She's Not There

by Joy Fielding

  “Not good.”

  “Do you want me to come back?”

  Yes, Caroline thought. “No,” she said. Peggy hadn’t wanted to leave Rosarito, but she had two children of her own to get back to. She had a job, responsibilities, a life.

  Rain and Jerrod had been the first to go, leaving as soon as the police gave their okay, off to spend Thanksgiving in New York. Caroline didn’t begrudge them their plans. They weren’t close friends, and there was nothing they could do here. Besides, Rain’s concern had verged on the spectacular, her sympathy so overwhelming that it left little room for Caroline to feel anything but numb. In truth, she’d been glad to see them go.

  She was equally relieved when her brother and Becky followed suit the next day, the tension between the two having become unbearable after Mary’s arrival. Peggy and Fletcher were the last to leave. “We’re just a phone call away,” Peggy had said then.

  “What’s happening?” she asked now.

  “Apparently the police think we did it.”

  “That’s ridiculous. What are you going to do?”

  “Hunter wants us to go home.”

  “Maybe that’s not such a bad idea.”

  “I don’t know. He’s called a press conference for this afternoon,” Caroline said, feeling sick to her stomach. The world press had jumped on the story of Samantha’s disappearance, and Hunter had decided they should sidestep the seeming incompetence of the Mexican police by appealing to the international community for help. At first Caroline had resisted taking her grief public, but Hunter was insistent that a mother’s tears would go a long way toward getting Samantha back, so how could she refuse? The police were against them talking to the press, and had been successful so far in keeping the reporters at bay, claiming that such publicity would only hinder their investigation. But Hunter was convinced that they were only concerned about looking bad. Besides, he argued, the police thought that he and Caroline were guilty of murdering their own child. So, screw them.

  “Let me know how it goes,” Peggy said before hanging up.

  “I guess we should start getting ready,” Hunter said.

  Caroline understood that he was referring to the press conference, but she wasn’t sure what he meant by “getting ready.”

  “Maybe brush your hair, put on a bit of makeup,” he explained, answering the question in her eyes.

  Caroline ran a disinterested comb through her hair and applied a bit of waterproof mascara to her swollen eyes. She changed out of her shorts and oversized shirt into a modest beige sundress. Her skin was tanned, effectively hiding the blotches caused by days of constant crying, and she’d lost at least five pounds, unable to eat much or keep anything down. Still, when she looked at herself in the mirror, she was surprised to see a seemingly calm and controlled, albeit haunted-looking, woman staring back.

  “Mommy!” Michelle shouted as the door to their suite opened. The child rushed into the room, throwing herself at her mother’s knees and almost knocking her down.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” Caroline said, staring down at the deep purple fingerprints now spread across the bottom half of her dress.

  “I had blueberry pie for dessert,” Michelle announced.

  “You’d better change,” Hunter said.

  Caroline returned to her bedroom and riffled through the closet. The beige sundress was pretty much the last clean article of clothing she had with her. The only other thing she could wear, besides shorts, bathing suits, or evening wear, was a blue-and-white-striped miniskirt and a sleeveless blue T-shirt.

  “That’s what you’re wearing?” her mother asked when Caroline returned to the living room.

  Caroline brushed aside her mother’s words with a wave of her hand. What possible difference did it make what she wore?

  Hunter scooped Michelle into his arms. Caroline noticed the child’s hands had been washed clean. “Ready?” he asked, heading for the door.

  As ready as I’ll ever be, Caroline thought.

  —

  She spent the next two days in bed, poring over the papers and watching the news on TV.

  “Haven’t you had enough of that crap?” Hunter asked, throwing the last of his shirts into his suitcase and zipping it up, then depositing it by the bedroom door.

  “Did you see this?” Caroline held out the latest edition of the Los Angeles Times, which her mother had brought back to the room earlier in the day. “We made the front page.”

  “Ignore it.”

  “Easy for you to say. You come off rather well, all things considered.”

  “Sweetheart, please…”

  “You’re the handsome man barely holding himself together,” she read. “You’re the one clinging tight to his daughter while I’m the one who’s aloof and standing ramrod straight.” She scoffed. “Who knew good posture was such a bad thing?”

  “Don’t do this to yourself…”

  “They even comment on the shine in my hair, as if she’d just come from the hairdresser,” Caroline read, almost choking on the words. “I haven’t washed my hair in a week, for God’s sake. The stupid reporter doesn’t know shine from grease.”

  “You can’t let it get to you. You’ll make yourself sick.”

  “Oh, and of course, we were out cavorting with friends at a nearby restaurant when it happened. God forbid they leave that part out.” Or mention that it was at your insistence, she thought, her attention temporarily diverted by something on television. Their ill-fated press conference was once again being broadcast around the globe. “Oh, there I am again, still ramrod straight.” I do look aloof, she thought. My hair does look shiny. My skirt is very short, as another paper had pointed out the day before.

  We’re asking for your help, Hunter said from the TV, his voice cracking.

  If anybody out there knows anything, anything at all, Caroline continued, taking up the reins, her own voice surprisingly steady and clear, if you think you might have seen Samantha, or have any clues as to her whereabouts, please contact the police immediately.

  We just want our daughter back, Hunter said, his obvious emotion in direct contrast to his wife’s eerily cool demeanor.

  In fact, Caroline had been dangerously close to fainting. Her deliberately calm exterior masked an interior that was collapsing in on itself, like an imploding building. The steeliness of her voice had been the only thing keeping her upright.

  Why did you leave your children alone? a reporter shouted out.

  Is it true the police consider you a suspect?

  Have you hired an attorney?

  Is it true you’re planning to leave Mexico?

  “So,” Caroline said, glancing at his suitcase, “you’re all packed?”

  He nodded. “It’s not too late to change your mind and come with us.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Caroline, please. Don’t make me leave you here alone. If anything were to happen to you, I don’t think I could live with myself.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to me. I’m a big girl. This is my decision. You don’t have to feel guilty about leaving.” Caroline knew he felt as guilty as she did about Samantha, maybe even more so. She’d heard him crying in the bathroom last night when he thought she was asleep. She’d even considered getting up and going to him, clinging to his side and crying with him, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. “You should go now. My mother will be getting anxious.” Caroline pictured her mother waiting in the coffee shop with Michelle, repeatedly checking her watch.

  “Please come with us.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Michelle needs you.”

  “My mother will take good care of her.”

  “I need you.”

  Caroline said nothing.

  The phone rang. Hunter walked to the side of the bed and picked it up. “Yes. Okay. I’m on my way.” He replaced the receiver. “At least come downstairs, say goodbye.”

  “I’ve already said goodbye.”

  Hunter approache
d the side of the bed, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Don’t I even get a kiss?”

  “Hunter…”

  “You have to stop blaming me,” he said, his voice a plea. “This isn’t my fault.”

  Caroline scrunched the paper in her hands into a tight little ball and hurled it angrily at the TV before jumping to her feet. “Not your fault? Really? Because I distinctly remember it was you who insisted that we leave the girls alone, that I was overreacting, that I was sounding just like my mother…”

  “I never said that.”

  “You promised they’d be safe…”

  “And I will be sorry to my dying day…”

  “Sorry isn’t enough.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to find our daughter!”

  “You don’t think I want the same thing?”

  We’re asking for your help, Hunter was appealing from the TV in yet another repeat of the press conference. We just want our daughter back.

  “How could you let this happen?” Caroline asked him, hearing her mother’s voice echo through the room. She could tell by Hunter’s face that he’d heard it, too.

  “I’ll call you when we get home,” he said, picking up his suitcase and walking out of the room.

  “You’re late,” Mary said instead of hello.

  “Happy Thanksgiving,” Caroline said, ignoring the rebuke and giving her mother a kiss on the cheek. “I brought dessert.” She held out the box containing the pumpkin pie she’d picked up from the gourmet grocery store on the way over.

  Her mother made no move to take it from her. “Store-bought,” she said with a lift of her well-plucked eyebrows, making the words sound vaguely obscene.

  Caroline closed the front door behind her. “I thought you liked Nicola’s pies.”

  Mary shrugged. “They’re all right. Overpriced, like all their stuff. Steve and I prefer their apple to their pumpkin.”

  “They didn’t have apple.”

  “Well, I guess when you leave things until the last minute…I’m surprised they were even open.”

  “Sorry. It’s been a little hectic…” Caroline peered over her mother’s shoulder into the empty living room. “Where is everyone?”

  “No one’s here yet.”

  “So I’m the first to arrive?”

  “You’re still late,” her mother said.

  Caroline sighed. “What do you want me to do with the pie?”

  “Put it in the kitchen,” Mary said, exiting the foyer for the living room.

  Caroline proceeded down the hallway toward the kitchen at the back of the tidy bungalow. “Something smells good,” she said, inhaling the aroma of roasting turkey and depositing the pumpkin pie on the counter. The small room had changed very little over the years. Despite new appliances and an update from laminate to granite countertops, it was essentially the same kitchen she remembered from her childhood: a slightly elongated square with a table and four chairs in front of a large window that overlooked a tiny backyard. Peering into the darkness, she pictured the old clothesline on which her mother used to air-dry the family’s freshly laundered clothes. When Caroline was little, Mary would secure her to that clothesline with a long rope tied around her waist. “Stop squirming. It’s for your own protection,” she’d insist when Caroline tried to wiggle out of its grasp. Steve, of course, had endured no such curbs on his freedom. When Caroline had protested this unfairness to her mother and argued that she, too, should have the freedom to play unfettered on the streets with her friends, Mary pointed out that Caroline had no friends.

  “It was nice of you to invite Peggy and Fletcher,” Caroline said now, entering the living room.

  She and Peggy had met in high school and bonded immediately, both being what is commonly referred to as “late bloomers.” “Misfits” was probably the more accurate term. Both girls had been shy and flat-chested, more interested in books than boys, although maybe that was because the boys in their class were more interested in the less-bookish, better-developed girls. They were also both fatherless: Peggy had lost her dad to cancer when she was twelve, and Caroline lost her dad to her parents’ acrimonious divorce a year later. Even though her father had tried for the better part of a year to maintain regular contact with his children, Mary had made that all but impossible, canceling agreed-upon visits at the last minute and scuttling proposed outings. Influenced by his mother, Steve had eventually refused to have anything to do with his father at all. The poor man had finally given up and moved to upstate New York, where he’d been killed in a car accident when Caroline was fifteen. “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy,” Caroline remembered her mother remarking to one of her bridge cronies. “Good riddance to bad rubbish.” The usual assortment of bitter clichés that were Mary’s stock-in-trade.

  “You look nice,” Caroline said to her mother in an effort to banish such unkind thoughts. It was Thanksgiving, after all. She was supposed to be awash in gratitude, not wallowing in past grievances. She sat down on the high-backed green velvet chair opposite the floral print sofa on which her mother was perched. “Is that a new dress?”

  Mary patted the curls of her freshly streaked hair, styled the way she’d been wearing it for as long as Caroline could remember. Short and sassy, she liked to say. Although short and stiff was the better description, the tight curls kept in place by a daily deluge of hairspray. “A present from your brother,” she said, caressing the folds of her silk print shirtwaist.

  “That was very nice of him,” Caroline said, trying to keep the shock out of her voice.

  “Yes. He’s very generous.”

  He should be, Caroline thought, since he lives here rent-free and doesn’t lift a finger to help out. “Where is he anyway?”

  “He had a business meeting.”

  “Really? On Thanksgiving?”

  “You know your brother. Always working on something.”

  Always working the angles, Caroline thought. Although the angles hadn’t been working for him for some time, his life having pretty much gone off the rails in the decade since he and Becky had divorced. First the real estate market had come crashing down. Then he’d lost his job. A string of disastrous investments had cost him pretty much everything he had left, including a newly purchased waterfront condo he’d bought at the height of the market and been forced to sell less than a year later at a substantial loss. His mother had attributed each successive failure to a combination of bad timing and worse luck, and had welcomed him back home with open arms. He’d been camping out in his old bedroom for the past three years, doing little but playing copious amounts of poker, drinking copious amounts of alcohol, and watching even more copious amounts of TV.

  Ironically, he’d perked up, albeit briefly, when Becky had come back into his life. She’d moved to Los Angeles immediately following their divorce, only to return four years later, having been diagnosed with terminal cancer. It turned out that the headaches that had plagued her for years were the by-product of a slow-growing but ultimately fatal brain tumor. She’d contacted Peggy, who had recently been appointed director of the newly opened Marigold Hospice, and shortly after that Becky had moved to the hospice, where she died two months after that. Surprisingly, Steve had been at her bedside every day, a sadly classic case of too little, too late and you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

  “So, what’s been doing?” Caroline asked her mother.

  “What should be doing?” her mother asked in return.

  Caroline shrugged. Her mother obviously wasn’t going to make this easy. “I don’t know. Have you seen any good movies?”

  “I don’t go to movies. You know that.”

  “Actually I didn’t. I thought you loved movies.”

  “I used to. But they’re all so violent now.”

  “What about bridge? I know you like that. Win any tournaments lately?”

  “Not with Paula Harmon as a partner, that’s for sure. I don’t know where her
head is these days. I think she’s losing it. We went down two tricks the other day when everyone else in the room made an overtrick. Then she got all defensive when I very gingerly tried to point out what she’d done wrong.”

  Caroline tried imagining her mother’s “gingerly” attempt to correct her partner.

  “What are you smiling about?”

  “Nothing. Sorry,” Caroline said, finding it odd to be apologizing for smiling. “I read somewhere that bridge players always think they’re better players than their partners.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I…Nothing. It was just something I read.”

  “Well, it’s stupid.”

  The doorbell rang.

  Thank God, Caroline thought, jumping up and hurrying to the front door.

  “Hi, there. Are we late?” Peggy asked as she and Fletcher stepped inside.

  “Right on time,” Mary said, coming up behind Caroline and accepting a bouquet of long-stemmed yellow roses from Peggy and a bottle of expensive white wine from Fletcher. “I’m so thrilled you could make it. Caroline, could you please put these gorgeous flowers in a vase? Don’t forget to trim the stems.” She handed them to Caroline with scarcely a glance in the roses’ direction.

  “Thank you so much for inviting us,” Peggy said, following Mary into the living room as Caroline walked toward the kitchen.

  “Fletcher, maybe you could open the wine,” Caroline heard her mother say in an almost coquettish tone of voice.

  “Okay. Where does she hide them?” she muttered as she searched through the cupboards for a vase.

  “Talking to yourself again?” a male voice asked from behind her. “I hear that’s the sign of a crazy person.”

  “Shit,” Caroline exclaimed as she spun around to face her brother. He was sitting in one of the kitchen chairs, one long leg crossed over the other. “You scared me half to death. Where did you come from?”

  He pointed in the direction of the bedrooms.

  “I thought you were at a business meeting.”

  “I was. Snuck in twenty minutes ago. Thought I’d have a nap, but your scintillating conversation with Mother kept getting in the way. You might try the cupboard over there.” Steve pointed toward a high cupboard above the stove.