HEN I WAS LITTLE, four or five, my greatest fear was that some day my mother might not come home from work. Addition and subtraction were useful mainly insofar as they helped me track her movements (how many minutes till she left the office? how many minutes to walk from office to subway?) and even before I’d learned to count I’d been obsessed with learning to read a clock face: desperately studying the occult circle crayoned on the paper plate that, once mastered, would unlock the pattern of her comings and goings. Usually she was home just when she said she’d be, so if she was ten minutes late I began to fret; any later, and I sat on the floor by the front door of the apartment like a puppy left alone too long, straining to hear the rumble of the elevator coming up to our floor.

Almost every day in elementary school I heard things on the Channel 7 news that worried me. What if some bum in a dirty fatigue jacket pushed my mother onto the tracks while she was waiting for the 6 train? Or muscled her into a dark doorway and stabbed her for her pocketbook? What if she dropped her hair dryer in the bathtub, or got knocked in front of a car by a bicycle, or was given the wrong medicine at the dentist’s and died, as had happened to the mother of a classmate of mine?

To think of something happening to my mother was especially frightening because my dad was so unreliable. Unreliable I guess is the diplomatic way of putting it. Even when he was in a good mood he did things like lose his paycheck and fall asleep with the front door to the apartment open, because he drank. And when he was in a bad mood—which was much of the time—he was red-eyed and clammy-looking, his suit so rumpled it looked like he’d been rolling on the floor in it and an air of unnatural stillness emanating from him as from some pressurized article about to explode.

Though I didn’t understand why he was so unhappy, it was clear to me that his unhappiness was our fault. My mother and I got on his nerves. It was because of us he had a job he couldn’t stand. Everything we did was irritating. He particularly didn’t enjoy being around me, not that he often was: in the mornings, as I got ready for school, he sat puffy-eyed and silent over his coffee with the Wall Street Journal in front of him, his bathrobe open and his hair standing up in cowlicks, and sometimes he was so shaky that the cup sloshed as he brought it to his mouth. Warily he eyed me when I came in, nostrils flaring if I made too much noise with the silverware or the cereal bowl.

Apart from this daily awkwardness, I didn’t see him much. He didn’t eat dinner with us or attend school functions; he didn’t play with me or talk to me a lot when he was at home; in fact, he was seldom home at all until after my bedtime, and some days—paydays, especially, every other Friday—he didn’t come clattering in until three or four in the morning: banging the door, dropping his briefcase, crashing and bumping around so erratically that sometimes I bolted awake in terror, staring at the glow-in-the-dark planetarium stars on the ceiling and wondering if a killer had broken into the apartment. Luckily, when he was drunk, his footsteps slowed to a jarring and unmistakable cadence—Frankenstein steps, as I thought of them, deliberate and clumping, with absurdly long pauses between each footfall—and as soon as I realized it was only him thudding around out there in the dark and not some serial murderer or psychopath, I would drift back into a fretful doze. The following day, Saturday, my mother and I would contrive to be out of the apartment before he woke from his sweaty, tangled sleep on the sofa. Otherwise we would spend the whole day creeping around, afraid of shutting the door too loudly or of disturbing him in any way, while he sat stony-faced in front of the television with a Chinese beer from the takeout place and a glassy look in his eye, watching news or sports with the sound off.

Consequently, neither my mother nor I had been overly troubled when we woke up one Saturday and found he hadn’t come home at all. It was Sunday before we started getting concerned, and even then we didn’t worry the way you normally would; it was the start of the college football season; it was a pretty sure thing that he had money on some of the games, and we thought he’d gotten on the bus and gone to Atlantic City without telling us. Not until the following day, when my father’s secretary Loretta called because he hadn’t shown up at work, did it start to appear that something was seriously wrong. My mother, fearing he’d been robbed or killed coming out drunk from a bar, phoned the police; and we spent several tense days waiting for a phone call or a knock on the door. Then, towards the end of the week, a sketchy note from my dad arrived (postmarked Newark, New Jersey) informing us in a high-strung scrawl that he was heading off to “start a new life” in an undisclosed location. I remember pondering the phrase “new life” as if it actually might reveal some hint of where he’d gone; for after I’d badgered and clamored and pestered my mother for about a week, she’d finally consented to let me see the letter myself (“well, all right,” she said resignedly, as she opened her desk drawer and fished it out, “I don’t know what he expects me to tell you, you might as well hear it from him”). It was written on stationery from a Doubletree Inn near the airport. I’d believed it might contain valuable clues to his whereabouts, but instead I was struck by its extreme brevity (four or five lines) and its speedy, careless, go-to-hell sprawl, like something he’d dashed off before running out to the grocery store.

In many respects it was a relief to have my father out of the picture. Certainly I didn’t miss him much, and my mother didn’t seem to miss him either, though it was sad when she had to let our housekeeper, Cinzia, go because we couldn’t afford to pay her (Cinzia had cried, and offered to stay and work for free; but my mother had found her a part time job in the building, working for a couple with a baby; once a week or so, she stopped in to visit my mother for a cup of coffee, still in the smock she wore over her clothes when she cleaned.) Without fanfare, the photo of a younger, suntanned dad atop a ski slope came down from the wall, and was replaced by one of my mother and me at the rink in Central Park. At night my mother sat up late with a calculator, going over bills. Even though the apartment was rent stabilized, getting by without my dad’s salary was a month-by-month adventure, since whatever new life he’d fashioned for himself elsewhere did not include sending money for child support. Basically we were content enough doing our own laundry down in the basement, going to matinees instead of full-price movies, eating day-old baked goods and cheap Chinese carry-out (noodles, egg foo yung) and counting out nickels and dimes for bus fare. But as I trudged home from the museum that day—cold, wet, with a tooth-crunching headache—it struck me that with my dad gone, no one in the world would be particularly worried about my mother or me; no one was sitting around wondering where we’d been all morning or why they hadn’t heard from us. Wherever he was, off in his New Life (tropics or prairie, tiny ski town or Major American City) he would certainly be riveted to the television; and it was easy to imagine that maybe he was even getting a little frantic and wound-up, as he sometimes did over big news stories that had absolutely nothing to do with him, hurricanes and bridge collapses in distant states. But would he be worried enough to call and check on us? Probably not—no more than he would be likely to call his old office to see what was happening, though certainly he would be thinking of his ex-colleagues in midtown and wondering how all the bean counters and pencil-pushers (as he referred to his co-workers) were faring at 101 Park. Were the secretaries getting scared, gathering their pictures off their desks and putting on their walking shoes and going home? Or was it turning into a subdued party of sorts on the fourteenth floor, people ordering in sandwiches and gathering around the television in the conference room?

Though the walk home took forever, I don’t remember much about it except a certain gray, cold, rain-shrouded mood on Madison Avenue—umbrellas bobbing, the crowds on the sidewalk flowing silently downtown, a sense of huddled anonymity like old black and white photos I’d seen of bank crashes and bread lines in the 1930s. My headache, and the rain, constricted the world to such a tight sick circle that I saw little more than the hunched backs of people ahead of me on the sidewalk. In fact, my head hurt so badly that I could hardly see where I was going at all; and a couple of times I was nearly hit by cars when I plowed into the crosswalk without paying attention to the light. Nobody appeared to know exactly what had happened, though I overheard “North Korea” blaring from the radio of a parked cab, and “Iran” and “al-Qaeda” muttered by a number of passersby. And a scrawny black man with dreadlocks—drenched to the bone—was pacing back and forth out in front of the Whitney museum, jabbing at the air with his fists and shouting to nobody in particular: “Buckle up, Manhattan! Osama bin Laden is rockin us again!”

Though I felt faint, and wanted to sit down, somehow I kept hobbling along with a hitch in my step like a partially broken toy. Cops gestured; cops whistled and beckoned. Water dripped off the end of my nose. Over and over, blinking the rain from my eyes, the thought coursed through my mind: I had to get home to my mother as soon as I could. She would be waiting frantically for me at the apartment; she would be tearing her hair out with worry, cursing herself for having taken my phone. Everyone was having problems getting calls through and pedestrians were lined ten and twenty deep at the few pay phones on the street. Mother, I thought, Mother, trying to send her a psychic message that I was alive. I wanted her to know I was all right but at the same time I remember telling myself it was okay I was walking instead of running; I didn’t want to pass out on the way home. How lucky that she had walked away only a few moments before! She had sent me directly into the heart of the explosion; she was sure to think that I was dead.

And to think of the girl who’d saved my life made my eyes smart. Pippa! An odd, dry name for a rusty, wry little redhead: it suited her. Whenever I thought of her eyes on mine, I felt dizzy at the thought that she—a perfect stranger—had saved me from walking out of the exhibition and into the black flash in the postcard shop, nada, the end of everything. Would I ever get to tell her she’d saved my life? As for the old man: the firemen and rescue people had rushed the building only minutes after I got out, and I still had hopes that someone had made it back in to rescue him—the door was jacked, they knew he was in there. Would I ever see either of them again?

When I finally made it home, I was chilled to the bone, punch-drunk and stumbling. Water streamed from my sodden clothes and wound behind me in an uneven trail across the lobby floor.

After the crowds on the street, the air of desertion was unnerving. Though the portable television was going in the package room, and I heard walkie talkies spluttering somewhere in the building, there was no sign of Goldie or Carlos or Jose or any of the regular guys.

Farther back, the lighted cabinet of the elevator stood empty and waiting, like a stage cabinet in a magic act. The gears caught and shuddered; one by one, the pearly old deco numbers blinked past as I creaked up to the seventh floor. Stepping into my own, drab hallway, I was overwhelmed with relief—mouse-brown paint, stuffy carpet-cleaner smell and all.

The key turned noisily in the lock. “Hello?” I called, stepping into the dimness of the apartment: shades down, all quiet.

In the silence, the refrigerator hummed. God, I thought, with a terrible jolt, isn’t she home yet?

“Mother?” I called again. With rapidly sinking heart, I walked fast through the foyer, and then stood confused in the middle of the living room.

Her keys weren’t on the peg by the door; her bag wasn’t on the table. Wet shoes squelching in the stillness, I walked through to the kitchen—which wasn’t much of a kitchen, only an alcove with a two-burner stove, facing an airshaft. There sat her coffee cup, green glass from the flea market, with a lipstick print on the rim.

I stood staring at the unwashed coffee cup with an inch of cold coffee at the bottom and wondered what to do. My ears were ringing and whooshing and my head hurt so badly I could scarcely think: waves of blackness on the edge of my vision. I’d been so fixed on how worried she would be, on making it home to tell her that I was okay, that it had never occurred to me that she might not be home herself.

Wincing with every step, I walked down the hallway to my parents’ bedroom: essentially unchanged since my father had left but more cluttered and feminine-looking now that it was hers alone. The answering machine, on the table by the tumbled and mussed-up bed, was dark: no messages.

Standing in the doorway, half-reeling with pain, I tried to concentrate. A jarring sensation of the day’s movement jolted through my body, as if I’d been riding in a car for far too long.

First things first: find my phone, check my messages. Only I didn’t know where my phone was. She had taken it away after I was suspended; the night before, when she was in the shower, I’d tried to find it by calling the number but apparently she’d turned it off.

I remember plunging my hands in the top drawer of her bureau and clawing through a bewilderment of scarves: silks and velvets, Indian embroideries.

Then, with immense effort (even though it wasn’t very heavy) I dragged over the bench at the end of her bed and climbed on it so I could look on the top shelf of her closet. Afterwards, I sat on the carpet in a semi-stupor, with my cheek leaning against the bench and an ugly white roar in my ears.

Something was wrong. I remember raising my head with a sudden blaze of conviction that gas was seeping out of the kitchen stove, that I was being poisoned from a gas leak. Except I couldn’t smell any gas.

I might have gone into the little bathroom off her bedroom and looked in the medicine cabinet for an aspirin, something for my head, I don’t know. All I know for sure is that at some point I was in my room, not knowing how I got there, bracing myself with one hand against the wall by the bed and feeling like I was going to be sick. And then everything was so confused I can’t give a clear account of it at all until I sat up disoriented on the living room sofa at the sound of something like a door opening.

But it wasn’t the front door, only somebody else down the hall. The room was dark and I could hear afternoon traffic, rush-hour traffic, out on the street. In the dimness, I was still for a heartstopping moment or two as the noises sorted themselves out and the familiar lines of table lamp, lyre-shaped chair backs grew visible against the twilight window. “Mom?” I said, and the crackle of panic was plainly audible in my voice.

I had fallen asleep in my gritty wet clothes; the sofa was damp too, with a clammy, body-shaped depression where I’d been lying down on it. A chilly breeze rattled in the venetian blinds, through the window my mother had left partly open that morning.

The clock said 6:47 p.m. With growing fear, I walked stiffly around the apartment, turning on all the lights—even the overhead lights in the living room, which we generally didn’t use because they were so stark and bright.

Standing in the doorway of my mother’s bedroom, I saw a red light blinking in the dark. A delicious wave of relief washed over me: I darted around the bed, fumbled for the button on the answering machine, and it was several seconds before I realized that the voice was not my mother at all but a woman my mother worked with, sounding unaccountably cheerful. “Hi, Audrey, Pru here, just checking in. Crazy day, eh? Listen, the galley proofs are in for Pareja and we need to talk but the deadline’s been postponed so no worries, for now anyway. Hope you’re holding up, love, give a call when you’ve got a chance.”

I stood there for a long time, looking down at the machine after the message beeped off. Then I lifted up the edge of the blinds and peeked out at the traffic.

It was that hour: people coming home. Horns honked faintly down on the street. I still had a splitting headache and the feeling (new to me then, but now unfortunately all too familiar) of waking up with a nasty hangover, of important things forgotten and left undone.

I went back to her bedroom, and with trembling hands, punched in the number of her cell phone, so fast that I got it wrong and had to dial again. But she didn’t answer; the service picked up. I left a message (Mom, it’s me, I’m worried, where are you?) and sat on the side of her bed with my head in my hands.

Cooking smells had begun to drift from the lower floors. Indistinct voices floated in from neighboring apartments: abstract thumps, somebody opening and shutting cabinets. It was late: people were coming home from work, dropping their briefcases, greeting their cats and dogs and children, turning on the news, getting ready to go out for dinner. Where was she? I tried to think of all the reasons why she might have been held up and couldn’t really come up with any—although, who knew, maybe a street somewhere had been closed off so she couldn’t get home. But wouldn’t she have called?

Maybe she dropped her phone? I thought. Maybe she broke it? Maybe she gave it to someone who needed it more?

The stillness of the apartment unnerved me. Water sang in the pipes, and the breeze clicked treacherously in the blinds. Because I was just sitting uselessly on the side of her bed, feeling like I needed to do something, I called back and left yet another message, this time unable to keep the quaver out of my voice. Mom, forgot to say, I’m at home. Please call, the second you get a chance, okay? Then I called and left a message on the voice mail at her office just in case.

With a deadly coldness spreading in the center of my chest, I walked back into the living room. After standing there for a few moments, I went to the bulletin board in the kitchen to see if she had left me a note, though I already knew very well she hadn’t. Back in the living room, I peered out the window at the busy street. Could she have run to the drugstore or the deli, not wanting to wake me? Part of me wanted to go out on the street and look for her, but it was crazy to think I would spot her in rush-hour crowds and besides if I left the apartment, I was scared I’d miss her call.

It was past time for the doormen to change shifts. When I phoned downstairs, I was hoping for Carlos (the most senior and dignified of the doormen) or even better Jose: a big happy Dominican guy, my favorite. But nobody answered at all, for ages, until finally a thin, halting, foreign-sounding voice said: “Hello?”

“Is Jose there?”

“No,” said the voice. “No. You cah back.”

It was, I realized, the frightened-looking Asian guy in safety goggles and rubber gloves who ran the floor waxer and managed the trash and did other odd jobs around the building. The doormen (who didn’t appear to know his name any more than I did) called him “the new guy,” and griped about management bringing in a houseman who spoke neither English nor Spanish. Everything that went wrong in the building, they blamed on him: the new guy didn’t shovel the walks right, the new guy didn’t put the mail where it was supposed to go or keep the courtyard clean like he should.

“You cah back later,” the new guy was saying, hopefully.

“No, wait!” I said, as he was about to hang up. “I need to talk to somebody.”

Confused pause.

“Please, is anybody else there?” I said. “It’s an emergency.”

“Okay,” said the voice warily, in an open-ended tone that gave me hope. I could hear him breathing hard in the silence.

“This is Theo Decker,” I said. “In 7C? I see you downstairs a lot? My mother hasn’t come home and I don’t know what to do.”

Long, bewildered pause. “Seven,” he repeated, as if it were the only part of the sentence he understood.

“My mother,” I repeated. “Where’s Carlos? Isn’t anybody there?”

“Sorry, thank you,” he said, in a panicky tone, and hung up.

I hung up the phone myself, in a state of high agitation, and after a few moments standing frozen in the middle of the living room went and switched on the television. The city was a mess; the bridges to the outer boroughs were closed, which explained why Carlos and Jose hadn’t been able to get in to work, but I saw nothing at all that made me understand what might be holding my mother up. There was a number to call, I saw, if someone was missing. I copied it down on a scrap of newspaper and made a deal with myself that if she wasn’t home in exactly one half hour, I would call.

Writing the number down made me feel better. For some reason I felt sure that the act of writing it down was going to magically make her walk through the door. But after forty-five minutes passed, and then an hour, and still she hadn’t turned up, I finally broke down and called it (pacing back and forth, keeping a nervous eye on the television the whole time I was waiting for somebody to pick up, the whole time I was on hold, commercials for mattresses, commercials for stereos, fast free delivery and no credit required). Finally a brisk woman came on, all business. She took my mother’s name, took my phone number, said my mother wasn’t “on her list” but I would get a call back if her name turned up. Not until after I hung up the phone did it occur to me to ask what sort of list she was talking about; and after an indefinite period of misgiving, walking in a tormented circuit through all four rooms, opening drawers, picking up books and putting them down, turning on my mother’s computer and seeing what I could figure out from a Google search (nothing), I called back again to ask.

“She’s not listed among the dead,” said the second woman I spoke to, sounding oddly casual. “Or the injured.”

My heart lifted. “She’s okay, then?”

“I’m saying we’ve got no information at all. Did you leave your number earlier so we can give you a call back?”

Yes, I said, they had told me I would get a call back.

“Free delivery and set up,” the television was saying. “Be sure and ask about our six months’ free financing.”

“Good luck then,” said the woman, and hung up.

The stillness in the apartment was unnatural; even the loud talking on the television didn’t drive it away. Twenty-one people were dead, with “dozens more” injured. In vain, I tried to reassure myself with this number: twenty-one people wasn’t so bad, was it? Twenty-one was a thin crowd in a movie theatre or even on a bus. It was three people less than my English class. But soon fresh doubts and fears began to crowd around me and it was all I could do not to run out of the apartment yelling her name.

As much as I wanted to go out on the street and look for her, I knew I was supposed to stay put. We were supposed to meet at the apartment; that was the deal, the ironclad agreement ever since elementary school, when I’d been sent home from school with a Disaster Preparedness Activity Book, featuring cartoon ants in dust masks gathering supplies and preparing for some unnamed emergency. I’d completed the crosswords and dim questionnaires (“What is the best clothing to pack in a Disaster Supply Kit? A. Bathing suit B. Layers C. Hula Skirt D. Aluminum foil”) and—with my mother—devised a Family Disaster Plan. Ours was simple: we would meet at home. And if one of us couldn’t get home, we would call. But as time crawled by, and the phone did not ring, and the death toll on the news rose to twenty-two and then twenty-five, I phoned the city’s emergency number again.

“Yes,” said the woman who answered, in an infuriatingly calm voice, “I see here that you’ve phoned in already, we’ve got her down on our list.”

“But—maybe she’s in the hospital or something?”

“She might be. I’m afraid I can’t confirm that, though. What did you say your name was? Would you like to speak to one of our counselors?”

“What hospital are they taking people to?”

“I’m sorry, I really can’t—”

“Beth Israel? Lenox Hill?”

“Look, it depends on the type of injury. People have got eye trauma, burns, all sorts of stuff. There are people undergoing surgery all over the city—”

“What about those people that were reported dead a few minutes ago?”

“Look, I understand, I’d like to help you, but I’m afraid there’s no Audrey Decker on my list.”

My eyes darted nervously around the living room. My mother’s book (Jane and Prudence, Barbara Pym) face-down on the back of the sofa; one of her thin cashmere cardigans over the arm of a chair. She had them in all colors; this one was pale blue.

“Maybe you should come down to the Armory. They’ve set up something for families there—there’s food, and lots of hot coffee, and people to talk to.”

“But what I’m asking you, are there any dead people that you don’t have names for? Or injured people?”

“Listen, I understand your concern. I really, really wish I could help you with this but I just can’t. You’ll get a call back as soon as we have some specific information.”

“I need to find my mother! Please! She’s probably in a hospital somewhere. Can’t you give me some idea where to look for her?”

“How old are you?” said the woman suspiciously.

After a shocked silence, I hung up. For a few dazed moments I stared at the telephone, feeling relieved but also guilty, as if I’d knocked something over and broken it. When I looked down at my hands and saw them shaking, it struck me in a wholly impersonal way, like noticing the battery was drained on my iPod, that I hadn’t eaten in a while. Never in my life except when I had a stomach virus had I gone so long without food. So I went to the fridge and found my carton of leftover lo mein from the night before and wolfed it at the counter, standing vulnerable and exposed in the glare from the overhead bulb. Though there was also egg foo yung, and rice, I left it for her in case she was hungry when she came in. It was nearly midnight: soon it would be too late for her to order in from the deli. After I was finished, I washed my fork and the coffee things from that morning and wiped down the counter so she wouldn’t have anything to do when she got home: she would be pleased, I told myself firmly, when she saw I had cleaned the kitchen for her. She would be pleased too (at least I thought so) when she saw I’d saved her painting. She might be mad. But I could explain.

According to the television, they now knew who was responsible for the explosion: parties that the news was alternately calling “right wing extremists” or “home-grown terrorists.” They had worked with a moving and storage company; with help from unknown accomplices inside the museum, they had concealed the explosives within the hollow, carpenter-built display platforms in the museum shops where the postcards and art books were stacked. Some of the perpetrators were dead; some of them were in custody, others were at large. They were going into the particulars in some detail, but it was all too much for me to take in.

I was now working with the sticky drawer in the kitchen, which had been jammed shut since long before my father left; nothing was in it but cookie cutters and some old fondue skewers and lemon zesters we never used. She’d been trying for well over a year to get someone from the building in to fix it (along with a broken doorknob and a leaky faucet and half a dozen other annoying little things). I got a butter knife, pried at the edges of the drawer, careful not to chip the paint any more than it was chipped already. The force of the explosion still rang deep in my bones, an inner echo of the ringing in my ears; but worse than this, I could still smell blood, taste the salt and tin of it in my mouth. (I would be smelling it for days, though I didn’t know that then.)

While I worked and worried at the drawer, I wondered if I should call somebody, and, if so, who. My mother was an only child. And though, technically I had a set of living grandparents—my father’s dad and stepmother, in Maryland—I didn’t know how to get in touch with them. Relations were barely civil between my dad and his stepmother, Dorothy, an immigrant from East Germany who had cleaned office buildings for a living before marrying my grandfather. (Always a clever mimic, my dad did a cruelly funny imitation of Dorothy: a sort of battery-operated hausfrau, all compressed lips and jerky movements, and an accent like Curt Jurgens in Battle of Britain.) But though my dad disliked Dorothy enough, his chief enmity was for Grandpa Decker: a tall, fat, frightening-looking man with ruddy cheeks and black hair (dyed, I think) who wore lots of waistcoats and loud plaids, and believed in belt beatings for children. No picnic was the primary phrase I associated with Grandpa Decker—as in my dad saying “Living with that bastard was no picnic” and “Believe me, dinnertime was never any picnic at our house.” I had met Grandpa Decker and Dorothy only twice in my life, tense charged occasions where my mother leaned forward on the sofa with her coat on and her purse in her lap and her valiant efforts to make conversation all stumbled and sank into quicksand. The main thing I remembered were the forced smiles, the heavy smell of cherry pipe tobacco and Grandpa Decker’s not-very-friendly warning to keep my sticky little mitts off his model train set (an Alpine village which took up an entire room of their house and according to him was worth tens of thousands of dollars).

I’d managed to bend the blade of the butter knife by stabbing it too hard into the side of the stuck drawer—one of my mother’s few good knives, a silver knife that had belonged to her mother. Gamely, I tried to bend it back, biting my lip and concentrating all my will on the task, as all the time ugly flashes of the day kept flying up and hitting me in the face. Trying to stop thinking about it was like trying to stop thinking of a purple cow. The purple cow was all you could think of.

Unexpectedly the drawer popped open. I stared down at the mess: rusty batteries, a broken cheese grater, the snowflake cookie cutters my mother hadn’t used since I was in first grade, jammed in with ragged old carry-out menus from Viand and Shun Lee Palace and Delmonico’s. I left the drawer wide open—so it would be the first thing she saw when she walked in—and wandered over to the couch and wrapped myself up in a blanket, propped up so I could keep a good eye on the front door.

My mind was churning in circles. For a long time I sat shivering and red-eyed in the glow of the television, as the blue shadows flickered uneasily in and out. There was no news, really; the picture kept returning to night shots of the museum (looking perfectly normal now, except for the yellow police tape still strung up on the sidewalk, the armed guards out front, rags of smoke blowing up sporadically from the roof into the Klieg-lit sky).

Where was she? Why hadn’t she come home yet? She would have a good explanation; she would make this into nothing, and then it would seem completely stupid how worried I’d been.

To force her from my mind I concentrated hard on an interview they were running again, from earlier in the evening. A bespectacled curator in tweed jacket and bow tie—visibly shaken—was talking about what a disgrace it was that they weren’t letting specialists into the museum to care for the artwork. “Yes,” he was saying, “I understand that it’s a crime scene, but these paintings are very sensitive to changes in air quality and temperature. They may have been damaged by water or chemicals or smoke. They may be deteriorating as we speak. It is of vital importance that conservators and curators be allowed into the crucial areas to assess the damage as soon as possible—”

All of a sudden the telephone rang—abnormally loud, like an alarm clock waking me from the worst dream of my life. My surge of relief was indescribable. I tripped and nearly fell on my face in my headlong dive to grab it. I was certain it was my mother, but the caller ID stopped me cold: NYDoCFS.

New York Department of—what? After half a beat of confusion, I snatched up the phone. “Hello?”

“Hello there,” said a voice of hushed and almost creepy gentleness. “To whom am I speaking?”

“Theodore Decker,” I said, taken aback. “Who is this?”

“Hello, Theodore. My name is Marjorie Beth Weinberg and I’m a social worker in the Department of Child and Family Services?”

“What is it? Are you calling about my mother?”

“You’re Audrey Decker’s son? Is that correct?”

“My mother! Where is she? Is she all right?”

A long pause—a terrible pause.

“What’s the matter?” I cried. “Where is she?”

“Is your father there? May I speak to him?”

“He can’t come to the phone. What’s wrong?”

“I’m sorry, but it’s an emergency. I’m afraid it’s really very important that I speak to your father right now.”

“What about my mother?” I said, rising to my feet. “Please! Just tell me where she is! What happened?”

“You’re not by yourself, are you, Theodore? Is there an adult with you?”

“No, they’ve gone out for coffee,” I said, looking wildly around the living room. Ballet slippers, askew beneath a chair. Purple hyacinths in a foil-wrapped pot.

“Your father, too?”

“No, he’s asleep. Where’s my mother? Is she hurt? What’s happened?”

“I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to wake your dad up, Theodore.”

“No! I can’t!”

“I’m afraid it’s very important.”

“He can’t come to the phone! Why can’t you just tell me what’s wrong?”

“Well then, if your dad’s not available, maybe it’s best if I just leave my contact information with you.” The voice, while soft and sympathetic, was reminiscent to my ear of Hal the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Please tell him to get in touch with me as soon as possible. It’s really very important that he returns the call.”

After I got off the telephone, I sat very still for a long time. According to the clock on the stove, which I could see from where I sat, it was two-forty-five in the morning. Never had I been alone and awake at such an hour. The living room—normally so airy and open, buoyant with my mother’s presence—had shrunk to a cold, pale discomfort, like a vacation house in winter: fragile fabrics, scratchy sisal rug, paper lamp shades from Chinatown and the chairs too little and light. All the furniture seemed spindly, poised at a tiptoe nervousness. I could feel my heart beating, hear the clicks and ticks and hisses of the large elderly building slumbering around me. Everyone was asleep. Even the distant horn-honks and the occasional rattle of trucks out on Fifty-Seventh Street seemed faint and uncertain, as lonely as a noise from another planet.

Soon, I knew, the night sky would turn dark blue; the first tender, chilly gleam of April daylight would steal into the room. Garbage trucks would roar and grumble down the street; spring songbirds would start singing in the park; alarm clocks would be going off in bedrooms all over the city. Guys hanging off the backs of trucks would toss fat whacking bundles of the Times and the Daily News to the sidewalks outside the newsstand. Mothers and dads all over the city would be shuffling around wild-haired in underwear and bathrobes, putting on the coffee, plugging in the toaster, waking their kids up for school.

And what would I do? Part of me was immobile, stunned with despair, like those rats that lose hope in laboratory experiments and lie down in the maze to starve.

I tried to pull my thoughts together. For a while, it had almost seemed that if I sat still enough, and waited, things might straighten themselves out somehow. Objects in the apartment wobbled with my fatigue: halos shimmered around the table lamp; the stripe of the wallpaper seemed to vibrate.

I picked up the phone book; I put it down. The idea of calling the police terrified me. And what could the police do anyway? I knew only too well from television that a person had to be missing twenty-four hours. I had just about convinced myself that I ought to go uptown and look for her, middle of the night or no, and the hell with our Family Disaster Plan, when a deafening buzz (the doorbell) shattered the silence and my heart leaped up for joy.

Scrambling, skidding harum-scarum to the door, I fumbled with the lock. “Mom?” I called, sliding the top bolt, throwing open the door—and then my heart plunged, a six-story drop. Standing on the doormat were two people I had never seen in my life: a chubby Korean woman with a short, spiky haircut, a Hispanic guy in shirt and tie who looked a lot like Luis on Sesame Street. There was nothing at all threatening about them, quite the contrary; they were reassuringly dumpy and middle-aged, dressed like a pair of substitute school teachers, but though they both had kindly expressions on their faces, I understood the instant I saw them that my life, as I knew it, was over.