One Cold Night

got through to him.
    “Sweetie!” he answered.
    “Can you talk?” When he was working, she always asked before plunging in.
    “It’s fine. I’m with Morgan Schnall on a drunk-and-disorderly in Prospect Park.”
    In the background, Susan heard Officer Schnall objecting noisily to Dave’s remark. He didn’t usually team up with a street cop on routine calls, but occasionally at the end of a slow shift he’d go along on his way home.
    “Schnall wants me to tell you that he is not the drunk and disorderly individual of which I speak.” Dave said it in his cop voice, dipping into the earthy rhythms of Brooklyn cop talk and shedding his IvyLeague polish; he had once told her that he feared his education alienated him from his colleagues. “He’s not drunk — yet — just disorderly, and that he cannot help.”
    “Dave” — she felt too nervous to kid around with him — “I’m worried.”
    “What’s going on?” His tone grew quieter.
    “Lisa’s not home.” She explained the essentials, once again leaving out the reason for her argument with Lisa; that was something she would have to explain to him carefully, at the right time. “Her cell phone’s here and I can’t reach her, and none of her friends have heard from her. I don’t know what to do.”
    “Let’s give her till midnight. She’s never stayed out later than that.”
    “But, Dave, I’m really worried.”
    “Sweetie, listen to me. You’ve got to keep in mind that Lisa’s a teenager, and teenagers are masters of the disappearing act.”
    “Right. But do you think I should go out and look around for her anyway?”
    “I think we should give her until midnight; she’s stayed out that late before. Just hang in there and wait for me, okay? I’ve got another hour on my shift, then I’ll be home.”
    How could he have such a casual attitude about this? She guessed this was what people meant by hardened cop. But the Dave she knew was anything but hardened; he was quiet and intense, hard when he needed to be, but mostly, with Susan, soft. Dave was hands down the most loving and reliable man she had ever known, and the truth was she had trouble thinking of him as a cop. He was the lover in her bed, the friend at her ear, the guy who grocery-shopped whenshe didn’t have time. “Midnight,” he had said, “wait until midnight.” How could she? But she had to trust his judgment; she didn’t have any better ideas.
    She sat on the couch, tried and failed to calm down, then got up and paced the floor. How could she wait a whole hour when each minute was now broken into small eternities? One hour. Standing at the card table between the windows, she was able to place two puzzle pieces in the growing blue edge, but patience failed her and she continued to pace. Finally she went to the bedroom she shared with Dave. The green chenille bedspread was still pulled flat from the morning. She picked up a few spare coins and receipts from her nightstand and put them away; folded her nightgown over the back of the chair by the window; hung Dave’s navy-blue robe on the closet’s inside hook. That was three minutes. One hour?
    Plucking a tissue from the box on her bedside table, she dusted the frames hanging on the wall by her dresser, stopping at one: a newspaper article about Dave Strauss, the Harvard graduate who had made the inscrutable decision to become a New York City cop. (Not so inscrutable to anyone who knew him; he had simply followed in his father’s and his father’s footsteps.) The Rothka case, which had so vividly captured the city’s attention, had briefly made Dave a minor celebrity. In one of the piece’s two photographs, Dave was a young man wearing “the bag”, the blue uniform of the street cop; in the other, he was shown in his current evolution as a detective, relaxing between Susan and Lisa on the living room couch. It had been published last November, and looking at the picture now, Susan felt moved by the happy triad of their newly minted family. She dusted the black frameand polished the glass protecting the newsprint, then turned to her dresser.
    She ran a clean tissue over her collection of perfume bottles, thinking she should go to the kitchen for her real cleaning supplies but not bothering to, because that really wasn’t the point. She was passing time, keeping busy. She arranged some stray papers in a pile behind her jewelry box, then dusted the box itself, then opened it. On the top tier were all her