One Cold Night

from her distance across the bed. “Is that Suzie on the phone?”
    Susan felt almost lulled by her parents’ dreamy state of half sleep, a sweet blur so remote from the sharp edges of her own night.
    “Did Lisa call you two tonight?” Susan asked. “She’s not home.”
    “Lisa’s not home,” Bill told Carole.
    “What?” A warble of panic had entered Carole’s tone.
    “What’s going on there, Suzie?” Bill demanded.
    “Lisa didn’t call you?”
    “No, she didn’t call us. What the heck is happening there?” His voice had come vividly awake.
    Susan didn’t know how much to tell them; it seemed unkind to frighten them, across so many miles, with details about the confessions and the paint.
    And she was afraid to admit the worst: that she had not adequately protected Lisa in the big city.
    “If you hear from her, Daddy, please call me right away. We’ve got the police here; everyone’s looking.”
    “The police!” Bill nearly shouted.
    Susan could hear her mother’s panic escalating in the background of her father’s voice; something falling off a nightstand, the thump of footsteps, the quick opening of the closet door where her parents always hung their robes.
    “Tell Mommy not to worry.” It sounded as false to Susan as it felt saying it. “Just call me if Lisa contacts you.”
    “We’ll be on the first flight we can get.”
    Susan sighed; what had she expected? “Okay, Daddy. I guess I’ll either be at the store or at home. I really don’t know; I—”
    There was a click. Bill Bailey had hung up the phone, sprung into action. Susan held on to the handset before hanging it up and thought, What if Lisa’s home right now? Her next thought was that, with police stationed outside her building, she would have been told. But what if Lisa was on her way home? Or what if, by the time her parents arrived all the way from Texas, Lisa had been found — writing poetry on napkins in a Tribeca Starbucks, pacing the wide sidewalks of Park Avenue, brooding on the boardwalk at Coney Island, wherever a fourteen-year-old imagination might lead a distraught heart?
    Were they all overreacting? Susan wondered. They very well might have been, and for a moment that possibility calmed her; but then she thought with certainty that the police knew better than to overreact. She thought of the yellow line, the dribbled arc of paint across the cobblestones,the footprint. And she thought about how her own selfishness had been a catalyst for all of this: Lisa’s flight, Dave’s anger, even the yellow line. She thought of her parents and how they had tried so hard to let her finish her childhood when she became pregnant so young. She thought of Peter Adkins, who had swept her away like a giant wave; and how, until the wave crashed to shore, she had loved every minute of it.
    Susan remembered the first time she had set eyes on Peter in high school when she was fourteen. He was sitting at a desk in the middle of the classroom, swayed back in his chair; an eleventh grader, he had volunteered to serve as a student mentor in a ninth-grade history class. Arms crossed over his chest, he listened to Mr. Talbot explain the French Revolution.
    “Marie Antoinette was just fifteen years old when she married Louis the Sixteenth, the king of France,” Mr. Talbot was saying, when for reasons unknown to Susan even now, she turned around. Her eyes caught Peter’s. She remembered the confluence in her mind of a brilliant, romantic, high-strung French queen and the sight of Peter’s muscled forearms, dusted with blond hair, locked across his chest. As soon as she looked at him his eyes scrunched in a smile, as if he had been waiting for her to turn around. That was the moment. The beginning.
    Peter Adkins, her first love. Not tall, not heavy, but somehow he had seemed large. Honey-toned skin, blond hair, eyes the blue of a gas flame. The twang at the end of each word when he spoke to her: “How many acorns can you hold at once?” The hoarse whisper of his voice in her ear. Their sticky palms clasping. The first time they had made love he smelled of wood smoke; the second time of dampness.
    Three acorns, then; her hand had been small. Now, if asked, she could hold at least five.
    Peter had been a star with no real outlet; he didn’t act on stage or play sports or particularly excel at academics, though he was a good student. Instead, Peter shone in the eyes of other people, whom he collected along with their adoration. For