Free Girls by Frederick Busch Page A

daughter back.” My throat tightened up when I said it, and I shut up.
    Mrs. Tanner said, “There is a cosmological dimension, you know.”
    I said, pretty stupidly, “Like a—something about God?”
    She nodded, smiling very tiredly. “A manifestation of His intelligence. A plan. Perhaps a test. It might be a desperate woman who needs a child,” she said. “I feel something like that. Somebody who doesn’t want to hurt anyone. Somebody with a very deep need.”
    I had to say it. “No, it’s a man. It nearly always is.”
    Mr. Tanner said, “You know that.”
    I wanted not to answer that, so I said to her, “A plan, you said. God has a plan? Is that what you mean?”
    She said, “I pray for it. If not Janice back, and safe with us, and whole, then God’s design.”
    Her husband nodded, but his eyes were closed, and I know he was weeping or working not to.
    She took my left hand in both of hers. Her skin felt clammy. Her fingers felt light, powerless. She didn’t seize me; she only held. She said, “You’re very decent to help. It makes you sad, doesn’t it?”
    “It’s a sad business,” I said.
    “I think you’re dealing with more than that,” she said. Her voice had a tendency to lift, a lightness that I associated with her limbs. She was being cooked from the inside out by the radiation or thechemicals, and now she had to carry this. Three cheers for God’s design, I thought.
    They gave me names and telephone numbers and, like an investigator, I wrote them down. When I looked up, I saw that all of them were watching me. The expectation in their eyes reminded me of the wallpaper I should not have taken down.

    The Tanner family printed more posters. The amount of the reward was now five thousand dollars, and I wondered where a preacher with a very sick wife finds that kind of money. The new posters were on yellow paper, and some were a foot and a half or two feet high, so there was another crop, a new flowering of her face. It was the same photograph, and the enlargement made it coarser, like she’d aged while I watched. Her mouth looked more vulnerable in the new version, and I found that I couldn’t meet her eyes.
    Girls run away, and not only to the Port Authority bus terminal on Forty-second Street in New York, and not only from the country. Boys and girls run away. I knew no statistics, and I hadn’t talked to a cop about it, but I assumed they ran away a lot and were stolen very little. You read about it, of course, but it’s usually an infant taken from a stroller or a carriage. Once in a while, a drunken father or boyfriend punches an infant to death, or burns it, or the mother kills and buries it. If the child is older, I thought, and a girl, and she hasn’t run away, she’s dead. I remembered a few cases of kidnapping and the rest were murder, or rape and then murder. I worked not to think about Janice Tanner in some maniac’s car or trailer or furnished apartment. I tried not to think of her blood on bathroom tiles or her body in a crawl space, moving a little every time he slammed the door going out or coming home, like she still was alive and very badly hurt and frightened. I worked not to imagine her alive. I tried not to observe her fright.
    I went to work every day. Sometimes at home, after a while, I slept. One day, I took the dog for a long walk over the hill behind thehouse, pushing myself through it until the snow, which was the height of my knees a dozen yards from the door, was up to my waist. The dog leapt, tearing himself loose, then sank in, then worked himself free, jumping again. His tongue hung out, stiff and pink, like he’d been running for an hour. I was heaving and blowing, gasping with high sounds.
    “We’re a couple of old guys,” I told him.
    He breathed in choppy pantings and his winking, friendly, alien eyes stayed on me. He was a dog bred for errands, and he waited for me to find one. The spittle turned to ice around his long, blunt muzzle, and he