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back on her heels and laughed until tears spurted out of the corners of her eyes. "She's crazy," Maggie said loudly. "Fat . . . pig . . ." Rose gasped. "My God," she said, pointing at Jim. "You're a cheater, and you ..." She pointed at Maggie, groping for the right word. "You're my sister," she finally said. "My sister. And the worst thing you can say about me is 'fat pig'?" She lifted the bag, twirled it, tied the top into a knot, and heaved it as hard as she could at the door. "Get out," she said. "I never want to see either one of you again."
Rose spent most of the night on her hands and knees, scrubbing, trying to remove every trace of Maggie and Jim from her apartment. She yanked the sheets and pillowcases and comforters off her bed, dragged them to the laundry room, and doused them in two cups of detergent. She washed her kitchen and bathroom floors with Pine-Sol and warm water. She mopped the hardwood floors in her living room and bedroom and hall. She scrubbed the bathtub with Lysol, then scrubbed the tile shower walls with an antibacterial anti mildew spray. The little dog watched for a while, following her from room to room, as if Rose were the new cleaning lady and the dog were a distrustful matron, then yawned and resumed its nap on the sofa. By four in the morning, Rose's mind was still whirling, and the one thing she could see clearly when she closed her eyes was a picture of her sister, in Rose's own new boots, churning her body up and down above Jim, who lay in the bed with a glazed, blissful look in his eyes. She pulled on a clean nightgown, got into bed, and yanked the clean sheets up to her chin with an angry jerk of her wrists. Then she shut her eyes, breathing hard. She thought that she'd managed to tire herself out. She thought she might sleep. Instead, she closed her eyes and fell headlong into the memory she knew was there, hiding, crouched and waiting for her. The memory of the worst night of her life, which had also starred Maggie.
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It was an early day, a teachers' in-service, and it was just after noon on a late-May day when school let out. Rose had collected her books from her locker and met Maggie outside the first-grade classroom, checking to make sure that her sister had her own backpack. Maggie did. She also had a familiar-looking piece of pink paper in one hand. "Again?" asked Rose, and held out her hand for the note from Maggie's teacher. She read it while Maggie walked ahead of her, toward the path behind the elementary school that would lead them home. "Maggie, you can't bite people," Rose said. "She started it," her sister called back sullenly. "It doesn't matter," said Rose. "Remember what Mom said? You have to learn to use your words." She hurried to catch up with her sister, huffing slightly beneath the weight of her backpack. "Did it bleed?" she asked Maggie. Maggie nodded. "I could have bitten it off," she bragged, "if Miss Burdick wasn't looking." "Why would you want to bite off someone's nose?" Maggie pursed her lips even tighter. "She made me mad." Rose shook her head. "Maggie, Maggie, Maggie," she said, the way she'd heard her mother saying it. "What are we going to do with you?" Maggie rolled her eyes, then looked at her sister. "Will I be on punishment?" she asked. "I don't know," said Rose. Maggie pursed her lips. "It's Megan Sullivan's sleep-over party." Rose shrugged. She knew all about the sleep-over part y. Maggie had had her pink Barbie suitcase packed for days. "Did you get any library books?" Rose asked, and Maggie nodded, and pulled Goodnight Moon from her backpack. "That's a little kid book," Rose said. Maggie glared at her sister. It was true, but she didn't care.
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"Good night, mittens on the chair. Good night, people, everywhere," she whispered, and started skipping down the path. The path ended behind the Mcllheneys' yard. Rose and Maggie skirted the swimming pool and the deck, crossed the Mcllheneys' front yard, then crossed the street to their house, which was a twin of the Mcllheneys'—a twin, really, of every house on the street. Two stories, three bedrooms, red brick, and black shutters, and square green lawns, like houses in a little kid's coloring book. "Wait up!" Rose yelled, as Maggie skipped across the street and dashed up their gravel driveway toward the front door. "You're not supposed to cross the street yourself! You're supposed to hold my hand!" Maggie ignored her, hurrying ahead, pretending she couldn't hear. "Mom!" she called, setting her key down on the counter and sniffing to see what was for lunch. "Hey, Mom! We're home!" Rose walked through the front door and set the backpack down. The house was silent, and she could tell even before Maggie told her that their mother wasn't home. "Her car's not here!" Maggie reported breathlessly. "And I looked under the apple magnet, and there's no note." "Maybe she forgot it was an early day," Rose said. Except she'd reminded her mother that morning, sneaking into the gloomy bedroom, whispering Mom? Hey, Mom? Her mother had nodded when Rose said they'd be home early, but she hadn't opened her eyes. Be a good girl, Rose, she'd said. Take care of your sister. It was the same thing she said every morning—when she said anything at all. "Don't worry," said Rose. "She'll be back by three." Maggie looked worried. Rose took her hand. "Come on," she said. "I'll make you lunch."
Rose made eggs, which was nice, even though she wasn't supposed to, because they weren't allowed to turn on the stove. "Don't worry," Rose told Maggie. "You can double check me to make sure I turned it off."
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Then it was one-thirty. Maggie wanted to cut through the backyard to play at her friend Natalie's house, but Rose thought it would be better if they stayed and waited for their Mom to come home. So they sat in front of the television and watched Heckle and Jeckle cartoons for half an hour (Maggie's choice), then educational Sesame Street (Rose's). At three o'clock their mother still hadn't come home. "She probably just forgot," said Rose, but now she was starting to worry, too. The day before she'd heard her mother on the telephone. "Yes!" she was shouting at someone. "Yes!" Rose had edged right up to the closed bedroom door and pressed her ear against it. It had been months since she'd heard her mother speak in anything more than a drowsy, distracted mumble. But now she was yelling, each word hard and distinct as a pane of glass. "I. Am. Taking. My. Medication," her mother said. "For God's sake, let it go! Let me be! I'm fine! Fine!" Rose closed her eyes. Her mother wasn't fine. She knew it, and her father did, too, and probably whoever her mother was screaming at knew it, too. "It's okay," she told her sister again. "Can you find Mom's red phone book? We have to call Dad." "Why?" "Just find it, okay?" Maggie came running with the book. Rose found her father's office number and dialed carefully. "Yes, may I speak to Mr. Feller, please?" she asked, in a voice at least an octave higher than her normal husky one. "This is his daughter Rose Feller calling." She waited, her face still, the telephone pressed to her ear, her little sister standing beside her. "Oh. I see. All right. No. Just tell him we'll see him later. Thank you. Okay. Goodbye." She set the phone down. "What?" asked Maggie. "What?" "He's out," Rose said. "The lady she didn't know when he'd be back."
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"But he'll be home for dinner. Right?" asked Maggie, her voice spiraling higher and higher and ending in a squeak. Her face was pale, her eyes were enormous, as if the prospect of having both parents go missing was more than she could take. "Right?" "Of course," said Rose, and then did something that let Maggie know that there was really, actually something to be afraid of—she handed her sister the remote control and walked out of the room. Maggie trailed her. "Go away," said Rose. "I have to think." "I can think, too," said Maggie. "I can help you think." Rose took off her glasses and polished them on the edge of her shirt. "Maybe we should see if there's anything missing." "Like a suitcase?" Rose nodded. "Like that." The girls hurried upstairs, opening their parents' bedroom door, and looking inside. Rose braced herself for the usual wreckage —tangled sheets, pillows on the floor, a collection of half-empty glasses and half-eaten pieces of toast on the bedside table. But the bed was neatly made. The dresser drawers were all closed. On the bedside table, Rose found a pair of earrings, a bracelet, a watch, and a plain gold band. She shuddered, then slipped the ring in her pocket before Maggie could see, and could start asking questions about why their mother had cleaned her room and taken off her wedding ring. "Suitcase is here!" said Maggie, bounding happily out of the closet. "Good," said Rose, through lips that felt frozen. She'd have to try calling her father again and telling him what she'd found, as soon as she could get her sister busy doing something else. "Come on," she said, and led Maggie out of the bedroom and back down the stairs.
Maggie worked the rolling pin back and forth over the plastic bag full of potato chips. Rose looked up at the clock for the third time in less than a minute. It was six o'clock. Rose was trying to pretend that everything was all right, even though nothing was all right at
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all. She hadn't been able to get her father on the phone, and their mother still wasn't home. Even if she'd forgotten about the early dismissal, she should have been home by three-thirty. Think! Rose thought to herself, as her sister ground the potato chips into shards, then into dust. She had already pretty much decided that their mother had gone AWAY again. She and Maggie weren't supposed to know about AWAY—about where it was, about that her mother had been there. But Rose knew. Last summer, after their mother had come back from AWAY, Maggie had come to her with a crumpled brochure. "What's this say?" she asked. Rose read it carefully. " 'Institute of Living'," she said, staring at the drawing—a cupped palm holding the faces of a woman, a man, and a child. "What's it mean?" "I don't know," said Rose. "Where did you find it?" "In Mom's suitcase." Rose hadn't even asked what Maggie was doing looking in their mother's suitcase—even at six, Maggie was a notorious snoop. A few weeks later, Rose had been driving home from a Hebrew school field trip with the Schoens when they'd passed a bunch of buildings with a sign in front, and the sign had had the exact same picture on it as the brochure—same faces, same cupped hands. "What's that?" she'd asked, trying to be casual, because the car had sped past the sign too fast for her to try to puzzle out. Steven Schoen had snickered. "The loony bin," he'd said, and his mother had whirled around so fast her hair whipped against her cheeks, and Rose could smell Aqua Net. "Steven!" she'd scolded, and then turned to Rose, her voice soft and syrupy sweet. "That's a place called the Institute of Living," she'd explained. "It's a special kind of hospital for people who need help with their feelings." So. That was AWAY. Rose wasn't too surprised, because anyone could tell that their mom had needed some kind of help. But where was she now? Had she gone back there?
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Rose looked at the clock again. Five minutes past six. She called her father's office again, but the phone just rang and rang. She set the receiver down and walked into the family room, where Maggie was now sitting on the couch, looking out the window. She sat down next to her sister. "Is it my fault?" Maggie whispered. "What?" "Is it my fault she went away? Did she get mad at me because I get in trouble at school?" "No, no," Rose said. "It's not your fault. She's not away. She probably just got confused or something, or maybe she had car trouble. There's lots of things it could be!" But even as she reassured Maggie, Rose slipped her hand into her pocket and felt the cold gold ring. "Don't worry," she said. "I'm scared," Maggie whispered. "I know," said Rose. "Me, too." They sat on the couch, side by side, as the sun went down, waiting.
Michael Feller pulled into the driveway at just after seven o'clock, and Rose and Maggie hurried out the door to meet him. "Daddy, Daddy!" Maggie said, catapulting herself toward her father's legs. "Mom's not here! She's gone! She didn't come back!" Michael turned to his oldest daughter. "Rose? What's going on?" "We got home from school early . . . it's a teachers inservice day, I brought home the notice about it last week ..." "She didn't leave a note?" asked their father, hurrying to the kitchen, so fast that Rose and Maggie had to run to keep up. "No," said Rose. "Where is she?" asked Maggie. "Do you know?" Their father shook his head and reached for the red address book and the telephone. "Don't worry. I'm sure it's nothing to worry about."
Midnight. Rose had made Maggie eat some of the tuna noodle casserole, and tried to make their father eat some, too, but he'd
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waved her away, sitting hunched by the phone, making call after call after call. At ten, he'd noticed that they were still awake and he'd hurried them into their nightgowns and into their bed s, forgetting to make them wash their faces or brush their teeth. "Go to sleep," he said. For the last two hours they'd been lying side by side in Rose's bed with their eyes wide open in the darkness. Rose had told Maggie stories—"Cinderella" and "Little Red Riding Hood," the story of the princess and the enchanted slippers who danced and danced and danced. The doorbell rang. Rose and Maggie sat straight up at the exact same instant. "We should get that," said Maggie. "It might be her," said Rose. They held hands as they ran down the stairs in bare feet. Their father was at the door already, and Rose could tell without even hearing a word that was said, that something very bad was happening, that their mother was not okay, that nothing would ever be okay again. A tall man was at the door, a man in a green uniform and a broad-brimmed brown hat. "Mr. Feller?" he was asking. "Is this the residence of Caroline Feller?" Her father swallowed hard and nodded. The tall man's hat dripped rainwater onto the floor. "I'm afraid I have some bad news, sir," he said. "Did you find our mother?" Maggie asked in a tiny gasping voice. The trooper looked at them sadly. His leather belt creaked as he reached to put his hand on their father's shoulder. Raindrops fell on Maggie's and Rose's bare feet. He looked down at them, then back up at their father. "I think we should talk privately, sir," he said. And Michael Feller, shoulder slumped, face broken, led him away. And after that . . . After that was their father with his Stonehenge face. After that
