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felt like a smack in the face. My heart couldn’t keep up with its own pounding; it slammed against my chest wall so hard . . . how could it not explode? I pictured pieces of cardiac muscle pierced on the shards of my shattered ribs.
    Jonah hadn’t come home the night before. He hadn’t reached out to me. Therefore, something unthinkable had happened. Absolutely. Sure, I could imagine him walking in the door and running upstairs shouting, “Susie, Susie, you’re not going to believe what happened to me!” But it was getting harder each minute to take off on any flight into fantasy.
    My husband was missing. Then I thought, Missing? If I’m lucky .

Chapter Three

    I sat on the edge of the mattress. Instead of doing what I meant to—covering my face and sobbing—I started sliding and almost landed on my ass. My nightgown again, and the perils of the good life: Everything was so smooth, there was hardly any friction between the gown and the Egyptian cotton sheet. My bare feet saved me with an up-down, up-down step, like in one of those folk dances performed by people trailing ribbons. When at last I got steady, I was panting, almost gasping, from the effort. This was crazy. I was strong, fit, well coordinated if not brilliantly athletic.
    Except the bottom had dropped out of my life. Ninety-nine percent of me believed that. But that other one percent was almost afraid to call Jonah’s cell: He would answer with his cold, busy voice: “For God’s sake, Susie, there’s an emergency here! Dammit, don’t you think if I had a free second—if anyone here had a free second—you’d have gotten a call?”
    I called anyway. Three rings and then “This is Dr. Gersten. I can’t answer the phone right now. To leave a message, please wait for the tone. If this is an emergency, please press the number five and the pound key.”
    “Jonah, sweetheart, I know something’s happened—your not coming home at all last night—and I’m terribly worried. Please call me as soon as you can, or have someone call me to let me know how you are. I love you.” Right then it hit me. Maybe something had happened in the city during the night and I didn’t know about it yet. I rushed for the remote. But my hands started shaking again, so it took four tries to turn on the TV. I didn’t care whether it would bringterror or relief. I just needed to know what was out there. That was what I’d done for months after 9/11, turning on the TV every few hours, ready for the worst but hoping for the sight of Nothing Catastrophic. I’d longed for boring weather forecasters standing before maps, McDonald’s commercials. And that was exactly what I got now: normality as presented by News Channel 4. Darlene Rodriguez was asking Michael Gargiulo if he knew why people used to eat oysters only in months that had an R in them. The sports guy glanced up at Darlene and Michael from his papers. From his grin, it looked like he’d been born with double the normal number of teeth; all of them gleamed with pleasure at his knowing the oyster answer.
    I switched off the TV and paced back and forth on the carpet, trying for grace under pressure—or at least enough self-control so I wouldn’t howl like a dying animal. I leaned against the footboard. Considering all the crap I’d read in my life, how come I’d never come across a magazine article entitled “What to Do When You Wake Up and Your Husband Isn’t There”? It would have had a bullet-pointed sidebar of suggestions that could flash into my head.
    The only information I could imagine in such a sidebar was “Phone police.” No, that probably wasn’t right. I remembered a TV show on which the wife called the cops and the guy on the phone asked, “How long has he been missing?” When she said, “Well, he didn’t come home last night,” the cop told her, “Sorry. We can’t take any action until he’s gone for three days. Try not to worry. Nine times out of ten, they just show up.” The cop