But I do.
And Mom’s car is in the drive! The high school
must have been dismissed, too.
5.
It’s the way she clutches the phone
and that unspeakable expression on her face—
her voice attempting to comfort
someone who is NOT me.
She glances, half-smiles out of habit
as I walk into our latest house.
But only her mouth smiles. Her eyes
are hollow wells of worry. Her eyes
miss the BIG change in me.
I need her
to hang up and follow me
to the bathroom,
to talk to me
through the door,
tell me, “Abbey, I’m here,”
but she doesn’t.
I count to ten.
Breathe deeply.
Count again.
Is she talking to Aunt Rose? Uncle Todd?
Is it about New York?
Her voice quivers and doesn’t sound like her own.
What’s going on there?
6.
I soak my underclothes in soapy warmth
and think of the sink in my art teacher’s class,
with its every-color splatter, and paint brushes
rinsing free of paint.
The TV buzzes loud from our den
with news of a magnitude I can’t comprehend.
Why can’t Mom hear me
crying for her, needing her, screaming in my head—
the kind of screaming
a mother should hear?
7.
She finds me in bed,
sketchbook propped in my lap.
“Something’s happened…” she whispers.
I rise and shadow her
from room
to room,
questions stick in my throat.
“My sister!” she chokes,
tossing random shirts
and pants toward a suitcase
and swiping at her eyes
with a pair of socks.
I pick up clothes where they land,
fold them neatly,
place them gently
into her bag.
“What’s going on—” I begin,
but she’s distracted and tells me,
“I have to request a sub,”
replacing my words with hers.
I rearrange the photos of relatives on her dresser
and stare at a recent one
of my cousins.
Mom pauses packing for a few seconds,
looks directly at me and tries to explain
with plain language, straightforward,
seemingly simple:
Your Aunt Rose is missing.
Still, I stare,
my face a fill-in-the-blank,
my brain shuts down, my words dry up.
Missing?
Missing from her desk, her office in New York,
the towering building in which she worked,
but the building in which she worked,
her office, her desk are also missing,
as in—no longer.
Missing?
How can a building just give up,
be gone? How can people just disappear?
Mom is preparing
to drive to New York—
which is half a map from here—
to be with my cousins,
Jackson and Kate,
who are thirteen and eight,
and with my Uncle Todd,
while Dad and I
will be missing
her.
But not the same kind of missing.
My Aunt Rose is missing from the 86th floor
of a building that’s smoldering and missing
most of itself.
I visited her office once,
with my cousins and Uncle Todd.
See, my Aunt Rose and I,
we see eye to eye. We click.
She gets me. That day, she let me
sit in her chair and pretend to be Boss,
so I bossed everyone: Be nice! Make art!
Aunt Rose agreed, “Let’s decree
naps, music, candy—and raises
for everybody!”
A framed landscape I’d drawn
decorated her office’s white wall,
which I guess
is not there
anymore.
8.
“All?” I ask.
“All planes are grounded,” Mom repeats,
her voice gone monotone.
“As in, not in the air?” I ask again.
She nods, looks out our window
to the empty sky. “Who knows
what’s coming next!”
After planning her route, she hesitates—“Your dad
will be home soon”—and then kisses me,
grabs her final necessities,
and loads her car.
I remind her to wear her seatbelt,
to call when she gets there,
then I wave goodbye,
but she’s already in math-teacher
problem-solving mode.
In comparison, my problem shrinks
to beyond microscopic, so I befriend
the bathroom.
Beneath the sink, Mom’s supplies
loom like a commercial
for a product I can’t decode.
The folded, illustrated instructions,
black-and-white line drawings
of a woman who smiles with knowledge
she won’t share
with a girl like me.
The woman, all curves and experience,
could help me if she wanted,