Local Woman Missing

by Mary Kubica

  “I wouldn’t do that to you, Meredith,” she says. “I’m not that kind of friend.” It’s a slap in the face. She isn’t the kind of person who would hurt a friend. But I am.

  I rise from the chair. I show myself to the door. She follows. At the door, I turn to face her. “I’m so sorry that we didn’t tell you,” I say in a last-ditch effort to apologize. “Marty and I thought it was for the best.”

  “Marty and I, Marty and I,” she parrots, her anger tangible. She’s red in the face, her poise and aplomb gone. She believes that Marty is cheating on her with me. That if or when he sneaks out of his house late at night to rendezvous with some woman, that woman is me. It’s not, of course. My marriage means everything to me. Josh means everything to me. I would never do something like that to him, or to Cassandra for that matter. I’m not that kind of woman.

  There’s nothing that I can say to make her believe me. It’s best that I just leave.

  As I step through the door frame, Cassandra barks out, “I hope you rot in hell, Meredith. I hope you both rot in hell.”

  I can’t help but notice how her word choice is a carbon copy of the threatening texts I’ve been receiving. The language of the texts returns to me. I know what you did. I hope you die. You’ll never get away with it, bitch. I hope you rot in hell, Meredith.

  Cassandra has been the one sending me these texts.

  I wheel around to face her. “It was you,” I say, more shocked than anything. There’s a tremor in my voice. “You’re the one who’s been sending me those awful texts. You’re the one who’s been trying to scare the shit out of me.”

  “Did it work?” she asks, satisfied in herself because she can see that it has.

  “Were you following me?” I ask, aghast, thinking of the time a text arrived just as I was leaving the hospital, as if the sender knew I was on my way home and alone.

  “If I was,” she asks, “would it be anywhere as awful as what you’ve done? As what you’re still doing?”

  I consider the threatening, hateful wording of the texts. Was she hyperbolizing only or does she want me dead? Do I have a reason to be scared for my safety, for my life?

  “I’ve done nothing,” I say, trying to justify again how Marty and I withheld the information about our past for her sake. For Josh’s. We didn’t do it to hurt anyone. But I barely get the words out before the door slams closed, a dead bolt slipping into place on the other side.

  * * *

  I won’t let Delilah play with Piper. Delilah begs, “Please, Mommy, please.” She wants to know why.

  When I tire of making excuses, I snap at her, “Because Mommy said so,” feeling guilty for losing my patience with Delilah. It’s not her fault. It’s mine. I can’t go outside and face Cassandra, but I also can’t trust her to watch my child.

  The next day they have Lily Morris over to play. Cassandra must purposefully send the girls into the front yard to rub it in Delilah’s face. She sits in the front window and cries, heartbroken that she hasn’t been invited, not that I would have allowed her to go even if she was. Piper and Lily dance around the front yard, laughing, holding hands. I’m appalled that Cassandra would stoop so low as to hurt my child in an effort to get back at me.

  In the coming days, Leo continues to cry every time I leave him with Charlotte. He clings to me and begs, “No, Mommy. No.” I feel awful making him go. I think about calling in sick to work, staying home with Leo. But doing so would only be a disservice to him, because the days he has to go would then be ten times worse.

  I make deals with Leo. I bargain with him. “If you don’t cry all week, Mommy and Leo will do something special on the weekend. Just you and me.” I tell him we’ll go to the children’s museum together, or to the children’s garden at the arboretum if the weather cooperates. His pick.

  The mommy guilt is getting to me. I spend time thinking about quitting the yoga studio, about taking on fewer clients, if any clients at all. For as much as I love being a doula, I’ve been having misgivings ever since the Tebow baby was born. I think of Jason and Shelby often. I haven’t stayed in touch well enough. It’s hard to do. The baby has suffered irreparable damage. I don’t know to what extent. I’ve started to second-guess the way I handled things in the labor and delivery room. I didn’t do everything in my power to protect Shelby. I could have done more. I could have physically put myself between Dr. Feingold and my client.

  I call Jeanette. I tell her what happened. We talk it through.

  As a midwife, Jeanette is one of the few people I know familiar with my line of work.

  “Maybe it’s time,” I tell her, “that I set my work aside and focus on my own family for a change.”

  She tells me the same thing I told Shelby. “You have to do what’s best for your family. But, Meredith,” she says, “you handled Dr. Feingold exactly as I would have. Don’t ever let yourself think you’re not a good doula, or that you didn’t do everything you could for that woman. You’re only human.”

  All the time, I find myself staring out the window at Marty and Cassandra’s house. I think that if Cassandra had the cunningness to buy a burner phone, to follow me around town and send intimidating texts, she’s capable of much worse. Are the texts only empty threats? Or do I have a reason to fear for my family and my safety?

  LEO

  NOW

  On your fourth day home, I go back to school. I walk there, taking the long way. I still can’t walk by our old babysitter’s house without feeling the need to dry heave, even though last I heard she and her husband don’t live there anymore.

  Dad says not to talk to the kids at school about you. If anyone asks, I’m supposed to say my dad told me not to talk about it. That goes over about as well as to be expected. During lunch, I get my cafeteria tray knocked out of my hands because I won’t spill the details of what happened to you.

  The tray falls. Dr. Carmichael blames me because by the time it hits the ground, Adam Beltner is nowhere around. Everyone laughs. Look at that idiot, they say.

  Dr. Carmichael makes me clean it up. By the time I do, there’s no time left to eat. I go hungry.

  I get nudged during the day. Kids ask questions that I ignore. They throw things at me. They call me names. Jagoff. Jerkweed. They stare. They point fingers and laugh.

  The effing reporters have snapped about a gazillion pictures of you since you’ve been home. They’re in the paper. They’re all over Snapchat and Instagram. Kids keep sharing them on their own stories like what’s happened to you is their own tragedy. Everyone’s seen the pictures. It’s the same picture, taken from ten angles by ten different photographers. In them, you’re red, covered with blisters on your arms and face. Bleach burns, the doctors said. Second degree. They’ll probably scar. Your clothes don’t fit right. You haven’t bathed in eleven years; you look like trash.

  I overhear some kid call you a burrito face because of the blisters and burns. I go to punch him in the face, but Piper Hanaka gets in my way. “Ignore him, Leo. He’s, like, just trying to screw with you. Don’t give him what he wants.”

  Piper Hanaka is your age. She’s two years older than me. She’s a senior, practically engaged to some guy she’s been dating since freshman year. Rumor has it, they’re going to different colleges next year. They’ve decided to break up before they go. Neither wants to hold the other back and, if it’s meant to be, I’ve overheard her say, it will be. It sounds very mature, and also stupid as shit. But it means that in exactly eight months from now, Piper Hanaka will be single. Not that she’d ever want me.

  Do you remember Piper Hanaka? You used to be friends. I don’t remember that. She told me once, all cloak-and-dagger-like in the hall. Just sidled up to me at my locker and said she had a dream about you. I went mute. I didn’t know what to say. So I said nothing. Then she said, “Do you want to know what it was about, Leo?”

  I said, “Okay. I guess.” />
  She told me about her dream, how the two of you were trying to pick all the woolly bear caterpillars up off the street. You did it so the cars couldn’t drive over them. You’d gather them in the palms of your hands, then run them back to the trees. You’d set them on the leaves, watch them walk away. By the time they reached the end of the leaf, they were moths. They could fly. In her dream, you were still six.

  I thought it might mean something. I thought her dream might be premonitory, like you were dead and you’d turned into an angel with wings, and were flying to heaven.

  But as it turned out, it was just a dream. Not all dreams mean something.

  She said, “I still think about her, you know? I, like, think about how we used to hang out when we were kids. I wonder if we’d still be friends if she never went away.”

  Went away, she said. Like you had some choice in the matter. I didn’t hold it against her. She’s the only one who ever talked to me about you in a way that wasn’t brutally honest. She’s also one of the few who doesn’t give in to the herd mentality and make fun of me.

  Piper Hanaka used to live across the street from us. You and she used to ride your bikes on the sidewalk, do cartwheels, play house, climb trees. I don’t remember any of it. Any knowledge I have is secondhand from Dad.

  Piper and her family moved after everything happened. I don’t remember them living there. As far as I know, that’s always been old Mr. Murphy’s house. But Dad said their house was on the market within five days of Mom being dead. They didn’t go far ’cause Piper is still at the same school as me. They stayed in town, just on the other side of it, where they didn’t have to look out their window and be reminded that bad things happen to good people every day. It’s like six degrees of Kevin Bacon. All the time, we’re closer to disaster than we think.

  I asked Dad to put our house on the market, too. I wanted to get up and go. I wanted to start over somewhere else as someone new, where no one had heard of Mom and you.

  Dad said no, because what if you came back and couldn’t find us? As long as you were gone, he would never leave. Time stood still in your absence.

  To be straight, Piper Hanaka and I are not friends. Piper Hanaka is way too cool to be my friend. In case you didn’t realize it by now, I have no friends.

  That said, Piper Hanaka doesn’t want to see me get expelled for punching some douchebag in the face. She stands in between him and me until I back down and leave.

  KATE

  11 YEARS BEFORE

  May

  The rest of the way home, we’re on the lookout for the car. Both Bea and I are circumspect, though I start to second-guess myself, wondering if the car was following us at all, or if it was just another car having as much difficulty navigating the roads as I was. I may never know.

  By the time we reach our neighborhood, the rain has let up. Still, everything is gray and nondescript. The streets are empty. The trees hang heavy with rainwater, their branches, what’s left of them, anyway, reaching down to touch the ground. The weaker of the twigs have fallen, unable to sustain the weight of the water or the force of the wind. Hail remains, melting on lawns.

  I slip down the alley behind our house. Most of the homes in the neighborhood have alleys to provide rear access, because it keeps things uniform and aesthetically pleasing from the street. The alley is narrow. It’s wide enough that two cars, going in opposite directions, can just eke through.

  I pull down the alley going slowly. About a hundred feet ahead, Josh returns from wherever he’s been. I pull into our driveway and park, and Bea and I get out, making our way to him. He stands by his car, waiting. No one is allowed in the Dickeys’ garage because it’s been deemed a potential crime scene. Yellow caution tape surrounds the door. I see Bea’s eyes go to it, and then move away. It’s hard to believe something bad may have happened there.

  “I was out searching for Meredith and Delilah,” Josh says before we can even think to ask. He wears a button-down shirt, and only half of the shirt is still tucked into the waistband of his jeans. He isn’t wearing a belt, and his jeans slip. He grabs ahold of the waistband and hikes them back into place. His eyes are fat.

  “I didn’t know the search party was headed out again today,” I say, feeling guilty that Bea and I weren’t here to help. Tomorrow I’m scheduled to work at the animal hospital, so I won’t be able to help then, either.

  “It wasn’t, not with these storms, but I couldn’t just sit around all day doing nothing,” he says.

  Bea asks Josh where he looked, and he rattles off a half dozen locations, mostly parks and other outdoorsy places that Meredith likes to take the kids, though with the weather as inclement as it is, there’s no chance they would have been at a park. “Stupid, right?” he asks.

  His dog, Wyatt, spent the day alone because Josh didn’t have the patience to take him, worried the dog would only slow him down. There are only so many places he could bring a dog. He tells us he needs to take Wyatt for a quick walk, and then go get Leo, who’s with the sitter. He’s overwhelmed. He’s strung out.

  “Have you told Leo anything about Meredith and Delilah?” I ask.

  Josh closes his eyes. He shakes his head vigorously. He looks at me. “I can’t. What would I even say?” he asks, venting about how it’s all so tiresome and incapacitating because he doesn’t want to walk the dog or get Leo; all he wants to do is be out there, searching for Meredith and Delilah. He hates being home, being idle. It feels shiftless. He should be pounding the pavement, looking for his family.

  “Leo is your family, Josh. He needs you as much as Meredith and Delilah do.”

  “Let me walk Wyatt,” Bea offers. “Kate and I will keep him while you go get Leo. Spend time with him. Talk to him. He’s a smart boy, an observant boy. Surely he realizes that Meredith and Delilah aren’t here. When is he ever without Delilah?” she asks. It’s conceivable that Meredith has been at work all this time—she’s had back-to-back births before—but other than the few hours Delilah is at school, she and Leo are never apart.

  Bea goes with Josh to retrieve Wyatt. I let myself into the house alone, slipping past the workers. They don’t stop what they’re doing, but I see their gazes fall to me out of the corners of their eyes. Their conversation—spoken in some other language that I don’t speak—goes on. I don’t know what they’re saying.

  I climb the stairs and move down the hall for the bedroom. It’s dark in the hall; the light from the windows doesn’t reach here. I lock the bedroom door, and then slide a chair in front of it for good measure. Ordinarily I wouldn’t ever shower with workers in the house, but I can’t bear to go another second without. In the bathroom, I undress. I hear the workers in our house. I hear their tools and their noise, rehabbing the second bath down the hall. With the other bathroom inoperative, this is the only one in use for now. It’s the one in Bea’s and my bedroom, which means that when we’re not home, the men are in here, doing their business. It’s no longer just mine and Bea’s because they leave the toilet seat up, our own towels tilted and wet.

  I stand in the shower, letting hot water wash away the memory of Dr. Feingold’s hands. I lather the soap onto a loofah and scour my body with it. I pile on shampoo and scrub at my scalp, though he didn’t touch my scalp, but as far as I’m concerned, his hands have been everywhere.

  By the time I come out of the bathroom and dress, the men are packing up their things and leaving. I watch through the slats in the blinds as they load their belongings into their trucks and drive slowly away.

  The earth outside is sopping wet. The puddles are profuse, not even puddles anymore but now flooding. The sky is darkening, though I don’t know if it’s due to the weather or because night will be here soon. It’s hard to say anymore. I can’t remember the last time we saw the sun. That alone would be depressing enough, but with what’s happened with Shelby, with Meredith and Delilah, things are dire.

 
; Bea and Wyatt are just back from their walk. I watch them out the window as they arrive home, coming up the path and to the front door. The door closes and Bea’s voice calls for me up the stairs.

  “Be right down,” I call as I run a comb through my wet hair. Back in the bathroom, I towel dry the ends of it and throw it into a messy bun. I gather the towels to wash, heading downstairs, watching where I step because our home is covered in rosin paper and plastic sheeting, and sometimes nails or debris get dropped. We have to clean up after the workers leave. Zeus is here somewhere, but wherever he is, he’s hiding. He doesn’t like having people in the house any more than I do.

  Bea changes out of her wet clothes and into something dry. She pours me a glass of wine and brings it to the sofa, where we sit with Wyatt at our feet. Dusk falls and the house turns dark. Bea and I make our way around, turning on lights. We reconvene on the sofa.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she says.

  I sip from my glass of wine. “About what?”

  “Just because Dr. Feingold is a creep,” she says, “doesn’t make him a murderer.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “What if he lied about knowing Meredith, not because he’s somehow involved in her disappearance, but because of the malpractice suit. Think about it, Kate. If he believed for a second that you were pregnant and in need of a doula, he wouldn’t want Meredith to scare you away. Meredith would have bad-mouthed him after what went down with that Tebow baby. It’s bad for business.”

  I consider what she’s said. “I guess you’re right,” I tell her, though this doesn’t make him any less culpable in my mind. He’s still on the suspect list, as far as I’m concerned.