2

AFTER CHICAGO, AFTER EVERYTHING, IT WAS Virginia who first understood what had happened. She and Edward had watched the ten-o’clock news, which featured a report from the State Fair and the concert Emily was supposed to be attending as it had broken up, an hour before. These things took a long time to empty out, of course; and that much longer to find your car and drive home. Edward suggested they go upstairs and go to bed. Perhaps, he implied, they might make love. And they did, although Virginia seemed distracted; seemed to be gazing at some mark or sign in the distance. When they were done, Edward said he would go downstairs and wait for Emily. Virginia waited in the bed with the light out, wide awake, still looking deeply at whatever it was she thought she was trying to make out, that was trying to speak to her.

A little after midnight, Edward came back upstairs. He said, “I just don’t know where—”

Virginia interrupted him. “You call that woman, and ask her what her son’s done with Emily.”

Jane had been in bed a little while, reading something—everything she read might be one thing, so little of it did she seem to retain for more than an instant—when the angel of agony came and stood in her doorway; came and stood and looked upon her with an air that suggested she would be here some while.

Or in any case, the telephone rang. She noted that it was half past midnight, and answered.

“Mrs. Lowry? Jane, it’s Edward Byrne. Emily’s father. I’m sorry to call so late, but Emily hasn’t come home and she was supposed to be with Bill, so we wondered . . .”

“They’re not here. They’re supposed to be at the fair, aren’t they?”

“Well, yes. But we figure they should have been finished there by ten.”

“I suppose it’s crowded—that the buses are slow.”

“They were taking the bus?”

“Oh, yes. I needed the car today. And Billy said he didn’t want it anyway. They were going very early.”

“I know. So I suppose they could still be on the bus, riding home.”

“They might have had to wait a very long time, what with the crowds, and the night schedule and so forth.”

“I suppose.”

“I don’t think I’d begin to worry just yet. Billy’s very reliable about coming home. I don’t think he even likes being out late. So they’ll probably be turning up any minute.”

“It still seems a bit late,” Edward said. “Even allowing for the bus and so forth.”

“Well, it’s not unheard of for teenagers to get . . . diverted. To run into friends and decide to wander off with them. No sense of time at all. But I’m sure they’re fine.”

“I’m sure you’re absolutely right. But Ginny’s terribly wound up. I don’t think Emily’s been out past eleven in her life. Maybe for a prom or something. But not really.”

“Oh, I’m sure they’re fine.”

“Of course,” said Edward. “But just the same, could you give us a call when Bill comes in? And of course we’ll do the same when Emily turns up.”

“I’d be happy to do that. But I’m sure they’re fine. I mean, it’s not unheard of for teenagers to stay out all night. To watch the sun come up. And to be oblivious to the fact that the whole world is going mad with worry.”

“I know. I know,” said Edward, and he could not decide whether he ought to be irritated with Jane for her insouciance or with Virginia for her anxieties. “But call us all the same when he comes in, okay?”

“Of course. But you mustn’t worry. Really, you mustn’t, Ted.”

No one had ever called him Ted. But there it was. He was not going to argue about it under the circumstances. He was not sure he didn’t rather like it; didn’t rather imagine that this “Ted” Jane had conjured up could bear up under the present situation better than could plain old ordinary Edward.

He said, “I won’t. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

“Of course it’s nothing,” said Jane. “Trust me.”

“All right. Sorry to have disturbed you. But do call, okay?”

“Of course,” Jane said. “Now go and get some sleep, Ted.”

“Okay. Good night. Thanks.”

Jane returned to her reading, but had no appetite for it. She could not say she was worried. It was thirty-five minutes after midnight. She had been quite emphatic with Edward Byrne that there was nothing to it, and she supposed that, probably, this was the case. Her intent had been to ease his mind, but nothing is more readily misunderstood than a good intention, and perhaps what had been impressed upon Edward’s mind was not comfort, but a notion that Jane was indifferent to their children, that she was not a good mother.

As she turned out the light, as she tried to sleep, it was this that lay upon and over her mind: that she ought indeed to be worried, not only about the world’s estimation of her as a parent, but, as the minute hand of her alarm clock scoured the circuit of the dial, about William.

Jane is, of course, no stranger to anxiety—the Age of Anxiety, dating from around August 1945, is twenty-three years old this very month—and her daily life is in essence a sandbagging operation against its seas and their tides. But this is worry, and it is a little different from anxiety: Particular rather than pervasive, it arrives unannounced, without anxiety’s harbingers, dread and foreboding, the fearful tea in which we steep awaiting oblivion. Instead, worry simply turns up on the doorstep, the overbearing, passive-aggressive out-of-town relative who insists he “won’t be any trouble” even as he displaces every known routine and custom of the house for days and weeks on end; as he expropriates the sofa, the bathroom, the contents of the liquor cabinet and cigarette carton, and monopolizes the telephone and the ear of anyone within shouting distance. Worry displaces the entire mood, the entire ethos of the house—even if that mood hitherto consisted largely of anxiety—and replaces it with something more substantive, more real than a mere mood. You would be mightily pleased to have ordinary anxiety back in residence, for under worry there is no peace whatsoever, not even the peace of cynicism, pessimism, or despair. Even when all the rest of the world is abed, worry is awake, plundering the kitchen cupboards, raiding the refrigerator, playing the hi-fi, watching the late show until the national anthem closes the broadcast day; then noisily treading the halls, standing in your bedroom door, wondering if by chance you are still up (knowing that of course you are), breathing and casting its shadow upon you, the silhouette of its slope-shouldered hulk and its towering black wings.

From sheer exhaustion, Edward and Virginia drifted off to sleep a few times that night, but never for long. Every stirring and creak and yawn in the bones of the house hurled them out of the tangle of their unformed dreams to sit bolt upright in bed to wonder if this might be Emily’s footfall. Edward went downstairs four or five times. Finally, around five-thirty, he settled in the living room, overlooking the street, and having transited irritation and anger at Emily, simply wept for want of his little girl.

Virginia heard him, or rather heard yet another unaccustomed sound, and called out to him. He told her it was nothing, for it was nothing indeed; the empty street, the icy light of the moon, the distant scatter of chirps from the earliest-rising birds. He watched the dawn come like a great reproach: Everything is rising, coming, coming into itself—everything there is—except your own heart’s desire.

At seven, he went up to Virginia and told her he supposed they should call the police now. He would call William’s mother first, and then he would get on with it. Virginia nodded and went downstairs to brew coffee.

Jane answered on the first ring, and Edward said, “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“I’ve scarcely slept. I suppose I was too casual last night when you called. Then I woke up around three, and I thought, this is all wrong.”

“So he hasn’t come back? Called or anything?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Well, we think we ought to call the police now.”

“I suppose you—we—should. For all the good it’ll do.”

“I don’t see what else there is. To do. Do you?” Edward was aware that an edge had risen in his voice; that he was chafing a little, caught between these two women, the one sitting in his kitchen dull and mute as stone, the other now muttering sullenly at him.

“I’m sorry,” Jane said. “Of course we should. This is very hard. Will you tell me right away what they say? What we ought to do?”

It was understood that Edward would call, and that he would call on Jane’s behalf as well as his and Virginia’s, although how this arrangement had been effected you could not say, save that he was the male on the scene, and since Jane lacked such an agent, Edward would act for her.

Edward telephoned the police station, was put on hold, and finally was transferred to a voice that announced itself as Lieutenant O’Connor. Edward described how matters now stood.

“So she—they—should have been home when?” this O’Connor asked.

“Maybe by eleven. Last night.”

“So they haven’t been missing too long.”

“Long enough that we’re sick with—that we’re very concerned.”

“You see, the thing is, Mr. Lowry—”

“Byrne. The boy’s name is Lowry. The boy’s mother is Mrs. Lowry. There’s no father. Well, there is, but . . .”

“Fine, fine, Mr. Byrne. The thing is, it hasn’t even been twelve hours. I can’t even take a missing-person report for twenty-four.”

“What can you do? Now?” Edward said. He was beginning to fray already. The cup of coffee Virginia had set before him was cold.

“I can tell you to stay calm and not to worry too much. Most of the time, they turn up within a day. That’s why we wait. If we didn’t, we’d be processing false alarms right and left.”

“You think they’ll ‘turn up’? That’s swell,” Edward said. Virginia had come over next to him, trying to listen to what the cop was saying, her hand heavy on his shoulder. “You think my daughter’s a stray cat that just wandered off or something?”

“I don’t think anything of the kind, Mr. Byrne.”

“Sorry. But, hell, I mean, suppose something’s happened to them. Is happening to them. Now. You don’t worry about that until the clock strikes eleven or twelve or whatever?”

“If anything happened like what you’re thinking we’d probably already know about it. Accidents, emergency rooms, we get all those reports. We’d know.”

“So you think we should just relax and wait. When two perfectly reliable, dependable kids just disappear like this?”

“People don’t disappear. They go somewhere, but you and I don’t know where. Especially teenagers. And especially at the fair. We get maybe double these sorts of calls during the fair. There’s ten thousand other kids there and they meet each other and off they go. Turn up the next day or so saying, ‘Oh gee, I didn’t know what time it was.’ That’s just what they’re like. I don’t have to tell you that.”

“I suppose not,” Edward said. He could see no profit in pressing the point that this was not what his daughter was “like.” “So what’s next? We wait until eleven-oh-one tonight and then I call you back?”

“I won’t be here that late. But you can come in and file a report at the desk—”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake—”

“Look. I’m sorry. I know this is very . . . frustrating. Tell you what. If they’re not back this afternoon, you come down around three, before I go home, and we’ll do it then. Okay?”

“All right.”

“See, chances are they’ll be back and we’ll never have to bother. But there you go, okay?”

“Sure. That’s in the Public Safety Building, right?”

“Second floor. Room 217. Now this Mrs. Lowry will need to file her own report for her son.”

“But you’ll extend this . . . courtesy to her as well? She can come too?”

“Sure. No problem. Makes sense to do them together.”

“Good. Well, thanks. And we’ll see you—”

“If you need to. Probably won’t.”

“Okay. Goodbye,” Edward said. He hung up the phone, and looked at his wife. He had not looked at her, it seemed, since the night before, since before all this had begun. Other than being a little colorless and a little drawn, she looked like herself, but then he saw that her pallor was less a color overlying her skin than a transparency through which another face was visible, and it was an ancient face, the face perhaps of Virginia’s mother, or some other long-dead person in her lineage. It was not, in any case, his wife, or so it seemed to him, even as he held her and explained the parts of his conversation with the police lieutenant that she had missed. For the rest of the day, as they waited, he did not really look at her again—although he said soothing things to her and squeezed her hand—for fear she might shatter, might flare and turn to cinders before his eyes.

Edward had called Jane a little before eight o’clock and explained what could and could not be done as regarded the police. Then, at an hour which would normally find her scarcely beginning to stir, she realized she had the whole day before her. Now she might have taken Lieutenant O’Connor’s advice (as relayed by Edward) not to worry, but this was of course no more practicable than not breathing, and in fact every other possibility besides worrying was severely circumscribed: She could not go out, for fear that Billy would then come home while she was gone; and she also could not go out because he or Edward or somebody might telephone; and she could not use the telephone herself for fear of tying up the line when Billy or Edward or somebody was trying to get through. She could, she supposed, ask to use a neighbor’s phone, but that would be to risk missing the phone ringing here.

It is bad enough that worry induces a sense of paralysis, and worse when it imposes paralysis as a duty, as the best solution to the problem from which it has arisen. The world, of course, is deeply contingent, and we are doubtless fools to believe we are ever free from its accidents or the purposes and deeds of others. But we enjoy the illusion—or the promise, for those inclined to belief—that we can act a little in our lives and the lives of our fellows, and not always for the worse. Perhaps that is why worry leads so easily to despair, to existential doubt and disbelief, for we can do nothing good under its aspect but wait, and it is a passive, virtueless kind of waiting, a kind of timorous staying out of the way, standing atop a chair while the mouse of chance runs amok round the kitchen floor.

It took Jane the better part of an hour to devise a strategy whereby she might contact the outside world, or in particular her friend Frances, whose ear, she realized, she desperately needed; whose counsel, however self-regarding and jaded, would be a welcome alternative to the buzzing of the worry swarming around her. The strategy consisted of being rude, or at least abrupt, of abandoning every shred of telephonic finesse to deal with the emergency at hand. So it was that Jane dialed Frances’s house and when the phone was answered, she more or less bellowed rapid-fire, “It’s Jane. Billy’s disappeared. Please come over right now. Can’t talk. Don’t call back.”

Counting the rings, Jane figured it took all of ten seconds. She slammed the receiver back down into the cradle and kept her hand on it, holding it down for fear it might somehow levitate off by itself and render the line busy. Then she caught her breath, and making sure the phone was secure, she sat and waited, she hoped, for Frances to come, and tried not to think overmuch on the probability that the someone might have tried to call during those ten seconds, the ten she had willfully stolen from worry, and perhaps, if she was unlucky, from William’s life entire.

Frances arrived twenty-five minutes later and burst into the apartment, breathless, as though both it and she were in flames. “What the hell is going on, Jane?” she said, and then, rather than let Jane answer too hastily, repeated herself. “What the hell is going on?”

“Billy’s gone. He went to the State Fair with his girlfriend yesterday morning and they should have been home by eleven or twelve. But they never came back.”

“So did you call the police?”

“Ted—the girl’s father—did. We’re going to go down and file a missing-person report if they’re not back this afternoon.”

Frances moved toward Jane and put her left arm around her and pulled her close, hugging her. “Poor baby,” she said. “Poor baby.” She stepped back and looked at Jane from head to foot, appraised her as though William might be hidden somewhere on her person. Then she said, “So do they think anything . . . untoward might have happened?”

“They think nothing happened—that they just wandered off the way kids will, and that they’ll come home sooner or later.”

“And what do you think?”

“I suppose they’re right. He’s not the Lindbergh baby, is he? And there haven’t been any reports of accidents or . . . violence and so forth.”

“But . . . ”

“But this isn’t like him, is it? They say this happens all the time, particularly at the fair. That some kids meet some other kids and go off. But Billy’s not the kind to do that, is he? He’s not very . . . social. So why would he go off with anybody? And he’s very reliable, except when he forgets things.”

“He’s a sweet kid.”

“So it’s not like he’s going to just forget to come home.”

“What about the girl? Maybe she’s the reason.”

“Oh, she seems very normal. Quiet. Small. Girlish-looking. Irish Catholic family. The father’s in pharmaceuticals. The mother does Junior Leaguey things—however Catholics do them. Virginia’s her name.”

“And she’s . . . virginal?”

“She’s not, not really. Maybe a little reserved. And he’s very nice. He called the police. He’s going to take me down to the station. If we have to go.”

“So was Billy very involved with this girl?”

“I think so. You never know.” Jane paused. “I mean, they don’t say, do they? But they’re always together, at least since June.” Jane gestured down the hall. “Why don’t we go in the kitchen? We’ll have coffee.”

Jane stopped in the kitchen doorway. “I think he wrote her love letters. I think maybe she wrote poems for him,” she said, and then moved to the counter, to the percolator. “That’s awfully sweet, isn’t it?”

“So maybe they eloped.”

“Nobody elopes anymore.”

“I did. Once. To Iowa. With Jimmy McGowan.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“It was fun. Maybe it’s still fun. Shame about Jimmy. Dull man.”

They sat down at Jane’s table and drank coffee and continued to talk in this way, elliptically, moving away from the matter of William for a time, and then returning to it. This gave Jane some ease, worrying openly for a minute or two, then taking shelter in familiar topics—politics, people they had gone to school with, men about whom Frances held opinions or with whom she had had experience—before coming back to worry. She attained a little more ease when, around eleven-thirty, she and Frances were simultaneously struck by the notion that, under the circumstances (and given the ascendant heat), a round of gin and tonic would be in order. And at twelve-thirty, Jane made egg salad sandwiches, and for the first time in twelve hours she felt optimism.

After a second round of drinks, Frances slipped away to visit her office and Jane made the bed and did the dishes. She did not make William’s bed or even enter his room. She had begun to sense how far she might push herself, to what extent she might permit reality or active speculation about it to trespass in the precincts of her heart; how much the few strands of peace she had painstakingly woolgathered in the last few hours might withstand.

At two, Frances returned. At two-thirty the phone rang. It was Edward, saying they would be by in twenty minutes to pick her up to go see Lieutenant O’Connor. Jane excused herself for a few minutes to prepare for this; to put on a sober lightweight dress and to fix her hair and makeup. It was as though she was at last embarking upon the occasion this whole day had been planned to culminate in all along—a wedding or a funeral or a graduation ceremony.

She smoothed her dress, and asked Frances to check her. She was fine, Frances said—“They’ll probably put you in the lineup”—and, yes, Frances would stay here in the apartment, for the sake of the phone, just in case.

It is no slight thing, the facts parents know about their children, without even knowing that they know them. Answering the policeman’s queries, Jane found that she could say without hesitation that Billy was five-eleven and weighed 160 pounds, even though she had some years ago given up attending the physical examinations where these statistics might be obtained. He had been born April 1, 1951 (always amusing, that one), and had brown eyes and brown hair. Jane could have easily recited his birth weight, the duration of her labor, and the blend of analgesics that had rendered her semisensate from the waist down, if the lieutenant had so desired. She could have told him things William himself did not know or had forgotten: His first word (“Da”); his shoe sizes at various points in his toddlerdom; the name (Ollie) of his favorite stuffed animal until he was five; his IQ (130) on the Stanford-Binet scale.

In turn, Jane learned that the Byrnes’ daughter’s full name was Emily Elizabeth; that she was born almost exactly a year after William on March 25, 1952, in exactly the same hospital; that she was five-four and about 110 pounds and had light blue eyes and auburn hair, although Jane noticed that the lieutenant translated this to “lt. br.” on his form. And of course, Virginia could have given him all the same supplementary information about Emily that Jane possessed in regard to her son and then some: that Emily’s baby-sitter when she was an infant was named Mrs. Kane (and that Mr. Kane had a drinking problem); that her confirmation name was Mary Agnes; that she had wanted to become a nun when she was seven and a geologist when she was eleven; that her menses had begun a few weeks after her thirteenth birthday; and that she adored her father and definitively preferred him to her mother, which was a little sad, but completely understandable in a girl of Emily’s temperament.

After both questionnaires had been completed and the lieutenant had laid down his pencil, Edward said, “So now what?”

“Now,” Lieutenant O’Connor began, “these get typed up and duplicated and you bring me a nice clear picture—like a school photo—and the whole package goes all around the department here and to all the sheriffs in the five-state area.”

“And then they start looking?”

“Well, looking, maybe. Searching, not exactly. To be honest.”

“I’m not following you,” Edward said.

“Well, they probably get ten or twenty packages like this a week. We get more, being a metropolitan force. So, no, you can’t go search—go actively looking—for all these kids, all these people. You just couldn’t do it all.”

“So what do all these sheriffs and cops do?”

“They’re made aware of the matter. It goes into the files. So if they see something, notice something—kids who don’t seem to belong locally—maybe they put two and two together.”

“Maybe,” Edward said. “But you, the police here, you search, you investigate, right?”

“We make an alert. Everybody knows. But, no,” the lieutenant said, “we don’t mount a search, do an investigation.”

“You don’t?” Virginia said.

“Well, what do you do? Just exactly?” Edward asked.

“I’m sure—” Jane found herself interjecting to no purpose; Jane, to whom the police, at least in theory, were but a precursor to some future gestapo.

Lieutenant O’Connor put his hands together on top of his desk and spoke slowly. “There hasn’t been a crime. No abduction. No foul play. No law broken. They’re not even truant, because they’re both over sixteen.”

“School starts tomorrow,” Virginia offered, inanely, Jane thought. Then Jane reconsidered. It was the kind of thing one said to fill empty spaces, to keep the madness at bay while the moment passed, the madness Jane had to admit she was already up to her boottops in.

“So, really, you don’t do anything,” Edward was saying. “Strictly speaking.” Edward—this Ted—Jane thought, sounded nobly prosecutorial, like Welch facing down Joe McCarthy. She was not sure what this might accomplish, but it heartened her.

“I wouldn’t say that. Within our . . . brief, we do everything we can. But until there’s evidence of a crime, we can—”

“So if Emily turns up in a ditch somewhere, you guys will get to work,” Edward said. “That’s really swell. Gives me every confidence.”

“That’s really not fair. Or how it works. We have a framework. From the city, the state, the district attorney, and that is where we have to be.” Lieutenant O’Connor shifted his eyes from Edward to Jane, detecting in her a perhaps more willing interlocutor. “Now really, as far as investigation goes—figuring out what they might have done, where they might be—you people are actually better equipped than any cop. You know these kids, their friends, their associates, their interests, their habits. Right?”

“I suppose,” Jane said. Edward was looking away, his hands knotted together. Virginia watched the lieutenant talk to Jane, whose eyes were riveted upon him.

“So first thing, what all of you do”—Lieutenant O’Connor looked over to Edward—“is call all their friends, ask questions. Then go through their rooms, their stuff. They’re careless, even when they’re trying to be secretive. So chances are there’s something that will point you in the direction they went.”

“So we get to sleuth this thing out while you—” Edward put in.

“Hush,” Virginia said. “Let him finish.”

“Then we have something to go on. For example, maybe they planned to go to San Francisco, so we can put a query in to the police there—something substantial, that they can maybe look into.”

“Maybe look into. Swell,” Edward said.

“So you’re saying you think they ran away?” Virginia asked.

“I’m not thinking or saying anything. But it’s an obvious possibility. And San Francisco, California in general, is where they all go these days. And the boy’s father lives there, right?”

“Yes,” said Jane. “But it’s scarcely likely he’d go to him. The man doesn’t take any interest—”

“Still, you have to consider these things. That’s how it works. Little fact here, little fact there. See what you find. Then come back and see me.”

Edward said, “So that’s it. That’s what you have to offer?”

The lieutenant nodded. “For right now, yes.”

Edward stood, taking Virginia’s elbow as he did, and she rose with him. He said, “Well, thank you. This is all very . . . helpful.” Then the two of them moved out into the hall, and the lieutenant watched them speak briefly in whispers, the wife, he figured, chewing out the husband for being sarcastic.

The other woman remained for a moment, still in her chair, in nearly a daze. He decided to rouse her by standing up from his desk. “You think about this California thing, Mrs. Lowry. About the boy maybe going to look up his dad. It’s pretty common.”

Jane shook her head. “He wouldn’t.”

“All the same . . .” Lieutenant O’Connor finished, and finally Jane stood up, and he walked her out to the hall. She was an attractive woman, he saw, and he wanted to make nice to her, because he pitied her situation, if not necessarily the woman herself; she and all these other white-collar swells, with their spoiled mixed-up kids.

“Your address—475 Laurel. That’s an apartment house, right?”

“Yes,” Jane said, looking ahead.

“I had a case there when I was a rookie. Ground-floor apartment.”

“That’s us,” Jane said, and looked at him. “You must mean the taxi-dancer thing.”

“Yeah, that’s it. Maybe twenty-five years ago, a little more.” Lieutenant O’Connor continued, “Nice big apartments. Guy had a whole darkroom in one of the closets. That still there?”

“No. Not anymore. Not since we came.”

“Too bad,” Lieutenant O’Connor said. “Make a nice hobby for your boy. When he comes back.”

When Edward and Virginia came home, Emily’s postcard lay with the other mail on the vestibule floor. On the picture side there was a generic photo of a Minnesota lake, on the other, face up, her handwriting. Virginia fell upon the card, picked it up, and read it, still on her knees. She read it again, and then she handed it up to Edward. He read it aloud, expressionlessly, like a jury foreman announcing a verdict.

“ ‘Dear Mom and Dad. I am going away for a while with Bill. It’s something we need to do. It’s very serious and important, but we are not in any kind of trouble. Please don’t worry. I love you very much. Emily.’ ” Edward’s daughter’s name came out of his mouth with a shudder, with an ache in his chest.

Virginia stood up, unsteadily. “So that’s it,” she said. “They ran away together.”

Edward nodded.

“I suppose we ought to be relieved,” Virginia said, and she brushed her hands against her skirt.

“I suppose we should,” Edward said.

“But you know what? What it really does,” and her voice was rising, but then it fell off. “What it really does is make me a little mad.”

“Because . . . ?” Edward said, thinking he ought to know what she was going to say, but somehow did not.

“Because if she had the . . . the consideration to send us a card, she should have had the consideration to not do it in the first place,” Virginia said. “Does that make sense?”

Edward thought about this for a moment, and said, “It makes, well, one kind of sense.”

“I know this is all wrong, but I’d like to swat her one,” and then Virginia began to cry, to shake with great quaking sobs.

Edward put his arm around her shoulder, which seemed to be the stooped and bony back of an old woman as the sobs traveled up through it. “I know,” he said. “I understand,” and he added, rather helplessly, “It’ll all turn out,” and Virginia said nothing in response to him at all.

Somehow, that night, all of them—Jane and Virginia and Edward—slept easier. Edward had called Jane about the postcard, and after he had told her what it said and she had thought about it, she wondered if she had not preferred the uncertainty of the earlier part of the day to the knowledge the card had afforded them. For then—and the same feeling stole upon the Byrnes—there had remained the possibility that the children would simply return: that whatever circumstance had impeded them had removed itself; that whoever had taken them had released them or had been escaped from; that, for whatever reason you cared to name, the whole business had been an accident, a temporary mistake.

But now everyone knew it was irrefutable and deliberate, a piece of childish willfulness grown huge and monstrous. Jane, Edward, and Virginia might go ahead and look for the children—try to find them so as to rescue and save them—but the children were intent on thwarting them; didn’t want to be saved. After Edward turned out the light in their bedroom that night and laid his head on the pillow to begin staring at the dark ceiling, he heard Virginia mutter, “ ‘Please don’t worry. I love you very much,’ ” and her tone was not far removed from sheer fury.

When the clock struck twelve, there had been, of course, no further word about anything; nothing to be hopeful about or even to speculate upon. But the meeting with the lieutenant had given them, if not a sense of purpose, some distractions: the rounding up of photographs, the searching of the rooms, the interrogation of friends. And the possibility of one distraction opened their imagination to others: Jane, for example, realized she had not played any music in the house since before her trip to Chicago, and determined to begin working her way through her entire record collection, albeit not at such volume as to make the phone inaudible. Virginia turned to prayer, understandably, although she would be the first to take umbrage at anyone’s describing this as a distraction, for it was indeed doing something—taking action, perhaps the only effective action possible—about the situation.

Edward remained a little more at sea. He had found no reassurance in their meeting with Lieutenant O’Connor; had scarcely in fact been able to contain his livid despair at the police department’s indifference, its condescending and ineffectual response to their dilemma, not much more than paper-shuffling, make-work, and do-it-yourself detection.

So although Edward slept that night, he also awoke many times; and on two of these occasions he thought he heard someone on the porch or at the door, and of course he thought it was Emily. Because she hadn’t necessarily meant what she said in the postcard, had she? Or had changed her mind. And of course he went downstairs and there was no one there at all.

There is something called mother love, which is tender but girded by great fortitude, by a steely determination to protect and foster until the child can fend for itself, and thus moderated by a certain practicality which is soft-hearted but by no means soft-headed. Father love, or at least Edward’s love for Emily, may be somewhat different: It is a little awestruck, and since in Edward’s generation it is not much touched by the quotidian business of dressing and changing and feeding and supervising, it rather tends to remain that way. That this child is simply a child is glorious enough; that it is his child makes it doubly so. That it is a girl child, that it partakes of the beautiful and ineffable nature of woman, renders it a glorious mystery; and because it is his wife’s child—because it contains her, her youth reborn, captured and held in check, as if redeeming death itself—it is surely a species of miracle. It goes without saying that the girl child ought to be good; that she proves to be good—in her perfect and unself-regarding beauty, and her uncontingent love for the world in general and him in particular—is unfathomable, almost unbearable.

This is not necessarily universal, and perhaps it only applies to Edward or to men like him. Even Edward himself would have to admit that while he adores Susan (who is prettier and steadier than Emily; and who never, of course, put him through what he is going through now), at some point after infancy or after her sister was born, she became something like her mother’s second-in-command, unfailingly responsible, helpful, and unflappable, and so a little too uncomplaining, a little too self-possessed, a little too invulnerable to meet his own deeply vulnerable father love on its own terms.

With Emily, it is otherwise, and sometimes he wonders if Susan did not sacrifice something—perhaps willingly, as was her nature—so that he and Emily could be so very close. But now he has the other thing, and it is more than worry or agony. He looks at the empty porch, the empty street, and the darkened houses, and all he can conceive is emptiness, loss upon loss, nothing rather than something or everything or even anything at all. This is what Emily has left him; this is where his love, more foolish and heedless than anything he felt as an adolescent, has gotten him.