Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 136, No. 5. Whole No. 831, November 2010

Jennifer Itell earned an MFA from Emerson College in Boston before moving to Denver, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Denver and the Lighthouse Writers Workshop. Her short stories have appeared in a variety of publications, including Redbook, Story Quarterly, Cimarron Review, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She is currently at work on a novel, for which she received a 2006 Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute fellowship. This is her EQMM debut, and a promising one it is!

1.

The old woman followed them home from the grocery store. Gwen felt a slight thrill at realizing she was being pursued. She was headed home to an afternoon of hobbling on her knees after the baby, who wanted to walk all the time now but needed assistance — and here was something different.

A stalker?

Well, that was likely the fiction writer in her making leaps. Stalker was a strong word for the elderly German woman who’d taken to her son in the produce aisle. “Oh, look! He has an avocado!” she’d chirped in a pleasing accent, and Gwen had turned to see that Max had stretched from the grocery cart, lifted an avocado, and bitten right through the skin with his two teeth. He wouldn’t relinquish it, so Gwen had let him gnaw on the two-dollar piece of fruit while she chatted with the woman about babies and miracle spot removers and such. They talked until Max began to wriggle and squeal and the avocado slipped from his hands to the floor, and Gwen sensed an imminent tantrum. Then she said she needed to get going, and the woman — Louise, she’d said her name was — dug through a pocket in a worn overcoat, came up with a pad and pencil stub, and wrote out her number for Gwen. “In case you want that recipe I mentioned,” she explained. She tickled the baby’s avocado-smeared chin before stepping aside so Gwen could get on with her shopping.

Gwen had enjoyed their conversation, but afterward she felt overly aware of Louise’s presence in the store as she moved up and down the aisles, and she purposefully kept her eyes on her list, focused now, determined to get what she needed and get Max home. While at the checkout counter, Gwen saw Louise near the door, rearranging some of the items in her bags, and she got the sense that the old woman was lingering. Maybe she craved another baby fix. She had thirteen grandkids, she’d told Gwen, but none of them lived nearby. Maybe this should have struck Gwen as odd — none of them? — but it didn’t.

She avoided Louise on the way out, using the door at the far end of the store, for fear of another lengthy interaction. She couldn’t risk running into naptime and having Max fall asleep in the car instead of in his crib at home. She needed to work on an ending. She was a freelance end-writer. She wrote the last chapters for mid-list novelists who got writer’s block or lost their oomph in the final weeks before their manuscripts were due. For each project she took on, she drafted a half-dozen possible endings, then mulled them over until one began to stand apart in her mind, then she molded that one until it seemed the only possible conclusion the story could have reached, as if the characters had been heading there, however blindly, since page one. It was a strange profession, and one Gwen couldn’t talk about thanks to a menacing clause in her contracts, but it suited her well in that she could work from home. At least, that was the case before Max was born. Now his naps allowed her only enough time to take a quick shower, make a cup of tea, and turn on her computer. That was usually how it went. He’d let out a piercing screech just as her fingers touched down on the keyboard.

Louise was gone by the time Gwen finished loading Max and the groceries into the car. Also, it had started to snow. Light flakes flitted around while Gwen scanned the parking lot, feeling relieved and also a little guilty when she didn’t see Louise.

And then there she was again, pulling out of the parking lot behind Gwen in an old VW bus. A coincidence, Gwen thought, until the Volkswagen took a right at the golf course, then a left into the suburban neighborhood in which Gwen lived, and then another left onto her cul-de-sac. Gwen pulled into her driveway; Louise parked by the mailbox.

While Gwen busied herself getting Max out of his car seat, she tried to guess at what Louise might want. Now the situation felt awkward and inconvenient more than thrilling. For a moment, it seemed Louise wouldn’t get out of her bus, and Gwen thought she’d simply pretend she hadn’t seen the boxy rust-orange relic parked at the end of her drive; she’d head inside and come back for the groceries later. It was cold enough out that they wouldn’t spoil. Then the driver’s door of the Volkswagen opened.

“The recipe!” Louise shouted, rushing up the driveway toward them. “I remembered the ingredient I couldn’t think of before!”

Gwen and Max circled the kitchen island, round and round. Gwen had on her husband’s old kneepads, which she’d found in the garage not long after Max took to his feet, and so she thunked on the hardwood as she went. Max held tight to Gwen’s index fingers and now and then paused in his bowlegged swagger to point and say dat-dat-dat at Louise, who sat at the table sipping the tea Gwen had fixed over an hour ago.

In the grocery store, Louise had done most of the talking — a lonely old grandmother needing an ear. But now the roles had somehow reversed and Gwen, who didn’t usually open up to strangers, found herself going on about how hard it was to keep up with her job (copywriter, she’d told Louise) and look after the baby, especially since Max was such a horrible napper, it was like he was broken or something, missing an Off button (he looked up at her when she said this and gave her a razz), and then there was her husband, who always worked late, and who probably wouldn’t understand if she tried to talk to him about it, this tug-of-war going on inside her between her fierce love for their son and a desire to return to a time when she could sit for hours in front of the computer letting her mind drift this way and that—

Mentioning her husband made Gwen pause to wonder what he would say to the fact that she’d invited Louise into their home. She could hear how the conversation would go:

You did what? A total stranger?

Not a total stranger. We talked in the produce aisle. For like twenty minutes. She’s perfectly harmless. She’s seventy-something years old. She has thirteen grandkids.

How does that make her harmless? Gwen, you need to look out for our son. It’s your job right now to keep him safe.

I am keeping him safe.

It doesn’t sound like it.

I am. But you don’t know how hard it is taking care of him for twelve, thirteen, fourteen hours a day…

“I know how hard it is,” Louise said. “I remember.”

Had Gwen been ranting aloud again? Maybe.

“You need help,” Louise continued. “A babysitter. Do you have a sitter?”

“Yes,” Gwen said. “She comes a couple afternoons a week, but Max hasn’t warmed to her yet. He screams and screams.”

The babysitter was a young, pretty neighborhood girl whom Gwen had hired so she could keep up with her work and also so that maybe now and then, maybe one afternoon a week, she’d have time for her own writing. It was terrible and embarrassing to have reached the point she was at in her career — churning out surprising yet inevitable endings on the sly — and here she hadn’t finished (let alone started!) a publishable story of her own in years. Before Max was born she’d spent too long pursuing a novel draft down a dead end, and since his birth, there’d been no time. Even when she managed to steal a few hours, she couldn’t think of what to write about anymore. She was out of ideas. She’d sit at her desk, stare at a blank screen, and listen to Max’s angry wails reverberate throughout the house. She essentially paid the babysitter so she could sit in her basement office and feel like a neglectful mother and a professional failure, one hanging onto the tail of a decade-old accomplishment — a short story published in a highly respected literary magazine and then selected for publication in The Best American Short Stories series. The series’ guest editor, L— M—, an author Gwen had always admired, had touted her as a young talent worth keeping an eye on, and yet she’d slipped from view and become, of all things, a ghost writer.

Max let go of her fingers and ventured on his own toward the cabinets. Gwen stood and stretched, then started unloading the dishwasher. Max moved along the cabinet faces until he reached the dishwasher too; he rattled the plastic silverware holders. “Are you helping? Thank you!” Gwen said. She handed him a spoon.

To Louise, she said, “I don’t mean to complain. Sometimes I complain and then I fear something bad will happen to Max to make me pay for being ungrateful. I realize how lucky I am. I have friends my age who’ve had so much trouble conceiving, and Dan and I decide to try for a baby and just like that — here he is. Perfect. Well, except for the whole napping thing, but otherwise, what more could I ask for? I have no right to ever wish for anything else.”

“Nonsense,” Louise said. “You can wish for whatever you want. No harm can come from wishing.”

Gwen looked at the clock and saw it was already four — how had two hours passed? — and then she looked out the window above the sink at the snow, which was coming down at an angle now, in sleety flakes. The morning’s weather hadn’t predicted this — possible afternoon showers, the weatherman had said — but here was an ice storm with no sign of stopping. The sight of it made Gwen shiver. She looked back at Louise, who seemed perfectly at ease at the kitchen table, and in her own age-spotted skin. Her long grey hair was gathered loosely at her neck in a faux tortoiseshell barrette. She wore an oversized, shaggy brown sweater that engulfed her solid frame and looked like something one might wrap up in to go to sleep. Gwen had this thought about Louise’s sweater and then immediately realized she was exhausted. It hit her with a swoop, as if she’d opened a door and let months and months of sleeplessness in.

“Oh,” said Louise, pointing. She started to rise from her seat. “Maybe you don’t want him to play with that.”

Gwen looked down to see that Max had traded his spoon for a knife and was about to put the pointy end in his mouth.

“Oh shit!” Gwen said, grabbing the knife away and causing Max to cry. “What’s wrong with me?”

Then she too erupted in tears. She picked Max up and he looked at her wet face, startled. He stopped his own crying and furrowed his little baby brow.

“Silly Mommy!” Gwen said, wiping her face. “Silly sleepy me!”

Louise appeared at their side. She shut the dishwasher, and then she reached for Max, who had reached out his arms to her. Gwen had never seen him do this with anyone who wasn’t family. It was his level of comfort with Louise — first in the grocery store and again when she’d approached them in the driveway — that had caused Gwen to invite the old woman in for tea, despite the voice in her head that knew what her husband would say. Now Max snuggled into Louise’s fuzzy sweater, which was exactly what Gwen had felt an urge to do just minutes earlier.

“Go nap,” Louise said to Gwen. “You need rest.”

Gwen considered the offer. Her husband was due home at six, but the weather might hold him up, or he might end up having to stay late at the office, which would leave Gwen by herself to simultaneously fix dinner and deal with Max during his crankiest hours. Would it be insane to leave Max with Louise while she lay down for a short nap so she could revive herself? What could happen? She didn’t bother (though later she would) to think through possible outcomes as she did with all the endings she wrote, because her mind landed on what she thought was the inevitable one: She’d take a short nap, then wake in plenty of time to usher Louise out of the house before Dan came home.

2.

She awoke with a start!

Years ago, when Gwen was in school for creative writing, she’d been told never to have a character awake with a start — apparently it had become cliché — yet here she was awaking with one. She wasn’t sure what had caused her panic. It was dark in the room and out the bedroom window she could see snow falling steadily in the bullhorn of light from the streetlamp. Six o’clock. The house was perfectly quiet. Wrongly quiet. Max blossomed in her mind, the way he did whenever she surfaced from sleep. His plump face, his drool-drenched chin and mischievous open-mouthed smile. To Gwen, the smile suggested they shared a joke — a joke they only half got and would both soon forget. Her perfect child. Why would she ever wish for anything else? She’d fallen asleep wishing for just one more story idea, and the thread of something had flitted through her mind — an old woman, green-gray eyes, an avocado dropping to the floor and disappearing into a dark, cobwebbed corner — but then the images dispersed, falling away from the flimsy thread that held them together — whose green eyes? what neglected corner? — and she’d drifted into what felt like a drugged sleep, and now two hours later—

Wrongly quiet.

Her heart pitter-pattered in her chest like tiny feet taking flight.

Her perfect child — where was he?

3.

She found them in the playroom in the basement curled kidney-like in a bean-bag chair, asleep. “Oh!” Gwen shouted, and relief washed over her, a wave of gratitude like the time she remembered she’d left the bedroom door open and ran into the hallway just as Max reached the top of the staircase. A few more seconds and he would have tumbled down. Thank goodness she’d been spared that mishap. She would be a better mom, she’d sworn that afternoon, and she swore it again now. A more attentive mom.

Louise stirred, then opened her eyes and gave Gwen a sleepy smile. “I must have drifted off too,” she said.

Gwen held her arms out for Max and the baby woke during the transfer. He smiled groggily at Gwen and reached to pinch her nose. “How long has he been asleep?” Gwen asked.

“Oh, close to two hours, I think.” Louise pushed herself up from the beanbag. “He’s a good sleeper.”

This was ridiculously far from the truth. Had he ever taken a two-hour nap? Maybe during those drowsy first few days of life, but since then it had been half-hour to forty-minute naps at most. Gwen put a hand to Max’s forehead to see if he felt hot, but he didn’t. “His bedtime’s in an hour,” she said, aware of the accusing edge to her voice. “He’ll never fall asleep now.”

“He will,” Louise assured her. “When it comes to babies, sleep begets sleep. Tell me, does he usually wake from his naps in a good mood or a sour one?”

“Sour,” Gwen admitted. She pictured Max’s face all scrunched and puckered, as if in reaction to a lemon sucker.

“Well, he’s not sleeping enough, then. Babies should always wake happy.”

Max seemed happy now, if a little sleep drunk. Gwen knew she should be grateful — Louise clearly had some magic touch when it came to babies — yet she felt irritated, as if Louise had stolen some intangible thing from her, and she also feared her husband would arrive home at any moment. How would she explain Louise?

Louise must have sensed what was worrying her because she gathered her things — her worn overcoat and a knitted handbag — and said in a breezy voice that she should be going, that it was likely time for Gwen to fix dinner and she didn’t want to be in the way. Gwen and Max walked her to the front door. They stood for a moment looking out at the snow as it pelted the front stoop. Several inches had already piled up on Louise’s bus. Gwen felt suddenly sheepish. This woman had done her a kindness and she was sending her out into harrowing weather without offering her dinner or suggesting she stay until the storm let up. She was torn between making this kind of offer and her urgent desire to get Louise out the door. She wanted her gone, and not just because her husband was due home. It had to do with the near-miss feeling she’d experienced when she found Louise and Max sleeping in the basement. She wanted to forget the afternoon and her lapse in judgment; she wanted Louise far away.

“Well,” Louise said, “I enjoyed our visit. And this little one — he loves me!”

She crooked a finger under Max’s chin and he gave her a happy, dopey look. She turned to Gwen. “You have my number. Maybe you’ll call sometime and we can meet in the park.”

“Yes, that would be nice,” Gwen said, though she didn’t intend to call.

Then Louise was off. Gwen stood with Max in her arms watching the tail-lights of the Volkswagen as it disappeared down the street; she wondered if the old woman had very far to drive and remembered that Louise had failed to write down the recipe that had been her pretense for following them home in the first place.

It’s just as well, she thought.

She felt relieved as she shut the door against the cold. A rush of warmth from a nearby heat vent and Max’s arms around her neck made her aware for a moment, before it was time to turn her thoughts to dinner, that she had absolutely all she needed.

(Postscript)

The thing about near-misses is that you forget. Relief fades; you get lazy. The door that leads out to the top of the stairs: You swear you won’t leave it open again, but you do.

4.

So Gwen had taken a nap that snowy afternoon and woken in time to rush Louise out the door before Dan came home; she’d felt as if she’d gotten away with something; she’d even had a small moment of recognition about the state of her life. A fitting ending for a slightly strange day. Both she and Max had come out unscathed and well-rested, and as a result, a series of things happened: First, Max played quietly while Gwen fixed a dinner that wasn’t just slapped-together sandwiches. Then Dan came home and noticed Gwen’s relaxed mood and commented on it, and Gwen told him about her day, though not the whole of it — she left Louise back at the grocery store. She and Dan conversed all the way through dinner without the underlying tension that seemed always in the room with them lately, inching up like water in a flooding basement, threatening to corrode everything from the bottom up. All that water gone, as if someone had poked a little drain hole or turned a relief valve in their marriage. Then Max began to rub his eyes in his highchair and they carried him up to bed together and watched him drift off to sleep without a fuss just as Louise had predicted, sleep begetting sleep.

It had been an exceptionally good evening, which is why, by the following afternoon, with Max writhing in naptime protest in her arms, Gwen forgot all about the near-miss feeling of the day before. Why had she been in such a hurry to get Louise out the door? The answer escaped her as she looked out the nursery window and saw the rust-colored bus parked once again in front of the mailbox.

“I don’t understand,” Louise said. “How do you decide how a story should end?”

“Oh, it’s not as hard as you might think.”

They were seated at the kitchen table. Gwen had disregarded the menacing clause and had told Louise about her job. She’d felt in conspiracy with Louise for over a week now, and so this breach of contract didn’t seem too terribly wrong.

“A story can end one way, or it can end another. I mean, if you view life as a series of small decisions — and every day we’re faced with hundreds of them, right? — then every story has countless possible endings.”

“Or only one,” Louise said as she bopped Max up and down on her lap, “if you believe in fate.”

“Well, I suppose,” Gwen said. “Of course I have to go with the one that seems the most satisfactory, or fated, based on what came before. And it can’t be too shocking or too tragic or too happily-ever-after. I guess it’s a little tricky in that you don’t want readers to see an ending coming, yet you want them to get there and say, Of course!”

“I see. But how do you make them sound right, your endings for other writers?”

Gwen stood to clear the dishes; they’d eaten large slabs of a coffee cake that Louise had baked that morning in Gwen’s kitchen.

“I happen to have an ear for voices,” Gwen explained with her back turned. It was a skill, the way she could step into other people’s stories, but not one she was too proud of, because this ability of hers was tied too closely to one of her deepest fears: that she didn’t have her own voice, that each of her belabored sentences was shaped out of latent memories of sentences she’d read. “I can read two-thirds of a manuscript and take it from there. It’s kind of like the way some actors have a knack for impersonating.”

“You’re very talented,” Louise said.

“Or easily influenced,” Gwen countered.

They hadn’t talked about it in any official capacity, but the old woman had become Max’s nanny. Gwen wasn’t paying her. She felt as if she should be, but the subject of money hadn’t come up and Gwen didn’t want to broach the topic for fear of possibly insulting Louise and because it would mean admitting to just how much Louise was doing for her, and she wasn’t ready for that admission. Also, she and Dan couldn’t afford a nanny, and on top of that, she’d yet to tell Dan about her unspoken arrangement with Louise. Louise arrived each morning soon after Dan left for work and stayed into the early evening. Somehow she sensed when it was time to go, because she was always gone — though sometimes only by minutes — by the time Dan returned.

Gwen’s days were a breeze now. Louise played with Max after breakfast while Gwen worked on her endings. In her basement office she could hear Max’s quick steps and the thunks of Louise plodding after him in Dan’s kneepads. At lunchtime Gwen reemerged and the three of them ate together. Some days, Gwen would give Louise the cash intended for the young babysitter, whom Gwen had fired, and Louise would go grocery shopping. She’d return with ingredients for complex recipes that she patiently taught Gwen how to make. Around three each afternoon, Louise and Max retired to the playroom for a long nap on the beanbags, and Gwen worked on her own writing.

She’d actually begun a story. It was about recent events: an old woman following a young mother and son home from the grocery store and nudging her way into their lives. It had a fairytale-esque quality to it, Gwen thought, though without the dark edge.

So things were good. Of course, there was some unease attached to this new arrangement. Who was Louise? Where did she return to each evening? How did she spend her weekends? Gwen was curious, but whenever she asked Louise about her life away from them Louise would somehow manage to avoid talking about her current situation and would instead drift into stories about her childhood in Germany. Only later would Gwen realize that Louise hadn’t answered whatever question she’d asked. Once, when Louise and Max were napping, Gwen went out for the mail and noticed a gap in one of the flowery, sun-faded curtains that covered the Volkswagen’s windows. She stood on her toes for a peek and saw that the bus had been stripped of its back seats. She saw a sleeping bag and a semi-inflated air mattress, a large black trash bag with clothes spilling out in a jumble, a stack of books, a discarded apple core. A sour taste came to Gwen’s throat. She stepped away. The mess in the bus didn’t fit with her picture of Louise, who was always wiping the counters in Gwen’s kitchen and picking up after Max. The bag of clothes? Maybe she’d been meaning to get to a Laundromat. The mattress? Maybe she was a camper. She was very hippie-ish, very earthy. Maybe, during the warmer months, she liked to sleep under the stars.

Gwen didn’t look in the bus again. Life was going too well to question the things that were a little off about Louise. The tug of dissatisfaction that had been pulling at Gwen in the months before meeting Louise had disappeared. She and Dan were getting along again. She wasn’t tired and grumpy at the end of each day, and he no longer had to work so hard to keep things harmonious. He was taken aback the first time she served spaetzle for dinner, but he was also thankful for the home-cooked meal. He started coming home from work at a more reasonable hour, and they spent their evenings playing with Max, who, once he pulled himself from the stupor of his afternoon nap, was always in a delightful mood. He was learning a few words now (Daddy and uh-oh!), and they loved to listen to his guttural babble. “He sounds German, doesn’t he?” Dan said one night and Gwen, caught off guard, had laughed.

She finished her story.

She composed a cover letter and sent it off with high hopes to the editor she’d worked with years ago at the highly respected literary magazine. She sent it snail-mail, the old-fashioned way, and she felt lighter than she had in years when she dropped it in the mail.

“Why aren’t you writing today?” Louise asked.

She’d come up from the playroom to find Gwen at the kitchen table, blowing on a lukewarm cup of tea. Max was still asleep in the basement, in his playpen.

“Just taking a break,” Gwen said.

She’d forgotten how debilitating rejection letters could be. She’d received all types — tiny-slip-of-paper rejections, try us again, if only you’d done x y or z, love it but we ran out of money rejections — and she’d never been able to dismiss them lightly. Once she’d realized that they were part of the whole writing/publishing world, she’d become inhibited, then stalled.

The letter lay before her on the table. Louise bent forward to read it. “Oh, I see. I hadn’t realized you’d written a story.”

“It was nothing,” Gwen said. “Kind of silly, really. Now that I think about it.”

She told Louise how the story had been sparked by their meeting in the grocery store, but it lacked tension.

“Tension? Who wants tension? What’s wrong with a happy story? There should be more happy stories in the world.”

“In the world, maybe. But happy stories don’t make for a great read.”

Louise lowered herself into the chair across from Gwen. “So you need more trouble in your life, is that it?”

“No.” Gwen gave a half-hearted laugh. She picked up the letter and creased it down the middle. She thought she heard Max squeal, and she stood to go get him, glad for the distraction.

“It’s just the neighbor’s cat,” Louise said. “He’ll sleep another forty minutes.”

“Oh.” Gwen pulled at the skin of her neck, feeling suddenly annoyed. It irked her that Louise had come to know her son well enough to predict his naps to the minute. She wished Max would wake early; she missed him now that he was doing all this sleeping. She felt like taking back what Louise had taken from her — this intimate knowledge of her son. Or, rather, what she’d willingly given.

“Your story,” Louise said, “can you add some trouble and send it again?”

“No.” Gwen stood and took the letter to the recycling bin. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It’s just a story.”

“But that’s not true,” Louise said. “I can see that it matters deeply.”

That night, the baby was fussy. Gwen had gotten her wish earlier in the day in that Max had woken early from his nap, but it turned him into a little crab apple and he fought going to bed. Or maybe Gwen’s own bad mood, brought on by the rejection letter and the fact that Dan had had to stay late at work, had infected him. She tried to shrug off her sadness and keep focused on cheering up Max. “It doesn’t matter!” she chattered in a sing-song voice as she bathed him. “It doesn’t matter deeply!”

Then the baby got sick. He threw up in the tub. It wasn’t much, but what came out of him was thick and pink and had a medicinal cherry smell that made Gwen wonder, for the first time, how exactly Louise was getting her son to sleep. What secret ingredient had she been slipping him? What magic elixir? And how had Gwen refused to see?

5.

She didn’t wake with a start but with a sickly feeling brewing inside her, as if she’d eaten something spoiled and now that spoiled thing was flourishing. She’d taken a nap; she hadn’t meant to, but she’d fallen asleep reading. The first two-thirds of someone else’s manuscript lay spread on the comforter. She wasn’t sure how she knew something was amiss, but she knew. The house was quiet. That morning, she’d told Louise that they couldn’t spend their days together anymore, that she needed to get back in sync with Max on her own. Louise had looked stricken; she’d winced and reached for the baby, who was snug on Gwen’s hip, but then she’d let her arms fall. “You’re right,” she’d said. “It’s what’s best for you and Max. I understand.”

They’d gone out to the stoop to see her off. A month had passed since Louise first entered their lives and Gwen couldn’t help but feel a little sorry to see her go. There’d been some pink vomit, but Louise, when Gwen questioned her, said she’d given the baby some of the infant Tylenol Gwen kept in the medicine cabinet because his teeth seemed to be bothering him. She’d been beside herself to hear it had made him sick, and this made Gwen feel bad for suspecting something else. Still, the incident pushed Gwen into acknowledging that it was time to part ways.

When she woke from her nap, she remembered the last thing Louise had said to her. Before driving off, she’d rolled down the driver’s-side window of her bus and called out, in a perfectly cheery voice, “I hope you get your trouble!” When Gwen had looked at her quizzically, she’d said, “For your story! I hope it comes to you.”

Wrongly quiet.

The baby wasn’t in his crib where she’d left him. She searched the house from top to bottom; he wasn’t anywhere. The front door was closed but unlocked and Gwen couldn’t recall if she’d remembered to turn the bolt before taking Max up for his nap. In all likelihood, she hadn’t. She circled the house again and ended in the basement in the playroom trying to quell a dizzying rise of panic. Louise must have returned, she told herself. She’d taken Max somewhere, to the park, maybe, but they’d be back. She stared at the beanbags where Louise had often napped with her son. Her perfect child. There was no sign that Louise had ever been there. Not even a stray gray hair.

Something erupted inside Gwen, a geyser of fear. She thought for a moment that it had lifted her up, that she was floating, but then she looked down and saw that her feet were still miraculously on the ground. She ran to the kitchen and called her husband at work. She told him to come home; told him she couldn’t find the baby.

“What are you talking about?” he asked. “Did you call the police?”

“No,” Gwen said. “He’s with the nanny. I know he is.”

It was quiet on the other end of the line. Gwen tugged at her neck as if trying to free her voicebox. The useless thing. Of course she should have called the police before calling her husband. How had she not thought of that? It didn’t matter. Louise would evade the police as she’d evaded Gwen, revealing nothing about who she really was or where she might be headed.

Dan said, “Gwen? Honey? We don’t have a nanny. Do you mean the sitter?”

“I fired the sitter. Weeks ago.”

“Honey?”

“She’s driving a bus. A rust-colored VW bus. He’s with her.”

“I’ll be right home,” Dan said. “Stay there.”

He didn’t say It’s your job to keep him safe, though Gwen heard it in her head. She hung up the phone, remembered the scrap of paper Louise had handed her the day they met. She found her purse, dumped the contents onto the floor, and rooted through the mess until she found Louise’s number. She dialed. An upbeat female voice told her she’d reached a day spa.

Gwen asked for Louise. “Don’t know any Louise,” the woman said.

Gwen read the number on the paper aloud and the woman said, “Right number, no Louise.”

“No,” Gwen said firmly.

“What do you mean, no? Honey, you sound like you could use a massage. Would you like to set something up?”

The phone slipped from Gwen’s hand. The kitchen tilted sideways. The world was un-righting itself. This isn’t happening, Gwen thought. This isn’t right.

(Afterthought)

There are countless possible endings. Happy endings and sad endings. Abrupt endings that leave readers wanting more. Anti-climactic endings in which a character’s been given an opportunity for change or redemption, but she turns and walks away. Near-misses. Joycean epiphanies, Oprah aha!s A character experiences a moment of insight that changes her view of the world forever. Sometimes the insight comes too late. Sometimes the thing a character wanted from the start turns out to be the wrong thing; she didn’t want that after all. Be-careful-what-you-wish-for endings. You could be punished for wanting too much, for never ever being satisfied. For averting your eyes a moment too long. For making a silly mistake. For trusting a stranger. The story will end — it has to; it’s inevitable — but the punishment might not.

6.

Gwen sat in her car in the parking lot of the grocery store watching the automatic doors open and close. She was here because it was the only place she’d ever seen Louise outside of her own home, and she was hoping the old woman would reappear. She would need food for Max, and milk. If Gwen spotted her, she would follow her in, snatch Max from her arms, turn back time to the way things had been before that ill-fated meeting. She was here because she didn’t know where else to go or what else to do. She couldn’t go home, couldn’t face this particular ending that she herself had made inevitable. She’d left the house before her husband had gotten there. Surely he’d called the police by now and they were looking for Max and also her. She would sit here until the sun went down, until someone came and dragged her away.

Outside the car it was an incongruously sunny day — incongruous considering the storm that raged inside her. It was warm in the car, but Gwen knew that outside, the air was chilly. She felt as if she were in a vacuum, as if in the stale space of her car time had paused, was holding its breath. She thought of something Dan had told her the evening after her first encounter with Louise. He’d come in stomping the snow off his shoes and when she’d asked if the drive had been bad, he’d said it was the weirdest thing — the weather had been clear in the city, just a light drizzle until he’d hit the edge of their neighborhood, and then his view had gone white.

Please, Gwen thought, I’ll do anything, give you anything, just bring him back.

A knock on the window broke the vacuum’s seal. A policeman stood looking down at her. A young man; someone’s grown son. “Ma’am?” he said in a gentle voice. “Ms. Smith? Are you all right? One of the grocery clerks said you’ve been out here for some time. She called the station. Your husband called too. He’s worried. He said to tell you Max is fine.”

7.

She found them in the basement, curled on a beanbag. Max was sleeping and Dan had a protective arm around him. When Gwen came in he untangled himself from the baby and stood and put his arms around her. “Are you all right?” he whispered.

She nodded. “What about Max? Where did you find him?”

“Here. We have a little escape artist, it seems. He must have gotten out of his crib and made his way down the stairs on his own. It’s a miracle he didn’t hurt himself. I guess it’s time to get some gates up, huh?”

Gwen shook her head; she started to say that it wasn’t true, the baby hadn’t gotten from the top floor to the basement on his own — but then she stopped. She sunk to her knees and pressed her cheek to Max’s forehead. She kissed his nose. He sighed, eyes still shut, and reached up to pat her face with a pudgy hand. Such a tiny, delicate, perfect being.

“Honey,” Dan said, his voice soft. “I’m worried about you.”

“I’m all right. I got a little lost. A little confused. I let my priorities get out of whack. But I’m okay.”

“I read the letter,” Dan said. “About your story. I saw it when I was taking the recycling out this morning. I’m sorry they didn’t want it. I know how those letters can get to you.”

“It’s no big deal. Not after this scare with Max.”

“It’s been some day, huh? Your phone call terrified me. You weren’t making any sense. The nanny? The bus? What were you talking about?”

“Not now,” Gwen said. “I’ll explain some other time.”

Dan accepted this with a sigh. He said, “When I was driving home all I could think was, what if he’s really not there? What if, just like that, my world’s gone? I offered up one of those bartering prayers: Take anything else, but not my son. Then I got home and he was here and you weren’t. I didn’t know what to think. I hadn’t meant to barter you.”

“I did the same thing. Hopefully it doesn’t work that way, though.”

“Hopefully not.”

“But maybe sometimes it does.”

Dan lowered himself onto one of the beanbags again and the three of them sat together, a stunned family. “Maybe there’s a story in this,” Dan said after a while.

“No, I don’t think so,” Gwen said, even though she knew that a story was exactly what Louise had intended to give her — a parting gift of sorts. “No,” she said again. “I don’t want it.”