The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets - By Kathleen Alcott Page 0,16

of the mournful, elongated meows and hissing had not reached the families eating quiet dinners, and the landlord reported that the man seemed friendly enough and always paid his modest rent on time. The footage of him on the news showed him in tears, and the papers reported him as dimwitted though remorseful. The number of cats had grown rapidly, from ten to seventeen in just a few months, and he had naïvely hoped he could love and take care of all of them. By the time the number had reached forty, the situation was long out of control, but he worried what would happen if he told anyone.

There were threats of charges and a slew of highly vocal animal rights activists, but in the end the former were dropped and the latter found causes less wilted and easier to chant slogans at than the lonely, possibly mentally disabled man who swept up thirteen-year-olds’ messes.

I had never done anything to incite such a rage in my father. His anger took a subdued form that seemed to sit and percolate, wishing to avoid explosions, only outwardly expressing itself in a cupboard shut just too forcefully, a phone gripped just beyond necessity. The men in badges had come and given me a serious talking to, my father nodding in solidarity with his hands clasped between his knees. When they gave a roundabout implication that maybe I’d done this for the reward, I burst into hot, ignoble tears. They looked at each other and stopped. It was clear they’d said enough. My father shook their hands at the door and apologized again, closed the door, and laid his head, briefly, upon its frame. He took a brisk route into the kitchen, where he made a sandwich and left the ingredients sitting out. He spent the rest of the afternoon in his bedroom, and I tried to keep busy. I teased our unresponsive cat and rode my bike around the block fast and without pleasure; it became evening and my father had still not surfaced.

I wanted badly to see James and Jackson, but they were spending the weekend with Julia’s mother in a dry, flat town four hours south. I was hungry. Though I was a reasonably autonomous girl and could easily have fixed myself something to eat, I did not. I reread part of a book about a brother and sister who run away to live in a museum and fell asleep with the light and all my clothes on, missing my mother fiercely.

I woke to the smells of breakfast and wandered into the kitchen, where my father gently asked that I sit. He put before me a heaping plate—a silent apology or an assimilation of one for not seeing to my dinner the night before—of two raspberry pancakes, two strips of bacon, and an egg-in-a-basket, the yellow-white a wondrously perfect circle against the even brown of the bread. He did not speak, did not look at me, and got up twice to refill his coffee. He did laugh lightly, perhaps sadly, certainly thinking of my mother, when a strand of my hair got into the syrup without my noticing.

I devoured every last bit. I was hungry from crying, from telling a useless lie, from what the missing girl had taken with her when she left, from the realization that had grown hard and final in my sleep: that she, and it, were not coming back. When he was sure I was done, he addressed me. We were to go to that poor man’s house and I was, in no uncertain terms, to apologize. Furthermore, I was to have no more ideas about solving the mystery of Anna Martin. There were plenty of adults doing the best they could. I was to keep doing well on my tests, to ride my bike, to feel the independence and responsibility a library card afforded, to make thoughtful decisions based on my growing set of rights and wrongs, to do all the things Anna could not.

As we approached the man’s little house and crossed the yard, which was thick with unraked leaves, I wished with all my concentration that he would not be home. As if he knew this, my father informed me that he had called Mr. Mortensen ahead of time and he was expecting us.

He opened the door in a pink pullover sweatshirt that was pilled and ill fitting and scared me, somehow. Though the cats had all been taken two days before, the