Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

Jasmine wasn’t there. On the schedule. That was what was wrong. She was on a mission. Sarah didn’t recognize the mission, but more surprising even than that — which was pretty damn surprising since Sarah approved and cleared every mission — was how no one else was on the schedule either. How every one of their girls was also on a mission. Against all protocol, every single Operative was gone, off-site, and in Jasmine’s case, off-dimension.

“What the hell is going on?” Sarah said.

A creeping, slow-moving sense of what was going on crept and slowly moved into the pit of Sarah, and she was about to say, Jesus, we’re too late, it’s today, but then the client elevator dinged and that ding was followed by voices, unfamiliar, gruff voices, and those voices were followed by screams, which were followed then by more voices and gunshots and then more screams, and so, really, Sarah was too late to say even that.

The day Sarah’s mother disappeared (was abducted), she forgot to pack Sarah a school lunch. She promised Sarah she’d bring it to school before lunch, that she’d bring it right away, and later Sarah wondered if her mother had been on her way to bring that lunch to school when she was taken, or if she’d simply forgotten about the lunch altogether, which had happened before. Sarah always hoped that her mother forgot about the lunch a second time and was tootling around in their apartment or somewhere in the city, doing something silly and unrelated to Sarah or Sarah’s school or Sarah’s well-being, when she was nabbed.

Sarah would have been happy to know, for instance, that her mother had gotten sidetracked even on her way home from dropping Sarah off at school. That she had walked by a Duane Reade and remembered that her hair dryer had broken and that she wanted a new one, and that while in Duane Reade, she remembered other things she needed to get — makeup, a humidifier, Q-tips — and that she was grabbed as she was walking out of the store.

Sarah loved her mother and loved it when her mother did things that were motherly, which she didn’t do too often, but Sarah would have preferred it if her mother had been taken away from her while doing something frivolous or ordinary, and not in one of the rare moments she exhibited any kind of maternal instincts.

Sarah’s mother never came back, in any case, and Sarah’s teacher shared some of her lunch with Sarah when it was clear there wouldn’t be a lunch. She ate half an apple and half a ham sandwich, drank half a Tab. The rest of the day was normal. The entire day, in fact, felt normal. Her mother’s forgetting her lunch — they were running late and her mother had almost forgotten her own shoes — the two of them running the last two blocks together, Sarah spacing out during most of the school day, running around the playground by herself, crossing two bars on the monkey bars before falling off, and her mother running late to pick her up from school. These all pointed to any ordinary day.

But then her mother was really late.

And then her mother was so late that the receptionist called the only other number on file, which was Sarah’s aunt’s number, because she’d already called Sarah’s house four times and the receptionist had kids of her own, you know, and couldn’t spend the whole night waiting there with Sarah.

“I wonder what happened to that mother of yours,” her aunt said as they walked hand in hand to the subway. Sarah didn’t mind at the time. She didn’t suspect, in other words, that anything had gone wrong, and plus her mother never let her hold hands this long because it made their hands sweaty and Sarah’s mother didn’t like sweaty hands, so Sarah shrugged and squeezed her aunt’s hand quickly and her aunt squeezed back.

They picked up pizza on the way to her aunt’s apartment. Her aunt let her watch television while she called around looking for Sarah’s mother. She gave Sarah a bath and gave her a T-shirt to wear as pajamas, too big and wonderfully soft and thin, and then she read to Sarah from A Wrinkle in Time —“One of my favorites when I was a girl”—and then she tucked Sarah into her big, fluffy bed and told her, “In the morning, guess what? You’ll wake up in your own bed!” And as she fell asleep, Sarah thought to herself that she wouldn’t be upset if she didn’t wake up in her own bed, that it would be just fine, thank you very much, to wake up in her aunt’s bed, which felt clean and lovely, but then she woke up and it was the morning and she was still at her aunt’s, and she was surprised by how much this upset her.

Her aunt took a day off work and took Sarah to school and picked her up again in the afternoon, and the rest of the afternoon and that night, her aunt told Sarah things like, “She’s probably just with some friends in the city and lost track of everything,” and, “You know how your mother can be sometimes, like she’s on a different planet,” which was true, or had been true when her mother had been a younger woman. As a girl and into her teens, Sarah’s mother had the habit of disappearing from the house for a day or two, crashing on the couches of friends in the city or in Brooklyn, or not sleeping at all, sitting in diners or cafés with friends or people she had just met, and then coming home to any number of punishments, which didn’t bother her at all because she hadn’t been a rebellious girl, just forgetful and thoughtless. When she had become pregnant with Sarah — she hadn’t the slightest idea who the father was, or else convincingly pretended she hadn’t — she’d changed, or if nothing else, she had stopped leaving the house and forgetting to come back, at least until now.

Another night passed, and then it was Saturday and there was no school, and her aunt said, “Hey, do you want to go to Coney Island today?” and Sarah said, “Sure,” even though what she really wanted was to go home and for her mother to come back. But she didn’t want to upset her aunt, who seemed more than upset enough, and she didn’t want to say what was on her own mind, either, as she would only upset herself by saying out loud the thing she wanted to do but couldn’t do. And so, fine, she would go to Coney Island with her aunt, except her aunt stayed home and Sarah went with a friend of her aunt’s who also had kids, three of them, the oldest four years younger than Sarah, and for most of the day, Sarah watched her aunt’s friend yell at her kids or caught her aunt’s friend staring at her with a strange, sad, pitying look in her eye.

On Sunday, her aunt bought cookies and pizzas and cake and popcorn and closed the blinds and turned her apartment as dark as she could and ran movie after movie after movie, Sarah’s favorites, which weren’t many and which were mostly her favorites because they were the ones she had at home— Labyrinth and Top Gun and Time Bandits . When they ran out of movies, Sarah’s aunt kept the apartment dark and the popcorn popped and they sat and watched whatever was on TV, and then, on Monday, the police came over. After that, a man and a woman from CPS came to her aunt’s house, and after that, Sarah’s aunt took her back to her mom’s apartment, where they packed her clothes and her toys up, and Sarah asked her aunt if they couldn’t just stay there. Sarah’s aunt told her, “Maybe, maybe we will, maybe we’ll come back here and stay until your mother comes back,” but they never did. One day while she was at school, her aunt moved what she could from Sarah’s old apartment and sold the rest and what she didn’t sell was left on the curb. And then time passed and Sarah changed and while she didn’t know it, her mother changed, too, which was why when Sarah was older and she saw her mother week after week, year after year, she never once knew they’d been brought back together.