by Shannon Kirk
The drone detected no movement in or around the ranch.
The presumed landlord, Jerry Sabin, was a reclusive concert pianist who lived in a colossal brick home (mansion) overlooking the “subject dwelling.” His daughter, Gretchen, did not attend the local school, and nobody had seen her all summer.
Verified accounts of the Sabins’ electrical fence and traps kept them from involving the Sabin property in any sharpshooter surveillance staging.
Nobody wanted to involve the Sabins for fear of involvement or that they’d send up red flags. Law enforcement would craft a controlled inquiry, knocking on the Sabins’ and the ranch door simultaneously.
With every hour of the day, things grew more tense. They grew especially more tense when a few resources were diverted to deal with the aftermath of a tornado that ripped across Great Katherine Lake in the middle of the afternoon. Electrical lines had fallen across roads around the lake.
Evening now, and the overthought inquiry is underway.
Here Mag is in the Milberg police station, waiting on Dick-Thumb, the feds, the local cops, anyone, to return from the overly cautious, overly planned inquiry. Only one day has passed since Nathan Vinet showed up in California. Thirteen whole years since Laura Ingrace stole her baby. What’s another hour of waiting? Another fucking hour is a fucking eternity.
“Let me go storm in there right now,” she’d yelled several times in the station throughout the day.
“No, no, Ms. Bianchi. We don’t want a hostage situation. We don’t want anyone hurt. We don’t know if she has any weapons.”
Mag nodded then, hanging on the word weapons. Admittedly, she couldn’t shoot down the notion. Couldn’t deny that Laura Ingrace might indeed have weapons. Sure, everyone else at the Triple C might know Laura as a bumbling clod when it came to sports, might know her for the quiet presence that would lob biting zingers and dry jokes at precise times in group conversations, might know her as a total nerd who was always tracking birds. But, and Mag had never shared this with anyone, Mag knew some secrets about Laura Ingrace.
Could Laura have weapons on her? Now? Now with weapons?
Yes, detectives, officers, agents, Dick-Thumb, Ms. Counselor with the doe eyes, I understand. I’ll wait here and bite my nails to the skin and then down to the knuckles while you delay me, mollify me, in your nauseating, mint-green, windowless hell room—I will literally eat my own hands from the nerves while I sit like the useless, dumb, unplugged fax machine in the corner, because, okay, maybe, you’re right, I guess, it seems unthinkable, but not really, Laura Ingrace might indeed have weapons. Fine! Stop looking at me and go save my girl. Mag didn’t say any of this out loud. Instead, she nodded and skulked off to punch buttons on the unplugged fax machine, just so she had something to stab.
Was Laura Ingrace’s impossible tree-banked arrow shot that hit Marianne—the camp nurse at the time—in the ass really a fluke? Mag knew it was not. She’d never told anyone else when she learned the truth years later. Not even Carly. But that was all innocent, right? Laura never intended to hit Marianne. Right?
“Ma’am, you’re going to need to calm down and stop pacing. Maybe take a nap here in my office. We cannot have you attacking the suspect if we bring her in,” a man with badges said at some point in Mag’s fog-filled, station-house day.
“I’m not taking a nap. You take a nap,” she barked back.
The officer didn’t push, but he did send in the damn doe-eyed counselor again.
Did the odor of violence seep from her? Was murderous rage blazing from her eyes? Was her brain screaming a war cry? Yes, perhaps. Mag indeed had visions of murdering Laura every time she looked at Nathan Vinet’s picture of her in Dyson’s with her daughter. She planned the physical moves it would take to snap Laura’s neck with her legs. Could be over in four moves and four seconds. Swoop. Squeeze and fall. Torque. Crack. She imagined executing D’s famous five will get you ten, ten will get you killed and sending Laura off to a permanent nap. You take a nap, bitch.
Dr. Nathan Vinet walks in to find Mag still waiting in the same mint-green multifunction room she’s been roaming in and out of all day. The fax machine is still unplugged; perhaps the number pad’s faceplate is newly cockeyed and cracked. So sue me, Mag thinks. She sits in one of two green molded chairs. Nathan takes the other, handing her a to-go coffee from Scheppard’s. He keeps his own to-go coffee along with a wax bag of something that smells like hot cinnamon.
“My cousin is the baker at Ferry Farm & Fudge, and he gave me an unauthorized bag of contraband snickerdoodles. You’re supposed to only get them hot at four a.m. Anyway, hope these help with the wait,” he says.
“Your family is all over this town, aren’t they?” she asks in a disconnected tone, revealing a deep wish that she, too, had family all over some town where she lived.
“Yep. One of my brothers owns the hardware store next to Scheppard’s. Small town.” He digs out a hot cookie for her.
“The locksmith. The one with the big key in the window,” she says, staring forward and taking a bite of the offered cookie.
“Yes.” He opens his mouth to say more, perhaps recite the litany of relatives in town, but chooses to respect quiet.
Mag, appreciative of the cookie and the quiet and his presence, finishes the cookie in three bites. She knows that in some distant reptilian part of her brain, she’s logging the perfect blend of hot butter and granules of sugar mixed with a dusting of cinnamon sticking to the roof of her mouth. Nathan hands her another cookie, and the two sit side by side in mutual shell shock. They eat cookie after cookie and sip coffee, which Scheppard’s calibrated just right with steamed milk and sugar. They eat and sip and stare at the green-and-gray linoleum floor. Mag had earlier climbed on her green chair and unscrewed several of the long fluorescent bulbs, so the lighting is less eye-stabby and more like a lonely hospital wing after visiting hours. The merciful aroma of cinnamon and coffee masks the otherwise relentless scent of bleach.
“I settled Thomas with a friend for the night. I’m staying with you,” Nathan says. “Okay?”
Mag nods a yes, chewing her fifth cookie. “Thanks,” she reinforces.
They’d already chatted on the plane ride here, so she knows Nathan’s pertinent biographical details: he’s a family physician, Thomas is his only child, he’s a widower, his wife died earlier in the year he took Thomas to the Triple C to go camping. Five years ago. He and Thomas had vowed not to discuss his wife’s/Thomas’s mother’s death during that one trip—and they damn well near succeeded. Nathan had considered Mag’s late-night-campfire words a relief, and he’s sorry to admit this, but a relief to listen to someone else’s woes. And when Mag disappeared the next morning, Nathan said he’d returned to his fog of grief, focused solely on consoling his young son. He somehow forgot about the abrupt clarity this woman named G had brought into his life, about the comfort of talking to her, and even about the shocking story she’d told him about the kidnapping of her daughter. Looking back on that dark time, Nathan explained, when your ten-year-old son shakes so hard in grief he seizes, when medicines and counselors can’t calm him, everything else in the world disappears. But Thomas is much better. Both of them so much better now.
Mag again thanks Nathan for the coffee and the hot cookies and for staying with her.
Cord had called a billion times and said he’d delayed his trip to Italy, as he now considered himself “on standby, awaiting commands.” Mag told him not to fly out but to hold base at the Triple C. Gun range D was so amped over the whole event he was about to explode into a million tiny D-soldier clones. Unafraid of vigilante options, Mag felt she had enough cover if things went sideways. Big sis Carly would fly in as soon as Mag said the word.
Sitting with virtual stranger Dr. Nathan Vinet was the only consolation Mag allowed. He didn’t look at her with pity. Not with history. Not judgment. Not directives on how she should feel or think. He looked at her as an equal, himself equally bruised, and with solid—forged from h
is own battles—strength. A tarnished and honed and experienced strength. Like the finest polished silver on the table, with smooth handle, earned nicks, and storied scrapes.
“I just, I just, I’m sorry. I keep saying this, but I just can’t put this all together. Why would Laura disappear that day from camp? And then, when, somehow, why? Why did she come back three years later and steal my baby?” Mag rubs the tips of her fingers to remove the film of sugar and cinnamon from her cookies. Nathan hands her a napkin.
He obviously has no answers, and he wisely remains silent. He doesn’t offer clichés or overwrought speculations. He sits and listens to her questions, hands her the last cookie, and takes back the spent napkin when she’s done.
“I just don’t get it. I just don’t get it,” she says.
Nathan stands, tucks the empty wax bag under the wing of his biceps, and offers his non-coffee-cup hand to pull her up. “Let’s walk outside. We can sit on a bench by the door. The wind is crazy. That tornado ripped across Great Katherine today, but wind is better than this bleach smell.” With the cookies gone, the bleach is back and won’t be denied.
Mag doesn’t refuse or even hesitate or appear to give Nathan’s directive a thought. She takes his hand and rises and continues talking as if she were still within her previous train of unanswerable questions.
“I mean . . . how can you explain this? Laura was always odd, true. And I knew, even saw, experienced, some things about her that others would find shocking. But, this? No. No . . . How?”
“You know,” Nathan says, as they reach the station’s all-glass double door entrance, “I haven’t asked for details, and you’ve been pretty darn busy all day. But what about this Laura? Who is she? Tell me a story about her, anything to paint who she is. Do you want to?” He holds the door open while Mag moves outside. They match in height and stride and sit on a bench by the door in a series of easy motions, a tandem-gliding, ice-skating duo.
While trying to tame her long black hair in a clip, fighting with a wind yanking tufts in different directions, Mag considers Nathan’s questions about Laura Ingrace and whether she has an illustrative story about her. Yes, she has many. And one fairly profound story—in terms of personality shaping and relationship staging. So where to begin? She’d spent, what, one, two, three, yeah, fourteen summers with Laura Ingrace. Age six to twenty.
Are those sirens in the distance? She thinks. No, I’m wishing, fearing sirens.
There’s the one time she slept over Laura Ingrace’s house at age fourteen, and things Mag witnessed there, and even became party to.
Maybe sirens? She’s straining to hear but telling herself it’s the wind.
And, stemming from that one night at Laura’s, there is the one activity she shared with Laura in secret: a nighttime treetop competition, more aggressive than was ever intended by Triple C management. And nobody but Mag and Laura knew the rules they played by.
Those are definitely sirens. Mag and Nathan rocket up from the bench.
A mushroom cloud of shouting in the station and interior doors banging blooms over the howling wind and mixes with definite sirens growing louder and louder. Mag and Nathan step away from the bench, drawn to flashing lights between a line of dark pine that divides the parking lot from the adjacent main road. A blurred river of red, white, and blue streams toward the station entrance.
Mag is frozen. Officers and dispatchers who were inside run outside. They look at Mag with collective bewilderment. Mag doesn’t know how to read this sudden crowd or the sirens or the flashing lights. The doe-eyed counselor bursts out the front door, clattering the glass-in-steel frame against the cinder-block facade. And just when the counselor is about to grab Mag’s arm, a cop car speed-turns in at the entrance at the end of the line of pines. This was an unmarked car that now has one of those stick-on-the-roof lights. The same car Mag’s dick-thumb detective had been in when he drove out with a Milberg deputy so as to execute the inquiry. The deputy pulls up to the station’s front curb. Mag is five feet away. Nathan behind her. The station crowd behind them.
Mag’s detective is in the back seat.
Next to her detective is a girl in a gray T-shirt.
Mag’s detective opens his door.
The girl slides across the seat and scootches out. She’s wearing jeans rolled at her slim waist, too big for her there, but fitting okay in length. They’re men’s jeans.
The girl stands tall. She’s wearing no shoes.
She has long black hair.
She has violet eyes.
She matches Mag in height.
“Dali’s shoes don’t fit me,” she says in a disconnected tone, her gaze starry and staring into Mag’s. She seems bewitched. She seems lost on some other plane of reality.
“Baby,” Mag bumbles out, her voice cracking. She fights tears.
Mother and daughter are clones, and two feet apart.
“Lucy,” Mag forces out, using all the maternal strength she has to say the right name. “Oh baby—” Her voice broken, tears erupting.
An ambulance hauls in from the fire station across the street. Officers and agents and dispatchers crowd around, gasping, murmuring, a couple of them crying. A beat-up Ford pickup skids into the lot.
“Son of a bitch, friggin’ press already!” someone in the crowd blurts.
“Damn local Joe. Milberg Press. You know he listens to the scanners. I’ll deal with him,” someone else says.
The wind is wilder now, wilder than it’s been in a week of wild wind. Howling, whipping, twisting in the bowl of space between the cinder-block station and the line of pine along the adjacent road. Everyone’s hair is literally on ends. Papers are pulled off clipboards and fly in mini cyclones. Empty plastic bags and takeaway food containers are strewn and tossed around parked cars. Numerous empty soda cans clink and scrape as they bounce and skid and roll, banging off tires and rolling more. Tomorrow is recycling day, and some “friggin’ nitwit” put the bin out early, someone is saying.
But all is still in the bubble of the mother-daughter reunion. Everything else disappears for them as they lock in, seeing each other eye to eye. Neither one winces. Mag doesn’t blink, even though she’s seeing her baby girl through thirteen years of tears.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
LUCY
Earlier today, Dali had tried to drive me to the ranch so I could get Allen, a few hours after the tornado ripped across Great Katherine. But the damn tornado blew electrical lines down on the roads so we were trapped until Dali figured out some back-ass, long-ass way, which led us all the way around the lake through nine hundred other towns and over a zillion endless mountains. And then it grew dark, and my anxiety to see Allen grew so bad with the delay, I think that’s why I lost my mind and gave in when we saw the cop by the ranch.
I miss Allen so much.
And also a pair of shoes and a change of clothes. Dali’s jeans are too big for me, and his Converses are the size of boats. I was going to sneak in or send Dali in, somehow try to avoid Mom, who is not my freaking mother. I don’t know. I don’t know! But when we got close to the ranch, we saw two weird cars parked on the country road. And Dali’s not a moron. He said they were unmarked cars and recognized one of the drivers as a town cop.
I set my hand on Dali’s arm. “I’m ready,” I said. Because I don’t know. In that moment, I felt ready and I needed some relief.
“You sure?” he said.
“Yeah.” No. Never. I’ll never be ready. “Sure.”
So Dali drove me right on up to the unmarked car with the cop he knows. And that’s how I came to be standing here, looking at a woman who looks like me, on the curb of the Milberg police station.
This woman is my mother.
I don’t need the birth certificate that’s burning a hole in Dali’s borrowed jeans’ pocket. I don’t need a video of my birth. I don’t need a DNA test.
This is Gretchen Bianchi. This crying woman who stares in my violet eyes with her violet eyes from a height that is l
evel with mine—she’s my birth mother.
The wind has been blowing for a week, and today’s the strongest. I could choose to believe we’re a pair of black-haired witches who flew into town on broomsticks and whipped up these cyclones to accompany a ferocious reunion. Or I could believe the army of fairies in the fern garden answered my secret wish to feel safer and fuller and without all the mind hives and anxiety. Because right now in this bubble of time with the older twin of me, I feel a sudden rush of safety. Who’s the real monster I’ve been avoiding all my life? Who? Do I really have a father who’s a monster? Where’s Mom? Did they say someone’s checking the ranch? Right after Dali left me with these cops? Where’s Mom? Stop. Look at the woman in front of you.
I’m choosing to allow this rush, even though, even though I know other parts of me tremble, and other parts of me boil, other parts of me cry, and other parts of me hide. Right now for a blip bubble of time, I’m allowing some strange happiness to bloom. My brain feels illuminated and full of floating glitter. She breathes, and the air smells like chocolaty coffee and sugary cinnamon.
I could accept this as simple reality, and this indeed is my mother, Gretchen Bianchi.
My mother.
My real mother looking at me. She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t wince. I think I see a whole ocean of love in her eyes.
I do not want to step out of this bubble. I don’t want the wind to stop. I don’t want this, whatever this is, to end. I don’t want to deal with what comes next. Please don’t take this lightness away, Mom. Please don’t take this woman, my mother, away and make me run again.
Mom? Mom? Who are you? Where are you? Please don’t drive into this lot and take me away. But where are you? Did you leave me?
Where are you? Who are you?
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
MOTHER
The cops haven’t found Laura Ingrace. She’s vanished. And all Mag can do is relive events from their childhood together as she waits for Lucy at Boston Children’s Hospital. For two days now, Lucy has been enduring rounds and rounds of checkups, tests, and psychoanalytical interviews with doctors and law enforcement.