The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets - By Kathleen Alcott Page 0,17

smell was overwhelming. One sharp glance from my father let me know I was not to let the slightest acknowledgment of this so much as breeze across my face.

He looked at me, but not my father, with his down-turned and watery eyes.

“Come in … please,” he said, with a slowness and thickness that sounded more like a muted foghorn than words. He shuffled in, gestured to a futon with sun-faded cushions so thoroughly defaced with cat scratches that the foam showed through more often than not, and sat himself in an orange plastic chair that was very clearly once the property of a junior high school classroom. The only other objects in the living room were a television, on top of it a bunch of little white flowers in a novelty plastic cup bearing a faded endorsement for a children’s movie, and another school chair, but this one of dark blue. Tacked on the wall was a very old wedding photograph. The two people in the picture—presumably his parents—had their eyes slightly off center, and I tried to fixate on anything but that, the thought of him being a child once too much to bear.

“Ida?” My father asked. “Do you have something to say to Mr. Mortensen?”

The same hot tears began to stroll down my face. Tasting the warm salt in my mouth, I pushed my tongue against the roof of my mouth, willing the sibilant word I was here in this awful-smelling, sad excuse for a room to say.

“I’m suh, suh, sorry,” I sobbed. “I wanted … I just wanted … her to be back.”

The man gave me the look he probably received all day long, the look that says: I pity you, but not quite enough to take the time to understand you. He raised one hand, palm upward, and let it drop. He closed his eyes as if to make the vision of the lanky, crying girl go away. It was more than likely he wanted to share four walls with me as little as I wanted to share them with him. Neither the man nor I had the words for that moment, but my father did.

“Mr. Mortensen, I’ve explained the very serious consequences of her actions to my daughter, and she is, as you can see, extremely remorseful. I can’t imagine what you must have gone through, and can only apologize again for the nightmare that was brought into your home.”

The man, again, flipped his hand up in a gesture that could imply both receiving and offering. He nodded weakly, brought a remote from his pocket, and turned on the television. It was a signal as good as any, and we left.

Two weeks later, the case was solved—though “solved” seems the wrong word for it. (Were it solved, the girl would have been back in the neighborhood, all the photographs and votive candles would be taken off her porch, and our parents would not think twice if we were not home exactly within the ten minutes it took to return from school.) Though what all the parents wanted was for a broad-shouldered, fiercely virtuous detective type to come across a hidden clue that snapped all pieces together and led to the kidnapper, that was not what happened. There was no hero. Instead, a man with a criminal record that spanned years simply came forward and confessed. He had strangled Anna with a piece of yellow cloth, he said, and would lead them to her grave. The body had decayed for two months, but the blue-and-white-striped flannel pajamas Anna had been wearing served as instant identification. In the photograph that graced the front pages of all the newspapers, taken in the courtroom after the man was sentenced to death, he is smiling.

Though on paper I had only given local animal rights activists a cause to unite around briefly and community members an unpleasant aftertaste to gossip about, it seemed to Jackson that I had at least done something about the missing girl, and I think this is how he avoided the issue of my using what he may or may not have said in his sleep as a reason to go ruining the life of some poor disabled guy with a repulsive amount of cats—although years later, it showed up in his memory as an event altogether wrong, something he felt embarrassed to be even slightly connected to. What it did was make him think about consciousness in a way that children are hardly prompted to do.