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He touched the tabletop and ran his fingers over a copy of a drawing that a Japanese war child had made of its mother. The mother had bright swollen lips; the skin on her hands hung loose like rubber gloves. Willa hated those pictures, had seen that one before and read the caption: HIGASHI YAMAMOTO, MY MOTHER 53 YEARS OLD. Willa's mother had promised to keep them hidden, but sometimes she forgot and left one lying around the house.

“Not for you,” said Willa, though she knew he couldn't see it, and she backed up.

She brought him to the front room where she used to sit with her mother and father counting trucks in the night, the lights coming toward them on the highway out of nowhere, the rush of sound, then everything growing smaller and smaller, less and less noisy, until it was quiet and they were just sitting there again. In summer they had watched from the porch, and then they could feel the wind of the passing trucks, like feeling the waves the motorboats made when she swam in Lake Michigan on vacations—more ripples than waves, really—and with the trucks it was not quite wind, but more a slight, brief wall of air. Her parents didn't argue when they sat there watching trucks. Her father didn't talk about his office, and her mother didn't talk about the rallies. It was the quietest time they had.

What a baby she'd been in her father's arms, thinking that under the ground was more ground, that in the silos was wheat, that her father would sit there forever in the green stuffed chair. She sat the boy down beside her in the creaking chair and told him to listen for trucks.

“Car,” he said, and she said, “A truck is a big car.”

“Plane,” he said, and she thought of the ones she took to New York to visit her father. The flight attendants always gave her coloring books full of drawings of pilots and suitcases—books meant for much younger kids. Willa knew she should save them for her father's little children, but since he always took her to the hotel, never home, she left the books and crayons on the plane with a wonderful feeling of spite.

He had two children with his new wife, one who was just hers and one who was both of theirs. This meant that Willa had a half-sister and a stepbrother, which should have added up to something whole, but though she knew their names were Katherine and William, which was so close to Willa, she had never seen them, not even pictures, and part of her was not convinced they existed. The boy squirmed in her arms, so she put him down and took his hand, but he stumbled, groping at the air, so she picked him up and carried him again, making her way unsteadily to the ant farm in her room.

She couldn't show him, really. She could press his fingers to the glass, but that wouldn't tell him anything, so instead Willa read to him from a library book about army ants, though her ants were simple garden ants.
Army ants always moved in columns five ants wide, she told him, marching and marching for seventeen days; then they stopped and laid eggs until they were ready to march again. They had jaws like ice tongs and could eat a leopard, and almost all of them were female. The boy sat in her lap with a mild, interested expression on his face, so she told him about the replete ants who filled their abdomens with nectar until they swelled like grapes, then hung suspended from the ceiling of the nest. When the other ants were hungry, Willa said, they tapped on the mouth of the replete ant, and it spat out a drop of honeydew.

The boy looked a little bored, and he was still shivering, so she lugged him down to the basement where they could be close to the furnace's warmth. As he sat on the floor by the furnace, she kneeled beside him and lightly touched his hair, so like milkweed. How did he get to be so blond, she wondered; his mother had hair as dark as Willa's.

“Stand up, would you,” she told him, and when he did she took both his hands and led him slowly across the room. “See, you're not a baby, you're a big boy. You walk fine.”

“Fridge,” said the boy when they stood before it, for he must have heard it humming, and he reached out and placed his palms flat against the large white door.

“Did you know some children don't live with their parents?” Willa told him. “Either the kids get taken away, kidnapped when they're still young and cute, or else they run away when they're a little older and no one wants them.”

Holding the door ajar with her foot, she hoisted him up and guided his hand to the middle shelf of milk cartons. This was the shelf of the two to five year olds: Jason Mccaffrey with blue eyes and brown hair, Crystal Anne Sandors, DOB July 22, 1979, who was three and a half now, pouting like a brat and wearing tiny hoop earrings and pearls. Some of the children had been computer-aged, so that Billy, who was two when he disappeared from his aunt's shopping cart in Normal, Illinois, appeared three years later on the carton as a five year old, his face grainy and stretched-out, coated with wax.

To call those children missing, Willa knew, only meant they were missing for somebody, even though maybe they were found for someone else.
Just because they were not at home did not mean they were wandering the earth alone. There were too many of them, just look at all those cartons. First Crystal probably ran into Jeffrey, and then Crystal and Jeffrey ran into Vicki, and soon there were masses of them, whole underground networks. When she went to the supermarket with her mother she spotted them sometimes, kids poking holes in the bags of chocolate in the candy aisle or thumbing through a comic book—kids in matted gray parkas that once were white. They had large pupils and pale skin from living inside the earth.

They knew how to meet underground, these groups of children, knew how to tell a field with a hidden silo from a field of snow, how to comb through the stubble of old corn to find the way down, then slide behind the men in uniforms who guarded the silo like an enormous jewel. They could pass by the waiting dogs, for they were scentless from being frozen for so long. They were thin and coated with wax and could slide quite effortlessly through cracks. Underground they formed squads by age: the blue squad for the nine to eleven year olds, the brown squad for the babies who couldn't walk yet and were covered with mud and dirt. In the underground silos they found piles of wheat and hay left over from the days when the silos had been used on farms. They slept on the hay, woke in the morning with straw stuck in their hair. For breakfast they ground the wheat with stones, formed it into patties, cooked it into small round cakes.

The children knew Willa only as a sort of looming presence. They couldn't see her, but they could feel a shift in the atmosphere when she picked up their cartons, as if a cloud had cast its shadow or a truck swept by the house. They didn't understand how much she made them do; they thought they had their staring contests when they were bored, when really it was Willa pairing them up so they would stare into each other's eyes. Some of them she liked more than others, and these children received favors. The ones who had been there the longest got to sit at the front of the shelf. So far none of them had had to leave. This soup was not for eating. Her mother called it soup for a rainy day.

Someday Willa might have to join them. She did not know how to get there, exactly, but she knew she would figure out a way. Her mother would not be with her, or her father. The larger you were, the harder it was to survive; she could tell that from watching her ants. At eleven, Willa was still
quite runty for her age, though her mother made her drink glass after glass of milk. She put the boy down, and then she took out the missing children and told him about each one, placing them in a large ring around him on the concrete floor, as if it were a birthday party and time for Duck Duck Goose. When she got to Craig Allen Denton, REPORTED MISSING FROM THE HOSPITAL ON THE DAY OF BIRTH, 9/11/80, she stopped and stared at him, then wiped the frost from his face with her cuff.

Craig Allen Denton had a shriveled face as white as milk and eyes screwed into slits. His mouth was open in a howl, his fist clenched in a tight ball by his cheek. Willa looked at him again, held him under the light, then turned and stared at the child in her basement. The baby in the picture, she saw, was the toddler on the floor. Melody must have stolen him, or maybe Melody's baby had been switched with him.

Before, Willa had thought the baby in the photo had closed his eyes because he was crying. Now she saw that he had no eyes.

Somewhere, to somebody, this eyeless boy was missing. Melody had a son, and the boy had a mother, but still something was wrong. Something was always wrong, no matter how right things seemed. Willa had known this for a while, but still it gave her a headache to think of it. She pulled the boy onto her lap and rubbed her forehead against his hair.

“What's your name?” she asked, but he only sneezed.

When she heard a creaking on the stairs, Willa assumed it was a cat. She was showing the boy how to run his fingernail along the side of a carton and gather tiny flakes of wax. She was telling him about Gail May Joliet, DOB 3/12/71, EYES hazel, Gail May who had been computer-aged so that the edges of her face were visible now as a series of small black dots like poppy seeds. “Computer-aged,” said the print beneath, and in the wavery lines of her cheeks you could see how they had taken away Gail May's baby fat. Now she looked like a five year old whose cheeks had been carved away.

“She lives in the underground village,” Willa told the boy. “She's a gymnast, you should see—she does back flips and balance beam and horse, and I think parallel bars. She's the head of the blue squad. Also she carves tunnels. She's two-and-a-half months older than me.”

And she took his hand and placed it over Gail May's face.

Her mother must have been standing there watching from the stairs. She must have been staring at the ring Willa had made of all the soup, of all the milk cartons, arranged not by flavor but by child. She must have been looking at Willa and the boy sitting in the center of the ring. As Willa's eyes lighted on her mother and Melody two steps behind, she tightened her hold on the child.

“What on earth are you doing?” said her mother from the stairs.

Willa shrugged and touched the child's staticky hair. Her mother came toward them, kneeled outside the circle, let out a strained laugh.

“What are you doing with all the soup? It's melting, Willa. Will you just look at that? All my good soup is turning to mush.”

She was right. Tiny puddles of water were collecting underneath each carton as the soup began to sweat. Her mother started to pick up a carton, but Willa leaned over the boy and swatted at her hand.

“Leave it, Mom, okay? I'll clean it up.”

“I thought you were reading in your room,” said her mother. “We heard you reading to him.”

She stepped over the cartons, scooped the boy up, handed him up to Melody, and whispered something. Then Melody and the boy disappeared up the stairs. Outside the ring of cartons, Willa's mother crouched.

“Were you building a city?” she said. “There are blocks in the attic if you want to build with him. Why did you have to defrost all my soup?”

If she had felt like it, she could have explained things logically to her mother, how in an Emergency Situation the radiation would seep into the basement, inside the furnace, inside the canned goods, stacks of magazines, bottles of wine. How it would go right through the thick white insulation of the fridge, through the wax and cardboard of the milk cartons, through all those dotted faces to the soup.

But her mother knew that, and still she kept making soup.

Willa sighed. “I wasn't defrosting.”

“What were you doing then?”

Her mother stepped over the cartons and kneeled by her side.

“Just playing.”

“Well then,” said her mother. “I'll put them away. I can't have all that soup melting. You can't refreeze, it doesn't work.”

“Ill do it,” said Willa, and as her mother sat cross-legged in the middle of the circle, she began collecting the cartons by age, by group, starting with the babies and moving up.

“Melody has potential as an artist,” said her mother. She handed her daughter a carton, out of order.

“I'll do it. Let me do it.” Willa peered at the carton—G. Phillip Stull, red squad—then put it back on the floor.

“Oh—oh I see,” her mother said. “You were talking to him about these pictures, weren't you? You were telling Melody's baby about the children on the cartons.”

Willa continued her ordering.

“I think a lot of it is media panic, honey,” her mother said. “I mean, from what I've heard. A lot of these kids are with their divorced parents, or there's a custody problem, or they ran away. You'd be surprised. Most of them aren't actually missing at all.”

Willa turned and began to collect the two to four year olds.

————

Upstairs, she went to Melody, who was cutting an apple into pieces in the kitchen, and stood by her side. In the living room she could hear her mother murmuring to the child.

“Hi there,” said Melody, and Willa said hi.

“Your Mom said I could cut Jo-Jo an apple. Thanks for playing with him. Did he give you any trouble?”

Willa shook her head. Melody popped a slice of apple into her mouth and chewed.

“He's a good kid. All his babysitters love him, once they get used to him.”

“Did he, I mean, was he—”

“He was born like that.”

Willa nodded, and Melody squinted at her. “Has your mother been telling you stuff? About where I worked and all?”

Willa shook her head.

“Oh, okay. It's just that I've had a bunch of jobs, worked all over the place, but my last job was at that power plant down by Acton, and it's hard to say, about his eyes. You can never say for sure, but if your mother told you
I shouldn't take any more chances with that place, I can't argue. Too many funny things.”

“What'd you think when he was born?”

Melody shook her head. “I had a C-section—you know, when they cut you open?” She traced a line down her stomach. “I was out cold.”