Local Woman Missing

by Mary Kubica

  The baby’s condition improves by the time she’s allowed to go home. But even when she does go home, there’s much uncertainty about her future.

  The days and weeks pass. The Tebows meet with an attorney. They decide to sue Dr. Feingold for malpractice. Shelby calls and asks if I think it’s a good idea.

  “Jason says we’re doing it, whether I like it or not. He’s pissed. Dr. Feingold screwed up.”

  This isn’t for me to decide. “You have to do what’s right for your family,” I tell her. She has a case. I was there. I saw with my own eyes. I saw him do things to Shelby’s body without her consent, things that carried a great deal of risk.

  A malpractice suit can’t change anything that’s happened. Their baby will likely have special needs. A settlement could help pay for the baby’s care.

  “If I can help in any way, I will. Whatever you and Jason need.”

  The attorney looks through Shelby’s and the baby’s medical records. He speaks with medical experts. He decides that the Tebows have a case.

  The next week Dr. Feingold receives the medical malpractice complaint. The first thing he does is call me. “Those folks wouldn’t know their ass from their elbow. Far be it for them to decide that I did something wrong. You put the idea into their head.”

  “I shouldn’t be speaking to you,” I say.

  “If you did this,” he says, “if this was your idea, I’ll ruin you. Do you hear me? I will ruin you.” He enunciates one word at a time. I. Will. Ruin. You.

  I hang up the phone. My whole body shakes long after I do. For over an hour I sit at the kitchen table, unable to move. My thoughts dwell on one thing: How will he ruin me exactly? Will he ruin my career? Or will he physically ruin me?

  Josh comes home with the kids. They’re bubbly, loud. Delilah is excited. Their classroom is getting caterpillars. When they turn to butterflies, they’ll release them outside.

  She hugs me. She’s getting taller. Her arms, when she wraps them around me, reach my waist. She asks me, “When can I have a playdate with Piper and stupid Lily Morris?”

  “Delilah,” I tell her, “we don’t call anybody stupid.”

  “But she is,” she pouts.

  “Delilah,” I warn. My voice is stern.

  “Fine. But when can we have a playdate? And does Lily Morris have to come?” she pleads. She sets her hands on her hips. One juts out. Only six and already she has a flair for the dramatic. I smile at her, wishing life could only be this complex. I do feel badly for her. I know how hard it is to be left out.

  “Yes,” I tell her, “Lily Morris has to come. Because we don’t want to leave anyone out. That doesn’t feel good, does it?”

  Once the kids leave, I tell Josh, “I was just about to start dinner.” In the next room, the TV turns on. I haven’t so much as thought about dinner.

  “How about we order something?” he suggests. I like that idea. I don’t feel like cooking. My stomach is in knots. I don’t even know that I could eat.

  Josh is looking at me. He’s incredibly handsome. Josh has always been incredibly handsome. He’s dapper. His suit is slim-fitting, navy. He has many suits. While other men collect cigars or license plates, Josh collects suits. Some are tailor-made and others off the rack. He’s always trying to impress. He has a likable personality, a gravitational field. People are drawn to him. He’s outgoing. His smile lights up a room. Everyone likes Josh.

  I should trust him enough to tell him what happened to the Tebows, what’s happening with Dr. Feingold and about the threatening texts. But he would be disappointed after the fact. And he would worry. He would want to know how and why I got myself into this situation to begin with. And then he’d want to completely revamp the way I do my work, to some other formula where he believes I’m at less personal and professional risk. But I love what I do. I love the way that I do it.

  I put the Tebows and Dr. Feingold out of my mind. Soon it will be through.

  LEO

  NOW

  Around the same time you disappeared, some other lady did, too. They found her. Except that by the time they did, she was already dead.

  For a while, cops thought it was all connected. They were wrong. Now the lady’s husband is in the slammer. He’ll be there for a long time, twenty to life, ’cause they found her bloody clothes in a Dumpster behind where he worked.

  That night the lady cop calls Dad on the phone. He takes it into another room because he doesn’t want you to hear what she’s saying. But when I ask, he tells me. Turns out, the people who took you were dumb enough to use their real names, because there is a real Eddie and Martha Cutter living in Michael, Illinois. Eddie and Martha own a house on Calhoun Street. They’ve owned it twelve years. The lady cop texts Dad a picture. It’s not the nicest house because half of its shutters are missing and there’s mildew on the white siding. The trees grow out of control, nearly hiding the house. The inside is ten times worse. It’s filthy. The carpet is stained. There’s water damage on the walls, turned black with mold. There’s standing water on the floor. Dirty dishes pile up in the kitchen sink.

  The only problem is that Eddie and Martha are not living there anymore because when the cops went to investigate, the house was abandoned. “Detective Rowlings is trying to locate their family, to see if they know anything about their whereabouts.”

  I’m wondering what happens if they try and come here.

  There are no pictures of the basement. The lady cop told Dad about the conditions they kept you in, but Dad can’t tell me because he’s too busy crying his eyes out.

  Your friend Gus was nowhere in sight. There was blood in the basement.

  You get the idea.

  There’s more urgency about getting your memories back. The lady cop doesn’t come right out and say it, but she thinks hypnosis is bullshit. But Dad looked into it and said that if they can relax you enough, you might just remember something your mind has been keeping from you.

  The night before the hypnosis, we’re all getting ready for bed. You’re in your bedroom, Dad’s in his. From the hall, I hear you making noise in your room. I wonder what you’re up to in there. I go to see. You’re not so hesitant when you open the door, like maybe you’re getting the hang of Dad and me.

  “What are you doing in here?” I ask, looking around. The lights in the room are off.

  “Nothing,” you say. You’re sheepish. You don’t want to tell me.

  “You must be doing something.”

  “It’s something stupid,” you say.

  “Like what?”

  “Just a game I play.”

  “What’s it called?” I ask.

  “It don’t really have a name.”

  “How do you play it?”

  You don’t want to. But you show me, anyway, after a while of me begging. You think I’m going to make fun of you for it. I don’t. Instead, I play your game with you. It’s not super dark in your room because of a light from down the hall. So you close the bedroom door, trapping both you and me inside. Still, it’s not black. Outside your window the moon is bright.

  “It’s better when you can’t see nothing,” you tell me.

  “Why’s it better?” I ask.

  “It just is. That’s how the game is played. We got to close our eyes,” you say, to make up for the lack of blackness. You tell me to keep my hands at my sides. “It’s cheating,” you say, “if you feel with your hands first.”

  We stand with our backs to one wall. The object of the game, you tell me, is to be the one to get closest to the opposite wall without running into it. We can’t use our hands.

  I try. I fail. I feel like a fish out of water trying to walk with my eyes closed. I can’t even walk in a straight line. I plow into the bed frame and give up. This game is dumb, but I don’t tell you that.

  But I watch as you keep going. You stop within a cent
imeter of the wall, like you had some sixth sense that it was there.

  “How’d you do that?” I ask.

  You tell me it’s one of those things you got real good at: finding your way around in the dark.

  “There wasn’t no light where they kept us,” you say. “None at all. When someone takes your eyes away from you, you figure out how to get by on other things.” So that’s what you did. You learned to survive on your other senses and on instinct. It’s pretty cool.

  “Wanna play again?” you ask.

  I don’t. Not really. There’s a stinging pain in my thigh from where I ran into the bed frame. Chances are good it’ll bruise. I don’t feel like doing that again.

  Still, I shrug my shoulders and say, “Why not?” ’cause I can tell it’s what you want to do.

  MEREDITH

  11 YEARS BEFORE

  May

  I haven’t forgotten about Cassandra. I’ve been busy. But all the while, she’s been on my mind. I want to be a better friend to her than I’ve been. I’ve been so busy burdening her with my needs, that I’ve forgotten about hers. Something is off with Cassandra. I have to know what it is.

  On a Friday afternoon, I pick up a Bundt cake from the local bakery. After Delilah is in school and Leo with Charlotte, I walk it to Cassandra’s house. I go to her door and knock. She answers with Arlo in her arms.

  “What are you doing here?” she asks. Her tone is curt.

  I present the Bundt cake. “I thought we could talk. It feels like we never have the time to just talk anymore. I miss you, Cassandra,” I say.

  She harrumphs, which is how I know that she’s really put out about something. “Come in,” she tells me. I step inside and out of my shoes. “You want coffee?” she asks. I tell her yes, following her into the kitchen. Cassandra wears a dress, which she almost always does. It’s long and cotton and comfortable-looking, but still a dress. She looks lovely in it. I can’t remember the last time I wore a dress.

  “I’m glad you stopped by,” she says as I help myself to a chair. I watch her brew a pot of coffee one-handed, with Arlo in the other. It’s effortless. I would have dropped either Arlo or the coffee by now.

  “I’ve been wanting to for a while. Things have been so busy.”

  “I have something I want to show you.”

  “Oh?” I ask, thinking it’s something having to do with the kids. Something having to do with Delilah, Piper, Lily and their little squabble. I hope that Delilah hasn’t done something she shouldn’t have, like give Lily Morris a mean picture.

  Cassandra brings a book to the table. It’s a photo album. People don’t keep photo albums anymore. Everything is digital these days. If anything, people scrapbook. Scrapbooks are lovely. But I don’t have the time for that.

  The album shows its age. The plastic photo sleeves bend. The pictures themselves look old, taken with a 35mm camera. No one has cameras anymore.

  Cassandra thumbs through to a certain page. She lays the album flat when she finds it. I see enough red to know what it is. The name of my alma mater is written on almost every T-shirt and sweatshirt in the book. We lived in campus gear when we were in college.

  She points to a picture. There I am. There Marty is. My cheeks go flush. I have a hard time swallowing. My saliva is suddenly thick.

  Her voice quavers when she speaks, in both anger and pain. She asks, “Why wouldn’t you and Marty tell me, unless you had something to hide? I’ve known for weeks what you two were up to,” she goes on without waiting for an answer. “You thought you could get away with it.”

  She doesn’t know that we dated, that we slept together. But the picture is damning enough. In it, we stand side by side. Marty’s arm is thrown around my shoulders. It’s casual, comfortable. We knew each other. We knew each other well. That we didn’t tell her and Josh looks bad.

  “If I told you that nothing has happened between Marty and me, would you believe me?” I ask.

  “You could try. But I wouldn’t believe you.”

  I look her in the eye. She looks away. She sets Arlo in his seat, and cuts him a piece of the cake.

  I tell her, “Nothing has happened between Marty and me in eighteen years.”

  She looks back to me. “But something did happen between Marty and you?”

  “That was a long time ago, Cassandra. We didn’t know you back then. You didn’t exist to us.”

  “But you dated?”

  “It was only young love.”

  She looks aghast when I say this. “You loved him?”

  I regret my choice of words immediately. I should have phrased it differently. I never should have said the word love.

  “I thought I did. I was blinded by all those overpowering emotions that we feel when we’re eighteen. But now I know that it wasn’t love at all. Cassandra, what you and Marty have is love. That was just naivete. Infatuation. Two stupid kids.”

  “Why should I believe anything you say,” she asks, “when you’ve been lying to me all this time?”

  “I never lied,” I remind her.

  “You’ve been keeping secrets from me, keeping me in the dark.”

  Cassandra is a gorgeous woman. She’s elegant and articulate and savvy and smart. In no way would Marty want me now that he has Cassandra. But it’s hard to know these things about ourselves. Cassandra feels deceived. “We did it for your sake. For yours and Josh’s,” I say.

  Cassandra sits upright. “Does Josh know?” she asks.

  I tell her, “No. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. Not that it mattered either way because there is nothing going on with Marty and me. I swear to you, Cassandra, on my life. On my children’s lives. There is nothing going on between Marty and me.”

  “Did you sleep with him?” she asks.

  “Cassandra. Don’t do this.”

  “Did you?” she demands. We’ve both forgotten all about the coffee and cake. The cake sits beside us. Only Arlo eats it. The coffee has finished brewing. It waits for us in the pot.

  “I was eighteen,” I say. It’s not the answer she’s looking for.

  “So you did sleep with him, then.”

  “Cassandra.”

  “Answer the question, Meredith. Did you or did you not sleep with my husband?” She’s yelling now. In his high chair, Arlo gets scared. To appease him, Cassandra offers up another slice of cake. I watch him take it by the handful, shove it in until he’s covered with it. There’s cake in his hair.

  “I did,” I whisper, though he wasn’t her husband then. But to remind her of that would only make her more upset.

  Things go from bad to worse quickly. Cassandra already knew I’d slept with Marty before she asked. Because wedged between two pages of the photo album is a note, folded in half, that I wrote him over a decade and a half ago. I know what it is as she unfolds it and forces it into my hands. I can’t bring myself to read the note, though I know what it says. After months of dating, I’d gotten pregnant. The baby was Marty’s. I was fully intent on keeping the baby, which I explained to Marty in the note. He could be a part of the baby’s life, if he so chose, but there was no obligation.

  As it turned out, he didn’t have to choose. Because two days later, I miscarried.

  “What did you do with the baby?” she asks.

  “We lost it at twelve weeks.”

  “Shame,” she says icily.

  It terrifies Cassandra, knowing how close Marty came to having a child that wasn’t hers. If I hadn’t miscarried, Marty and I may have raised the child together. We may have gotten married. The life she knows might not have existed.

  “Are you still fucking my husband?” she asks coolly, and I gasp.

  “Of course not,” I breathe out.

  “I’m not stupid,” she says. “I know.”

  “Know what?” I ask, truly confused.

  “
I know what you and he are up to. His late-night grocery store runs. Those ten o’clock ice cream cravings.” She puts it all in air quotes, implying she doesn’t for a minute think Marty runs off to the grocery store that late at night because he’s craving ice cream. “Do you know that sometimes he thinks I’m so dense I won’t realize how he comes home empty-handed? He doesn’t even bother picking up ice cream as part of his charade. He just goes and fucks you and comes back, and then he climbs into bed with me, nine times out of ten forgetting to put back on his ring.”

  It saddens me to think of Marty sneaking out late at night to cheat on her, though I can’t say I find it shocking. Not because of anything Cassandra has done or not done, but because the Marty I knew in college was slick. He was a ladies’ man.

  Maybe he hasn’t changed as much as I thought.

  What shocks me is that Cassandra thinks that I, too, slip out of my house at ten o’clock some nights, leaving Josh and the kids behind, and go to meet up with Marty.

  “Cassandra, if Marty is seeing another woman,” I say, “it isn’t me.”

  “And why should I believe you, Meredith? Why should I believe anything you say?”

  “I’ve never lied to you,” I say.

  “Bullshit,” she snaps, again startling Arlo. I’ve never seen Cassandra so angry. I’ve never heard her use this language in front of her kids. I don’t blame her for being upset, especially if she believes there’s something going on between Marty and me. Still, she’s taking it to the extreme. “You have lied to me, Meredith. You’ve been lying to me since the day we met.”

  “If I did, it was lying by omission and not an outright lie. There’s a difference.”

  “Is there?” she asks.

  I say nothing. In truth, I don’t know that there is.

  “When do you plan to tell Josh?” she asks. It isn’t so much a question as it is an ultimatum.

  “I’ll tell him, if that’s what you want me to do,” I say. I’ll tell him now that Cassandra knows. But I want to be able to tell him on my own terms. I don’t want Cassandra to be the one who tells him. “Please let me speak to him first, before you do.”