Seven Minutes to Noon

placate the children when they were being irascible.
    “You think it’s a bad sign, don’t you.”
    “I don’t know. It’s just so specific. It makes me feel...” He shrugged his shoulders, clearly trying to slough off a sensation he didn’t wish to share with Alice.
    “Say it,” she told him, fixing her gaze into his. “It’s creepy knowing someone actually saw her, and then she fell off the face of the earth. It’s bad news. Say it.”
    “Okay.” He planted his hands on his waist, suddenly reminding Alice of Buzz Lightyear in the frilly apron at Mrs. Nesbit’s tea party, having given up the ghost of his identity. The lines of Mike’s face succumbed to gravity, vanquishing the essential yang of his personality. “It scares me.”
    Alice nodded, grateful for Mike’s honesty in acknowledging that this could turn out to be something even his good humor couldn’t fix. She didn’t like to deny him the presumptions of his natural happiness, but she also didn’t like to pretend. The discovery of a witness might have been hopeful, but in truth it felt foreboding, pinning Lauren down in a specific place at a specific time heading in a specific direction. Her disappearance now seemed more tangible. Now they knew that between eleven forty-five that morning, when she was last seen, and noon, when she failed to arrive at Pilates, something had changed her plans. Possibly her life. In just fifteen minutes’ time.
    “What do we do now?” Alice asked, surprised by the warble that had entered her voice.
    Mike reached out to touch her belly and watched his own large, squarish hand circle their twins. Then after a moment he looked up to face her. Brown eyes, bright with a golden flint.
    “I’ll tell you what I really think.”
    She had seen this troubled mix of regret and resolution in him only once before, nine years ago when she had miscarried their first child. He had refused to let her believe they would never have a family, and had energetically rallied her back to the cause, even though, at the time, having a child was more her wish than his.
    “What do you think, Mike?”
    “I think — I know there’s nothing we can do about this.” His eyes narrowed, darkened. “And worrying won’t help.”
    Alice felt a stab at that; it was one thing to joke about her nervous edge and wholly another thing to identify it as a weak link in their life’s overall perspective.
    “Worry is normal,” Alice countered, “in a situation like this.”
    “Yes, it is.” His lips seemed to stiffen and stretch into a forced, almost professional smile. She didn’t like it. “How much did you sleep last night, Alice?”
    She looked away from him, at the linoleum floor, a sea of off-white squares nearly impossible to keep clean. “Not much.”
    “Did you sleep at all?”
    She shook her head. Counted the squares.
    Mike leaned forward, raising his voice, forcing her eyes to acknowledge him. “You’re pregnant,” he said. “Not that I need to remind you.”
    She smiled a little. “No, you don’t.”
    “Try not to indulge in the anxiety, sweetheart, okay? That’s all I’m saying.”
    Alice nodded.
    “I love you,” he whispered below the loopy refrain of SpongeBob SquarePants that sailed in from the living room. “We don’t want this to become worse than it needs to be.”
    “I wish I knew what it needed to be.”
    “So do I,” he said. “But we can’t know until we know. Even Tim can’t know. I called him this morning after I read that stuff in the newspaper. He’s a total wreck. We’ve got to hold ourselves together for Tim and Austin, okay? We have to keep reminding them that at this very moment we know nothing for sure, that Lauren is probably out there somewhere, that there’s still a good chance she’ll be back.”
    “We don’t know—”
    “It’s all we can know right now, Alice.” He laid hishand over her stomach again. “I’m telling you, don’t go to that other place. Okay?”
    Alice placed her hand over his, stilling the restless babies under the weight of both their hands. This was the real Mike she married, not the comedian, not the hyperactive creative director, not the humble carpenter, but the man who cared and felt deeply, who for better or worse never let her slide.
    “Okay.”
    Mike ran a hand through his hair, dislodging his largest cowlick. “The risotto’s gonna be mush if I keep turning the heat on and off.”
    “Go cook, then.”
    “Are we square?”
    “I