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the sound of her voice. Every part of me said no. It was as if there was a great scream being sounded inside me. My legs wobbled.
    Lieutenant Abraham put his arm around me. “Lean on me,” he said. “I’ll get you home myself.”
    I closed my eyes and practically let him carry me out of the mall security office. On the street just outside the mall, he helped me into his automobile. He spoke quickly with some patrolman and then got in to drive me home. I lay back, my eyes closed. My pill had put me in a state of limbo, numbness. It was as though I were drifting in some dream. I embraced it.
    I was confident that by the time we arrived at my home, I would wake up and find myself sitting in the living room, thumbing through one of my fashion magazines. All that had happened wouldn’t even be a bad dream, much less any sort of memory. Mary would appear in the doorway to tell me that John was almost home. It was remarkable how she could sense that, but she was remarkable in so many ways that I had stopped being amazed.
    I felt us stop at a traffic light and opened my eyes.
    “You okay?” Lieutenant Abraham asked.
    I looked at him as if we had never met. Then it all came rushing back at me. I turned and looked back toward the mall. What if I was leaving forever without Mary? I envisioned John and me at the dinner table days, weeks, and months from now without her. During our meal, both of us would avoid looking at Mary’s chair. Whenever John would speak, he would sound like someone afraid of silence. No matter how hard he would try, for me, his words would fall like iron pebbles from his lips. He could try everything, talk about his day at work. He could run on and on with descriptions of the stock market and the economy that I was sure would be welcomed on CNBC or Bloomberg. None of it would work.
    But he wouldn’t be able to stop talking, and for that matter, neither would I. At these once-precious dinners, now without Mary, we would become two people housed together in some prison cell who spoke different languages but needed the sound of their voices to keep their sanity.
    Afterward, I would welcome the kitchen cleanup. I would avoid using the dishwasher. Scrubbing and drying pots, pans, plates, glasses, cups, and silverware would feel like penance. In fact, all of my housework would become an act of contrition. Not to mention how deeply dependent I would become on pills to get me through the day. Too often, that was already happening.
    I thought that John might not blame me for losing my focus, failing to pay attention to Mary, and instead concentrating on material gifts with such intensity that I didn’t see my little girl led off and out of our lives that dreadful day, but I would always blame myself. I would always carry the cross down my own Via Dolorosa and dream of myself crucified in our backyard, moaning, “Why hast thou forsaken me?”
    I sat up in Lieutenant Abraham’s car. “I’m so frightened,” I said.
    He nodded and drove faster.
    “Somehow, you read about these things in the papers or see them on television but never feel vulnerable, never think it can happen to you,” I said.
    “I know.”
    “Will I get her back?”
    “I’m on it. Special Agent Dave Joseph will be on it. We’ll get her back,” he said firmly.
    I closed my eyes and leaned back again.
    I’ll be home soon—home—and John will be home soon, too. Surely he’ll know exactly what to do. I couldn’t wait to get home now.
    We had a two-story, three-bedroom Tudor house on Westgate in that area of Brentwood that seemed more like city suburbs than city. Although Brentwood had more than its share of celebrities from Hollywood and well-known businesspeople living there, its national infamy had come with the O. J. Simpson case. Everyone we knew and everyone we met who learned that we lived in Brentwood always managed to ask how close we were to the murders. John hated that.
    But there was no denying that we lived in a rather