Free Signs and Wonders by Alix Ohlin

nobody had mentioned its pleasures: how fun it could be to sit in a coffee shop with your family, all of you jet-lagged and laughing at some dumb joke.
    Just as quickly as it had arrived, the moment slipped away as Lucas put his cutlery back on his plate, his breakfast untouched, and stared out the window.
    “Okay,” Jason said, doing his best to move them all along with his warm, sunny smile. “Let’s hit the sights.”
    And they did: the castle, the Royal Mile, the parliament building. The kids yawned through various tours and were placated with gift-shop trinkets and snacks. Jason bought Judith a cashmere shawl when she wasn’t looking, and she scolded him for the expense and then hugged him; though they’d been married a year, she still felt strange kissing him in front of the kids. Sometimes she thought about Maggie’s reaction when she told her she was dating a divorced guy and that the kids seemed “great.”
    “Those poor children,” Maggie said, and Judith, who’d only just met them, felt defensive on their behalf.
    “They seem to be coping pretty well,” she said. “They say kids are resilient.”
    “Yeah, they do say that,” Maggie said. “But is it just because the kids don’t, you know, actually explode?”
    Judith imagined she meant that kids can’t explain themselves, because they often have no words to describe the things that had happened to them. “I don’t know the answer to that question,” she said. She still didn’t, and thought that probably nobody did.
    “Hey,” Jason said, “come back to us,” and she realized that she was still holding the soft, pale blue cashmere to her cheek.
    But all in all it was a good day, and they slept well that night and felt better the next morning, when they climbed the 287 steps to the top of the Walter Scott memorial, panted with the accomplishment, heard from a tour guide about his famous
Lady of the Lake,
then looked down at the gardens below. The Edinburgh skyline was shrouded in a gentle haze. And then it was time to climb down. Jason was holding Molly’s hand, and they glanced around for Lucas, but couldn’t find him.
    The panic was not immediate. They just assumed he was exploring somewhere and had forgotten to let them know he was wandering off. They walked around for a few minutes calling his name. Then Judith and Molly stayed put while Jason canvassed a broader area. He was gone for fifteen minutes, then half an hour, then came back and left again for another half an hour. As Judith and Molly sat there, other tourists came and went, taking pictures, chattering, and she was offended by their blithe ignorance. Finally she saw Jason climbing back up the steps, and he was holding out his hands in a hopeless,
empty
gesture. Even though she was too far away to see his eyes, she could feel his heart turning over, and his alarm ignited hers, and her heart was pounding and she allowed herself to actually think the terrible thought that Lucas was missing.
    Such a sweetheart was Molly that she stayed silent and polite through the lengthy interview at the police station, downed the muffin and milk a kind secretary brought for her, and didn’tcry. Jason, on the other hand, was falling apart. Judith had never seen him like this. She thought he’d permanently exorcised violent and dark emotions from his life but it turned out that they were all simmering underneath. When the police officer said they couldn’t do anything right away, his recognizable personality, the self she knew and loved, disappeared, and he became an entirely different person.
    “Listen to me, you Scottish motherfucker,” he said. “My son’s somewhere out there, in a city he doesn’t know, in a foreign country, and he’s nine years old. You need to find him, do you understand? I’ll stand right in front of you and yell my fucking head off hour after hour until you do something about this.”
    The police officer, a kindly, portly, gray-haired man with a bristly