Introduction

"A magnificent debut filled with characters so vivid, strange, and richly imagined, you emerge feeling changed."?Sarah Shun-lien Bynum In New York City, a girl called Leonora vanishes without a trace. Years earlier and miles upstate, Goldie, a wild, negligent mother, searches for a man to help raise her precocious son, Paul, who later discovers that the only way to save his soul is to run away. As the narrative moves back and forth in time, we find deeper interconnections between these stories and growing clues about Leonora?this missing girl whose face looks out from telephone poles and billboards?whom one character will give anything to save.

The Sweet Relief of Missing Children is a suspenseful novel about the power of running and the desire for reinvention. It explores the terror and transcendence of our most central experiences: childhood, parenthood, sex, love.

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Excerpt

The girl had received all her immunizations. She had been
inoculated. She had been warned in school assemblies and
by her mother and father and several aunts. One of these aunts
had a serious-looking mole on her cheek, a sharp chin, a stern,
pale mouth, and she wore no jewelry except for a black-stoned
ring on her middle finger, all of which gave her the appearance
of a witch or intractable schoolmarm. The girl took these warnings
seriously—the aunt’s most of all. She knew to watch her
back. She knew to avoid slow cars driven by men in sunglasses.
She knew, at home alone, to say to the stranger on the phone,
“My mother’s in the shower now. Shall I have her call you back?”
She would never say she was home alone, nor take the shortcut
through the alley. All these warnings, all this advice, the real message was: You are precious. You are precious but you are not
free. You can’t be both.
Did anyone get to be both things at once? It was unlikely.
The girl knew her family’s code word. If someone unfamiliar
tried to pick her up from school, he had to know the code word.
He had to say it aloud. If he didn’t? She was to go to the principal’s
office. She would have. She was staunch, confident.
She bore an obligation to the future to remain safe. The future
was the tiny spray you feel on your face when you peel an orange,
a simple promise.
The code word was—
It was not something she told anyone.
As a baby, she had been fed iron-fortified rice cereal and
homemade purees; she had worn a pink satin headband. The
headband, the booties, the yellow-haired doll propped in the
corner of her crib, the expression of awed, nervous delight on her
mother’s face, all this said: A girl! A girl! Later, vast quantities of
vegetables: peas, succotash, lima bean soup. Her parents rarely
served dessert. Occasionally a graham cracker, maybe a small
bowl of vanilla ice cream. No sugar cereal, no candy bars. When
she had a cough, her mother squeezed lemon and honey into a
mug of hot water. The girl ate and drank whatever was put before
her. She dried the dishes with a gingham cloth. She obeyed.
Early on her mother taught her about the wage gap, the suffrage
movement, the sheer poverty of certain minds, some of
which—but not all—were male. It was never too early to illuminate
the harsh truth of the matter for a girl. Boys could play,
could treat the world like a junkyard to be rummaged through,
but girls needed a different set of eyes. Girls needed to be wary
and strong and curious but not too curious. “Say ‘feminist,’ ” the
mother coached, and the girl, as a toddler, said it. Still, she was given the traditional things, babydolls and pink. Her hands mastered
the rhythms of needlepoint. Her mother knew how to
accept a paradox: a girl could be anything, could shatter the
glass ceiling, but she was still a girl. Girls liked lace; they loved
bows. Give a girl a pink something, give her a doll that tinkled
in its pants, she’d be happy.
She was happy, this girl.
Even when the sadness of life pressed up against her, even
when she learned about the wage gap, corporate greed, the fact
of death. This last truth, death, came one afternoon in the back
of a taxicab. The girl, her mother, and her aunt were going to a
museum. The mother said, “Hildegard passed away last week.
From Meals-on-Wheels. The German? Her daughter’s coming
from Florida to collect her things.”
“Godspeed,” the aunt said.
“She was ready, I suppose.”
“Passed away?” The girl was maybe four.
“Died,” her mother said.
A silence.
“Death,” her aunt said forcefully, and patted her lap like she
was beckoning a puppy.
“Oh,” said the girl, but she wasn’t sure exactly what it meant.
The aunt raised a dark brow. “Like the end of days. On a personal
level. Like, you know—” But she just snapped her finger.
“It means the body goes to sleep,” her mother said gently.
“Not sleep,” the aunt chastised.
“No, that’s right. Not sleep. Not exactly.”
“The body stops working,” said the aunt. “Lights out.”
“It rests,” her mother added.
“Rests?” The aunt scowled. “Not really.”
“Rests, sure.”
“That gives her the wrong idea.”
Her mother said, “Who doesn’t have the wrong idea?”
“It goes to the cemetery. It’s buried,” the aunt said.
The girl pictured a hole in the earth. In the hole was a white
bistro table with two chairs and, above it, to block the sun, an
umbrella with crisp stripes of red and white.
“Everyone dies,” the aunt said.
“Someday, yes,” the mother agreed in a softer voice than
usual. “Hildegard was very old.”
The girl pictured rheumy Hildegard in her flannel housecoat
on a bistro chair. Sometimes she’d accompanied her mother to
deliver the woman’s meals.
“We hope it happens when we’re old,” her aunt added, “but
there’s no saying.”
“Everybody?” the girl asked. Nothing was true for everybody:
her mother had said so.
“I’m afraid so,” said her mother.
The cab jerked to a stop. The girl felt cold. She had not known
it would end. She knew she would grow up, yes, but hadn’t realized
there would be a time when her body would stop. Her mind
placed another person at that underground table, across from
Hildegard, strange Hildegard who kept a dozen spare flashlights
in her apartment, a flashlight on nearly every surface. The other
person at the table was the girl. Her! She was wearing her favorite
pink nightgown.
They got out of the cab. Briefly she was frightened, wished
she hadn’t asked. Isn’t it better to be confused than to know?
Her mother and aunt had changed the subject; now they were
talking about a woman so desperate to have a baby that she
advertised in the newspaper. The girl was frightened but not for
long, because soon they were in the museum, standing before a painting of a fat gentleman in a festive tricornered hat. He was
holding a bottle of beer. The hat, the beer, the expression of
wicked, heaving delight on the man’s face—
“Is he dead?” she asked her mother.
Her mother read the placard on the wall. “He lived two hundred
years ago,” she said. “He’s certainly passed on.”
His face was red and happy. He was making the most of it.
He made the girl feel better, and her sense of permanence
returned. Later they bought postcards of paintings from the gift
shop. The girl spun the rack, looking for that man with the beer,
but couldn’t find him, and she was too shy to ask.
So she learned about failed fallopian tubes, about Cambodia
and Medea and illiteracy and toxic shock and still she was happy,
still she dried the dishes obediently with a gingham cloth. “What
a happy girl!” people said, and she was proud to hear it. It was
her duty to be happy. It was her duty to be curious but not too
curious, to be pretty. She understood that you could be too curious
but you couldn’t be too pretty.
Was she pretty? You wonder, even if you don’t ask. Either she
was or she wasn’t. It’s a detail, one of many, but it’s everything.
Three stitches to repair a cut on her chin. These were sewn by a
genius—a plastic surgeon, highly regarded, whose face conveyed
the taut smoothness of plastic—to ensure there would be no
scar, or just the slightest scar, a tiny pale c like a baby’s fingernail
clipping, noticeable only in a particular light if, say, you tilted
her head back, tilted it as a lover might with his thumb when he
meant to kiss her. But she was just a girl. No lovers tipped her
head. Her parents paid the plastic surgeon because, yes, she was
beautiful, and beauty has no price.
Soon a brother was born. He was cute for a while, around his
second year, with that pudgy, incurious, pink face. Later he was just a boy, not handsome, not ugly, the poor kid. How could he
compete? The girl possessed calm confidence, concern for the
lower classes, a dimple in her right cheek. The girl had an innate,
stately grace. Sometimes she peed her pants when she laughed,
sometimes she tripped, and isn’t this the finishing excellence in
a perfect girl? A touch of clumsiness. It reassures.
The girl knew her family’s code word, the word a stranger
would have to know for her to trust him. She practiced what to
say when a man failed to speak the code word, practiced the
purposeful stride back to the school—she would not run, would
not show fear, would simply stride into the principal’s office,
would say to Mrs. Levenson, “Excuse me, but I believe there is a
man who means me harm.” Her voice would be stern and calm.
She liked that phrase: he means me harm. It belonged to another
time.
The brother forgot the code word. He knew he was safe. He
could take a stick and drum the tops of strangers’ garbage cans
all the way to school, and if someone stuck a head out the window?
He’d run. If some creep tried to abduct him? Screw the
code word. He’d knee the dude in the balls.
But she was a pretty girl, raised in a religion of immaculate
self-protection. She rubbed lotion on her elbows and heels. She
practiced walking with a book on her head. She loved rags-toriches
stories, loved that show Lauren Rules the West, about a
clever orphan girl who becomes mayor of a small town. She
loved hopscotch on the sidewalk in front of her building, loved
her brother, loved celery with peanut butter. She felt sure that
the world was vast and exotic, full of light and darkness both,
and maybe one day she’d go to India? Maybe one day to the
Wailing Wall? The Grand Canyon? She wanted to see great
places. She wanted that feeling she got when she climbed the stairs inside the Statue of Liberty, that rising heat in her chest
that meant: We are littler than we imagine, but together we make
something bigger than we believe possible. Light and darkness. She
was a Libra—she felt the presence of two scales inside her. As
she saw it, it was her duty to forget about death with one part of
her mind while thinking about nothing but death with another.
How did you do this? She wasn’t sure. She was working on it. In
the meantime she wanted to fix things, to be a social worker, a
nurse, someone who tends to those who are not pretty or raised
in brownstones, those who do not sleep beneath a shelf of goodluck
charms—polished stones, onyx, jasper—who do not read
books about gifted animals or have mothers singing “Take Me
Out to the Ballgame” as they tuck their children into bed. No
one got to be precious and free. Everyone died. It was her duty
to remember this, to remember and forget at the same time, to
teach other people how to do the same.
She loved Crackerjack. She loved the home team with all her
heart.
She was twelve; her name was Leonora; she would disappear.
... view entire excerpt...

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