The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets - By Kathleen Alcott Page 0,14

and gave us ten minutes to change and brush our teeth and turn off the lights. From outside came the whoops of teenagers, the sudden acceleration of cars driven by those with new licenses, the wee-woos of a mechanical ghost slowly losing batteries.

The sources of light in their bedroom after dark were of a different frequency: the glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling, the luminous crack from beneath the door that changed in color while Julia watched television, the modest glow of the fish tank, the red of the numbers from the astronaut clock—they were known by few and as such I cherished them as secrets, like the little sighs that issued from James like exclamations as he drifted off : mm, mmph, Mmph!

I couldn’t sleep and whispered to Jackson to see if he was awake. I twisted my body toward him, I dared myself to ask the question that hung over the flowers and cards on the porch of the woman with the lost daughter:

“Where do you think she is?”

“I …” Jackson stuttered with the thought of I, with the thought of an authoritative statement; as children we were rarely asked questions of this gravity.

“I don’t know. Maybe he let her go somewhere. Or maybe he wanted someone to come with him somewhere, and they’re almost there, and then he’ll let her go.”

“Like where?” I tried to imagine Anna and a faceless man in a car, listening to the radio loud and stopping at gas stations so she could get whatever snacks she wanted, but I couldn’t shake my vision of Anna with all the pieces missing, like what is left after the cookies have been cut out of the dough.

“Mexico?” I suggested. I had always liked the sound of Spanish being spoken by the Mexicans who waited around at gas stations for work: it seemed happy, the way it moved like mountains, rolling. There was a postcard from Puerto Vallarta on our fridge that I had memorized, and I imagined Anna in one of the beach lounge chairs, smiling that smile, sending little squirts of lemonade through the gap in her teeth or drawing a picture of the ocean: the reporters sometimes mentioned on television that art and music had been her favorite classes.

“Mexico. Yeah. Like maybe he was gonna go with his friend? But his friend couldn’t? So he took Anna, only it’s long-distance and she doesn’t have the money to call.”

Jackson rolled over and I looked, again, at the neon stars we had stuck to his ceiling, considering Mexico. I liked the idea that she was just on vacation, but why her? It had to be someone who knew her, who admired, like I did, the way her skin stayed brown and friendly all year, the way she tilted her head when she listened. Who maybe had seen her play piano at the band recital, like I had, and watched the way she bent her head way low and sideways, her curls falling even longer while her fingers leaped.

It wasn’t long before James started murmuring, and as always, I was reassured by the sounds. They meant that people were still people when they slept, that these hours void of conscious words and sunlight were still part of the story, if perhaps in parentheses. And what fit between parentheses, I learned later, were often the parts that provided fuller meaning, that sought to include what was overlooked.

“The … the …” James struggled from his sleep, clearly on the verge of a pressing communication.

“THE COWBOY SKITTLES.”

He lashed his head emphatically against the pillow, then reassumed inertia. I waited for Jackson’s reply, but it never came. I cast my head to the astronaut clock, which read 9:17, and watched as the digital numbers changed, the backward and upside-down L becoming two boxes that signified 8. At 9:20, James let out a sharp breath.

“All night,” Jackson said. “Gold.”

“Nightgold,” agreed James, his lips moving over his teeth between words. “All of it.”

The clarity faded. The sleeping words deteriorated into syllables, and the syllables were like marbles scattering, rolling away from the others only to collide again as if happening into the same groove on their shared surface. The effect was that of someone imitating a language he didn’t speak: it was nonsense that was grouped, punctuated.

“Ah za kneeth.” It sounded as if James was pleading.

“Kerr pree, puh hmz.”

“Miss-ing,” sighed Jackson. “Missing missing.”

“Missing,” echoed James.

“Girl not lady.”

“No-nowhere girl.”

Seeing my opportunity, I butted in.

“Anna?” I asked. And then, more insistently, “Anna?”

“Anna,” they breathed