"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.

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 abbreviated excerpt only...

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