RUTH PULLED OPEN THE DOOR TO THE LITTLE SHED. THE hinge complained, but Amanda did not respond.
“Come on, now.” Ruth didn’t want to be this person. The helpmeet; the supporting player. Her daughter was also lost to her. Who would help her find her grandsons? Who would hold her up?
“Where’s Rose, where’s Rosie. What are we going to do?” Amanda was sitting on an upturned bucket.
“Come on. Stand up. Come out of here. Into the light.” The little building smelled.
The women went outside. The sun asserted itself. Ruth checked the timer on the phone. It had been eleven minutes. George would be back in forty-nine. This was not so long. You could reduce it down to seconds and keep vigil, count it out loud. She’d hear the approach of the car on the gravel. She’d see him again. “That’s better,” she said, and it was. The fresh air made some kind of promise. “They took Archie. He was sick again.”
Amanda couldn’t think about this too.
“We made a plan. One hour. They’ll take him. George will be back for you and me and Rose.”
“Should we go to the woods in the back? Should we walk to the road? How far is it? Is it this way?” Amanda pointed, but she wasn’t sure where.
“The road is down that way. Would she go down there?” This didn’t make any sense to Ruth. She couldn’t imagine why the girl would forsake the safety of the little brick house.
“I don’t know! I don’t know why she’d leave. I don’t know where she’d go.” Amanda couldn’t say it, but what if the girl hadn’t left at all, was already dead, somewhere in the house? That thing with JonBenét Ramsey had begun as the search for a missing child, but her corpse had been in the basement all the while. Who killed JonBenét Ramsey, anyway? Amanda couldn’t remember.
“Let’s go back inside. Let’s walk through the house once more.” Ruth had a terrible vision—the girl in the powder room by the side entrance, toothless and faint?
“Rose!” Amanda screamed it. The day was silent in response. There was nothing out there for them.
“Let’s look inside. Let’s be methodical.” Ruth needed them to make sense of things.
They hurried up the driveway, the gravel shifting under their steps. Amanda could feel every rock through the thin rubber soles of her shoes. Ruth could not move quite as fast as the younger woman, but she did. There was an urgent matter to attend to. “Let’s go inside.” Amanda said it like it had been her idea. “Maybe she’s hiding.” There was no reason for the girl to hide, but maybe she was? She was jealous of the attention her brother had earned. She was lost in a book. She didn’t want to go home. “Do you think they’ve got to the hospital yet?”
“It’s too soon. But they’re on their way.” Ruth went into the house by the side door. She opened the little closet where they had some waterproof boots, the chemical ice melt for the steps, one of the two broad plastic snow shovels, an old canvas tote bag stuffed with other canvas tote bags. No Rose.
“They’re going. They’ll be safe.” Amanda was convincing herself.
“George will leave Clay and Archie. They can see the doctor. Then he’ll come right back for us.”
“I’m not leaving without Rosie!” Amanda opened the powder room door. Nothing.
“Of course. That’s the plan. He’ll come back for the three of us.” It was just sensible.
“And what? We’ll leave? We didn’t finish packing!” They needed their things.
“We’ll go back. We’ll see to Clay and Archie. Then I don’t know what.” Ruth wanted to say: You don’t need your things. You have us. We have one another.
“Rose!” The name just fell into the empty house. There was only the exhalation of all those appliances, but neither woman heard that anymore. “Then what? What’s the doctor going to say? What’s the doctor going to do? Did Clay even take the teeth with him?” They’d put them into a plastic baggie. Macabre. Would a doctor screw them back into his head?
“I don’t know then what.”
“We’ll go home? We’ll come back here?” Neither made any sense.
Ruth opened the pantry door. No thirteen-year-old girl would hide there. “I don’t know!” She was, in fact, yelling. Ruth was mad too. “I don’t know what we’ll do, don’t ask me as though I have some answer at my disposal that you don’t. I don’t know what we’ll do.”
“I just want to know what the fuck is going to happen. What the fuck is the plan. I want to know that we’re going to find my kid and all three of us are going to get in your fucking expensive car and drive to the hospital and the doctor is going to tell me that my baby is okay, and that we’re all okay, and that we can all go back to our house.”
“I know that. But what if that’s not possible?”
“I just want to get the fuck away from here and you and whatever is happening—” Amanda hated her.
“It’s happening to all of us!” Ruth was furious.
“I know that it’s happening to all of us!”
“You don’t care, do you, that I’m here and my daughter is in Massachusetts—” She could feel the ghost embrace, her grandsons’ four sweet hands.
“I care, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it. My daughter is in— I don’t know where my daughter is!”
“Stop yelling at me.” Ruth sat down at the kitchen island. Ruth looked up at the glass globe of the pendant light, the one that had shattered when the planes—she didn’t know those were planes—had flown overhead. Why did this woman not understand that however unlucky they were, they were also lucky? Ruth wanted to sleep in her own bed. But she wanted these people to stay.
“I’m sorry.” Did she mean it? It didn’t matter. “Rose!” Amanda looked at the woman and understood. They could not leave this house. They could not go back to Brooklyn. They could see the doctor and maybe stop at the store and come back here and hide and wait for whatever was coming. This woman was not a stranger at all; she was their salvation. “I’m sorry. I just want my daughter.”
“I want my daughter too.” Ruth could hear Maya’s voice, the sweet register of her girlhood. Ruth could not make peace with whatever was required. She wanted to know that her child and her grandchildren were safe, but of course, Ruth would never know that. You never know that. You demanded answers, but the universe refused. Comfort and safety were just an illusion. Money meant nothing. All that meant anything was this—people, in the same place, together. This was what was left to them.
“Rose!” Amanda did not sit because she could not. She went back through the living room, into the bedroom that was Archie’s, through the bathroom where the tub was now empty, to the bedroom that had been Rose’s. Amanda knelt on the floor and looked under the bed, where there was nothing, not even dust. She went back to the bathroom and plugged the drain properly and began filling the tub with water.
She emerged into the living room. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I yelled. I’m sorry I’m terrible. I want my daughter, I don’t know why I yelled at you. I know you understand, but I want my daughter. She was just right here. I don’t understand what’s happening.” She wanted to hug Ruth, but she could not.
Ruth did understand. Everyone understood. This was what everyone wanted, to be safe. This was the thing that eluded every single one of them. Ruth stood up. So, she’d look for the girl, or her corpse, if she was dead. She’d do what was required, she’d do what was human.
Amanda pushed open the doors to the back porch and looked down at the pool. She screamed her daughter’s name at the woods. The trees moved a little in the wind, but that was the only thing that happened.