It is stated that several police officers fired shots into the back of the thirty-one-year-old “rape suspect” Jones as he was fleeing them from his residence on Brush Street, Detroit; officers claimed that Jones was believed to have a weapon and to be threatening them, though no weapon was subsequently found in the alley, or in the vicinity. It was believed that Jones was involved in drugs and illegal firearms though neither were found in the house, or in the vicinity. Nonetheless, the review board ruled “mitigating circumstances” and found the shooting “justified.”

  At the end of the article it is noted that the shooting of Zekiel Jones has become a “controversial local issue” and that demonstrations have been held in front of Detroit police headquarters resulting in the arrests of several activists. A “midnight candle vigil” was held following the decision of the review board but after several hours was “peacefully dispelled” by Detroit riot police.

  Hannah is relieved, little is said of the “Far Hills rape victim” whose identity has not been revealed. Nor is there a photograph of the deceased Jones.

  Hannah tries to recall—was Zekiel Jones an official suspect?

  Hannah tries to recall—had she ever accused anyone of rape?

  She is confused, she is trembling badly. Despondency has clouded her mind.

  Wes has said Stop thinking about it.

  Wes has advised There’s nothing you can do about it now, so stop thinking about it. You have the children to think of, you are their mother.

  Wes is practical, pragmatic. Wes has had enough of Hannah’s stricken conscience as Wes has had enough of Hannah’s migraine-prone femaleness.

  He stiffens if she touches him, so she has ceased touching him.

  She stiffens if he touches her, so he has ceased touching her.

  Hannah has overheard Wes on the phone speaking with an unknown party: She’s been like this since—you know. She’s been—what’s the term—“self-medicating.”

  It is true, Hannah has been self-medicating. For Hannah is a convalescent. From what precisely, Hannah doesn’t know.

  Certainly, Hannah is unwell. She could not begin to sleep at night without medication. Her thoughts are obsessive and as clotted as meat mangled in a grinder, often she finds herself standing very still, thinking, or trying to think, as time passes by her in a drifting stream.

  Initially Hannah tried to confront Wes, insisting to him that she’d never identified a Black man as the rapist, she’d never acknowledged that she had, in fact, been raped; it is Wes who has made the accusation. But Wes denies this vehemently, Wes tells Hannah that it is she who remembers wrongly, she has been ill, she has been not herself, confused, her brain has been affected, she’d fallen and injured her brain, she is amnesiac, she takes too many drugs, she drinks too much, just stop, for Christ’s sake—stop.

  And so, Hannah stops. Hannah will stop.

  Desperate at the prospect of losing her husband. For it can happen, it has been happening ever more frequently in Far Hills—losing the husband.

  Begging to be forgiven for what she recalls, what she believes, what she knows to be true. No one raped her, certainly not Zekiel Jones, why will none of them believe her.

  He has not called her, since. Her lover.

  Unless it is her husband whom Hannah loathes, and hopes he will leave her: for if he leaves her, she will retain the house and the children, she will not lose her place in Far Hills.

  Don’t be ridiculous, what are you saying. You can’t live without him.

  Can’t live without a husband. Not in Far Hills.

  You adore him, you are lost without him. He is the only man who has ever loved you and even if, now, he no longer loves you, still he is the only man who has loved you.

  Also, you won’t retain the house. Alimony and child-support payments will make of you a genteel beggar in a rented row house in Franklin and your Far Hills friends will never see you again.

  Almost, Hannah has come to believe that Zekiel Jones was someone she’d known. Not a friend exactly but someone in her life. Despite the difference in their ages, a classmate of hers in Cleveland. One of those Black students she’d observed at a distance in high school, attracted to them, the girls as well as the boys, in a way envious of them, believing that they were together in ways their white classmates were not but with no way to bridge the distance, or no way that Hannah knew.

  Now, trying to summon the face of the parking attendant at the Marriott smiling at her as if indeed he knew her, and she knew him—You have a good day, ma’am!

  But Hannah can’t recall, the smiling face has vanished.

  “No Help”

  He was not the one. Not him.

  I never identified him. Never named him.

  Not sure why, why she is here, or what exactly this place is.

  Something has urged Hannah here. Ascending the concrete steps to the Far Hills police station in the single-story municipal building it shares with the post office.

  Except, two steps from the top, Hannah hesitates, considering.

  In an instant, struck still. A paralysis has slid over her body as invisible as a second skin.

  In dark glasses, a wide-rimmed straw hat obscuring half her face. A Guatemalan bag of woven hemp slung over her shoulder.

  Strangers pass by Hannah entering the police station, exiting the police station, taking little notice of the woman in linen trousers, linen jacket, silk shirt, and high-heeled sandals.

  He should not have died.

  I don’t understand: Why did you kill him.

  If one of the figures passes brazenly through her Hannah will understand that this is the zone she has come to call underwater. Here, sounds are muted, imprecise. It is not possible to distinguish clearly between the harmless chittering of birds and the staccato cries of sirens in the distance. If there are human cries, or babies’ cries—these, too, are obscured in underwater.

  Sometimes in this fugue state Hannah is distracted by an agitation of the air at her elbow. She turns, but no one is there.

  Turns again, and no one. But the possibility of someone whom now she sees at a distance as if, in an instant, this person (usually male) has the power to veer rapidly away from her, silently.

  In this way she has seen, or imagines she has seen, Y.K. at a distance, in the act of turning away from her. She has glimpsed the ponytailed boy whose name she doesn’t know, unshaven and swaggering on a Far Hills street where his kind doesn’t belong.

  How far the Far Hills police station is!—at the very end of Main Street, a longer walk than Hannah has anticipated in her high-heeled shoes.

  Hannah has patronized the post office countless times but she has never once entered the police station. That other dimension of life, like a hospital, or a mortuary, with which, she has liked to think, she has nothing to do.

  A weekday morning of tasks, errands. For months in her trance of shame, mortification, soul-fatigue, Hannah has not often left the house, but today boldly—bravely—she has stopped at Village Pharmacy, Village Stationer’s, Village Cobbler where she has taken a pair of Wes’s (heavy, leather) Florsheim shoes to be reheeled.

  Tasks, errands. Proof of domestic life. There is solace in these as in the bracketed spaces of a calendar or the precisely measured bars of a window.

  Hannah is feeling blurred, dreamy. It is possible that, indeed, Hannah is dreaming and this is all underwater.

  Yet, Hannah is here. Something has drawn Hannah here.

  Except, Hannah cannot seem to decide: to enter the police station, or to retreat.

  “Ma’am? Can I help you?”

  A police officer leaving the station has noticed the blond-haired woman in her late thirties standing very still on the steps, like a mannequin. Grateful for dark glasses, so dark her dilated eyes are not visible to the officer.

  The man is brisk, courteous. He is not unfriendly but he is not smiling. Hannah isn’t accustomed to uniformed public-service persons not smiling at her, this is subtly wrong, ominous.

  Her smile is stiff, involuntary. It fails to meet her frightened eyes.

  “Thank you, officer. No one can help me.”

  Abduction

  Fear a ringing phone.

  Rare for Wes to call Hannah at home during the day, from his office, a signal that this is (surely) bad news.

  Bad news Hannah dreads to hear. More bad news.

  Already she has begun trembling.

  Already since the police station the other day, paralysis on the steps, Hannah is susceptible to bursting into tears.

  Why why did you. Why did I.

  Calmly Wes asks if the children are home, if the children are in the house, Hannah says yes of course, the children are home, not in the house but in the backyard, Ismelda is watching them as they play in the wading pool. At least Hannah thinks that is where the children are …

  … faint-headed stumbling to the rear of the house carrying the phone anxious to see if indeed Conor and Katya are in the wading pool, hearing their uplifted happy voices, a vast wave of relief as Hannah assures Wes that yes, the children are safe, of course the children are safe at home, never allowed out of the sight of a protective adult.

  Is this a rebuke of her as a mother, Hannah will wonder. As if the children would be otherwise than safe.

  Not so calm now, his voice quavering with disgust, fury, helplessness Wes tells Hannah that there has been another child abduction, this time in Far Hills—The first time, in Far Hills.

  According to a news bulletin he has just heard, the abduction took place that morning on Ashtree Common, less than a mile from the Jarretts’ home, a private road that intersects with Cradle Rock Road.

  Wes is incensed, indignant. That that pervert-murderer would dare to strike here.

  Hannah opens the sliding glass door, steps out onto the redwood deck, sunshine strikes her between the eyes as a steer is struck by a sledgehammer yet in the same instant recovering, frantic to see that yes the children are safe, of course. Splashing noisily in the wading pool oblivious of Mommy staring at them faint with relief that they are safe.

  Remaining out of sight. Doesn’t want to alarm the children should they happen to glance up at her and see something in Mommy’s face of which Mommy isn’t aware.

  Difficult for Hannah to follow the thread of what Wes is telling her, often lately she has difficulty hearing what others say to her, the more vehemently they speak, the more difficulty, as something willful and stubborn in Hannah resists the vehement emotions of others, as a weak swimmer resists forceful waves, out of a wish for self-preservation. Why, why are you telling me these things. Leave me alone, I do not want to know.

  But yes, terrible news, Hannah is responding as one does—Oh! Oh, no …

  Sickened to hear, as a mother, as a neighbor, that a ten-year-old boy has been abducted from Ashtree Common just a few hours ago, name not yet released to the media, though the boy has been identified as a student at Far Hills Day School and so it’s possible (Wes is saying, excitedly) that Wes and Hannah know the parents, it’s possible that Wes and Hannah have even met the boy who’d been walking the family dog in a wooded area frequented by joggers and bird-watchers only a few minutes from his house, sighted by a neighbor shortly before he “disappeared into thin air …”

  Soon afterward the dog turned up whimpering and abashed, trailing its leash.

  Babysitter, drawing closer.

  Hannah watches the children in the little pool constructed just for them in mimicry of the larger pool for adults with its elegant Mediterranean-blue ceramic tiles. Weak with love and the anxiety of love for such small bodies, small perfect bodies, as vulnerable to predators as fledgling birds to hawks swooping out of the sky. As she’d stood frozen on the steps to the police station, so Hannah stands frozen now in a paralysis of terror that might be mistaken for resignation as one might stare at a great volcano erupting that had been smoking and smoldering for centuries, flaming lava now spilling from its crater, rushing down the volcano’s sides to annihilate everything and everyone in its path: the innocent as well as the guilty.

  “But was it Babysitter?”—Hannah asks, as if Wes might be able to answer such a question, and Wes says, “Christ, Hannah!—d’you want two of them?”

  Hannah bites her lip, rebuked. Like a child who has said the perfectly obvious, yet forbidden thing.

  Wes tells Hannah that yes, the modus operandi of the new abduction appears to be similar to the previous abductions to which Babysitter has laid claim, as if there could be any doubt—(for what are the odds against a second pervert, behaving so like the first!)—except this abduction is bolder, more daring than the others: The abductor had driven on a private road, a cul-de-sac, risking being seen by witnesses; he’d parked his vehicle in a small parking lot with only a few other vehicles; he’d risked abducting a child in the late morning, in full daylight, in a sparsely populated area in which his presence might have been noticed; and he’d risked abducting a child with a dog.

  Most of all taking a chance in a neighborhood with so many small winding roads, where you can get lost even if you know the area.

  “But maybe he knows the area,” Hannah says, “maybe he’s from Far Hills.”

  Wes laughs dismissively. As if Hannah has meant to say something witty and not something very stupid.

  “Nobody in Far Hills would do such things! Whoever it is he’s from the city—the police are sure.”

  Hannah remains silent. Wes continues: “It’s revenge. It isn’t even about the children, it’s about us. He wants to terrorize us.” In a lowered voice adding, “White people. It’s what police think but it’s kept out of the papers and TV.”

  Hannah has not heard this. Hannah has not read anything hinting at this. Yet there has come to be a kind of consensus among suburban residents, that Babysitter must be a resident of Detroit.

  Implied, Babysitter must be non-white.

  But a Black man would be easily noticed in Far Hills. Turning onto Ashtree Common, of all roads. Hannah doesn’t point this out.

  “—they’re thinking, he’s light-skinned. Or could be Hispanic, working for a lawn crew, or construction, and coming back some other time, knowing exactly where to go.”

  Far Hills is serviced primarily by individuals who are non-white. And it’s certainly true, many of the workers know the area well, in some cases better than the residents.

  “It’s like we’re held hostage in our lives. In our white skins.”

  Hannah murmurs yes. A vision comes to her of Zekiel Jones, in his Marriott uniform, calling after her—You have a good day, ma’am.

  “Just keep the children safe,” Wes says, in the jovial voice with which he ends most conversations, “that’s all we can do. We’ll go away in August for three weeks, we’ll be safe there—northern Michigan.”

  With a promise to call back when he has more news Wes hangs up. By this time Hannah has returned to the house, unseen by the children in the wading pool.

  Sickened, dismayed. Another child! So close.

  Hannah considers turning on the TV, or the radio. Yes? No?

  A rush of her blood like lust, a sudden yearning to know the worst.

  Vigil

  And now, the vigil.

  A day, a night, another day and another night, no further news of the missing child.

  Each of the seven previous abductions attributed to Babysitter has ended in death. Limp child bodies, naked, on their backs displayed in public places in a way to evoke nineteenth-century photographs of dead children in their beauty and serenity.

  The shortest interim between the abduction and the discovery of the body has been three days. The longest, eleven.

  Hannah tries not to be aware. Hannah tries not to think.

  On the brink of sleep, Hannah tries not to dream.

  What would it be, to be the mother of the missing child.

  What would it be, to be the missing child.

  Another morning, another interminable day. So long as the body is not discovered the missing child is still alive.

  What would it be, to have hope.

  Hannah can think only of her children: She must shield them from knowing. Since it’s summer and school isn’t in session it isn’t difficult to keep the children in quarantine, make excuses for not driving them to see their friends, or allowing their friends to visit them; not so difficult since other parents are keeping their children in quarantine as well.

  Hannah dreads their knowing: Something terrible has happened to a child who lives not far away from them, a child like them, who attends their school.

  Yes but he’s older. Fifth grade in September.

  As soon as Wes comes home in the early evening he turns on local TV news, then again at eleven more news, Hannah keeps away, out of earshot in another room or in bed early steeling herself for a profane outcry of Wes’s from downstairs which would signal that the body of the missing boy has been found.

  Waking from a gnarled sleep to hear muted voices, discovering Wes gone from the bed, downstairs in his office listening to a radio, volume low.

  Outside the windows, darkness. Not the dark that precedes dawn but a pitch-dark. Hannah is astonished, it’s three-forty.

  Not like Wes, to care so much for “news.” To care so much for the lives of strangers.

  He is afraid, too. Babysitter, so close.

  And—For the first time, Babysitter has taken one of ours.

  Upstairs in their bedroom before returning to bed Wes lifts a hand to claim Hannah’s attention: “Hannah.”

  “Yes?”

  “See here.”

  Gravely Wes removes a key from the drawer of his bedside table, lifting the key so that Hannah can see it clearly, leading her then to the mahogany cabinet against a wall of the bedroom where he unlocks one of the cabinet doors and removes the gun, which Hannah hasn’t seen since Wes purchased it some months ago.

  This time Hannah is more attentive to what Wes has to show her: a Smith & Wesson revolver, .44 Magnum. Blue-black finish, short barrel. Always kept loaded, safety lock on. Wes demonstrates how the gun is held in the hand, how the safety lock is switched off.