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herself on the stone wall in the side yard of their house, the arms of a maple tree stretching above her. This was through his living room window, and when he looked again, a few minutes later, she was gone. Janet calls goodbye to him from the foyer, closing the front door just as he closes the kitchen window, and the air, which had been flowing past him in loops and curves, seems to tighten suddenly and take on the shape of the room.
    It is a lovely day, the sky so powdery blue that Janet almost decides to walk to the store, but she would rather not have to carry her outfit back home. She drives into town with all four windows open, parking by the reservoir. D. Barnett Fashions, where she is planning to buy her dress, is less than a block away, just past the Quik Stop Convenience Store and the Lily Taylor Hair Salon and the Why Not Bar, which Rollie Onopa, the proprietor, named from a line in a song. The wind carries the rich sweet smell of the first browning leaves, a smell that has always reminded her of burnt marshmallows. When she was a child, she used to roast marshmallows in the fireplace every Christmas Eve while she and her parents watched
Rudolph the
Red-Nosed Reindeer
on TV. On the Christmas after Celia’s seventh birthday, a few short months before she vanished, Janet and Christopher gave her a Barbie doll and a set of glitter lipstick. It occurs to Janet that she would love to go to a movie this afternoon, to seal herself in a dark room for an hour and a half, completely anonymous, immersing all her sorrow and passion and curiosity in someone else’s story, a fiction, and then to step outside and clutch her chest and rock back on her heels, blind-sided by the fresh air and sunlight. She is no longer welcome at the Reservoir Ten, where she tore one of the movie screens a year or two ago—a long story—but she could easily visit one of the other theaters in town. She does not have the time, though. She would not be able to concentrate. And anyway she has to buy a dress. She is passing the pavilion where United States Congressman Asa Hutchinson stands asking for a quarter, a dollar, anything you can spare, when she sees Sheila Lanzetta, whose daughter, Kristen, was Celia’s best friend, sitting at a picnic table paging through a journal.
    Sheila hears someone tapping past her on the sidewalk. She is reading an article in the latest issue of
Social Text,
a long, tangled piece about aboriginal Filipino culture and the concept of feminine time, a term the author uses without attribution, as though she has coined it. The author’s argument relies heavily on the ideas of Baudrillard and Kristeva, writers whose work has always seemed just so much wet cement to Sheila, and she has spent the last half hour or so trying to puzzle out the connection between multiple refractivity and the hermeneutics of the feminine. As such, she almost fails to see the person passing by, barely glancing up from her reading. Janet’s face is turned fully away from her, toward the sunlight crinkling on the surface of the reservoir, but Sheila recognizes her from the way she carries herself, her hands curled loosely into fists like a person holding a firefly she is trying not to crush. When Sheila calls out to her, Janet stops and spins about, a little too surprised, and gives a tiny laugh. She says that she was lost in her thoughts and didn’t see her. Sheila smiles. You were hoping I wouldn’t spot you, right? she asks, and Janet grimaces and admits that, yes, she was. She says that she has so many things on her mind right now, you know how it is, and Sheila says that she can certainly sympathize. Ever since Janet lost her daughter, she has fallen into uncomfortable languishing silences around Sheila, and Sheila believes that she understands why: it has to do with watching Kristen grow up and take on the first features of her adolescence, pierced ears and braces and training bras. Janet must see her own daughter, or what she could have