See How Small. Scott Blackwood

back. She said he’d better be careful. She said she had him figured out. Michael began to worry about her abducting Alice from school at recess or lunch, and so he sometimes made impromptu visits to the school office around these times — claiming he needed to drop off a jacket or Alice’s left-behind chocolate milk — to quiet his anxiety.

      A few times on the phone Lucinda had prompted him with people’s names, places in Austin where they used to live or hang out years before. She even mentioned the murders, saying she’d seen one of the girls’ parents on the news leading up to the fifth anniversary. Something about a memorial fund. “Can you imagine?” Lucinda had said. He asked her why the fuck was she bringing all this up now? Often during these conversations, Alice, as if on cue, would begin calling him from her room: Could he turn the closet light on? Flip her pillow over? Brush her teeth again because she didn’t want a gold tooth like his? On the phone, Lucinda would pivot suddenly, confess that she made a mistake, that she missed the old days. She needed Alice back in her life. She was sorry for accusing him of stealing Alice. Sorry for the way she’d acted. She had a sponsor at AA now, she said. He should go too. Then he’d hear her inhale softly — almost mournfully — on her cigarette and could see her lying in some stranger’s bed (her sponsor’s, probably), the ashtray balanced on her bare belly, the shadowed curve of her breast. He’d say it all would be okay, they’d come through this, if they just learned to trust each other. This was their job now, he said, rebuilding that trust. Part of him actually believed it.

      For the past few months, Michael had worked at straddling the gaping hole Lucinda had left in their heads. Sometimes he did this by taking Alice to a kid matinee at the Paramount Theater. Sometimes by picking up Lucinda’s slack at the YMCA Preschool parents’ day or taking on extra hours working at the men’s residence while Alice was there. Sometimes he and Alice would make space ships and submarines from duct tape and discarded boxes they found in the alley behind the apartment. But most of the time Michael spanned Lucinda’s absence by levitating on vodka tonics and her left-behind anxiety pills. They’d watch too much bad TV and laugh too loudly and long at his downstairs Korean neighbor’s jokes, which Alice didn’t understand but laughed at anyway, like the one about a Korean restaurant manager and the missing neighborhood dog.