LITMIR.BIZ

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phone to the window and dialed again. No Linda out there now. The windows in her house were dark. What to do now? Go bang on the door? Maybe Robbie had already come outside and found his mom and taken her in. Call the police? She went back into the yard, carrying the receiver in one hand. “Linda?” she called into the foggy darkness. “Linda, where are you?”

      No one answered. The fog had thickened and the neighborhood was dark now. Even the streetlight on the corner, the hateful one that shone into her bedroom window, had chosen this moment to be dark. She dialed Linda’s number again, listened to it ring.

      Back in the house, Sarah phoned her own son. She heard Alex’s sleepy “What?” on the seventh ring. She poured out her story. He wasn’t impressed. “Oh, Mom. It’s not our business. Go back to bed. I bet she went right back home and she’s probably asleep right now. Like I wish I was.”

      “But what if she’s wandered off into the night? You know she’s not in her right mind.”

      “She’s not the only one,” Alex muttered, and then said, “Look, Mom. It’s four in the morning. Go back to bed. I’ll drop by on my way to work, and we’ll knock on their door together. I’m sure she’s okay. Go back to bed.”

      So she did. To toss and turn and worry.

      She woke up at seven to his key in the lock. Good heavens! She’d made him detour from his Seattle commute to come by, and she wasn’t even up and ready to go knock on Linda’s door. “Be right down!” she shouted down the stairs, and began pulling on clothes. It took her longer than it should have, especially tying her shoes. “Floor just keeps getting farther away every day,” she muttered. It was her old joke with Russ. But Russ wasn’t around any longer to agree with her. Sarge was sleeping across her bedroom door. She nudged the beagle and he trailed after her.

      She opened the kitchen door to a wave of heat. “What are you doing?” she demanded. Alex had the back door open and was fanning it back and forth. “What’s that smell?”

      He glared at her. “The stove was on when I came in! You’re damn lucky you didn’t burn the house down. Why didn’t your smoke detector go off?”

      “Batteries must be dead,” she lied. She had gotten tired of them going off for every bagel the old toaster scorched and had loosened the battery in the kitchen unit. “I must have left the burner on last night when Linda was outside. So it wasn’t on all night, only three or four hours.” The stove top still simmered with heat and the white ceramic around the abused burner was a creamy brown now. She started to touch it, and then drew her hand back. “A little scouring powder should clean that up. No harm done, thank goodness.”

      “No harm done? Only three or four hours? Shit, Mom, do you not understand how lucky you were?” To her dismay, he unfolded her kitchen step stool and climbed up to the smoke detector. He tugged the cover open and the battery fell to the floor.

      “Well! There’s the problem,” she observed. “It must have come loose in there.”

      He eyed her. “Must have,” he said in a tight voice. Before she could stoop down, he hopped off the stool, scooped it up, and snapped it back into place. He closed the cover.

      “Want some coffee?” she asked as she turned on the pot. She’d preset the coffeepot just as she had for the last twenty years so she wouldn’t have to fill it up every morning. Just push the button, and then sit at the table and read the paper in her pajamas until the first cup was ready when Russ would come down.

      Or not, as was now the case.

      “No. Thanks. I need to get on my way. Mom, you’ve got to be more careful.”

      “I am careful. It wouldn’t have happened if the night hadn’t been so weird.”

      “And you wouldn’t have forgotten your card in the ATM last week, except that the fire truck went by, so you didn’t hear the machine beeping at you as you walked away. But what about locking your keys in the car? And leaving the sprinkler running all night?”

      “That was months ago!”

      “That’s my point! This ‘forgetfulness’ started months ago! It’s only getting worse. And more expensive. We had that water bill. And the locksmith. Luckily, the ATM sucked your card back in and the bank called you. You didn’t even realize it was gone! And now we’re going to have a little spike in the power bill this month. You need to go to the doctor and get checked out. Maybe there’s a pill for it.”

      “I’ll handle it,” she said. Now her voice was getting tight. She hated being lectured like this. “You’d better get on the road before the traffic builds up. You want some coffee in your commuter mug?”

      He stared at her for a time, wanting to continue the argument, to reach some sort of imaginary resolution. Luckily, Alex didn’t have the time. “Yeah. I’ll get my mug. Looks like everything’s okay at the Masons’. There goes Robbie to work. I don’t think he’d be doing that if his mom were missing.”

      There was nothing to reply that wouldn’t make her sound even more like a crackpot. When he came back in with his mug, she reached for the coffeepot and saw it was full of pale brown water. She’d forgotten to put the grounds in the filter. She didn’t miss a beat as she took out the instant coffee. “I’ve stopped making a full pot just for myself,” she said as she spooned powdered coffee into his commuter mug and poured the hot water over it. He took it with a sigh. Once he was gone, she fixed the coffee properly and sat down with her paper.

      It was eleven o’clock before the police arrived, and one in the afternoon before an officer tapped on her door. She felt terrible as he carefully jotted down her account of what she had seen at 4 a.m. “And you didn’t call the police?” the young man asked her, his brown eyes full of sorrow for her stupidity.

      “I called her house twice, and then called my son. But I didn’t see her outside, so I thought she’d gone home.”

      He folded his notebook with a sigh and tucked it into his pocket. “Well. She didn’t,” he said heavily. “Poor old lady, out there in her slippers and Christmas lights. Well, I doubt she went far. We’ll find her.”

      “She was wearing a hot-pink workout suit. And bedroom slippers.” She rummaged through her recall. “And she had a baseball bat. And a Hello Kitty backpack. Like she was going somewhere.”

      He took out his notebook, sighed again, and added the details. “I wish you had called,” he said as he pocketed it again.

      “So do I. But my son said she had probably gone home, and at my age it’s pretty easy to doubt your own judgment on things.”

      “I imagine so. Good afternoon, ma’am.”

      It was Thursday. She went to see Richard in the nursing home. She took, as she always did, one of the photo albums from when they were children. She parked in the parking lot, crossed the street to the coffee shop, and bought a large vanilla latte. She carried it into the permanent pee smell of Caring Manor, through the “parlor” with its floral sofa and dusty plastic flower arrangements, and went down the hall, past the inhabited wheelchairs parked along the walls. The hunched backs and wrinkly necks of the residents reminded her of turtles peering out of their shells. A few of the patients nodded at her as she passed, but most simply stared. Blue eyes faded to pale linen, brown eyes bleeding pigment into their whites, eyes with no one behind them anymore. There were familiar faces, residents who had been there at least as long as the three years that Richard had been here. She remembered their names, but they no longer did. They slumped in their chairs, waiting for nothing, their wheels a mockery to people who had no place to go.

      There was a new nurse at the desk. Again. At first, Sarah had tried to greet every nurse and aide by name each time she visited Richard. It had proven a hopeless task. The nurses changed too often, and the lower echelon of aides who actually tended the residents changed even more frequently, as did the languages they spoke. Some of them were nice, chatting to Richard as they cleared away his lunch tray or changed his bedding. But others reminded her of prison guards, their eyes empty and resentful of their duties and the residents. She often brought them small gifts, jars of jam, squash from her

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