Chaos

1.

The fourth-grade mothers learn that one of the fourth-grade girls, Jade, is missing. Their sons and daughters announce this at the dinner tables. The children are reluctant to provide the news. Nothing like this has happened before, and they don’t know how the mothers—who the children are old enough to be mortified by—will react.

The fourth-grade mothers are all in. It is summer and there is plenty of light. They will take the school playground and its adjoining toddler yard. They will take the library parking lot. The area around the Veteran’s Building; the middle school track. Filled with mission and flanked by their jacketed children. Their fourth-grade children call out too softly for anyone but the mothers to hear them. Their babies babble and point.

None of them know this child, this family. Her parents are lithe and smiling runners who show up in their office clothes to every PTA meeting. One or the other of them always offers themselves for any new committee. The best of them, even though they can’t think of this couple as “of them,” at least not yet.

2.

At the PTA meetings, the wifely eyes slide over to this husband, whose Facebook handle is SurferDan. They sometimes pore over his page when their husbands are asleep but none of them braves a friend request. On PTA nights, the fathers pack the kids into their trucks for the pizza parlor with the cartoons and the cheap pitchers. Their husbands at the annual motel pool wear bucket hats and dark t shirts.

The mothers see this husband and wife in the early mornings, running like deer in the dim streets before work. No, none of them know this elegant family with its single child and desertscaped yard. Their kids are not even friends with this now glamorous, glittering girl.

Because their kids are all connected by their smartphones, the fourth-grade mothers learn that Jade had a fight with her mother! Wears thong underpants! Ran out in the night, in her sweats and socks!

Now, the mothers’ smartphones start to buzz. The missing girl is so grown, they text. One of the very few fourth-grade girls to need a bra. Sneaks out at night. Got her period early. Suddenly, the mothers need to get back to cooled sinks of sudsy dishes. To baths and the choosing of outfits for the next day. They haven’t weaned the last of the babies yet, haven’t fully returned to their bodies.

It’s bedtime. A few minutes of reading. One or two of the mothers stretch tentative fingertips to their husband’s chests, shoulders, hips. In their sleep, their torn-off acrylic nails become lost in the sheets.

3.

Morning. Their husbands have left for their cubicles and jobsites, so the houses, the kids, belong to the moms. Who run to hug their flat-chested daughters and compliant sons. The fourth graders have already forgotten last night’s search. So the mothers have to ask them how far the girl got and the children say Jade is home; she’s fine. The mothers hedge their advantage by pushing extra granola bars and Rice Krispie Treats into brown sacks. They’re for Jade, give them to Jade.

Who has terrorized the fourth-grade mothers. They don’t know what to do with their husbands, their children, the other PTA mothers, whom they realize now they hate. They haven’t been visited by chaos. But now they know it is only a matter of time, that chaos will extend its slim fingers for them all.