Among the Missing Read Online Free

afternoon, while they are eating lunch. Across the room, the praying lady is solemnly bending over her salad, and for a moment Sandi is so lost in watching, so lost in thought, that she doesn’t know what Janice is talking about.
    “Guy?” she says blankly.
    “The man I saw you with,” Janice says, smiling. “He was riding with you in your car.” She arches her eyebrows, gently suggestive. “He looked cute, from a distance.”
    What can she say? “Oh,” she says. “No, it’s … just someone I know.”
    “That’s a start,” Janice says. “Knowing someone, I mean.” She shakes her head thoughtfully, and her bobbed hair sways from side to side. “You know,” she says. “I just wanted to say that … I don’t know anyone who has gone through the kind of personal tragedy you’ve gone through, and I just want you to know how much I admire you. You really are a together person, and it’s such an inspiration to me. I wanted you to know that. I mean, you’re seeing people, and you’re getting on with your life, and I’m just really glad for you.”
    Sandi thinks for a moment: a myriad of things. “Thank you,” she says at last, and Janice briefly touches her hand.
    “You’re a real role model for me,” Janice says earnestly. “I’m sorry, I just wanted to tell you that.”
    The old woman across the room has stopped praying. She now appears to be sobbing silently.
    •   •   •
    Sandi used to have a normal life. Didn’t she? She remembers thinking so, when they first moved to Chicago. She’d loved the big north suburban house they’d bought—so old, so much history! She loved that there was a little park right around the corner, and not far beyond was a row of small quaint shops, and beyond that was the girls’ school, everything comfortably arranged. She was away from her crazy family at last, away from the small-town restrictions of her former life.
    So it had seemed. But now, as she feels more and more unsettled, she can’t help but worry that this comfort is only an illusion. Earlier that week, as she stood on the playground, waiting to pick her girls up after school, a thin, shrill woman—another parent, apparently—had harangued her about the hormones that were being injected into chicken and cattle. These hormones were affecting the children, the woman said. The girls are having their periods earlier and earlier, sometimes as young as nine and ten! And the boys, the woman continued. Had Sandi noticed how aggressive they’d become? “Doesn’t it frighten you?” the woman asked, glaring, and Sandi had nodded, somewhat dizzily.
    “I saw a tooth,” Sandi confided. “A human tooth, outside the building where I work. In an ashtray!” And the woman had looked at her warily, silent. After a moment, she walked away, as if Sandi had somehow offended her.
    She must have seemed like a crazy person, Sandi thinks now as she sits at her desk. She frowns, moving her cursor along a line of numbers on her computer screen. Somewhere, over the tops of the thin-walled maze of cubicles, she can hear Janice laughing her flirtatious laugh, and she has to swallow down the presentiment that Janice will die soon, that Janice will, in fact,be murdered. She slides the arrow of her mouse, points and clicks as the janitor who looks like Safety Man passes by and salutes cheerfully when she glances up. I am an insane person, Sandi thinks. They will all recognize it, eventually. She can’t go on like this much longer. Sooner or later, they’ll begin to realize that she is not really one of them; that she is in a different place entirely.
    But she continues on: weeks pass, months, and yet here she is, driving through the flow of traffic, humming to a tune on the radio, and Safety Man smiles serenely beside her, gazing forward like a noble sea captain.
    “You’re doing fine,” Safety Man tells her. “Everyone thinks so. You can go on like this for a very long time, and no one will notice. You keep