She's Not There

by Joy Fielding

  Fletcher walked into the living room, looking surprisingly put together for a relaxing Sunday afternoon in tailored black dress pants and a blue-and-white-striped shirt. “Hi, Caroline. I didn’t know you were dropping by.”

  “Hunter and Rain have been having an affair,” his wife told him.

  “What?”

  “Fifteen years ago,” Caroline qualified. “They were sleeping together while we were in Mexico.”

  “I thought Hunter didn’t even like Rain,” Fletcher said.

  “And Jerrod just called you out of the blue to tell you this?” Peggy asked.

  “Apparently Rain confessed that she and Hunter not only had an affair, but had been sleeping together when we were all in Rosarito, right under our noses. He said he’s been debating with himself for months about whether or not to tell me. Then with all the recent publicity about it being the fifteenth anniversary…You honestly had no idea?”

  Peggy and Fletcher shook their heads in unison, the shocked expressions on their faces convincing Caroline that they were telling the truth.

  “I’m not sure I understand the point of telling you this now,” Fletcher said. “It happened so long ago, you and Hunter have been divorced for years…”

  “They were together the night Samantha disappeared.”

  “What?” said Peggy.

  “What?” echoed Fletcher.

  “Our anniversary dinner?” Caroline asked, as if she still couldn’t quite believe it. “When she went to get a sweater and he was supposedly checking on the kids?”

  “They were together?” Peggy said, repeating the question in Caroline’s voice.

  “He didn’t check the kids,” Caroline said. “Which means nobody looked in on them for more than an hour.”

  There was a long pause.

  “So Samantha could have been taken up to half an hour earlier than anyone considered,” Peggy said.

  “Are you sure about this?” Fletcher asked. “Maybe you should talk to Hunter.”

  “I just came from Hunter’s. He confirmed it.”

  “Shit,” said Fletcher, lowering himself into the pink and blue floral chair.

  “Shit,” said Peggy, mimicking her husband as she sank into the grayish tweed.

  They remained that way, three points on an invisible triangle, for several minutes. Caroline stared at her friend’s kind face and, for the first time, realized that Peggy was wearing eye makeup, that her hair was freshly washed and curled, and that she was wearing the turquoise silk dress she reserved for special occasions. “Oh, my God. You were getting ready to go out.”

  “We have a wedding,” Fletcher said, almost apologetically.

  “I’m so sorry.” Caroline jumped to her feet, ran to the front door.

  “Caroline, wait,” Peggy said, running after her. “We still have time…”

  “No,” Caroline told her. “It’s a wedding. You can’t be late. It’s bad luck.”

  “You just made that up.”

  “Go to your wedding,” Caroline told her. “I’ll be fine.”

  She ran to her car and backed out of the driveway, waiting until she was around the corner to pull over to the curb and burst into tears. She wasn’t sure why she was crying, whether the tears stemmed from learning about Hunter’s affair with Rain or the knowledge that this discovery had come too late to make a difference. Would knowing at the time that he and Rain were together when he was supposedly checking on the kids have changed anything? Would the Mexican police have been able to uncover the truth about Samantha’s disappearance if they had been aware of the possibility that she’d been taken from her crib a full half hour before the time they’d originally considered? Or would they have been just as clueless?

  Her sobs increased in strength and volume until her entire body was shaking. And she realized she wasn’t crying because of Hunter’s betrayal or even because the truth had come along too late to make a difference.

  Fifteen years after her daughter had been stolen from her crib, Caroline was crying because there was still only one truth that mattered: Samantha was gone.

  —

  “Where the hell have you been?” Michelle demanded as soon as Caroline stepped through her front door.

  Caroline dropped her purse to the floor and walked into the living room, each step an ordeal, as if she were wading through quicksand. “Please, Michelle. We can’t keep doing this. I don’t have the strength.”

  Her daughter was right behind her. “You disappear for hours…you don’t call…”

  “How can I call? You took my fucking phone.”

  “Nice one, Mother. Where have you been?”

  Might as well get this over with, Caroline decided, understanding that her daughter wasn’t about to let it go. “I went to see your father.”

  “That was hours ago.”

  “What do you mean? How do you know that?”

  “Dad phoned. He was concerned, said when you left you seemed very upset…”

  “How insightful of him. Did he tell you why I went to see him?”

  “He said he’d leave that up to you.”

  “Insightful and thoughtful.”

  “Can we skip the sarcasm? Are you going to tell me or not?”

  “About why I went to see him? No. I think I’ll toss that ball back into his court.”

  “About where you’ve been for the last three hours,” Michelle corrected.

  “I went to see Peggy.”

  “That was two hours ago. I called there,” Michelle explained before her mother could ask.

  “You shouldn’t have done that. They had a wedding…”

  “She said you’d already been there and were probably on your way home. But you weren’t, were you? So I’ll ask again, where have you been?”

  “It’s no big mystery, Michelle.”

  “Then why are you making it one?”

  “I just drove around for a while. I ended up in Balboa Park.”

  “Balboa Park? On a Sunday afternoon? With all the tourists?”

  “Yes. I like it there. I used to go there a lot.”

  “When?”

  “Years ago. After…It doesn’t matter. I’m home now.”

  “About time,” her mother said, entering the living room and brushing past Caroline, sitting down on the sofa, a cup of tea in her hand. “I made tea, if anybody wants some.”

  “Mother!” Caroline exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”

  “I called her,” Michelle said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I was worried about you.”

  “You were worried about me, so you called my mother?”

  “She tells me you’ve been acting quite irrationally lately,” Mary said.

  “I haven’t been acting irrationally…”

  “You’ve been conversing with some crackpot who claims to be Samantha, you’ve flown off to Calgary…”

  Caroline spun angrily toward Michelle.

  “Don’t you dare be angry with Micki,” her mother said. “She confided in me because she’s concerned about you, the way most daughters are concerned about their mothers.”

  Caroline shook off her mother’s barb with a shake of her head.

  “And now you disappear for half the day without telling anyone where you are. After what happened the last time you vanished like that, I don’t think you can blame any of us for being worried,” Mary said. “I certainly hope we won’t be reading about today’s exploits in tomorrow’s papers.”

  Caroline pictured herself flying across the room and knocking her mother to the ground with one well-aimed punch to the jaw. “Low blow, Mother. Even for you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I will have some of that tea.” She walked out of the room and into the hall, head high, shoulders back, praying she wouldn’t give Mary the satisfaction of tripping over her own feet.

  “You shouldn’t have said that,” she heard Michelle tell her grandmother.

  “She needs to be reminded. You did the right thing, calling m
e,” Mary said in return. “You’re a good girl, darling. Don’t let anyone try to tell you otherwise.”

  Divide and conquer, Caroline thought. Her mother’s favorite technique, her way of asserting dominance, maintaining control. And why not? It had always worked for her.

  Caroline walked into the kitchen to find her brother sitting on the counter beside the sink, looking slightly disheveled in a pair of torn jeans and a lime green short-sleeved shirt. His hair, too long and jutting out over the top of his collar, made him look as if he’d just been roused from bed, which perhaps he had. “Already poured you some,” Steve said, holding a china cup toward her. “A bit of milk, no sugar. Correct?”

  “She brought you along for reinforcement?”

  “I left the straitjacket in the car. What can I say? Have some biscotti. They’re delicious.” He pointed to the plate of biscotti on the kitchen table.

  “I see she made herself at home.”

  “That’s our girl. So, is it true?”

  “Is what true?”

  “That you’re in the middle of some sort of breakdown?”

  Caroline took a long sip of her tea. “I’m not having a breakdown.”

  “But you have been talking to some crackpot who claims she’s Samantha?”

  “What if she’s not a crackpot?”

  “Still doesn’t make her Samantha.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Think about it, Caroline. What are the odds?”

  “What difference does it make what the odds are?”

  “I’m the gambler in the family,” he reminded her. “You don’t bet against the house, the house in this case being common sense.”

  “Since when have you had any of that?”

  Steve slid down off the counter. “Let’s not make this personal. I’m not the enemy here.”

  “No,” Caroline conceded. “The enemy’s in there.” She looked toward the living room.

  “You don’t think you’re being just a little hard on her? She was there for you, you know. After Samantha disappeared. You were down in Mexico. She moved in, looked after Michelle. And after you got back and were such a basket case. She was pretty much all the mother that kid had.”

  “And look how well that turned out.”

  “It hasn’t been easy these past fifteen years. For any of us.”

  “Did you know?” Caroline asked.

  “Know what?”

  “That Hunter and Rain were having an affair.”

  Her brother looked toward his scuffed brown shoes.

  “You did know.”

  He hesitated. “I suspected.”

  “How? Why?”

  “I don’t know why. Just a gut feeling, I guess. I saw the way she looked at him, the way he looked at her, when they thought no one was watching. Plus the way he was always putting her down when she wasn’t around. Like he was trying to hide how he really felt. It just made me wonder. And then the night Samantha disappeared…”

  Caroline felt her breath catch in her lungs. “The night Samantha disappeared…What?”

  Another moment of hesitation. “I saw them.”

  “What do you mean, you saw them? You saw them together? When?”

  “Hold on. Hold on,” Steve cautioned. “I didn’t say I saw them together.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “It was after I’d gone back to my room to try to talk some sense into Becky, you know, try to talk her into coming back to the table, but of course she wouldn’t listen, and I was about to leave the room, I’d opened the door, and that’s when I thought I saw Hunter walking down the hall. And I remember wondering what he was doing over in our wing. And then, when I ran into Rain in the lobby, I just put two and two together…”

  “And kept the answer to yourself.”

  “What was I going to say, Caroline? Happy Anniversary. I think your husband’s having an affair! I didn’t know that for a fact. It might not have been Hunter I saw. He and Rain might not have been together. Even if they had, it might have been perfectly innocent.”

  “Well, they were together and it damn sure wasn’t innocent. Instead of checking on the kids, my darling husband was, in fact, screwing a woman who was supposed to be my friend, and if you’d told the police what you saw…”

  “I told them what I knew, which unfortunately was nothing. Even if the man I saw was Hunter, even if he and Rain had been together, I had no reason to believe he hadn’t checked on the kids when he said he did.”

  He was right. Still Caroline wasn’t ready to let her brother off the hook so easily. “You should have told me.”

  His answer was as direct, as forceful, as an arrow to the heart. “You shouldn’t have left your kids alone.”

  The simple statement took her breath away. She doubled over, gasping, the teacup slipping from her hands and dropping to the tile floor, shattering into a hundred tiny pieces.

  She heard the shuffle of feet moving toward her. “What’s going on in here?” Michelle asked over the ringing in her ears.

  “My God, what have you done?” her mother said, scrambling to pick up the broken slivers of china.

  “I’m sorry, Caroline,” her brother was saying. “I shouldn’t have said that. You know I didn’t mean it.”

  Don’t be sorry, Caroline thought, feeling her knees about to give way. It was the truth, after all. He’d just said the same thing she’d been telling herself for the past fifteen years.

  Which was when the doorbell rang.

  “I’ll get it.” Steve excused himself, running for the front door as if he’d literally been saved by the bell. He returned as Michelle was helping Caroline into one of the chairs grouped around the kitchen table. “There’s someone named Lili here to see you,” he told his sister. “She says you’ve been expecting her.”

  The phone was ringing.

  Caroline reached toward the nightstand beside her bed and lifted it to her ear, noting it was barely 6:30 A.M. Was it Arthur? Calling so early because he wanted to check in on her before she left for work, to tell her how much he missed her, even though it had been less than twenty-four hours since they’d been together?

  But instead of Arthur’s soothing baritone, it was Peggy’s husky alto she heard. “Have you seen the morning paper?” she asked before Caroline could say hello.

  “No. Why?”

  “I’m coming over,” Peggy told her. “Don’t look at the paper. Don’t answer your phone. Don’t check your computer until I get there.”

  “What are you talking about? What’s going on?”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  “Wait…what…?” The phone went dead in her hand. Caroline sat there staring at it for the next several minutes. “What just happened?” she whispered, heading for the bathroom as the phone rang again.

  Don’t answer your phone, she heard Peggy say. Don’t check your computer. Don’t look at the paper.

  “Why not?” she asked out loud, ignoring the phone’s persistent ring as she washed her face and brushed her teeth, then pulled on a bathrobe and headed down the hall.

  Michelle sat up in bed as Caroline passed her room. She rubbed her eyes and stared accusingly at her mother. “Who keeps calling?”

  “Just some idiot making crank calls. Go back to sleep. You don’t have to be up for another half hour.”

  “As if I’ll be able to sleep,” Michelle whined, pulling a pillow over her head as Caroline closed the door to her room.

  Don’t look at the paper, Peggy admonished in Caroline’s head as she ran down the stairs to the front door, throwing it open and lifting the morning paper into her hands.

  EVERYTHING, MY FAULT, read the headlines in bold black letters, and beneath it, a picture of her smiling face. Caroline had never seen the picture before, although she knew exactly when it had been taken because she recognized the Starbucks logo in the window behind her head.

  “No. Please, no.”

  She carried the paper into the kitchen and
spread the front section across the table, the phone resuming its awful ring as her eyes flitted from one terrible paragraph to the next, from one damning statement to another. It was all there. Every indiscreet word she’d uttered; every heartfelt confession she’d made. Her deepest secrets laid bare in black and white for all the world to read: her guilt at having left her children alone, her continuing despair at the loss of her younger child, her complaints about her narcissistic mother and difficult older daughter, Hunter’s upcoming nuptials to a “considerably” younger woman that left her feeling “pissed,” even the details of her last night with her former husband, when he’d told her he was leaving and she’d abandoned all reason and pride and begged him to stay. I pleaded with him not to leave me.

  She flipped to page ten, where the story continued, covering her return to teaching and the subsequent suicide of one of her students. I feel so guilty, she was quoted as saying beneath another candid photo of her laughing. Everything that’s happened. It’s all my fault. Everything, my fault.

  “This can’t be happening,” she said, watching the printed words blur and disintegrate, only to regroup and return in larger, bolder type than before. “Please just let this be an awful dream.”

  Ten minutes later Peggy was on her doorstep. She took one look at Caroline’s ashen complexion and gathered her into her arms. “Tell me everything.”

  —

  “Everything all right at home?” he’d asked as she returned to the bedroom, cell phone in hand.

  “Everything’s fine.” She’d turned her phone off and tossed it onto the pile of clothes lying on the floor. Then she’d climbed into bed beside him, burrowing into his side, allowing his strong arms to surround her. It had been a long time since she’d been in bed with a man, even longer since she’d felt safe. “Well, as fine as it can be where my daughter is concerned,” she continued. “Like I said, she can be difficult.”

  “I guess it’s hard being an only child.”

  Caroline’s eyes filled with tears and she tried to look away. Arthur’s hand, gentle on her chin, stopped her, forcing her eyes to his.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Caroline hesitated. “She wasn’t always an only child.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “I haven’t been completely honest with you.”