One Cold Night

cyberspace, drifting like thin white clouds that never become rain. Life without Lisa would be unbearable.
    She went to the kitchen and made some coffee while her parents waited at the dining table, admiring the birthday roses, which had opened. As the coffee brewed, steaming its fragrance into the kitchen, Susan stood in the doorway and looked at her favorite wedding photo, a black-and-white unplanned shot sheand Dave had had blown up to poster size and framed in white-lacquered wood. They were married by a justice of the peace on a dock in Red Hook. Immediately after the ceremony, as they walked arm in arm along the dock, a strong wind had surprised them. Dave, in a black tuxedo, had his arm around Susan’s waist and pulled her closer as her dress billowed up and out, revealing her bare legs and the sneakers she had assumed would stay hidden beneath folds of white satin. The expensive pumps she had planned to wear had stayed home in their box — during the rehearsal, she had discovered that the heels got caught in the slats between the dock’s wooden boards. In the photo, they were both laughing. She remembered that as one of the two sweetest moments of her life; the other being the first time she ever saw Lisa, moments after her birth.
    She got her BlackBerry from her purse and keyed in an e-mail to Lisa.
    Love = your newborn face, the soft, soft feel of your brand-new skin. You were the most beautiful flower girl in the history of weddings in your long yellow dress at the end of the dock with daisies in your hair. That one daisy kept sliding down and you ignored it and when it finally fell it was caught by the wind and flew out like a feather over the ocean. It was such a windy day. Love also = Dave. Maybe having you both in my heart and life and days was too much to expect. Life has a way of hitting back at us (doesn’t it?) and I have always been a little too selfish.
    When the coffee was ready, Susan brought a tray with two filled mugs, a small pitcher of milk and a bowl of sugar to the detectives. She wondered if Detective LaPierre was reading her e-mail right now;reading it, and sending it back out to Lisa. Susan returned to the kitchen, prepared her parents’ coffee and carried another tray to the dining table. Sitting down, she told them about last night.
    “That’s why she ran out, then.” Carole’s expression softened, shedding a layer of panic. “Any teenager would respond that way.”
    “She’s run away,” Bill said. Bill and Carole looked at each other and seemed to mutually exhale. “She’ll come back,” he added. “They always do. You did, Suzie, remember?”
    Susan had run away for one day when she first learned she was pregnant, before returning home to tell her parents everything.
    “I remember,” Susan said. “But Lisa probably didn’t run away. This is different.” She carefully explained first about the yellow paint, then about Becky Rothka and finally about this morning’s phone call from the groom. She did not mention the lurking man who looked like Peter; she just couldn’t believe it had actually been Peter, and the suggestion would upset her parents too much. “Dave will be here in a little while. He’s working with the detectives and they need to talk to you both.”
    “Okay,” Carole said.
    “Anything we can do, Suzie.” Bill nodded. “Anything.”
    “The thing is” — Susan picked up an advertising flyer she had dropped on the table yesterday and nervously rolled it into a tube — “I just told Dave this morning about Lisa.”
    “Oh, Suzie,” Carole said, but gently, “you never told him before? We always assumed he knew.”
    The heavy stone of her mother’s disappointmentsank low in Susan’s stomach. “I wanted to tell him so many times, but—”
    “Well, that was a mistake, young lady,” Bill said, “from every point of view.”
    Bill’s tone was the one he had always used to straighten her out whenever she did something wrong. The tone with which he had solved her pregnancy: “We will raise the baby as our own.”
    “I know, Daddy,” Susan said. “You’re right, but—”
    “No buts, Suzie—”
    “Bill, please let her talk.”
    Susan glanced at Carole and the two women — Lisa’s two mothers — wordlessly agreed that Bill’s need to commandeer the moment would have to be overlooked. His wife’s rebuff sent him deeper into his chair. He glared at Carole and she ignored him.
    Carole leaned foward, reaching across the table so