Despite the matching clothes, there’s no question who’s who in the photograph. Placed in front of a camera, Sean does not comprehend smile – or any of the expressions photographers use in its place. No matter how many times Liz explains to Sean that the way he contorts his face is not a smile, no matter how many times he’s shown the evidence, it doesn’t matter. Every posed photograph of him taken from the age of three – and counting – features Sean’s idea of a smile. This exaggerated and mirthless grimace, lips stretched away from each other as far as possible in every direction – is something like what an orangutan does, drawing its lips apart to bare its teeth.

The photograph is almost too much. It feels as if my chest is full of broken glass. I hand it to Shoffler with a strange reluctance, as if by turning it over to the detective, I’m somehow relinquishing possession of my sons.

“I thought you said they don’t dress identical,” Shoffler says.

“They don’t,” I tell him. “Most of the time.”

“Huh.”

Half an hour later, after a tour through the fairgrounds – refining my account of the day – Shoffler’s satisfied. He switches off the tape recorder and sticks it in a pocket. He pulls out his cell phone, takes a few steps away, and turns from me. I can still hear what he says. He’s summoning everybody to headquarters.

I’m in a fog, shuttling back and forth between disbelief and panic. One moment, I can’t believe this is happening. Then I know it’s happening – Sean and Kevin are missing, they’re missing – by the cold fist squeezing my heart.

“I think while we’ve still got some light,” Shoffler is saying into his phone, “we’d better expand the search into the woods.”

I don’t notice exactly when the rose-and-peach sunset drains away beneath the horizon, but suddenly it’s night. A crescent moon, startling in its clarity, hangs kitty-corner in the inky, star-strewn sky. I pull my cell phone out and call voice mail at home – for about the tenth time.

Nothing’s changed, no messages.

Shoffler wouldn’t let me go out with the initial search teams. Everyone offers the same advice: the best thing I can do is wait. It’s my sons who are missing, yet I’m supposed to sit and watch, a spectator at my own disaster.

And yet it’s oddly familiar, this sense of being in the audience while the well-oiled machinery of catastrophe rolls into action. Between the news and TV crime shows, disaster flicks and reality TV, we’re prepped for every kind of nightmare. No matter what it is, it’s already happened in some form to someone else – filmed in gritty detail and with a musical score to punch it up. I should know.

From my bench, I can hear Shoffler from inside headquarters, voice at volume: “Start at the intersection of 301 and Shade Valley Road. Then the bird should deploy at point 19, first sweep the fairground…”

At first the words make no sense. And then bird and deploy and sweep drop into the proper linguistic slots in my brain and I understand the detective is talking about a search helicopter.

Christiansen says: “If the kids’re in the woods, you won’t see them from a copter.”

When yet another squad car arrives with a trunkful of powerful flashlights and four more uniformed men from Carroll County (with more on the way), Shoffler organizes new teams.

Food has appeared from somewhere. Papa John’s Pizzas, Gatorade, cans of Pepsi, big aluminum thermos dispensers of coffee, inverted towers of white foam cups. Someone’s pinned a topographical map to the wall and marked it into a grid. The first search party departs in a welter of raspy walkie-talkie communication, and then the second. When the third, consisting of four men and two women, assembles to watch Shoffler delineate their area on the topo map, I find myself on my feet.

“I’m going.”

Shoffler hesitates. “If we find them,” he starts, “it’s possible…”

His voice trails away, but I can read his mind: It’s possible they won’t be alive. I nod to show I understand.

Shoffler opens his mouth, as if he’s about to launch into his tired spiel about the best way to help being to stay put. But then he changes his mind, nods his assent. “What the hell,” he says.

We walk through a densely wooded area in a ragged line, each person separated from the next by the prescribed double arm’s length distance of six feet, a span that shrinks and expands wildly depending on the terrain and its obstacles. Flashlights burrow into the darkness, probing and tunneling in well-defined cylinders of light until the beams fray off at the outer reaches of their scope and then dissolve into incandescent mist. The beams of the flashlights pry into hidden corners of the dense underbrush, illuminating tangles of multiflora roses, the crevices of big moss-covered rocks, the rough bark of tree trunks, leaves and branches, patches of glittery streams, the bright startled eyes of animals. Beams skid wildly through the sky as the searchers clamber over rocks and fallen logs. Every once in a while, the jaunty tune of a cell phone makes its anomalous intrusion and someone conducts an awkward conversation with spouse or friend.

The search party, a segmented monster, makes a huge amount of noise as it crashes along, each man or woman yelling, “Sean! Kevin!” Above, the helicopter contributes even more noise, the thudding of its rotors as it makes methodical sweeps over the fairgrounds throwing up such a din that we can hardly shout over it at times. The voices calling for Sean and Kevin sound thin and puny, hopeless cries into the wilderness.

We trudge and grope and clamber our way through terrain that’s not only rugged and full of unexpected and hidden ravines, but choked with brambles and vines, this underbrush often head high. It’s very tough going, as Shoffler warned us all, and it takes its toll. Every few minutes, there’s a yelp of pain, a curse. Within ten minutes, my legs and arms are torn up from the thorns, and my face is bleeding.

An occasional raspy bulletin from Shoffler crackles out from the leader’s walkie-talkie. We halt until it’s clear that the communication is routine and involves no news of the boys. Each time this happens, my heart bangs against my rib cage and there’s an electric surge of adrenaline. I’m suspended, teetering between hope and dread.

The search group also pauses when the helicopter hovers, as it does every few minutes, hesitating in one of its sweeps to cast a brilliant cone of light beneath it, so powerful it turns night into day. Then someone says, “Let’s go,” and we continue, clawing through the dense foliage, shouting until we’re hoarse.

I sink into a kind of trance, focused only as far as the end of my beam of light, which I swing from side to side, methodical as an automaton, making certain to cover every inch of my patch of terrain. Many times, the light falls on a branch or a clump of leaves and tricks me into the momentary belief that I’ve seen a pant leg, an arm, a shoe, the curve of a head.

They’re so small, really. When I check on them, asleep in their beds, when they’re quiet and inert, I’m shocked sometimes by how small they are – considering the space they take up in my life. If they were covered with leaves, even some halfhearted effort to hide them… It would be so easy to miss them.

I blink my eyes, sharpen my focus, close my mind to the thought: covered with leaves. But I can’t keep from my mind the terrible notions that float into it. I can’t stop thinking of that shoe, for instance, Kevin’s shoe, derelict against the metal of that chute. The way it sat, inside its barrier of police tape, waiting for the evidence technician.