me like I knew something she didn’t. “Why would she be in the car?”
“Because everyone has to be somewhere. Right?” She had no time for her own piece of completely useless wisdom right then. She ran downstairs and into the kitchen, picked up the phone, started to dial, then hung it up, and thought for a second. “The car?”
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
She swiped her car keys out of her pocketbook, and we hauled out the side door, down the stairs to the curb, where her car was parked and empty. She jangled her keys against her leg and her head twitched from left to right looking down the street. Neighbors were driving their kids to school and themselves to work. City commuters walked past our house to the train station while my mother stood on the sidewalk in her pleasant pastel nurse’s uniform, took a big breath, and said, “I can’t believe I can’t find my daughter.” She ran her hands through her hair and scratched her scalp with her mellow-long fingernails, her hands shaking. She wasn’t the cool ER nurse anymore. Her panic made her too young for that. Thirty-five years peeled off her, and the stories she’d told me about her childhood showed in her eyes. She was nine, wearing her Sunday dress and wool coat in Rockefeller Center, separated from my grandma Terri, lost for hours in the huge crowd of people that came to look at the Christmas tree, shivering next to a cop when they found her. She was hiding in her closet, crying because her hand-me-down clothes were too big and made her look fat. She was seven, in the supermarket breaking a glass jar of artichoke hearts, then taking a slap in the mouth from Terri that made her lip bleed. She was thirteen, months after Terri died, coming home late from school in a panic that she wouldn’t have dinner ready for my grandfather, then him being late. She was the interrupted kid, the misplaced care-taker of too many things. And then—because keeping it cool, keeping her feelings underneath where she thought they belonged was what she was best at—she somehow jolted out of it with a new plan: “Let’s check the back. Jake, you go around the house that way and I’ll go this way and we’ll meet at the back door.” We split up. Mom started off in a fast walk that turned into a run. That’s when my head got loud with all the scary stuff that could have happened: stolen, kidnapped, beaten, killed, cut up for someone’s pleasure. I guess it’s a sign of the times when an eleven-year-old thinks these are actual possibilities. Any of those images alone were terrifying enough, but coupled with the idea that I might have to live in the house without her was a scenario beyond torture. The dinner table without her. The walls with no one knocking on them. I could predict the loneliness but I couldn’t measure it. In that moment I remembered who I felt most connected to in the house. And it wasn’t the people paying the bills.
Then I thought, Idiot, you didn’t check the porch yet, and I made a deal with God. God, if I get to the porch before Mom does, Dani will be standing there with her hands and face washed and her teeth brushed, in one piece ready to go to school. I hoofed ass up the slope of the driveway and around the side of the house, racing my mom for my sister’s life. “Be there,” I kept saying. “Be there, be there.” I did get to the porch before my mother did, but Dani wasn’t standing there. She wasn’t washed or brushed or ready for anything. She was lying on the wicker couch. Asleep. No blanket, no pillow. Just pajamas, socks and a red hooded sweatshirt pulled over her head. It’s so like God to change the outcome of your prayers just enough so you can’t quite tell if He personally handled your request.
Her sleeping hands had searched for heat and made their way to her mouth. Somehow she looked more vulnerable on the vinyl cushions of our ancient couch with its chipped white paint than she did in the images I’d conjured a few seconds before.
Mom came running up the porch steps. I turned to her and put my finger to my lips so she wouldn’t wake her. I was proud to have been the one to find her. And for a second Mom listened to me; then she kneeled down to her and shook her a little. “Danielle.” Dani’s eyes snapped open and she let out a little scream. That made my mother scream. “What are you doing out here?” Mom asked.
“I was sleeping.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to.”
My mom looked back at me for a second, probably trying to see if I’d come up with my own answer. “Well I guess that’s OK. But are you cold?”
“A little.”
Mom grabbed her fingers and rubbed them fast between hers. Granted, the porch was on the side of our house surrounded by hedges and up enough of a slope that it couldn’t be seen from the street, but that didn’t seem reason enough for Mom to think Dani couldn’t get swiped by some black-market psycho during the night. Maybe it was just me, but I expected a different reaction than: Here, let me warm your fingers little girl and you’ll be juuuust fine.
“Go inside and get warm, Danielle.”
“OK.”
Dani stood up and walked through the side door. “And brush your teeth,” Mom yelled. “We have to go to school now.”
All that September, if Danielle wasn’t in her bed in the morning, my mother would sigh and say to me, “Would you please go on the porch and wake your sister up.” Seems a first-grade girl sleeping outside by herself regularly should have sent up a few more flags than it did. Dani started taking covers and pillows out with her, and that was enough because September was still bringing the kind of overnight weather a blanket could protect you from.
The night she came into my room, I mostly still feel like shit about. She tried to take the blanket off my bed and I think I said something like, get your own and quit waking me up or something stupid like that and yanked it out of her hands. But the thing was, it wasn’t so much that she wanted my blanket as she wanted me to know she was out there. It sucks when it takes you a year to catch on to something any schmuck with a quarter of a brain could probably figure out in a half hour.
She stopped coming to me after that. So I started setting my alarm clock for 2 a.m. and kept it under my pillow so I could check on her and not wake up the rest of the house. Some nights she’d be asleep in her room, some nights she’d be outside and sometimes I’d take an extra blanket down to her. Other nights I’d say, fuck it, I’m not checking on her anymore. She’s fine. And even if she’s not, my parents will take care of it. Fuckin joke that was.
Then October came.
It was almost 2 a.m. by my clock. I knocked the one Come-in knock and got no response. I went into her bedroom and she was gone. I got a pair of gloves from my closet and went down after her.
She had the hood of her red sweatshirt pulled over her head, the string cinched up so tight it covered her nose, mouth, eyebrows; all you could see were eyes peeking out of the little hole like a pair of brown dice. She had two blankets: the one against her was fuzzy and plaid and the other was rust colored, so heavy and wooly you’d think it was issued by the Army. Somehow she got both the blankets around her body tight as plastic wrap, like she put them flat on the floor, laid down on one side and rolled herself up like a burrito. She looked up at me through her hood and I said, “Dani, it’s freezing. You sure you wanna stay out here?”
She closed her eyes and nodded. How someone could be so soft spoken and so stubborn at the same time blows minds. “OK, I got you these anyway.” I laid the gloves on top of her and stood there for a second wondering what was going on in this kid’s head. That’s when she wiggled one arm out of the cocoon of blankets and knocked once on the wall behind her.
I said, “What?”
She knocked again.
“Whudda you want?”
She
