Jennifer makes the phone call, the look on her face enough to tell me Alice hasn’t picked up. She disappears for a minute, coming back holding something. “I’d like you to see this.”

It is a small framed picture, a wallet-size school photograph of a girl with blond hair and blue eyes, braces glinting against the photographer’s flash. She has a big smile on her face, but her eyes are not smiling. It’s as if the photographer said, “Say cheese,” and she did, but there is no happiness behind it. It is more of a grimace.

“Stacy?”

“Yes. Her last school picture. She died seven months later.”

I stare at the face of an innocent young girl. “Why do you think she did it?”

“No one knows. Alice blamed Ed, because he insisted that they take the psychiatrist’s advice and medicate Stacy for her depression. But we don’t know why she was depressed in the first place. They did their best with her, and it wasn’t easy, them being older parents, but they gave her everything. They loved her entirely.”

“So even having love doesn’t guarantee happiness.”

Mitch takes the little picture out of my hand. “Shit happens. Sometimes you survive it; sometimes you don’t.”

He’s a survivor. And so am I.

Chapter 53

53

The balloon rises to the sky, a perfect azure blue sky without a trace of cloud. Alice grips the edge of the basket and looks directly down as the balloon slowly achieves its maximum tethered height. Buddy is standing with his nose pointed skyward. He is a tiny dot on the ground, hardly discernible as a dog; land-bound and diminished.

The propane engine roars intermittently, keeping them aloft. The vivid orange-and-blue zigzags of the balloon itself gently swell above their heads, so that the view is 360 degrees around them, but not above.

Ed puts his arms around her, leaning against her back, his chin on her head. “We aren’t going to give him back.” He has his lips close to her ear so that she can hear him against the roar.

Alice sighs, glad to feel herself surrounded by her husband. “Yes, we are.”

She’d missed Jen’s call, coming as it did while she was fumbling for dollars in her pocket to pay for lunch. After listening to the voice message, she shut the phone off. Just a few more minutes, a half hour of being Buddy’s family.

As slowly as they ascended, Ed and Alice in their beautiful balloon descend, the tethered balloon reeled in so gently so that the landing is barely significant. In between blasts of the furnace, they can hear Buddy, frantic at their disappearance. He is leaping and barking, fighting against the leash being held by the balloonist’s assistant. As they get closer, they see the panic in his eyes, the fear that he has been abandoned.