A Master Plan for Rescue by Janis Cooke Newman

could someone who could read strangers, who could look at a person and know something about him, how could that person have held my message in his hands and not understood how important this was?
    But my father read people, not magnetism on paper. He hadn’t seen my mother in her dress with the black sleeves, hadn’t seen her leaving the apartment every day with the piece of lace bobby-pinned to her black hair, as if she was afraid to let God see the top of her head only walking down Dyckman Street.
    He would have to see for himself, have to be dragged up to our apartment, made to stand in the doorway of the bedroom that was once his and watch her exhale cigarette smoke at the cracks in the ceiling as if she was letting go of some essential part of herself. And he would have to do it soon, before it was too late and there was nothing left of the black-haired bootlegger’s daughter who had once been my mother.
    •   •   •
    That night I stood outside my mother’s room listening for the sound of her sleeping. When my mother was awake, her breath stayed shallow, as if she was afraid to send it deep into her chest, afraid she’d disturb something that was lying there. Only when she slept did she take a full breath.
    Once I heard it, I left the apartment, stepping out into the hot darkness. I crossed the street and slipped into a narrow alley. The supers of the adjacent buildings stored their garbage cans here, and the air was close and filled with the nose-biting smell of ammonia and the sickly sweetness of something rotting, but I was worried my father wouldn’t come if he saw me, and I could see our steps perfectly from here.
    Uncle Glenn came out wearing his white Civil Defense helmet and armband, and headed down the street. Then some of our neighbors who had war factory jobs, the sharp shine of their metal lunch pails glinting as they passed beneath the downward-casting light of the streetlamp. When my legs got tired, I found a wooden crate halfway down the alley, kicked it to the front and sat on it.
    As it got later, a scrabbling started up from deeper in the alley, as if the garbage were coming to life. The sound made the skin on the back of my neck twitch, and I inched the crate closer to the sidewalk.
    Then, suddenly, the alley was lit up with the pale gray light of dawn, and the side of my face was stuck to the cool bricks of the apartment building to my right.
    The next night, I brought out my luminous-face alarm clock and set it to go off every hour. The green glow of the clock kept me company as I sat on the crate watching for my father. My eyes weren’t good in the dark, but I was sure I would know it was him when he came, even if he was wearing a disguise, as if I were a radio tuned to his particular frequency.
    Each hour, I woke to the hard brass ringing of the clock.
    The next night, I set the alarm for every half hour.
    I did this for two weeks. Leaving the apartment in darkness to sit in the alley with the clock shining green in my face. Staying out until the sky lightened enough for me to make out the shapes of the cars parked in the street. Only then would I go inside and change out of clothes that had taken on the ammonia and sweet rotting smell of the alley—or maybe it wasn’t the clothes, maybe the smell had worked its way inside my nose—getting into bed and falling into a deep sleep that lasted until early afternoon.
    I was living the schedule my father had lived when he worked the graveyard shift at the Navy Yard, the schedule he’d kept in those months before we went to Paradise together. Waking and sleeping the same hours, except for the time he’d spent with me, sitting in the green armchair listening to the Silvertone.
    Over time, I began to believe that my father could sense when I was asleep, that this was one of the things he could read. I pictured him walking past the alley within reach of my hand, pausing to watch me sleep with my cheek pressed against the bricks, the