The back door was unlocked. He came in through the mudroom with the bag thumping over the sill and the paper sack under his arm, and he said, "Hello, hello, the traveling salesman has returned," the way he always said it, and nobody said anything back.
He stood in the mudroom and listened.
The house had a sound he did not know. It was the refrigerator, humming, and the clock on the stove, and under them something thick and held, the way a room sounds right after a door has slammed, when the air itself seems to be waiting to see if it will happen again. Then he went through the mudroom door into the kitchen and stopped.
Every drawer was open. Every single one, the silverware drawer and the junk drawer and the drawer of dish towels and the deep drawer by the stove with the pots in it, all of them hanging out of the cabinets like tongues. The cushions from the bench in the breakfast nook were on the floor. The cabinet under the sink was open and the trash can had been pulled out and tipped, and coffee grounds and a banana peel and a crumpled grocery receipt lay across the tile in a fan. Through the doorway to the living room he could see more of it. The couch cushions were off and stacked crooked on the rug. Linnea's backpack was upside down by the front door with its contents spilled in a little landslide, a folder and a lunchbox and a library book about octopuses and a single pink mitten that had been missing since March. The coat closet stood open. Coats lay on the floor below it as if the closet had shrugged them off.
His first thought, standing there, was burglary. His heart did a hard thing. His second thought, a half second behind the first, was that burglars don't take the cushions off the breakfast bench.
Noelle was sitting at the kitchen table.
She was sitting very straight, in one of the four wooden chairs, with her hands flat on the tabletop in front of her, the way people sit in waiting rooms when they are about to be called. She was still in her scrubs, the lavender ones with the little cartoon teeth on the pocket that the kids at the practice loved. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail that had loosened on one side. She looked at him when he came in. Her face was pale and composed and her eyes were red at the rims, and she held his gaze, and she did not get up.
"Hi," she said.
"What happened?" He set the bag down. He set the sack down on top of it, carefully, because he could hear the snow globe slosh. "Noelle. What happened? Are you okay? Where's Linnie?"
She didn't answer the last part. She looked, instead, past him, to the left, and he followed her eyes.
His daughter was standing in the corner between the end of the counter and the refrigerator. It was a small space, a foot and a half wide, where they kept the broom and the step stool, and she had pushed herself into it so that she was half hidden by the side of the fridge, with the broom handle leaning against her shoulder. She was still in her school clothes, purple leggings and the sweatshirt with the sequin cat that changed from silver to pink when you brushed it the wrong way. She had her swimsuit on underneath. He could see the blue straps at her neck. Her feet were bare on the tile. Her hair, which was the color of wet sand, the color of his mother's, was in the two braids Noelle had put in that morning, and one braid had come half loose. She was holding the purple watch against her chest with her other hand wrapped around it, as though it were something alive that might get away.