Occasionally, over the past couple of years, Parr dreamed about his sister, a recurring dream, identical each time in its particulars. The sun was just overhead, the white car eye-blinkingly bright, its right front tire running over the curb as she turned off Natural Bridge Road onto Hanley and down the hill toward his house. The dreams felt chemical, like freshly developed photographs, and he took them to have meaning. Several times, with different women, he’d said it aloud. “I feel it. She’s coming back.”
         So far he’d been wrong. Premonition-wise, in that Margo had not come back or been found. And telling the women hadn’t turned out right either. He told them because it was an interesting thing about himself, maybe, and he tended to run out of things to say. For a week or two’s worth of dates he could talk about teaching English in Japan, living there for five years, and his month-long trip to Australia right before he moved back. But his part-time job at the preschool vaguely embarrassed him, as did the B’s and C’s he’d been earning in his night classes. The women, nice women, felt bad for him, but he wondered if he appeared pathetic, trotting out this tale of woe. Sympathy, he was coming to understand, wasn’t an emotion that readily blossomed into love. Summers, his built-in swimming pool made him feel good about his prospects; in the cooler months he floundered.

         He’d finished painting his bedroom the day before. Two-plus coats of a deep teal blue. The color didn’t look quite right to him – more like a shade you’d expect to see on a boat. April had chosen it. When she first visited his house she remarked, “You need some color around here,” a rare, and thus valuable, definitive statement. Parr hadn’t acted on it right away. He waited until they’d been going out for a couple of months before he choreographed the trip to Home Depot for a drill bit, the detour through the paint department. Between the hefty student loan debt she’d amassed at Wash U and her modest salary as a public radio producer, she was as cash poor as Parr. Just last week she presented him a new shower curtain patterned with small black and white checks that wiggled when you stared at them. “Found it on the bus,” she said, and he was nearly certain she was joking. If April agreed to move in he would promise to accelerate the renovations, paint every room in the house.
         Still, Parr didn’t want April to think he didn’t have a mind of his own, so he bought new sheets and a comforter. White sheets because white was hopeful, and a dark gold comforter stitched with metallic gold thread. He was proud of this bold choice, though not at all confident. His dresser and nightstand looked shabby next to the new paint and bedding, but no one could say the room wasn’t transformed.
          “Very nice.” He could hear that she meant it. Because she’d chosen semi-gloss, the paint still looked wet and Parr held his arms tight to his body. A silence fell on them, stuck in the threshold, looking at the bedroom like an exhibit in a museum. In moments like these he said things he shouldn’t say. In a moment like this one he had told her about the dreams. This moment was rescued by a growl from her stomach.
          “Hungry?” he asked.
          Margo, Parr’s missing sister, had last been seen eight years ago backing out of their mother’s driveway in their mother’s white Volvo, not with Shane, but with him still in the picture. If not for that, the whole scenario would have been a lot more optimistic to any mind, including Special Agent Fried’s. Shane with the assault and manslaughter raps. Special Agent Fried with his nervous tugging at the tips of his walrus moustache.
          Margo drove off, she’d drive back. That was the simple logic of his dream. The dream relinquished no clues regarding where she’d been and what she’d done. After her disappearance, Parr and his sisters, Angie and Twyla, had spent a ridiculous number of hours sitting around drinking red wine and smoking and imagining Margo’s life. One of the reasons he’d gone to Japan to begin with was to escape those pointless debates as to whether it was more likely that they’d headed for the east coast or the west coast or the Canadian or Mexican border. More people disappeared without a trace than you’d guess, Special Agent Fried said, but Parr had to think that they were the smart, methodical ones, not thugs like Shane or space cases like his sister.
          Growing up, Parr was the only one in his family who really enjoyed playing board games and Margo was the only one who humored him, even after she moved out. She’d stop by once a week or so, after he’d gotten home from school, and they’d play checkers, although it was hard for her to sit still and she quite often forgot it was her turn in the middle of trying to figure out her next move. She regularly forgot the name of her bank, the name of her doctor, why she was crying. The last time he’d seen her she was wearing a wrinkled yellow cardigan, misbuttoned.

          What Parr didn’t tell anyone was that he’d come back from Japan and bought this house on Hanley because of the dream. Maybe the trick to premonitions was creating the conditions for them to be realized.

          April didn’t seem to mind that he stared at her. She was so beautiful to him that he focused on her in parts, so as to not be overwhelmed. As she chewed, for example, he studied her impossibly dainty nose. All other noses were blunt snouts compared to this one. Three freckles fell in a row, diagonally, across the bridge. Fitting, he thought – an ellipsis for a woman who left so much out. He’d never met anyone who spoke so little of herself.
          “I like the way you cook vegetables,” April said. “You’ve got el dente down pat.”
          At moments like this, Parr was almost positive she really did like him. “Have you given any more thought to Easter?”
          “What are they like?”
          “My family?” He didn’t know how you could answer this question.
          “Do they behave? Shout? Throw things?” April punctuated with her fork and a snow pea fell to the floor. She bent over to retrieve it, and when she was back to sitting upright Parr noted she was sneering slightly.
          “No, no, nothing like that. Mom and Twyla sometimes get a little tipsy. Peabody, Angie’s second husband, drinks, but quietly.”
          “Holidays are volatile in my experience.”
          “My niece, Polly, is seven. You can always play with her. I mean, that’s what I do if things start getting heavy,” he said. “Not that things generally get heavy. Mom can be kind of critical and Mom’s husband, Nick, sneaks into the kitchen and eats things he’s not supposed to eat because of his diabetes. That’s about it.”
          “I don’t know. What about Margo?”
          “Don’t worry,” he said, “it almost never comes up.” Parr left it at that.

ANGIE

          As her dreams go, it’s a positive one. She’s with Parr in Japan, playing pinball in an enormous arcade. There’s a crowd gathered around them because she’s got some kind of magic touch going with the flippers and a hip-bounce, and the pinball machine is going crazy, emitting sound bites of cheering and applause and a few measures of martial-sounding music on top of the arrhythmic ringing and clanging that accompanies the accumulation of points. Her feet ache. The arcade’s floor is concrete and she’s been playing for hours. She’s always tired in her dreams. Angie hadn’t visited Parr in Japan. She had told him she was coming, that she’d bought a ticket, even. And then she told him that Polly had the mumps and she couldn’t come after all. She didn’t know how she felt about that – his unquestioning acceptance of her flimsy story. But she was so relieved when he moved back. They didn’t feel like a family with him gone.

          What she’d never told anyone was that a week before her disappearance she’d given Margo money – three hundred dollars – after they’d all sworn not to do that anymore.

          The dryer had gone out the previous weekend. It had tumbled the cold wet clothes for several hours before she’d gotten suspicious. Since Peabody had started drinking again things like that tended to get past her. Like her twelve-year-old daughter Henry’s recent growth spurt, which Angie had failed to keep up with, resulting in shirts of Peabody’s and jeans of hers being appropriated into a ragamuffin wardrobe. The cat bowl empty for some number of days and the cat not returned, a fact she hoped to keep from Polly. Now it was Easter, and yesterday, before she and Polly had dyed the eggs, she’d washed all the curtains in the house, re-hung them wet, and opened the windows, which she hoped would make them dry faster, and she kept the windows open overnight, because it seemed like clean, dry curtains might make up for her inadequacies as a homemaker and hostess. She was the only one with a table large enough to seat all the adults.
          “Angie, you’re a damn fool,” Peabody said. The furnace had never been quite up to the task of warming their drafty bungalow. He paced the length of the house and looked thirsty for Jameson’s.
          “Once the oven gets going, it’ll warm up in here.” But she’d forgotten that her mother was bringing the ham and Twyla was bringing pies and supposedly Parr and his newish girlfriend were bringing a hot side dish, so she didn’t really need to turn on the oven. She pushed the thermostat up another couple of notches and decided to bake cookies and leave the windows as they were.

          There wasn’t money for a new dryer or the power bill, but that was business for another day. It was going to be hard to maintain a festive attitude if she got started on the list of things they didn’t have money for.
          “I’m thankful for you, Miss Polly-wolly-pudding-all-day,” she told her daughter. Peabody’s thinking-about-drinking made Polly nervous, too, but now that Angie had her busy stirring the cookie batter, she was humming, despite her stated skepticism regarding the concept of Easter cookies.
          “Hearts?” She snorted when Angie pulled the cookie cutter from the drawer.
          “It’s hearts or Christmas trees.”
          Polly’s hair was pulled into sloppy braids. The hanks were uneven and the part ambled crookedly down the back of her head, but fixing them would disturb the moment. The whiskey bottle was in the cupboard behind where Polly sat on the stool at the countertop and Peabody wouldn’t ask her to move, not so early in the day anyway. They made the icing while the cookies baked. Polly added tiny drops of color, one at a time, to three small bowls, creating perfect pale shades of yellow, pink, and blue.
          So things were going fairly well until Twyla called to say that their mother and Nick wouldn’t be coming. Nick was having a tingling in his toes and fingers. Twyla would pick up the ham on the way over. “A tingling?”
          “Don’t start, Ange. Be relieved. Everybody will have a better time with Mom not there.”
          Angie considered the curtains. She hoped she hadn’t gone through all that rigmarole just for her mother. “She could have called earlier.”
          “She says they kept hoping the tingling would stop.”
          “Tingling!” Angie knew that in being petulant she was answering her own question, why their mother hadn’t called her directly. “Okay. Whatever. Why don’t you come over a little early, hang out before Parr gets here?”
          “Is he still bringing the girl?”
          “As far as I know.”
         
          This April person was either cold or avoiding Parr or both, holing up in the kitchen. She hadn’t so much as dipped a finger into the buttery icing.
          “Peabody won’t say what he thinks.” Angie slapped icing onto the too-warm cookies.
          “Did he know Margo?”
          “No, he and I met later that year.”
          “Maybe he thinks you won’t like what he has to say.”
          “As if that’s ever stopped him.” Angie wasn’t really thinking about what she was saying. Did she care what Peabody did or didn’t say? “I think she’s dead.” Angie shook her head angrily. She was spattering icing all over the place. She had never spoken these words. Was this what she really believed or was it what she hoped? It would be a disaster, wouldn’t it, if Margo returned now? With Margo gone it didn’t matter that Angie hadn’t liked her for a long time, that Margo had hurt them all, betrayed them in countless petty ways. But what was she doing talking about this anyway? It had been years, really, since it had been the big hot topic, and she and Twyla and their mother had made this official before Parr moved home – no more Margo talk. Parr was the youngest and he had loved Margo in a better, uncomplicated way. None of them wanted to send him back to that loss. Yet now, something about this girlfriend of his was goading her on.
          “Margo had a quality that men couldn’t resist – a vagueness they hoped to bring into focus. She had the skinniest wrists and she wore twenty bangles at a time, which meant she had to keep her arms cocked or they’d drop right off. That’s how I remember her – left hand on her left shoulder, gazing out the window at something that wasn’t there.” This April was a cool customer, sitting with her hands folded in her lap, all ears.
          “She was always like that, long before she started drinking and doing drugs. She didn’t belong here, she told me that once. And that’s how she lived her life – like she was just waiting for someone to realize that a mistake had been made and get her the hell out of here.”
          Peabody had snuck up on her. He rested his hands on her shoulders. “Does anybody really feel like they belong here? I mean, what would that mean exactly – to feel at home in the land of greed and plenty?”
          “I do, I belong here.” Angie jumped up from her chair. “Don’t try to make me feel bad about that. I’m supposed to be here, with you and Polly and Henry.”
          “We were talking about Margo,” April said.
          Angie whipped around to face her. Tattletale! Now she spoke.
          “This is why I drink,” Peabody said, pouring a juice glass full of whiskey.
          “Why is that?” April asked.
          “Helps the medicine go down.”
          “Drinking makes things easier for you?”
          Angie didn’t understand the question. What other reason was there?
          “More or less,” Peabody said.
          “What’s going on in here?” Parr stood in the threshold. His face was pinched with concern. “Twyla wants to know when we’re going to eat.”
          “I’m getting to know your family, Parr.”
          Oh, she was a peach all right.
          Peabody chimed in. “Angie here thought it’d be a good day to talk about Margo.”
          Poor Parr, he seemed to shrink in the doorway. He looked at Angie expectantly.
          She nodded. “It’s true. It’s not healthy to not talk about it.”
          “Christ, Angie. It’s history.” Peabody refilled his juice glass.
          “You’re a lizard. You don’t have feelings. You don’t belong here. What are you doing here anyway?” Angie grabbed his glass and gulped down the whiskey. She might as well be speaking in tongues. The whiskey burnt her mouth and throat.
          Peabody snatched the bottle and shoved past Parr.
          “Are you okay?” Parr asked.

          They left her alone in the kitchen to cool off. But she wasn’t upset, exactly. Her body was possessed by a strange relief. She was lightheaded, buoyant – as if her pores were expiring tiny plumes of helium. It would be frightening to feel this free all the time.
          She frosted two sheets of cookies, taking enough time that they would think she was penitent. When she heard The Cars playing she knew Peabody had found something else to drink. There it was, an empty liter of red wine on the coffee table, another one started, and full glasses all around. Twyla and Peabody leaned back groggily on the couch. They must have started before Peabody had come in for the whiskey. Twyla had kicked off her insanely pink patent leather sling-backs and her pink linen shift was scrunched at her waist. The platters of cookies she’d sent in – leaving herself alone with April to begin with – had been devoured. Parr was playing Parcheesi with Henry. Henry’s mouth was smeared with pink icing and Parr’s was smeared with yellow. Henry’s blouse pulled too tightly across her back and her cuffs were rolled up to disguise the too-shortness of the sleeves. The room was just plain cold. She slammed shut the windows in the living room and the dining room, saw that someone had set the table.
          Tucked into the alcove, in the chair beside the bricked up fireplace, April sat, brushing out Polly’s braids. The thick brown waves bristled with static electricity. April’s glass looked like whiskey. She held two green elastic bands between her lips. Angie felt a tickle of irritation. Parr must have been watching her, seen it on her face. He leapt to his feet, nearly knocking over his glass of wine, and swept Polly out of April’s reach.
          “Where have you hidden your chocolate bunnies, little girl?” Parr held her at the waist, upside down, the tips of her hair brushing the floor. He swung her from side to side like a human broom.
          Polly squealed and giggled. “I’m not going to tell you.”
          Now Henry got into it, came over and started tickling Polly’s sides, and she squealed louder.
          “Save me,” she cried. “Save me!” She flung her head around, looking for a rescuer.
          Henry kept at it. “There’s no hope for you. Buwhahaha!”
          Polly started kicking. Parr ducked his head and held her out a bit further from his body. Was she still having fun? Her voice sounded a little frantic. “Oh, somebody, please help me!”

         
APRIL

          Their damn sister was just gone. As gone as the fifth chair flute player you sat next to for three years in high school, never finding it necessary to challenge her, because how was fifth chair in any substantive way better than sixth? And then you graduate and never hear from her again. There were hundreds of people like that in a person’s life, right? All the folks you worked beside for a couple of months or years in disposable jobs. You knew the names of their kids and their parents’ ailments and how many pounds they hoped to lose before swimsuit season. Neighbors, landlords, and the UPS guy when you were buying a lot of stuff online. The people in the coffee shops and video stores and public libraries who were a regular presence in your life until you moved to another state and threw away the membership cards and library cards and so forth. You could fill a stadium, probably, with all those people. People who were just gone, as you were just gone to them.

          It was the first day of pool season, April 24th, 85 degrees, humid. It had taken the better part of the last thirty-six hours to fill the pool with very cold water. Parr had swum laps before he went to buy meat and buns and stuff for a cookout. He had that walrusy layer of fat on him. He slept naked year round, apparently. Even in January and February when he woke in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep, he just pulled on boxers and sat on the couch drinking green tea and watching snippets of movies on cable. She figured that if she was a nice person she would have gotten up to keep him company, at least once, but instead she rolled over onto his side of the bed, enveloped in his leftover warmth.
          Peabody lounged on an inflatable red raft in the middle of the pool with a can of Budweiser balanced on his stomach. He drifted like a leaf, vaguely clockwise.

          Just before Parr left for the store he brought April a stack of old Time magazines and a bowl of red delicious apples. He opened his mouth and closed it. Opened it again. Put his big palm over her left knee. “I can’t believe you’re here,” he said.
          “Look at this zit on my chin,” she said. “Do illusions have zits like this?” She willed him to let it rest. She glanced over at Peabody.
          “I mean, that you’re still here.”
          “Parr!”
          “What? I was so lonely and I hoped more than anything that I would meet someone smart and wonderful like you.”
          She wanted to tell him that these were things you shouldn’t tell another person. But he would ask why and it would be impossible to explain.
          Just after Parr left she went inside for a soda. The kitchen smelled like sawdust and the grit felt weirdly good beneath her bare feet. Peabody appeared beside her, covered with goosebumps.
          “You’re dripping,” she said. What kind of person didn’t even grab a towel? Parr had set out a stack of freshly laundered beach towels on a Rubbermaid table right next to the pool.
          “I wondered what you were up to.” Peabody bee-lined for the cupboard where Parr kept the grocery bags. He did a double-take, apparently confounded by the missing cupboard doors. Kneeling, he rummaged behind the sacks and pulled a dusty bottle of Bushmills from the back. He wiped it off on his sopping swim trunks. “So what’s with you and Parr?” he asked. “You got some kind of beauty and the beast vibe going?”
          “Go away, Peabody. You don’t amuse me.”
          “I’m not trying to amuse you.”
          “You have the soul of an old potato.”
          “Just your type, huh?”
          Exactly.
         
          She’d had no business even meeting Parr. She’d left the after-work gathering at the over-priced vodka bar, feeling smudged by the banality of the conversation – petty mumblings over promotions and fundraising skullduggery. A full, margarine-yellow moon hung lazily in the sky and she took it as a sign to stop for a drink. She liked drinking alone at unfamiliar bars, bumming smokes from strangers. There were three bars more or less in a row on Kingshighway, just south of Chippewa. She could walk home if she had to. She chose the bar in the middle, the one she was sure she’d never been in before. Parr had driven across town only because Twyla’s goddaughter had just gotten a job bartending there. A job she held onto for only a couple of weeks. When April walked in, Parr was singing karaoke, a slightly flat rendition of “I Fall to Pieces.” She almost walked out then, but she already had the bartender’s eye.
          “How’d I do?” he asked. His forehead was sweaty. “I’m not sure that song was my best choice.” Turned out she’d taken the seat right next to the one he’d claimed. How had she missed the bottle of Bud sitting there? Parr was so not-smooth, so goofy. At the end of the night, when he insisted on walking her out to her car, she still didn’t want anything to do with him, yet she’d told him all about her job, her money worries. She’d liked Parr’s stories about living in Japan. It was comical, the picture of this big, galumphing guy shambling through the crowds of compact, orderly people.
          Before she could escape inside her car, Parr pulled her to him in a hot, awkward bear hug. “I’d go home with you right now,” he told her between kisses, as if that was even on the table.

          Recently, Parr had asked her how many lovers she’d had. He imagined, perhaps, that their combined number – his and hers – would fit neatly on two hands or create some other romantic configuration that would confirm that they were meant to be together.
          She cut her best guess in half and halved it again, and then once more for good measure. Twelve, she said, and took care to attach a period to her answer. The look on his face, a tense flattening of his chin and cheeks, made her wish she’d told him the truth, that she didn’t know, couldn’t remember them all, probably had forgotten as many as she remembered. “Does it matter?” she asked him, daring him to say yes. Then she chickened out, grabbed his cock before he could answer.
          “Too bad I’m a happily married man, huh?” Peabody pressed his erection against her hip.
          She shuddered. “Bloody shame.”
          If there was somebody for everybody, maybe the trick was to avoid your somebody. Maybe ending up with a person who was all wrong for you was the best possible outcome. She took a deep breath. She’d need her strength to deal with the rest of the clan.
          His family! Neither sister had liked her. What would the mother be like, for God’s sake? As they shook hands Twyla’s sharply tweezed eyebrows undulated and her nostrils flared. April could tell they’d been hopeful, that they really did want someone for their brother, and they were put out that she wasn’t what they had in mind. April thought she had erased herself into nondescriptness – no makeup, no perfume, and the blandest outfit she could come up with, pressed khakis and a navy blue cable knit sweater. What had Twyla seen? Smelled? The same thing Peabody was sniffing after?

          In her dream the woman looked a lot like Gwyneth Paltrow, only April knew it was Margo. (Gwyneth after a month-long bender in Reno, Gwyneth with stomach trouble and chronic headaches and a bad haircut.) Margo was sitting at Parr’s dining room table making bead bracelets with Polly and Henry and April. Almost as many beads got dropped onto the god-awful shag carpet as got strung onto the elastic thread. Tiny plastic primary colored beads that would be ground into the two-toned green fibers and never be vacuumed up.

          Peabody was arranged like a target: the aquamarine oval of the pool, the red rectangular raft, the sunburnt man, a shiny aluminum can. He lifted his head and winked at her. Bastard. It pissed her off how drinking eased things for him. Drinking only dulled her, made her feel like she was wrapped in cotton in a snap-shut jewelry box. He’d pay for it, she figured, but look at him now! Not a care in the world. She grabbed an apple. Wound up. Aimed for the can on his belly.

         
PARR

          Parr could tell that April really liked the pool. She’d brought over two bikinis and two kinds of sunblock. He thanked the weather gods for summer’s early onset. He didn’t feel good about leaving her alone with Peabody, who had shown up at noon sharp in his swim trunks as if he’d received an engraved invitation. That was when Parr got the idea for a barbeque. A crowd would be better. Get Henry and Polly and some of their friends over – that was the ticket. April would see that his family really could have fun. Peabody was an agent of unease. And Easter had been such a disaster.
          “Well that was fun!” April had thrown her big straw purse on the couch. Her keys clanged inside it. He didn’t turn on the lamp, but she snapped on the overhead light in the kitchen. He sat beside her purse as she banged around in the cupboards – a glass and the aspirin bottle pulled out. The water ran and ran. He shoved the purse out of sight beneath the couch. He waited for her to reappear. Lit from behind, she seemed to be vibrating. He thought she might hurl the water glass at him.
          “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I had no idea – ”
          She turned her back on him. “Forget it. Let’s fuck.”
          He didn’t know what else to do. She was already naked when he got to the bedroom. He imagined that April was on fire and he hurled himself against her like a blanket to stifle the flames.
          Even afterward, he was afraid she might say something more, something he wouldn’t want to hear. He slid to the end of the bed and rubbed her feet, worked his thumbs into her arches until she moaned. He nibbled at her right ankle. Ran his tongue up the ridge of her shin. Kissed a tiny, white crescent-shaped scar on her knee. Why did everything have to be so unsettled? He made his mind a blank screen. What did he really think had happened to Margo? April’s knee tasted flat, like bare wood. He couldn’t make the blankness take shape. This was a new kind of blankness, with no image attached to it at all, not even a shape or a color or hiss of static. And no car rounding the corner. No car. No road. No rotting body, no mildewed efficiency apartment in a distant city, no hotel room, no jail cell – as though Margo had traveled further away when he wasn’t paying attention. No longer missing, but truly disappeared. He began to weep.
          “I’m sorry, Parr.” April pushed herself to sitting. “We all drank too much. It doesn’t mean anything. Okay?” She wiped his tears with her fingertips. Such a tender gesture. He was afraid to look at her face, in case her expression didn’t match. He pressed his lips to her knee. Again, he emptied his mind. Eyes closed, eyes open, it didn’t matter. He could see only what was in front of him. Skin. That scar, like one half of a parentheses. The briefest bit of punctuation.