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them what my mother had been wearing at the mall: a black sweater covered in cat hair and a pair of brown suede pants that, at the knees and lap creases, had faded to the color of butter.
    They asked if anything had been taken from the premises. “Everything’s here,” Dad said. “In order.”
    “Has she ever done anything like this before?”
    Dad turned to me. “Clar, can you excuse us for a second?
    Maybe go check on Jeremy?”
    I stared at him and then went upstairs to Jeremy’s room. A friend of my mother’s had given him a karaoke machine. Jeremy was watching the “Moon River” tape.
    I crept back out to the landing above the stairway.

    “She was married before,” Dad was telling the detectives. “She left him without warning.”
    I had never heard of the first husband.
    “Where does the ex-husband live?” one of the detectives asked.
    “Finland. The northern part. He’s a priest there. Or he was.
    A Sami man.” “A what?”
    “Sorry. A native. Part of the native population. Like Eskimos.” “Any chance she went back to the priest? What was his
    name?”
    “Eero. Eero Valkeapää.” He spelled it for them. “And no, there’s no chance. She was very unhappy with him. It’s been more than a decade. Fifteen years since she saw him.”
    “Any reason for you to expect your wife might have been having an affair?”
    “Out of the question,” Dad said. “She wasn’t . . . how do I say this? Olivia wasn’t a sexual person.”

9.
    I knew things Dad didn’t.
    I was eleven when my mother gave me her earrings. I was watching Jeremy one afternoon when he had a tantrum. He had carried anything with an electrical cord—the toaster, the blow dryer, the small TV from my parents’ bedroom—into the center of the living room.

    I looked all over the house for my mother. I found her outside in the garden, kissing a man under the bird feeder. Like mistletoe, I thought. The man was Mr. Wells, the owner of the art-house theater in town. He was a drunk who attempted to disguise the stench of bourbon with an excessive application of Ben-Gay. I tried to sneak back into the house without them seeing me, but I’d locked the door.
    “Here you go, baby,” she said later that night. “The earrings are a tradition among the women in our family.” She said her own mother had given her a pair of earrings when she was my age, and now she wanted to give them to me. “I can’t wear them anyway,” she said.
    My mother had slits in her ears where her piercings once were. Years had caused the rips to split and separate, each one an inverted V , like the door to an unzipped tent.
    “Here,” she said. “Take them.” With pinched fingers, she
    held the gold hoops out to me, as if holding dead mice by their tails.
    Mr. Wells left town the following spring—most likely, his wife had found out about my mother—and moved to Texas. Shortly after he left, a package showed up at our door. The return address was in San Antonio.
    Without opening it, my mother placed the package inside two of Jeremy’s plastic bags—he kept his collection in the hall closet—tied the bags in a knot, and threw the bundle in the trash.
    “Wrong address,” she said to me.

    Later, I ripped open the plastic bags. Inside was a miniature horse and a T-shirt that said DON ’ T MESS WITH TEXAS .
    A scarecrow stood in the center of the small garden Dad had helped me plant. I dressed it in the DON ’ T MESS WITH TEXAS shirt. If my mother noticed, she never said a word.

10.
    Two days after my mother vanished, I came home and her car was in the driveway. I ran into the house.
    “The police found it parked at the Rhinecliff train station,” Dad said.
    I returned to the bakery in the mall and found the fried-egg lady. Now she was wearing an apron over a solid black shirt. I asked her if my mother had bought bread the evening of December 16. I wanted to know if she’d been planning on coming home for dinner, and then changed her mind.
    The