The Six Rules of Maybe

for three days, Juliet, too. Hayden looked like a ghost, his skin white and his eyes hollow, and I felt like a ghost, everything of meaning gone and over with.
    I watched the street every day, put Zeus’s food bowl in the front yard, his water bowl, too, called his name again and again and listened for the jangling of his tags. I made flyers with a picture I had taken of him, his face eager and looking straight into the camera so that he looked right into your eyes from the page. People needed to see what a good dog he was. I walked our neighborhood, putting up the flyers and calling to him, looking for some movement in the bushes or trees. Every time the phone rang, my heart leaped in hope. Every time I remembered that he was gone, it was like getting thebad news for the first time—the hurt and realization hit with a force that felt forever new.
    I imagined him being taken in by someone, his collar gone, maybe, ripped off on a tree branch. He would be sitting with some new family as they had dinner, wondering where we had gone. Why had we not come and gotten him? Or I imagined him running still, or exhausted, or the worst imagining, scared and alone. He was innocent and vulnerable out there by himself. He could be hungry or tired or thirsty or hurt, and he had no voice to ask for what he needed.
    I couldn’t stand that he wouldn’t know how hard we were trying to find him. What if he thought we didn’t care anymore? He might think we had stopped loving him, when we would never, ever be the kind of people, person, who would stop loving him, who would abandon someone who needed us.
    “I know she’s fine,” Mom said. She misread my agony, my inability to rest, my ceaseless watching through our living room windows. We did know Juliet was fine. She had called from a phone booth and given no explanation other than she needed to be away for a while. As for Mom herself, we didn’t discuss her own disappearance, her arrival at 4:00 a.m. that morning, when she finally came back to the shattered pieces of her neighborhood and her own home, her makeup off and her hair disheveled. She still wasn’t wearing that ring on her hand, though I didn’t care anymore. Fine, go ahead and marry Dean Neuhaus. It didn’t matter anyway. It mattered less who came than who was gone, Hayden most of all.
    And Hayden was gone, even if he was still there in our basement room. He was sullen and didn’t eat with us or talk much—his reason and justification for being with us had disappeared, and so he made himself as scarce as possible too, as he waited for Juliet to return. For Zeus to return too. He talked to Mom downstairs in the kitchenand I listened in. The conversation had only big empty spaces where answers should have been. Mom didn’t know what to do. Hayden didn’t know what to do. We avoided each other, like my kiss was a bad part of town we needed to stay away from. He would stand outside and shake the box of treats Zeus liked. He had lost everything.
    “Scarlet!” Mom yelled up the stairs. In Jasmine’s house, no one yelled, there was a rule against it, but not at ours. Mom would call out from wherever she was—the backyard even—when she needed something. Dean Neuhaus would hate that.
    I poked my head down the stairwell.
    “Honey, I need you to get some stuff for dinner. Unless we want milk with a side of milk.” In spite of everything that had been going on, she looked good. Calm, maybe even happy. Marriage proposals were obviously uplifting. “I told Hayden to be ready in five minutes. I know you’re perfectly capable of doing this yourself, but he’s driving me crazy. Get him out of here for a while? I need some time away from the black cloud that we’re living in. One hour, to breathe . Me and Neil Diamond need some time together.”
    “Mom …”
    “Please, Scarlet. He needs to get out. I need him to get out. I worry about him being alone so much.”
    I wanted to protest, to find a way to escape, but I heard the basement door close, his footsteps on the kitchen floor.
    “Bus is leaving,” he called.
    We didn’t talk in his truck. The windows were down and the radio was on, but there were no jokes and no laughter and no ease. Our pain and the ways my family had let him down sat right between us. He looked in the rearview mirror as he always did to check on Zeus. I couldn’t even speak about his absence. I couldn’t even speakabout my own part in everything that happened. There was an equation—the