Among the Missing Read Free Page B

back!” they chant, and it seems to work. She thinks of how much Allen would like these mental cheerleaders. How he would laugh.
    Sandi’s daughters, Megan and Molly, seem to be coping fairly well. Sandi knows that she doesn’t think about them as much as she should, but she is there for them. She makes nice desserts, she helps them with their homework. She sits in the TV room with them for a while, trying to watch what they are watching.
    “What is this?” she asks, and Megan shrugs, her eyes blank, reflecting light.
    “I don’t know,” Megan says. “It’s something like,
I Eat Your Flesh
, or something like that. It’s not scary. They don’t show anything,” she says with disappointment, and Sandi nods.
    “Mom,” Molly says. “Put your arm around me.” And Sandi does. Molly leans against her as, on screen, a woman opens a basement door. The woman peers down the dark stairs, and the lightbulb fizzles and goes out as the music begins to build.
    “This doesn’t seem like it’s appropriate,” Sandi says, though she’s hypnotized as the woman begins to descend the stairs into darkness.
    She is thinking of her mother. “You sound depressed,” her mother had said, earlier, and Sandi had sighed.
    “Not really,” Sandi said. “Not especially, under the circumstances.”
    “Mmm,” her mother said, in the same suspicious voice she used once, when Sandi would say she was too sick to go to school. “You know something, sweetie?” her mother said at last, thoughtfully. “I’ll tell you. I don’t pity the dead. The ones I feel sorry for are those poor children. I think about them all the time, the little doomed things. You and I, Sandi, we probably won’t live long enough to see the end of things, but they will. They’ll see the beginning of the end, at least. It’s going to be so hard on them, and I just keep thinking, what can we do to prepare them and make it easier on them? I don’t know, honey. It’s inevitable, now. There’s no turning back.”
    Sandi had closed her eyes tightly while her mother was talking, and when she opened them, she saw that her hands were folded on the kitchen table, limp as gloves. “Mother,” she said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
    •   •   •
    But she does. That’s the worst thing. She knows now, as they sit watching TV, and she will know later, when the girls are asleep, when the house is quiet: There are terrible forces at work in the world. She will sit in front of the television, but even with the volume up she will hear the noises as the house settles, creaks, sighs. She’ll be aware of the sudden movement of shadows; she’ll slip into the girls’ bedroom, hovering over their beds, feeling their breath. Once, as she leaned over Molly’s bed, the child stirred. “Dad?” she murmured, sleepily, and when Sandi touched her she relaxed. She even smiled vaguely, and Sandi knew that in the child’s dream, her father’s fingers were against her cheek. A feeling shot through Sandi’s hand.
    Perhaps there are times such as this for everyone, Sandi thinks, times when we draw closer to the spirit world, to the other lives. Allen himself had said as much, having grown up in a funeral parlor, with dead bodies always downstairs from his bedroom. “I don’t discount
anything
,” Allen had told her. “I’ve seen too much to think that death is really just
death
.”
    At the same time, it seems to Sandi that most people, normal people, would recoil from such intimations. Schizophrenia is merely intuition gone awry—intuition metastasizing and growing malignant. Sandi can feel it sometimes, and as she sits in front of the television, she can hear her husband’s laugh among the audience that responds to a late-night talk show host’s punch line. “Allen?” she whispers, and Safety Man seems to glow in the moonlight as he sits by the window. He says nothing.
    •   •   •
    “So, who’s the guy?” says Janice one