Seven Minutes to Noon

finish the sentence but he didn’t have to; Alice knew the ending: or I’ll go crazy.
    “Don’t leave without saying good-bye, Tim. Please?”
    His eyes, green as moss, considered her. He balanced his burning cigarette half off the counter, crossed the narrow kitchen and took her in his arms. This close, his smoky smell was pungent.
    “Of course we’ll say good-bye.”
    “I’ll miss you and Austin so much,” she whispered into his coarse blond hair, feeling Lauren well up inside her, burying her own face in her husband’s neck for the last time.
    Alice stopped on her way through the living room, where Austin had circled a tiny cowboy with a ring of brown plastic cows. She bent down to kiss his soft cheek.
    “You smell like cinnamon.” She kissed him again, then added in a whisper: “I love you.” Austin froze as she ran her fingers gently over his face, memorizing every curve and swoop of bone and flesh.
    She let herself out, deliberately not turning around for final glances. Walked slowly down the stairs, through the building’s front door and into the hot, noisy neighborhood. Walked steadily toward Blue Shoes. She would open the store, late. Sit there. Serve customers. Go through the paces. There was no place she felt she could easily be today, so it didn’t matter where she was. The life of the street continued and she felt soaked by a sensation of helplessness. In less than two weeks, one third of her life — the Barnet family — had spun into oblivion like an extinguished star.
    She stopped in front of a corner deli whose window was papered with magazine covers. A sidewalk rack held the day’s newspapers. Lauren had become a subset, a little box in the corner of the dailies. POLICE HUNT FOR MOTHER’S KILLER, NO CLUES. UNBORN BABY STILL MISSING. LADY KILLER STILL LOOSE IN BROOKLYN. Moment to moment, Lauren’s death was fading from the front page. Tomorrow, would it even be there?
    Alice picked up the New York Times and looked at the Metro section. For the first time in days, the reporter who had been following Lauren’s case did not have something on the front page. Alice searched her memory for the reporter’s name. Erin Brinkley, that was it.
    She wondered if she should call Erin. Talk to her. Give her the forbidden nugget of held-back fact: that Ivy was a girl. Alice fished her cell phone out of her purse and flipped it open. Slowly, she dialed Information. She could call the newspaper and be connected with the reporter in minutes. Splash the news of Ivy over the front pages so people would know what they were looking for, not just a baby but a baby girl. Alice could tell Erin Brinkley everything.
    But then she thought of Frannie and Giometti. Ivy’s gender was being held back on purpose; the detectives had to know what they were doing. Alice flipped shut her phone; making secret calls was not for her. She would not be the one to jeopardize the case. Instead, she would stick to what she could do: care for her family, run her business, find a new home.
    After three hours at Blue Shoes, tending the shelf life of beautiful, overpriced shoes, chatting with browsers and watching street traffic pass from her side of their sparkling plate-glass window, Alice still couldn’t get her mind off Tim and Austin’s leaving. For the hour they overlapped, from two to nearly three, she and Maggie analyzed and deconstructed Tim’s decision and discussed how to tell the children that Austin would be gone for a while.
    “It’s going to break their hearts,” Maggie said. “For them it’ll be another death.”
    “Mags, that’s too extreme. He’ll be back.”
    “I think Tim’s leaving for good. I think he’s had enough.”
    “I hope you’re wrong,” Alice said.
    “I only know that if it were me, I’d be gone. This whole place would be too painful.” Maggie dinged open the cash register drawer for no reason other than dramatic effect, then pushed it shut.
    Maggie had a point. The more Alice thought about it, the more she wondered why she and Mike were staying in the neighborhood. Why didn’t they let the situation with Julius Pollack eject them not just to another house but to another city? Another state? Why live here? she wondered as she walked to school to pick up Nell and Peter. Why not move south, where it was always warm? Or north, where they could ski in winter and enjoy cool summers? Or overseas, away from their roots, where they could raise sophisticated, multilingual children far