by Mary Kubica
That said, I overheard the occasional snarky remark from time to time. Sometimes, in summer, with windows open, the sound of angry, arguing voices carried from their house to ours. But that’s a marriage. They’re not all happy, all the time. Bea and I argue, too.
“Meredith came from a broken family, you know,” Josh says. “I did, too. We wanted ours to be different. But I could tell something had her down lately.”
“Like what?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I thought maybe she was seeing someone else. Maybe she was falling out of love with me.”
His eyes move from Bea to me and back again. He’s looking for one of us to either substantiate or disprove his theory. I can’t honestly do either because I don’t know. Neither can Bea. We know Josh and Meredith well enough, but not enough to know if she was being unfaithful. We’re not that kind of friends, and we’re just as close to Josh as we are to Meredith. We don’t have a loyalty to one over the other. If Meredith was cheating, it isn’t the kind of thing she’d tell us.
“That’s unlikely,” I say. I say it to appease him, but the truth is I never had any reason to believe Meredith wasn’t madly in love with Josh.
“Even if that’s the case and—worst-case scenario, Meredith is leaving you—why would she take Delilah and leave Leo behind?” Bea asks. “She wouldn’t do that, Josh. She adores those kids. Both of them. You know that.”
Josh shakes his head. He’s at a loss. He asks, “You think I should call the police, or is it too premature for that? Maybe I should give it the night and see if she comes home on her own. I don’t want to blow this out of proportion.”
Bea tells him, “If you’re worried, Josh, I don’t think a call to the police would hurt.”
I echo Bea’s sentiment. Between the fever, the weather, Meredith not answering her phone, there’s plenty of cause for concern. The sudden scourge of missing women also has me worried. I can’t get Shelby off my mind.
We convince Josh to come inside. With one last glance at his own home, he grudgingly does. He sits down on our sofa, and while Bea disappears into the kitchen to keep Leo company, Josh calls the police and reports his wife and daughter missing.
MEREDITH
11 YEARS BEFORE
March
The text comes from a number I don’t know. It’s a 630 area code. Local. I’m in the bathroom with Leo as he soaks in the tub. He has his bath toys lined up on the edge of it and they’re taking turns swan diving into the now-lukewarm water. It used to be hot, too hot for Leo to get into. But he’s been in there for thirty minutes now playing with his octopus, his whale, his fish. He’s having a ball.
Meanwhile I’ve lost track of time. I have a client in the early stages of labor. We’re texting. Her husband wants to take her to the hospital. She thinks it’s too soon. Her contractions are six and a half minutes apart. She’s absolutely correct. It’s too soon. The hospital would just send her home, which is frustrating, not to mention a huge inconvenience for women in labor. And anyway, why labor at the hospital when you can labor in the comfort of your own home? First-time fathers always get skittish. It does their wives no good. By the time I get to them, more times than not, the woman in labor is the more calm of the two. I have to focus my attention on pacifying a nervous husband. It’s not what they’re paying me for.
I tell Leo one more minute until I shampoo his hair, and then fire off a quick text, suggesting my client have a snack to keep her energy up, herself nourished. I recommend a nap, if her body will let her. The night ahead will be long for all of us. Childbirth, especially when it comes to first-time moms, is a marathon, not a sprint.
Josh is home. He’s in the kitchen cleaning up from dinner while Delilah plays. Delilah’s due up next in the tub. By the time I leave, the bedtime ritual will be done or nearly done. I feel good about that, hating the times I leave Josh alone with so much to do.
I draw up my text and then hit Send. The reply is immediate, that all too familiar ping that comes to me at all hours of the day or night.
I glance down at the phone in my hand, expecting it’s my client with some conditioned reply. Thx.
Instead: I know what you did. I hope you die.
Beside the text is a picture of a grayish skull with large, black eye sockets and teeth. The symbol of death.
My muscles tense. My heart quickens. I feel thrown off. The small bathroom feels suddenly, overwhelmingly, oppressive. It’s steamy, moist, hot. I drop down to the toilet and have a seat on the lid. My pulse is loud, audible in my own ears. I stare at the words before me, wondering if I’ve misread. Certainly I’ve misread. Leo is asking, “Is it a minute, Mommy?” I hear his little voice, muffled by the ringing in my ears. But I’m so thrown by the cutthroat text that I can’t speak.
I glance at the phone again. I haven’t misread.
The text is not from my client in labor. It’s not from any client of mine whose name and number is stored in my phone. As far as I can tell, it’s not from anyone I know.
A wrong number, then, I think. Someone sent this to me by accident. It has to be. My first thought is to delete it, to pretend this never happened. To make it disappear. Out of sight, out of mind.
But then I think of whoever sent it just sending it again or sending something worse. I can’t imagine anything worse.
I decide to reply. I’m careful to keep it to the point, to not sound too judgy or fault-finding because maybe the intended recipient really did do something awful—stole money from a children’s cancer charity—and the text isn’t as egregious as it looks at first glance.
I text: You have the wrong number.
The response is quick.
I hope you rot in hell, Meredith.
The phone slips from my hand. I yelp. The phone lands on the navy blue bath mat, which absorbs the sound of its fall.
Meredith.
Whoever is sending these texts knows my name. The texts are meant for me.
A second later Josh knocks on the bathroom door. I spring from the toilet seat, and stretch down for the phone. The phone has fallen facedown. I turn it over. The text is still there on the screen, staring back at me.
Josh doesn’t wait to be let in. He opens the door and steps right inside. I slide the phone into the back pocket of my jeans before Josh has a chance to see.
“Hey,” he says, “how about you save some water for the fish.”
Leo complains to Josh that he is cold. “Well, let’s get you out of the bath,” Josh says, stretching down to help him out of the water.
“I need to wash him still,” I admit. Before me, Leo’s teeth chatter. There are goose bumps on his arm that I hadn’t noticed before. He is cold, and I feel suddenly guilty, though it’s mired in confusion and fear. I hadn’t been paying any attention to Leo. There is bathwater spilled all over the floor, but his hair is still bone-dry.
“You haven’t washed him?” Josh asks, and I know what he’s thinking: that in the time it took him to clear the kitchen table, wash pots and pans and wipe down the sinks, I did nothing. He isn’t angry or accusatory about it. Josh isn’t the type to get angry.
“I have a client in labor,” I say by means of explanation. “She keeps texting,” I say, telling Josh that I was just about to wash Leo. I drop to my knees beside the tub. I reach for the shampoo. In the back pocket of my jeans, the phone again pings. This time, I ignore it. I don’t want Josh to know what’s happening, not until I get a handle on it for myself.
Josh asks, “Aren’t you going to get that?” I say that it can wait. I focus on Leo, on scrubbing the shampoo onto his hair, but I’m anxious. I move too fast so that the shampoo suds get in his eye. I see it happening, but all I can think to do is wipe it from his forehead with my own soapy hands. It doesn’t help. It makes it worse.
Leo complains. Leo isn’t much of a complainer. He’s an easygoing kid. “Ow,�
� is all that he says, his tiny wet hands going to his eyes, though shampoo in the eye burns like hell.
“Does that sting, baby?” I ask, feeling contrite. But I’m bursting with nervous energy. There’s only one thought racing through my mind. I hope you rot in hell, Meredith.
Who would have sent that, and why? Whoever it is knows me. They know my name. They’re mad at me for something I’ve done. Mad enough to wish me dead. I don’t know anyone like that. I can’t think of anything I’ve done to upset someone enough that they’d want me dead.
I grab the wet washcloth draped over the edge of the tub. I try handing it to Leo, so that he can press it to his own eyes. But my hands shake as I do. I wind up dropping the washcloth into the bath. The tepid water rises up and splashes him in the eyes. This time he cries.
“Oh, buddy,” I say, “I’m so sorry, it slipped.”
But as I try again to grab it from the water and hand it to him, I drop the washcloth for a second time. I leave it where it is, letting Leo fish it out of the water and wipe his eyes for himself. Meanwhile Josh stands two feet behind, watching.
My phone pings again. Josh says, “Someone is really dying to talk to you.”
Dying. It’s all that I hear.
My back is to Josh, thank God. He can’t see the look on my face when he says it.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Your client,” Josh says. I turn to him. He motions to my phone jutting out of my back pocket. “She really needs you. You should take it, Mer,” he says softly, accommodatingly, and only then do I think about my client in labor and feel guilty. What if it is her? What if her contractions are coming more quickly now and she does need me?
Josh says, “I can finish up with Leo while you get ready to go,” and I acquiesce, because I need to get out of here. I need to know if the texts coming to my phone are from my client or if they’re coming from someone else.
I rise up from the floor. I scoot past Josh in the door, brushing against him. His hand closes around my upper arm as I do, and he draws me in for a hug. “Everything okay?” he asks, and I say yes, fine, sounding too chipper even to my own ears. Everything is not okay.
“I’m just thinking about my client,” I say. “She’s had a stillbirth before, at thirty-two weeks. She never thought she’d get this far. Can you imagine that? Losing a baby at thirty-two weeks?”
Josh says no. His eyes move to Leo and he looks saddened by it. I feel guilty for the lie. It’s not this client but another who lost a baby at thirty-two weeks. When she told me about it, I was completely torn up. It took everything in me not to cry as she described for me the moment the doctor told her her baby didn’t have a heartbeat. Labor was later induced, and she had to push her dead baby out with only her mother by her side. Her husband was deployed at the time. After, she was snowed under by guilt. Was it her fault the baby died? A thousand times I held her hand and told her no. I’m not sure she ever believed me.
My lie has the desired effect. Josh stands down, and asks if I need help with anything before I leave. I say no, that I’m just going to change my clothes and go.
I step out of the bathroom. In the bedroom, I close the door. I grab my scrub bottoms and a long-sleeved T-shirt from my drawer. I lay them on the bed, but before I get dressed, I pull my phone out of my pocket. I take a deep breath and hold it in, summoning the courage to look. I wonder what waits there. More nasty threats? My heart hammers inside me. My knees shake.
I take a look. There are two messages waiting for me.
The first: Water broke. Contractions 5 min apart.
And then: Heading to hospital.—M.
I release my pent-up breath. The texts are from my client’s husband, sent from her phone. My legs nearly give in relief, and I drop down to the edge of the bed, forcing myself to breathe. I inhale long and deep. I hold it in until my lungs become uncomfortable. When I breathe out, I try and force away the tension.
But I can’t sit long because my client is advancing quickly. I need to go.
LEO
NOW
To be straight, I never thought they were going to find you. I gave that up a long time ago. In all honesty I kind of wish they hadn’t ’cause Dad and I were getting along just fine without you. It took him long enough to get over you in the first place. Now you’ve gone and reopened the wound, made him mourn for Mom all over again as if she’s only just died.
The truth is, Dad was never much of a dad to me until he got over missing you. But now you’re back and, in his eyes, you’re all that matters.
That’s not to say I didn’t think about you. I thought about you a lot when you were gone, though all I ever knew was the absence of you. I knew I was supposed to have a big sister, but didn’t. I knew that compared to you, I was second-tier.
There’s a room in our house that’s yours. I don’t ever remember anyone living in there. It’s pink, that’s all I know, ’cause I’m not supposed to go in there and mess it up. It’s off-limits. Dad pretends it’s something sacred and holy, but all it is, is an old dusty room.
At school they treat me like some special-needs kid because of you. Everyone’s supposed to be nice to me because I’m the kid whose mom is dead and whose sister is gone. The truth is, nobody’s nice to me. They treat me like a freak instead.
I don’t remember having a sister. I can’t be sad about it. When you were gone, I tried to remember. I wanted to remember. But turns out, kid memories are weird. I spent probably too much time trying to learn about implicit and explicit memories, like why I can’t remember us playing together when we were little, or Mom singing me to sleep, but the smell of bacon always comes as a punch to the gut, and I don’t know why.
Dad tells me you used to push me on the swing in our backyard. We still have that swing. It’s no ordinary swing but is instead a scrap of wood with two thick strings that hangs from a tree. You probably don’t remember this, but when I was three—and you were five—you pushed me so hard I fell face-first off the swing. I don’t remember it, either. But Dad’s told that story so many times it’s like I do. It’s like I can convince myself that I remember what it felt like when I let go of the strings, fell forward and face-planted to the ground. It left me with a scar over my eye. The scar I’ve still got, but the memory of it is gone. They’re not false memories because they really happened. They’re just false to me. There’s a difference.
I don’t know why I’m telling you this. You probably don’t care.
When you were gone and I wanted to feel close to you, I Googled your name. You’re all over the internet, you know. A recap, mostly, of the last few days before you went missing. Details about the search and what happened to Mom, potential sightings that never panned out, like the lady who said she saw you at some IHOP in Jacksonville, right across the street from the used-car dealer where she worked. Dad booked a flight that very night, left me behind and went to Florida where he searched for you for days. You never turned up. Not a year later, some man said he spotted you at a Safeway in Redwood City, California, and after that, a truck driver swore he saw you at World’s Largest Truck Stop. Dad went to those places, too, but every time he came back empty-handed and sad.
There’s a reward for your return, you know. There’s nothing people won’t do for money, even lie.
Online there are the conspiracy theories, too. My favorite is the newspaper article from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, 2015, where people swear some girl in the background of a black-and-white photo is you. That photo is all over the internet now. That girl, whoever she is, in famous, or infamous, or whatever. The cops were never able to identify her, and yet there are whole sites devoted to that picture, like Find Delilah, which some obsessed nobody started up in the hopes of finding you and earning that reward.
Ten grand the reward is up to now. That woman who found you hit the jackpot.
But for as much as people th
ink the internet knows everything, the one thing it doesn’t say is that the girl who came back isn’t the same one who disappeared.
KATE
11 YEARS BEFORE
May
Bea is in bed when the police finally come. It takes over an hour. With weather conditions as they are, emergencies abound. The police and paramedics have been kept busy lately, rescuing people from flooded roads and homes.
The officers arrive without lights and sirens. They slip nearly invisibly down the darkened street, pulling to the curb and parking in front of Josh and Meredith’s house.
When he called to report Meredith and Delilah missing, Josh was told that an officer was on his way, and so he’d left Bea and me and carried Leo home, to get him to bed before they came.
When will Mommy be home? Leo had asked as they left, chocolate on his fingers and lips, woozy with fatigue.
I open the front door and step out onto the covered porch with a throw blanket wrapped around me, my feet bare. I leave the porch light off, feeling invisible in the darkness, though I stay alert. It’s hard not to be scared after all that’s happened. I have to wonder if some monster is stalking women in the neighborhood, or if what’s happened to Shelby and Meredith are two isolated incidents. I back myself into the corner on the porch, where nothing can come at me from behind. The wooden porch is damp on my feet. It’s still raining, but the rain is slower now, the night more tame. It’s quieted down to a peaceful drizzle. I stand in the darkness, staring through the trees that disrupt my view of the street. I watch as two officers make their way to Josh and Meredith’s house, where Josh pulls the front door open before they have a chance to knock and wake up Leo.
I hear their voices, one male and one female. They introduce themselves. Josh says hello and tells them his name. He invites them inside. The officers step in and he closes the door. The blinds are open in their house, so I can see Josh and the officers, but I can’t hear what they say. There’s a chill to the night air, and soon I’m cold. I wait outside awhile, until five minutes turns into fifteen, and I step back in, watching through a window until, forty minutes later, they finally leave.