Missing

First, Chris left her. Now, Brandon is missing. Hannah slips softly out of her seat in the auditorium of the science museum where, with the help of a handful of over-involved moms and one token dad, she’s overseeing her class of twenty-two second graders. Well, it should be twenty-two. Right now, there are twenty-one. Of course it’s Brandon who’s run off. Hannah would prefer to spend the duration of this educational video about the solar system wallowing. But she’s got to find Brandon before the chaperones realize he’s missing.

Hannah hasn’t made a great impression on these parents today. The cashmere-clad moms recoiled at her knotty hair, her snot-crusted gloves. The lone father pulled up the short zipper of his overpriced sweater in suspicious disgust as he took in her red-rimmed eyes. Their doubtful, disapproving faces silently asked, Can such a disheveled woman lead our children to academic greatness? They probably think Hannah is hungover or high. They would never pause to consider maybe, just maybe, poor Ms. Forrest’s heart is broken. If their badly behaved second graders grew up to be prostitutes or pill heads, it would be Hannah’s fault. Mercifully, neither of Brandon’s notoriously difficult parents are here today. His mother emails the fourth-grade teacher almost daily requesting special accommodations for Brandon’s sister. The last thing Hannah needs is a mother like that on her case. The stars and planets video is a half hour long. Hannah has thirty minutes to find Brandon before the lights snap on and she becomes the failure everyone already thinks she is.

This morning, before work, Hannah’s two-year dream of marrying Chris dissolved more quickly than the half packet of artificial sweetener he took in his daily coffee. She assumed she could quit teaching after the wedding. Live off Chris’s handsome salary. Say goodbye to troublemaking kids like Brandon who never stay in their seats. Their parents who always want more, more, more. Never mind that Chris hasn’t proposed yet. Or even asked her on a date.

So, the last thing Hannah needs is to chase down this year’s antagonist child through a crowded museum. She stands in the corridor outside the auditorium, unsure where to start her search.

“If I were Brandon, where would I go?” she says aloud, unthinking.

“Can I help you, ma’am?” asks an employee in a polo embroidered with the museum’s logo.

“Just talking to myself,” Hannah says, bringing a jagged thumb nail to her lips.

“Well, if you need any help, I’ll be over there.” The employee’s brows squeeze together over concerned eyes as he takes in the lollipop-red patches on Hannah’s dry, cracked lips where she’s pulled the flaking skin with her teeth.

The only lesson of the year Brandon engaged with was a module on caterpillars and butterflies, the part of the second-grade curriculum Hannah dreads most because of what happened during her first year of teaching. She stayed late on a hot Friday in September to set up the baby caterpillars in their classroom environment. Over the weekend, the air conditioning broke. The caterpillar food melted into inedible sludge. She gagged when she cleaned up the liquified food, the dead larvae. The kids acted like she killed their family pets. They sat in misery as Hannah read the book about the insects’ life cycles aloud, blaming her for the fact the real deal wasn’t percolating in the back of the room. But this year, all the larvae lived, and of course Brandon loved the lesson even though it was a bitch to put together. Hannah hopes intellectual curiosity, rather than his mile-wide disobedient streak, compelled Brandon to flee the group.

Hannah scans rows of potted plants in the butterfly room. She dodges monarchs, red admirals, and painted ladies, all of which she recognizes from repetitive lesson plans and annual trips to this museum. Hannah hates knowing this much about butterflies. She hates that she’ll visit this humid, fusty room again next year with at least one kid who, like Brandon, gets up every fifteen minutes to sharpen his pencil. Who disrupts lessons with incendiary nonsequiturs like McDonald’s serves horse meat just because his mom won’t take him there. There’s at least one every year. If Chris had given her a ring, she could have given an unapologetic Fuck you, I quit letter to her principal, who cares only about standardized test scores and why her class’s aren’t higher.

Perhaps Chris left her because she cheated on him. Could it really be called “cheating,” though? A year ago, lonely and drunk, Hannah fell into bed with a kind-eyed stranger she met at the bar. She thought of Chris the whole time. She pretended the hair she squeezed between her fingers was Chris’s sandy blond coif, not the stranger’s deep black shag. Hannah imagined the lean body beneath her was Chris’s strong, thick frame.

Not that she knew, exactly, what Chris’s body looked like. She’d felt her limbs slacken as his honeyed hair glinted in the lights of the café where they both ordered coffee each workday. Never gripped it with lusty hands. She only ever saw him in the suits he wore to work year-round. Except once. One glorious summer Sunday morning, she saw him in their café, even though he didn’t usually go there on weekends. He was slick and sweating in a dry-fit tee, his shorts showcasing a few delicious inches of sculpted quadriceps. The memory of his shorts swishing together as he jingled out of the belled café door turn her organs to water even now.

So, it wasn’t cheating on Chris, not really. But when she woke up in the dark-haired stranger’s apartment, shame slopping in her belly, it felt like cheating. She tip-toed away without a glance at the snoring lump who’d slept with his warm arm wrapped around her shoulder. On her cold walk home, Hannah vowed never to betray Chris again. And how did he repay her year of remorse? With two weeks of anxious, unexpected absence from their usual café and the audacity to return with a radiant tan and a sparkling gold wedding ring. Chris is married to someone else, and Brandon is still missing. The too-hot butterfly room grows nauseous.

Hannah starts to worry as she hurries along the corridor to the North American animals exhibit. It occurs to her that something sinister could have happened to Brandon. But then again, he likes to push her buttons. Just yesterday, she confiscated from him a mini bouncy ball. He knows he isn’t supposed to play with toys in class. You could have taken someone’s eye out, she said to him. She reaches now for the little ball, still in her tote. Gold glitter flecks suspended in a hard knot of clear rubber.

There isn’t much time left before the solar system video ends and her own absence causes alarm. Hannah peeks into the exhibits of life-sized bison and bighorn sheep as if Brandon is hiding behind the glass. She meets her own faded reflection as she gazes out onto painted plains, across artificial firs. She wonders if this is how Chris sees her—a shadowy figure in the background of his life.

Chris is the star of hers. Hannah cherishes each detail she’s collected about him over the years. The smell of his tea tree oil soap. The fact he prefers charcoal gray suits with white oxford shirts. On Fridays, he doesn’t wear a tie, and Hannah gets a glimpse of the sweet, soft space between his collarbones.

Once, Chris held his work badge in his left hand while his right rifled through his pockets for change. Edwards & Wright, it read in stately blue letters. A law firm. She should have known Chris was a lawyer. Hannah created a fake LinkedIn account and scrolled through the company’s many Christophers until she found hers, smiling at her through the computer screen. Christopher Jones. Jones. Mrs. Hannah Jones. Hannah Louise Jones, or maybe Hannah Forrest Jones. Mr. and Mrs. Christopher Jones.

Now some bitch she doesn’t know is Mrs. Christopher Jones instead of Hannah. Some prettier, fitter woman who makes more money in a year than Hannah would in five teaching second grade, probably. Someone who deserves Chris. Someone Chris deserves. Someone who will never love him as much as Hannah does. Hannah lays a hand on her soft stomach, blanketed by a synthetic sweater she bought for $12.99 at Costco, where she went to help her mother buy plastic cutlery in bulk for Thanksgiving. She used to think the soft, black sweater was beautiful. Now, she wants to shred it, throw the bits into the fake river in the otter exhibit. Of course Chris never saw her. People like her are invisible to people like him.

She grips the confiscated rubber ball in a white-knuckled fist, stares into the shining black eyes of long-dead caribou. Without Chris, Hannah is like these animals. A frozen, bloodless thing, unable to speak a word while mouth-breathing children lean toward her, their parents lording over them.

“Can I help you, ma’am?” another cheerful employee asks. Hannah tries to force her face to relax. She cannot betray her purpose in this room.

“Just looking, thanks.” Hannah’s false smile is too wide. Shows too many teeth.

“Are you sure?” The woman’s forehead melts, and her eyes soften. She doesn’t often encounter a solo museum goer with messy hair who’s all but running through the room, leaning too close to the glass of each exhibit. Not an adult one anyway.

Hannah squeezes the ball in her fist. She has about seven minutes to find Brandon and haul him back to the auditorium. Only the dinosaur exhibit is near enough, so in Hannah walks to what is the museum’s busiest room.

Children swarm the space. They point at the giant brown bones of a Tyrannosaurus rex standing in a skeletal lunge, its eyeless head trying but failing to threaten the little bodies that would have been easy prey were it alive. Thick, scientific words drip from tiny mouths with precocious sweetness. Over time, Hannah has hardened against the softness of children, their tender curiosity. She’s been asked by one too many eight-year-olds why she doesn’t have kids. Why she isn’t married. Whether she’s pregnant or just chubby. They’re cruel, if only accidentally.

Hannah isn’t enough for poor Brandon, who hates her class so much he’s run away. She isn’t enough for Chris, who left her. She isn’t enough for her class, which she’s left in the theater. She isn’t enough for the principal, who expects her to keep an overcrowded class of rowdy kids in line and overachieving on a shoestring budget. She will never be enough for the kids’ parents, who will gossip about her at school-sponsored functions for years to come. She has failed them all.

There are only three minutes at best before Hannah will have to speed walk back to the auditorium. She walks down a corridor toward the men’s room, opens the door, and calls his name. He doesn’t respond.

“Hey, are you okay?” a dad asks. “Looking for your kid?”

Hannah nods.

“What’s his name?”

“Brandon.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll find him.”

The kind stranger offers a closed-lipped nod and enters the men’s room calling Brandon’s name. Hannah wonders if this man judges her for losing a child. If he’s a predator, lurking in the dinosaur exhibit where children screech with glee. Whether she has just condemned poor little Brandon to a horrible fate by sending this man in after him. The dad returns from the bathroom, apologetic, without Brandon. Hannah’s shaking frame and frantic gaze make him uneasy.

“You’ll find him,” the man says before hurrying away from Hannah, the wild woman with the tear-stained cheeks and manic eyes.

On her final loop through the dinosaur room, Hannah spots a corner exhibition of several partial skulls. A large potted plant. A few feet behind, a staff-only door. Hannah rounds the planter and peers to the back edge of the exhibit. There, Brandon squats, still in his puffer jacket, eyes enormous.

“Brandon, you had me worried sick,” Hannah says to the scared heap of a child.

“It was an accident, Ms. Forrest,” he says fast. “Everyone was there, then they were gone.”

Water floods the rims of Brandon’s eyes. Hannah lowers herself to his level, sits on the floor beside him. She loosens her grip on the ball in her hand.

“I’m not mad.” She’s not, not anymore, not at Brandon.

His eyes puncture the balloon of anger she’s carried around the museum, letting the air out in a flat hiss. She wants to hide like Brandon. To sit in a dark corner while the world carries on around her. She ruffles the top of his head. She’s not supposed to do things like this, not really, but he’s terrified. He’s only eight. This won’t be the last time he’ll feel overwhelmed, afraid, lost. He doesn’t have to be alone in it, not this time, not yet. Hannah is here.

Brandon had the right idea, Hannah thinks. All anyone ever does is drive you crazy or break your heart. It’s easier to be alone in the dark. When you’re eight, someone might come save you. When you’re grown, no one will.

“Brandon, I want you to go meet up with the rest of the class. They’re just across the hall in the auditorium.”

Brandon nods, confused. “You’re not coming?”

“I’m right behind you.”

For once in his stupid, little life, Brandon listens. Hannah hears his sneakers squeaking on the linoleum floor as he goes.

She closes her eyes. How she wishes she could climb into the tall, artificial grasses in the animal exhibits. If only she could dive into the frosty, too-blue painted water on the backdrops and forget Chris’s wedding ring. Forget Brandon, the ball in her palm she couldn’t bring herself to return to him. Forget the twenty-one children who think she sits among them learning how stars die. Forget their parents. Forget herself.

It wouldn’t be so bad to be a taxidermied animal, after all. The worst is over for them. They live unbreathing, untroubled in hermetically sealed boxes where no one can bother them at close range. How preferable to living as a broke, lonely woman who feels too much. The sort Chris would never love. The sort he’s never even noticed.

Hannah could find him on Instagram. Find his wife there, too. From their posts, it wouldn’t be hard to determine where they lived, roughly at least. What TV shows they watched together in a tangle of limbs and throw blankets. Which five-star beach resort they chose for vacation every summer, fucking like hot, hard-bodied rabbits morning, noon, and night while Hannah’s soul withered as she taught summer school in a soupy classroom. She could watch Chris and his wife progressing. Getting promotions. Moving into bigger, better houses in sunnier, grassier neighborhoods. Birthing bright, beautiful children who might end up in her class one day. Maybe Hannah would have to look across her wobbly desk to tell the ever-handsome Chris and his still-stunning bride that their son was doing wonderfully in second grade. He’s the best reader in the class, she might say through a plastic smile accentuating her deep crow’s feet.

Hannah opens her eyes and taps her throbbing head against the planter behind her. She unclenches her fist. The ball she cups in her hand is about the size of a marble, slightly bigger, nearly as hard. Its glitter flecks catch the light. She bounces it gently on the floor, catches it. The video her class is watching must be over now, the lights coming on. Soon the students will ask Where’s Ms. Forrest? and the parents will try to believe it when they say She must be in the ladies’ room. Hannah bounces the ball faster. The parents and confused kids will wait until the theater is empty before one of the moms goes to the bathroom to search for her and realizes she’s not there. Then, they will panic. Hannah holds the ball in her palm, the gold glinting like Chris’s wedding ring. Quickly, as if she meant to do it all along, she puts the ball in her mouth and swallows hard, a bitter pill covered in grit from the floor.

When the lights come up in the auditorium, the children do ask Where’s Ms. Forrest? The parents stand up, stretch their stiff knees. She must be in the ladies’ room, the token dad says. We’ll give her a moment, says a mother. She will have to talk to the principal about Ms. Forrest, this mother thinks. First the red eyes, now this. Another mom clutches the gold chain at her neck, exchanges nervous glances with the shortest parent of the group, a no-nonsense woman with a hard jaw who has questioned Ms. Forrest’s curriculum more than once this year. Their family dog died back in September, she explained via email to Ms. Forrest. Her son found Charlotte’s Web very upsetting. It doesn’t matter that Charlotte is a spider. Her boy is very triggered by the death of any animal. Surely Ms. Forrest should have obtained parental consent before she taught the book. It is she who finally offers to check the bathroom.

She returns confused. Over-smiling museum staff approach to usher them out of the room before the next group enters. Brandon raises his hand.

“I saw Ms. Forrest in the dinosaur room,” he says.

And so, the parents and the other second graders follow tiny, troublesome Brandon. Inside his pockets, Brandon crosses his fingers so hard they hurt. Ms. Forrest is his favorite teacher. It will be his fault, he thinks, if they don’t find her. He guides one of the chaperones to the corner where Ms. Forrest found him, where he expects they will see her now, still sitting on the ground with bent knees, but she’s gone.