Seven Minutes to Noon

mundane bliss of the everyday world. The one from which people didn’t vanish and weren’t murdered. The one that used to be so real to her and now seemed ephemeral. The one where her children lived and to which she needed to find a road back.
    She locked up the front door and turned down the stoop into a wash of sunshine, wishing she had thought to bring her sunglasses. Still on her own block, she encountered the first yellow sign. MISSING. Lauren’s smiling face, inviting a search. MISSING, not DEAD. Alice ripped the sign off the light post and crumpled it up. She threw it in the garbage can on the corner of President and Smith. Across the street, she could see the little kids’ side of the playground, bustling with prenap toddlers, mothers building new friendships and nurturing old ones. She didn’t know how she would ever be able to go back there. But she would; her children would demand it. The playground made her cry again so she looked away, down Smith Street. Horns were blaring. Up ahead an intersection was blocked. Yellow rectangles glared from light posts, tree trunks, electric junction boxes. MISSING transformed into FIND MY BABY PLEASE FIND IVY DON’T WASTE A MINUTE FIND HER SHE’S OUT THERE ALL ALONE. Alice ripped down every sign she saw, crying more uncontrollably with each removal.
    Where was Ivy? Where was she? She needed a mother and Alice could be that mother. Without a mother, Ivy could know nothing about herself.
    Alice was glad not to run into anyone she knew. Only strangers witnessed her fury as she ripped down the signs and crushed them and threw them in the trash. Weeping. Destroying. Raging against what had happened to her sister. Every block had at least one storefront under constructionand twice she tore signs from their temporary plywood fronts. She couldn’t remember taping them here; it must have been Maggie.
    Finally the punctuation of yellow signs stopped. She walked steadily forward, dizzy from fatigue. Degraw Street between Hoyt and Bond, where they parked the family car in a cheap lot — Mike kept his pickup truck on the street since he used it all the time — was deserted. Almost deserted. A gray-haired man turned around and walked in the other direction as soon as she stepped onto the block; he looked vaguely familiar from behind but she couldn’t place him. She undid the parking lot’s padlock with her key and pulled open the massive iron double doors. The sound of gravel underfoot was oddly reassuring. She opened all the windows of their old green station wagon before squeezing into the driver’s seat. The air conditioner hadn’t worked for two years; it was an ’88, not worth repairing. Sweat glued her thighs to the vinyl seat.
    It was a relief to be driving, moving, going. On Bond, where she had to drive for a block before turning left up Douglass Street, she caught a fetid whiff of the canal just to her right. She hated that smell and drove faster. The farther she distanced herself from the canal and Bond Street and Hoyt Street and Smith Street the better. She couldn’t wait to get onto the highway. When she turned left onto Court Street, she knew she should have slowed down as usual — with so many cars and trucks double-parked in front of stores, the driving was always a nerve-wracking zigzag — but she didn’t slow down. The yellow signs were everywhere and she couldn’t get to them, rip them down. Erase what had happened to Lauren, to Tim, to Austin — and to her. She felt suddenly that she had to get out of Brooklyn and for a moment, when she pictured the airport, she considered the possibility of getting on a plane. She could do it, buy a ticket and leave. Maggie could run the store. Mike and the kids could join her wherever she went. They could go to France, Italy, Greece, Mexico — forget about everything.Her mind was just capturing the aqua clarity of water, broad pale beaches, an endless horizon, when up ahead she was jolted to a near stop by a knot of traffic. She had to get out of it, to keep herself focused on the vast ocean with its quiet promise that nothing really mattered but the turning of the earth. A shaft of sunlight exploded against her windshield. She squinted into it, veering sharply right at the next corner.
    She felt the scrape and jolt of her collision with the bus before she even saw its hulking form. The impact threw her against the steering wheel and a spasm passed through her middle. Her babies. Her hands flew to her belly,