by Noah Hawley
Maggie liked her, because spending time with Frankie made her feel young, something that being with David in his world—populated entirely by people like David, in their forties, and some even in their fifties and sixties—did not. Maggie had just turned twenty-nine. She and Frankie were seven years apart. The only difference between them, really, was that Maggie had married a millionaire.
“You got lucky,” Frankie used to tell her.
“He’s nice,” Maggie would say.
“So even luckier,” Frankie would say and smile. Among her friends there was a lot of talk about landing a rich man. They used to put on short skirts and tall boots and go to bottle-service clubs, hoping to land a Wall Street up-and-comer with a full head of hair and a dick of steel. But Frankie wasn’t really like that. She had a softer edge, having been raised with goats and chickens. Maggie never worried that Frankie was out to steal her husband away. It would be absurd, after all, to trade in your twenty-nine-year-old trophy wife for a twenty-two-year-old, like a cliché on steroids. And yet, she supposed, stranger things had happened.
Just a few years earlier she had been the one paid to teach other people’s children. A twenty-two-year-old preschool teacher, living in Brooklyn. She rode her bike over the Brooklyn Bridge every morning, using hand signals like she was supposed to. The foot traffic on the bridge was minimal at that hour. Joggers mostly. A few health-conscious commuters brown-bagging their way across the river. She wore a lemon-yellow helmet, her long brown hair fluttering behind her like a cape. She didn’t wear headphones or sunglasses. She braked for squirrels, stopping mid-span to take in the view and have some water. In the city she took Chambers to Hudson and rode north, checking behind her every minute or so for taxi drivers on cell phones or slicksters in German automobiles who’d stopped looking at the road.
She got to work every morning by six thirty. She liked to straighten up before the kids arrived, to restock supplies. The schoolhouse was small, just a few rooms in an old brick building next to a parking lot that had been turned into a playground. It was on a tree-lined street in a part of the West Village that had an almost old London feel. Sidewalks curved like crooked fingers. On Facebook she once posted that she liked this part of the city best, its timeless, genteel nature. The rest of the city felt too cold to her; wide avenues of windy business towers, like gleaming bank machines of human resource.
The first student usually arrived at eight, strolling or shuffling or scootering, hand in hand with Daddy or Momma, sometimes still half asleep, lying in a futuristic Maclaren or Stokke supercarriage. Little Penelope or Daniel or Eloise, shoes so small they could fit on a doll, tiny short-sleeved shirts with checks or stripes like one day they would grow up to be wealthy nerds, just like Daddy. Four-year-old girls in eighty-dollar dresses with one pigtail or flowers in their hair picked from a pot outside a brownstone by a harried parent on the way to school.
Maggie was always there to greet them, standing in the asphalt playground, smiling with sunny exuberance as soon as they appeared, like a dog who jumps to its feet at the sound of a key in the front door.
Good morning, Miss Maggie, they cried.
Good morning, Dieter; good morning, Justin; good morning, Sadie.
She gave them a hug or mussed their hair, then said good morning to Mommy or Daddy, who often grunted their replies, having started texting the moment their kid’s feet touched school property. They were lawyers and advertising executives, magazine editors and architects. The men were forty or older (the oldest father in her class was sixty-three). The women ranged from late-twenties supermodels with children named Raisin or Mudge to harried working moms in their thirties who had given up on finding a living, breathing husband and convinced a gay friend to come in a cup in exchange for six weekends a year at the summer house in the Catskills and the honorary title of “uncle.”
She was a patient teacher, sometimes inhumanly so, warm and thoughtful, but firm when necessary. In their evaluations, some parents wrote that they wished they could be more like her, a twenty-two-year-old girl who always had a smile and a kind word, even to a screaming child who had just screwed their nap.
Maggie usually left the school around four, walking her mahogany-colored bike to the curb before snapping her chin strap and lurching into traffic. In the afternoons she liked to ride over to the river and take the bike path south. She stopped sometimes to sit on a bench by the water and watch boat traffic, the helmet forgotten atop her head. She would close her eyes every time the wind blew. On days when the temperature was over ninety she might buy a shaved ice from a Mexican man with a cart—usually cherry—and sit in the grass eating it with the flat thumbnail of a tiny spoon. On those days she would take off her helmet and lay it on the grass like a lemon drop. She’d relax on her back in the cool green and stare at the clouds for a long time, flexing her toes on the lawn, before reaffixing her helmet and starting the long ride home, her lips stained the color of childhood.
How distant it seemed to her now, just seven years later, the unemployed mother of a toddler or, more precisely, the pampered wife of a millionaire.
As soon as they arrived at the house, she and David would go to the market and stock up on supplies, while Frankie stayed home with Rachel. Montauk at this point wasn’t the brand-name scene of the Hamptons, but you could feel it creeping in. The local general store now sold specialty butters and artisanal jams. The old hardware store stocked heirloom linens and had been remodeled in distressed white bead board.
From a roadside stand they bought tomatoes, fat and cracked, and went home and sliced them thick and ate them with sea salt and olive oil. There was no such thing as hardship anymore, certainly nothing more than a fleeting inconvenience, and yet when she reflected on it late at night Maggie was amazed by how her sense of life’s difficulties ebbed and adapted to fit her new circumstances. Whereas, before David, she would have to bike home in the rain some days through gridlock traffic and scour her apartment for pennies to do laundry (and even that couldn’t truly be considered hardship in a world where children went to bed hungry), now she found herself exasperated by foolish things—misplacing the keys to her Lexus, or being told by the clerk at D’Agostino that he didn’t have change for a hundred. When she realized this, how soft she was becoming, how privileged, Maggie felt a wave of self-loathing. They should give all their money away, she told David, raise their kids hand-to-mouth with the proper values.
“I want to go back to work,” she’d say.
“Okay.”
“No. I mean it. I can’t just sit around all day. I’m a worker. I’m used to working.”
“You’re taking care of Rachel. You tell me all the time how much work that is.”
She would twist the phone cord between her fingers, keeping her voice down so as not to wake the baby.
“It is. I know. And I just can’t—I’m not going to have my daughter raised by nannies.”
“I know. We both feel that way, which is why it’s so magical that you can—”
“I just—I don’t feel like myself anymore.”
“That’s a normal postpartum—”
“Don’t do that. Don’t make it about my body, like I can’t control myself.”
Silence from the other end. She couldn’t tell if he was being taciturn or writing an email.
“I still don’t understand why you can’t take more time,” she said. “We’re only up here a month.”
“I hear you. It’s frustrating for me too, but we’re in the middle of a big expansion on a corporate level—”
“Never mind,” she said, not wanting to hear the details of his job. It’s not like he enjoyed her war stories—the woman who cut ahead of them at the supermarket, the playground soap operas.
“Okay. I’m just saying—I’m going to try to make it out Thursday night at least twice.”
Now it was she who was silent. Upstairs Rachel was asleep in her crib. Maggie could hear sounds from the other side of the kitchen that made her think
Frankie was changing over the laundry. On the edge of things was the sound of the ocean, that tectonic drum, the heartbeat of the earth. At night she slept like the dead because of it, some core genetic pulse once again in phase with the rhythm of the sea.
It was late the following week that Frankie disappeared. She had gone into town to see a movie at the little old art house theater. She was meant to be home by eleven and Maggie didn’t wait up. It was her night with Rachel—rising at her earliest cries and soothing her back to sleep—and her instinct on those nights was always to front-load her sleep, so as soon as the sun went down (sometimes before) her head would be down on the pillow, her tired eyes perpetually reading and rereading the same short pages of her book, without ever making it past the second chapter.
In the morning when she rose with Rachel (who had come to bed with her just after midnight) and Frankie wasn’t up, Maggie thought it was a little strange, but the girl was young and maybe she met someone at the movie or went for a drink after at the old sailor pub on the way home. It wasn’t until eleven when she knocked on Frankie’s door—they’d agreed that Maggie would have the day to herself—and then opened it and found the bed empty and unused, that Maggie began to worry.
She called David at the office.
“What do you mean she’s gone?” he said.
“Just, I don’t know where she is. She didn’t come home and she’s not answering her phone.”
“Did she leave a note?”
“Where would she leave a note? I checked her room and the kitchen. She went to a movie. I called her cell, but she’s not—”
“Okay, let me—I’ll make a few calls, check to see if she came back to the city—remember she was having troubles with that boy—Troy something—and if I don’t turn up anything or she’s still not back, I’ll call the local police.”
“Is that—I don’t want to overreact.”
“Well, we’re either worried or we’re not. You tell me.”
There was a long pause, while Maggie thought it through—during which time she also made a snack for Rachel who was biting at her ankles.
“Babe?”
“Yeah,” she said, “it’s weird. You should call.”
Three hours later, she was sitting across from the local sheriff, Jim Peabody, whose face looked like the last piece of jerky in the jar.
“Maybe I’m just being silly,” she said, “but she’s usually so responsible.”
“Don’t do that to yourself, Mrs. Bateman. Take your power away. You know this girl and you had an instinct. You gotta trust that.”
“Thank you. I—thank you.”
Jim turned to his deputy—female, heavyset, about thirty.
“We’ll visit the theater, talk to Sam, see if he remembers her. Grace’ll go by the pub. Maybe she stopped in there. You said your husband was calling her people?”
“Yes. He phoned some friends and some of her family—nobody’s heard from her.”
Rachel was coloring—mostly on the paper—at a small round kid’s table Maggie had picked up at a flea market, the kind that came with two adorable little folding chairs. Maggie was amazed the girl hadn’t bothered them once during the entire visit, as if she understood the importance of what was happening. But then she had always been a sensitive and serious child, so much so that Maggie sometimes worried she was depressed. She’d read an article about it in the Times—children with depression—and now it hung in the back of her mind, a Big Idea that could tie all the little ideas together—the poor sleeping, the shyness—or maybe she was just allergic to wheat.
This is what motherhood was, one fear eclipsed by another.
“She’s not depressed,” David would say. “She’s just focused.”
But he was a boy, and a Republican to boot. What did he know about the intricacies of female psychology?
When there was still no word by sundown, David put the rest of the week’s activities on hold and drove out. In the minutes after he arrived, Maggie felt like a balloon deflating: The strong business-as-usual facade she had put on disappeared. She poured herself (and him) a stiff drink.
“Rachel asleep?” he asked.
“Yes. I put her in her room. Do you think that’s a mistake? Should I have put her in ours?”
He shrugged. It made no real-world difference, he thought. It was just an issue in his wife’s head.
“I called the sheriff on the way in,” he told her when they were sitting in the living room. The ocean roared in through the screens, invisible in the black night air. “He said she definitely went to the movie. People remembered her—a pretty girl dressed like the city—but nothing from the bar. So whatever happened, it happened on her way home.”
“I mean, what could have happened?”
He shrugged, sipped his drink.
“They checked the local hospitals.”
Halfway through her drink, Maggie grimaced.
“Shit. I should have done that. Why didn’t I—”
“It’s not your job. You were busy with Rachel. But they checked the hospitals and no one fitting her description came in last night. No Jane Does or anything.”
“David, is she dead? Like lying in a ditch or something?”
“No. I don’t think so. I mean, the longer this goes the less positive I’m gonna spin it, but right now it could just be—I don’t know—a bender.”
But they both knew Frankie wasn’t the bender type.
That night Maggie slept fitfully. She had a dream that the Montauk Monster had come to life and was slithering out of the lagoon and across the road, moving inevitably toward their house, leaving a slug trail of gore behind. She stirred and rolled, imagining it surging up the siding to the second-floor window—Rachel’s window. Had she left the window open? It was a warm night, stuffy. She usually closed it, but this time—given her absent brain, her distraction over Frankie—had she left it open?
Maggie woke with her feet already on the floor, a mother’s panic moving her down the short hall to her daughter’s room. The first thing that struck her was that the door was closed. Maggie knew she hadn’t closed it. In fact, she always put a doorstop in front of it to keep it from closing in the wind. She hit the door almost at a run, and the knob wouldn’t turn. Her shoulder hit the door hard, making a loud bang.
Behind her she heard David stir, but from inside the room she heard nothing. She tried the knob again. It was locked.
“David!” she yelled, then again, her voice taking on a tinge of hysteria.
Then he was behind her, moving fast but still sluggish, some part of his sleeping brain left behind.
“It’s locked,” she said.
“Move,” he told her.
She did, flattening herself against the wall to let him get in there. He grabbed the knob in his big hand and tried to turn it.
“Why isn’t she crying?” Maggie heard herself say. “She must be awake. I must have woken her up. Banging.”
He tried the knob again, then gave up, put his shoulder into it. Once, twice, three times. The door stretched the jamb but didn’t open.
“Motherfucker,” he said, now fully awake, taken by fear. Why wasn’t his daughter crying? Instead, all that came under the door was the surge of the ocean.
He stepped back and kicked the door hard, reaching down for some primal Neanderthal strength. The jamb shattered this time, one of the hinges popping, the door flying open and bending backward, like a boxer who’s been gut-punched.
Maggie pushed past him into the room and screamed.
The window was wide open.
The crib was empty.
* * *
Maggie stood staring at it for a long time, as if the sight of an empty crib was a surreal impossibility. David ran to the window and looked out, first one way, then another. Then he was out of the room past her. She heard his feet thundering down the stairs, then heard the front door slam and heard his feet running through first grass, then sand, then gravel, as he made his way to the road.
“Yes,” he said. “This is life or death. I don’t care what it costs.”
A pause as he listened.
“Okay. We’ll be up.”
He hung up, eyes locked on some point in the middle distance.
“David?” she said.
“They’re sending someone.”
“Who?”
“The company.”
“What do you mean someone? Did you call the cops?”
He shook his head.
“This is my daughter. They took my daughter. We’re not using public servants.”
“What are you talking about? Who took her? She’s missing. They need to—we need to have someone, a lot of someones, out there looking for her right now.”
He stood and started turning on lights, going room to room, making the house look awake. She followed.
“David?”
But he was lost in thought, some kind of masculine scheme playing out in his head. She turned and grabbed the car keys off the hook.
“Well, I can’t just sit here.”
He caught up to her at the door, grabbed her wrist.
“It’s not—” he said, “she didn’t wander off. She’s two. Someone climbed up to her window and took her. Why? For money.”
“No.”
“But first,” he said, “first they took Frankie.”
She leaned against the wall, her head spinning.
“What are you—”
He put his hands on her, not in a rough way, but firmly, to let her know she was still connected to the earth, to him.