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  Though she had invited just a handful of neighbors to Gretchen’s baby shower, a number of others had stopped her over the last few weeks, their voices hushed. “Is it true? You’re going to be a grandmother?” Their voices, inflected with exclamation points, still belied a tone of judgment, pity, so that she knew when she turned her back, lips would purse, heads would shake, all would think, Poor Judy.

  Poor Judy, one of her kids disappears, joins a cult; the next one goes off with a deadbeat rock band and never calls. And now the third, knocked up and living on a commune.

  Judy could hear it all, as if her ears were satellite dishes picking up the lone remarks her neighbors made to each other across telephone wires: You wonder what happened in a family like that. . . . Judy gave those kids everything; they were just rotten eggs, nothing you can do about that. . . . It’s sad, isn’t it? Some people’s lot in life. . . .

  Every holiday, Judy observed how all the other driveways were jammed with cars brimming with car seats and suitcases. If she stood too long at the window, she felt a hollow place open in her chest. Rusty didn’t understand. “You want cars, I can get us cars,” he’d brag, swaggering through the house. “I can get us cars all up and down the block. I could park this whole place in.”

  “You know that’s not it,” she’d say.

  “Then don’t bring it up.”

  If she was lucky, she got a postcard from Henry, his sloppy handwriting letting her know he was in L.A. or heading off to a tour of the U.K. The Brother of Carson Glide was still together and had slowly gained some national acclaim, although Henry was the only original member. Last she’d heard, he’d changed his name—he was always metamorphosing for the stage—one time he signed his name “Siggy,” another time just “H.” The last postcard had been from “Ransom.” Over Christmas, he’d written to her that he was working on his sixth album (she’d never heard the first) and that he was riding in the same tour bus as Alice in Chains (Judy hoped she wasn’t his girlfriend). “Better keep this card,” he’d written. “We’ve got a radio hit in the works. This’ll probably be worth something someday.” The card, a shot of the Hudson River, had been ringed with coffee stains, and in one corner there was a dark red smudge that suggested either blood or ketchup.

  Once a booking agent had called the house looking for Henry, had left her a number. Judy kept it and had considered calling it to reach Henry about the shower. But there was only so much weirdness she could take. It was bad enough that she’d had to add an addendum to each cute Peter Rabbit invitation, explaining that Gretchen had requested black baby clothes only. Judy had put in parentheses: They don’t show dirt!

  The sad thing was that Judy had always dreamed of attending the birth of a grandchild. She envisioned crocheting in the waiting room of the hospital, relished the thought of biting her nails, waiting up all night, eating prepackaged ham sandwiches from the staff fridge. Her own births were such vague but happy memories. There were whole albums downstairs on the bookshelf, each devoted to a pregnancy, dutifully documented by Polaroid snapshots of her belly from month to month. With each birth, her face had grown rounder, her hair shorter—from a flouncy ponytail with Henry to a cut-and-sprayed shoulder-length shell with Carson, to a tight bulb of screw curls with Gretchen.

  With Henry’s birth, they had planted a redbud tree on the southwestern edge of the property, and during the next two pregnancies, she had posed in front of it at some point in spring, wearing a Japanese-style maternity dress—red with dark pagodas—while holding a paper umbrella. Both were gifts from her father after a business trip.

  She got up from the bed to go to the window, then stood in the first light with her hands clasped, looking out across the square yard at the tree, its leafy plumes like a shot glass full of swizzle sticks, to remind her of things past. But there was something else out in the yard. She saw it now, a dark shadow moving along the woodpile. It came to the redbud tree and scampered up the bark.

  “Well, I’ll be,” Judy said under her breath. She made a grab for the binoculars Rusty kept on the dresser and peered through the pinkish dawn up into the bright arms of the tree. There, perched like an owl on a limb, was the runt of Ivy’s litter, Constantine Wilhelm—or, as the couple across the street had called him, Connie. How the cat had made it back was a mystery, unless maybe he had never left. Maybe the couple had driven off with their baby and abandoned its grandmother and their cat.

  Through the binoculars, Judy watched his gray eyes, slow to blink. His tail swung from side to side in slow rhythm, like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. Judy could see the whites of his whiskers against his dark face, his one white front paw.

  Chapter 6

  MISSING CHILDREN

  When the phone rang the next morning, Judy—who had fallen asleep next to her husband for the first time in five years—shot up from the bed, only to discover that it was Hael, her voice friendly and ringed with bright energy.

  “Judy, hello,” she said. “I realized I forgot to ask you if you wanted to schedule a second appointment.”

  “A second appointment?” Judy rubbed her eyes and stared at the phone cradle as if she didn’t quite recognize something about it.

  “The first session is always a bit of a shock,” Hael continued cheerily but matter-of-factly. “The thing is, Judy, I really like you. I’d like to take you on as a client, free of charge.”

  What kind of sales pitch was this? Judy scrunched the lapels of her robe together at the base of her neck. A few dark leaves fell out of the creases from when she had tried shaking the redbud tree to draw down Constantine Wilhelm earlier that morning, but he had only stared at her in defiance and lashed his tail.

  “I’m afraid you’ve caught me by surprise,” Judy said. “I just woke up.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry. I hope everything’s okay. You left looking so dismayed. I’m afraid I sometimes forget how jarring it is for people from the outside to come here.”

  Judy could hear the pleasant voices of children chirping away in the background. “Gretchen’s gone,” she said, hearing her voice tremble. “She’s left Ray.”

  “I heard,” Hael said. “Just a little spat though. Not to worry.”

  Judy narrowed her eyes at the phone cord. There was something suspicious about Hael’s reserve. Rusty appeared in the hall, rubbing his eyes, looking stricken. He gave Judy a quizzical look, then passed her to head for the kitchen.

  “Thanks for the offer,” Judy said frostily into the phone. “I think I’m doing quite well.”

  “I’m going down there to look for her,” Rusty announced as he waited for an English muffin to toast. He drummed his fingers on the counter and stared out the kitchen window at a hummingbird at the feeder, the slender beak a needle, the wings whirring like an electric razor.

  “Don’t be silly,” Judy said breezily. “I’m sure it was just a spat.”

  Rusty squinted at her, craning his neck across the counter. “Where is this place? You been there?”

  Judy shrugged. “Just some apartment buildings near Logan Square.” She filled the kettle with water. Tributaries, she thought to herself.

  “You don’t want me to go down there, do you?” His voice was testy.

  She jumped at the sound of the toaster. “What’s the point if she’s gone?”

  “You think something’s happened to her?”

  “Hael said it was just a spat.” Judy faced the window next to him, pressing her hips to the sink and letting the water from the faucet course over her fingers.

  “Who is this Hael?”

  “Just a neighbor.”

  “Is she one of those nuts with the phony kids?”

  “They’re not phony. They’re regular kids. There’s nothing wrong with them.”

  Rusty looked at her with disbelief and stuffed half an English muffin between his teeth, chewing hungrily. “You’re brainwashed,” he said. “You went down there and they brainwashed you.”

  “No,” Judy said. She could see Rust
y’s face going red.

  “Yes, they did.” He nodded slowly. “You planning to leave too? Or are they coming for you?”

  “Rusty, you’re acting crazy. Nobody’s coming to get me. I’m sure Gretchen is fine—let’s not interfere.”

  Rusty turned around in place with a snort, then took the other half of his English muffin, covered in peanut butter, and hurled it over the shuttered doors of the kitchen into the living room. “You’re a piece of work, Jude, you really are,” he stormed. “It’s your attitude that’s gotten us here—three kids all out there, we don’t know where, because you”—he stuck out a finger—“you don’t care.”

  Judy felt her neck go red, heat flash at her temples.

  “You coward, Rusty,” she hissed. “How convenient for you to blame this on me when the real reason is that you, Rusty Glide, never gave our kids an inch. You are the reason they left, the reason people like Gretchen and Carson turn to cults.” Judy set the kettle on the range and cranked up the gas flame.

  Rusty stood seething in the kitchen doorway, his knuckles pressed into the countertop. After a moment, he opened the door to the garage, slammed it behind him, and drove off wearing nothing but his robe.

  She had said it. She, Judy, had said it. She felt brazen and light—a stone had moved, a chip had toppled. She didn’t even care that, after combing the living room, she couldn’t find the far-flung English muffin. She went to her closet, dressed quickly in a blouse and skirt, and headed for Fort Cloud Middle School to prep for her one o’clock health class.

  Penis and vagina were not words that passed easily through Judy’s lips. It was hard for her to utter them above a whisper, which is why she had been practicing these words aloud in the car with the windows rolled up. She couldn’t very well use twig and berries or china with her seventh graders, though such trusty synonyms had always served her well around the house. They were safe words that conjured approachable, multipurpose images—never mind that she herself had routinely blushed in front of supper company whenever someone complimented her on her good dishes.

  Judy was teaching seventh-grade health, the school synonym for sex ed, because she was the lone female gym assistant now that the county had liquidated 20 percent of its teachers, based on seniority. Her two colleagues, coaches Bud and Bruce Luger (twins), didn’t feel qualified to teach the topic since they had never raised daughters. Until Judy came along, the Lugers had always taken a family vacation during the one-week sex ed unit, leaving a substitute with a stack of filmstrips on abstinence and menstruation that had been in use at Fort Cloud Middle School since 1965 and were otherwise stored in the library vault.

  Two students in the class had already presented Judy with notes from their parents to excuse them on the grounds of explicit language and adult content, leaving Judy with eighteen wild-eyed, smirk-stricken young girls and boys drumming their fingers on the yellow desktops and looking at Judy with quiet anticipation. In her younger days, Judy had been an expressive and rigorous teacher, well known in the home ec wing for her sharp criticism of piecrusts and keen eye for sloppy stitches. She had inspired fear in the hearts of her pupils during the unit on gelatin and was said to detain students after school if they forgot to sanitize their kitchenette before leaving for the next class. A fashionable young teacher with feminine wiles, she had also cultivated a following. She was the kind of woman that young girls idolized, the kind of woman young boys imagined naked.

  But time had caught up with her after she quit school, the year Henry was born. And when she returned two decades later, her children mostly grown, the school had modernized, eliminating the home ec wing to make room for computer labs. Judy had been forced to start over, returning first as a hall monitor. Checking for passes, twirling her whistle, she had become keenly aware that the students had changed, though she had not. Her clothes were the same, her hair, though she’d begun to color it, was the same length, and she still wore the same shade of red lipstick.

  From time to time, one of her students turned out to be the son or daughter of someone Judy had taught in one of her first home ec classes. Sometimes these old students came back as parents. They caught Judy in the hall, and shaking their heads, they’d laugh at her. “Mrs. Glide,” they’d say, “you haven’t changed at all.” Judy would try to take this as a compliment, but wandering the halls when classes were in session, she sometimes felt as if she were chasing an old self that kept turning corners ahead of her. Occasionally she would catch up with it, and she would feel through her whole being how she had aged. This feeling had never been more prevalent than when she’d been asked to step in and teach health. “Penis,” Judy practiced under her breath. “Va-va-geeeee.”

  Judy stood at the front of the classroom, digging her fingers into the wood podium as a few stragglers filed into their seats after the bell. She looked over her notes on ovulation and stalled by digging through the pockets of her purse for a piece of hard candy in case her voice broke. A snicker started in the back by the dry-erase board, then threaded itself audibly up and down the aisles. When she looked up, the faces before her seemed theatrical and wild—girls with huge painted eyelids, shimmering like beetles, and boys with stiff, shiny hair, spiked up like barbed wire. A green-haired sprite in the second row twisted around his tongue to reveal a silver ball, then offered Judy a suggestive wink. Next to him, a barrel-chested boy giggled in silence, shocks of laughter convulsing his whole form, until he burst forth with a surge of wheezing guffaws, and the whole room turned to howls.

  They sounded like penguins, Judy thought, rocking back on her feet to observe. She offered a fleeting smile, then pursed her lips, but this only seemed to send the students into an even greater swell of laughter, their cackles turning into something more menacing—a roar. They shrieked like monkeys now and pointed to her, and Judy experienced the strange sensation that humans have long only imagined: the notion of sitting in a zoo while the animals line up to gawk at you.

  Finally, a quiet girl in the front row flipped her braids back, looked squarely at Judy, and demanded to know what Judy had above her lip.

  Judy touched her mouth. “It’s probably just lipstick,” she intoned, looking at the girl, puzzled. “It’s Cherry Fire,” she offered, tugging a tissue from the sleeve of her blouse and beginning to dab at the corners of her lips. “Is it smudged?”

  New giggles erupted from the back by the dry-erase board, though the rest of the room sat under a hush. “Higher!” called the boy with green hair.

  “Yeah,” challenged another, this time from the far left corner. “I can see it way back here.”

  Judy drew her brows together, then reached into her purse for a compact. “I don’t see anything,” she said after a quick glance in her mirror.

  “Look closer,” whispered the barrel-chested boy. “Don’t you see it? You’ve got to see it.” He wrapped his arms around himself, a preemptive move to hold in a wave of forthcoming laughter. “Do you see it? It’s so obvious!” He clapped a hand over his mouth to conceal a grin.

  “Mrs. Glide,” said the girl with the long braids stoically, “you have a mustache.”

  The room fell silent. The kids went ashen. No one scratched a scab, no one chewed gum. Judy surveyed the faces, striving for connection—were these human children? Did they really belong to people? Had they really been infants once? Weren’t they really monkeys? A different generation, a different species?

  “For heaven’s sake” was all Judy could think to say, clucking her tongue. She eyed the girl with braids warily. “Do I need to write you a pass to the office?” she said. “And the rest of you?” She looked around, then stepped out from behind the podium in her mauve shoes, her body rigid, her eyes ground into little points of gray light. Still, she could feel her hands trembling, the pear-shaped earrings dangling erratically from her ears.

  “Penis,” Judy said sternly, spitting out the word like the hull of a seed. “Vagina,” she said seconds later, beginning, slowly, to walk up an aisle. The faces
rotated on their stems away from her, unable to meet her sharp gaze. Her heels clicked satisfyingly against the tile, resounding against the chalkboard. “Go ahead,” Judy called, fighting the wavering tone in her voice. “Say it with me. I want you to feel comfortable in your bodies.”

  Slowly, a few voices joined her, dissonant and squeaky. She passed through an aisle of scraggly sideburns, halfhearted goatees, hands on knees, knees that were jumpy, shoes that were unlaced. Ears glinted, full of silver specks; wrists rustled, hooped and wound with string. “Say it with me,” Judy commanded. “Don’t be afraid.”

  She stopped at the back of the room and rapped her knuckles on the board by a red-haired boy who was feigning sleep. “Robert,” she said, leaning down, grinding her palms into his desk. She mustered her energy. “I can’t hear you.” She waited for his answer and was determined to stare his eyes open, even if it demanded the rest of the period. But he shifted, and something on his shirt caught her eye. She looked down to read, in dark red script: The Brother of Carson Glide U.S. Tour.

  Judy felt herself go hot, begin to perspire. “Where did you get that shirt?” she asked quietly, careful to keep her voice steady. The boy opened his eyes, looked down at his chest, then sat upright in his chair, breaking into a wide smile. “They were in Milwaukee last night,” he said grinning. “Think you could get me an autograph?”

  Judy felt her lip twitch. She stood up, hands limp at her sides. “Let’s watch a filmstrip,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. Then she walked toward the door, flipped off the lights, and started the film she had picked up at the library as an emergency backup. She sat apart from the rest of the class, her face obscured by the camera and the reel of film. She kept her eyes on the screen, fighting the lump in her throat, running a finger carelessly back and forth over the top of her lip, where a cluster of downy hairs brought her a strange sense of momentary relief.