Bea. “And ice!”
“I’m the ruler version of the birds that Uncle Henry made,” says Colin.
“You’re not my ruler, though,” says Bea.
“Everybody has to have wings,” says Stella, “so we can fly.”
“And sleeping darts,” says Jack, reaching behind his back as if he had a backpack. “So we can smite our enemies.”
The rain stings both their faces. Alice thinks she needs Quinn to walk and not to think and so she talks. “The fourth time I was pregnant I named her,” she says. “I wasn’t far enough along for anyone to tell me the sex—who knows. But in my head they were all girls. I named her, the fourth one—Penelope. After this writer. Anyway. I said the name sometimes, out loud when I was by myself. I had learned to be better at not hoping, but I still did. It was so stupid, but I did. I saw friends and walked around the city. I went to my studio and sat for hours imagining her. The last thing that I painted was her, them. I mean, I never saw them. It was swirls. I painted after Penelope and before the last one. It was so obviously wrong, two dimensions and a bunch of colors. I understood for the first time how very little what I made could hold.”
What Alice doesn’t name is the shame that she felt so often at the end, before she quit. All those years of all those predawn hours. All those years of pots of coffee and paint stains on her fingers, her whole body aching from the work, not able even to hear what Henry said when she got home. All those years of her head down and smiling and pretending when she went to parties, angling for her work to get shown. And then to have her dreams come true: a show, attention, positive reviews—to see so clearly all at once: some mentions in a section of the newspaper that hardly anybody read; all those people at her opening, their plastic glasses filled with wine, their empty nods; and none of it adding up to anything, no one seeing, grasping, truly understanding what she spent so long making, so long laying out. It was the babies but it was also everything around her—all that talk with Henry about the climate, reading the fucking news, people dying, suffering, and her still pouring everything she had into paint and form, tearing up and gluing together canvas scraps: the extraordinary shame she felt when she finally saw how little, really, her work mattered. How embarrassing, to have ever thought that it might matter; how little any of it was worth.
“I miss her so much,” Kate says.
“Me too,” says Tess.
Kate had promised herself not to lionize Helen after her death. She had, at various points in her life, and to the detriment not only of herself but also of her relationship to her mother, lionized Helen while she was alive. Helen was a forceful presence, whip-smart, well-read, loving. She was also critical, too quick to assume, often very loud. In high school, Kate had hated her. This was unsurprising—mothers and their daughters—but Kate’s hatred had felt deeper, purer, than that of her friends. It was the first time she’d been able to glimpse her mother not as caretaker but as rival: her mother picking books for her, picking clothes for her, because of what these choices might say about them both. Her mother was an intellectual in a place where no one valued intellectuals. She loved this about herself, and Kate did not. Kate wanted only to be like all the other girls, her mother to be like all the other mothers. She hated her mother’s commitment to, her investment in, quality and taste—what Kate thought of and saw, at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, as ways to alienate herself. But then, of course, she got older. But then, of course, her mother was—and who could say things like this as a grown-up person without feeling embarrassed, infantilized, but also, Kate and Helen thought and said it proudly, not least to one another—Kate’s closest friend.
“She was so fucking loud,” Kate says. The kids are still outside playing, and it’s warm inside. “She never didn’t have an opinion, was always in our shit. I think I thought when I moved away I’d have some sort of buffer. It was one thing to talk on the phone every day, another to have her coming over to tell me I shouldn’t leave the house without a bra on, taste testing my lentils, telling me the dinner I made was bland. But then I missed it. Like some sort of masochistic baby. Her voice felt so much a part of me that I didn’t even need her in the room to know she thought my fucking food was bland.” Kate sits quiet, looking out the window; the children running. One, two, three, four, five, she thinks. “I know you all think I’m silly. Josh says I have to move on. It’s boring, how sad I am. Just about everybody in the world has to survive losing their mother. And how fucking lucky we were to have her. She used to ask the girls in my class who weren’t my friends to be friends with me. We’d see them at the grocery store or the beach or something, and she’d introduce me to them, as if we didn’t see each other every day and they just didn’t like me. They liked her! They didn’t even know her, but they liked her, and she’d pull me over as if she could force them to be my friends after all. She was on my side, I guess, is the point. Which, like, again—sure, fine, who cares. But she’s the only person in the world who ever saw me the way she saw me, who loved me like that, who remembered me as all the things I’d ever been and also thought of me as all the things she still thought I might become . . . It feels harder—fucking terrifying—that there is no longer any person in the world who loves me like she did.”
“Stop it!” Bea says. “We’re not supposed to run that way.”
“Let’s go to the barn,” says Colin.
“I don’t like it there.”
“We need a cave,” says Stella. “We need somewhere to trap our enemies.”
“I used to take the train down to the city on my days off,” Quinn says. She knows Alice is trying to distract her. She puts one hand on Alice’s arm and loops her other arm around her waist. She still doesn’t like her. But they’re out here together. She thinks maybe if she talks long enough about her daughter, Maddie will appear. “This lady,” she says, “used to watch Maddie when I worked, but I never knew what I was supposed to do with her all that other time. I had a good stroller someone gave me, one of my old coworkers at the restaurant got it from her rich cousin. I took the train down to Manhattan. Off-peak. When the conductor came by I’d nurse Maddie and, if it was a guy, he’d just say no worries, he’d come back, but he’d never come back. I took her to the Met because you got to pick how much you paid and I’d pay a dollar. The ladies at the desks sometimes would look at me funny, but what the fuck did they know about my life. I spent hours in there. I’d never been to a museum, at least not one like that. I wanted her to have all that stuff inside her. Like, I thought it would just stick. I thought maybe then she’d think she was a person who had a right to stuff like that. It sounds dumb, maybe, but you know that big room with all the sculptures and the light? In the front, when you first walk in, there are these little-kid statues chasing birds that always freaked me out. But I’d sit in there, take her out of the stroller and face her forward on my lap. I thought she liked it. I guess it’s like your job to think your kid is smart; she couldn’t even talk yet, but I was pretty sure she got it. I thought she’d explain it to me when she got big. She’d babble a lot at the hieroglyphics, the big old portraits. Those weird ones? Jean Dubuffet? She had opinions. Just like she still has opinions.” Quinn almost smiles. “Fuck,” she says. “Fuck fuck.”
What Quinn doesn’t say is that that whole time, on those trips to the museum, Quinn was also going to the city to buy heroin. She could buy it close by, too, but she went down there so she would buy it less often than she wanted. What she doesn’t say is sometimes her dealer asked to hold her daughter, and she let him. She left Maddie in the room and went into a bathroom and shot up while he did. That he was completely fine, a person; Maddie almost never cried when she left her with him; she was only gone a small amount of time—but that then, like now, she’d pretended not to acknowledge how often she needed, wanted, to get some time away. Ignoring the consequences. What Quinn doesn’t say is that sometimes she hates being a mother, even as she loves Maddie, and she’s worried now that that’s why Maddie’s gone. She doesn’t tell Alice that she thinks maybe she was a better mother after she shot up. She doesn’t tell her that addiction is compulsion, an act of filling all the gaping holes where love and care might be but are not. She knows that she’s already failed Maddie. Even more shameful, though, than the ways she’s failed, the ways she knows she always will: somewhere, far away, the thought exists inside Quinn’s brain that if Maddie’s really gone, then Quinn can finally fully disappear herself.
Stella is the fastest, Jack right behind, then Colin, then Jamie, then Bea. They bound and trudge, and both twins fall, and Colin grabs the back of Stella’s coat to slow her. Stop! he says. Wait for me! Bea helps the twins up, and they are once again all five bounding forward. Where are we going? Jack says. We’re flying! says Bea.
The clouds have gotten darker, thicker. They’re bright somehow, because it’s still daytime, but Tess hasn’t seen the sun for hours. Sometimes, in Florida with Helen, swimming in the ocean, Tess would get a rush of fear: when she couldn’t touch the bottom, when the kids weren’t within her reach, even though they both knew how to swim. She’d have to still herself, to focus her eyes on both the kids and remind herself to stay steady, to call to Martin to keep his eyes on them so she could go back to shore. She’d call to Helen and to Kate and Alice, tell them she was going running and could they help Martin—trusting herself least of all to keep anybody safe—and then she’d leave them, change into her sports bra and shorts, and go for a run all by herself.
“I was jealous of you,” Tess says. “I guess. It’s all so predictable. But she was yours.” The wine bottle is empty. Tess has her feet up on the stool next to her; her arms are wrapped around her shins. She says, “I don’t understand intimacy. I’ll always be pretending. I was jealous of how entitled you all felt to her—like you just knew she would make herself available to you if and when you needed. I probably bitched about it to Martin, but mostly I was just so blood-spittingly jealous. Mostly I just wished that she was mine like that.” Tess doesn’t look at Kate. She wants to tell her the truth, but she can’t do it if she has to remember Kate’s right there. “I was proud, I guess, too, that I had to do everything all on my own. But that didn’t mean I didn’t envy what I thought was the ease all of you had.” She wants to correct this because it’s not quite right. Of course she had help, all sorts. Her parents paid for college and for law school; they loved her, in their way. But she couldn’t talk to either of her sisters without feeling like they were in some competition in which only one of them would make it out alive. The love among them all was complicated, stunted, sometimes painful. She didn’t blame them, but when she saw Martin and his siblings with Helen, she understood how far from that they’d always been. This was not tragic, was the main thing. She’d yearned, she saw now, sometimes in her twenties, to be tragic. But she’d long since lost interest in waiting around to be saved. She won’t say this part out loud to Kate—she’s not quite capable of saying shame out loud. But what she wants Kate to know is that Helen was special. What she wants Kate to know is that, even as Tess and Helen got close over the years they spent together, Helen was not ever, could not ever be, Tess’s mom. There’s something irrevocable about what it must have been to have had that. It’s alive inside of all of them—Martin, Kate, and Henry—something strong and sure and solid that Tess will never have.
Alice is lightheaded. Maybe it’s not from blood loss but from what Quinn is saying, from the way her desperation’s only gotten thicker since they started walking, her fear has only gotten more intense. There’s so much white in front of them. The ice has hardened on top of the branches, and the snow sits on top of that. Bits of it drop down on them as they keep walking. It’s afternoon now, and the sun is high up in the air, and Alice thinks that if Maddie’s made it through the first night, there’s no way she survives another one. She can’t tell if she’s holding on to Quinn or Quinn is holding on to her. Her hands and her wrists ache. She reaches up to touch where the branch hit her and the blood is hard and crusted, already scabbing over. Her body, working, she thinks. She walks faster.
Quinn speeds up with her. If she doesn’t speed up just like Alice, if they don’t keep hold of one another, she, maybe both of them, will fall again.
They smell the smoke before they see it. They’ve been so busy keeping one eye on the children as they’re talking, they forgot to keep an eye on the stove. Kate had meant to check it every ten minutes; she doesn’t know this oven. Her dough is particular, specific.
The fire alarm goes off, and they’re both up. The smell of burning is strong all of a sudden, sharp and acrid. They both run to the stove, and Kate reaches in to grab the pie without a hot pad. She burns her palms and fingers and the pan clanks against the counter, the crust already black and crisp.
“Fuck,” Kate says. “Fuck. Fuck.”
Tess looks at her, then at the pie, which seems now to be crisping further.
“Fuck,” Kate says again. She starts to cry. It was, of course, Helen’s recipe. The apples she chose specially from their farmers’ market in Virginia, half sweet, half tart. She peeled all of them herself, only letting Tess and the children chop. When she ran her hands through the sugar and the butter, mixing, adding the corn starch Helen always recommended, she’d felt better than she had in weeks or months.
The alarm has not stopped beeping. Her hands shake, red and hot. She picks up the pie—the glass still hot, all those apples heavy in the pan. She throws it, hard and heavy, far across the room. The apples splat against the floor and wall and bits of juice spread across one of the cabinets. The glass is thick and clunks hard on the floor before it cracks.
Tess grabs one of the stools from the island to climb up and stop the beeping. She grabs at and untwists the fire alarm, but it won’t stop. She pulls at the batteries and takes them out, but that just causes another, slower beep that’s just as loud.
“Fuck,” Tess says, and throws the fire alarm against the wall as well.
The way the rain falls—steady, not quite hail, but cold and close to frozen—Alice has stopped registering it as wet so much as just the way her skin feels now. The snow gives more when they step than it did an hour ago. Shots of cloud and sky pop through the lines of branches, a blank, flat gray that only further brightens up the strips of white along the trees.
They think of the children at the same time. The smoke has spread and thinned, but the smell lingers. The broken pan and pie still splattered on the floor. Tess has hold of Kate’s shoulder but turns her body so she can sneak a look outside. She’s finally gotten the smoke alarm to stop.
The children aren’t there any longer. Tess stands and scans the length of the yard and the garden. The barn lights are off and the rain comes down in sheets and she can’t see where the children are. She hears the cars out front on the highway and she screams the names of both her children and she and Kate run outside without their coats.
Quinn knows that it’s Alice’s house because of those times she’s driven by here. She knows the barn, which looks different from the back than the little bit she saw when she drove by, curling her neck, going slowly—all the curtains kept wide open—thinking it was only fair, when every bit of her life was something Alice had already seen.
Tess and Kate run out to the road as if there wouldn’t have been squeals and screeching, tires, metal, glass, and sirens, as if their own bodies wouldn’t have cracked and broken as soon as the children were hurt, but they’re not there. The street is just a street, with cars driving past, the sound of ice and water splashing under tires. They look up and down in both directions, then run out to the back. They hear them soon enough, but it takes a while to figure out where they are.
“The fucking igloo,” Tess says.
Jamie pins Jack against the snow, and Bea and Colin burrow a hole beneath the inside wall, and Stella, who saw her first, sits cross-legged, face wet, hands in pockets, thrilled that there are now as many girls as there are boys among them, and asks her if she wants to play stinging birds and alicorns.
They’re a pile at first, and neither Kate nor Tess sees her. The kids are laughing at them, silly, frantic mothers. We were right here the whole time. Can you believe we all fit inside it? Look, Mom, one of them says. They’re not sure which mom the kids mean.
We found a girl.
She looks cold, but no bone or skin is broken. She looks tired. Her face is red, lips chapped. Resilient, Tess thinks, which is what her favorite teacher called her when she was in law school and which she stopped believing she was long ago.
“Madeleine?” Kate says.
The girl looks up at her, and the kids all stare like they never would have thought to ask her name.
Josh’s igloo has lost half a wall, and the lights are on upstairs, and Alice hears Tess as they come up past the barn. Alice reaches in her pocket for her phone and sees she has ten missed calls from Tess that she must not have felt because her hands and hips are numb.
“She’s here,” Tess yells.
Alice looks at Quinn, not willing to hope yet.
“Madeleine,” says Tess. “Alice, Madeleine is here.”
Alice stands there shocked, her forehead throbbing, afraid that she’ll start crying, and watches Quinn run into the house and up the stairs, and she stays still and listens as Quinn makes a sound unlike any sound Alice has ever heard a person make.