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  “Oh!” she said when I opened the door, bringing her hand up to her chest as if I’d surprised her. Then: “The girl.” Her eyes, jumpy in their sockets, darted quickly past me to the rest of the house.

  “Can I help you?” I said. The cold air whooshed in.

  “Hell-o,” she said formally. “I’ve been meaning to see you for a while now. By you, I mean your family.” She had a slow, breathy way of talking, as if she’d recently been let off a respirator. Her eyes scanned the outside of the house, the hallway behind me, the book in my hand: The Virgin Queen, an Elizabeth I biography.

  “Yes?” I said, without particular patience. She’d interrupted my reading.

  “Did you get my letters?” she said. My skin prickled at the nape of my neck. I was wearing only a sweatshirt and pajama pants. I wanted to call for my mother.

  “What letters?” I feigned ignorance.

  “Your brother is buried,” she said, clasping her thin coat shut. Her hands were as red as her ears, the tips of her nails torn off unevenly, the edges ragged and violent-looking.

  “Go away,” I said. My voice sounded silly and girlish. I was whining.

  “There are horizons of soil,” Melissa Anne said. “Humus first and then topsoil and eluviation and subsoil and then, and then …” She stopped to think, chewing on her lip. She was staring at something at her feet, then something at mine, then something behind me. A flurry of ideas ran through my head—slam the door, slap her across the face, tell her she’s insane—but I just stood there, listening. “Regolith,” she finally said. “It is regolith before the bedrock.” She was nodding.

  “I’m closing the door,” I said, even though I wasn’t.

  “He’s in the topsoil. The good news is that he’s only as deep as the topsoil. You need to find him. He’s scared.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Oh!” she said again, with the same surprised look that had greeted me. My words surprised us both. Tears sprang to my eyes from the cold. Her eyes settled fully on my face, as if just now seeing me. Something in her expression changed; it mellowed, as if the spark that had been igniting her were suddenly cooling.

  “You thing,” she said, “you poor thing.” She held out a raggedy hand like she was going to touch me. I scooted back, my slippers shushing against the tiles, seeming suddenly very loud. She smiled at me then. Her front teeth were badly yellowed, her bottom ones overlapping, crowding messily on top of each other. Coupled with her round face, it gave her an ominous jack-o’-lantern look. “Such sadness,” she said. “It is not even to do with your brother, is it?” Then: “It’s just to do with you, isn’t it?”

  “What?” I said, though I’d heard her. She was beaming now, as if she’d just been crowned Miss Fairfield 1996. Her body buckled forward, not so much a fluid movement as a hiccup, as if she were trying to lurch into the house. I pictured her hands on me, her rancid breath in my nose. With just inches of space between us, she said, “You will always be like this.” She said it simply, as if she were saying, “Winters will always be cold” or “Birds will always fly south.”

  She still smiled her Halloweeny smile. Then she pursed her lips, like she could kiss me. “Find him,” she said, and I pushed the door into its jamb and screamed like a child: “Mom! Mommy!”

  • • •

  The police station workroom was numbingly antiseptic, a line of identical desks sitting in a neat row, large pale tiles lining the floor; the one chalkboard scribbled with Perp and DWI and Drive-by offered the only hint that this might be something other than a tax attorney’s or actuary’s office. The Fairfield cops didn’t have a whole lot to do. Aside from missing kids, the most action Fairfield saw was teenagers with open containers and false burglar alarms. Two of the Danny posters hung on a bulletin board, between an announcement about the annual police auction and a reward poster for a lost German shepherd. Bessie was the dog’s name, and it had watery brown eyes.

  The chair I sat in reminded me of the chair in Chuck’s office, unforgiving and hard. An officer I didn’t recognize—Reyes, the coppery name tag over his badge said—hunted and pecked into his computer as I talked. My mom stood next to me, and I was embarrassed for the untucked back of her shirt, the funky smell of her breath.

  “She said he was buried,” I told Reyes.

  “Did she give any specifics? Indicate that she had any part in the burying?”

  “She said he was in the topsoil. She knew about all the layers of the soil. I don’t really think she had any part in anything. She just seemed nuts.” I told about the dyed hair and the teeth and the fingernails and the ears and the jacket. I didn’t mention what she said about me.

  “Was she in any way threatening?”

  “No,” I said. “She said he was scared.”

  My mom made a gulping noise then, like choking on her own saliva. Reyes looked at her. I didn’t. She put her hand on my shoulder, and then, as I was repeating Melissa Anne’s physical description, ran it roughly through the top of my hair, as if she were having a hard time controlling herself.

  Eventually Reyes told us, “Thanks for coming in, you never know what will turn into a real lead, we’ll certainly keep alert about this.”

  “That’s it?” my mother said.

  “There’s not a lot else we can do now, Mrs. Pasternak,” Reyes said. His eyes were brown and apologetic, like Bessie’s.

  “She came to our home!” my mother said, and Reyes went into a spiel about how the alleged Melissa Anne seemed neither a direct threat nor in violation of any law. We didn’t even, he pointed out, have verification that this was in fact Melissa Anne.

  “There’s no law against knocking on people’s doors and saying something upsetting.” He added quickly, “Unfortunately.” Then he looked at me. “I’m sorry this happened to you.” It seemed wooden out of his mouth, something he’d been taught to say at a mandatory in-service about talking nicely to people who came into the station with inconsequential complaints.

  During the car ride home, my mom kept patting my knee, asking if I was all right. All of a sudden, it seemed, she couldn’t stop touching me. I made sounds, like mmm, to show I was okay, not wanting either to worry or to encourage her. It was a little suffocating, being in such an enclosed space and so much in her focus all of a sudden. I cracked my window even though it was frigid out. When my dad came home from work, he and my mom had a quiet conference in the living room, and I heard my mother stage-whispering her version of events: crazy and woman and nothing.

  That night I lay in bed listening to the sounds of the house. Night-time activated my senses. From only the slightest change in pitch, I could anticipate when the refrigerator was about to rev its motor into full hum or the furnace about to cycle a short blast of warm air. I could, from a floor away, hear the wheezy breathing of one of the sleeping dogs, or from several blocks, the rush of car tires against slick roads. Soon creaky footsteps came from my parents’ room. I was used to their occasional trips to the bathroom, the low squeaks of faucets turned on, the sustained, airy gasp of a toilet flushing and refilling. But tonight someone walked the halls. From the weight of the footfalls, the pronounced thud of each step, I guessed my father. The sound grew louder and louder, as if heading this way. My parents never paced the house at night. When the noise finally stopped, I could sense someone right outside my door—not that I could hear breathing, just the electricity of another body nearby—and it put me on edge beneath my blankets, my toes tensing, a low whir in my ears.

  When the door finally eased open, my dad’s broad outline came clear. I watched him drooping against the doorframe, one hand and then the other moving through his hair, and I wondered if he was sleepwalking. Wondered too if he could see the whites of my eyes watching him. The very idea made me feel caught, made me quickly close them.

  The footsteps continued toward my bed until I felt the weight of him at the foot of it. My mattress bowed easily beneath him—it was not a very good mattress—and my body listed slightly to
ward him. He made a strange, slobbery noise, something like the razzing sounds he used to make when we were little and he’d press his lips to our bellies and blow, he the tickle monster, Danny and I his howling victims.

  He said my name now. At least I thought he said it. His voice was thready and whispering, just above a hush. I opened my eyes again. There he sat, slumped in on himself, his hair an unkempt plume from where his fingers had just been. He put a hand on my foot and lightly squeezed my ankle.

  “Hi,” I said quietly.

  “Oof.” It was a sudden noise, of alarm or maybe embarrassment, I couldn’t tell. “Did I wake you?” he said.

  “Mmm,” I said noncommittally. It seemed shameful to admit I’d been up.

  “We’ll get her,” he said.

  It seemed odd and needlessly vengeful, the idea that we’d get Melissa Anne. I didn’t really think she needed getting. I just wanted her not ever to come back. I recognized, though, he was just trying to be reassuring.

  “I know,” I said.

  For a while he just sat there and I didn’t know what to do, what to say. The birch tree in our backyard made soft cracking sounds from the weight of the snow on its branches. One of the dogs was awake downstairs, walking along the kitchen linoleum.

  When he spoke, his voice was already different. “Okay,” he said, more composed and Dad-like. More daytime. He patted my foot officiously, two quick taps. When he stood, his joints cracked, a low imitation of the birch branches. “Sleep tight, bed bugs bite,” he said, a phrase he hadn’t spoken in years. As he moved back to ward the door—how long had he been in here? One minute? Ninety seconds?—I filled quickly with a sad, fretful version of nighttime, alone in the dark, creatures lurking under bed frames and behind closet doors. I felt suddenly years younger, and not in a good way.

  Already he was in the hallway.

  “Thanks,” I said, wondering how long he would’ve stayed, how long he would have sat and held my foot, had I kept quiet.

  Within days of Melissa Anne’s appearance, my parents fired Howard and tracked down Denis Jimenez, a private investigator referred by one of my mom’s old vet tech coworkers. The coworker had hired Denis to investigate her husband during their divorce, and by the time Denis was done, he’d uncovered tax fraud, a sometime girlfriend, and several marijuana plants growing in the soon-to-be-ex’s new apartment. Tenacious as a bulldog, my mom’s old coworker said of Denis Jimenez.

  By Saturday he was at our kitchen table. My mother paged through her fat manila folder of notes and recited stories about everything from Danny’s brief and early aptitude for painting to his love for Diet Pepsi to that girlfriend of his she found to be snobby (You know, she said, turning to Dad and me for help, the one with the Polish name). She flipped through Danny’s baby books and his later photo albums. “Here,” she told Denis. “ Fifth-grade graduation.” “His first swim meet.” “After his driver’s license exam.”

  At first Denis listened to her with the intent stare you’d expect from a private investigator, complete with notepad in hand, young assistant by his side. He and my mother took turns vying for the ashtray in the middle of the table. But as my mother drifted to the noncancerous mole Danny had had removed from the back of his neck two years earlier and the sprain in his ankle during sixth-grade gym and the funny way he dropped the s from specific, Denis began to sense, it seemed, that there easily could be no end to this. He started subtly, and then not so subtly, slapping his pad against his hand, clearing his throat, trying to ask questions. At one point as he began to speak, she held a hand in the air. Denis looked to my father for help, but my father had the glazed, faraway look that came so naturally to him when my mother was like this. None of this behavior was new, though in front of an audience of watchful strangers, I felt fresh shame.

  “Mrs. Pasternak!” Denis finally said, almost yelling. “Can you show me the boy’s room?”

  We all trailed upstairs together, my mother in the lead, followed by Denis, his assistant, Dad, and me. As we crowded into Danny’s room, my mother continued to talk (Danny didn’t have the arm to be quarterback, though that’s what he always wanted. What boy doesn’t want to be quarterback?). Denis nosed through Danny’s stuff with the tenderness and care of a bulldozer, pulling comic books off shelves and saying things like “Not much of a reader,” pointing to the St. Pauli Girl poster on the wall and asking, “Big drinker, your son?” and even pawing through the dirty laundry basket still sitting in the back of the closet and commenting on the funk.

  “You can wash this, you know,” he said to my mother, the statement that finally quieted her. “If he’d been snatched out of this room, that’d be another issue. There might be evidence in here. But given the circumstances, no reason you can’t clean these. Might help with the smell in here.” My mother blanched. It wasn’t clear if Denis was scolding or trying to be helpful; his tone seemed to fluctuate only between impatient and strident.

  The assistant, Kimberly, smiled in our general direction. With her honeyed skin and blond-brown hair pinned back with several well-placed barrettes, she looked like the effortlessly pretty girls who appeared in the college catalogues that had already started coming in the mail for me. She wore a neatly collared short-sleeved shirt, her collarbone showing through the V neck. It was such a poised collarbone, so sharp and symmetrical, with a thin pearl necklace resting above it. I would never be a girl with such a nice collarbone. I couldn’t even picture mine.

  “I can meet you downstairs when I’m done,” Denis said to my parents. An offer or an order, it was unclear, though none of us moved. I watched as he roughly fingered the contents of Danny’s dresser, pawing through sweat socks and unfurling sweaters. He was not particularly attractive. He had deep-cocoa-colored skin rutted with the faintest hint of pockmarks at the cheeks and temples. His black mustache was spotty and looked to be a product of neglect rather than choice. His fingertips were yellowed, probably from the chain-smoking. A faded brown stain ran down the front of his shirt. But I already liked him for his unsentimental zeal. He was a one-man windstorm whipping through our stale little house.

  Back at the kitchen table, Denis peppered us with questions—what kind of kid had Danny been, what did my parents fight with him about, what did I fight with him about, who were his friends, who did he confide in, was he a partier, did he display common sense, where were his favorite hangouts, what rules did he most commonly break, was he a virgin, what were his secrets? (Denis said he knew that was an oxymoronic question. I didn’t point out that he was misusing oxymoron.)

  My mother shuffled through her index cards. She answered the most basic questions with long, tangential monologues. My father maintained his dazed expression. Kimberly continued to smile at us, which seemed to be a key part of her job. Another part seemed to be jotting down notes. Her most important duty, though, appeared to be exchanging meaningful glances with Denis whenever one of us said anything apparently noteworthy, such as the mention of Danny’s growth spurt or his dyslexia. They were constantly looking at each other, Kimberly and Denis, like a couple showily suppressing a secret.

  My mother lit new cigarettes with the still-burning ember of her previous one. She fiddled with the pack, sliding it back and forth across the table. My father kept swallowing, the only noise he made; I could hear the saliva going down the back of his throat. It was not until Denis asked if Danny was into any hard drugs that my dad spoke: “This is my son you’re talking about.”

  “Listen,” Denis said, “I can understand the desire for someone in your situation to be protective. But that’s not going to do any of us any good, and it’s certainly not going to help me do my job.” My father shook his head. Denis went on. “You know more than thirty percent of kids in suburban high schools admit to at least one occasion of cocaine use before graduation?”

  My mom blew smoke out of her nose. She looked like she could cry, though she always looked like that now.

  “He smoked pot,” I said. “I don’t think he di
d other stuff. All the jocks are paranoid about getting caught.”

  Both of my parents stared as if I’d just spun my head around or presented the Shroud of Turin. “I don’t know for sure,” I said. Then: “No, I pretty much do.”

  Denis nodded at me with a look that I would grow more used to in the coming months, but that first time it took me by surprise. I felt girlish and giggly, like I might have to jam a palm into my thigh to suppress escaping laughter. In general, Denis had a suspicious watchfulness about him, which could quickly leave you feeling exposed. Already, barely an hour into our first meeting, my parents bristled in their chairs, my mother worrying bits of paper to pulp, my father’s face having morphed into a brow-heavy glare. But as Denis nodded at me, tipping his chin forward and curling his lip into a cagey smile, he made it seem that he was bringing me into the fold, conferring a certain undeniable power on me. For just a beat, his eyes brightened and things between us grew intimate and conspiratorial. I felt a warm heat rising through my chest.

  As quickly as it had come, though, the expression disappeared. But the warmth lingered. I found myself clenching my teeth against a smile. Denis, in the meantime, moved on to more questions: was Danny more passive or aggressive, more stubborn or flexible, more of a thinker or an actor, more contemplative or impulsive? These were easy ones. I left them to my parents.