say where they were going?” she asked, though she already knew the truth: she had missed them, and they were gone.
Mr. Yang shook his head again. “They don’t tell me.” He had peeked out from behind the curtains just in time to see Mia and Pearl backing carefully out of the driveway, the Rabbit piled high with bags and boxes, and driving off into the growing darkness. They had been good people, he thought sadly, and he wished them a safe journey, wherever they were headed.
A note, Izzy thought wildly; there must be a note. Mia would not have left without a good-bye. “Can I go up and check their apartment for something?” she said. “I promise, I won’t bother anything.”
“You have a key?” Mr. Yang opened the door and let Izzy clomp up the stairs. “Maybe the door locked?” It was, in fact, and Izzy knocked several times and rattled the doorknob before giving up and coming back down.
“I don’t have key,” Mr. Yang said. He held the storm door open as Izzy rushed outside. “You ask your mommy, she have the key.”
It took Izzy twenty-five minutes to walk home, where—although she would never know it—Mia and Pearl had dropped off their keys just a short time earlier. It took her another half an hour to find her mother’s spare keys to the Winslow house in the catchall drawer in the kitchen. She was quiet, ignoring the half-eaten carton of lo mein and orange chicken left on the counter for her, careful not to disturb her brothers or her parents, who by then had dispersed to their various corners of the house. By the time she returned to Winslow Road, it was nine thirty, and Mr. Yang—who on weekdays rose at 4:15 in order to drive his school bus route, and liked to keep a regular schedule—had already gone to bed. So no one heard Izzy come in through the side door, unlock the door to Mia and Pearl’s apartment, and step inside at last, knowing deep down that she was too late, that they were gone for good.
By nine the next morning, the Richardson house was nearly empty as well. Mr. Richardson had gone in to the office to catch up, as he often did on Saturday mornings; the recent developments in the McCullough case had set him behind in everything else. Lexie was asleep across town in Serena’s queen-size bed. Trip and Moody had both gone out: Trip to distract himself with a pickup game at the community center, Moody on his bike to Pearl’s house, where he intended to apologize but instead—to his consternation—found a locked door and no Volkswagen. And on Saturday mornings, Izzy knew, Mrs. Richardson always went to the rec center pool to swim laps. Her mother was such a creature of habit that Izzy didn’t even bother to peek into her bedroom. She was certain she had the house to herself.
It was unfair, all of it, deeply unfair: that was the one thought that had pulsed through Izzy’s mind all night. That Mia and Pearl had had to leave, that they’d finally made a home and now they had been driven away. The kindest people she knew, the most caring, the most sincere, and they’d been chased away by her family. In her mind she cataloged the many betrayals. Lexie had lied; she’d used Pearl. Trip had taken advantage of her. Moody had betrayed her, on purpose. Her father was a baby stealer. And her mother: well, her mother had been at the root of it all.
She thought of Mia’s house, glowing golden and warm. All her life she’d felt hard and angry; her mother always criticizing her, Lexie and Trip always mocking her. Mia hadn’t been like that. With Mia she’d been different, in a way she hadn’t known she could be: in Mia’s accepting presence she’d become curious and kind and open, as if under a magic spell. She had felt, finally, as if she could speak without immediately bumping into the hard shell of her sheltered life, as if she suddenly saw that the solid walls penning her in were actually bars, with spaces between them wide enough to slip through. Now Izzy tried to imagine going back to life as it had been before: life in their beautiful, perfectly ordered, abundantly furnished house, where the grass was always cut and the leaves were always raked and there was never, ever any garbage in sight; in their beautiful, perfectly