After Pete and I left the police department, we drove to Ma’s. The closer we got to our childhood home, the more nervous I became. This was the first time I’d seen Ma since Dee had gone missing. At first my mother seemed relieved to see me and grateful to Pete for dragging me from my apartment in Riverwest. She held my face between her papery, sun-spotted hands and cried with no noise. She gave me a wet kiss right on the mouth, like she used to do all the time when we were babies, and she pressed hard against my lips. I was reminded of the night in Riverwest when I’d thought about kissing Dee. I wished then I had kissed her. I wished I’d kissed her more and more. When my mother pulled away, my face was wet with her—her salt and spit ran down my chin. I wiped it away with the back of my hand.
“Hi, Mama,” I said.
Then she slapped me hard.
My head stung, and Leif burned on my eyelids too. His hardness getting harder, the bloodier I got.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” she asked. “Your sister is missing, Margaret.”
The word missing hit me as if she’d slapped me again. It’s odd now to think that it took so long for the seriousness of the situation to sink in with me. Was it the fact that I was wrapped up in my own tailspin? Was it the fact that I didn’t want it to be true? Either way, the weight of the word missing, the state of it, seemed to hover above me, just out of reach, in the weeks after I discovered that Ma had filed Dee’s report.
“And Pete said you’ve been living in Riverwest. For Christ’s sake. You’re lucky to be alive.” I didn’t want to speak to the dramatics of this comment, so I bit my lip.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”
“You’re going to be sorry.”
I looked at Pete. He shrugged.
“I really don’t know what happened, Mama. I saw Dee on the Fourth, but we had a fight . . . Not anything serious. Just the usual stuff. And she ran out. She didn’t even call me once after that.”
“Then you should have known.”
She was right. I should have guessed something was wrong.
“I want you to stop thinking about your own damn self so much.”
I nodded. She had said what I was thinking. I thought I would cry, so I scrunched my face tight.
“It’s not your fault, though, baby.” I put my hands to my face, afraid they would come away wet, and felt the places where my cheeks were still sore. Wasn’t it, in some way, my fault? Was that why I resisted believing Dee was gone? Because if I let that fact sink in, I’d also have to admit how much of her disappearance could be my own fault?
“But we’re gonna find her?” I croaked. Ma brushed my jaw with her fingers. Peter coughed. “We just need to find Frank.”
“We’ll find her.”
Ma stepped back but held the frame of my shoulders as if she were afraid I might leave. I took in the living room, and suddenly, I did want to leave. The house had been turned into a command center. A tattered map of Milwaukee spanned the entire north-facing wall. Lake Michigan was a wide blue mouth reaching toward the window. There were tiny red dots to show where Dee had been before she went missing—home, the mall, classes, work, a restaurant on Brady Street. (There was no dot in Riverwest.) It gave the city a diseased look, all the dots spread across the map like chicken pox. I thought of a picture of us when we had chicken pox together—all three of us lined up tallest to shortest, Dee last, barely four, with our shirts off to show the speckled skin.
The coffee table was littered with legal pads and phone books, numbers and notes, and more maps. The ink made me dizzy, so I collapsed on the leather sectional and put my head in my hands. I felt my mother’s eyes on the back of my neck. I realized she blamed me, in a way, for losing Dee. She couldn’t know, and I hoped she never would know, the circumstances surrounding Dee’s disappearance, but she knew I’d ignored her calls for weeks. She put a cup of black coffee in front of me.
“So what the hell is going on, Margaret?”
I told my mother what I’d told Peter and Wolski, how Dee had been seeing Frank, how she had found out that he was cheating on her and maybe lying about his identity, and how she was planning on confronting him. I could tell Ma was stung that Dee and I had kept her relationship with Frank a secret, and that she wanted to have words with me about this, but there were too many logistics to discuss. Instead, they filled me in on everything they’d been doing so far—the interviews, the phone calls, the posters, the hotlines.
Later, Suze arrived to help us make pie and to busy the house, which was empty, and quiet, and full of worry and other things my mother wouldn’t name. Even the ghosts seemed reluctant to go about their usual ghostly business—slamming doors, and clanging pots, and rattling paintings in their frames. My aunt arrived in a flurry of perfume and incense. She carried grocery bags stuffed with red wine and Crisco and rhubarb, and she marched to the kitchen like it was Thanksgiving in July. Peter was asleep when she arrived, but my aunt roused him, and we all went into the kitchen. Ma opened a bottle of green chartreuse and poured shots for everyone. Then we made pies. I remembered this from my father’s death too. My mother and my aunt had dusted the whole kitchen in flour, and the ceramic tiles were slippery with wayward Crisco for weeks after his funeral. My mother hated idle hands.
We mixed the dough in big blue glass bowls, and then my mother spread waxed paper over the whole kitchen table, and we stood on the chairs and dusted the paper with a thick coat of flour, and then we rolled the crust. I had no idea what we were going to do with all of those pies—meat pies with carrots and onions and potatoes and cheese, fruit pies with strawberry and rhubarb and apple and blueberry, and sweet pies with pecans and key lime and chocolate. We baked them in rounds, and the kitchen got so hot we all had to go sit out in the backyard. We finished the green chartreuse and watched the fireflies flit through the tall grass. When the pies were done, my mother was exhausted, so Suze put her to bed.
The kitchen was still too hot to breathe in, so we sat outside. Suze chain-smoked and I sat on the stoop beneath her so she could brush my hair, which she said looked like a rat’s nest. I closed my eyes and leaned against her shins. The night was humid and quiet, except for the rush of the traffic toward the city that echoed behind our fence. It was a night Dee and I probably would have gone out drinking. She would have tried to get me to wear a dress; I would have asked her to pick a top that covered her belly button and her stunning hips. (It mattered not at all; men hounded her in her track sweats and her dresses.)
“I’m going to tell you something no one else will,” Suze said.
I turned to face her, and she tucked some stray strands of hair behind my ear. I shivered. The human ear is a very delicate thing, I thought.
“What’s that?”
“You’re going to have to tell the truth eventually,” she said.
“I am telling the truth,” I said.
“Then tell it better.”
Suze stroked my head.
Suze left after midnight, and I didn’t have the courage to go into my old bedroom, the one I’d always shared with Dee, so I curled up on the couch and read and reread the missing-persons report. Each time I read it, Dee became more and more of an abstraction, a character, a sketch of a human, and it scared me but not enough to stop reading it. The thing was, I was looking for something. Now I can see that I was trying to understand if I really believed she was missing. I think I still believed (or was it just a hope?) that Dee was laid up somewhere with Frank, hiding from me, and Ma, and Pete, from the repercussions of the Fourth. Or maybe she was scared to hear what I might say when I found out she was back with Frank? This prospect hurt most of all.
I woke up in the night and forgot where I was. I reached down to the floor to find Leif and his gun, but my fingertips brushed the worn carpet instead. We were not allowed to eat in this room when we were younger, but we used to do it anyway, when Ma wasn’t home. There was often a thick, crumby line of food left between the couch and the coffee table. Ma cursed us for this. I ran my fingers there, but the carpet was clean. I called Leif from the living room phone with my eyes closed. He did not pick up.