4

The next morning Jim went to retrieve his daughter. Grade, a blue Kleenex tissue petaled about her nose, cried a little when she handed the baby to him. “Allergies,” she said, lowering stormy eyes. She plucked at the baby’s toes. “It’s a terrible thing to say, but I feel like she’s mine.”

“Don’t,” Jim said.

Gracie stammered odd bits of advice. Babies liked heartbeats, so Jim might want to buy a recording of the sounds infants heard in the womb. Babies took to water like small spaniels. “Take her into the bathtub with you,” she advised. “Hold her in the shower.” She told him how to handle the baby’s head. What to feed the baby. How to sleep so lightly you might hear colic rumbling in a small, silky stomach. “So what are you going to call this little one?” she said.

For a moment Jim remembered all the names he had inked neatly onto a piece of paper.

“You have to give her a name, for God’s sake,” Gracie said. “I certainly hope you aren’t one of those people who are going to call their child ‘Junior.’”

He looked down at the baby. “I’ll give her a name.”

“Listen,” she said, pressing a folded piece of paper into his hand. “The best pediatrician in town,” she said. He said good-bye to Gracie and ignored the other nurses. He strode right by the doctors and orderlies. He wished he could parade triumphantly past everyone in the entire hospital, even the patients. Two of the younger candy stripers cupped their heads together. He heard a dry, breathy whisper, like a wind washing dirty sand across a beach.

“We’re out of here,” he said to the baby, and walked out of the hospital, the same clean way he imagined his wife had when she had taken out their savings as simply as she had taken away his life.

When he pulled into the neighborhood, it was barely ten, His parents wouldn’t be arriving until noontime. The streets seemed deserted. Everyone who worked was already gone, the kids at camp or down at the playground. He didn’t know what any one of them thought about any of this. No one had called to say “What a shame” or “I knew it would come to this” or “Is there anything I can do?” Not one person had invited him for dinner or said one thing about the baby, and no one mentioned the news reports. Still, he had his suspicions. He walked down the block and swore he saw curtains floating uneasily from the windows, a half-moon of face appearing. He walked by a group of his neighbors, all of them sitting on the curb, sipping sugary lemonade someone’s kid had made, and although they boisterously offered him a cup, he could tell something else was going on, The laughter seemed to retract, the conversation to fade. And the other day he had come home to find Henry Sandlovitz, his neighbor from across the street, prowling nervously in Jim’s yard. “Lost my golf ball,” he said, but when Jim came around to help him look, all they both found were the bright dandelions Jim had never really had the heart to pull. The two men stood silently looking at the flowery yellow heads, “You ought to borrow my power mower,” Henry said abruptly. Embarrassed, Jim kicked at the overgrown grass, releasing a wave of grasshoppers that hummed and trembled in the blades.

It was his fate, but the neighborhood somehow seemed to take it on as their own. Threatened by an unseen unease, wives suddenly came out to meet their husbands at the train station. Husbands, too, began bringing home roses in crinkly blue tissue paper or bottles of Spanish wine.

Later, Maureen Reardon, the one neighbor who would befriend Jim, would tell him just how all the women talked about him. As soon as they heard the first reports, everyone said they had known a marriage this young, this strange, would come to this. Lee seemed to be always alone, in those awful faded blue jeans and tattered sneakers, that hair like a wild woman’s. They hadn’t liked her playing with their girls. They studied Jim’s pining silence after Lee had disappeared. They wondered, too, what it might be like to have someone missing you so much, it robbed them of sleep. The women argued over Lee, too. She was wild. Jim had spoken to some of them, but Lee had never said one word. They would have taken her under their wing. They could have showed her recipes, they could have shared hairdressers and long, lazy talks on hot summer afternoons.

Myths sprang up. When one of the women wanted to threaten their wayward daughters, Lee’s name was invoked. “You’ll end up a prostitute like Lee!” mothers shouted. “You’ll end up dead on the side of the road!” Secretly, though, the daughters, and sometimes even the mothers, might be thrilled. Sometimes they imagined Lee had simply escaped, that she was now in silky red dresses, dining in a restaurant so expensive none of them could even imagine peeking at the menu. They thought of Lee on some older man’s arm, diamonds sprinkled across her fingers. Lee not having to be bored and restless at home, waiting for her kids to amble back from school, Lee not having to wake up beside anyone except her own sweet self. Women hung damp, sticking wash onto backyard clotheslines. Their hands chapped. The wood clothespins sometimes splintered and infected in their skin. “Might be nice to be Lee on a day like this,” they told one another. “You can bet she’s not hanging clothes.” Imagine leaving your baby, they said, but still they thought of her when the jammy fingers of their own kids tracked onto the walls, when a colicky baby kept them up one night too many. Could you love something you didn’t let yourself know? Was a baby yours if you never claimed it?

Every moment, Jim was aware the baby was his. He had driven his daughter home with one hand laid gently across her. He had driven twenty miles an hour, not caring if the other drivers swore at him. He had brought the baby into the house, and as soon as he opened the door he felt the silence, alive, waiting for him, His throat ached.

The baby erupted in cries. He looked at his daughter, pained, and for a moment he wondered: Who would he rather lose, Lee or the baby? And the answer was always the baby. He let her cry for a moment and then began slowly, stubbornly, rocking her.

A half hour later his parents arrived in a cab, He bundled his daughter and stepped outside, They were loaded down with stiff brown bags and suitcases, and as soon as Gladys saw Jim and the baby, she burst into tears. Jack stood perfectly still, a brown paper bag dangling from one hand.

“I don’t know who to hold first,” Gladys said. “Oh, that beautiful little angel! Here, let me take her. Please, I know how to hold a baby.” She cradled the baby in her arms. “What’s this baby’s name?”

“I haven’t named her yet,” Jim said.

Gladys gave him a sharp look. “Well, you had better, don’t you think?”

Jim threaded fingers through his hair. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me, not naming her,” he said. “There must be something.”

Jack embraced Jim roughly. “Don’t you worry,” he said. “I’ve got a feeling about things turning out for the best.”

“What feeling?” Jim said, but his father turned and handed him a bag. “New Zealand apples,” Jack said. “A little bruised, but you can’t get anything like that here, I bet.”

“Will you look at this house,” Gladys said. “We could have helped you find something nicer than this.” Gingerly she stepped inside. “I’ll clean,” she said.

Jack put away the groceries, eyeing with suspicion the tomatoes in the crisper, “Dyes,” he said.

“Wrong,” Jim said. “They’re from a garden next door.”

Jack suddenly lifted up two cucumbers. “You tell me which is garden and which is Top Thrift.” He moved his hands up and down like a balancing scale.

“Please,” Jim said, but his father waggled his hands again. Jim rolled his hands over the cucumbers. They looked exactly the same to him, so he took his cue from his father’s face, from the way his eyes flickered when Jim’s hand moved to the cucumber on the right. “That’s yours,” Jim said.

“What did I tell you, his father’s son or not?” Jack said. He slapped the wrong cucumber against his thigh in triumph.

“He gets his intelligence from mc,” Gladys said, cheering a bit, “And we’re having both cucumbers in a salad.”

For a while it was fine to have his parents in the house. He liked the company, the connection, and his parents took control of the baby. They gave her the loving attention he somehow couldn’t, and the baby seemed dazzled. She kept looking around until she caught sight of Gladys or Jack, and then her whole body seemed to relax. She seemed always to be waiting to be pampered, And pampered she was. Every night Gladys would take a bath with the baby, balancing her in her lap. Through the bathroom door Jim would hear his mother singing, the same lullabies she had sung to him. The two of them would emerge, skin flushed with pink, Gladys in a blue flannel robe, the baby swaddled in a fuzzy yellow sleeper. “Bedtime for the ladies,” Gladys said, settling herself onto Lee’s rocker, pressing off the wood floor with one tender toe, lulling the baby before she put her down, “Little Marilyn,” she crooned, “Sweet little Linda.” She looked hopefully at Jim. “Little Amy,” she suggested.

Jack, too, was in love with the baby. In the morning Jim would stumble into the kitchen to find his father seated with the baby, giving her greedy suck from his finger. When Jack sang to his granddaughter, he crooned hillbilly tunes about broken hearts and smashed dreams, sung so cheerfully you couldn’t help but think these lyric tragedies might turn out all right in the end.

Gladys worried. “What are you going to do come September when you have to go to school? Who’ll look after little Andrea?”

“Lee will be back by then,” Jim said.

“Honey,” Gladys said. “Honey, you got to plan as if she won’t.”

Gladys began folding and unfolding the baby’s things. Tiny T-shirts, diapers. She started to cry. “This poor little motherless lambie,” she said. “Why don’t you come home and let us take care of you both.” She flung up her hands. “Look at you. You don’t know how to eat properly. You don’t know how to dress a baby. You have no idea what’s cute.”

“I do too,” Jim said.

“You could transfer and go to school at home. There’s not much room, but we can manage,” Jack said. “And when you’re through with school, the Top Thrift has a pharmacy.”

“And a pharmacist, too, I bet,” Jim said.

“So I’ll fire him when you’re done with school,” he said, “So maybe I could use two pharmacists. Something wrong with that?”

“Look, I can’t leave,” Jim said, a clip of tensions forming at the bottom of his neck.

“We want you with us,” Gladys said. “That’s natural enough.”

They didn’t say another thing, either one of them, but he saw how Jack scouted the house, silently fixing the sockets he considered dangerous, shaking his head at the dampness of the cellar, sniffing for dry rot, peering around for termites. Gladys, the baby cradled in her lap, told her stories about the house “back home,” the flower garden she would show the baby how to tend when she was older, the dog she might buy for her, She told her fairy tales about evil mothers who abandoned their babies to wolves so hungry, they might eat swaddling clothes as easily as hamburger, about grandmothers who knitted wings out of magic yarn, It all began to be wearying. Jim felt as if another life were being overlaid over his first and real life with Lee.

His parents refused to talk about Lee at all. The house was inhabited by Lee’s photo, her face was in every room, but neither one of them ever commented. Jack, picking up the mail, would sometimes find bills addressed for Lee and stuff them in his back pocket. Jim would find them in the trash, crumpled, unopened, and he’d take them upstairs to his room. He paid her bills. He acted as if it were important to keep up her good credit rating. Gladys, watching, shook her head. “Baby,” she said, but stubbornly he kept writing. She brushed fingers along his fingers. “Well,” she said, “you do what you like.” His anger uncoiled.

He turned toward her, furious, “She’s my wife,” he said. “What exactly is it that you think I like to do concerning this? You think she left and that’s it, let’s just get on with it?”

Gladys studied him for a moment. “I talked to the police, too, you know. They called me. And they told me there was no sign that anyone made her leave the hospital but herself. She left her baby,” she said. “She left you.”

“How do you know what happened?” Jim said. “Were you there? What do you know about the reasons?”

“What do you know?” Gladys said quietly.

Jim folded inward. “She married me, didn’t she?” he said. “She stayed. And she had the baby. You think someone so anxious to leave does that? Maybe she was in trouble and couldn’t tell me. Maybe she was forced to leave.”

“I never knew anything about that girl,” Gladys said, “All I know is now you’re unhappy. And don’t you think that there’s something else here that matters to me, because there isn’t.” She patted his hand.

His parents might refuse to acknowledge Lee, but she didn’t seem to need them to live. She managed to crackle and glint in even the most ordinary events. He couldn’t pour the milk for his cereal without seeing her in the shadows of the kitchen. His parents were blind. They ignored the newspaper reports he cut out. They answered his phone as if it were their own, but if the caller had some lead about Lee in California, Gladys’s voice would scissor shut. “For you,” she said, and then she would walk carefully out of the room. Lee was dead to her, dead to his father. Jim, kissing his daughter good night, fanned his wife’s memory. “Good night from Mommy,” he whispered.

His parents, too, suddenly began to make him worry more about Lee. He didn’t dare go out to the store by himself and leave his parents alone in the house, because what might happen if Lee suddenly showed up and he wasn’t here? Gladys, in righteous fury, would drive her away. Jack might lecture her so bitterly, Lee would just leave. They’d bombard her with so many questions, she might think he had hardened toward her as well, and then she couldn’t help but flee again. He couldn’t risk leaving them alone, but he didn’t want them to think he couldn’t trust them. Falsely jovial, he suggested outings. “I bet you’d love to see the school,” he said. Tense and tired, Jim drove his parents with him to the library. Irritated, he watched Jack browsing through book after book, when all he wanted to do was go home. Gladys, beaming, even started up a conversation with a young woman in the circulating stacks. “You know my son?” she said cheerfully. Before they left Jack insisted Jim check out two books on fishing for him. “We’ll have to come back here,” Jack said.

Jim felt like a baby-sitter who had to keep watch. When they went to bed early, settling into the spare room, Jim prowled restlessly. He was wary of every noise. He couldn’t risk their hearing any sound he himself didn’t. He force-fed himself coffee, so black and strong it created a jumpy rhythm in his blood. At night he skimmed on the edge of sleep, and when he woke his face was furrowed.

His parents ended up leaving three weeks later. There was an emergency at Top Thrift. Workers were striking; fruit was rotting on the shelves. “Come home with us,” Jack said. “Close up this house for the whole summer. You can always come back here when school starts if that’s what you want. I just hate to think of you here alone.”

“I can’t,” Jim said. “What if Lee shows up?”

“I’m staying here, then,” Gladys said.

“No, you’re not,” Jim said. “Both of you have been here for almost a month.”

“We’ll come back, then,” Jack said. “Right this weekend if we can. And I’m mailing you a plane ticket so you and my granddaughter can come home anytime you want.”

Gladys placed both hands on the sides of his face. “This isn’t your home,” she informed him. “No one says you can’t be happy.” She kissed the baby and then stood back, letting her husband take his turn, Jack was awkward with the baby, but he pulled Jim to him. “I find out you needed anything and you didn’t call, there’s going to be big trouble.” He stepped back. “We understand each other on this,” he said.

“Sure we do,” Jim said. He watched his parents climbing into the cab, windows rolled down, hands outstretched to grip his, and for the first time he noticed his mother’s skin, roughened like a kind of parchment. Stricken, he clutched at her fingers. “I wish you were staying,” he blurted.

“Why, honey,” Gladys said, “I’ll come up every weekend until you tell me to stay put at home. We’ll call you every single day to make sure you’re okay. And you know I want you home.”

He watched them leave, and for a long while he couldn’t bring himself to go back inside the house. He sat out on the stoop, rocking the baby, singing something low and tuneless deep in his throat, while behind him the empty house seemed to be alive and moving and dangerously unpredictable.

That night, hours before his own parents would be home, he called Frank. He blurted out three sentences about the baby before Frank cut him off. “What do you want from me?” he said wearily.

“Don’t you want to see your granddaughter?”

The wires thickened with silence.

“I want to see Lee,” he said finally.

“Well, she looks like Lee,” Jim said, although there wasn’t one thing in the baby that looked anything like his wife.

“Look,” Frank said. “I’d just as soon you didn’t call here, you understand? Lee never would have left home if it weren’t for you, And every time you call, I remember that.”

“But you have a granddaughter,” Jim said.

“I used to have a daughter.” He was silent for a moment. “I have a whole new life here,” he said. “How long am I supposed to keep it on hold for Lee?” And then he hung up in a thread of static. Jim sat, idly cradling the phone, daydreaming, thinking what a lucky thing that might be, to feel as if you had a life.

That night he wasn’t hungry at all, but because of his daughter he felt a responsibility to eat. Having a proper dinner suddenly seemed like the mark of being a good father, He tried to remember Jack cooking dinner for him, but all he could remember was one Sunday breakfast when Gladys was sick in bed with the flu and Jack had burned the eggs so badly that the pan had had to soak for a day and a half before anyone would even think about cleaning it. His father was a man who knew everything there was to know about food except how to cook it.

Jim ferreted through the cupboards. Lee had been a terrible cook, as bad as he himself was. They had gotten by on mixes and canned goods and odd combinations of sandwiches. He hadn’t minded. He had thought if might only be a problem when the baby was old enough to bring her friends home for a dinner that wouldn’t embarrass her.

He pulled out a package of instant Spanish rice. There were three eggs in the refrigerator, half a package of sweating American cheese, and all the vegetables that Jack had filled the freezer with.

He cooked eggs, spattering them with cheese. He made himself a plate, but when he sat down, to his disappointment, his appetite stayed dulled, He ate anyway and then went upstairs and fed the baby a bottle of formula.

He came back downstairs. He felt suddenly uneasy. If he left the front door open, Lee might come back in. He might wake and persuade her to stay. But then, she might come back for his daughter. He got up and locked every door, every window, And then just as he was about to go upstairs, he thought of Lee, a tentative ghost at the front door, shivering, sick, maybe too disoriented to think to ring the bell or to call. He went back to the front door and unlocked it.

His parents kept their promise, calling every other day, keeping him on the phone so long that by the time he hung up he felt swollen with their concern. His ears hurt. Otherwise he kept to himself. He got used to the constant phone calls. The police had advised him to change his number. They themselves got at least twenty crank calls a day. Crazy people claiming they had seen Lee in heaven. A man claimed he had been kidnapped along with Lee, taken up to an alien spacecraft. He didn’t want to change the number, didn’t want to shut Lee out if she called, Reporters still called, badgering him for stories he no longer would give. Some of the pulpier presses took the few syllables Jim would give them and make headlines out of it. LEAVE ME ALONE, CRIES ANGUISHED SUSPECT. They all thought he did it, cleared by the police or not. He had his own signs posted up all over town. Lee’s face staring out from telephone poles, from bus stations. Reward. He never listed any amount because he no longer had much of an amount that he could spare from the money left in the other account, from the loans Jack gave him to live.

People did contact him. “I saw a blonde at the Bestern Diner on Route 3,” a man rasped. “Lee is living next door to me,” a woman told him, People claimed they had seen Lee in a restaurant, Lee trying on red-haired wigs at Macy’s, Lee wheeling a bike down a country road. It didn’t matter. He kept a notebook of the calls and the callers, and followed every empty lead he could.

One night he picked up the phone to hear a woman’s voice. “Jim?” she said, so friendly he thought for a moment he must know her. “You must be a nervous wreck,” she said.

“You could say that,” he said, waiting, trying to match a face with the glittering voice.

“I bet you’d love a home-cooked meal.”

“Maureen?” he said. He glanced out the window, but Maureen’s house was dark, the driveway empty.

“I’ve been told my steak and zucchini is the best in town,” the woman said. “Wouldn’t you like that? Some steak? A nice glass of wine?”

“Who is this?” Jim said.

“A good night’s sleep,” the woman said. “Clean sheets. A warm, comforting body next to you. Doesn’t that sound pretty?”

Jim, stunned, was silent. “Well, you think on it,” the woman said politely. “No offense taken if you’re not up for company yet.”

He borrowed money to hire a detective, a man named John Martini, who assured Jim that he would find Lee.

The days had a dangerous edge. He’d go outside and find the buses had changed numbers or a street had suddenly changed names. He suddenly wanted to go to the neighborhood barbecues, to sit on a wicker chair and not think of anything except how much mustard he wanted on his hot dog; but he was no longer invited. He sometimes wheeled his daughter in the cheap pram he had bought with Lee, but no one ever stopped.

When people walked by they averted their eyes. He sometimes thought if he put in a garden, the men at least might be forced into talking to him, and then, if he plowed it over, the women would befriend him. He wasn’t working, and school wouldn’t start up again for another month. He had the time and money to tide him through the summer, so one day he went outside and tried to dig the yard, but after an hour the bugs bothered him so much that he gave it up entirely.

He didn’t know what to do with his daughter. Looking down at her, he felt all his emotions drying. If there were no baby, there might still be Lee. Lee was too young for a child. He was suddenly sure that she had left the baby, not him, and for one blinding moment he saw himself speeding away from the hospital with her, the two of them, outlaws on the road, each holding no other hand but the other’s.

His daughter cried, and he picked her up roughly, like one of the brown bags he packed at Jack’s supermarket. She stared at him, and he averted his eyes, The phone rang, and a voice told him a blond woman was spotted two hours away at a small bar called Bruntello’s. He plucked up the keys and resettled his daughter on his hip, and as soon as he felt how wet she was, she started to cry. He rushed her to the changing table and began prying open diaper pins; he hastily dusted her rosy bottom with powder, and the whole time he imagined the blond woman, his Lee, taking her time, folding her long legs into a strange red convertible and driving away. When the baby cried, recoiling from the prick of the diaper pin, Jim hastily patted her on her shoulder, “Okay,” he said, fixing the pin and jerking her up into his arms again.

He drove out with a dry and quiet baby beside him, but when he got to the bar the parking lot was empty. “Up you go,” he said, picking up his daughter. Inside, two men sat nursing watery-looking drinks at a leather bar. There were four red vinyl booths, and only one of them was filled, with an older couple silently eating burgers. The bartender looked as young as Jim, and shook his head at the baby. “Isn’t she a little young to be boozing?” he said.

“Did you see this woman?” Jim said, pulling out Lee’s photo. The bartender blinked. “No, but I wouldn’t mind seeing her,” he said, grinning.

“Did you see her?” Jim pulled at a waitress’s arm. She gave the photo a frank stare, “There was a woman with hair like that,” she said, “But I don’t know if it was this one.” She frowned. “Anyway, she left about ten minutes ago. By herself.”

“Fine,” Jim said angrily. “Ten minutes. That’s just fine.”

The whole way home, he ignored the baby. She was quiet until the last half hour of the way home, and then she began to wail angrily. “Yeah, well I’m mad, too,” he said, swerving to avoid another car.

“How’s my little darling?” his mother kept asking. She insisted he put the phone to the baby’s ear so she could warble melodies, so she could tell her granddaughter a bedtime story. “What a good girl,” Gladys said, but Jim always felt hollow. He boiled bottles and cleaned diapers and fed his baby, but his heart stayed numb.

The next day he woke at ten. The silence in the house suddenly scared him. Bolting upright, he went into the baby’s room. She was completely still, and when he touched her she seemed ravaged with fever. Panicked, he called the pediatrician. Her voice was calm and dry. She kept asking him questions, and when she was finally silent, he shivered. “Wash her with alcohol,” the doctor said. “Cool her down. You do that, and if she’s not better by tomorrow morning, you take her in.” Terrified, he soaked cotton swabs and stroked them on the baby’s fevered skin, and this time she started crying. She fretted in his arms. He was sure her cries would fuel whatever rumors were floating around the neighborhood, but he didn’t really care. He half hoped someone would come banging at his door, just so he could get some advice out of them.

He needed a baby thermometer, but he was afraid to put her in the car, to take her outside. He sat on the chair and rocked her. He sang every pop song he could remember. Finally he dipped his finger in wine and let her small mouth work at it. He didn’t know if alcohol was bad for a baby, but it quieted her down, and when she fell asleep he laid her down on the bed and watched her, balanced on one elbow.

He stayed with her all that night, just watching her, and in the middle of the night he noticed she had cooled. He stroked her forehead, and suddenly he fell dizzyingly in love. The baby clutched his finger.

In the morning he named her. He laid her in her crib and got out a phone book and traced a finger down until he found a name he liked, “Joanna,” he said.

He began reading her stories, singing her the songs he remembered Gladys singing. He put her crib in the bedroom with him so he could hear her least sound. Sometimes at night he’d wake up and just stand over the crib, watching her, making sure she was alive.

The evenings started to cool toward fall. He began planning his courses, worrying about getting someone to sit for the baby while he was in class. Someone he could trust. He scribbled plans. The school had already promised him work/study in the library; he could get yet another loan from Jack to help meet expenses until he was on his feet.

He was puzzling over his books one evening when he noticed the woman next door, Maureen, had begun sitting on her porch, too. She was always wearing a short, summery dress, her curly bobbed hair held back by a plastic headband. She couldn’t be more than ten years older than he was.

Sometimes, when he looked up, he saw her watching him, and defiantly he stared right back. He wouldn’t drop his gaze until she dropped hers. She hadn’t said one word to him since Lee had disappeared. Her husband, Mel, nodded to him mornings, though, but since Jim didn’t garden, he didn’t care.

One cool summer evening Maureen simply walked over with a covered casserole. Jim stood up when he saw her. “I bet you eat terribly,” she said. “You tell me where’s your oven inside and I’ll heat this for you.” He nodded her inside, trailing her to the kitchen. She put the casserole in and then turned awkwardly to him.

“That’s some baby you’ve got there,” she said, “Can I hold her?”

“Go ahead,” he said. Maureen picked her up, soothing the tender skin with one finger.

Maureen ended up staying the evening. She put the baby to bed and then played a long careful game of gin rummy with Jim. “Well, here we are,” she said.

“How come you came over?” he said.

She shrugged. “You look harmless enough.”

“Is that what the neighbors think these days?”

“I didn’t say the neighbors, I said me.” She dusted her hands off along her sides. “Listen, who cares what they say. All anyone needs is one friend, anyway, and as far as I’m concerned you got me.”

She stretched. “Well, Mel’s waiting,” she said.

“You can come back anytime,” Jim said.

“Then I will,” Maureen said.

He didn’t expect her back, but two nights later she came, this time with a toy for Joanna and a fresh pack of cards. “Mel’s working late,” she said. “Lots of nights I just feel stir crazy alone in the house.”

She stayed nearly until midnight, until Mel’s car pulled into the drive, and as soon as she saw her husband, her face brightened. She put down what she claimed was a winning hand and sprang from the porch to greet him. “I’ll see you later, Jim,” she called, leaving him to the night.

He told Joanna stories about Lee. She loved the color blue. She never combed her hair so it looked combed. She’d once cracked an egg into her hair because she thought it would make it shiny. The baby, moon-faced, peered up at Jim.

How could someone just disappear? Presto change-o. He wouldn’t let her. He left Lee’s clothing in the closets. He did what laundry of hers he could find and folded it neatly into her drawers as if she were on nothing more extended than a vacation. Her hairbrush, still sifted through with blond strands, he refused to clean.

Sometimes he talked to her. He was gentle at first, begging her to come home. He promised her they’d move to the country. He told her story after story about their courtship, as if she could hear him, as if his memory were more compelling than her own. “We were so happy,” he insisted. Some mornings, though, he shouted at her. He accused her of being selfish, of being so fucking stubborn he’d like to put his two hands about her neck and kill her. “I can’t do this without you!” he cried.

He dreaded the nights. Sleep was no escape because Lee was always there, prowling restlessly, eluding him. In the dream he’d go to call her and find that he couldn’t remember the one crucial digit. He’d trail her down a street only to have her turn and see him, her face indifferent. Over and over he dreamed she was having a heart attack. He slung her body around him like a coat, He got her to the hospital. “I’ll never leave you,” she gasped, and then her body would crumple. One night he dreamed Lee was dying. He heard her screaming, and then he began screaming, too. His terror woke him, his scream, and then, there in the night, harmonizing with him, was the baby’s scream. Stunned, he got up, kicking off the covers. She was thrashing in her crib, her small face contorted, streaked with red. She didn’t calm down; she stiffened when he picked her up, her body quivering in his hands. “Want to compare dreams?” he said. “Who had the worst of it, do you think, you or Daddy?”

He brought her back to his bed and buttressed her in with pillows. “We’ll keep each other company,” he told her.

He called Lee’s old number at the Silver Spoon, half thinking she might answer. He called Information in different cities and asked for listings for Lee Archer. Only once did he get a listing, in Atlanta, and terrified, he dialed. A man answered, his voice heavy with sleep. “Is Lee there?” Jim said, trying to sound casual. If pressed, to get to Lee he’d lie. He could be a job prospect. He could be a relative. “Isn’t it awfully late for this?” the man said.

“It’s an emergency,” Jim said.

The man sighed. “Hold on,” he said.

“Hello?” a woman said, a voice as distinctly different from Lee’s as his own, and Jim hung up.

One night, when he was most lonely, he cooked Lee’s favorite dinner, imagining that this might be the night she’d come home. He fried chicken so crisp and greasy, he had to drain it on four layers of thick paper toweling. He set two places with real linen napkins and silverware and a rose in a water glass. He steamed peas and pale baby carrots from Mel’s garden. He arranged Joanna in a plastic crib by the table, and for a while he waited until the food was cold, the chicken congealing. Every time a car door slammed, he told himself it was Lee. Every voice in the distance could be his wife. He waited until the bit of appetite he had had was smothered, and then he left everything on the table, as if somehow the leftovers might still summon his wife home to him.

Every week he went to the international bookstore and bought six different newspapers from all over the country, pruning the pages for stories, Lee could be anywhere. Every body that was found made him terrified because it could be hers. He examined every picture of a crowd, circling faces that might be hers. He felt an odd camaraderie with what he called the “others,” the people with missing sons or daughters, with husbands who left. People did show up again, he told himself. Embarrassed, he began buying the tabloids at the supermarkets. He liked The Planet, he had a fondness for the Truth Universal News. There were stories about people who were thought to be dead who suddenly showed up. There were colorful stories about amnesia. Could that be possible, Lee wandering in Oklahoma, being a clerk in pastel suits, using the name of Delia or Anna or whatever name she might see on the back of a cereal box? He imagined Lee’s face flashed across a TV screen.

He went to the Silver Spoon, where Lee had worked, the baby papoosed against him. One of the waitresses knew him and refused to serve him. When forced to by the owner, she smashed his glass of water on the table so hard it chipped. She let his order cool before she slapped it down, and even when he left a tip so large it was embarrassing, she snubbed him. “What is wrong with you?” he said.

She jerked her arm away. “I knew Lee, that’s what’s wrong,” she said. “You figure it out.”

Memory was stronger than the present. He could see Lee so clearly that it pained him. He walked into a psychic’s office once, a storefront with a translucent white palm in the window. A woman in a blue dress gave him a sober, teasing smile. “How can I help?” she said, and he was suddenly so grateful, he burst into tears.

She unfolded a deck of cards. A few fell, sliding onto the dirty floor, but she scooped them up again. “No matter,” she said cheerfully.

“My wife is missing,” he blurted. She glanced sharply at him. “Well now,” she said. She pressed the cards back into a pack. “I have something for you.” She paused. “Candles. Very special ones only I can make. You bum one every night for seven days and they will bring her back,” she said. “You mind, though, if she’s dead, they’ll only bring her spirit back, and then you’ll be in real trouble. You’ll need me all over again. One man—he brought his wife back in spirit and she kept hovering over him. In the subways. In a diner. He had to buy more candles to put her spirit at rest.” She blinked at Jim. “It’s up to you. Twenty dollars a candle.”

“Forty for all of them,” Jim said.

She sighed. “Did you know the dead take things? You look in your own house. Anything shiny’s missing, you’ll know who took it. You have electrical appliances? The dead love electricity. When things go on the fritz, that’s them.”

“Thirty-five,” Jim said.

In the end he paid forty dollars for four blue candles. He lit them every night. He sat in the dull blue glow and waited for something different to happen, but in the end it didn’t matter one way or another, because he still saw Lee everywhere, he saw her nowhere at all.