Free A History of the Present Illness by Louise Aronson

heard nothing from or about Sophie, Marta couldn’t eat. She couldn’t sleep. She turned off her pager, threw bills and catalogs unopened into a pile on the front-hall floor, and erased phone messages as soon as she was certain they had nothingto do with Sophie. She didn’t know what was happening at work, and she didn’t care.
    Twice daily, Nick checked the bus depots and youth shelters. He organized groups of their friends to methodically canvas the Haight, Golden Gate and Buena Vista parks, the Tenderloin, SoMa, and every other part of the city where teenagers were known to sleep in doorways and under bushes. Every three days, they went to the police. “With this type of kid . . . ,” said one officer, shrugging his shoulders and not even bothering to finish his sentence, much less write down Sophie’s most distinctive characteristics. They stared at him, speechless, coming up with suitable retorts only much later. “Your father would have known what to say,” Nick told Marta as they drove home, and his use of the past tense hit her like a blow.
    They hired a private detective who repeatedly claimed he found signs of Sophie—in Seattle, then Phoenix, then L.A.—but it was always some other chubby teen with brown hair, pimples, and black clothes. They learned that the country was full of runaway kids prostituting themselves, doing drugs, and somehow getting by on the streets. Before Sophie left, Marta would have converted her new knowledge into donations to charities and letters to the editor about the precious individuality of the nation’s faceless, voiceless youth. Now she knew all that social passion was just a role she’d played for her own selfish gratification, a persona she’d invented that had fooled everyone but Sophie.
    When Marta finally went back to work, she found she’d lost her taste for the sorts of patients who reminded her of herself in that long stretch of her life she thought of as
before
. Within weeks of her return, she resigned. She could no longer bear the commute across town to the group practice affiliated withthe city’s best private hospital or the lovely, renovated Victorian with its hushed modern decor and well-heeled patients scheduled every fifteen minutes. Instead, each morning she walked up Glen Canyon Park and through the divide between Twin Peaks and Mount Davidson to the chaotic campus of century-old, crumbling California mission style buildings with red-tiled roofs, where she had enough time to debate the meaning of life and the purpose of medicine with the Americanized children of gravely disabled elderly immigrants and to provide thoughtful, compassionate care for people so down on their luck they put her own life into perspective.
    For weeks after Ricardo’s death and Sophie’s disappearance, friends and colleagues asked how Marta was, openly inviting discussion of her losses. For a few months after that, they graciously excused late school pickups and incomplete patient notes, acknowledging indirectly the dramatic changes in her life. And then they moved on, as she had, at least superficially. At home and at work, she did what needed doing for life to continue for the living and present. She said nothing as Nick took on more and more cases, as Jason, quieter than before, did his chores and Sophie’s without ever being asked to pick up the slack, and as Olivia cried at the slightest provocation, since their youngest also continued to laugh as easily as before and so remained their happiest and most carefree child. But Marta felt Sophie’s absence as she might feel an amputation. The sensation, relentless and persistent, resembled less the loss of a hand or foot, which would be immediately evident to others and alter her ability to do even the simplest things, and more the loss of an ear or breast, a fundamental and defining feature she could function without but would never stop missing.

Becoming a