butterfly, its wings fluttering against her thighs with each tug.
He looked at her and a memory came to him of when they first dated, Lorie taking his hand and running it along her belly, her thighs. Telling him she once thought she’d be a dancer, that maybe she could be. And that if she ever had a baby she’d have a C-section, because everyone knew what happened to women’s stomachs after, not to mention what it does down there, she’d said, laughing, and put his hand there next.
He’d forgotten all this, and other things too, but now the things kept coming back and making him crazy.
He poured a tall glass of water for her and made her drink it. Then he refilled it and set it beside her.
She didn’t sleep like a drunk person but like a child, her lids twitching dreamily and a faint smile tugging at her mouth.
The moonlight coming in, it felt like he watched her all night, but at some point he must have fallen asleep.
When he woke, she had her head on his belly, was rubbing him drowsily.
“I was dreaming I was pregnant again,” she murmured. “It was like Shelby all over again. Maybe we could adopt. There are so many babies out there that need love.”
They had met six years ago. He was working for his mother, who owned a small apartment building on the north side of town.
Lorie lived on the first floor, where the window was high and you could see people walking on the sidewalk. His mother called it a “sunken garden apartment.”
She lived with another girl and sometimes they came in very late, laughing and pressing up against each other in the way young girls do, whispering things, their legs bare and shiny in short skirts. He wondered what they said.
He was still in school then and would work evenings and weekends, changing washers on leaky faucets, taking out the trash.
Once, he was in front of the building, hosing down the garbage cans with bleach, and she rushed past him, her tiny coat bunched around her face. She was talking on the phone and she moved so quickly he almost didn’t see her, almost splashed her with the hose. For a second he saw her eyes, smeary and wet.
“I wasn’t lying,” she was saying into the phone as she pushed her key into the front door, as she heaved her shoulders against it. “I’m not the liar here.”
One evening not long after, he came home and there was a note under the door. It read:
My heart is either broken or I haven’t paid the bill.
Thx, Lorie, #1-A
He’d read it four times before he figured it out.
She smiled when she opened the door, the security chain across her forehead.
He held up his pipe wrench.
“You’re just in time,” she said, pointing to the radiator.
No one ever thinks anything will ever happen to their baby girl. That’s what Lorie kept saying. She’d been saying that to reporters, the police, for every day of the three weeks since it happened.
He watched her with the detectives. It was just like on TV except nothing like on TV. He wondered why nothing was ever like you thought it would be and then he realized it was because you never thought this would be you.
She couldn’t sit still, her fingers twirling through the edges of her hair. Sometimes, at a traffic signal, she would pull nail scissors from her purse and trim the split ends. When the car began moving, she would wave her hand out the window, scattering the clippings into the wind.
It was the kind of careless, odd thing that made her so different from any girl he ever knew. Especially that she would do it front of him.
He was surprised how much he had liked it.
But now all of it seemed different and he could see the detectives watching her, looking at her like she was a girl in a short skirt, twirling on a bar stool and tossing her hair at men.
“We’re gonna need you to start from the beginning again,” the male one said, and that part was like on TV. “Everything you remember.”
“She’s gone over it so many times,” he said, putting his hand over hers and looking at the detective wearily.
“I meant you, Mr. Ferguson,” the detective said, looking at him. “Just you.”
They took Lorie to the outer office and he could see her through the window, pouring long gulps of creamer into her coffee, licking her lips.
He knew how that looked too. The newspapers had just run a picture of her at a smoothie place. The caption was “What about Shelby?” They must have taken it through the front window. She was ordering something at the counter, and she was smiling. They always got her when she was smiling. They didn’t understand that she smiled when she was sad. Sometimes she cried when she was happy, like at their wedding, when she cried all day, her face pink and gleaming, shuddering against his chest.
I never thought you would, she had said. I never thought I would. That any of this could happen.
He didn’t know what she meant, but he loved feeling her huddled against him, her hips grinding against him like they did when she couldn’t hold herself together and seemed to be holding on to him to keep from flying off the earth itself.
“So, Mr. Ferguson,” the detective said, “you came home from work and there was no one home?”
“Right,” he said. “Call me Tom.”
“Tom,” the detective started again, but the name seemed to fumble in his mouth like he’d rather not say it. Last week he’d called him Tom. “Was it unusual to find them gone at that time of day?”
“No,” he said. “She liked to keep busy.”
It was true, because Lorie never stayed put and sometimes would strap Shelby into the car seat and drive for hours, putting 100 or 200 miles on the car.
She would take her to Mineral Pointe and take photos of them in front of the water. He would get them on his phone at work and they always made him grin. He liked how she was never one of these women who stayed at home and watched court shows or the shopping channels.
She worked twenty-five hours a week at the Y while his mother stayed with Shelby. Every morning, she ran five miles, putting Shelby in the jogging stroller. She made dinner every night and sometimes even mowed the lawn when he was too busy. She never ever stopped moving.
This is what the newspapers and the TV people loved. They loved to take pictures of her jogging in her short shorts and talking on the phone in her car and looking at fashion magazines in line at the grocery store.
“What about Shelby?” the captions always read.
They never understood her at all. He was the only one.
“So,” the detective asked him, rousing from his thoughts, “what did you do when you found the house empty?”
“I
