Open endings v conclusions - in short fiction - and a strong story in current NYer

Danielle McLaughlin's story In the Act of Falling in the current New Yorker had me right from the start, a strange and moving account of a mid-career mom whose 9-year-old son is clearly disturbed in some way though exactly how is not clear, to her or to us or probably to anyone - the kid is solitary, easily obsessed with strange topics such a dead birds, focused at present on some sort of apocalyptic theories espoused by a woman in the neighborhood, he's been out of school for weeks, expelled for unprovoked fighting (the story is set in Ireland; at least in the present-day U.S. no child would be expelled for two weeks for pretty much any reason); the dad, an unemployed financial consultant of some sort, stays at home with the child but he seems terribly irresponsible and narcissistic so all of the responsibility, as usual, falls on the mother. Story centers on a day when of all things the dad gets a job interview - the job prospect seems very sketchy and by all appearances his doesn't want to work or do much of anything but look at the expensive art books he buys and they can't afford - so the mom ( who btw is never named) has to make arrangements to come home to watch the kid. When she gets home, later than she'd thought, the child is nowhere to be found, which leads her to a half-panicked odyssey around the neighborhood, including an encounter with a seemingly disurbed man who tells her he knows where the child is, and leads her to a scary, unoccupied house. All this was great, had me totally engaged, shows that McLaughlin - I'd never seen her fiction before - is a writer of great skill and promise - but unfortunately the story does kind of deflate at the end. Instead of building to a conclusion or revelation, McL brings the main characters back together - mom, dad, son, apocalypse lady and the mom looks up at a flock of birds, starlings. This is classic "open" ending for a short story - a strand that runs back to her forebear (I assume she's Irish) Joyce, but has also become a bane, a trick, almost a cliche, a way for less experienced writers to close the narrative without but leaving possibilities open and suggested and sometimes ambiguous. This story - if in fact it is a story, maybe it's part of a longer narrative like so much NYer fiction? - needs a conclusion rather than just an ending.