In 1989, Marion was sorting buttons at the kitchen table when the television drew her attention from the next room. Frank had left it on while he went upstairs for his glasses. She heard enough of the program to recognize the subject before she saw the screen: the fugitive, the Westfield family, the effort to show what the missing man might look like now. A white button rolled beneath her hand. She caught it against the table’s edge and sat still, waiting for the next words.
She went to the doorway carrying the button without noticing it. On the television was a modeled head, a three-dimensional plaster bust. The program explained that a forensic artist had made it from photographs. Marion moved closer. This was not the flat image she had encountered in the supermarket two years earlier. She could see the difference even on their small set: a face given depth and shape rather than an older appearance rendered on paper. The distinction mattered. She had not simply stumbled upon the old clipping enlarged.
Then the resemblance reached her. It was not a list she could have made for someone else, a measured agreement of nose and mouth. It arrived as recognition sometimes did across a crowded store, before the familiar person turned fully toward her. Thomas Reed. She gripped the button until its rim pressed into her finger. But this was no crowded store, and nobody was turning to answer the name. A reconstruction stood on a television screen. Her response belonged to her; it could not make the object into the man.
Frank came down carrying his glasses by one temple. “What is it?” he asked. Marion moved aside so he could see. She almost said, There, that’s him, and caught herself with the first word unspoken. “Would you sit with me?” she asked instead. He looked at the screen, then at her, and lowered himself into his chair. She sat on the edge of the sofa. Between them lay the rug Nora liked to stretch out on, the pattern faded where afternoon sunlight reached it.
They listened to the program. Marion kept her eyes on the bust when it appeared and on the screen when it did not, afraid that looking away would turn this into something remembered instead of something seen. The account concerned Edwin Vale. The neighbor she had known had used Thomas Reed. She held those two names apart deliberately, as she had tried to hold them apart in every explanation. The broadcast did not know her memories, and her memories did not establish the identity of the person being sought.
“It isn’t the same picture,” she said. Frank put on his glasses. “No.” “The first one was made to show him older. On paper. This is made from photographs.” She heard herself explaining what he had just heard and stopped. He did not tell her she was imagining things, but neither did he supply the certainty she had once wanted from him. “I can see why it troubles you,” he said. For a moment she was grateful enough to cry. Then she realized he had agreed only to the truth he could know.
She thought of the envelope upstairs and the years in which she had learned to leave it alone for days at a time. She thought, too, of Ruth’s hand lifting the pickup card from the drawer. Those consequences had once seemed arguments for or against the resemblance, as though family damage could make it false or justify it as true. Now they seemed separate. She could have handled her family badly and still have noticed something worth reporting. She could also have been careful with everyone and remained entirely mistaken.
The new question was smaller than the one she had been trying to answer. She did not have to decide who Thomas Reed was. She had to decide whether what she remembered belonged with people whose job was to check it. That thought brought no rush of courage. It brought the prospect of stating a few things plainly and letting strangers find them insufficient. Frank rested his hands on his knees. “What are you thinking?” he asked. She looked down and discovered the little white button still in her palm.
“I don’t want you to tell me I’m right,” she said. “I couldn’t tell you that.” “I know.” She placed the button on the arm of the sofa, where she would have to remember to retrieve it. The television continued, voices filling the room with an assurance she did not feel. She wanted to hear her next words without those voices beneath them, and to know they were her own. Marion stood, crossed the rug, and turned off the television before speaking again.