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egg lady shrugged. “Sure,” she said. “Sure, she bought bread.”

11.
    Two weeks after my mother disappeared, Virginia took me to see a psychic. She said she’d found one that specialized in my situation.
    “You know, lost people,” Virginia said.
    The psychic had asked that I bring a photo. I’d selected

    one of my mother standing in front of the movie theater. One day, as I was coming home from school, I saw her exiting the theater and I asked her to pose. In the picture, she was wearing white culottes and looked like she was forcing herself to be patient. “Why didn’t anyone tell me how unbecoming those are on me?” she said when she saw the photo. She stared at me accusingly, and later donated the culottes to a charity clothing drive.
    The psychic was sixty, maybe older. She held my fingers in hers and told me I was a sad, sad person, with a sad soul. “I can see it in your eyes. What lonely eyes.” My hands were cold in her oily palms. I stared at her so long I thought I might start crying. I handed her the picture.
    She held the photo up to her forehead and closed her eyes. Her lashes were beaded with blue mascara. “Someone has done harm to her,” she said. “She’s in a field and it was a bad man who did this to her.”
    “Did what?” I asked.
    The psychic said she’d need more money to try to see the man, and the exact location of the field. She pushed a large jade bracelet up and down her thick, hairless forearm.
    I had already given her the money I earned babysitting. I unclasped my coin purse. Red, ripped lining.
    “Your earrings would do the trick,” she said.
    I touched my earlobes. I was wearing the earrings my mother had given me.
    “They’re from my mother,” I stammered.

    “Good,” the psychic said. “It might help.”
    She reached for my ear. I leaned back in my chair and then jumped up. I found Virginia in the front of the parlor.
    “Let’s go,” I said. “Let’s run.”
    We sprinted down the street, hand in hand. We had never held hands before. We ran until we were out of breath, and fell laughing against the side of a grocery store. As Virginia laughed, she threw back her head, and her long hair brushed the rainbows on the pockets of her jeans. She had light eyes, good eyes—boys said they were bedroomy.
    That night, I stared at myself in the mirror on the inside lid of an old jewelry box. I squinted my eyes, trying to make them look seductive, vague, distant.

12.
    A month after my mother’s disappearance, we hired Suzette. Suzette was an elderly Chinese woman who came in the afternoons to help us clean the house and look after Jeremy. Her own retarded son had died at the age of thirty. I couldn’t piece together all the details: a Circle Line cruise around New York, a fascination with a seagull, a fall from the top deck.
    Suzette thought she could understand Jeremy. “He said he missed you today,” she told me one afternoon. I had just come home from school.
    “Really?” I said. I’d never heard him speak. He could grunt when upset, but to my knowledge, he had never formed words.

    I stood with my backpack still on, staring at Jeremy. He was sitting on the toilet, the door wide open. Suzette was trying to potty-train him. She paid a great deal of attention to his fecal matter: she’d serve him beef or large quantities of 7-Up if she thought he was having difficulty in either direction.
    “Did you say you missed your sister when she was at school?” Suzette coaxed.
    Jeremy said nothing.
    “Did you miss me, Jeremy?” I said.
    Nothing. I felt jealousy so intense I didn’t know what it was. I wanted to slap Suzette. I stomped to my room, closed the door, and hoped my mother was dead in a field.

13.
    Dad wrote letters to my mother. He wrote them by hand on long reams of old computer paper, the kind with the perfora-tions on the sides. Some days, his letters, in clean all-caps, covered one sheet, other days, three. He never separated a page from the one