… Opens a Package She Knows She Shouldn’t

The car grows cold. Ever since she inherited her mother’s Buick, the clock on the dash has refused to work. Still, she can sense the minutes pass.

How can Rosa, whose nose twitches at a whiff of insincerity, have become intimate with a man who, before he leaves his house, douses himself in Eau de Pretension? How can a scientist who prides himself on his advice to the nation’s presidents tolerate the beliefs of a woman who is convinced she can divine the powers that influence a person’s life by studying a pack of cards?

Then again, how moved Rosa must be, seeing a distinguished scientist like John Sebastian Mickelthwaite shorn of his defenses. Crying after an orgasm. Professing his gratitude in her arms. And Mick, relieved of the need to keep up all that pretense. Able to admit his disappointments. Heartbreaks. Failures.

Mick is in his seventies. Doesn’t Rosa worry she will be widowed a second time? Technically, Rosa and Mick ought to have let Maxine know about their romance. Probably, they were embarrassed. Or they wanted to spare her envying their companionship. If so, their assumption makes her feel even lonelier.

She ought to drive home. But her bones seem to be dissolving. She stretches sideways and closes her eyes. Time passes. The cold and damp wake her. Her legs and hips are cramped. The stopped clock—it reads 4:35—is close to being right. The yellow sports car is gone. Waking Rosa seems unthinkable.

Maxine walks up the sidewalk and rings the bell. A minute passes. Maybe she should leave. But the light comes on and Rosa opens the door. She doesn’t seem to have been asleep. Did Mick just leave? At work, Rosa wears voluminous skirts, embroidered vests, and beaded shawls, so when she comes to the door in a flimsy white nightgown that reveals a faded dove tattooed above her left breast, Maxine thinks her friend has been keeping this a secret, too—that she is a small, aging widow who is raising two sons alone.

“Maxine? You look like you got run over by a bus. Is it Zach? Come in.”

For all the times Rosa has been to Maxine’s house—in the weeks after Sam’s death, and to set up for departmental parties—Maxine has driven to Rosa’s house only once, when Rosa’s car was in the shop. The cottage, unassuming on the outside, reminds Maxine of Jeannie’s home inside the magic bottle on the television show she and her father used to laugh at (or rather, Maxine laughed while her father ogled Jeannie). She follows Rosa through the red-flocked foyer, then down the hall past Rosa’s sons’ bedrooms. Both boys are studying at Michigan State. They want to follow in their father’s footsteps, Dwayne in the music-producing business, Jamal as an entrepreneur who, like his father, wants to revitalize black-owned businesses in Detroit. Rosa must worry even more for their safety than Maxine worries for Zach’s. In marrying a man of a different race, Rosa had been trying to create a future that wouldn’t be defined by history. But her husband was killed by the blindness of that same history. Even with degrees from MSU, the prospects for two dark-skinned young men living in Detroit are grim.

Rosa fills the kettle. Her broad Slavic face radiates the same hope as the sunflowers on the tablecloth. She settles beside Maxine and rubs her back until Maxine is crying in her arms. That’s all anyone wants, isn’t it? To be held? Isn’t that the best Terror Management System any of us has devised?

Rosa offers Maxine a paper towel to wipe her eyes. “You can’t be this upset because you found out I’m fucking that jackass we both know no feminist in her right mind could fall in love with.”

Maxine takes deep breaths to stop her shaking. Then she tells Rosa everything she can think to tell her. Rosa makes all the right noises. Expresses amazement, then concern, then shock that Maxine might hold herself responsible for her student’s violence. Or think Zach might be mixed up in this madness.

“You don’t know my son,” Maxine says. “Everything you’ve ever heard about Zach has come from me. I’ve been deluding myself for years.” Once, she says, she got a call from the principal at Zach’s elementary school. Her son tried to set another child on fire. Zach? Maxine had said. My son tried to set another child on fire? How could that be? For goodness’ sake, the boy was in kindergarten. What kind of kindergartener would set another child on fire?

The principal ushered her into his office with the gravity of a man about to tell a mother that her child, for the good of society, ought to be kept under lock and key. Zach had lit a match, held it out to another boy, and told him if he took another step, Zach would burn him.

Naturally, Maxine had been appalled. Her son did what? He threatened to burn another little boy? Where were the adults? Did this happen in a classroom? Where did Zach get the matches?

No, the principal said. The incident had taken place on the playground. Zach’s teacher hadn’t been present. But Zach didn’t deny his victim’s claims. Zach refused to divulge where he got the matches. But he admitted he had practiced lighting them in the boys’ lavatory, which, on its own, warranted his expulsion.

Maxine asked if Zach offered an explanation for what he did, and the principal glared and said, “Do you really think there is any possible justification for one child threatening to set another child on fire?” He suspended Zach and refused to allow him back unless Maxine took him to a psychologist.

Maxine had found a quivering Zach on the bench outside the principal’s office. She knew she should be horrified by what he’d done. And yes, she should make an appointment to have him evaluated by a child psychiatrist.

She had knelt and shaken him by his shoulders. Zach, she said, it is never, ever, okay to hurt another child. You know that! You’re not allowed to hit anyone. So how could you think it was all right to set someone on fire? To burn him? You know what you did is very, very wrong. Don’t you?

Zach stared stonily ahead and refused to speak.

She told him she knew he wouldn’t have threatened to hurt another kid if he hadn’t thought he had a good reason. So what was going on? Why did he threaten to set that other child on fire? Even saying the words had made her sick. How could she imply he had a reason?

“They were hurting us!” Zach burst out. “Every day, the bigger boys make us be afraid. They won’t let us do anything. And they hurt the girls. I mean, they really hurt them! And they hit some of the smaller boys. Especially Norm. I’m not as big or strong as they are. There was nothing I could do.”

She asked why he hadn’t told the teacher.

But he had told the teacher. And Mrs. Barnard said they needed to figure out how to get along. She told the bigger boys to be nice to the younger children. But the older boys got even madder at Zach for tattling. So Zach called a meeting and said the younger kids needed a weapon. So they could protect themselves. Norm made slingshots, but those didn’t work. So Zach got the idea one of them should take matches from their house. He knew they weren’t allowed to light matches. But they could say they would light the matches. They could use the matches to scare the bigger boys. Zach wouldn’t really have set Benny on fire, he told his mother. He didn’t even know how to light a match! He practiced in the boys’ room, and he couldn’t get the match to work. All that happened was he got a little smoke out of one match, and he made sure there wasn’t any paper in the can before he threw it in. In the end, Zach held out an unlit match and told Benny he would burn him. Benny started to cry, and he ran to tell Mrs. Barnard. “I wouldn’t really have burned him!” Zach had sobbed. “But no one was protecting us!”

Maybe she had been wrong, but she told Zach that even though what he had done was very wrong, she understood he had been trying to protect the other kids. When they got home, she confined him to his room. But she ended up bringing him dinner in bed, so it seemed more like a picnic than a punishment. The next morning, she went back to see the principal. Of course, she said, Zach had been wrong to steal those matches, let alone practice lighting them in the restroom. And he certainly had been wrong to hold out a match and threaten to burn another boy. But he hadn’t intended to carry through his threat. And why hadn’t the teacher done more to protect the smaller, weaker children from the bigger bullies?

The principal threw her out. “You’re fooling yourself,” he had warned. In all his years as an administrator, he had never heard of a kindergartener coming up with such a disturbing plan. “Your son has very serious problems! If you cannot recognize that he needs psychological help, then you have problems, too!”

She might have been shamed into taking Zach to a psychiatrist. But Sam wouldn’t hear of it. How dare the principal fault their son for standing up to bullies! Were they raising a child who was afraid to protect the weaker members of his community? Zach was six. How could he be expected to understand the true consequences of setting another child on fire? The threat was like saying, “I’m so angry I want to kill you!”

Sam had gone in to talk to the principal. But Sam ended up angering him even more. The other boy’s parents threatened to sue the school if Zach wasn’t suspended. Which the principal was only too glad to do.

Maxine waits to see which side Rosa will take. Will she say, “They blamed Zach? They threatened to put a six-year-old in jail?” Or will she hint Sam and Maxine were blind that their son was headed down a dangerous path, albeit in the name of righting the world’s inequities?

“Listen,” Rosa says. “I never met this Thaddy Rapawhosit. I have no way of knowing if he’s the lunatic who wrote that gobbledygook in the newspaper, or if you are making too much of some garbled clichés anyone might spout. But I do know your son. I watched him grow up. I do not need special powers to know he has a good heart. And I do not mean a heart so good it tips over into blowing people up. You are his mother! How can you not have as much faith in your son as I do?”

Maxine feels nauseated she even suspected her son of being in cahoots with the crazy bomber. What if Zach finds out his own mother believes him capable of committing such terrible crimes?

The kettle shrieks, which makes Maxine jump up from her chair.

“You have to relax,” Rosa tells her. “There’s nothing you can do, at least not this early in the morning.” She fixes Maxine a cup of tea and slices her some homemade oat-and-walnut bread. “Come on,” she urges. “I know you’re dying to ask how long Mick and I have been carrying on.”

Maxine knows Rosa is only trying to divert her from worrying about Zach. And it does feel good to stop, if only for a minute. “You must hate me for saying all the horrible things I’ve said about Mick. He’s actually a very good man.”

Rosa laughs. “When he isn’t being a pompous old fool.” She crosses her arms across her breasts, as if she only now realizes her tattoo is exposed. “We were going to tell you. Mick doesn’t directly supervise me, so I doubted the administration would object. But I hate everyone thinking I’m just some secretary trying to get ahead by sucking a professor’s dick.”

Maxine is afraid the image of Rosa putting John Sebastian Mickelthwaite’s penis in her mouth might make her ill. But the idea of her two friends lying in bed pleasuring each other pleases her, too.

“We haven’t been together very long,” Rosa says. The relationship started when Mick began asking Rosa for advice about his granddaughter. The girl had been living with his dead daughter’s lover. But the man was arrested for selling heroin, so Mick will be adopting the girl and caring for her on his own.

“I couldn’t help it,” Rosa says. “I saw a side of him none of us has ever seen. And—stop me if this is too much information—one thing led to another. I saw parts of him none of us had ever seen.” Rosa puts her hand to her mouth. “I’m going to be a grandmother!” The child’s name is Risa, which means “laughter” in Spanish. “Don’t you just love it? ‘Rosa, meet Risa. Risa, meet your new abuela, Rosa.’ How can I pass that up?”

That her friend has found companionship fills Maxine with joy. But her happiness for her friend fails to calm her panic for her son. “If I don’t go to the police right away,” she tells Rosa, “Thaddy might kill another victim. But if I do go, how can I keep Zach from getting mixed up in this mess?”

“Listen to me,” Rosa says. “You do not know this student is the bomber, let alone that your kind, sweet, beautiful son has heard from the guy since he was, what, fourteen? It would be irresponsible of you to go to the FBI with nothing but your suspicions. You need to go straight home and hire a lawyer. Well, first you need to take a shower. After that, you need to find a lawyer.”

A lawyer! Maxine doesn’t know any lawyers. Except the one who helped her settle Sam’s estate. “I guess I could use the university’s legal department. If I’m right about Thaddy, they’re going to end up getting involved anyway.”

“No,” Rosa says. “If it comes down to the university covering their ass, their lawyers won’t hesitate to throw you to the wolves.”

Maxine doesn’t care about herself. Even if Thaddy is the bomber, she can’t be sent to prison for having taught him. But she doesn’t want to hire a lawyer who won’t put her son’s best interests first. She can just see Zach hobbling down a prison corridor in an orange jumpsuit. As tall as he is, Zach has always walked with a hunch, as if he feels guilty for taking up too much space. Guilty for growing up white, male, straight, middle-class. Maybe prison is where he has always wanted to be. Hobbled. Restrained. Her son will find a way to be useful to the other prisoners. Helping them fight their legal battles. Teaching them to read and write. But he will stand up to the guards. If not on his own behalf then someone else’s. Even if he gets out in one piece, the remainder of his life will be in tatters.

“Don’t worry,” Rosa says “Mick plays golf with the attorney general. He’ll find you the best criminal lawyer in Michigan.”

“Really?” Maxine says. “He would do that for me?”

“Of course he would!” Rosa says. “There’s nothing Mick loves more than doing favors that prove he still has connections to people in high places.” Rosa glances at the clock—it’s after six, and Maxine knows Rosa needs to get ready for work. Maxine herself has a seven-thirty appointment to meet the provost. And she needs to show up at the nursing home by eight-forty-five to take her mother to get her hair done.

She uses Rosa’s bathroom to clean up. Hugs Rosa. Thanks her. Then gets back in her car and drives to campus, where she steers her mother’s giant old Buick into the garage behind the institute. Up and up she drives, maneuvering the LeSabre along each narrow ramp. This is why she usually walks or bikes to work. There are never enough spaces. Employees like Rosa who live too far to walk or bike need to waste hours searching for a parking space or waiting for the bus. Why is she studying immortality? The quality of most people’s lives is determined by their ability to get to work on time, with a minimum of frustration.

She emerges from the dark, dank garage into a Michigan morning so humid she might as well be living inside one of Zach’s terrariums. Since when does April in Michigan feel so tropical?

When she pushes through the frosted doors to the institute, the first thing she notices is the stack of packages. Ordinarily, Deidre, the receptionist, would have sorted the previous day’s deliveries. But Deidre is still on maternity leave, and Rosa left early to price venues for the fundraiser. (Pairing Rosa and Mick on the fundraising team had been Maxine’s idea, hadn’t it? Mick would provide the contacts, Rosa the know-how. Unless they came up with the idea themselves?) Even before she notices her name on the top package, she recognizes Zach’s name in the upper-left-hand corner, followed by his address in Oakland. The wrapping is fashioned from a grocery bag, the way Sam taught Zach to cover his schoolbooks. They even used grocery bags to wrap presents, except for the year Zach’s class sold wrapping paper to raise money to replace the pirate ship.

She touches the box, lightly, with her fingertips. Was it only the day before that Mick warned her not to open any suspicious packages? She lowers her palm, pressing it to the address. How can she not open a package from her son?

Then again, if Zach wanted to send a package, why wouldn’t he send it to their house? Why a package and not a call? Maybe the contents are so valuable he doesn’t want the gift to sit on their porch. But how can he afford to buy a gift if he asked Norm to steal those savings bonds?

The package—the size of a cigar box—lies sandwiched between her hands. She shakes it—carefully. If a box this small explodes, how badly might she be hurt?

She carries it to her office. She should call the police. But this package is from her son. According to the return address, he is back in Oakland. Maybe he mailed her a gift to make up for all the worry he has put her through.

She slits the wrapping. The grocery bag came from a Trader Joe’s. But which Trader Joe’s? When she visited Zach, was there a Trader Joe’s in his neighborhood?

The box, which has been crafted from a lightweight wood, like balsa, is fastened with a clasp. As she nudges the hook, she knows she will find nothing inside but a gift from Zach. Even as she knows the contents will blow up in her face.

She falls back, hands flailing at her eyes. Her head radiates pain where she cracked it against the coat rack. Her face stings. But when she puts her hands to her cheeks, she doesn’t feel anything raw or wet. In the windowless room, powder hovers in the air. Anthrax? She stops breathing. Then again, if it is anthrax, she already is good as dead.

Sprawled there, entangled in the coat rack, she pats herself for injuries. The gray carpet seems unstained by anything except the orangey smudge where, weeks ago, she dropped a meatball sandwich. Beneath the desk lies one of the objects that must have exploded in her face. She fishes it out—a spring, narrower than a soup can, which someone meticulously stitched inside a gray felt cover. That same person must have compressed the spring, then set it in the box and closed the hasp. Maxine discovers two other snakes beside the bookcase. The white dust sifts to her desk, coating her stapler, her papers, the collection of wind-up robots her students have given her. She sniffs more deeply—if she isn’t already poisoned, she will be now—and is transported to her mother’s bedroom in Fenstead, where, as a little girl, Maxine loved to inhale the Jean Naté talcum powder her mother dusted beneath her arms to keep from sweating. Who would have gone to such elaborate lengths to pull a prank? She might have been blinded by a spring. Even as she forms these thoughts, she can hear Sam shouting these same questions to their son. A package had arrived at Sam’s office; when he opened it, snakes sprang from the box, frightening him half to death. When Zach came home, Sam was waiting for him in their living room.

“We didn’t mean to hurt you!” Zach had cried.

“‘We’?” Sam echoed. “Who is this ‘we’? Don’t go blaming Norm. Norm might have the smarts to rig up a contraption like this, but he would never say boo unless you put him up to it.”

Maxine remembers a change coming over Zach’s face, so subtle only a mother would have noticed it. “Yeah. Sorry. I shouldn’t try to blame Norm. It was only me.” Even then, Maxine suspected Thaddy had prodded Zach into carrying out the plot. What boy wouldn’t think it great fun to play a prank on his father? No one would get hurt—they would cover the springs to make sure they didn’t poke out his father’s eye. The “smoke” would be nothing but baking soda, harmless as the fuel Zach and Thaddy had used for the rockets they set off behind the house. Why hadn’t Maxine shared her suspicions with Sam? Because even then she knew Thaddy hated her husband. Hated him because he was bringing technology to people who would be better off in their primitive, authentic state. Hated him because he was married to a woman Thaddy fantasized about being married to himself. In sending that earlier package, Thaddy had been letting her know he could have found a way to kill her husband. He was sparing Sam, for her sake.

And now, what kind of message is Thaddy sending? Is he saying she mustn’t divulge what she knows or the next package won’t be so harmless? Please, she thinks. Let Thaddy have typed Zach’s name and return address because he knew I wouldn’t be able to resist opening any package with my son’s name and address in the upper-left-hand corner. Please let it mean Thaddy has no idea Zach has moved.

She leaves everything where it is. Finding no one in the corridor, she hurries to the ladies’ bathroom. Her face is pale, not only from shock but from the powder. She looks like a high-school thespian made up to play an elderly woman by the seventh-grader in charge of makeup.

She sneaks back to her office, gathers the three felt-covered bedsprings, the paper bag with the Trader Joe’s logo on one side and her name and address and her son’s name and address on the other side, then jams these inside her backpack, along with Thaddy’s portfolio, the Conrad novel, and her copy of the manifesto. She sets the cigar box atop her bookcase. She almost wishes it had contained a real bomb because the explosion would have destroyed the evidence. Even then, the bomber’s true identity might have been revealed by some telltale clue. In Conrad’s novel, Verloc’s wife sews their address into her brother Stevie’s coat so if he ever gets lost, the police will know where to bring him. Then Stevie blows himself up, and the police find the label among the shreds of flesh and bits of bone that remain of him.

The muggy day feels even more surreal than it did before. The temperature must be in the seventies. She crosses the street and takes the elevator up to the provost’s office.

“Provost Bell is finishing another meeting,” the receptionist tells her. “If you would please take a seat?”

Maxine settles into one of the maize-and-blue Lucite chairs and stows her backpack beneath the maize-and-blue Lucite table. Mindlessly, she pages through a brochure that showcases the university’s most generous donors, nearly all of whom have given money to build the new center for entrepreneurial research or to renovate the sports facilities. Useless to think any of them might donate to her institute. Maybe if she could promise their grandchildren would never die. But a donation to the medical school would be more likely to achieve that aim.

Three men in suits emerge from the provost’s office. Maxine picks up her pack and swats a powder stain from her skirt.

“Maxine!” Provost Bell rises from her desk, upon which stands a large wooden statue of a wolverine. “So good to see you again!” She looks Maxine up and down. Her nostrils dilate as she sniffs the flowery scent. She motions Maxine to take a seat. “Have you given any more thought to the topic we discussed the last time we spoke?”

From where Maxine sits, she can see the screensaver on Perpetua’s computer—the Bell family in front of their cottage up north, five girls and two boys, plus Perpetua’s healthily tanned husband, his arms draped around his wife and children’s shoulders.

“Yes, Perpetua,” she says, “I have. And I have serious reservations about making our services available to outside industries. How can we remain objective if we know we can make more money by saying what the company funding our research wants us to say?”

The provost has the startled look of a woman who isn’t accustomed to being disagreed with. “Oh, no, no, no. The university would never put you in a position where you would be pressured to do anything unethical. Look at the medical school. The pharmaceutical sector does provide funding for basic research. But the faculty would never allow such funding to affect their findings.”

“I’m sorry,” Maxine says. “I can’t go against the wishes of my faculty.” Although for all she knows, her faculty would readily accept a contract from whoever puts up the cash. She thinks of placating the provost with an overly optimistic report on the institute’s fundraiser. Maybe she should pitch her new focus on Immortality Studies. Then again, feeling the way she feels, she can’t imagine why anyone would want to spend a day longer than necessary on this planet.

Loneliness. That’s what they ought to be studying. The loneliness of a widow who has lost a beloved spouse. A parent who has lost a child. A child who has lost a parent. The loneliness of the adolescent white male who can’t measure up to his parents’ expectations, whose classmates bully him and beat him up, who is seething with desire but whose every encounter with the opposite sex is greeted by humiliation. All those geniuses in Silicon Valley keep inventing gadgets to distract themselves from their pain. They don bionic exoskeletons to show off their superhuman powers when what they really want is to avoid opening the clasp on their hearts and confronting whatever emotional snakes and shrapnel come bursting out.

That’s when she starts to shake. She might have been blown up. By her son. Or by the crazy terrorist to whom she introduced him.

Perpetua notices how distraught she is. “I’m sorry, Maxine. Ever since Sam’s death … I know you haven’t had the same energy. Maybe it would be better to disband the institute. You would still have your appointment at the Residential College. Everyone on your faculty would have his or her home department to return to.”

Even in her nauseated state, it occurs to her this isn’t true. “Not Mick. Mick doesn’t have any other appointments.”

Perpetua looks abashed. “But Professor Mickelthwaite just celebrated his seventieth-third birthday. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind accepting the very generous retirement package we would offer him. And I’m equally certain no one on your faculty would mind losing an office in that smelly old basement. We haven’t released the plans for the new Thomas and Betsy Winkelmann Center for Entrepreneurial Research, but we would be happy to set aside a floor for your institute, if only you reconsider changing your focus to the more entrepreneurial aspects of Future Studies.”

So that has been their strategy. If the university dragged its feet in getting rid of the mold, if they starved the institute of funding, then the faculty would give in and accept corporate contracts.

The outrage registers dully. All Maxine wants is to exit the office without vomiting on the hideous maize-and-blue rug.

She makes it to the door, then stops to say she does have one request. If the institute closes, might HR find a suitable new position for her chief administrative officer, Rosa Romanczuk?

Perpetua purses her lips. “That depends on her skill set.” She rattles off a list of spreadsheet formats and bookkeeping applications whose acronyms mean nothing to Maxine and will mean even less to Rosa. Maybe none of that matters. Mick must have savings socked away. He can pay the tuition for Rosa’s sons. He and Rosa will be able to devote their energy to looking after Mick’s granddaughter.

Maxine shakes her head. “Rosa’s skill set is of entirely different order. A skill set you seem to have no idea how to value.” Then she hurries past the receptionist, down the stairs, and across the Diag to the garage. She locates the Buick and tries to focus on guiding it down the ramp. As the gate swings open, she drives out without looking and nearly runs down a student. Motioning she is sorry, she drives across town and crosses the mist-shrouded Huron River to Sunrise Hills.

She signs in, then waits for the elevator. Across the hall, a troupe of elderly tai chi students move at a glacial rate, as if, by slowing their motion, they might stretch out the final few moments of their lives.

“Hello! Hello!” This from an old man sitting to one side of a potted plant. An aide in flowered scrubs waits behind him. At his feet lie matching pink suitcases. Tied to the armrest of his wheelchair is a yellow balloon printed with a giant smile. The old man—she needs a moment to place him as Arnold Schlechter’s father—beams up at her as if he expects her to pat him on his head and take him home.

“You’re my Arnie’s friend! From the university! Maxine, isn’t that your name? Today is the day! My Arnie is coming to get me! He said he wouldn’t be here until nine, but I am rather eager to be sprung from this chicken coop.” He looks up at the woman whose dark hands rest on his chair. “Not that I haven’t received the most excellent attention. Only, as they say, there is never any other place like home. Or rather, the home I am going to be making with my son and his darling family, who have been generous enough to take me in.”

“It’s so nice to see you again,” Maxine says, wishing the elevator would come. How can she face Arnold Schlechter, knowing the identity of the man who blinded him and refusing to divulge it to the FBI?

“Tell me,” the old man says. “You and my Arnie, you see each other socially? I know he isn’t an easy man to get along with. But he has always been good to me and, when she was living, to his mother.” He lifts one palsied finger and uses it to push up his owlish glasses, which are slipping off his nose. “I am his father. But even a father can see his child is something of a know-it-all. ‘Arnie,’ I used to say, ‘you know more than the other children. But just because you know more doesn’t mean you need to point out the other person’s ignorance.’” The elder Schlechter shakes his head. “If he has a lovely woman such as yourself as his friend, perhaps he has softened his edges? Perhaps you and your husband will join my son and his darling wife for dinner some evening?”

From the corner of her eye, she glimpses Schlechter and his wife step into the revolving door. “Of course!” she lies. “I hope to see you again—both of you—very soon!”

The elevator comes and Maxine escapes. On the fifth floor, she hurries past the residents in their wheelchairs.

“Maxine!”

She has passed her own mother without recognizing her.

“I knew you would be late.”

“Late? It’s only a few minutes past eight-thirty.”

“But I told you! They are in a different time zone in the basement!”

“All right, Mom. But this hasn’t been the best day of my life. Okay?” She signs her mother out. In the basement, she follows the arrows to the beauty salon. A tiny woman nearly as old as her mother, hair orange as a troll’s, waits beside a sink.

“Ah, there’s my girlfriend now!” the woman croons with an Irish lilt. She spins Maxine’s mother’s wheelchair so it backs up to the sink, twirls a black vinyl cape, and fastens it around her mother’s stringy neck. “I know how Miz Sayers here likes to get her hair done before any of the other women, because once they start coming in we do tend to fall a bit behind, don’t we, dear. And it isn’t comfortable for her, waiting in that chair. And all the hairspray isn’t easy on her breathing. So we have our own special arrangement. Don’t we, dearie. We call it a ten o’clock appointment, but I try to get here an hour early and finish Miz Sayers before my real ten o’clock lady comes down.” She tests the temperature of the spray against her wrist. “We have our own way of measuring time down here. A lady forgets her appointment and wanders down at the wrong hour, or even on the wrong day, and Theresa finds a way to squirrel her ladies in.” She squirts a thimbleful of shampoo in her palm, then rubs it across Maxine’s mother’s paper-thin scalp. She wets the downy hair. Works up a lather. Sprays away the soap. “There you go. That feels ever so nice, doesn’t it, dearie.”

Maxine’s mother lies with her head tilted back at an unnatural angle, eyes closed, cheeks sunken, mouth agape. This is what she will look like as a corpse. It hits Maxine: her mother will soon be dead. After that, she won’t see either of her parents, ever again. She never really cared about the future. She only wanted to bring about the Age of the Messiah because she imagined her father would be there, waiting at the Messiah’s side.

The hairdresser shifts Maxine’s mother so she is sitting upright. Then the tiny woman picks up a blower so big she needs to use both hands to hold it; careful not to burn the tops of Maxine’s mother’s ears, she blows her hair dry. Pats the fluffy white curls. Covers her mother’s face with a cloth and sprays some hairspray.

“There you go!” She unfurls the cape. “Aren’t you the most beautiful lady at Sunrise Hills! A teenager would be proud to have such clear, smooth skin. Did you bring your makeup, dearie?”

With difficulty, Maxine’s mother retrieves a cloth bag from the side of her chair and takes out the mascara Maxine bought. She tips up her face, and the hairdresser strokes her lashes with the wand. The hairdresser uncaps a lipstick and twists the tube as Maxine’s mother makes a fish face. The hairdresser inks the bottom lip, then the top, then produces a tissue so her mother can kiss and blot it. “There!” The hairdresser holds up a mirror. “At our age, we all need a little help from Mr. Makeup. You look lovely, dearie. Not a day over seventy.”

And really, her mother does look much younger. Why is Maxine so stingy with her compliments? She kneels so their faces line up in the mirror—her mother’s face, gaunt and fair, Maxine’s own, squarer, like her father’s, her hair dark and straight like his. “She’s right. You do look pretty.”

Her mother crooks her head as if she can only now take in her daughter. “And you look terrible. What’s wrong? Is it Zach?”

Maxine gives the hairdresser a twenty-dollar tip, then wheels her mother to an alcove beside the laundry room. “You were right, Mom. That student? Thaddy? I should never have let Zach hang around with him. It’s my fault. Everything! It’s all my fault!”

“I was right?” Her mother seems stunned.

“I need to find Zach. Right away. And I haven’t got the slightest idea where to look.”

Her mother blinks. Her hands fly around her face. “He always did love that cabin. Sam’s cabin? On the lake?”

Of course! How could she not have thought of the cabin? When Zach was young, he used to cross off the days until their vacations there. He loved planning which toys to bring. Loved packing snacks for the road and deciding whether they should take the time to visit the Call of the Wild Museum in Gaylord, or the Mystery Spot in St. Ignace, or the colonial fort in Mackinaw City. One time, Zach played a role in a reenactment of the lacrosse game in which the Ojibwas fooled the British into opening the gates, at which the Ojibwa team captured the fort and massacred the invaders.

The ride took six or seven hours, depending on how often they stopped. Zach was always the first to spot the statue of Paul Bunyan—like many lumber towns, Manistique claimed to be Bunyan’s home, a boast Sam joked was mixed liberally with the excretions of Paul’s giant blue ox, Babe. Zach would turn up his nose at the cabin’s musty smell. Sam complained about having to unlock the shutters and turn on the pump. Maxine bitched about sweeping up all the dead flies and chasing the mice from the cabin’s closets. They debated whether the animal crackers from the summer before were edible, whether the porcupines truly would eat the rubber tires on the car if Zach forgot to go out before bedtime and sprinkle pepper. But these were the chores and arguments that marked them as a family, that reminded them who they were.

At the cabin, Sam turned off his hyperactive social conscience. The one store in Manistique didn’t carry The New York Times. The television wasn’t hooked up to any channels. When they felt sated with the beach, they might take a trip to Tahquamenon Falls or hike through the Hiawatha National Forest (Maxine had been astonished to learn Hiawatha was a real person, and Gitchee Gumee was the Ojibwa name for Lake Superior). Sam took Zach fishing for walleye, which they cooked on the beach; afterward, they would sit around the fire making ghostly sounds between their thumbs to see if any of the loons on the lake would answer. Every autumn, they drove up to see the leaves. They braved more than one blizzard so they could build a fire in the fireplace and sip hot chocolate made with the fudge they picked up in Mackinaw.

Where else would Zach have spent the winter? She remembers now—he had asked if she ever planned on going back, and she said no, she couldn’t bear to be up there without his father. She hasn’t received a bill from the electric company, but Zach might have switched the account to his own name and be paying it electronically. He could be using the wood stove for heat, and the kerosene lanterns for light. Still, it couldn’t have been easy, getting through the long, dark winter on his own. She imagines him growing a beard. Despite everything, the image makes her smile.

She stops smiling when she realizes he probably hasn’t been living there alone.

“Oh, Mom,” she says. “I need to drive up to Manistique right away!” If it were summer, she might call one of the other families on the lake and ask them to check if Zach is living there. But this early in the year, the place will be deserted. And she doesn’t want to alert the sheriff, not until she knows who might be hiding in that cabin.

Back on the fifth floor, she signs her mother in at the nurses’ station. “Do you want me to leave you here so you can have some company?”

“No!” her mother barks. “I hate sitting here with all these cabbages!”

After Maxine settles her mother in her room, she asks if there is anything she needs. Maxine hopes her mother will say, “Nothing, dear,” or “A glass of water.” In her mind, she already is driving north.

“You could look for the envelope from Cousin Joel.”

“I’m sorry,” Maxine says. “I have to get up there right away. But the next time, I promise, I’ll turn this place upside down.”

Her mother nods. With the back of a crooked wrist, she rubs her eyes, smearing the mascara the hairdresser just applied. “Go!” her mother orders. “Neither of us could survive another tragedy.”