Seven Minutes to Noon

how awful it sounded. “Let me go!”
    “Come on.” Simon stood next to her. “I’ll go with you, Alice.”
    She flung the door open and held the railing as she ran down the front stoop. At the bottom step she felt her balance give way, felt herself toppling forward. Simon’s hands caught her from behind, grasping an elbow and a shoulder, steadying her.
    “Slow down,” he told her. “Get your bearings.”
    The depth and authority of his voice stilled her certainty that she could fly up and over the rooftops and treetops of Brooklyn. That with enough velocity she could defy gravity. That with the superpower of her determination, her beloved children would appear in the distance, uniquely recognizable, shimmering with vitality, beauty, life.
    But her body overrode her confidence, froze her in place.
    “Let’s go.” Simon stood in front of her, holding out a hand. Alice noticed the scratched gold of his wedding ring. Had he never taken it off? “Come on now.”
    She stood up. A mere human. A mother, searching.With Simon at her side she began to walk along Clinton Street in the direction of their old home.
    “What are you thinking, Alice?”
    “President Street.” She stepped out of a patch of shade into an expansive pool of burning sun. Puddles of rainwater dotted the sidewalk; she walked into them, over them, past them. “That’s the one address they have memorized.”
    They hadn’t been at Simon’s long enough to coach the children on his address, though they had already started learning the street number of the Third Place house. Why had she been so stupid, not training them for the present? Saturating them instead with assumptions about their future?
    “Shouldn’t we walk along Court Street?” Simon gently asked. She smelled his cologne in a waft of air, felt the steady warmth of his body as he kept pace beside her.
    “Right,” Alice agreed. “They might have gone into a store.”
    She had always made a point of taking them along on errands, as part of their domestic education. Urban survival skills involved levels of procurement: education, skills, money, apartments, goods. She had taught them to shop for quality and price. How to measure ingredients. Not to talk to strangers. She had taught them everything she thought they needed to know. But Nell, she remembered now, tended to scramble the last four digits of Alice’s cell number, and she didn’t know Mike’s. Foolish, Alice chided herself now, walking along Warren Street with the bustle of Court on the near horizon; foolish not to have insisted both children know all the family phone numbers by heart.
    Alice stopped in every store along Court Street, asking if two children, a little brown-haired boy and slightly larger peach-haired girl, had been in. No, she heard again and again. What’s going on? The police were just in here asking the same question. Simon stayed on the street, eyes open, stopping any acquaintances. No onehad seen them. They moved forward as quickly as Alice could; her body was leaden, hot, the twins already taking a stance against their older siblings, trying to hold her back. She could feel Simon’s harnessed energy, nearly explosive, at her side.
    Her skin bristled with droplets of sweat as she marched forward as quickly as her stubborn body would let her. They were getting close to President Street now. Close to their old home. Oh, babies, she silently wished, be there, be there, be there. They had never been outside her circle of protection before: home, school, friends, babysitter.
    Sylvie.
    The quicksand of dumb assumption.
    Alice marched forward, grabbing deep into her lungs for breath.
    “Slow a little,” Simon beseeched her, laying his warm hand on her hot arm.
    The orange DON’T WALK light at President and Court stopped blinking just as they approached the corner. A line of cars moved steadily toward the intersection. Alice crossed anyway. Crossed and turned onto President Street. Walked and walked until, just before the first park entrance, she saw Mike’s hastily parked pickup truck angled next to a fire hydrant. The driver’s side door gaped into the street.
    In front of the pickup was a squad car, red and white lights revolving in silence.
    Across the park a wail of sirens grew closer. Another squad car cut through the red light on Court Street and raced the wrong way onto President, stopping behind Mike’s truck.
    Alice and Simon broke into a jog.
    The pickup’s motor was running, but Mike