Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis — Read

I woke up staring at our darkened ceiling in the master bedroom.

The writer was imagining an intricate moment: Jayne saying goodbye to the children, kneeling on the cold granite of the driveway, a sedan and its driver idling behind her, and the kids were dressed for school and she'd left them so many times before that Sarah and Robby were used to this-they didn't sulk, they barely paid attention, because this was just business: Mom going nowhere again. (If Robby was slightly more emotional that day in November, he did not reveal it to Jayne.) Why was Jayne lingering when she said goodbye to Robby? Why was she searching his eyes? Why did Jayne stroke his face until Robby pulled back and flinched, Sarah's fingers still restlessly entwined with her mother's? She crushed them in a hug, their foreheads touching, the front of the house looming over them with the wall that was a map sprawling across its surface. She would only be gone a week. She would call them that night from her hotel room in Toronto. (Later, at Buckley, Sarah would point at the wrong plane cruising the sky, passing in and out of clouds, and tell a teacher, "My mommy's up there," and by then Jayne's pain would have faded.) Why did Jayne weep on the ride to the Midland Airport? Before Jayne left the darkness of our bedroom, why had I said the words I promise? My pillow was wet. I had cried in my sleep again. Sun was now filtering into the room and the ceiling was lighting itself indifferently in an enlarging diamond, and the umbrellas were still spinning and iridescent halos revolved around me-the remnants of a dream I couldn't remember-and mid-yawn my immediate thought was Jayne's gone. What the writer wanted to know was: why was Jayne so frightened the morning of November fifth? Or, more accurately, how did Jayne intuit what was going to happen to us during her absence?