The questions the officer asked seemed to float impersonally across the room. For reasons beyond her understanding, Mrs Johnson was less focused on the questions themselves than she was on how wrong it felt that he could ask them in such a detached way. Her arms were unconsciously hugging her sides as if trying to hold her together. She watched the officer scribble in a notepad every time she or her husband gave an answer. She had been so consumed by Aria’s disappearance that she did not even notice that their family cat was also gone.

Upstairs, the occasional squeak of a floorboard or scuffing of a drawer being opened was audible from a second officer who was examining Aria’s room. Given Aria’s past as a ward of the state, they did not have to wait to file a missing person’s report. But as much of a blessing as that was, the police seemed unmoved by her absence, as if it were a let-down to be expected from a “child like her.”

When the police had collected all the information that they could, Mr Johnson saw them out. Instead of comforting his wife, he stood there looking at her as if to say, “I don’t know what to do.” And he didn’t know what to do. About Aria missing. About his wife’s distress. He was just standing there, waiting for direction.

It was at times like this that Mrs Johnson’s picture-perfect family image began to burn at the edges, like filmstrip caught in the projector. She got up and found herself watching her other children – sent into the backyard during the police visit – through the window over the kitchen sink. This was her way of coping, to busy herself with petty tasks. The warmth of the water offered itself to her in ways that her husband would not. She found a certain security of control in the way the soap predictably cleared the filth from the dishes. Watching the children play outside, witnessing them explore the limits of gravity with smiles on their faces, she couldn’t help but be struck by their innocence. Mrs Johnson could not figure out why God would let things happen to corrupt that innocence.

At times like this, she would speak to God in her own mind. Today, her invisible prayer was to understand why one child is born into a home like theirs, with loving parents and all the advantages in life, and why another child is not. She could feel her husband standing behind her. It bothered her that he did not seem vexed by these kinds of questions. Perhaps it was because he was a man. She envied his capacity to simply accept whatever life threw at them. She also hated him for it.