Prologue - Baltimore Fishbowl



Prologue

Dear Officer Price,

It is very late. Here goes: A little girl may be in danger.

I’m not sure how, so I am going to watch her as carefully as I can.

Scarlet is her name and she belongs to the man downstairs.

With gratitude,

Rose Reed

The Mantra

I took it hard when my cat killed the gray bird.

The gray bird’s gray boyfriend cried and yelled in a tree overhead. The O of his mouth stretched painfully. He flew to another tree and another searching with his little pecan-shaped head for the female, but his voice grew softer because he was starting to know she wouldn’t be back.

All day I thought about this. Not thought about it. I pictured it as a cool corridor when you have nowhere to go and visiting hours have ended. You know that’s how the guy bird felt. I’m twenty-three but I cried on my bed, over the bird.

I have always felt too much for birds and stray cats, even for the skinny gray fox who hunts cats and birds late at night in my neighborhood—he doesn’t know what else to do.

I hope he found her body yesterday under the berry bush.

My mother Karen always said, “There’s a lot of sad things in Birdland, Rose. Birds steal nests from each other and kick the eggs to the ground. They abandon their own babies if we humans get close. They’re awful. They’re no better than the rest of us.”

Once she said, “You’d feed every sickly one-eyed cat in creation if you had the chance.” Then more quietly, “There are worse ways to be.”

Mom died one week ago today. I miss her voice most of all.

My mother’s neon sign still hangs in the window of our living room flashing the words “Free Psychic Reading with Every Haircut,” though she is gone. I guess it’s false advertising to turn it on, at this point, but I’ve already flipped the switch out of habit. The pink light’s dancing—she loved that sign.

Mom was the one who provided the psychic reading; from me a client gets a haircut and, if need be, a mustache wax. I know a trick to make it almost painless. Mom had her tricks, too.

A large wooden sign affixed to the roof hangs above the neon. It reads “Truth or Beauty” and is decorated with red and yellow roses hand-painted by my stepfather Ed. Soon enough this sign should come down, too—maybe I’ll tip the man who rents the basement ten bucks to climb a ladder and remove it.

It was supposed to say “Truth and Beauty,” a clever name for our one-two-punch business, Mom’s psychic consultation in the red-walled parlor and my hairstyling performed in the spacious yellow kitchen, but Ed made a typo. The roses looked so great we hung it anyway and laughed later—saying maybe you can’t have both in life, the beauty and the truth.

Each of us is a complex mix of the good and bad done to us by others, the wounds and glories meted out, and the irreversible gifts and curses implanted in us by God—this my mother taught me. I believe, if we’re honest, we come to our hairdresser or our psychic hoping to hear some encouraging news and be seen mostly for who we are, absolved, baptized and blown-dry—in the same session.

Only the psychic’s advice is lasting.

I wouldn’t want to be psychic again, even now with Mom gone to her reward. The whole bargain’s too confusing, but I’ll say this, it can feel meaningful, to look into someone’s eyes and believe that they see your deepest hurt and hope as well, hope shimmering someplace inside even you’ve forgot.

Keep coming to me for hairdos and I’ll give you a fun fix every time, leaving you to face your frizzy old self the next day in the bathroom mirror. Eventually, if you returned for psychic readings, Mom was going to talk turkey to you, to take you behind her satin-and-sequin room divider and take you apart, tell you who you were in her eyes, in God’s, beneath your hair, beneath your blood and bones, and it wouldn’t be completely pretty, it would be difficult and real. You’d come to remember how you got hurt but also how you did the hurting. The process led to abundant lasting change, and less pain for evermore.

Keeping her sign burning feels like keeping a candle for Mom who’s physically gone. Her cigarettes’ smell still hangs on the air, her words on my mind. Her light seems to promise her work’s not done yet, which is what she believed; we never finish what we’re meant to before we have to die.

•

It’s a Tuesday, my first morning open for business since Mom died in my arms watching Letterman last week, and I’m already brushing out the silky long hair of our neighbor across the street, Mrs. Sanchez. No doubt Mrs. Sanchez has come to call out of pity—she was one of Mom’s most faithful clients—but as she breezed inside my kitchen and took a seat in the salon chair a few minutes ago, she claimed she was sick to death of the maintenance involved in keeping long hair.

“I’m a mom, Rose,” she said. “Mom to tres niños.”

“How short?” I ask her. We’re studying her petite round face in my salon mirror.

I sense she’s aiming for Audrey Hepburn or Michelle Williams.

“Pixie,” Mrs. Sanchez says, her accent causing the word to sound like picksy.

Extra short won’t be right, though. Mrs. Sanchez has too brief a face to carry it off and a low hairline—she needs her hair to build a degree of height. I’ll break it to her after the shampoo.

As she sits in my hair chair and I make her scalp smell like blueberries, we don’t discuss Mom, not yet. We don’t say her name once, though Mrs. Sanchez wailed at Mom’s funeral, without an ounce of self-consciousness, to protest the loss of a person who made her feel unique, the person who’d cleared her flapping bats of self-doubt. Instead we talk about the early winter weather, the snow predicted for tonight when we haven’t had snow in this part of Texas in ages; we talk about Mrs. Sanchez’s daughter, Evangeline, who’s addicted to roller-skating, and we talk about me, what I’ve been up to, feeding stray cats, watching “Designing Women” reruns, reading up on how to wrap nails, which could be a lucrative addition to my business. But in truth, I haven’t been studying nails: I’ve spent every day and night since Mom died in and out of tearful panic, replaying our final conversation, and yanking out my own brown hair.

Mom did not believe in reading family members—too much intimacy breeds too much self-interest and potential confusion—but the evening she died, after she asked me to style her favorite hospice wig so that she could be buried in it, she said she wanted to give me a psychic reading.

She hadn’t offered me such guidance in a decade or more, and I hadn’t asked.

“Okay,” I whispered, as Mom’s thin hands gripped my plump ones.

During her last hour, Mom told me, “You’re a good person when you do hair.” Always start a reading with some insightful flattery. She also handed me an envelope with a note inside bearing one sentence penned in red ink, an abstract mantra—like the mystical riddles she gave repeat visitors, in my case: “Help the man downstairs.”

“Michael Hresko? The guy who rents our basement? Help him how, free rent, blowjob, getaway car? Where would I possibly begin?” I wanted to ask. “Oh, and why?” Michael, despite being young and handsome, has got an assortment of troubles—he’s a recovering alcoholic with debt, raising his kid on his own.

But you didn’t question Mom’s mantras; besides she was beyond weak.

I tried to appear calm, but my mother sensed my distress and invited me to lie down beside her. She held me tightly as she did when I was a child. And as we watched Julia Roberts take the seat beside David Letterman, crossing her bare legs that shimmered like jewelry, my mother spoke against my ear, her once booming voice turned scratchy.

“Use your gift.” Or I’m fairly sure that’s what she said.

“Gift?” I asked her, but she’d closed her eyes so peacefully.

I know this sounds strange, but part of me wonders if she didn’t say, “Use your guilt.”

“Which gift?” I hear myself asking myself aloud as I check the water temp for Mrs. Sanchez’ shampoo.

“’Kay?” Mrs. Sanchez asks.

“I’m okay,” I tell her.

“No, no, qué, you say something, Rose?”

“No, ma’am, I didn’t say anything.”

•

My name is Rose Ellen Reed. I am twenty-three, five-foot-two, one-hundred-and-fifteen pounds, wavy brown hair to my waist that I gave up cutting after Mom’s cancer came back this last time and I left college voluntarily to serve as her nurse, and a pronounced birthmark on my cheek, shaped like a smeared heart, which I’ve gotten adept at concealing. I am a Texas native—unexceptional except for my ability to style hair and write an A paper. I took patient pride in my schoolwork; I always titled my papers.

I live in Hendricks, Texas, population fifty thousand some odd people. We’re a speck between San Antonio and Austin, a pickle chip in the jumbo sandwich that is southwest Texas—a fine place for a traveler to buy gasoline.

In Hendricks, or Hickricks, as Mom was known to call her native town, one side of the city has a little more money and luck, like plenty of places. Mission Highway divides us: the have-lots from the want-mores. It also links us—Mom used to say winkingly, “We are all connected by a single Mission.”

If you were stuck living in Hendricks like me, any time you were bored, you’d walk Mission. There you can buy a pack of gum or a fajita taco or, if you’re legal, or close to it, a giant margarita. I like to visit the beauty supply store Hermosa to buy fruit-scented shampoos; I like to buy a cold glass bottle of Coke at the Mexican bakery.

If it’s an IMAX movie or a mall I crave, I have to drive down to San Antonio.

The highway is right close to our house, which is how we could afford a nice older place, this one with high ceilings and an actual basement, rarities in Texas. The more affluent folks live in ivy-strewn Spanish stucco houses across the highway, hidden behind a pair of pert hills, built by a developer to increase property value, tackier than fake boobs, Mom said.

I wasn’t born here; I was born two weeks early, on a picnic blanket by the side of the road, in an even dinkier town called Roseland, where my parents had driven to look at wildflowers.

It was Mom’s idea to rent out the basement to bring in more money; my step father Ed refurbished it ten years back and we’ve pulled in three hundred and fifty extra bucks a month ever since. Our tenant—a thirty-something recovering alcoholic, like I said, with a sad job as a hospital janitor—and his precious daughter Scarlet love their attractive basement spread. They play videogames on a flat-screen TV and eat dinner at the faux-marble kitchen island; they have a nicer setup than they’d be able to afford in a complex. Sometimes I hear them laughing; sometimes I hear them scream and shout.

Mom was often talking at me, lighting a cigarette, exhaling what she called dragon fire, every day, telling me our story in present-tense, in her mild Texas accent, her grammar broken now and again, always on purpose: “We got the best hairdos in town!” – “We are queen and princess of this here house, Rose, so let’s order up some sweet ‘n’ sour shrimp from the place that don’t know use MSG and drink rum punch out of those goblets we got at Dorette Roger’s yard sale” – “I know damn well you got a higher SAT than anybody on our side of town, so lift your eyes off the floor and smile like an asshole once in a while.”

Sometimes she told our story in third person, like a prayer: “Those gals who live in the Psychic House of Hair, God help them—they have more fun than is decent.”

When Mom talked, I listened. I watched her Faye-Dunaway-like face—I felt comforted, convinced, and frequently entertained. Same thing happened for clients.

This house is too quiet now in the daytime, just my black cat Bob Barker and me on hand. My worry gets the better of me, that’s why I’ve reopened the shop sooner than I’d planned. I ache from missing my mother, one of the greatest psychics in the state of Texas, but cutting hair is never a burden. Cutting hair brings a soundless peace.

As a child I too possessed psychic ability, more intensely when I touched a person’s hair, but during puberty I lost my gift in place of this panic that has never left me for long. Attacks come and go, chest tightness, tears, a feeling that something’s amiss, that I don’t deserve a seat at this table we’re all meant to share then it passes.

My panic was far more manageable before Mom’s cancer came back.

Heather, the psychologist who lives next door, who chatted with me, as a favor to Mom last month, said that she expects me to, quote, “jettison the anxiety” as I mature and “to emerge victoriously.” I try to think of the trouble like asthma. Gasp, clutch chest, cry, listen to Mom read TV Guide like a Shakespearean actor, and recover—except no more recitations from TV Guide.

When Mom whispered against my ear what sounded like, “Use your gift,” I’ll admit I actually wanted to scream, “What the hell are you talking about?” Gift is a noun she tended to reserve for psychic ability. Yet she’s the one who told me I’d never be psychic again.

After my stepfather Ed took his life—I’d found him suffering in the bathroom—Mom rocked me in her arms and told me, “Let it go, baby, it’s not your fault.” But I was hysterical, like someone in a movie, talking to myself, crying for hours. Whether psychic skill or wishful parenting, Mom told me firmly as a prediction that I would no longer dwell sorrowfully on this man who’d loved me as his own. She told me I’d never be psychic again, too, that I’d lost my gift from the trauma of finding Ed wounded like that, and I got the sense that the two forbidden acts went hand in hand—if I thought too hard about Ed, I might become revelatory again and know more suffering than I could bear. Somehow I banished Ed from my thoughts and meantime stopped reading people’s silent desires beyond how they wished me to style their hair.

Maybe Mom’s final advice to help Michael downstairs was just her morphine talking, I can’t be certain, but I have nothing left of her except that deathbed read. I have no family in town and I’ve lost touch with school friends. If Mom’s forecast means jack shit, well, now what? If it equals my destiny, the same exact question causes heartburn.

•

Maybe if I cut Michael’s hair he’ll ask me to dinner and we’ll start a meaningless little love affair. Maybe Mom wanted us to date, even if he does speak in clipped sentences loaded with catchphrases, like, “Rock on.” Maybe that’s a good, optimistic thing or maybe Mom actually believed, as she said when she’d had a few, that the women in our family are cursed to couple up with broken birds.

“Broken birds?” I asked, though I suspected I knew what she meant. Mom tended to date men with difficult problems.

“Translation: Losers.”

My real dad left us when I was two, but not by choice. He worked state road construction—late one night on a median repair, he got split in two by a sorority girl in her new black Mustang. That’s one kind of broken bird. We lost him; he lost us—losers.

Maybe Mom’s mantra was partway cruel based on her own lingering life regrets.

Pray God I’m just looking on the dark side. On a brighter note: When I saw Michael at Mom’s funeral over the weekend, Scarlet’s hair looked a dirty, tangled mess with broken ends to boot—hair in need of care. I mindlessly brushed it out with my fingers as she ate a piece of sheet cake.

“Could you give her another haircut sometime?” Michael asked me, perhaps unable to think of anything else to say.

“Sure, bring her by the house the next time you see my sign come on.”

“Will do,” he said.

“Okay.”

“Great, I’ll just bring her over.”

“Yay!” Scarlet said.

We’d already run out of conversation when they walked off awkwardly.

•

Before I rinse out Mrs. Sanchez’s conditioner, I ask her, “Can I go cool?”

“Sí, por supuesto.”

Cool water rejuvenates the follicles—it’s good for your immune system, Ed taught me. He taught me everything I know about hair.

Today I see his handsome, pockmarked face so plainly it chills me head to toe. Ed’s instruction lives in my body and brain, in my hands, it’s not something I’ve had to think about. I won’t start now.

Twice now since she moved in, I have shampooed, cut, and blown-dry Scarlet’s bouncy locks; I’m struck by the shine and softness—her hair seems to indicate a promise, a destiny, or that’s how I interpret it. Kids’ hair tends to be the healthiest of all, of course, their youth and innocence working like vitamins. Scarlet’s blond hair falls in ringlets, a gold so bright it’s nearly silver. When Scarlet sat in my hair-chair, I sensed that her early story, living with her overworked dad, reads drab and difficult—I could feel her tension without any special powers. That’s why, as I trimmed her ends, I tried to encourage her to be brave, to finish her homework before dinner and never miss school. And I told her, “Draw every day no matter what,” because she draws powerfully well. When she draws a portrait, she gets everything right, including the hairdo.

•

I find hair to be an accurate indicator of spirit much of the time. When a person is healthy and happy, her hair is most likely shiny and strong.

If she has fried it too often with the dryer, or dyed it too often with the box, if she hasn’t known when to stop, she needs a well-meaning hairdresser to say, “Enough, we’ll color again in a month, not now.”

I find hair to be an innocent aspect of the overall soul of the person who possesses it, a plant-like element that reacts to love and hate accordingly, helplessly—and keeps sprouting after death, even if chemotherapy has plucked out every strand, because it doesn’t want to give up.

I saw a crack addict outside the Elbow Room, arms covered in dim green skull tattoos, teeth in short supply, but she had just washed her short curly hair, and the broken tips were springy. Thanks to the spring, I sensed a yearning inside her, a wish that might save her life—and I wanted to smile hello though I didn’t do it.

As I touch Mrs. Sanchez’ cold hair, I find myself picturing her husband Carlos who runs a business hauling junk people no longer need, and wears his black hair slicked back with some kind of oil. I think he’s going to like her hair—I hope so—but somehow I sense that her girl Evangeline’s going to say it looks gross. One word: “Gross.” They’ve been arguing more recently, mother and daughter. This hunch plagues me.

I remind myself not to think on Ed anymore. I tell myself I’m being ridiculous! Same moment I smell Mom’s cigarette as if she just lit up.

I ask Mrs. Sanchez if she smells it too. She shakes her head, her eyes sad.

“You always smell a cigarette in your house.”

“Let’s do a bob,” I tell her, changing the subject. “It’ll look amazing on you.”

“Audrey Hepburn!” she sings.

“Bob,” I tell her. “Bob?”

“Okay, okay,” she says.

As I’m chopping her hair, Mrs. Sanchez tells me that she and Evangeline have been bickering rather viciously this month, and my stomach drops.

“She weighs sixty-five pounds and wants to wear mascara y eyeliner…to la escuela—I’m like, ‘You are hilarious—pero no way!’”

I remind myself that most preteen girls argue with their mothers. It’s not psychic to anticipate life’s business as usual. If I concentrate on her hair alone, I’ll relax.

Mrs. Sanchez’ silky hair is healthy and strong but also fine, and my scissors clip away long strands without real effort. The scissors snap and I move my hands faster.

“Girls become women,” Mrs. Sanchez says as I work. “It’s not that easy.”

“It’s not.”

“But Evangeline’s such her daddy’s girl—she no like me no more.”

Her two words daddy’s girl bug me, I’m not sure why. I’m moving my fingers fast through her damp hair, scrubbing away the broken pieces. Mrs. Sanchez can see I’ve eliminated her length and sculpted a slightly layered bob-shape, which flatters her neck.

“Evangeline loves you a lot,” I find myself saying, like I’m the psychic in the house. “Even if she doesn’t say nice a single nice thing about your haircut.”

“This length’s good,” Mrs. Sanchez says, checking her new look in my wide salon mirror, smiling radiantly, her crooked teeth on unapologetic display. Without Mom, she’d never admire herself with such abandon. But Mom gave her a psychic mantra as cockamamie sounding as mine to help Michael downstairs.

“Spend it all,” Mom told her, as I eavesdropped on their conversation. “Spend it all, every penny.”

•

Before Mom sat for an important appointment, she tied a silk scarf around her neck and adorned her wrists in dozens of slender silver bangles; she dotted her fat lips in red and lined her eyes in emerald strokes; she cinched her waist with a slim leather belt, which made her middle appear delicate and her hips pear-ripe—she meant to impress her visitors but not to dress any part other than that of a beautiful woman, which she was.

Mom gave those clients who returned to her parlor more than twice the trademark Miracle Mantra, which she promised sealed the client in a Bargain with God. Mom didn’t like the church because she felt looked down on there, but she liked the idea she held the same power as any priest or pastor any day. She would eventually provide a miraculous Bat Clearing, if the client had the stamina to face her own missteps.

“You are too rough with your sweet self,” Mom told Mrs. Sanchez at first, because she noticed that Mrs. Sanchez chewed her nails to the quick and nibbled raw the skin at the tip of each pinky. Nine out of ten smiles Mrs. Sanchez smiled too tightly, with closed lips; only one in ten appeared relaxed, spread wide, revealing her radiantly imperfect expression. The mantra came to her later, in a flash: “Spend it all.”

The next month Mom gave practical information: “Stop chewing your fingers this instant,” she told her. “Your husband Carlos loves you so—he’s not leaving. He may be more physically attractive, by conventional standards, but he knows you possess better wisdom, better skill—the way you cook enchiladas with twice the cheese the recipe calls for, the man goes weak-kneed. Olivia, he finds you so lovely. Smile your mischievous smile for him—the one that doesn’t apologize for its quirk.”

From the kitchen, I eavesdropped, as I often did, tucked inside the sunny alcove where I cut hair. During the next couple of sessions, Mom invited Mrs. Sanchez to sit behind her iridescent curtain in a low wooden chair intended for a child.

Behind the curtain, holding Mom’s hands in her own, Mrs. Sanchez recalled and recited her father’s cruel departure long ago, when she was three, during which he hurled insults at her mom and her. His final words, “Adios to nada y nada.” Her flapping bats told her she was nothing; Mom asked Mrs. Sanchez if she believed that.

“Are you nothing?”

“No.”

“I don’t believe you,” Mom whispered.

“Maybe I am nothing,” Mrs. Sanchez said, bursting into tears.

Then Mom waited a good, grueling twenty minutes while Mrs. Sanchez trembled, feeling paranoid, and considered her yesterday. My mother relished this dark hour most, surely because it led to light. It was during this hour Mom helped you uncover your bad hurt and your ensuing bad reaction, the “violence” you’d committed in the world.

“Are your hands healing?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t call me ma’am. Call me Karen. I’ve decided you really are something.”

“My hands are better now, look—and I don’t think I nothing.”

“Your father taught you poverty, but your own spirit teaches you inheritance,” Mom whispered. “Don’t expect the former if you want to welcome the latter, my friend.”

“Okay--”

“What can you give Carlos that you’ve been cruelly withholding?”

“He eats like a hog.”

“But what does he dream of?”

“More babies.”

“Have them.”

“Carlos says it’s my decision.”

“Tell him you’re having more babies—you want them as much as he does, I feel that.”

“I love little babies…we cannot afford.”

“Show Carlos you love him,” Mom said, in a whisper. “You’ve been...and I’m sorry to tell you this…but you’ve been trying to make Carlos feel like nada, and it’s working. Tell him you love his face, his heart, his cock. Stop with the pill. Love yourself, by having those babies, first in your mind’s eye.”

Bottom line: Mom helped our neighbor become the most generous person she could be, with herself, with her husband, with others, mostly by telling her that she could be, that she would be. Almost every night to follow, we smelled the most wonderful cooking smells drift from her kitchen, or from the grill, and we watched her daughter dance circles in the yard and watched Mrs. Sanchez welcome two more babies in three years. Carlos expanded his junk business. Now he sang lovely songs as he worked.

“Read me, too! Clear my bats,” I wanted to ask, but my own fear stopped me.

Bats—named after the evening Mom and I witnessed thousands of the fanged creatures take their twilight flight from beneath Congress Bridge in Austin—equal a deep fear or regret that’s difficult for you to define for a reason.

“Take me home!” I cried that night long ago. In the car, all I wanted was for her to turn around and take us back to the bridge, but by then the bats had gone into hiding.

•

When Mrs. Sanchez grins her exuberant grin for me and I get a look at her crooked front teeth that form the adorable X, I feel lost in care with her momentarily, as I could in childhood when I began receiving simple intuitive impulses. I smile easily, too. As I fluff her bangs with my fingers, I think I can sense that her husband’s going to bite her neck tonight in bed as he did when they were courting.

It scares me to think I see again. I tell myself, “Get a grip.”

Mrs. Sanchez kisses my cheek. She hugs me.

“When you smile, you like Mama.”

My mother was far prettier, but smiling we resembled each other.

I follow Mrs. Sanchez across the street to her door to retrieve the Tupperware bowl of pollo con arroz soup she wants me to eat for dinner. The cloudy sky looks like the rump of a fat gray goose. Maybe it will snow. As we’re standing here saying our goodbyes Evangeline skates up the walk, her hefty backpack strapped to her shoulders.

“We got out early because of the weather warning!” she tells me.

“Check out your mom’s haircut,” I say.

Stepping past us on her wheels, she steals a quick look and mutters, “Gross,” before clomping inside. Her word choice sets my heart knocking.

“Bye-bye, sweetheart,” Mrs. Sanchez tells me, rolling her eyes at Evangeline.

“What’s wrong? Don’t worry about Angie—I love my hair! You have a gift.”

As I trudge home, I pray and say to the sky that the gift Mom intended me to make good use of is my gift for hair. But the heavy clouding means I may not get any more business today, and the gray weather makes me fear heavier things lie in wait. I recall the last time it snowed in Hendricks a decade ago, how Ed drove me home from school and we marveled at the flakes hitting the windshield and gasped together as his station wagon skated the road. Gives me a jagged pain in my throat.

Enough. Michael’s yellow truck has just pulled up in front of the house with Scarlet no doubt in the passenger seat—he is singing with the radio, harmless enough. I’ll help the man downstairs right this minute using my scissors and be done with it. And I won’t panic again. I won’t pull my hair out. I won’t think on Ed. Starting right now.

•

As I cross the street to greet my man downstairs, shivering, snow begins to fall like popcorn. The bold red tree in our yard that Mom adored collected white blossoms. I’m searching the passenger side of Michael’s truck, but not spying Scarlet. I find myself freakishly convinced that he’s going to spring from the cab of his truck and take me by the shoulders, beg me to help him locate his child. Disturbing thoughts, my new specialty.

And before I can stop myself, I’m already thinking Ed thoughts, recalling how, the day after he took his life in our blue and pink half-bath down in the basement, a clump of my hair fell out and clung to my pillowcase. My mother scrubbed Ed’s blood from the pale blue walls of the bathroom that she’d sponge-painted with tiny seashell shapes, then urged me to put on my coat because she wanted to run errands. On the way to Kroger, Mom said, “Rose, don’t you let these events live with you; banish them from your house.” She took my hand in hers and continued: “Will yourself not to be psychic, baby, that’s for the best—Rose ain’t no freakin’ psychic, not after today—she’s just a typical happy-go-lucky girl, you hear me, God above?” I’ve not recalled the scene so specifically until today. The immediacy of it chills me deeper than the freezing weather.

The way Mom spoke then, with tears on her face, and the way she gripped my hand as we sat at the red light, made me want to believe her. I prayed she was right. Whether God made it happen or Mom, no more psychic messages reached me. She gripped my hand with the same urgency just before she passed, and with the same urgency, hasn’t she perhaps unlocked the cure that kept me calm enough to function?

When Michael opens the door of his truck, even if I ask him straight up in person, “How are you? Everything okay, really okay?” he’s just going to say, “It’s all good, Rose…how are you?” and in that case, maybe I’m going to have to remember all of Ed. Ed’s footsteps through our house, each of them, if I want to see the worst that needs tending. Could this be? Or said another way: the worst that can still be prevented.

But without Mom here to tell it to, how will I ever reach the pleasant end?

Now Scarlet pops her curly blond mop into view and waves at me from behind the glass. But when she opens her door, she calls merrily, “Rose, come quick!”

I’m gone racing to check on her and attempt to appear relaxed and prepared.

The Man

“Rose, guess what!” Scarlet calls from the passenger seat. She disappears from view again to retrieve something at her feet.

“What’s up?” Michael asks me, opening his door, avoiding eye contact. He hasn’t seen me since Mom’s funeral.

I’m sure he doesn’t actually want me to answer the question he posed, but I find myself babbling a response just the same.

“I’m back in business today in case you’d like me to cut Scarlet’s hair.”

But he’s collecting his empty coffee mug from the seat and doesn’t reply.

“What’s up with you?” I ask—returning his line with the same, a confirmation all is well—making a mental note of his turquoise scrubs, speckled with bleach and bloodstains, his red and black patent leather high-tops loose at the ankle in an I-may-be-white-but-I-listen-to-rap-music way. “Can you believe it’s sort of snowing?”

“It’s all good,” Michael tells me. That’s the way he always talks, every sentence seemingly cribbed from a chat room—every new sentiment vying to be the conversation’s killer.

Scarlet hops down from the truck hauling a poster board in her fat arms, a painting of a yellow rose, with thorns as sharp looking as the real thing, a first-place ribbon stuck to the top.

“I won the contest!” she tells me.

“They painted the state flower—she did the best one, according to the school,” Michael says, his cheeks flushing pride or embarrassment, not sure. I notice again how boyishly handsome Michael is, his nose sculpted to lift at the tip like Scarlet’s, his blond hair a shade darker than hers, curls in ringlets down his neck, longer probably than the hospital would prefer, a trim physique because he doesn’t drink a drop of beer.

“We had a show in the library,” Scarlet says. “Now I get to take it home—I’m giving it to you.”

She takes the soup from my hands and gives me the poster board—Mom and I have covered our fridge in her artwork. Both Scarlet and Michael wait for me to react. This has happened before; it’s hard for him to brag on her, I get that, so I’m called upon to do it.

“You are so talented, Scar,” I tell her. Michael looks away, excusing himself from the rave fest. “Thank you for this amazing painting, sweetie.”

Scarlet nods and scratches her soft tummy—her sweatshirt reads, “I’m a Very Important Person at Davy Crockett Elementary.”

“I wish your mom could see it,” she whispers; her eyes convey such empathy—Mom once said, offhandedly, she thought Scarlet might possess minor psychic ability.

Michael puts his hands on her shoulders to shut her down.

“Me, too.”

“Okay, I haven’t had lunch,” he interjects. “Let’s fix some grub, baby.”

We all make our way to the porch.

“How can I help this man, who uses the word grub?” I ask the chalk-drawn moon.

“Wait, can she cut my hair, Daddy?” Scarlet speaks to him in her baby voice.

“I’d be glad--”

But Michael has already stepped inside his screen door. I look at him through the crosshatch pattern that reminds me of the way Scarlet shades her drawings to indicate night. His eyes look sleepy: I picture him reclining dozily in his Lazy Boy to a repeat viewing of the chestnut flick, Ghostbusters, the theme song of which I’ve heard these two sing at odd hours.

“Another time for hair,” he says. “I’m due back at the hospital.”

“In this cold?” I ask. Glad I was off about the chair and the TV.

“It’s all good.”

I wait, willing him to say something more.

“I was sort of hoping it would snow,” he adds.

“Can’t she cut my hair?” Scarlet asks again, in a baby voice, as Michael instructs her inside with his eyes.

“Not now, Scar—you’ve got homework; she’s got better things to do.”

I’m thinking: “No, I don’t.”

“I’d be happy to cut her hair whenever, just text me.”

“Will do,” he says, holding eye contact with me, briefly, but then he’s already tugging Scarlet’s arm inside the stairwell that descends to their tiny but tidy apartment.

It’s now I glimpse his next quotidian moves with real confidence in the images: Michael opening a can of beef chili; Michael in a rush to get back to work, wiping his daughter’s nose with his own sweatshirt sleeve; Michael leaving the pot to soak in the sink, because the meat burned.

When I step inside my door, my cat Bob Barker greets me, rubbing my leg. He vibrates electrically and I scoop him up. I tell myself my imagination is working overtime, I tell myself burned chili is not much of a revelation, even if I’m right. But when Scarlet asks through the walls, “What are we having?” And Michael says, “Chili and cheese dogs,” I feel my heart gallop. When I smell what has to be chili burning on Michael’s stovetop, and I hear the smoke alarm shriek, I wish to God I had some customer’s hair to cut.

Michael to Scarlet: “Who you gonna call?”

“Ghostbusters!” says she.

But there’s no chance I’ll get more business now that we’ve seen a few flakes. It’s our first freezing weather in ten years—Texans will react like the stuff’s nuclear acid.

Crap. I try to sit up straight in Mom’s soft, saggy armchair in her bedroom and eat Mrs. Sanchez’s delicious soup, Bob snoozing at my side. Soon enough I set the bowl on the floor and let Bob go for it; I slide deeper into this ancient chair, fingers rubbing the loose cotton padding of the seat, like flabby flesh beneath the old upholstery.

Mom’s pink neon light still burns; I close my eyes and see another electric pink, the pink of Ed’s hair in the sunlight.

Panic arrives like swarming bats, and I have the sense, not that something sadly abstract is amiss, but that something horrible, something concrete and criminal, already happened under my watch, and that something equally violent is about to happen afresh to one of us inside this house, something I ought to prevent. A vision of burned chili, that’s a party trick, but do I have the strength to see the danger before it strikes?

Bob comes back to me sorry like a lover, purring, kneading my thighs with his paws, reminding me I’m not exactly all alone. Even though I’m crying, I think to turn on the TV on Mom’s bureau, maybe find a sitcom on Nick at Nite or silly infomercial. But wouldn’t you know, I tap into the local news and, before I can change the channel, it turns out a little boy from San Marcos, with short dry brittle hair the color of corn, has gone missing—in my tearful panic, I take it personally, read it as an impossible sign; I cut off the set and give myself Bob deep, pathetic hug. He nips me I do it so hard.

Ed’s face looms in my mind’s eye, as often happens when I freak out, before I can banish the image—when I try to pray to God, it’s as though he is Ed this afternoon, hanging out in the sky, with arms crossed, his flannel shirt a mix of grays and blues: “Please watch over me, sir. Please take care of Mom, if you see her. Please come into my thoughts if that’s what needs to happen. Please help that kid, Winston, if that’s something you’re authorized to do. Hear me as you used to.”

Bob begins to suckle my earlobe, as I cradle his warmth, the nursing an endearing quirk leftover from his kitten phase, something I encourage. My head goes radiantly clear, and I’m watching a little memory movie from behind my eyes of the day my stepfather first came to our door. Today it’s not going to hurt me but help us all.

The Medicine

Back then Ed delivered prescriptions for a pharmacy and came bringing Mom a fix for her nasal infection and a refill on her sleeping pills, late one Saturday afternoon in the fall. He honked his white Impala wagon to announce his arrival, something he didn’t normally do but he felt inspired.

After answering the door in her pink nightgown Mom tugged Ed inside the room with red walls, promising a free psychic reading for his thoughtful house call. “Don’t look at my swoll’ nose,” she said. “I’m much prettier than this—I can be magnificent.” Ed said he believed that. Then Mom located me at my desk, blindfolded me with a sock, and walked me into the living room. Before she yanked away the argyle, she had me to touch Ed’s craggy face and then his clean, soft ponytail, but of course I had no clue how to identify the stranger.

“He’s here, baby,” Mom said, removing my blindfold. “The motorcycle man.”

I didn’t follow. But Lord, Mom meant that Ed resembled this obscure actor we’d seen in an awful movie from the 70s called Freedom Highway about a bank president who robs his own bank and takes off on a cross-country tour of self-discovery, yes, on a motorcycle, white. In the film, you’re not surprised he leaves the bank. His long, strong build seems better suited to the open road than to a buttoned-up routine—his Jeff-Bridges-like ennui, his Dennis-Hopper-y disdain. “I want a man like that,” Mom announced and made a smart-aleck sign of the cross.

“He looks like him, don’t he?” Mom said.

I liked Ed right away because he saw me, where other adults saw only their kind.

As our eyes met, Ed’s and mine, he brushed my hair from my eyes, though we were strangers, and we experienced a see-through, Mom’s term for a moment when you make eye contact with another person and each absorb so much energy, you both know what the person is going through, if only for a flash. Not only that, you care. The see-through usually occurs between two people who happen to be feeling a lot—for separate, personal reasons. Because the see-through is very intimate, you look away quickly.

Seeing through can happen at the grocery, between you and the cashier with osteoporosis. You want her life to work out because she wears a heart-shaped button bearing a photo of her goofy grandsons, and because she looked at you and invited you.

If two people have a see-through at the supermarket, they’ll likely never find each other again. But if you have a see-through with someone you know, well, you’re opening the door to a potentially high level of communication, if you have the guts to face it.

My mother didn’t attempt a see-through with Ed, not then. She wanted to be blind and to invite Ed to hold her, adore her, hold her some more, and rock our world. She knew that her cancer, the cancer that week overlooked by her gynecologist, grew silently, slowly, deep inside her breast. This wasn’t psychic knowing exactly. As the doctor kneaded her breast, Mom felt a dizzying vibration, a terrible new exhilaration, she said. The lump she found in the shower that night amounted to the size of a cherry pit. She asked me to feel it, too, and wish it away, which I closed my eyes and did. Then she whispered in my ear, as I cried, that we were not to acknowledge the pit’s presence or allow it dominion over our world. We were not to invite doom. She bought a twenty-five-cent booklet in the checkout line at Kroger called Think Yourself Well. And she told me to love her extra powerfully for the next several months. She would let herself be loved by the next-in-line man as well—wherever he was—and the cherry pit, according to her mind-over-matter strategy, would disintegrate, disappear.

“Are you sure?” I asked then corrected myself. “You’re sure.”

I prayed that my breasts, which were beginning to flower almost imperceptibly, would take their sweet time, take years and years to bloom, and never kill me.

So, Ed did look something like the buff character in the 70s movie, plus a couple of decades. Of course, Mom felt sure he was not the same man—it would have been a shocker if this gritty guy in a crappy station wagon had appeared in any kind of movie, even a completely terrible one.

“You could have been a movie star. You’re cute,” Mom told him.

Funny thing was, during our see-through, I conveyed to Ed that he ought try to be who Mom wanted him to be.

“You look dead like the man who played the lead role in, what was that picture called, Rose? Freedom Highway.”

I may have winked at dear Ed.

“Guilty,” he said—he’d seen the film, maybe even got the comparison before. “I acted in a picture once upon a time.”

This made me love him straightaway, for his soft accent and his easy ability to fib.

As he met my bashful glance, Ed for his part knew I’d been in a state of yearning. Mom and I had been talking seriously about adopting a puppy, but she’d decided it wasn’t the greatest idea with a colder winter coming and her business hopping till eight or nine.

Ed even said to me, “I got myself a doggie, beautiful. You like dogs?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. I liked just as well that he called me beautiful.

“Why don’t you live in Hollywood?” Mom asked Ed.

“When I could live in Hendricks?” he whispered.

Then: “That part of my life was a flash in the pan,” he told Mom.

As she gave Ed the hopeful free psychic reading she gave every potential new lover, as I flopped on my stomach, eavesdropped and watched her take his large hands in hers, something changed inside the walls of my perception. I began to see people with stronger clarity. Maybe I sensed it was my turn to be the one who did.

As was her habit with a suitor, Mom meant to make Ed fall in love with her fast by giving him a rush of authentic psychic raving—she’d give a new guy a flattering taste, and later ration the psychic rumblings in a way that worked in her favor (“Walter’s going to get the third job he applies for next week, and it’s going to involve free leftovers.”)

If a date had heard how she’d work you through your secret pain and massage the worst hurt out of you, if he asked for treatment, she’d say, “Baby, you’re not ready.”

First, Mom told Ed she sensed an uncommon strength reaching out, an arm, his own, lifting him from quicksand, that’s how life had been—every chapter, Ed saving himself from himself. Most of the guys she wooed in this personal fashion (they received their own spin, of course, like, “You were meant to be a huge country music star.”) would listen to her flattering feedback and go, “Damn,” or, “That’s about right.” Melted by her praise. Ed didn’t blink. Ed’s sentence carried strange weight. He remained blank—chewed his lip mechanically and squinted, like waiting for the next random card to complete his hand. Mom started to doubt herself; she faltered—I saw it.

“You believe in psychics?” Mom asked him coyly. “Or do you fear them?”

Ed shrugged but finally shook his head politely.

“No offense,” he added, shooting her a warm grin. “I think it’s pure bull.”

Mom stopped again, shook out her dainty wrists, and gathered her strength. She didn’t like to get dark with a potential lover, but she wanted to prove her power.

“Go ahead and say what you were going to say,” Ed told her, grabbing her hands back, brushing his thumb against her knee. “Maybe you got me right.”

Mom opened her eyes, studied him, and spoke aloud to God—this time she went past flattery.

“Thank you, heavenly father. If Ed tries to kill himself, he’s going to botch it,” she whispered, looking into Ed’s eyes. “If this man, your son, strives to be his best self, he will bring happiness to many—Ed is special. If he fails, though, I’m afraid he has the capacity for harm.”

In that instant I watched Ed’s long face lose its cool and quickly regain it, like a tough guy riding a mechanical bull, determined not to let his flesh and bones reveal him.

As Ed planted a delicate kiss on my mother’s mouth, perhaps to stop her from talking, her body tensed. Something scared her. Did she catch his face flicker, too? “You’re a regular priestess, ain’t ya? I got no plans to kill myself when there are women as beautiful as you and your daughter in this world,” he said.

To my ears, these words came off worse than a line from Freedom Highway, and yet no one had ever labeled me beautiful before, twice in one night. I’d take it.

“I guess I’m off tonight,” she said, sounding half-convinced.

I’m not sure if it was a real psychic impression or my intense love for Mom, but I knew she felt conflicted. Like part of her wanted Ed to say she’d nailed his pain dead on and to weep in her arms, yet another felt relieved he denied her access to his difficult secrets. Maybe she felt, inside her hearts’ smallest heart, that if she looked any more closely just then, she wouldn’t be able to take him on nor he her. Meanwhile, I knew he’d come to our door for the worst kind of help, even at such a young age—I accepted it.

For a moment, Mom rallied, intent to regain a shred of power, and told Ed she didn’t believe he’d acted in the bad movie after all.

“I was silly, hoping you were the dream guy,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“But what if?” he asked.

“What if what?”

“What if you let me be the guy?” Ed fired back.

I could tell by her face she liked the idea.

•

The black front lawn reveals the snow has not stuck. Though it’s after 10 p.m., and Michael has to get Scarlet up and out of the house to school before 7:30, I find myself walking down my steps, exiting my door, knocking on his, and when there’s no response, flat out pounding.

“Yeah?” Michael cracks open the door, yawning—blue light flashing behind him.

I don’t know what to say, that I’ve been meditating and I’m concerned he might kill himself? What an insult, kind of like saying, “Your life’s shitty; I hope you won’t slit your wrists.”

“What’s up?” he says, reaching for blasé cheer but sounding plain cranky.

“What’s up?” I echo.

We wait. He’s looking at me like I’m crazy and maybe I am.

“Could I borrow a cup of sugar?”

“Hang on,” he tells me, yawning once more. “Come in if you want.”

I follow him down into their den that’s lit by soundless cartoon images of a dog toting a briefcase--Scarlet sleeps in their Lazy Boy, her plump form stuffed into a pair of yellow pajamas with feet. Her hair’s wet. In her arms, she cradles a drawing pad.

In the connected kitchenette, new-looking ceramic canisters line Michael’s counter, housing the flour, the sugar, both brown and white, the coffee, and the rice. Michael even keeps his spices alphabetized in a rack above the sink.

“How much?”

“How much what?”

“Sugar.”

“Oh. A cup,” I say. “Either white or brown.”

Michael manages not to roll his eyes. Measures a Pyrex cup’s worth of white and hands me the sturdy object.

“Thanks a lot—sometimes I crave cake at night.”

“Me, too,” he says finally. “Scar likes pound cake…but it’s pretty fattening.”

He’s waiting for me to say goodnight. Suddenly, I reach out and ruffle his blond hair that could use a shampoo, because as a kid I could get important clues from hair, once in a while. My touch makes him start.

“Piece of fuzz in your hair,” I tell him. “Sorry.”

“Later.”

“I’ll return the cup soon,” I say, hustling back up the steps feeling like a fool, only making myself look weirder when I say, “Oh, and don’t forget—I can cut her hair.”

“You said,” he tells me. Jogging behind me to lock the door I dart out.

Now that I’m in possession of one curving strand of this man’s hair, my cheeks red from the shame of my endeavor, I try to know more. Not sure if it’s the hair giving me this sense, but something tells me Michael’s not going to blow his brains out or cut his arms up, not with this angelic kid to care for.

His sweet kitchenette tells me he likes to cook or maybe he’s trying to like it—that he’s learning to prepare real meals for Scarlet when there’s time.

When Mom rented him the basement, Michael was going through his custody battle. She overheard him on the phone with his lawyer plotting the hearing, what to say, what to wear. Michael was drunk that day, or at least he’d had a few.

“I can smell beer on you, sir,” she said. I listened as I scrubbed the bathroom.

He almost left, but Mom grabbed his arm. Her heart went out to the most broken of birds—I guess it’s true—because she gave him an intense reading without any money changing hands, and didn’t raise the rent though she’d sworn she would next tenant.

“Sometimes God simply guides me,” she me later.

The mantra Michael received wasn’t mysterious. Mom told him to start going to AA meetings now, so he could establish a pattern for a few weeks.

“Do AA,” she said. “It looks good on paper.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And never take another drink,” Mom advised him. “Because that’s how you’re going to keep your girl and save your life.”

“My wife does hard drugs,” he told her. “She can’t kick them--”

“And she never will,” Mom told him.

“You’re not going to rent me this place, are you?” Michael asked.

“No, I’m going to rent it to you and your girl, and you’re going to stay sober.”

And then, Michael got down on his knees and hugged her around the waist like a sick sinner thanking Christ for giving him another crack at health and grace.

Mom couldn’t resist, she turned power-trippy then, speaking in easy-listening tones like a freaky priestess, “It’s going to hurt not drinking, Michael. But God likes to see us ache a little now and then, same as we enjoy seeing someone who’s had too many fair-weather days happen on tough times. Think of Christ, God’s own boy, made to die baking in the sun, his arms and legs nailed to a cross, scavenging birds plucking him to pieces. Think of Christ’s own suffering, and you’ll have some idea of God’s own weakness.”

Michael, the king of “What’s Up” actually said the words hallelujah amen. Over and over again, he spoke them, as my mother held his brow.

I add Michael’s hair to the envelope containing the note Mom took the time to pen for me even as she lay dying. I’m not my theatrical mother; I have no clue how to care for Michael when I don’t know him even a little bit, but I can’t pretend, I sense trouble coming on the cold snow-less air. Seeping through the windows. And I sense trouble having its way down below.

The Mistake

We are snow-free a day later, but it’s dang cold out. Heather Tanner, the psychologist next door, who analyzed me last year for precisely fifty minutes, crosses her legs in my hair chair.

“Your hair will hang crooked if you do that,” I say, gently tapping her knee.

She’s in her fifties and rather tightly wound—through a hole in my fence I’ve watched her sit in her folding chair. She sits there every day after she returns from Davy Crockett Elementary where she works as a guidance counselor, and makes a healthy living because she holds a Master’s in psychology, or so she bragged to Mom.

Mom said to me, “She holds it? Most people hang it on the wall, don’t they?”

Heather closes her eyes like she’s meditating on the spot, uncrosses her skinny sticks. Just over a year ago, she moved next-door, with her electric car and her sheepdog, Thor, the size of an actual sheep. Feeling vulnerable on the heels of her nasty divorce, she visited Mom twice for readings, but didn’t bother with the haircut from me. Mom offered her a freebie visit if she’d trade me a free therapy session.

“I’d be delighted to talk to her,” Heather said, friendly as all get out—in the name of preserving her karma, in the hopes of hearing some healing news from Mom. “Next time, will you…find my bats?”

But Mom was getting steadily sicker from the chemo and she wasn’t reading as deeply or generously. She was reading the surface, flattering and fooling.

“You’ve got great cheekbones, dear,” Mom said. “You’ll find love anew—get remarried.” And she threw in one specific that seemed to convince Heather slightly—“You will not sleep alone in your sleep-number bed past Christmas”—because I heard her whisper, “Interesting.” But when Mom, who resented Heather’s inherited dancer’s physique, added, “An older man with health problems who likes to snuggle might not be the end of the world,” Heather got to her feet in a huff, “Beg your pardon? Is that my mantra?”

Mom shrugged. Heather paced on her long, jaunty limbs; when she spotted Mom’s box of Marlboros, she asked if she could bum one.

“My friend, I’ll join you,” Mom said.

And together they smoked. They smoked awhile.

“Your heart’s not broke,” Mom told her out of nowhere.

“It most certainly is broken.”

“But not broke,” Mom said. “You think it’s empty. Give it time.”

Now, Mom is gone, and I’ve got nothing insightful to say to this unhappy woman. I have my hands in her fine hair, which is long to her shoulders, a mousy brown color, but here and there bright silver. My own pale face, reflected in the glass, appears less vivid in comparison to Heather’s square olive one. I feast my eyes on her natural beauty, like it’s art, note how her skin clings proudly to its scaffolding, refusing to sag, but that her frown makes her mouth appear tired of talking.

“So sorry about your mom,” she says. “That’s a bummer, darlin’.”

A bummer? I look away from the mirror.

“How old was she?”

“Fifty.”

“Christ. Three behind me—I’m so, so sorry.”

Her frail hair is soft as a baby’s, thanks to good nutrition, but thin as a baby’s, too, due to negative thoughts. Because of this, I forgive her for bringing up my mother’s death so casually, as though speaking to a child who lost a hamster.

But it still takes my face a second to recover and return to meet her blasé eyes. I remember the day we sat in her beige living room—beige sofa, beige armchair, beige wall-to-wall carpet with the vacuum marks—and I tried to tell her why I get upset.

“It’s like fear overtakes me, I guess,” I said. “I can be feeling perfectly fine, then it’s like a set of hands is around my neck, do you know what I mean? Strangling me.”

Heather looked shocked, but for-show shocked, not real.

“Whose hands?” she asked, looking out the window.

“It’s like the hands are mine,” I told her, and she faced me.

I felt her with me, like maybe she felt certain shit was her fault, too.

“What’s going to happen to me?” Heather asks today, from my hair chair, scratching her swan neck again, because if you have such a fine neck, touch it.

“Hmmm?”

She points to a hand-painted sign I made in seventh grade when we launched the joint business: “Want to know the future?”

Heather misunderstood and thinks I’m authentically psychic, too. I wonder what I might pick up from her life if I try to care.

Sleep-deprived, red-eyed and blue, I can still cut hair better than anyone on the highway, where chop shops in strip malls abound. They promise to fix homemade haircuts or they cater to salty old white ladies or sexy Hispanic women looking for extensions or sad retired men with almost no hair just halo-like fuzz. Mom got the psychic sense that Ed could style hair, like his father before him, but she didn’t predict my abilities, for hairstyling or revelation, both came as a stunning shock.

“As I cut your hair, I’ll see who you are and who you will be,” I tell Heather, faking it till I feel it. Maybe she’ll tip me extra.

“I want bangs in my next life,” Heather tells me.

She hands me a clipping from a women’s magazine, an ad featuring a woman with tight helmet hair and short humorless bangs who fights bugs with a can of spray.

“What else did you bring?” I ask, because another slip of paper has fallen to the floor.

“Oh, it’s just the other half of the ad.”

The other half of the page features a younger woman, sexy, happily snarling, her hair a radical shag of black and bleach-blond highlights, laughing coyly because she has just killed her kitchen roaches with an efficient odor-free disk.

“This could be you,” I say.

Heather’s cheeks color slightly, and I know we’re going to go for it.

“If you think so,” she says, then, “Twenty-five years ago, I wore a velvet dog collar out to bars.”

As I look into Heather’s eyes, I try to send compassionate vibes without going too deep. I want Heather to love the cut we decide upon. But the last thing I need today, after the psychic chili and embarrassing sugar incident, is to see and hear Heather’s intimate whispers or, ahem, intimate barking.

“I think you need a fresh start,” I say, about the hair. “Let’s shag it.”

“But I am a school counselor,” she says.

“We’ll skip the highlights but have fun with the layers,” I tell her, my fingertips massaging her split ends.

Heather nods slowly then quickly, and I know she’s thinking she might be able to start fresh, forget something revolting she did or he did, and see something bright gold.

Working my scissors into her wet hair, I tell myself, “Don’t get involved. Don’t see anything secret—don’t see.” And I don’t.

I finish Heather’s cut fast, invite her to put her glasses back on and have a look.

“Yikes!” she says, in a way that I know means she’s grateful for the shock. Her short hair looks like bird feathers and her neck appears twice as long.

“Here’s what I see for you, psychically what’s coming to me,” I say, to get it out of the way. Broken bits of her hair cling to my fingertips.

As I smear a little hot wax above her lip with a stick, I place my other hand on her shoulder and squeeze hard. I’m purely riffing, but she’s ready to take anything I have to sell. One thing I can say for sure is that Heather wants to get laid, without strings attached—she wants to have an outrageous orgasm, and not alone. It’s not a psychic impression, it’s coming from the pose she’s striking in the mirror—lips pursed, despite her burned pink skin where I took off the shadow of a mustache, her eyebrows arched. She needs permission to be bad.

“I’m going to loan you a red cocktail dress that belonged to my mother when she was her thinnest,” I say, and I know I’m going out on a limb here—but the vibe coming off Heather feels like joy. I picture her salsa-dancing her way toward temporary bliss.

“Wear this dress to Mamacita’s. You’ll find him there, wearing Polo.”

“Yeah, right,” she says. And then she says, “Hmmm,” considering the idea.

Finally, finally, after Heather has paid me thirty-four dollars, twenty for the cut and dry, four to wax, and ten in magnificent tip, she makes a stab at empathy. Looking me squarely in the face, she asks, “How are you doing since your mother passed away?”

I don’t buy it. I tousle her hair to suggest that punk-rock unruliness, and it’s now I decide how right Mom’s opinion: Heather feels basically numb. Has felt numb for a long time, even when she was married. She’s uninspired counseling the kids at Davy Crockett—her heart is empty, and that emptiness eats at her, creating more.

“I’m doing all right, thanks,” I say—and now I remember that Heather happens to be Scarlet’s counselor. I’ve heard them greet each other congenially by first name.

“Do you know the man downstairs?”

“I know his daughter,” she says, biting her lip as if she doesn’t want to say too much.

“Is she doing okay in school?”

Heather considers whether she should reveal anything. People usually will to me. In this way, I am my mother’s daughter.

“Confidentially? She had an accident at school last week.”

“Was she hurt?”

“Peed her pants in the cafeteria, that’s all.”

“She’s a good girl.”

“Pretty girl.”

“Very.”

“Artistic, did you know?” Heather asks but doesn’t care.

“Yeah, totally. I wonder if it’s hard to be a single dad.”

“Gotta be.”

“Why do big kids pee their pants?”

“Nerves.”

“Oh.” She adds some gloss to her lips and kisses the air, feeling fine.

“That man needs to get her a bra,” Heather says, lowering her voice. “That’s the bottom line. She’s a stout girl. She’s bulging badly, and the kids are going to keep being mean about it—they’re kids.”

“Can’t you do something?”

“You know, I sent her home with a note for him—I thought that might be simplest—but he never took action.”

“No?”

“I brought it up when I met him, and he acted really awkward.”

“Awkward how?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I’m running my mouth off…”

It’s now I make the mistake of ruffling her hair one last time, so an angle lands over her cheek, saucily, and I have the notion she encouraged her husband to leave her. Confessed to him she hated the sight of his flabby middle-aged body. She knows she deserved his abandonment, though she misses his presence in the house.

“Sometimes people fall out of love,” I tell her, without meaning to. “You let your husband know beyond a doubt that you weren’t in love any longer--”

Her I’m-pretty face morphs into her I’m-called-out face; I think she’s gotten the reading she wanted. But then the called-out face shifts into the I’m-sorry-I-came.

Shitty amateur that I am, I haven’t the foggiest what to say now.

Before I can get a grip, her I’m-prettier-than-thou face locks back in place.

“My husband left me,” she says, fluffing her hair, licking her front teeth. “That’s the bottom line here.”

My chest beats heart-attack-fast. She likes to say bottom line. Heather leaves quickly, with Mom’s dress still draped over her arm, one Ked squeaking as she stomps.

While Heather’s escaping, while my heart’s palpitating, Michael and Scarlet return home bundled in their knock-off ski jackets. The small red-leafed tree in our yard catches my eye. Honestly, I’m not certain if the danger I sense, the red flame in my brain, flashes for Heather or these two.

“Hi!” calls Scarlet.

“Hello, there,” says Heather flatly.

“Your hair looks very beautiful and sexy!” Scarlet says.

She and her dad descend their basement steps, singing a song that must have been playing on the car radio, sung from the point of view of a woman who’s determined to get what she wants, sexually.

“I’m gonna get what I—get what I—get what I want!” they both shout. If he feels comfortable singing that sexy song with her, joking about it, why won’t he take her to the mall for the training bra of her choice?

My neon sign is still burning, inviting them over, but I sense they’re planning to heat cocoa rather than come to my kitchen for a haircut. And Lord knows I can’t bring up the hairy activity a third time.

“I didn’t ask to be psychic again,” I tell the color blue through the window, apologizing to Mom for breaking her rule. The freaky falling temp only reinforces the sense of danger that I’d like to believe is wholly irrational, if only someone rational were here to tell me so. Curled in my hair chair, I remove my ponytail from its knot and hide my face in my cupped hands, building a cave where I take in the smell of Heather’s grape shampoo and that Suave ultra-hold mousse, as I wait for my bats to swoop. I pray to find an answer behind my own eyes. And then, big baby, I put on my mother’s Longhorns nightshirt on top of my clothes, hold my cold bones and let myself tune up. When Ed walks into my vision, I can’t resist his footsteps. “Ed,” I moan like a baby.

Missy

According to the new love-at-first-sight, okay-hell-let’s-shack-up routine, Ed occupied Mom’s former seat at our small kitchen table, across from me. She scrambled eggs, with potatoes and corn tortilla strips mixed in, migas—Ed had shown her how. Thirty-nine, she had let her hair grow down her back. Certain strands shone silver against the blond and brown. I’d never seen her look lovelier, but she told me she felt old when she tucked me. She said life meant to take away our gifts and we ought to fight life tooth and nail.

While Mom cooked, Ed watched me pick up my cereal spoon and bring it to my mouth. He crossed his eyes. He talked to me about school, pets, and even current events. He found me exceptional, he told Mom. He said he found me cute as a bug in a rug. I felt hungrier and food tasted better.

I’d jump from the table, pull Ed to the diamond-shape window and tell him, “Stand here. Watch, okay?” Then I’d run into the backyard in my pajamas and perform a back handspring across the grass—a boy at school had taught me—with Ed watching, clapping, seeing me, I could feel it. I loved the self I got to be around Ed.

“Your baby girl is something else,” Ed said, talking to my mother about me as though they were business partners and this topic ranked top of the agenda.

“Straight As—don’t got cause to throw her out.”

What did we know about Ed, except that he was fun loving and wanted to be part of our lives? That was enough for us. Where the past was concerned, Mom and Ed seemed to share information strictly on a need-to-know basis. He invited her to read him, in a teasing fashion, but she still wasn’t able to conjure much.

“You see anything new today, Karen?” Ed asked Mom, teasingly, trying to get a rise. “You got a handle on this overgrown boy yet?”

She knelt in front of Ed and gripped his thumbs in her small hands.

“Well, close your eyes, baby,” she told him.

Ed obeyed, but soon enough started to laugh. I giggled, too.

“No, sir, not today,” Mom said, standing abruptly, brushing herself off. “I can’t read fools, nor people who believe in nada.”

A couple of weeks into our new life with Ed, though, Mom announced she could see something, she felt pretty clear about it.

“You miss driving your truck all night long,” she said, serving us some bacon. “You miss horses. Don’t you?”

“Well, now you’re onto something,” Ed said.

“Wait, were you married before?” she asked.

“Ancient history,” he said.

Pleased by the easygoing answers, Mom turned on the kitchen radio predicting, “The next song that comes on says how much Ed loves me!”

It was a cheesy Kenny-G-type tune. Ed turned to me and blew his invisible sax.

“Do you play real saxophone too?” I asked.

“No, but I can play a fake guitar,” he said, grinning. “I’ve had real ones, but I always end up selling the damn thing. You want to play my saxophone?”

I took the invisible sax from him and mimed a solo, while Ed danced in his seat. When he picked a focal point, a person, like me, or an invisible instrument, even, he invested everything. Ed looked like he’d lived hard, skin weather-beaten, his front tooth cracked, his form a touch too thin, but his imagination had to be three times as large as that of the average grown man. And he could imitate anybody on TV, including Kermit the Frog.

“Yes, Piggy?” he’d say in a meek voice, if I hollered at him across the room.

Mom said, “He commits so hard he ought to be committed.”

No other guy had moved in with us for real, actually brought his belongings, and his dog, to stay. No guy had smelled so good—like Aqua Net hairspray, which he used to train his ponytails and braids—or brought such laughter or prepared pizza with pineapple and ham slices. No other had enjoyed having me around and certainly no other had told me inside my ear that I was a legend in the making. I looked up the word and understood that a legend was a person surrounded by miracles of her own design— suddenly that’s exactly who I wanted to be.

I wanted to take Ed from my mother, or for Ed to whisk me away in the middle of the night, but not really.

Eventually my love for Ed stretched beyond my ego. When he turned uncharacteristically quiet, while we watched “Wheel of Fortune” in the evening and Mom wrapped her round sexy legs over his double-long ones, or when we all ventured to his Baptist church every random now and again, I knew he felt troubled. I knew in the way little kids know shit about people they adore. So, I tried to see deeper psychic things about Ed. I prayed to God: “Make me see and make me a legend in my own life.”

“I love you, weirdo,” Mom said proudly, kissing his neck, accepting his tongue inside her mouth. “You work as a deliveryman, but you’re dreaming of a life on the range. I think you’d be damn good on my ranges, and they extend forever—I’ll tell you that right now. They got room for you and some babies we could create. A boy and a girl. Rose always wanted siblings. If my intuition’s right, she’s going to get them.”

Ed looked at me across the table, his face slack and easy. He winked. He gulped juice. He stuck out his tongue and I stuck out mine. Then I climbed into Ed’s lap for the first time and hugged him, felt the cloth of his old jeans. I remember I was wearing my Little Mermaid gown and how, when it rose up my thigh, Ed tugged it over my knee, protectively. I kissed his strawberry ponytail, lingering my lips on his hair. And I noticed his hands were shaking.

“I see something,” I told him, surprising myself.

His thick freckled hand on my stomach, he pushed me to get a look at my face.

My mother turned from the stove and waited to see what I might say. I’d never professed psychic ability before.

“You had a little girl, right?” I said. “But you don’t know where she is.”

Mom burned her knee on the stove rack—bitched and cursed.

Ed set me back in my seat and knelt beside me. He squeezed my upper arm too hard, but fine he didn’t mean to hurt anybody.

“You tell me what you see,” he said, without a hint of tease.

I saw a redheaded baby, big rooms of brown and green décor inherited from old people, clouds built of cigarette smoke, a young lady’s knobby wrist, a kid’s white sneakers dotted red, a table spread with a home cooked meal left uneaten, a dog, Ed’s same basset, Bernadette, not now but then, puppy-like, and still more. I saw Ed’s lovely wife. The face of his daughter, how very pretty her strawberry hair, milky skin and puckered lips. I saw myself standing in for Ed’s daughter, my hair light red like his. I saw the flat land of Texas, where they lived, the only land I’d known. His woman held my hands, to spin me; she laughed, kissed my lips. I felt happy and frightened at once. But I wanted to see Ed in a way I hadn’t before, a way that felt like God’s. Not that I would be able to articulate any of this for a time. And I had no idea how to filter these pictures or which ought to be circled in red, and believed.

“Rose, you don’t know what you’re talking about, sweetie,” Mom said, banging a frying pan in the sink. “Get ready for school now—you’re turning stupid.”

I stood in the doorway with my fists on my hips and met my mother’s eyes.

“Go, Goddamn it,” she said, tears in her eyes from the burn, her nightgown wide open to her ivory breastbone. For the first time I can remember, fear emanated from her face, making her appear older. I sensed for an instant how sick she was about to get.

I fumed but I went. And Ed’s elderly basset hound, Bernadette, the angelic farting dog I’d inherited the same day he came honking his station wagon, she came, too.

This day marked for me the moment at which my own mother began to doubt her gifts, and the moment she chose being loved over loving. And this morning also marked the beginning of my deep reading series for Ed—step right up ladies and gentlemen, watch the schoolgirl counsel the barrel-chested middle-aged man—conducted after school. Ed’s current thoughts sat like boulders on other historic thoughts. Sometimes I found that I could shift them. This day marked the start of the heaviest friendship of my life.

Missing

When I shake myself from my own movie and snap on the TV, in the name of numbing background noise, pregnant weather chick with her plastered-down brown hair says I ought to look closer at the marbled sky, which will bestow buttery flakes by midnight, when the red heart-shaped leaves will no doubt fall from the tree Mom loved most in our front yard. That tree typically keeps its romantic color till February.

It comes to me how weather chick’s going to sit down in a sec and banter with the aging anchor Marjorie about the fact that she’s going on maternity leave tomorrow.

“It’s a boy,” she says, as I already knew she would, “a football player in training.”

Okay, I’m scared shitless. Plus, the thought of Mom’s lush red tree going bare gives me the blues. In the street I hear Evangeline shriek playfully—yet the sound steals my breath. They let that little girl stay out too late. Something’s not right on our street. The leaves are already dropping. Is danger as close as the basement?

Next up, the sweet face of a little boy fills the TV screen, his school photo—several stalks of his thick, dry blond hair stand stick-straight. Red type says: “Missing: Winston King, age 10.” Poor Winston. Clearly his mother didn’t know it was photo day and left him looking sloppy—they were probably running late—and I shiver to imagine what hole he now finds himself in, what a heartbreaking mess his hair must be. Big news is they’ve found Winston’s blue backpack in a ditch near Seguin, about an hour away.

In another psychic flash I know the backpack has SpongeBob SquarePants stickers all over it—they don’t say this on TV, I just know, not that I necessarily want to.

Breathe. What did Heather say to do? Think practically. Instead, I’m practically in overdrive. One practical thing I can do is to buy Scarlet a goddamn training bra; another: stop meditating on Ed, for Christ’s sake.

If only it were so simple.

It’s dusk and I realize I haven’t eaten anything but a protein bar all day, so I slice into Mrs. Sanchez’ delicious pound cake, only I can’t taste it. Flavors are all the same since Mom left. Even eating’s not easy. Bob Barker devours everything I leave behind.

As a commercial for sugary cereal blathers—which only increases my panting anxiety—instead of picturing my hands on my neck, I picture my hands drawing. Like they are drawing on my mind.

This quirky OCD habit plagued me when I was a child, always when I felt troubled by something I didn’t know how to reason away. Once I let Ed go, I didn’t have to draw…

Now I visualize my own steady hand working a pencil over paper; I’m drawing a stick figure, a young girl, in my head, as I did in childhood. She needs help. From me. She wears a nightgown, shaped like a long bell. As it was then, it is comforting to draw the bell to house her in. She will wear frightened human eyes, brown and real, so real I will remember it’s not my hands drawing them, but my memory—and her eyes never fail to set my heart slamming again. Her eyes shift and reflect the world, sometimes my face. I never could draw anything right in real life, but when I used to imagine myself drawing this girl I felt like I was moving toward an answer—I never reached it, though. Fear halted my hand, then and now.

Cut to a sublime distraction on my screen: A handsome reporter on location in the steady wind. He could be an actor, that’s how nice looking. Christ, but I know this movie star. He is my old friend, and my very first kiss, Daniel Martinez. I heard a rumor he’d recently accepted a job back here—the story’s proven true. His trench coat and tie GQ, his five o’clock shadow cinematic, Daniel uses the thoughtful words eerie and eggplant to describe the gloomy sky on the day Winston went missing. I like that, even in my state. He’s too together to stay local for long; I am moved to turn up the volume.

“In his backpack, a change of clothes, as if the boy planned ahead,” says Daniel. “This sign could be a hopeful one. Please be on the lookout for this child. Incidentally, his backpack reveals he was a fan of SpongeBob, and I say this, not to tug at your heartstrings, but--”

Before our long-lost investigative stud can bid me adieu, static crackles and Marjorie, diehard anchor, apologizes for technical trouble.

So, I got the SpongeBob thing right, what the fuck. Am I to be one of those psychics who assist lost cops on cable TV? So, Daniel’s back around—Lord.

My mind’s eyes once again gaze upon the sketch of the girl; the dress is drawn, complete, and as usual, forms a triangular bell. Time for me to trace a circle for the head, and now, the eyes, they will simply appear: If I draw the rest, the eyes blaze awake. They are even more vivid tonight than the eyes I used to know…the eyes of the child Ed believed he’d lost forever, but they are different. Therefore, I don’t have cause to dwell on Ed.

How strange, these eyes belong to Scarlet Hresko, I’d recognize them anywhere, light eyes that promise a silvery paradise if she opts to let you in—an island cruise.

Scarlet? My hands shake noticeably. Mentally, I see them drop my imaginary pencil and clasp my own neck.

Drawing a straight line between Ed’s internal strife and Michael’s life with Scarlet is the last thing I want to do.

Right about now would be a fine moment to lose myself in haircutting.

Eerily for sure, I receive a text from Michael asking: “Will U cut Scarlet’s hair 2nite? Skool foto 2morrow. Not2mention Xmas party@skool.”

Hard wind sounds a long high note as I text back: “Sure thing. 6:30?”

He texts: “UR rilly cool!”

Rilly—really? I type: “Buy your kid a BRA!” but don’t send the message.

So I’m starting to draw that straight line now, I can’t help it. Because Mom’s drawn hers, hasn’t she? Lining me up to save a broken bird of the rare variety she and I didn’t have the foresight to save. If so, that sucks violently. If so…I could use some air.

•

Bundled in my mother’s leather jacket, I stroll into the yard with Bob to commune with nature such as it is beside exhaust-puffing, prostitute-straggling Mission Highway. You know when you lie to yourself and believe it? I tell myself I need to go buy more strawberry-and-banana shampoo, because it’s Scarlet’s favorite, like it’s urgent, though I know I’ve got one third of a big bottle left.

I just need to walk away, for now, maybe come home for the hair appointment, maybe not.

Winston is on half my mixed-up mind, the innocent wish I could locate him or assist anyone in urgent need; my pride occupies the other half. The stupid wish for a boyfriend who wears expensive ties and makes the world stand at attention, like Daniel, coupled with the fear that I don’t deserve anybody so put together, I deserve damaged goods, like Michael—and my own psychic mom knew the same.

She chose the same when she chose Ed, not to mention my dad, and others.

With the wind blowing against my form, I swear to God Mom’s cigarette smoke reaches me in an undeniable blast. I peek over Heather’s fence to see if she might be sitting back there smoking. Out of the twilight blue, here she comes now, though, wobbling down her walk in black heels and a black trench coat, Mom’s low-cut Lycra dress peeping through, a cigarette dangling from her lips, her wet hair a series of angles, with no sense of purpose. She climbs inside her hybrid car, the image of a bat stuck to the back bumper, an intended symbol of Austin, not neuroses, and off she rolls, based on my lazy advice she sit inside a dark bar and get plucked, chosen.

After Heather pulls away, I realize I gave her the wrong bar name, a more lowbrow place than I meant to recommend. “Lonely Star Lounge,” I whisper, because that’s the bar where the horny, harmless frat boys congregate. Mamacita’s, where I actually sent her, is the spot Scarlet’s bony mom Gretchen scored her drugs, before she got married and started letting her middle-class hubby do it. Mom and I would see her lingering out front, her pretty painted face like a glistening lollipop on the end of a stick.

I try to console myself: At Mamacita’s, Heather will get fucked or frankly insulted, and either way, she’s bound to feel something, right?

Bob follows me a few blocks as I walk Mission in my standard default mode. The city has hung clunky holiday bells made of shiny paper—silent and useless. We shuffle past the mildly retarded middle-aged man, Barry, who walks the road in a tight polo shirt and high-waist jeans, slurping a forty-four ounce cherry soda—his lips stained.

“I’m Barry,” he will tell you time and again. And we pass a hooker who seems ageless in a purple jacket that shines like an Easter decoration and a cowboy hat too small for her head. Something about her turns Bob off, I guess, and he ambles home.

On the side of the road near Hermosa Beauty Supplies, which has closed shop early, one squashed sneaker rests in peace.

Mom said, “In this town, the other shoe done dropped,” because in Hendricks, look down, on either side of the highway, there’s always one abandoned shoe on the sidewalk, or floating in the gutter, or on frequent occasions, a pair of dirty jeans or abandoned panties. I remember how we walked this road together, she and I, after I started getting my impulses. Mom said, “If you can love the people you see on the wrong side of Mission, you can become a great psychic, Rose, if you can love every single one.”

“I can!”

“Despite the terrible secrets they’ll tell you.”

“I can”—already I was wishing they’d love me in exchange.

She added, “Not good enough to care because you want something back--”

I said, “Do you love these people?” She goes, “I did.”

Something about this landscape we trusted, the plastic dress shoe at rest; it felt like the sign that an opposite good had to lie around the corner. God was watching out; he’d make us suffer for a while and then reward us if we were grateful for every loafer.

Walking down Mission, streetlights strangled in Christmas tinsel, I spy the familiar handsome jogger coming my way, with his superhero posture and natural bouffant hairdo, his chin so prominent it’s nearly a cartoon. He holds his fists in balls, like he’s ready to take flight. “Hello!” he used to announce as he passed. But last month, I said, “Hey there.” first, too brightly, too big, and he hasn’t greeted me since. I bet he works in Austin. I bet his wife is gorgeous and smart. Sometimes he pushes his toddler in a reclining stroller, the kid’s long curly hair blowing like dark vines. Mom used to joke, “There’s your husband!” when we saw him from the car, cracking herself up, and I remember I thought to myself how I’d never feel comfortable with a man so comfortable.

Perfect. Some gross guy at a red light honks at me now that I’m tearing up like a baby. He’s driving a green Mazda, low-built and shaped like an alligator’s mouth—looks roughly my age. I find regrettable the way he knots the end of his hair in a tight rubber band, making his petite ponytail a perfect triangle; I find regrettable his car’s burp; I do like the tattoo on his forearm—some kind of Chinese dragon.

He beckons me come to him, with two slow fingers. Next second, I spy one extremely old Reebok smashed in the road.

Maybe Michael’s my letdown of a prince who will hold up a single dead shoe, his secret confession, meant to set us both free if I can help him out. The cursed proposition makes my throat throb, especially when the handsome jogger streaks past, his meaty calves enabling him to swivel and hopscotch over my sidewalk square entirely.

Fuck it. I’ll show Mom, I’ll nab my own sorry prince: This baby-faced man marooned in his ugly car will work out fine.

Baby Face wears a dusting of facial hair, frail sideburns that remind me of pubic hair. He can’t know how bad that looks—or how other people will interpret his facial hair as a paltry guarantee he was born to drink Lone Star by the six-pack and repair refrigerators for a living. In his head, he may sport a beard; he may know that he’s capable of inventing an identity born in his mind’s eye. But it seems more likely he has started to live out the beer-slugging legend, written by watching eyes.

“You don’t have to be this guy!” I’ll tell him if I don’t chicken out.

“Yo!” he calls to me. “Let’s talk.”

While the light is still red, I cross the road between a Hispanic lady in an Oldsmobile and a guy in his growling truck, a faded yellow Chevrolet that reminds me of my house, oddly. I touch the truck’s bumper. I tell myself I could climb in the bed.

Now that I’ve crossed the road, and positioned myself on the sidewalk like a girl cliché, with one hand on my hip, I can see that Baby Face, beside the truck driver facing opposite, lacks one front tooth—his smile has grown too hopeful, a bit tense.

“How much?” he asks me.

I freeze in place, my skin scalding despite the dropping temp.

“I thought you wanted, um, directions,” I stammer.

“Baby, come closer.”

I pace backwards, the wind blow-drying my tears.

It’s now my eye catches a billboard positioned above Blockbuster featuring Daniel’s handsome face, the new investigative reporter on our scene. Daniel. He and I went to elementary and middle school together. Mom kept him afternoons. He could perform a back flip expertly. Kids were hard on Daniel, because he was delicate: shorter than everyone, thin, pretty like a little girl—and gorgeously light-stepping by nature, like a ballerina, not the straight girl-chasing boy he knew himself to be. No doubt he has grown into his graceful moves. He is still distractingly beautiful.

Daniel’s back in Hendricks after graduating with honors from Tufts, ironically—here he is hard at work, improving his little city’s sicknesses, hunting for the truth of things, or so it would seem. His eyes sparkle with purpose and self-esteem. Clearly, Mom considered him out of my league, or she could have sent me in his direction.

“Get in, for fuck’s sake,” Baby Face shouts. And I begin to jog. He pulls his alligator car through the red light and coasts close behind my behind.

The world blurs as I travel several storefronts. I am alone. The golden lights of McDonald’s smear, and I feel I could collapse, but then a sweet beep-beep car horn promises God is real. The horn’s not Baby Face, it’s a friend, this I know psychically.

I return to Daniel’s face on the sign and hear him complete his report on Winston King: “Incidentally, his backpack reveals he was a fan of SpongeBob, and I say this, not to tug at your heartstrings, but to inform you of key evidence, key evidence that you envisioned, Rose Reed! Stop being so meek and mild!”

In a reverse as irrational as my first reckless impulse, I take inspiration from the heat in my chest, tell myself what I have got is Mom’s difficult advice and Mom’s difficult gift. Her advice is not nothing, as she might say—might just be the upside-down fake-leather shoe that leads to the glass slipper, a pair of them, even, size eight narrow glass ones, if you please, or maybe it leads to some missing child, and I get to locate him.

When I spy my tenant and Scarlet watching me from his growling old truck, I say to Mom, “You got me.” I ought to have more faith in Mom and faith in this hard working fellow. As I wave dramatically hello, thank God, Baby Face zooms away.

Michael’s face asks, “What the hell is she doing?” while Scarlet beams.

The light goes green. Michael parallel parks the truck across the street and opens his door as though he’s ready to take action if Baby Face decides to haul ass backward.

“What’s up?” he says.

“I want bangs!” Scarlet calls.

Michael could use a haircut and a shave. If he knows he needs my help, maybe he’ll suddenly turn as assertive as Baby Face; maybe we can make this transaction simple and leave zero room for my doubt. He can open my door, buckle me up, and dot my cheeks with grateful kisses. Ask me, “What’s a woman like you doing out here in the dark? What’s a girl like you going to do with her life?” I’ll turn to him and say, “I can tell you have bats flapping in front of your face, and Scarlet does too, and it’s like that for me—it’s like that for everyone. We have to figure out why the bats. There’s no cause yet for terrible alarm! We should take a drive and be kind to each other along the way.”

But the questions Michael asks me are not yet at all complex.

“Are you, like, okay?” he calls. “Want a lift?”

“We’re getting Wendy’s!” Scarlet says in a baby voice. “Do you feel hungry inside?”

I nod—I climb inside the truck beside Scarlet and realize how much that I do.

•

It’s funny to notice Scarlet’s chunky little-kid tummy beneath this face like a statue. Her hair is a color I wish I could bottle and apply to every client who deserves a second chance, the color of sand on a clean beach that couldn’t exist in Texas, except in a Photoshopped travel brochure. She has a cowlick in back, adorably unruly. Her blue bed-roomy eyes shine with flecks of gold as if designed to hypnotize a suitor; her nose is a perky porcelain heart turned upside-down, like her dad’s; her eyebrows paint themselves high the way they’re supposed to. And I recall Mom’s description of Scarlet’s beauty: a fortune inherited recklessly early.

Washing her hair with strawberry-and-banana shampoo, watching the blue-pearl suds pop and disappear, I know a heavenly calm; Scarlet sighs, shows me it feels good.

I never lost the ability to intuit emotion from a client when I cut her hair. All great stylists must. When I became psychic at twelve, I knew more. Cutting Ed’s hair, for example, I knew what he liked, what made him feel alive—his haircutting, his homemade gumbo, more. Mom’s expertise ran deeper, in that she could detect your fear, but I felt lucky to be able to identify the thing inside that glowed. Lost in deep care with a person, face to face, I knew more. Occasionally, I had a knack for sensing danger.

Trimming Scarlet, listening to her hum a fast tune all her own, I’m reading tension in her stiff back, at war with the pleasure she feels from my touch. The tightness in her form begins to lift as I chop her locks with my scissors.

“I have bangs!” she notes, relaxing her shoulders.

“How’s school?”

She shrugs. Bob’s slinks against my leg, and something comes to me: Scarlet’s small breasts ache beneath her t-shirt, and when she touches her little palms against them through the smock, I tell myself I’m right. Here lies the physical tension perhaps. But her beautiful grin in the mirror promises separate joy.

“Rose, I’m in love!” she tells me.

I picture a little boy with a bowl haircut who asks her to show him one breast, in exchange for his lunch money; each day he pesters her. I believe this kid exists; I believe, too, that Scarlet finally agreed to accept that lunch money. But he’s not the one she loves.

Meanwhile, rubbing her temples, I think I know that someone else at school is giving her a hard time about the awkward additions, a girl from her grade, who says mean things, something like, “Yuck—you’re popping out.” This girl calls Scarlet Piglet.

By the time I’ve read this information, which could be right, could be my overactive imagination, obviously, based on how my own boobs were received, the haircut’s done. I’ve moved on to blow-drying, working the round brush in my left hand, the hand I write with, while with my right, gunning the diffuser to flatten the cowlicks.

“Tomorrow morning, my hair’s going to be curly again,” she says, frowning. “It’s picture day.”

“I’ll let you borrow the flattening iron.”

“I won’t get it right.”

“Want me to meet you early and run the iron once through?”

Scarlet claps hands beneath her apron, but winces just a little.

“Will the boy you’re in love with like your hair tomorrow?” I ask.

“He doesn’t go to my school.”

I get an image now: a male lurking in shadows, boy, young man, old man, I don’t know, reaching to embrace her. The shadows are disconcerting. My chest throbs.

Just now, we hear Michael clop up the porch steps, home from his grocery run, and insert his key in the door to the basement. “Daddy!” I know he bought the Kleenex they were out of. And I assume, but don’t know, that he is the man I saw, on the dark land, in my mind—a harmless father delivering his family’s groceries, or let us hope.

Then, “Ouch, I hurt,” Scarlet says, palming her breasts.

“If you get a bra, you’ll be more comfortable.”

“Yeah, I need one of them,” she says.

“Bras can be embarrassing for men, that’s how it goes. Maybe you and I will buy one together, at the mall. We could do the food court, maybe Saturday?”

“Yes, that rocks!”

After the haircut—Scarlet grinning with glee, her hair silky smooth and temporarily cowlick-free—I invite my young client to sit and draw at the kitchen table in the breakfast nook where Mom and I were accustomed to eating our eggs before the workday began.

Scarlet hands me a nub of red pastel crayon from her pink plastic kit, going, “Here, you can draw.”

Each month, Scarlet finishes a sketchbook of drawings that tell her current story, a visual diary of sorts, charcoal and pastel works that look more realistic with each season. She has always placed her name on the front in some ornate fashion, using paint or stick-on sequins—the book right now reads, “Scarlet rules,” in violet glitter pen. She’s always drawn her very pretty mother to perfection—she’s gorgeous as Scarlet, except ravaged by a long decade of drugs—but last month she drew my own mother, her sharp cheeks, and kind, worried eyes, the deep-set shadiness of them. It blew me away, how hopeless Mom looked in the drawing—she could look like that. As of now, Scarlet is shading a page with hard blue lines, in diagonal.

The urgent way she’s working the crayon coincides with my scalp’s impromptu itch—when I tug at my hair, I come away with several strands.

“Can I see your picture?” I ask.

“Sure.”

The face Scarlet’s drawing is one I recognize but can’t name, of a boy.

On the page before this one, which I flip to discover: the finished sketch of a grinning kid with a bowl haircut, wearing a green soccer jersey, his skin the color of a peach, his freckles the perfect freckly expression, and I tell myself he’s the one who asked to see her breast. She has scribbled the name Nathan at the bottom of the page.

“Nathan is obsessed with girls,” she says, nibbling a cold French fry.

In my head: They’re in math together, where they sit side by side.

This second boy, the one I recognize, the work in progress, “W.K.” according to her crayon, he is Winston King, the missing child. In the drawing, he runs, perhaps through an open field, while the stabbing diagonal lines threaten to overtake him. The boy’s face feels lit, by the moon or by headlights, by candle-glow, something.

“That’s Winston,” I say. “Wait, is he the boy you love?” I ask.

“He’s lost. I’m almost out of blue crayon. Can I see what you’re drawing?”

My picture is the stick figure in a bell dress, I hadn’t realized till she pulls it from my grasp, singing, “Rose! You drew a little girl!”

Michael knocks at the door now, and Scarlet hugs me close, whispering, “Bye.”

It’s weird, I really don’t want her to go—just feel she should stay close, for both our sakes.

“Scarlet, I’m sorry to ask this, but did Nathan kiss you recently?”

She turns pink. Nods her head.

“You’re like your mom,” she whispers. “You’re magic.”

Her praise lifts me sky-high. Watching her draw has done the same.

“I had to tell Nathan I don’t like him that way,” Scarlet tells me.

“You don’t?”

“Who do you love?”

But her dad’s knocking again, in a hurry, and Scarlet’s getting to her feet. At the door, Michael looks harried, but when he sees Scarlet’s hair, he says, “Awesome haircut,” with real cheer. Scarlet giggles. This guy works hard doing something most would consider beneath them, but he doesn’t complain, according to Mom. He’s strong and good in many ways, like all of us, however else he may be painfully deficient.

“How much do you I owe you?”

“No charge, it’s Scarlet.”

“Cool. Scar, you got to brush your teeth and hop in bed, girl.”

“Rose is going to fix my hair again tomorrow!”

“She’s your personal assistant all of a sudden?” he says, his hand on her back steering her out the door. But his smiling eyes find mine and convey a kind of amusement mixed with gratitude.

“Hey, do you want to hang out later?” I hear myself ask in a timid little voice that surprises us both.

•

Two hours later, I’m pouring myself a third goblet-size glass of Chardonnay—“You can drink in front of me, it’s no biggie”—and Michael and I are sitting close on Mom’s red sofa, where she told Ed she knew psychically he’d find his daughter, after I saw that he had one and he acknowledged it, after she got all pissed and yelled, “You got a fucking kid?” But soon the topic faded from view. Ed didn’t bring up the girl. And like with her lovers before Ed, Mom put the bats reading on hold.

One night, close to school-picture day, Ed volunteered to trim my hair, because I’d been whining how much I wanted bangs, saying, “I just need a trim,” and Mom had whined back, “I want a bigger income if I’m going to get my kid’s hair cut at a salon.”

Ed grabbed a spare tablecloth from the linen closet and tied it like a bib over my torso. He scrubbed my head in the kitchen sink using the most delicious smelling shampoo from his shaving kit and combed my hair with his Aqua-Net-tinged comb. I asked Ed if I could comb his long hair in return, and he said, “Sure, baby.” As I worked, I could smell him all around me; that’s when I first began to detect danger—for Ed, for his daughter, danger, like an animal, cold and frightened, lying in terrible wait.

I’m sitting here with Michael, who now smells shower-fresh, telling myself, “Be brave, help where help’s needed, ask about taking Scarlet to the mall, go the distance.” But he looks damn cute in the dim lamplight; he looks into me, blinking slowly, examining his fingernails, perhaps deferring to me because he thinks I’m smarter, waiting politely for me to make my desired move or issue my request. My head’s swimming.

The time we walked on Mission, when Mom said she didn’t love all of these people anymore, she told me, “If you feel better than or less than a client you’re trying to read, you can’t get lost in care, you realize that? Your own self-ness, your own shit, it can’t be a huge part of the equation.” Well, I definitely feel my own self-ness—and drunkenness—making me horny.

When Michael takes my glass from me because I’m about to slosh and sets it gently on the table, as he traces circles on my back, close to wear I buckle my bra, I rest my head on his strong shoulder.

“Do that some more?” I tell him when he stops. “I know what’s best for you.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“I’d like to kiss you,” he says.

“You would?”

“But first,” he says, and I’m predicting he’s going to do something raunchy like ask me to flash him my tits or my backside. “One request?”

“Yeah?” I go.

“You should eat the rest of your cheeseburger, so you don’t get a headache.”

Rilly?

“You should eat,” he emphasizes.

“I guess…you know, I wouldn’t mind,” I say, slurring the wouldn’t.

Impressively, he hops up, zaps my burger half in the microwave, slices it into hors d’oeuvres and feeds me with his fingers. He’s good with his hands, randomly artistic. Now maybe I’m the broken bird—he’s my mama. Queer, but I like it.

“It’s been hard to eat recently.”

“When my granddad died, I lost ten pounds.”

“Sorry he died.”

“Your mom was proud of you, you know?” Michael says, as I finish the rest of the sandwich, the greasy nourishment swimming through my veins. “She told me how you won that essay prize.”

“My mother told me not to get too big for my britches,” I say.

“I tell Scarlet not to,” he says.

“Maybe Scarlet should, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s a very talented artist, and it’s important she know that.”

“I don’t know how talented she is compared to other people out there--”

“Very.”

He rubs my back with fluid firmness; I want to bring up the bra-shopping trip, but I don’t want him to stop.

“Sometimes I think I’m really fucking up,” he whispers. “As a dad.”

To keep him working, I offer, “Your kid loves you a lot, man.”

He continues to rub my shoulders with the right amount of hurt.

“Thanks,” he says. “You know, I think you’re pretty, Rose. For real.”

Michael is lost in care with me, in a way that I am not with him. He means what he’s said and knows this compliment is something I’ve heard less often than I’d like. He’s not trying to manipulate me—he doesn’t even realize his compliment’s awkward.

It’s cheap: I reciprocate with a line designed to make him think I understand.

“I know you fight hard not to drink and you win your battle each day.”

Yeah, I’m pulling a Mom, telling my potential lover what I think he wants to hear.

Michael pulls back some—tense now, unnatural. Says, “It’s getting late—I should make sure Scar’s actually gone to sleep.”

As he glares at my drink, I gulp the last to clear the juice from view.

“Scarlet counts on her father,” I say, stating the obvious, feeling a bit desperate, wanting so much for him to hug and kiss me, make me forget the scent of Mom’s cigarettes that lives on, and stop trying to understand how this man’s endlessly hard life, beyond his hard dick, factors into my life’s quirky-ass equation.

“I’m really trying,” he says, “you know?”

“You’re succeeding.”

He’s also getting to his feet, nodding that we’ve talked enough.

“Wait. How do you know I’m ‘succeeding’ with her?”

“Well, just because. My mom thought so.”

He lights up. Michael wants me to get lost with him psychically the way Mom would get, for a few moments, anyway, and I thought maybe I would, but it turns out I mostly want to regurgitate her words, mostly I have the instinct to get laid, and offer the same.

As he walks to the door, made embarrassed by our pseudo-intimate conversation, I feel ridiculous. The wind breathes across the yard—bringing winter back, shipping with it a package of snow addressed to a colder state, like, “Take that!” When Bob Barker hops on the ledge of the round window, I know he’s going to dart from the house soon, blend with the night, and give me a hell of a time getting him back inside. Once more I sense that something fierce lies in wait, maybe in the yard, plucking red leaves to grind into a poison; maybe this monster’s already in the house. The monster will wait, until I’m off guard. He’s not someone or something I can just catch—because he’s not ready to be caught. That’s what I think.

My dark blue eyes implore Michael not to go—hound-dog eyes Ed called them. Luckily, my next line pleases: “You’re succeeding because…I see the amazingly sympathetic way Scarlet draws your face, like you’re her hero--”

That does it. Before Michael walks to me and licks my tongue aggressively, I know how he’s going to do it, like I’m his favorite ice cream he hasn’t tried in years, and I know that it’s going to make us both feel light.

After I’ve assured him it’s okay to move this fast with me—“This once”—we’re naked and he’s standing behind me, in my narrow childhood bedroom, watching our bodies in the mirror on the back of the door. My back hurts, but guys love this position.

“Yes, Michael,” I whisper. “Yes.”

“Could we lie down instead? I want to feel all of you against me,” he says after a couple of minutes, and I take a break from whispering the word yes.

“Sure,” I say, surprised.

Maybe I can come—it would be a first with another person, well, a second—because his warmth feels right.

But as Michael rests his easy weight on top of me, in my frilly, canopy bed, making the silly cloth roof jiggle, I hear Scarlet call his name through the floor. I’m close, but it doesn’t happen. I hear her voice several seconds before it is audible.

She calls out loud, “Michael!” Then she says, “Dad?” She’s woken up and found him missing.

“She’ll be okay, she’s dreaming,” he whispers. “You’re so close.”

“Mi--” I try to speak, but he clamps his big hand gently over my lips and smiles a kind smile, an “Enjoy this, baby” smile.

Nodding, I try to put myself back in the moment, but holding his damp blond hair, I envision a figure in the shadows again, and this time he’s taking Scarlet, carrying her like a ventriloquist dummy, his hand over her mouth.

“Dad!” Scarlet calls, truly afraid.

“Go to her,” I tell Michael, pushing his sweaty chest. “She’s in danger--”

Michael loses his erection. No jackpot for him tonight either. Soon he stands to find his jeans, snapping to it that he ought to see about his kid.

“I hope everything’s okay,” I offer.

At the doorway, he turns—his curls forming a jagged halo in the hall light.

“This better be one fucking whopper nightmare. Let me check on her, then you want to drink a cocoa on the porch, and I’ll tell you about it?”

“It’s so cold,” I say.

“Well, you can come inside, if she’s back asleep.”

Minutes later, Scarlet’s dozing again, he tells me. We’re on the porch. Michael seems not to want to ask me in, which stings—but beyond that, it troubles me. With his foot touching my foot, microwave cocoa he’s topped with whipped cream in our clutches, he assures me again Scarlet is content.

“I don’t see how she calmed down so quickly.”

“Bad dream. She’s been having them. Something’s bugging her.”

“You okay?” he asks. “Are you mad now?”

“You should get her a bra already,” I blurt. It must be thirty-five degrees out here, and I just want to climb into my bathtub and my bed and sleep off the loser day.

Michael moves his foot away.

“She’s a little kid in elementary, Rose, she don’t need no bra just yet--”

“She talks like a baby around you, but she’s growing up.”

He sets his chin in his hand.

“She’s in fifth grade, what’s next?”

“Uh, makeup, tampons, birth control pills, that’s about it.”

I take his other hand, which is trembling like a junkie’s.

“What’s wrong?”

“I need a drink. If I stay up too late, I always crave one about now.”

“Let me take her to the mall Saturday, we’ll pick up a trainer, over and done.”

“You’re a lady, you know best.” But I get the sense he’s not okay with the plan.

“What was all that business about Scarlet being in danger, though?” he asks.

My eyes find the frozen front yard. I know my sense of doom will just baffle him—once I grow to care for Michael, and he me, if that’s possible, maybe I can explain.

Heather pulls up in her electric car, as we’re parting ways. She limps toward her house, carrying high heels. When I call to her, once, twice, she doesn’t respond.

As Bob makes his way through my cracked open door, and scurries into the yard—“Farewell!”—I do worry that I’ve written an opera that’s coming cruelly true, everyone faring for the worst because I couldn’t rework events in my head in time.

“Look, goodnight,” Michael’s voice whispers, as he closes his door.

He is already inside his place locking up, as I run across the grass after Bob.

Heather lingers outside turning to face me, under her porch light’s super power.

“How’d it go?” I ask. “My cat got--”

“I guess I didn’t want sex as bad as I thought,” she tells me, when I mount her steps, breathless, and take her hands, which are scuffed dirty, as though she’s been rolled across a concrete lot, which I fear she has. “Thanks for the bar tip. I nearly got raped.”

The wind seems to carry a fresh gust of cigarette smoke and temp’s got to be down to thirty, the way it’s sending daggers through me.

“What’s your problem?” Heather asks, because I’m staring at Mom’s leafless tree.

“Heather, Scarlet isn’t safe, that’s my sense, but I don’t know how to help!”

“Not safe, how? From him?”

“I don’t really know.”

“Look, I need my rest; I think you should talk to a professional counselor.”

“Isn’t that what you are?”

“For small children, not deranged young adults.”

“Heather--”

“Don’t you even care to know what happened to me tonight?” she asks.

Heather peels down the low-cut v-neck of Mom’s dress to reveal a bite wound, a human one: red and thickly dotted.

“Christ, let me drive you to the emergency room--”

“Maybe your mother knew a thing or two, dear. You’re not remotely psychic,” she says, spitting into her summer plant box, combing her hair with her long regal fingers. “You told me I’d have a fun night, ha! If you think Scarlet’s in danger, set your heart at ease—she’ll probably win a raffle. Do not, and I’m a counselor, so listen up to this free advice: Do not quit your day job.” She makes a snip, snip gesture.

Several hours too late, I picture the guy who already beat her up when she wouldn’t stay inside his car for a screw or rather I picture his car, a Saturn missing its back fender. The sticker on his trunk says: “If you can read this, get the fuck off my ass.”

Maybe I’m on time this time, with Scar.

The wind sounds cruel, flute-y, high.

As exuberant snow, our first in a decade, powders my hair, I do something, if only to give God and Mom a chuckle. Without a moment’s hesitation, I walk myself inside and draft a note to the same officer who came when I called 911, as I held Mom’s sleeping head in my arms, a few minutes after she passed. Tell him Scarlet could be in real danger, it’s a feeling in my blood and bones. Then I walk it to his office on Mission myself, calling out to my runaway kitty Bob Barker as I go, calling and saying, authoritatively, “Get on over here, Bob; come on, son. Don’t play games.”

There’s an old-fashioned mail slot at the police station. Once I drop the card in the door, with my wine buzz dead, I expect my panic’s going to strike hard. I’ll sit. I’ll wait. Panic is like asthma. Then I’ll get to my feet and keep helping the man downstairs.

The air on Mission smells like vomit tonight; I won’t let it affect my head.

But how frighteningly random life feels, and no wonder psychics stay in business, no wonder people want to believe they’re psychic, insist upon it. In my frantic fantasy, Michael pulls up in his truck and carries me home, promising to complete my orgasm with his tongue, promising he’ll keep Scarlet under house arrest for years.

Instead, in real life, I see a white balloon hovering in the back of a black pickup, waiting at the snowy intersection, the balloon likely tethered to a package—an object— stored in the truck bed. No big deal, most would forget it. But this image triggers for me a déjà vu picture half-formed, of a balloon floating in a similarly ghostly fashion, in the back of Ed’s station wagon. The balloon, I recall now, belonged to Ed’s daughter Missy, the night we met her, the only night of our togetherness, when I was young, but not as young or frightened as she, tucking her knees beneath her chin, shivering in her triangle dressing gown, telling me, “I want to go home, please, Rose.”

Tonight’s balloon seems important. So, should I chase the black truck screeching away, trembling down Mission, only its red lights visible now?

Before I have time to bolt after the balloon, though, Michael halts his own pick-up.

“Scarlet’s not in the house—between the time we were on the porch and now!” “Scarlet--”

“She’s not in the basement!” he screams. “Where the hell did she slip off to?”

I’m running to the truck.

“Hurry up!” he says.

“We’ll find her,” I say, stupidly.

“This is not like her,” Michael says, stonily serious as you’d expect, and I can see him the way he was as a child, waiting on his mother to forgive him for breaking an important rule—no feet on her sofa—tears boiling inside his shaking cheeks, like he thinks he deserves the worst outcome and doesn’t deserve to cry.

I climb in his truck, with a real reason.

“Follow that black truck, up ahead—get going! Go!”

The black truck has blended with the night, as easily as Bob Barker, but maybe the white balloon bobbing will reveal it. My stomach turns as I accept that I am not full of fear just now. One part of me is exhilarated. Worthy-feeling. Praying to the falling snowflakes, “Please let me be of service on this earth! Before it is too late!”

The Mission

The black truck must have made a turn or sped its way to the Interstate so endless it might as well be the sea.

Home now, Michael sprints across the yard, change making music in his pocket, and knocks on Heather’s door, bangs. She opens it a stingy inch.

“Have you seen Scarlet?”

Heather steps onto the porch, clad in a terry-cloth robe, acting human suddenly—she makes a visor of her hand and scans the snow-powdered street as if that might help. Pretty fast, though, she disappears back inside, and Michael’s left pulling his own hair.

Letting myself inside their place, I see that Scarlet bunks in a corner of the long basement living room, curtained off with a sheet, illuminated sapphire by a heart-shape nightlight. I eyeball her teddy bear collection neatly arrayed at the end of her unmade bed; I sense that she says goodnight to each bear, not wanting any to feel left out. My throat aches as I call her name silently; I can feel her presence in the neighborhood.

“She’s outside,” I tell Michael, hearing him in the next room.

He’s pacing, not listening, and anyway I’m not speaking with enough volume.

“Maybe her mom picked her up!” he says. “No, I doubt it. I doubt that.”

“We could call her—let’s call her up, let’s--”

“No, if Gretchen gets involved…and Ken…that could turn ugly--”

Michael tumbles into Scarlet’s soft-lit space and accidentally knocks my shoulder. He’s on his phone calling 9-1-1, saying, “Age ten, ninety pounds,” and “She wouldn’t run away, I’m positive,” and then, “We tried that!”

The wide, high window is half-open, sending cold air inside a hopeless feeling situation, especially when the police lights bleed through. Bob Barker enters this open square, somehow knowing he’ll find me. I scoop him up.

“Hello!” a flashlight’s in my eyes, at the open window, the sill of which meets the ground. Here’s Officer Price, with his perpetually astonished looking long face. I squint at his white light and nod hello.

“It’s me, Rose Reed,” I say.

“This window might be evidence, miss. You open it?”

“No, sir.”

Michael lets Officer Price inside through the front door.

“She’s not here, man—find her, find her.”

Michael’s frantic, sweating in the cold, scanning the floor and the ceiling, crawling beneath her bed, examining a Tootsie Roll wrapper from her wicker trashcan, desperate for any clue—he’s nothing but love, terror and good intention, far as I can see.

“Is your kid the kind of kid likely to sneak out?” Price asks Michael.

“Not in a million years.”

“Where we you when you realized your daughter wasn’t here, sir?” Price asks.

“I was upstairs with her,” Michael says, pointing at me. “And when I got home she was gone.”

“She your girlfriend?”

“Landlord.”

I clear my throat, reddening, ready to tell the whole truth. Because Michael’s got it wrong—he came home and comforted Scarlet before she went missing.

“Wait, after you came downstairs, Scarlet, she was—”

Michael gives me a soulful look, shakes his head only slightly, and for a second he’s the same person who told me to lie down and let go, who told me to float.

“Me and her were in bed when Scarlet left, however she left.”

His voice lifts high on the second “left.” Officer Price is writing this story down. I nuzzle Bob’s cool black coat, trying to decide if I want to blow Michael’s lie or not.

“Hold it. This sound accurate to you, Rose Reed?” Price wants to know.

I don’t say anything.

What did Mom know about Ed when she invited him inside the house to stay?

That’s where my mind takes me—to the time of their love-at-first-sight coupling. I knew she wished to be blind and to invite Ed to hold her, adore her, hold her some more, and rock her world—acts he performed eagerly. She knew that her cancer, the cancer that week overlooked by her gynecologist, grew silently, slowly, deep inside her breast. She needed some true care, deserved it. What do I know about myself, except that I’m meant to assist this man and, in return, I hope, get cuddled close, fed warm food, and forgiven for my own crimes? I don’t think he hurt his kid.

Ed never hurt his kid intentionally; she ended up hurt by accident, and that is all. Yes, I played a part, but which part?

“Scarlet had a bad dream, put that in the report,” I mention.

“What kind of bad dream?” Price asks.

Michael’s pacing the floor again—Scarlet’s nightlight casting a dance-club effect.

“She’s been having little dreams, that there’s a man,” Michael says. “A man in the yard.”

“Is that what she told you?” Price asks.

“Yeah.”

“Did she draw the guy?” I want to know.

But Michael shoots me a sharp look like, “Let me handle this.”

“How much drawing did she do?” Price says, his mind in one hundred places.

“A whole bunch,” Michael tells him, but Price is already out the door on walkie talkie telling his men to scour the yard and every yard within a one-mile radius.

•

Late morning: Scarlet has been missing twelve hours when a fat news van parks diagonally on my front yard, two tires propped on the curb. After a sleepless night laden with panic attacks, I’m watching the scene rather twitchily from my sunny kitchen alcove—steam from my coffee curling the letter S—sensing the snow melting, wondering if the sun has erased a criminal’s footprints. My eyelids are alien-swollen from crying.

Maxwell House flavored with cinnamon dribbling down my throat, like my mother brewed, I observe that Daniel Martinez is the investigative reporter on the scene. I take in his handsome form—he’s still so compact, like a slim gymnast. Absentmindedly I comb the tangles from my dirty hair. I feel my own air come in and go out silkily. Bob Barker cleans his butt obliviously.

Daniel’s short but strong, his hair inky black, his tie a respectful dark blue, like a romantic night sky. As a child, his face was so beautiful the kids at school called him Chica, girl—he was the shortest boy in middle school and scrawny, yet his cheekbones and his eyes were already exquisite. Mean boys beat him more than once until he began to move less fluidly, with plodding caution. Today he walks the yard with firm purpose. His grace makes me want to cry.

Two cop cars follow the van, their three-beat sirens singing a song of too-late lamentation, one-half-day…it’s-too-late.

The red tree is empty, the leaves fallen in a quilt of apology on Heather’s lawn.

I have no idea where Scarlet might be, but I know that Michael’s going to knock on my door a couple of seconds before he arrives to pound his fist so hard a crack scribbles down the windowpane. Even the crack looks like a zigzag S. As he chants, “Come on,” I’m unlocking the knob with shaky fingers. Before I know it, here he is, fallen down on his knees, his arms around my waist, as he held my mother, his only hope, his cheek likewise pressed to her breast.

“Where is she?” he asks. “Maybe you’ve thought of it.”

There is a strong, sweet scent on his breath, but he’s not super drunk, not enough to help him cope. In fact, I see he’s merely swallowed a tablespoon of Nyquil, to ease his aching throat. He’s spent the night alternately pacing the floor and driving. For whatever reason, these truths I know. I know I want to help.

“Rose, there’s a detective outside, real pissed acting, and he’s telling everybody on his so-called team how you wrote a postcard, worried about Scarlet?”

“I felt concerned last night,” I say. “I told you about that, before you went to save her from her dream, well before she disappeared, Michael--”

“Look, I had to lie about the timing,” he cuts me off, standing up. “If I said she disappeared while I was in the house, how does that make me look? I’ll lose custody for being asleep at the wheel--”

“How does it make you look that you lied?”

“How does it make you look that you wrote a postcard predicting this shit?”

“Like a psychic who doesn’t have the talent to follow through,” I say inside my brain. To Michael: nothing.

“Are you going to tell Price what really happened, how I was home down there when she got taken?” he asks.

“How much more do you know, Michael?”

He shakes his head solemnly—his unshaven face looking washed out, and as if lined in graphite, in the new day’s light.

“You have gifts like your mother,” he says. “Or is it a fluke?”

“My gift was always more unpredictable than hers.”

“You must know something deep down!”

He shakes me nearly too hard, like in a movie. In a movie this behavior would be a warning sign.

“Do you have her, Michael?” I ask him pointblank, to see what he’ll do.

But now his ex-wife, Gretchen—I’d know her anywhere, from Scarlet’s sketches, her swerving cheekbones, her chiseled teaspoon of a chin—peers inside the window of the front door, searching with red eyes, a faux fur collar poking from the neck of her red wool jacket. Gretchen opens the door, enters. I notice she’s wearing bedroom slippers and tiny skintight jeans with gold studs dotting the low back pockets—I know she got them at Ross Dress for Less a couple of miles down on Mission, Ross Dress in Less, Mom and I called it. And I know she’s gone on Vicodin at present, which helps her swim around the terror she feels rather than dive to the bottom.

“Where’s my baby, Mickey?” she asks, her tanning-bed-tanned body quivering. Michael speaks to Gretchen with kindness and authority, like she’s his problem child.

“We’ll find her,” he says taking her in his arms.

“God fucking hates us,” she tells him, eyeballs wobbly.

She turns to me: “Can you help?”

While Michael comforts Gretchen, it occurs to me I’ve still got access to Scarlet’s hair trimmings—why didn’t I realize last night? I run to the kitchen and sift through the salon garbage until I find a lock of that unmistakable blond that could give someone a new lease on living, for at least a full month, which I place in an envelope for later meditation. Then I dress in my own tight jeans, a dark cable-knit sweater, and Mom’s leather jacket, tie my hair up, wash my face, brush my teeth, and double-quick apply enough makeup to act in a silent film, in case I have to perform a mini-reunion with Daniel. Without a word, I plan to brush fast past Gretchen crying now in Michael’s arms.

She moans, as he hugs her, marching her feet on the floor, kicking down an invisible enemy. Hoping to pick up information, I step close and stroke her long, highlighted hair, the colors silver, white, caramel, done in thick chunky stripes I’d like to strip and re-color. It’s like I’m deep-petting a cat one luxurious stroke before she can speak up. From touching her over-processed hair, I sense psychically that Ken, her new husband, keeps Gretchen stocked with prescription drugs, that he does them, too, now and then, a few pain pills, a little coke, but he’s not addicted. Ken likes to keep Gretchen weak—it makes him feel like he has a big dick but also, ironically, a big support system. “Fuck! Why did your landlord just pull my hair?” Gretchen barks tearfully.

“She might be able to help us find Scarlet, we don’t know yet.”

Gretchen grabs my sleeve.

“Are you a witch, like your mother?”

“Hairdresser,” I say.

Even as I handle her hair in one jacket pocket, her girl’s hair in the other, nothing else comes. Whatever. I make my way across the crunchy lawn meaning to find Officer Price and explain the postcard. In my head, my voice is rehearsing, “Look, some people get psychic impressions, it’s proven—sometimes I get mine at the last second, sadly.”

I’ve got my purse under one arm in case I decide to escape to Mission for a Coke.

“Rose?” Daniel’s voice calls, urgently. “I can’t believe you still live here!”

My tongue seems to expand inside my mouth—Daniel is so pretty, I feel wild-animal odd by comparison. Dan, so healthy, in his mind, his scalp, his soul; I feel sick.

His handshake (he’s still gripping my fingers) holds firm with technique, and I recall Daniel’s habit of asking endless questions as a kid, how much he wanted to know. I remember his slanting handwriting and the green-apple taste of his tongue when we’d been eating candy. I remember he seemed to like himself and want to obtain the best for himself, as you would a friend. He had a plan, a place he was headed. He still does.

“How’s your wonderful mom?” he asks.

“Dead, since very recently.”

He takes my hand again.

“Shit, I’m sorry. Of course, I learned about Ed, back when it happened.”

Daniel’s authentic-feeling concern causes me to shrink worse and speak softer.

“How are your grandparents?” I ask him.

“Poppy’s dead, and my grandmother’s in a nursing home now, Eventide.”

“Oh, that’s a fancy place with its own movie theater, I hear.”

“Yeah, unfortunately, she’s got dementia, so movie’s are confusing.”

“Did you come back here to be close to her?”

“There’s nobody else to do it. I swear she’s kinder to me now than she ever was, Rose, especially when she forgets who I am.”

Daniel laughs. I try to. He hands me his business card and jots his cell on the back insisting we should catch up, over coffee, or milkshakes—a reference to childhood.

“You’ll call?” he asks. Daniel always demanded a final answer, needed that sense of control, certain elements of his home life were so unpredictable.

“Yes—definitely—once Scarlet’s back home and all.” I’m blushing purple.

“Listen. Help out an investigative reporter?”

He gestures toward the black Jaguar parked in front of the house, motor running—a forty-something fellow with slicked-back hair in the driver’s seat, chatting on his cell. Scarlet has drawn him before, as if he’s smiling ingratiatingly for an invisible camera. I know straightaway: That’s Ken Leighton, her stepfather, and say so.

“Gotcha, that’s Leighton. Leighton wanted our news crew down here first thing this morning, so here we are—he does a lot of advertising on our station. He called us before I even checked the police report.”

As Daniel fills me in, I’m watching a broken-nosed Hispanic man with rolled-up shirtsleeves and a soft stomach watch me watch him. The guy is on the tall side. His hair is a white afro-like puff, a serious cloud hanging over his head, stubborn as a net dish sponge. I gather by this fellow’s gregarious energy he’s the top detective on the scene, the one who wants most to make everything okay. He’s talking to Heather who has emerged from her beige cave, with a fresh black eye to show for her regrettable misadventure. Judging by the way the detective’s looking at me, he suspects I’m a nut; Heather’s merely confirming it.

“Word from my sources is you made a prediction—by postcard, like an hour before the kid went missing,” Daniel says, winking at me. “You used to see some cool stuff, I tried to tell them that.”

“Key words, used to--”

I sound like Michael, avoidance at all costs.

“Anybody with insider information is a person of interest, though.”

“You didn’t say anything about Ed’s suicide, or any of that…to these cops?”

“Why on earth would I?”

“No, no, you wouldn’t.” I feel stupid.

“Look, help a guy out--”

“If I can.”

“Do you have the sense that Scarlet’s disappearance might be related to Winston King’s?”

“I… Is that what you think?” I stammer.

Then, “Rose,” he says, looping his fingers around my wrist, looking me in the eyes, like I’m a kid in some kind of trouble that’s about to snowball.

“Maybe you really can help, you know?”

Not lost on me: If the cases are connected, Daniel’s got a significant story on his hands.

“Hey, you want to speak on camera?” he asks.

This is the kind of opportunity Mom would have jumped at, come to life for—even if she had nothing to say. I just feel mentally exhausted. Before I can speak, though, Daniel has motioned his shooter to his side and he’s asking me for a quote.

“Do you believe you predicted that this child, Scarlet Hresko, would disappear, Rose Reed?” he asks, pronouncing Hresko to perfection, silent h, accent on the esk.

“Sort of,” I say, refitting my hair into a tighter ponytail.

“You drafted a note to the police saying outright, ‘This kid is in danger.’”

“Yes.”

He’s speaking to me with such respect, I want him to take me home, to his home, and never stop talking this way. If he would treat me like a goddess, I’d become one.

Before I can begin to work up the nerve to invite Daniel to buy me a chocolate milkshake at his lunch break, the soft-bellied detective’s pulling me, literally, toward his running car, telling me his name deeply, brusquely, “Trujillo,” accent on the hee, showing me a badge, and inserting me inside the springy backseat with a quick, “You’re not under arrest, but I know you’ll want to help us any way you can.” I sense real concern. I like the way he’s generous with touch, as some humans are, Mom included. Inspired by the smell of his skin—Dial soap—and the phlegm-y rattle of his former smoker’s voice, the heat of his hand, I have a vision he’s married with daughters, I suspect he’s still fighting to quit smoking, that he’s got the munchies nonstop, and I know this whole thing’s got him frantic, in a vicarious family-man way. Seems to me one of his girls performs gymnastics like a pro. Wait, maybe he has one boy, one girl.

Trujillo ushers Michael to the car same as me—handcuffed, he joins me, cuff-free, on the other side of this backseat sofa, and together, silently, we ride to the nearby station, with Miles Davis’ “Three Blind Mice” honking on Trujillo’s CD player.

Michael fidgets with his broken cuticles as we coast Mission, his Texas-sponsored bracelets clinking, and I feel panic crackling through my veins, trying to find me, that sense that I shouldn’t have been born, I’m making things worse. The sense that maybe I brought this whole drama on. Without thinking about it, I pull a sample bottle of rich hand lotion from my purse and begin to massage it inside Michael’s dry skin, making his face transform from tight and tense to sad and sobbing without noise. So I cease.

Trujillo checks us in his rearview mirror, the whites of his wide eyes bright warning signs, saying “Look out”—and I think they think Michael hurt his kid, screwed with her, maybe threw her away, and that I’m close enough to the source of evil to have sensed or seen it. But what do I think? I think Michael’s ex-wife trusts him; I think Scarlet loves her father, and thanks her lucky stars she has a safe place to live. I think my mother believed this man deserved a fighting chance, same as Ed deserved, even if most average citizens might not agree with her assessment. When I was a loving little child, I heartily agreed. She identified a power inside my unconditional love, and at the end of her life she trusted me to revive it.

•

“Think harder, Miss Reed,” Trujillo says, opening a pack of Lifesavers. We’ve chatted for a bit, about my recent past, the passing of Mom, my hair shop, when he breaks open the candy; now he turns on his tape recorder. Trujillo wants me to explain as carefully as I can what I was doing when I got the impression Scarlet might be in danger, but I don’t want to say: “Gripping Michael’s hair, enjoying the sensation of his erect penis inside me.” So, I’m pretending I can’t recall that precise information.

“You consider your tenant a close friend?” he asks.

“In a way,” I say.

“He claims the two of you went to bed together last night.”

“Uh, that’s true, yeah.”

He looks at his paperwork.

“Sexual intercourse, the whole bit—to completion? Forgive the abrupt question.”

“Uh, pretty much…”

“Yes?”

“Almost, I said.”

Trujillo crams a stack of candies in his mouth—offers me one. I eat a red hoop, notice that Trujillo smells citrus-y, like he needs a shower, after a long night of ongoing detective work that should have let up by now, if people weren’t so fucked in the head.

“Am I a suspect?” I ask Trujillo.

He mock-smiles, revealing long teeth, his gray eyebrows lifting into triangles.

“You’re an almost-suspect, Miss Reed—which is why you get to hang out in my pigsty of an office rather than the chill, gray interrogation room, which we refer to, behind closed doors, as the Intimidation Room. The thing is, my friend, you wrote a postcard predicting a tragedy and a crime. Am I to believe you’re a mystic? Or a psychopath.”

Heart palpitations.

“My mother was psychic, like I said. She, she told me to help the man downstairs.”

“What if I don’t believe in psychics?” Trujillo says.

“I do. My mother did.”

“You always do what your mother tells you?”

“She didn’t give me much other concrete advice to speak of.”

“Why would the man downstairs need this assistance?”

“His kid’s gone missing, hasn’t she?”

He folds the Lifesavers carefully closed, opens them up again and takes one.

“Look, I believe in intuition,” he says, laughing in exasperation, “and I have an intuitive feeling Michael’s not telling me the whole story—he’s jumpy. So far, you’re vague. You’re panicked. From you I want to know when you wrote this postcard, your big prediction. You write down your entire day for me yesterday, day and night, when you ate lunch, when you took your shower, exactly when you cut the girl’s hair and how long it took for that, what time you got romantic with Michael, how long it took for that, at which hour you suspected his kid might be in trouble, and at which hour you knew--”

“I’ll check my diary.”

He rolls his eyes, nods, and shuffles some papers, as I examine the delicate engraving on his wedding band, swirls, as though a swirling vortex equals marriage—unique choice, I like it.

Through the window of Trujillo’s office, a brown-red female cardinal lands on a branch, sunlight dappling the gray wood. I know my mother’s absence with a wild fluttering inside my chest. We used to spy cardinals in our backyard when I was little, the proud red male and subtler female. “He’s the showoff in those bright clothes; she’s the wiser,” Mom said. All I understand: I want to be on Michael’s side because she asked it. And I hope to care for him well enough to glimpse his very darkest truths.

“Michael’s already constructed his timeline, in fact, whilst sitting in the Intimidation Room. We’ll see if your stories agree.”

It does occur again and again like a clock bell: Michael might have returned to his house, all hot and bothered by me, to comfort Scarlet from her dream of the backyard invader, if such a dream occurred, molested and smothered her on the spot, hidden her body in his truck, made chitchat with me on the porch, dumped her before he came to find me walking Mission. This isn’t a vision, more a cruel prank.

“Please get to work,” Trujillo says. “We have our best chance of finding her in the first forty-eight hours.”

Here’s what I write:

Wednesday

Showered around 9.

Set perm for client at 11.

Painted nails and waxed mustache for another at 11:20.

Ate lunch—protein bar—1 p.m. or so.

Gave four haircuts, three blows—1:30-5.

Took a random walk—5:30.

Cut Scarlet’s hair—7ish.

Spent that time with Michael—8:30-11ish.

Scarlet dreamed, called out to her dad, scared, and he went to her—11ish.

Scarlet suddenly missing—some minutes after 11.

Michael and I searched streets together, after searching the house—after 11:30.

I look up; Trujillo’s eyebrows form sharper triangles.

“Ah, solid,” he says, exhaling, his face calm like our schedules agree. “You sure on these points, especially the sequence of when he left you, and reported Scarlet gone?”

“I’m sure. Because…” and now that Trujillo appears relaxed, I begin to lie easily, as easily as I lied to my mother when I predicted her cancer would never come back: “Michael heard her having a bad dream, calling out to him, and I said, ‘Go see about her, quick,’ and he went to her. Unfortunately, she was missing from her bed.”

“And did you join him simultaneously to ascertain whether she was still in bed, or if she was already missing from her home?”

“No, sir.”

“Interesting. He said that you did.”

Mute, I know my face has painted itself magenta.

“We’ll change the subject for a sec: One crucial item has been left off--”

“Which?”

“When did you get the overpowering feeling Scarlet was in danger, ma’am? When did you deliver your postcard addressed to Officer Price?”

“Oh! Right. I dropped the card…it was…right after I cut her hair,” I lie, somewhat shakily now. “Through the mail slot just before eight. When I cut people’s hair, I sometimes sense important things.”

“So, you took two walks after dark, not to mention the one at dusk. Because your next-door neighbor Heather said you took off walking in a huff after 11?”

“I walk a lot.”

“Why the second nighttime walk?”

I’m blowing this big time.

“Why the second walk?”

“I’m trying to get in shape—I’m curvy.”

Trujillo chews his bottom lip, waiting for me to spill my guts. It occurs to me his lovely broken nose is shaped something like an acoustic guitar, his chin a drum. He is harmony, order; I am chaos.

“Slow down,” I tell myself. “Do what’s right for Michael, and Scarlet.”

“Come to think of it, I didn’t want to tell you this detail, only because it makes Michael look bad, and he shouldn’t look bad.”

“Yes,” he says, not as a question, as a certainty.

“When we were in bed, I started to panic about her, then.”

“Okay.”

“I think I sensed the guy in the yard, you know? It kills me to consider it.”

“Did you hear any activity out there?”

“No, I just felt something close.”

“Anything else?”

I consider how embarrassed Michael was made by the prospect of buying Scarlet a training bra, and I don’t know how to answer this important question. In a strange-looking move, without thinking, again, I take Officer Trujillo’s clubby hands in mine, and try to read how he feels about his oldest daughter’s budding sexuality. Perhaps I’ve been made more confident by the photograph of Trujillo, his plump and pretty wife, whose black hair is thinning in front, clearly from grief, his three smiling girls, their builds athletic, the portrait set at an angle, at the edge of his overloaded police desk.

“Are you reading my palm? I have eczema.”

“Your girls are beautiful.”

“Those are my sister-in-law’s kids. My brother died recently. I look in on them—his wife’s a mess. Girls are a handful, especially the eldest.”

“Oh, they’re your nieces.”

“My wife Lucy and I have two boys, one about your age.”

He locates a dusty plastic frame that’s fallen on its face, amid the paperwork.

“Handsome,” I tell him.

“They look like her.”

Trujillo’s imperfect face is expressive and interested, his energy buoyed by the upbeat song of his soul’s intentions. He’s so well intentioned, I almost want him to find me out yet remain on my side; with my eyes I dare him to ask a deeper question. To get lost in care with me, and see through.

“The neighbor, the guidance counselor woman, mentioned some issue about a training bra—that Michael wanted to stifle the girl’s sexuality, wouldn’t get her one.”

I can’t help but break open a bit, basking in his energy—and in the fact that he seems to want to trust me, despite my factual errors.

“Rose, you turned red again when I mentioned her sexuality.”

“I think Michael feels afraid to talk to Scarlet about sex stuff,” I mutter.

“What makes you say sex stuff--?”

“She needed a bra? She was developing early, and he seemed embarrassed.”

Now he’s writing down my line, word for word, in addition to recording it.

“Bras can be embarrassing, they’re bras,” I stammer, cupping my breasts.

He doesn’t respond. I have already failed the man downstairs. Close to it.

“I wish you trusted me more,” Trujillo offers. “Even though you’re scattered, I want to believe in you. I think you’re a person who knows some important things.”

Flattered, I go: “You want me to give you a quick trim, tell you what I see about you?”

It’s the perfect sneaky change of subject for a man who yearns to believe.

“A trim?” he asks.

“Haircut.”

“Can you cut hair that’s got a mind of its own?” he asks.

“Sure. I can cut anybody’s hair.”

“I prefer a cleaner cut, but it’s hard to find the time. My hair grows quick.”

It’s a dry cut I perform, done with crappy scissors we find in the kitchen area.

“Take an inch off the top,” he teases. “And the back and the sides.”

As I scrub my fingers through his curly hair to shake out the loose pieces, I tell him that I know he’s worried about Winston King, that his life hasn’t been the same since Winston went missing, because that’s what is coming through.

“Yeah, I grew up in that same part, where the kid’s from, on a farm,” he says. “I don’t know if you’re psychic, but I do know that kid has got to me.”

“You worry at night.”

“Best time for it.”

I scoop his stray hair off the floor and bring it to my nostrils, mostly for effect.

“Freaky,” he says.

“You do believe, in psychics,” I tell him. “You do.”

“My granny could see inside the deepest places.”

Now I can’t be stopped. Now I care about him, not so intimately that his pain is mine, but just enough. For the moment, I feel as though I’m coming home to my power.

“Your son ran away when he was very small and it took you two days to get him home,” I say.

“Three days,” he corrects me, smiling a small smile because I’ve reached him.

“He’s a gymnast, he’s the one.”

“Almost went to the Olympics.”

“You had trouble accepting that he’s gay, didn’t you?” It just pops out.

I’m tugging at his hair with a small blue comb I keep in my purse.

“My wife did, too. Nice haircut, you’re really a pro.”

“You knew before anyone.”

“I’m a detective.”

“It’s good you accepted him; you can be too strict.”

“Rose,” he says, reaching for a change of subject. “I don’t want Michael to be guilty either; he very well may be. Statistically, these crimes…they’re inside jobs.”

I mean to nod, but I’m busy thinking how foolhardy to follow statistics, according to Mom. “According to my statistics,” she said, “when you arrogantly invoke statistics, odds become you’ll encounter a karmic exception.”

His phone rings and he grabs it fast, says, “What now?”

“We’re going to want to talk to you again,” he whispers at me, covering the mouthpiece.

“Sure,” I say, unsure whether I’ve helped Michael or dug his grave.

“Listen!” he tells the phone. “The psychic gave me something we can use—don’t let Hresko go just yet.”

Before I flee the scene, through his window, I spy the brown-red cardinal on the same bare branch, and write down a message on Trujillo’s memo pad, meant to throw him off Michael, meant to feed his hope in the way he needs it fed—with him watching me.

“Winston King’s abduction is connected.”

Having scanned it, Trujillo shakes his finger at me not to leave. He’s grinning at me like I’m a beloved niece, holding my words in his long hand.

As I sneak out and jog down the hall, pulling my hair out easily as I go, I marvel at our exchange about his gymnast son, and how Mom was right: It’s easier to offer aid and assurance to a stranger, before your own selfish interior wishes come into play.

As I walk Mission, Trujillo’s term “inside jobs” echoes, and I pray to God Michael’s my karmic exception. Is it so strange for a single dad not to want to acknowledge his kid’s puberty? Is it necessarily so terrible that a little girl’s little bra should embarrass a man? Or that Michael and Scarlet sing sexy pop songs they hear on the radio together? If Heather were still speaking to me, I’d ask her.

Stuffing my hands in the pockets of my jeans, I pass the Elbow Room and the beauty supply store and the pet groomer’s called Nails ‘n’ Tails.

Then I don’t see Mission anymore; I open a mental door—Ed’s standing there waiting. Searching, I walk through.

Insert title tbd

“Hot stuff, Rose,” Mom said, after Ed trimmed and styled my hair for the school photo—he’d given me longish bangs; he’d chiseled gorgeous swinging layers. Goodbye to heavy hair falling down my back; goodbye to babydom.

“Thanks, Ed!” I sang.

When Ed smiled, his eyes made stars, the wrinkles carved deeper on either side, in five pronounced points, echoing the star tattoo on his thumb.

“Where’d you learn to cut hair?” Mom asked, reclining on the sofa, letting him rub her feet.

“Born with it, I guess.” He kissed her big toe.

Mom sat up straighter. From my vantage point on the rug, where I lay sprawled pretending to do my homework, Mom looked like a queen, bathed in the flame of her cigarette lighter. Her lips bore hairline wrinkles from long years of smoking, but somehow it added to her sexiness.

We three felt content in this moment, Mom and Ed sipping strong margaritas from tumblers and smoking, their bodies hooked on the red couch. Ed had fixed me up my own special limeade concoction with a pink umbrella and crushed ice, which I felt utterly grown up to be drinking—especially as I flipped my new layered hairdo this way and that.

“You’ll sprain your neck,” Mom said.

It’s true we were waiting on the results of Mom’s biopsy, as she’d visited her gynecologist the day before. But we weren’t dwelling on the dismal possibilities. Ed had the night before announced he meant to stay with us forever. He’d promised to nurse Mom through her brief illness, helping out with cooking, cleaning and babysitting—his comforting words: “I’m going to make the whole thing go away, so it don’t really matter what that doctor has got to say.”

Mom crawled into Ed’s lap like an overgrown child, peering into his eyes.

“I see you,” she said. “I see something about your life.”

Ed waited, his face serious.

“Your daddy cut hair in Beaumont!” she said, her voice full of drunken certainty.

“Correct,” Ed told her.

“He wanted you to join his barbershop, but you refused.”

“How’d you know? You psychic or something?”

“Impressed?” she asked, climbing off him again, her bottom jiggling, her voice cresting with delight, which alerted him he ought to show her his deepest, starry-eyed grin, which he did.

Ed had smiled so often, he’d scarred himself—he wanted people to feel better in his presence, this was a priority.

“You’re magic,” he told Mom.

Mom hadn’t been able to read Ed or anyone very effectively in the past few weeks, therefore, this new knowledge of hers felt important, like a symbol of health.

“Rose is magic, too,” Mom said. “A little tiny bit. Mama’s got a lot to teach her, of course.”

“You do?” I cried.

Since Ed had admitted to Mom he had a kid he rarely saw, a humdinger of a bulletin, Mom couldn’t deny my burgeoning ability. Whenever she referenced it, my soul set to singing.

“Is Mama going to get well fast like the greeting cards say, Rose?” she asked then.

Ed and I locked eyes, and I knew he was telling me to have faith—and to show my faith to my mother.

“Sure, she will,” I told her, though I had no real instinct about it.

Ed winked at me like a real daddy; Mom picked me up and danced me; she kissed my lips; I felt loved in my mother’s arms. Then suddenly I sensed that my hand had just touched the spot on her breast that housed the disease. And I knew more, which I didn’t say a word about.

When the phone rang, Ed dashed to answer it.

“Karen, it’s all you,” he said, handing her the receiver.

“Yes, I understand, I’m not an idiot,” Mom told the person on the opposite end. “Stage two. Numerous treatment options to choose from. Lucky me. Let me say: I hope your medical technology works better than that snack machine you all got.”

“You’re going to be fine, baby,” Ed told her as she slumped on the sofa, exhausted looking.

“I know it,” she said like a bird’s anxious chirp.

And then her voice deepened: “Rose, listen up.”

I tried to smile at her, but my face must have looked afraid.

“You’re too young yet to be psychic yet, you hear me?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Put it on ice,” she added. “If I hear you’re reading for any man, woman, or child, you’re in a world of trouble. Clear?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

As I stared at my schoolbook, Mom and Ed disappeared upstairs into the bedroom where he’d romance their worry into oblivion. While I planted my face in Bernadette’s sour fur and sobbed, Mom moaned in ecstasy. Her moaning made me cry harder; I wasn’t sure why I wept so violently. We had faith she’d be fine, didn’t we? And weren’t we all happy now?

When Ed came downstairs, with his long red hair wet from the shower, and saw how upset I’d made myself, I expected he might scoop me up and invite me to cry some more. My arms reached for him. He didn’t accept them.

“Your mom’s strong,” he said. “She’s going to heal up.”

“Are you sure?”

“You want this old boy to teach you how to cut hair?” he asked.

“Yes, I do,” I said.

“You want to know all the secrets?”

I jumped up and down with little-kid resilience, always eager as hell to learn something new.

Taking my own hair in his freckled fingers, Ed showed me how to grip the stuff as if it were a tail, to cut in one confident sawing line, two inches from the bottom.

“Whose hair can I cut?” I asked.

“Mine,” he said, and as I grabbed his hair in my small fingers, I remembered that he needed my help as much as Mom needed his. I liked that.

I began to comb his thick hair, and I began to trust we were a family, each of us assigned to care for another in a very different capacity.

“Will you take care of me like your real little girl?”

“I’ll be your daddy now, yes, ma’am,” he told me.

“That’s a relief,” I said, and he grinned stars.

Ed handed me a pair of kitchen shears he’d sharpened to trim my hair for the school picture. My hands shook at first, but soon I worked gracefully, chopping at his long locks, with all of my strength, wanting above all other desire to impress my teacher.

“Once you start cutting, don’t stop,” he said. “Be at one with the hair, seriously.”

Holding that bountiful extension of coarse red hair in my grip, that’s when it came to me: His kid lived close by, not an hour away; he’d come to Hendricks to locate her.

“You did perfect,” Ed told me, as I held up a mirror. “I’m split-end-free. Plus, you sliced it nice and even. Merci beaucoup.”

Right then I couldn’t resist climbing into his lap to be close to him, to smell that light sweet fragrance that followed wherever he went. I thought we might talk about his girl and begin to make plans to find her. But Ed’s hand scraped my stomach, the fabric of my unicorn iron-on nightgown, and he lifted it off, like my body could burn him.

His movement confused me. I shifted in his arms and hugged his neck; I placed my lips on his, as my mother had done to me an hour before—I loved Ed as a daughter loves her father, and this was innocent love play.

That’s when I heard his voice tell me to get away, get the fuck away, out of his lap, out of his grip, less than a whisper. “Get the fuck off me.” His words, but he wasn’t speaking out loud—he was thinking them.

Ed’s body felt rigid, his hands on my shoulders pretending to cradle me, when they were really stabilizing me so I couldn’t float any closer.

“I don’t want to,” I heard his blood repeat urgently.

“I won’t hurt you,” I whispered, misunderstanding, staying put.

Mom came down the stairs in a blur then, nearly running, in a long t-shirt and with her bottom bare, as though a dream had jarred her to life, her wheat-colored hair loose and flowing. She looked at us through frantic eyes.

Ed interpreted her fearful expression as an accusation—he tensed worse.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said, bewildered.

“Just thirsty—I woke up so dry,” she added, shaking herself awake, tying her hair up in a knot and simultaneously revealing her brief tuft of beige pubic hair. She fetched some O.J. and called out to us, “Goodnight, kooks,” as she tiptoed back upstairs, sipping her drink and stealing looks at her new man and her baby playing hair salon.

Through it all, Ed remained mummy-still, his hands on my shoulders, pushing me, but as if defending himself from himself, speaking to Mom like a stranger: “Goodnight, babe.” His voice came out half as loud. He felt sure Mom was starting to know his story, but I think he had it wrong.

After my mother slipped back to bed, after I’d moved off Ed and sat beside him, I asked him to brush my hair, our new ritual. He seemed relieved. Touching hair was always easy for him. He felt like himself doing hair, same as I do working with clients. He breathed audibly, in and out, as if he’d been strangled half to death a moment before.

“It’s okay,” I think I said.

While I didn’t fully understand the nature of our new secret, whispered from inside his walls, I understood that I’d overheard a thing that couldn’t be shared, and could never be repeated except between Ed and me. I knew this secret amounted to Ed’s bats.

Beyond that, he meant to find his girl, and more than ever I meant to help him. Now I had a clear set of priorities: To clear Ed’s bats, worse creatures than my mother had ever encountered, and to make him the father we needed him to be, through faith.

To become a legend in my own life.

“I think I might know where to find your girl,” I told him. He parted my hair to the side and gently added pins. We didn’t speak for a few moments as he fixed the style. In the hand mirror, I looked like such a well-groomed little miss, like a princess.

When Ed said, “Melissa is my body and my blood, praise Jesus,” I felt he’d confirmed my suspicion that this was how we’d eventually heal him. Later, he’d be able to hold me and hug me close like any normal dad.

When Ed leaned close and whispered, “I believe in you, darlin’,” I could feel his damp hair against my cheek; I suspected I was the closest thing to divine support he’d found, after long years begging in churches.

•

Does the clue to Michael’s daughter’s disappearance lie in the soft hair that forms faint curling sideburns, so light in color and texture he neglects to shave it?

Standing in my mother’s cozy yellow kitchen—our mugs of tea swirling steam— Michael’s got a reason to let me cut his hair, dye it, too. Thank God I’ve got a straightforward task to perform.

Out on bail, given him by his disapproving mother, whom I can visualize—a hard-looking lady, but with sweet, heavy-lidded eyes like his—Michael plans to make a run for it before the police can bring him back in.

He’s already pacing my floor, making me shake. He’ll make his run in a brunette disguise, I’ve decided. But for the quaking moment he’s intent on interrogating me, as I’m meanwhile doomed to interrogate myself.

“Rose, what did you say about me to the police?” he mutters, eyeing the window.

“Nothing that bad,” I say, as I flip a sizzling cheese sandwich in my skillet.

If I saw psychically that Michael had hurt his little girl, I wouldn’t help him. What I sense from the man is fatherly fear and love and hungry human need, emotions I likewise sensed from Ed, it’s true—key distinction: I don’t believe Michael’s afraid of himself; he’s scared shitless of the powers that be.

So maybe Mom has set me up to assist Michael as a way to understand my role in Ed’s life, I can’t say for sure, but I have to believe she wouldn’t offer up the same sorrowful equation we encountered during my childhood, trying to house a man for whom society had no vacancy—none.

Yes, I’m aware I just said I have to believe.

“That guy, Trujillo, thinks I did it,” Michael tells me for the third time.

“You said--”

“He told it to my face.”

“But. That’s how detectives manipulate people.”

“So what did you tell him?”

He’s still walking the floor.

“Nothing much--”

He shouts: “What?”

“I told him Scarlet’s approaching adolescence, which can be a challenging time.”

Bullshit, wanting to sell Trujillo on my talents, I tattled deeper. Then again I also told Trujillo I saw Winston’s case linked to Scarlet’s, a flat-out lie to throw the cops off Michael’s trail.

“Why is everyone obsessed with the fucking training bra? I’m sorry I didn’t get her one the day she was born.”

Michael shakes his head vigorously when I offer the sandwich.

“Food is…ridiculous,” he says, his voice breaking.

I leave his snack on the table, hoping he’ll realize how much he needs nourishment. One hand in my pocket, I’m caressing Scarlet’s hair, hoping to pick up a clue, a picture. Nothing comes, so I take a break to wash and dry the same old skillet Ed used for omelets and hash browns.

“You’ll have to trade your truck for something else,” I hear myself offer, over the running water. Bob Barker’s glued to my leg, like he’s nervous or something.

“Yeah, I got a cousin who buys cars for junk, who can help me out.”

“Are you sure it’s the smartest thing…to run?”

“You think it makes me look guilty?” he says.

“Uh. It does make you look guilty.”

Michael comes up behind me, close. Short of a better idea, I turn to give him a hug, and to remind his body what happened between us last night, but shit, I feel a gun, hiding.

My heart begins to tap-dance, my breathing converting to quick asthmatic gasps.

“Careful,” he says. “I’ve got that for protection, and it’s loaded.”

“A gun?”

“That guy thinks I hurt my own kid!”

“I said…Trujillo’s probably trying to rattle you; it’s like on cop shows--”

“Hey, why are you breathing like that? You okay? Scared of me now?”

“I’m fine,” I manage to squeak.

He paces harder, making the floor creak and the whole skinny house sound like it might faint under the calm snowfall coming down, snow that will make the case still harder to solve, another tidbit I gleaned from too much TV.

Finally Michael seeks out the fridge, tucked inside a corner near the pantry. It’s covered in Scarlet’s art, a rainbow expression from his kid’s eye. Faces, places, stars and planets. He halts and studies the wonderful images—his heart sinking, I can feel it—as I dry my hands at the sink. Soon he starts to cry some, not that I look but I can hear.

I want to go to Michael, open my arms wide, but I’m still having trouble breathing—and I honestly feel like I need to draw that fucking bell-shape dress or I’ll suffocate on the spot. My eyes closed, my mind makes the triangle of the nightdress and I wait for the human eyes to shine—tonight they are Missy’s brown eyes, not Scarlet’s. My hands shake until I squeeze tight my mother’s gingham dishtowel.

Mom bid me prepare Ed a room in my heart, but she didn’t let herself see the worst of his suffering, not when she set us up as man and child and closed the door—she couldn’t have looked closely and let him stay.

My mother had different concerns, and I forgive her distraction. At the far edge of her psyche, of her soul, she must have believed I could handle the difficult situation. How much I wanted to be able to handle everything and heal--

“What are you doing?” Michael calls to me, and my eyes pop open.

“Praying,” I lie.

Yearning for booze, he yanks open the freezer, laughs in perverse delight and retrieves Mom’s vodka. Sniffling all the while, he mixes a heavy-duty screwdriver in a tall plastic tumbler.

“Don’t?” I hear myself ask.

Miraculously, he sets the cup on the table, thinking better of his impulse. For multiple reasons, I drink down every drop. My panic subsides in place of dizziness.

“That cop’s going to try to pin the whole fucking thing on me and waste time on my ass, when the real guy is out there,” Michael says, replacing the liquor and slamming the freezer door. “Which I don’t care—I’m always the guy they blame—if he’d find Scarlet and we could put this to bed. But I’m the only one who knows his ass from his elbow, at the end of the day, and I got to be searching the streets. Oldest story on the books…I’m the oldest personal scapegoat--”

Pin the thing, put to bed, ass from elbow, end of the day, oldest story… How can I go so low as to analyze his string of clichés when we’re talking about a life-or-death deal? But I’m half-drunk. What can I add to help?

“I wish we could find her latest sketch book, that’ll answer everything they need to know,” I tell him, remembering Trujillo’s words. “She draws everyone in her whole life—it’s almost like they’re all waiting to be interviewed on paper.”

“I’ve turned the house upside down. It’s nowhere.”

“Maybe you should take a look again before you leave.”

“It’s not in our apartment!”

“Do you want it to be?” I ask, buzzed and ballsy.

“What are you saying?” he croaks, fresh tears skipping down his face, but he’s looking at his phone, his clock. He knows he should leave soon; I find in my belly that I want to go with him.

“Maybe Scarlet took the book with her wherever she went.”

“I was jealous of how good she could draw,” Michael tells me, lifting his face to meet mine, wiping his tears and his pink lips with a paper napkin. “It’s fucking pathetic.”

“You were proud, too,” I say. “Come on, eat up then let’s dye your hair.”

He folds one glistening triangle of grilled cheese and force-feeds himself.

As I wash his hair of his work grit, his sleeplessness and sweaty terror, and massage his warm scalp, I can sense that, like Ed, he believes I might be able to help him find his daughter. He believes I’m the chance he’s got, and I pity his luck in this life if that’s true. I also take a moment to luxuriate in his estimation of me.

After I give Michael a shave and dye his hair black, he lets me chop at it. I start in the front and the top, with his trademark curls that billow. But already I sense his impatience.

“It’s getting late,” he says.

“You can’t rush an important haircut.”

He checks himself in my hand mirror and nods.

“Good enough.”

“Right now, it’s a mullet.”

But he’s done playing beauty shop—he’s pulling off his smock; I’m brushing stray hair off his neck. And I know what he’s about to ask me.

When he says, “Come with me,” I love how gentle his voice.

“I can’t,” I whisper.

“You don’t trust me.”

How can I explain to him? I’m just beginning to remember the way that Ed and I fantasized finding his girl; I have to face the real—I have to face everything down.

Even though I couldn’t conjure her precise address, how much it cheered Ed to conspire with me and consider the quest, to know I believed she dwelled close by. Likewise, how much it troubled me the sense we ought to leave her alone.

Mom failed to see Ed’s disease; it’s true she may well have overlooked Michael’s. And yet, what can I say, as he’s packing up the money I’ve invited him to borrow from the modest register, my heart quickens only because foolishly I want to travel beside him.

“Did I tell you her warmest coat’s missing, too?” he asks.

I shake my head, my throat tightening—my sane self means to remain home.

“Makes me think…she’s warm.”

“Goodbye, Michael,” I tell him firmly, taking a seat at the table.

As he walks to me and goes on his knees to propose God knows what, I try to appear calm.

“You can help me find her,” he says. “Please?”

“Good luck on your journey,” I say.

“Okay,” he whispers.

While Michael starts to rock me in his arms, my panic deepens, causing me to hyperventilate, but only until I realize Michael has pulled his handgun and is tracing it against my ribs.

“Trujillo said you could help find her,” he whispers.

My breath flows perfectly.

“He did? He said that?”

“I apologize for the pistol, but I need you to come with.” Michael tries to smile good-naturedly, though he’s not feeling happy. “Look. You can bring your cat.”

Evidently, to be held at gunpoint is all I needed in the way of a relaxation exercise. Now that I have no other choice, I get to my feet and scoot Bob Barker into his carrier. I’m efficiency in action as I pack peroxide for changing my hair, fresh clothes, canned and dry cat food, wheat bread and a jar of peanut butter.

Michael leads me out the door into the wicked cold, nudges me inside the passenger seat of his truck, and buckles me up with the advice not to freak out.

“Go back and leave some dry for the stray cats I feed on the porch?”

“Okay,” he says, surprised at my nonchalance—double-checking my expression for authenticity. “But give me your cell. And stay put.”

As we drive away, Bob Barker whinnying in regret, I spy Heather leaving the house again in this icy weather, the hem of Mom’s red dress peeping from beneath her coat, signaling my biggest mistake yet. Or was it?

I’ve made many.

As Ed and I wondered aloud which school Missy attended, he revealed to me in a moment of weakness, “She could be dead for all I know; her mother took her from me during the night,” and I promised him straightaway, because I felt I could, “She’s alive and well, and thinking pleasant thoughts of you. Missy knows you’d never hurt her.” Ed kissed my cheek and lingered, hiding, so I couldn’t glimpse his hope.

I’ve been stone mute since we left the house. Michael’s quiet, too, his eyes stuck to the road, like we might come up on his kid walking it, her hair lit up like a flame.

The dark leafless trees on either side of the highway remind me of skeletons standing in an eternal line.

The truck is cold; my nose is running.

I imagine a dark figure standing in wait in our yard, lining his form up with the tree for camouflage, but I can’t say this happened. I can’t see what went down the hour Scarlet disappeared from her room. The man I envision is a shadow; could be any man.

Some vicious voice inside my head asks me now if Michael’s troubles might well be identical to Ed’s, and insists Mom wanted to see me suffer. It’s probably my hunger and exhaustion talking.

“Shut up,” I tell myself.

“Are you talking to me now?” Michael says. “I’ll shut up--”

“But can I turn on the radio?” he adds.

I nod my head, eager for human noise.

He hunts for Scarlet news but there’s none, so he lands on a Beastie Boys tune.

I’m not insane; I realize I’ve been forced against my verbal will into a vehicle, but as Michael drives faster and the heater hums to life, I also recognize his hope bloom brightly.

“What color will you change your hair?” he asks me a few miles later.

“Blond,” I blurt—blowing my nose into a Kleenex he’s pulled from the glove.

It’s true, I haven’t met Michael’s worst self, not yet, but I believe Scarlet’s out there somewhere, warm in her winter coat but frightened to her bones, waiting to be found by her father—that’s why I’m here; that’s why I’ve opened my mouth to speak.

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