Here She Lies

the inside of the window a new half-inch strip of magnet had been stuck into a prodigious bed of glue. Now, tonight, the alarm system could go to bed happy.
    He produced a clipboard with a form for my signature. I signed Julie’s name and he gave me the bottom half of the carbon, which I folded and stuck in my pocket. I’d give it to her later, after she was finished with Lexy.
    “Baby down to sleep?” He must have met Lexy, too; Julie must have said something about feeding Lexy before her morning nap, not bothering to explain that today’s nap would come later than usual.
    “Just about.”
    “You can call us twenty-four/seven if there are any more problems with the alarm.”
    “Thank you,” I said, and watched him get into his car and drive away. And then I walked to the curb and into the road, where day by day I had made a habit of photographing Zara’s gradual evaporation.
    Though her outline had washed away, there was still some visual evidence of her blood. It was as if the asphalt had absorbed it, leaving shadowy splotches that were more or less pronounced, depending on the time of day and the weather. I didn’t know what I would eventually do with the photographs — maybe superimpose them and see what emerged, maybe just keep them as they were, to speak for themselves. For now I was collecting them, counting days forward, building Zara a passageway, in my mind, between the time zones of life and death. Or maybe my little project wasjust plain voyeurism. I didn’t know, but I felt more compelled to lift my camera to this moment than I had to anything else — except Lexy — in years.
    At exactly eleven o’clock, I called Gatsby’s. I recognized the voice of the clerk, an older woman who had sold me the sweatshirts.
    “No, dear,” she said. “We didn’t find a wallet here. There were two of us working yesterday and we closed up together. Give me your number and if it turns up we’ll call you.”
    I gave her Julie’s house number and my cell number, thanked her and hung up. I had counted on my wallet being there; it was the last place I’d paid for anything. Now I had no idea where it could be. Someone must have picked it up in the store, not said anything and kept it.
    So that was that. My wallet was nowhere. I left Bobby a voice mail saying that I was going to have to cancel all our credit and bank cards. Then I sat down at the kitchen table and began the arduous task of listing everything that was in my wallet, calling 800 numbers and making my way through labyrinthine automated customer service systems. The day passed. Darkness fell. Julie gave Lexy some rice cereal and her evening bottle, then bathed her. By dinner I was on my second glass of wine — the milk I would pump later tonight would be useless.
    After dinner I lulled Lexy to sleep in the rocking chair in the Yellow Room. I had discovered, with the overhead light dimmed just so, that at night the room acquired the richness of glazed apricots. This mutability of shades reminded me of the bloodied asphalt, howit revealed differences depending on elemental shifts. I thought about the unreliability of perceptions as Lexy fell asleep in my arms. I thought about love. I thought about Bobby on our wedding day and how scrubbed and handsome he’d looked in his tuxedo, beaming as I joined him in my white gown. How I dropped my bouquet of ivory roses and he picked it up and handed it back to me.
    I set Lexy down in her crib and went downstairs, where I sank into the bend in the living room couch and closed my eyes. I was tired. When the phone rang, Julie shouted from the kitchen, “It’s Bobby!”
    “What happened exactly?” he asked.
    I told him the whole story — the middle of the story, that is, since I still didn’t know its beginning: how I had managed to lose my wallet in the first place.
    “You canceled all the credit cards?”
    “I think so. I wanted to go over it with you to make sure I didn’t miss any.”
    “So neither of us has any credit cards now. Or bank cards. Wow. How are we supposed to get money?”
    “The old-fashioned way: You walk into a bank before it closes, talk to a human being and make a withdrawal.”
    “It’s Friday night and I’ve got no money.”
    It sounded like a song with an inevitable (to my burned-out brain) next chorus: And I got a date with my Lovyluv honey. As quickly as the lyric popped to mind, I banished it. Imagining her was driving me crazy.
    I took a deep breath and plunged into