Chapter 1

3:10 p.m.

Susan McPherson ignored her husband’s phone call. The couple sitting at her desk were in a rush. Away from work for a long lunch break, only a few minutes to sign the lease and write the check. They’d managed to convince the landlord that the two-cat policy could be stretched for their three kitten siblings. What can you do? Heartless to separate them and so forth—and Susan had subsequently ignored the phone. She had no other clients scheduled for the afternoon and had toyed with the idea of going to Buzz Café down on Harrison just to relax and read the paper for an hour. It would have been a rare moment to breathe, except that half the people in this town knew her, and so if she really wanted to get away, she needed to go into the city, to an anonymous café in Wicker Park, perhaps, or the Ukrainian Village. She stapled the security deposit and rent receipts to the couple’s rental application and tried to place the stapler back in the exact dust outline from whence it had come.

Her husband was insistent on the phone. She smiled, nodded at the clients. The man handed the lease to his wife to look over. Michael would call again, Susan knew. And he did. Again his number popped up on the caller ID on her desk phone. After a moment, she heard her cell phone vibrate in her purse—a desperate move since she so often left it at home, or forgot to charge the battery.

“It’s supposed to help us,” he’d once yelled at her, “these modern conveniences. Make our lives easier.” She suspected he’d bought it for her so it could make his life easier. (“Can you pick up some steaks on the way home?” “Can you drop the tax returns at the post office so they’re not late?” “Cable guy’s changed his appointment window. Can you run home to meet him?”) The combination of having a cell phone and working a mile away from home often worked against her. But his insistence this time was unusual. So she held up one hand in apology and took the call: “Housing Office, Susan McPherson.”

“Robbed. The house. Arthur, too.” His voice was midsentence, harried, higher than normal, and angry at having had to call and call and call, she suspected. Robbed. It took her a moment to connect his broken sentences. Their house. Her house. It was the middle of the afternoon, on a sunny April day, one of the first nice days they’d had since winter. Who robs a house in the middle of the afternoon? She could hear the turn signal blinking in his car, a distant car horn.

She’d soon learn that the afternoons were prime time for home invasions. That crime spiked in the first warm days of spring. She’d learn their neighbors had also been robbed, and that robbed was the wrong word. Burgled was what had happened to them. Robbery was just stealing, but burglary was breaking in and stealing. But of all the things she’d come to learn about burglary, none mattered to her much at all when she heard the next thing Michael said.

“She’s fine.”

Susan hadn’t understood at all what he meant. Who was she? Fine . . . ? Michael repeated himself. Susan couldn’t seem to make her mind process the words. Mary is fine. Mary is fine, though she sounded a little funny on the phone. You need to get home, Susan. You’ll get there sooner than I can. I’m in the car now.

Mary is fine Maryisfinemaryisfine . . .

But the words got stuck somewhere after fine. Mary?

“Why wouldn’t Mary be fine?” She noticed the rectangle of dust, the inexact placement of the stapler, thought for a moment how the office had scaled back the cleaning crew. Budget cuts. The clients began to fidget, the woman checking her BlackBerry. A lawyer type in a dark blue suit and trench coat, her brown hair in a tidy ponytail at the base of her neck. Why did this woman want to live in Oak Park anyway? Wasn’t she more the Gold Coast type? Susan knew the reason, though, even if this woman didn’t: kids. The couple were testing out the most urban of suburbs, seeing if it fit, seeing if it was a haven to raise your kids and walk your dogs and cultivate your garden. Susan herself had chosen to raise her kids here, one of whom was at this moment fine. Which is another way of reminding one of luck and chance.

Then she finally heard Michael. “She was home, Susan.”

Susan looked down at her desk at the three-cat clause in front of her. The air felt thinner suddenly, as if her office were lifting, hurtling toward deep space. “Mary was home?”

“Jesus, hello! This is what I’ve been telling you.”

“Home? During the robbery?”

“She’s fine. The police are there now, but you need to get home, Susan.”

She began to feel her daughter’s presence underneath her own skin. Why had Mary Elizabeth been home? Was she ill? How close had she come to . . . ? No, this was not the place to go. If Susan allowed herself, she could picture all kinds of grim scenes for her daughter, and her stomach would fill with dark, gnashing fear. When Mary had been a baby, Susan had a recurring dream about the two of them swimming in a pool, and as they swam, the pool got deeper and deeper, falling away from their feet until they were treading water. Only they didn’t notice. They were laughing and splashing, weightless and graceful, and then Mary said she wanted to show her mommy how she could hold her breath, how she could go under, and Susan laughed and nodded and watched her daughter bounce up once, take her lungs full of air, and disappear underneath the surface. Susan kept laughing, and waiting, and in a few seconds she, too, went underwater and watched her daughter’s tiny legs as she was sucked into an enormous vent far away on the side of the pool, and when Susan began to swim toward it, the hole of the vent slowly began to shrink back to its normal size, the tiny feet of her daughter kicking furiously, disappearing to a place unreachable. Susan would wake, suddenly, in a cold sweat and have to go into Mary’s room and make sure the little girl was still sleeping. And always, always, she was, sleeping peacefully, curls stuck to the pale skin of her forehead. But the image of those legs slowly receding, kicking furiously, the tiny feet in the crystalline water as they vanished—all the images stayed with Susan. As the years passed, she had forced her mind to stop when such grisly, terrifying scenarios filtered into her consciousness. Now though, this moment was like her dream, her daughter being taken away from her by forces too strong for Susan to fight, watching, her own call for help silenced. It didn’t matter that Mary was fine. What mattered was how close she had come to not being fine.

The clients to Susan’s left faded from her periphery; a single loud laugh from the break room melted into the background. She grabbed her purse to go. She thought she could feel her heart begin to work more quickly, to keep her conscious, yes, that’s what hearts did, pushed the blood around your body when you weren’t quite capable of keeping yourself upright.

Susan pictured Mary’s bedroom, the posters of rock stars who were hidden behind $1,000 jeans and push-up bras, pink hair and thick lipstick and airbrushing, so unapologetically stylized. The unmade bed, the clothes spanning the entirety of the floor, one wall painted a dark purple that Mary had been threatening to paint black. She pictured sealing herself in the house with Mary. This was the great secret of parenthood. As the childless couple sitting beside her began to contemplate their next move, what they were really asking was “Where is the safest place I can raise my child? Where can we go to keep the world at bay?” Susan apologized to them. She had to leave. Parents knew the world offered no such place. Not here in Oak Park, not in Chicago, not in the state of Illinois, not anywhere across America or beyond. The world had a way of reaching that child. And Susan knew that the world had just reached hers.

She scanned the office for her boss, Evan. She would remember the sunlight streaming through the plate-glass window of their shared office space, the silk roses gathering dust in a thin vase on her coworker’s desk, a tape dispenser shaped like a cow; she would remember the angry looks on the faces of the clients and how she wanted to slap them out of their selfishness, slap them into knowing—before they were quite ready—what vulnerability really felt like, slap them into recognition of their own safety; she would remember searching for her purse, her head darting around the desk, under the desk, atop the desk, until she realized she’d been looking at it the whole time. She would remember thinking just how far a single mile felt, as if gravity had suddenly become something other, something to fling her away, rather then keep her on the ground. How close? How close had Mary come?