“Hopefully soon,” I said. My phone buzzed on the coffee table and Chloe shrieked, “Your phone!” Before I could stop her, she’d jumped to get it.
“It’s okay,” I said, waving my hand, but she picked it up and handed it to me.
“It could be important,” she said, her face all serious, clearly imitating her father, who was a marketing executive and on call at all times.
“I doubt it,” I said. “There are no weekend emergencies in the life of a curator.” Sam and I exchanged a knowing smile. She was a librarian.
“Check it, check it,” Chloe insisted, and to humor her, I did. A text from Angie. All it said was OMG, have you seen this? followed by a web link. I silenced the phone and put it in my pocket. I could read it later.
“Nothing important, sweetheart,” I said, and leaned over to give her a kiss.
* * *
Half an hour later, I emerged from the subway to a dark sky and gusts of wind. I could smell the rain coming—that damp earthy scent. I picked up my pace, hoping to make it home before the storm. I was wearing my new sandals—an impulse purchase meant to brighten a particularly drab day a few weeks ago—and didn’t want to ruin them. Around me, people walked briskly, some already pulling their umbrellas out. Traffic crawled up and down Broadway, the usual Sunday late-afternoon rush. I was feeling crappy, my stomach queasy, my breasts swollen and sore, and was looking forward to a nap. There was nothing sweeter than an early-pregnancy nap.
I smiled hello at the used-books street vendor, who was putting away his folding tables. He shook his head in response and raised his eyes to the sky as if to say, You can’t fight Mother Nature.
Just before I turned onto my street, I saw a flyer affixed to the lamppost at the corner. A regular letter-size white sheet of paper—some writing on top, a color photo below it. The lower left corner flapped loose in the wind as I neared it.
I recognized her face before the words on top—in block red letters—came into focus: Missing Columbia Student.
My stomach turned. My ears started buzzing. I stood there, staring at the flyer, as the rain came down, big fat raindrops smacking the sidewalk, building up speed until it became a deluge and the windshield wipers of cars raged back and forth and my vision went black at the edges.
PART 2
THE WRONG GIRL TO TURN DOWN
15.
KATYA
THEN
“Remember the guy I told you about? The one without the T-shirts? I’ve started hooking up with him pretty regularly.”
Josh nodded, the suggestion of a smile making its way on his face. I knew he’d be happy to hear it. I was still feeling crappy for having hit on him the other week. We’d talked about it at length the next time. Therapist-patient boundaries, transference, father figure, and all that psychobabble. The truth was I felt so empty sometimes, so broken that I would get scared—like I-can’t-breathe scared—and grasp for anything. Guys were my drug of choice. I craved that warm, fuzzy feeling of a man wrapping his body around mine. Of being wanted, desired. It was proof that I was not as damaged as I feared. But like any drug, the effects didn’t last. I needed a new hit again and again. And, that day, after I’d opened up to Josh about my parents and gotten so dangerously close to telling him about Alex’s death, I’d felt particularly vulnerable. I hadn’t wanted just any guy. I’d wanted Josh to want me. Simple as that.
“His name’s Damian,” I said. “A hedge fund manager or something like that. He’s crazy busy, which works perfect for me.” Josh opened his mouth but I stopped him. “I know. No crazy in your office. Sorry. Anyway, Damian’s great. Strong, passionate as hell, yet detached and quite unpredictable. It’s almost like being with a new guy every time. He exhausts and distracts me. Still I can’t sleep.” I sighed. “If only I could quiet the chatter in my mind.”
Josh wanted to know what I thought about when I couldn’t sleep. Of course, he did.
“I don’t know,” I lied.
He raised an eyebrow.
I shrugged. “About how I fuck up everything, I guess. Like with Zoe, who—by the way—is no longer talking to me.”
“We all make mistakes,” he said, sounding a bit too patronizing, too impatient. “We all hurt people without meaning to.”
I felt the anger rising up my throat. “You don’t understand!” I blurted. “I’ve done some really awful things.”
“Awful like what?”
I stared at my Roman friend on the ceiling to steady myself. Josh had nearly tricked me into telling him.
“Go ahead,” he said. But the moment was gone. I was safe.
“You have no idea what it’s like to live your life fearing that . . .” Tears stung my eyes. I dug my nails into the flesh of my wrist, a trick I’d learned as a kid.
“Fearing what?” he asked.
“I’ve never told anyone.”
Josh waited. I dug in my nails harder.
“You won’t think I’m pathetic, will you?”
“Of course not,” he said, and held me in his gaze. I didn’t exactly believe him, but at this point I couldn’t care less what he thought of me.
“I fear that I’m marked,” I finally said. “That everything I touch turns to ashes and I can’t do anything to change that.”
Josh tilted his head questioningly.
“I was supposed to start fresh in America. I was going to reinvent myself,” I said, and released the tension on my wrist. “But it looks like I’m stuck with me, Katya the Horrible. It’s like a bodysuit I can’t wriggle out of. I fear that I’m . . .” I let the sentence hang unfinished and hid my face in my hands.
“You fear that . . .” he said, prompting me.
Barely audible, afraid that by saying it out loud I would make it true, I finally told him: “I fear that I’m unlovable.”
I started sobbing, hard and breathless, like a child. As if years of tears had accumulated inside me, building into enormous waves that crashed against my chest.
16.
LANA
NOW
The department buzzed with activity. Seemingly all assistants and research fellows were in today, poring over books and photocopies of drawings in the front room or staring at computer screens, typing up description data or other information on the Museum System database, sifting through online journals and publications, conducting research. My assistant, Caitlin, was at the desk right outside my office, working on the lending history reports for a couple of new acquisitions. A third-year PhD student at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, she came in four times a week. She was smart, pretty, and ambitious; a bit too pushy for my taste, but that made for a good assistant.
I was sitting at my desk with the shades half drawn. The light felt too bright today, too distracting, even offensive. I was supposed to be working on my presentation for the upcoming Visiting Committee meeting but had a hard time focusing. The purpose of these quarterly meetings was to update patrons on our work, upcoming shows, and new acquisitions. The next one was coming up in a week and our department, along with European Paintings, was to jointly introduce the Parmigianino show to a group of supporting trustees. I spread out my notes and started working on the outline. An hour later, all I had was a blank page but for the title, Parmigianino’s Drawings. How could I possibly concentrate when my mind was flooded with questions and worries about Katya?
I’d returned home in quite a state last night. After taking a hot, numbing shower, I’d finally looked at my phone, remembering it buzzing in my purse as I’d walked home in the rain. Angie had left me two voice mails and four more texts following the one I’d seen while at Sam’s. The last one read: Where the hell are you? She’d forwarded me the Columbia Daily Spectator’s missing-student article, which linked to a PDF of the notice I’d seen on Broadway and to a Facebook page, Finding Katya, that had been created. There was no additional information except that her
photo was also shared on social media under the hashtag #FindingKatya.
Anxious to find out more, I abandoned Parmigianino’s outline and googled Katya’s name. There was nothing new. I grabbed my phone and before I could change my mind, punched Tyler’s number. He picked up on the third ring. “Hi there. Good to hear from—”
“Is it true?” I interrupted him. I had no patience for pleasantries today. It was bad enough I was calling him.
“What?”
“About our donor.”
“What donor?”
“Christ, Tyler.” I took a deep breath. “Our egg donor. Remember?”
“Yeah?”
“She’s missing.”
“What do you mean missing? From the agency’s database?”
It occurred to me that Tyler, of course, didn’t even know Katya was still a student, let alone at his university. I sighed. It was time he found out. “Just google ‘missing Columbia student,’ then call me back. Okay?” I said, and hung up.
A shaft of light streamed through the window below the shades and pooled on my desk. Children’s voices drifted in from outside, playful shrieks and laughter, punctuating the hum of traffic on Fifth Avenue. Many student groups came to the museum in spring.
I pulled my chair forward and clicked on the Spectator’s link to the missing-student notice.
MISSING COLUMBIA STUDENT
The Department of Public Safety has been notified that Columbia University student Katya Dimitrova has not been in contact with family and friends for several days.
Ms. Dimitrova is 21 yrs/5’9”/115 lbs/green eyes/brown hair.
There is a coordinated effort to locate Ms. Dimitrova. If you know her whereabouts or have any information that will be helpful in locating her, please call immediately Public Safety at 212-854-5555 or the 26 Pct. Detective Squad at 212-678-1351.
As I read through it once more, I wondered what several days meant. Two? Five? The last I’d heard from Katya was on Saturday night, more than a week ago. Could she have been gone since then? A sinking feeling made its way into my stomach. I’d been bitching about her disappearing on me, calling her a flake, when I should have been worrying about her.
“Should I have done something?” I’d asked Angie when I’d finally called her back last night. “Gone to the police?”
“You barely knew her,” she’d said. “What were you going to report her for? Not getting back to you? If I ran to the police every time an editor ghosted me, they’d lock me up just so I’d stop bothering them.”
Angie had been right, of course. But still. I couldn’t help feeling guilty about it. I’d abandoned her in the club with some stranger.
My cell buzzed on my desk and I snatched it up anxiously.
“Just read the Spectator article,” Tyler said. “It’s her, all right.”
“Didn’t you get any information from the university? A briefing or something? I was hoping you’d have an update.”
“Haven’t looked at my e-mail today but I’ll check.”
It was just like Tyler to ignore his e-mail for hours. He’d never bothered joining Facebook or any other social media and would often leave his phone at home when he went out for the day. I used to joke with him about it, finding it endearing or infuriating depending on the situation. But now that we weren’t together, I couldn’t even get upset with him.
“Do you think something bad happened to her?” I asked.
“I’m sure she’s fine. She couldn’t deal with the finals and took off. Or something like that.” He spoke with such conviction that I already felt some of the weight lifting, my shoulders relaxing. I’d always envied Tyler’s optimism, his ability to trust that things would work out. It had kindled my courage and faith through endless disappointments and heartbreaks. With a pang, I realized how much I missed it. I began crying. Out of nowhere. Loud embarrassing sobs.
“Are you okay? Do you want me to come over?”
“No.” I snapped out of it. Damn pregnancy hormones. I’d been so weepy lately, I cried at the smallest provocation, even watching comedies. It was like having PMS on steroids.
“Are you sure? You seem distressed.” He sounded genuinely concerned, which upset me even more.
“Since when do you care?” I said, wiping my tears with my sleeve.
“That’s not fair.”
“You wouldn’t have left me for another woman if—”
“For God’s sake, Lana! I didn’t leave you for another woman. Let me come see you and we can talk—”
“I don’t want to talk about it, Tyler. I only called you because I was worried sick about our donor.”
“Why? I mean, of course, hopefully nothing happened to her. But no need to get worked up about it.” He cleared his throat. “It’s not like we know her. Besides, I’m sure she just got overwhelmed with the stress of finals. Like that other girl who went missing for a week. Remember? A few years ago?”
I’d forgotten all about it. We were in the midst of our first in vitro at the time and after the initial celebration of a positive result, the doctor had explained that my hormone levels were low and he was worried it could be a chemical pregnancy. We had to wait two more days to test again and make sure the numbers doubled. But they hadn’t. Nor had they gone down as they should have if it were just a chemical pregnancy. So then the doctors tossed in another scary term—ectopic pregnancy, which meant that the embryo had taken hold not in the uterus but in one of the fallopian tubes. After numerous blood tests and sonograms to confirm it, I’d had an injection to terminate the pregnancy before it ruptured my tube and put my life in danger.
I’d spent those two weeks in a daze. I’d only found out that there’d been a missing student after she’d turned up. I remembered Tyler complaining about how stupid and immature she’d been to have everyone worried, wasting the police’s time and resources.
“No need to panic,” he continued, “just because some girl you don’t really know wants a fresh start.”
He was making a huge assumption—two, actually—and I certainly didn’t want him to find out how wrong he was about me not knowing Katya, so I let it go. “Can you get more info?”
He sighed. “How?” I could tell he was growing impatient with me.
“I don’t know. You’re a professor there. The police must be keeping the administration in the loop. Ask around. I’m sure people are talking.”
“Lana, I cannot get involved in this,” he said sharply.
I pulled the phone away from my ear as if it had zapped me. What was I doing? If I pushed him too hard, he might get suspicious. If he hadn’t already.
“What I mean is,” he continued in a softer voice, “in light of the connection you and I have to her, we can’t ask questions about her. It might be seen as stalking—”
“I know. I know,” I said, and laughed nervously. “My outsized curiosity again.”
Tyler and I had a running joke about it. He claimed it was one of the things he’d loved about me from the start. “That’s what makes one a philosopher,” he’d told me. “Asking questions. People think it’s about the answers, but you can’t have answers without questions.”
“You and your outsized curiosity,” he repeated fondly. The familiarity of his teasing felt like an embrace.
I didn’t just miss Tyler. I missed us, I thought as I put the phone down. The playful dynamic we’d had, the feeling of togetherness, of being part of a team.
* * *
By the afternoon, the New York Post Metro section had picked up Katya’s story with the additional information that she was a foreign student from Bulgaria. “To miss her finals just short of graduation makes no sense,” a classmate of hers was quoted saying. But, again, there was nothing indicating when she’d gone missing. The thought that I could be the one to have seen her last that night at the club kep
t nagging me.
On the way back from work, I decided to skip the crosstown bus and walk through Central Park before getting on the subway. It was a breezy day and I hoped the fresh air would help clear my mind, ease my fears. We were barely a month away from the summer solstice and the sun didn’t set until past eight. Now that I was newly single, my evenings had grown longer, leaving me with a lot of free time. And that was the last thing I needed right now. When you’re waiting to get past a certain hurdle—like the three-month mark in pregnancy—time slows to a snail’s pace. Each morning I woke up excited to mark one more day on the calendar and each evening I dreaded the long night ahead, terrified that I would wake up again in a pool of blood. I was still spotting a bit but my ultrasound wasn’t until Wednesday. One day and two nights more to go before I’d have some news of how things were going.
The Great Lawn was crawling with people having picnics, throwing balls, or chasing Frisbees; a team of students was playing baseball in the far corner. I sat down on a bench across from the lake with the turtles, overlooking the Delacorte Theater and Belvedere Castle on the hill above it. Tyler and I used to spend the evenings cooking, eating, drinking wine, and talking. Since I was on my own, I’d lost all desire to cook, so I either prepared something fast and easy, like pasta, or ordered in. I ate while watching a film or reading a book, my iPad propped up next to my placemat. Tonight, between Katya’s disappearance and my upsetting conversation with Tyler, I was particularly loath to walk into the empty apartment. The pregnancy hormones surely magnified my emotions, but knowing that didn’t make me feel any better.
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