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his fingers on his thigh. “Maybe we should try the police.”
    “And report what?” Jane asked in a low voice. Anna knew that the decibel level of her mother’s voice dropped in direct proportion to her level of unhappiness. And when she started picking invisible lint off her skirt—like she was now doing—it meant that Jane Percy was on the verge of fury. “That our adult daughter didn’t meet us at the airport when she was supposed to? That she didn’t have the common decency to inform us of her alternate plans? Jonathan, I’m ready for a cocktail.”
    As Jonathan poured an icy martini into his ex-wife’s glass, Anna closed her eyes for a moment and recalled what it used to be like in the Percys’ town house on the east side of Manhattan, back in the long ago days before her parents had divorced. It had been a sort of Upper East Side WASP version of
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Her parents had all the drinking, the bickering, the loathing. But unlike the characters in the Albee play, they never yelled. Anna had learned well that a whisper could cut more sharply than a knife.
    By the time Anna reached middle school, Jonathan and Jane had reached what they called “a civilized arrangement”—they’d spend most of their time apart and come together when social niceties required that they be a presentable couple. This had worked for a year or so. After that, they headed straight for divorce court.
    It all made Anna wonder about the idea of one man, one woman, forever. Was marriage just another kind of peculiar institution? Maybe it was impossible to expect to love someone forever. Just because Jane Austen and Tolstoy and the Brontë sisters waxed poetic about eternal love didn’t mean that such love really existed; it just meant that they were excellent writers. Unfortunately, literature was not life. Right?
    Jane sipped her martini and sighed. “Evidently, our elder daughter will never take responsibility for her own life.”
    “We should find out what happened before we—” Anna was interrupted by the chime of her cell phone. She took it from her jeans pocket. “Hello?”
    “Don’t freak, Anna, it’s me.”
    “Susan!” Anna saw her mother sit forward on red alert while her dad sagged back on the couch in relief.
    “Where
are
you?” Anna asked her sister. “We came to meet you at the airport. You weren’t there!”
    “I’m on another plane. Using the air phone.”
    “You’re
what?
”
    “On my way to Albany.”
    “Albany
, New York?
” Anna asked.
    “No. Albany, Georgia,” Susan snapped. “Of course Albany, New York. I got off the plane in L.A. and got on a different flight twenty minutes later.”
    Anna was completely bewildered. “Why?”
    “Because fucking Dad
and
Mom are with you, that’s why,” Susan declared. “I just couldn’t do it, Anna. Don’t be mad at me. I’m trying to protect myself.”
    “Hold on a sec,” Anna told her, and put a finger over the mouthpiece of her cell. “She’s on a plane. She’s going to Albany, New York. Mom? She knows you’re here. Somehow.”
    Jonathan looked sheepish. “I told her doctor I’d get Jane to fly in—it was his suggestion, after all.”
    “Your sister has still not dealt with her issues,” Jane stated. “Don’t let her blame it on the rest of us.”
    Anna exhaled slowly. No wonder Susan had changed destinations. Then she spoke into the phone again. “Sooz? Why Albany? There’s nothing up there.”
    “I’m going to the Berkshires. I’ll rent a car and drive across.”
    “What’s in the Berkshires?”
    “The Kripalu Yoga Institute.”
    Anna knew the place she was talking about. It was a yoga retreat perched on a hillside above the Stockbridge Bowl, directly across from the Tanglewood concert grounds. Kripalu catered to spiritually minded visitors.
    On the hierarchy of places where Susan could have been headed after rehab, with a crack den in Philadelphia at the bottom and her grungy apartment on New