One Cold Night

connection dissolved. She wished she knew what he was thinking and that she could share her thoughts with him right now, but there was such a distance between them. He was a cop doing a job. She was a woman striving to understand what exactly was true and real. She was so terrified for Lisa she could barely think.
    Dave’s voice returned. “Susan?”
    “My parents are here.”
    “We’ll need to talk to them.”
    “Of course.”
    “Susan, I—”
    “Dave?”
    Their connection dropped out completely this time. Susan wished she knew what he had been about to say: “I love you,” or “I’m not coming home,” or simply, “I’ll see you later.”
    A throng of reporters gathered around Carole and Bill Bailey. Susan watched questions being thrown at her stunned parents as Johnson shook his head, refusing comment on their behalf, and pulled them forward.
    They hadn’t brought any luggage, but her mother had her enormous purse, which might have counted; it was a big, brown leather tote she took everywhere. She huddled against Johnson as he guided her through the media circus. Bill followed, head down. Theywere a quintessential Southern couple in their late fifties: lean and handsome, neatly groomed, wearing perpetually stoic smiles that normally promised confidence but now, in this context, looked dazed. Carole’s short, teased hair had gone slightly blonder but was still well within the bounds of good taste. Bill’s silver hair had thinned. Susan was shocked to see how much older her parents looked since last spring.
    Johnson opened the shop door to let her parents in, pulling it quickly closed behind them. Outside, he shook his head at the reporters, then turned down Water Street in the direction of the building the police had been trying unsuccessfully to enter.
    “Suzie.” Carole lifted a hand to gently touch Susan’s face. “All those police. Have you heard from her?”
    “Not yet, Mommy.” The hum of her own voice sounded thin and small, and the little-girl Mommy coming from a grown woman rang with contradictions: If Susan was to be a mother now, how could she still be a child?
    They fell into each other’s arms. Susan reached a hand out for her father; the shoulder of his wool overcoat felt hard and cold. He smiled and touched a chilly finger to her hand.
    “Let’s don’t lose faith, Suzie,” he said.
    As a child, she used to call her newly sober and born-again father “the minister” behind his back, though in fact he was an insurance salesman. The one time he had caught her saying it, his refusal to be offended — in fact, his insistence on taking it as a compliment — had shamed her. “I’m proud of my faith, Suzie,” he had said, “and you should be, too.”
    “I won’t lose faith, Daddy.”
    “Let’s pray for Lisa.”
    Susan, Carole and Bill huddled into an embrace, their heads tilted into a gently touching triad. Susan closed her eyes and listened to the murmur of her father’s voice, asking for Lisa’s fast and safe return. Behind them, she heard Audrey join the prayer. In the whispering moment Susan began to feel comforted, but then she had the loneliest thought of her life: Our prayers are selfish, contradicted by reality. As soon as she thought it, she hated herself for thinking it, but it was too late. The voice in her mind was too strong to ignore; it was Lisa’s voice, insisting Susan take another look.
    Like Dave, Lisa was a nonbeliever, though unlike him she was an agnostic holding out the slim chance of a power greater than herself. Each minute that passed without her now brought her voice more desperately into Susan’s consciousness. Lisa was adamant that God had abandoned her at birth. For the first time, Susan began to wonder if that could be true, and if in fact she herself had abandoned God by abandoning Lisa. She may not have literally abandoned her baby, but she had bargained with motherhood, and didn’t that basically count as an abandonment of faith? Because if you couldn’t live authentically, how could you expect innocence from a mean world? And if you couldn’t expect innocence, forgiveness, how could you maintain a faith in God?
    Until last night, as far as Lisa knew, she had been turned away by her birth mother; that was her truth. How could Susan have expected her confession to reverse Lisa’s long-held truth of her own abandonment? How could Susan hold on to the faith that God had her best interests in mind when so many of her judgments and