I rub my eyes, trying to wake up.
“How do you know Mom didn’t come home?” I say. “Maybe she had an early class.”
“Her bed is still made. I’m worried, Sanskrit.”
I’m worried, too. Mom has done a lot of irresponsible things, but staying out all night isn’t one of them.
“I think we should call the police,” Sweet Caroline says.
“You have to calm down,” I say. “I am calm. That’s why I think we should call the police.”
“Bad idea. They’ve already got the Child Protective Services report because of you.”
“That was a long time ago. And it got discredited, remember?”
“My point is if the police find out Mom didn’t come home, things could get complicated.”
Sweet Caroline thinks about it, biting at a nail. Mom clicks her nails on her teeth when she’s worried, but Sweet Caroline bites until she bleeds.
“This is a crisis. We need to call Dad,” she says.
“That’s the worst time to call Dad.”
Dad’s idea of a crisis is having to make dinner on a weeknight.
“Why don’t you call the yoga studio just to make sure she’s not there,” I say.
“What will you do?”
“I’ll check the house.”
“Don’t leave, Sanskrit.”
“I’m not leaving. I’m going down the hall.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“Stay here and call the yoga studio. I swear I’ll be right back.”
Sweet Caroline stretches out her arms like she’s going to reach for me, but she doesn’t. It’s funny how she’s so tough and so vulnerable at the same time. She gets scared and suddenly she wants a big brother.
I wait for Sweet Caroline to get on her phone, and I head down the hall.
I slip into Mom’s room.
It’s dark. I crack open the blinds, and light floods in. I look at her pillow. The letter is gone.
I check between the sheets and under the bed, just in case it fell. Then I look back at the pillow.
Gone.
Does that mean Mom came home and found it?
I rush back into the living room.
“Your wife has disappeared,” Sweet Caroline is saying into the phone.
“Hang up.”
“It’s our father,” she says, holding her hand over the receiver. “I’m informing him of current events.”
She speaks into the phone: “I don’t know where she went, Daddy. I just know she never came home.”
I hear Dad’s voice coming through the earpiece.
“You have to come and get us,” Sweet Caroline says. “We’ll find Mom and then you can drive us to school.”
Dad’s voice again.
“An hour’s too long!” Sweet Caroline says.
She looks at me, desperate.
What can I say? Everything is difficult for Dad. That’s why we don’t call him when it’s not his weekend.
Sweet Caroline thinks for a second, then she says into the phone, “You have two unsupervised, unfed children here. What if the big one happens and we have no water in the house?”
Dad says something, then Sweet Caroline puts down the phone.
“He’ll be over in five minutes,” she says.
“That was mean of you,” I say.
“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” she says.
“How could she just leave you here alone?”
Dad says it like he’s angry, like parents should be responsible for their children at all times. That’s easy for him to say when he only has to be responsible one weekend a month.
“That’s why we called you,” Sweet Caroline says. “It’s weird of her.”
“Have you checked all her usual haunts?” Dad says. “Runyon Canyon, the yoga center, that colon cleansing place…”
“Gross, daddy.”
“It’s not my fault. Your mother is nuts now,” he says.
Sweet Caroline clamps her hands over her ears.
“You married her,” I say. “You must have seen something in her.”
“People change,” Dad says.
He’s looking at Mom’s altar as he says it. There’s a little picture of Guru Bharat on the table next to a candle. I never noticed it before.
“Maybe they can change back,” I say.
“Why are we standing here talking about unimportant things?” Sweet Caroline says.
Dad sighs. “You’re right,” he says. “Let’s take a ride and see what we can see.”
“Someone has to stay here,” I say.
“Why?” Sweet Caroline says.
“What if Mom comes back and nobody knows it, and we’re still out there looking for her.”
“She’ll call us,” Sweet Caroline says.
“Good point,” Dad says.
“She lost her phone,” I say.
“Really? That’s a problem,” Dad says.
“I’ll stay and you guys go. Then if something happens, we can call each other.”
Sweet Caroline looks at me, trying to figure out if I’m up to something.
“I don’t know about this—” Dad says.
“I’m an adult,” I say.
Sweet Caroline opens her mouth to say something.
“Practically an adult,” I say, cutting her off.
“Alright then,” Dad says. “It’s you and me, Sweet Pea.”
He heads for the car with Sweet Caroline at his heels.
Once they’re gone, I pace the house. I sort through the gift baskets, eating various chocolates.
I check my phone, making sure the ringer is on so I’ll hear it.
I pace some more.
Eventually, I end up in my bedroom. I lie down and stare at the ceiling.
I don’t know how much time passes before I hear the front door open. I’m thinking they must have found Mom.
“Sweet Caroline?” I call out.
There’s no answer.
I hear footsteps in the hall. Mom’s door opens and closes.
“Mom?” I say.
Still no answer. I try her door. It’s locked.
I hear crying inside her bedroom.
“Can we talk, Mom?”
I feel like I’m outside of my body. I’m dizzy and cold.
“Mom?”
She won’t answer me.
I walk into the living room and lay down on her meditation mat. I can feel the indentation of her body from laying on it so many times.
One time when we were still a family, Dad took us up to Mammoth Lake during the winter. Zadie refused to come. He said he spent his childhood running in the woods and saw no reason to repeat the experience.
I still remember that trip. We stayed in a cabin, and I touched snow for the first time. Mom was raised on the East Coast, and she told us stories about the snow when she was a little kid. One night there was a big snowstorm, and Mom got us all to go outside the next morning.
“Watch this!” she said.
She lay back in a snowbank and waved her arms up and down by her sides and scissored her legs open and closed. She hopped out of the indentation so she wouldn’t damage it.
“I made a snow angel,” Mom said.
I looked at the indentation and I saw what she meant.
Dad lifted up Sweet Caroline and me and laid us in the indentation. We both fit perfectly, curled together in Mom’s impression in the snow.
That was a long time ago. Mom and Dad loved each other then. At least it felt like they did.
I settle against the impression in Mom’s meditation mat. It’s shallow, hard, barely there. I try to fit my body into it, but we don’t match anymore.
“Sanskrit.”
Mom looks at me from the hallway. Her face is puffy and red. She blows her nose into a tissue.
“I thought you’d still be asleep,” Mom says. “I’d get home and you wouldn’t even know I’d been gone all night.”
I glance at the clock in the kitchen.
“It’s eight thirty, Mom. We’ve been up for two and a half hours.”
“I lost track of time,” she says. “Where’s your sister?”