sang in the pipes, and the breeze clicked treacherously in the blinds. Because I was just sitting uselessly on the side of her bed, feeling like I needed to do something, I called back and left yet another message, this time unable to keep the quaver out of my voice. Mom, forgot to say, I’m at home. Please call, the second you get a chance, okay? Then I called and left a message on the voice mail at her office just in case.
With a deadly coldness spreading in the center of my chest, I walked back into the living room. After standing there for a few moments, I went to the bulletin board in the kitchen to see if she had left me a note, though I already knew very well she hadn’t. Back in the living room, I peered out the window at the busy street. Could she have run to the drugstore or the deli, not wanting to wake me? Part of me wanted to go out on the street and look for her, but it was crazy to think I would spot her in rush-hour crowds and besides if I left the apartment, I was scared I’d miss her call.
It was past time for the doormen to change shifts. When I phoned downstairs, I was hoping for Carlos (the most senior and dignified of the doormen) or even better Jose: a big happy Dominican guy, my favorite. But nobody answered at all, for ages, until finally a thin, halting, foreign-sounding voice said: “Hello?”
“Is Jose there?”
“No,” said the voice. “No. You cah back.”
It was, I realized, the frightened-looking Asian guy in safety goggles and rubber gloves who ran the floor waxer and managed the trash and did other odd jobs around the building. The doormen (who didn’t appear to know his name any more than I did) called him “the new guy,” and griped about management bringing in a houseman who spoke neither English nor Spanish. Everything that went wrong in the building, they blamed on him: the new guy didn’t shovel the walks right, the new guy didn’t put the mail where it was supposed to go or keep the courtyard clean like he should.
“You cah back later,” the new guy was saying, hopefully.
“No, wait!” I said, as he was about to hang up. “I need to talk to somebody.”
Confused pause.
“Please, is anybody else there?” I said. “It’s an emergency.”
“Okay,” said the voice warily, in an open-ended tone that gave me hope. I could hear him breathing hard in the silence.
“This is Theo Decker,” I said. “In 7C? I see you downstairs a lot? My mother hasn’t come home and I don’t know what to do.”
Long, bewildered pause. “Seven,” he repeated, as if it were the only part of the sentence he understood.
“My mother,” I repeated. “Where’s Carlos? Isn’t anybody there?”
“Sorry, thank you,” he said, in a panicky tone, and hung up.
I hung up the phone myself, in a state of high agitation, and after a few moments standing frozen in the middle of the living room went and switched on the television. The city was a mess; the bridges to the outer boroughs were closed, which explained why Carlos and Jose hadn’t been able to get in to work, but I saw nothing at all that made me understand what might be holding my mother up. There was a number to call, I saw, if someone was missing. I copied it down on a scrap of newspaper and made a deal with myself that if she wasn’t home in exactly one half hour, I would call.
Writing the number down made me feel better. For some reason I felt sure that the act of writing it down was going to magically make her walk through the door. But after forty-five minutes passed, and then an hour, and still she hadn’t turned up, I finally broke down and called it (pacing back and forth, keeping a nervous eye on the television the whole time I was waiting for somebody to pick up, the whole time I was on hold, commercials for mattresses, commercials for stereos, fast free delivery and no credit required). Finally a brisk woman came on, all business. She took my mother’s name, took my phone number, said my mother wasn’t “on her list” but I would get a call back if her name turned up. Not until after I hung up the phone did it occur to me to ask what sort of list she