Free Vanishing Acts by Jodi Picoult

you do on the outside?”
I look up over my fork. “I run a senior citizens' center.”
“Like a nursing home?”
“The opposite,” I explain. “A place for active seniors to come and socialize. We had league sports and chess tournaments and season tickets to the Red Sox.”
“No shit,” Monte says. “My grandma, she's in one of those places where they just give her oxygen and wait for her to die.” He takes out a pen that he has whittled to a sharp point, a makeshift knife, and begins to run it under his nails. “How long you been doing that?”
“Since I moved to Wexton,” I tell him. “Almost thirty years.”
“Thirty years?” Monte shakes his head. “That's, like, forever.” I look down at my tray. “Not really,” I say.
If I had been allowed to make my phone call to you, this is what I would have said:
How are you? How's Sophie?
I'm fine. I'm stronger than you'd think.
I wish it hadn't happened this way.
I will see you in Arizona, and explain.
I know.
I'm not sorry, either.
Fitz
I'm not prepared for what I see when I turn the corner onto the street where I grew up. Two news vans from the Boston area are parked in the driveway of what used to be Eric's childhood home. In front of Andrew Hopkins's little red Cape is a lineup of television reporters, each facing a cameraman whose job it is to carve out a small square of background and make it look as if no other journalist has stumbled onto this grand story. This is a plum assignment, and under any other circumstance I might find myself sitting alongside the others, bumming cigarettes and thermoses of coffee while we wait for the Victim to peek out the front door. I park the car and circle around the media into my former backyard. A gay couple lives here now, with their adopted daughter–the gardens are far more manicured than anything my parents were ever able to pull off. But there's still a corner of the chain-link fence behind the rhododendrons that's bent up, just high enough for you to squeeze underneath into Delia's yard–a secret passage where we'd leave each other notes and treasures. I walk up the back door and let myself inside. “Dee?” I call out. “It's me.”
When there's no answer, I wander into the kitchen. Delia is dressed in jeans and one of Eric's sweaters; her hair is a wild black tangle around her face and her feet are bare. She is hunched over the counter, with the phone pressed to her ear. Underneath the kitchen table, Sophie sits in her nightgown, lining up plastic farm animals into military formation. “Fitz!” she says when she sees me. “Guess what? I couldn't go to school today because all the cars were in the way.”
“Could you check again?” Delia says into the phone. “Maybe under E. Matthews?”
I kneel beside Sophie and hold my finger up to my lips: quiet. But Delia slams down the phone instead and swears like a sailor–the same Delia who once nearly took my head off for saying the word damn in Sophie's presence when she was only three months old. When she looks up at me, her eyes are full of tears. “They must have told her about me ... about us being here in New Hampshire, but she hasn't called, Fitz.”
There are all sorts of excellent reasons for this: Delia's mother doesn't live in Arizona now, and hasn't been told yet of Andrew's apprehension; she's not even alive anymore. But I don't have the heart to point these out to Delia.
“Maybe she's afraid you won't want to talk to her, with your father's arrest and all,” I say after a minute.
“That's what I thought, too. So I figured . . . maybe I'll just call her, instead. The thing is ... I can't find her. I don't know if she's remarried or if she goes by her maiden name. ... I don't even know what her maiden name is. She's still a total stranger.”
I stick my head under the table. “Soph,” I say, “I'll give you a dollar if you go upstairs and find Mommy's purple nail polish before I finish counting. One, two, three . . .”
She is off like a