know that, long ago, Orla had a baby girl. He knows that the baby was taken away. He thinks it is an old story. But for Orla, the story never ends.
* * *
After Floss and the cop took Marlow, Orla lasted two and a half more months in New York. She fantasized that another cop—an Irish-looking lady cop with a sturdy bosom, that was what she always pictured—would knock on the door of 6D one day and present her with her baby. She would say she had been looking after Marlow herself, whispering every night in her ear that she’d see her mother soon. She also had a more realistic fantasy: that Floss would come back one day and thrust Marlow over the threshold, broken from putting up with her crying and begging to go back on the deal.
Besides wait and dream, there wasn’t much to do. Orla’s phone still didn’t work; the internet was still dark. She was afraid to go to the police, who might know, when they tapped her name into a computer, that she had kidnapped her own child from the hospital. Orla dug a damp, warped phone book out from the stack behind the building’s foyer door and pored over it, looking for groups and agencies that had “children” or “parents” or “family” in the name. She walked to their offices, even when it took hours, just to find locked doors and wary staff. Did she really think, at a time like this, they could—What was it she wanted, again? She went back to the lawyer’s office where she had signed all the papers and found a note taped to the front desk: GONE UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. Not closed, she thought, staring at it. Gone.
She went twice to the house in Brooklyn Heights. Both times, every window was dark.
January brought more files—that was what they called them, the things their phones came back on displaying, the photos and videos and texts and emails that ruined their lives—and the return of the late-night shows. When the programs came back, their studio audiences rose with tears in their eyes. At home and ravaged by hormones, Orla cried, too. But the attempt at normalcy proved premature. Within the month, all the hosts would be ruined. The last man to go, the perkiest one, was called away in the middle of his monologue one night. His lapel mic picked up the frantic whispers of the producer who rushed into his shot. “Your home computer turned on,” he said. “I don’t know what it said, but I just got a call that Rachel’s locked herself in the bathroom. She says—she says she’s going to—”
The host hurried off the stage. The band stood there, agape. Their horns swung silent by their sides.
Orla knew what the end of the producer’s sentence was. She had recently seen the newspaper story about Jordie, the freckled publicist from the pet party, jumping off his nineteenth-floor balcony. He would be remembered as the first, but there were hundreds right on his heels. Experts warned of uncharted territory.
In February, there were almost nine thousand. The next few years would be bad, but there would never be a month worse than that.
The government sprang into action. Bridges were wrapped in fencing, patrolled by men with rifles who scared jumpers back to the land. Prescription pads—the paper ones—were phased out altogether. The system that replaced them filtered its input through Homeland Security. Drugstores put glass over everything from Lysol to Wite-Out. Certain trees—ones that people somehow identified as doing the trick, if the driver held the wheel just right and kept his foot bravely on the gas—became morbid sensations, then mulch, when the police had them cut down. The wooded roads in Orla’s hometown, the ones that used to worry parents on graduation night, were now lined with stumps and filled with sunlight.
Weapon sales were halted by emergency mandate, which left people who already owned them to decide: Should they turn theirs in, or wait for someone desperate for a gun to break in and take it? People whose back doors had stickers that warned of how they handled intruders—Nothing in this house is worth getting shot over—got putty knives and oiled goo and scratched them off the glass.
The hangings were harder to stop. No one knew how to legislate rope. But at each hardware store in the country, there was an extra worker in jeans and a red vest, looking like all the rest of them as he