by Joy Fielding
“My pleasure.” Cindy led Faith into the kitchen, motioned toward the four pine chairs at the rectangular pine table. Faith sank into the closest one, stared at Cindy expectantly. “Regular or herbal?” Cindy asked as Elvis spread himself across the top of Faith’s feet.
Faith said nothing, and for a moment, Cindy wondered if she’d understood the question. She was about to ask it again when Faith finally answered. “Herbal,” she said, her sudden smile at odds with the sadness in her eyes.
“Ginger peach or spearmint?”
“Spearmint.” Faith laughed, a delicate tinkle that danced in the air like wind chimes.
Cindy filled the kettle with water, turned on the burner, turned back to Faith, thinking that the young woman looked much older than her years, closer to forty than thirty, Cindy thought, noting the dark circles rimming Faith’s eyes, the sallowness of her complexion. “Did you get any sleep at all last night?”
Faith nodded. “A bit.”
“It’s not easy being a new mother.” Cindy pictured Julia as a baby. “It’s not easy being a mother, period,” she added, picturing her now.
“Seems easy enough for most people.”
“Don’t kid yourself.”
“Your girls are so beautiful. They’ve turned out so well.”
“Thank you.” Cindy crossed her fingers, said a silent prayer.
“Did you worry about them a lot when they were babies?”
“Of course.”
“I worry about Kyle all the time.”
“That’s perfectly normal.”
“I worry about everything,” Faith continued as if Cindy hadn’t spoken. “His safety, his health, whether he’ll be happy when he grows up.”
“I don’t think you ever really stop worrying about those things.” Again Cindy thought of Julia.
“I mean, look at what’s going on in the world today. Terrorists, suicide bombers, AIDS, poverty, child abuse …”
“Faith,” Cindy advised gently, interrupting the seamless flow of catastrophes, “you’ll make yourself nuts if you worry about all those things.”
“How can you not worry? All you have to do is pick up the morning paper.”
“Don’t pick it up.”
“You have to know what’s happening. You can’t just bury your head in the sand.”
“Why can’t you?”
“Because things won’t get any better that way.”
“And you think worrying yourself sick is going to make things better?”
“No, but you should be aware.”
“You can be aware again when Kyle starts sleeping through the night.”
“It just doesn’t seem right to bring a child into a world where so many bad things are happening, where there are so many evil people.”
“There are good people too,” Cindy said, trying to reassure them both.
“I try to be a good person.”
“You are a good person.”
Faith grimaced, as if she’d had a sudden spasm. “I’m not a very good mother.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Kyle cries all the time.”
“He has colic. It has nothing to do with you.”
“I try to comfort him. I feed him. I hold him. I even sing to him. But he still cries.”
“Julia was the same when she was a baby. The only one who could get her to stop crying was Tom.”
“Tom’s your ex-husband?”
“Yes.”
“Was that him before? With the redhead?”
“That was him.”
“Is she his new girlfriend?”
“Wife.”
“I think Ryan has a girlfiriend,” Faith said matter-of-factly as the kettle began whistling.
“No,” Cindy started, then stopped. How would she know whether or not Ryan had a girlfriend? “What makes you say that?” she asked, busying herself with making the tea.
“I can see it in his eyes.”
“What do you see?”
“It’s more what I don’t see.”
Cindy understood without asking exactly what Faith meant. She’d seen the same lack of substance in Tom’s eyes before he walked out, as if he were already gone. Still she said, “He’s probably just tired.”
“No. It’s more than that. Less,” she corrected. “I don’t think he loves me anymore.”
“I’m sure Ryan loves you, Faith.” Cindy pictured Ryan’s troubled face as he sat on his front steps, Elvis’s head in his lap. The subtle scent of spearmint filled the air as Cindy deposited the steaming mug of herbal tea on the table in front of Faith. “He’s just worried about you, that’s all.”
“Worry isn’t love.” Faith lifted the mug to her lips, quickly laid it back down. “It’s hot.”
“Better give it a few minutes to cool off.”
“My grandmother used to say that.” Faith smiled at the memory. “ ‘Give it a few minutes to cool off,’ ” she repeated in a voice not her own. “She died last year. Cancer.”
“I’m sorry.”
“She’d had this really hard life. Her oldest son committed suicide, you know.”
“How awful.”
“Yeah. My uncle Barry. He was schizophrenic. I don’t really remember him. He died when I was still a kid. He hanged himself in the bathroom. My grandmother found him.” Faith raised the mug to her lips a second time, breathed in the aromatic steam still rising from its surface. “Suicide kind of runs in my family.”
“What?” Cindy recalled Detective Bartolli’s questions about her daughter’s recent state of mind. Has she been depressed lately? How upset was she about the breakup with her boyfriend?
“I had a great-aunt who threw herself off a tall building,” Faith was saying, “and two cousins who slashed their wrists. And my mom took too many pills once, but then she called all the neighbors and told them what she’d done, so they rushed her to the hospital and she had to have her stomach pumped.”
“That’s terrible.” Cindy gingerly sipped at her tea, not quite sure what to say next. “You would never …”
Julia would never …
“What? Oh. Oh no! No, of course not. I would never do anything like that.”
“Because things are never as black as they seem,” Cindy said earnestly, the cliché filling her mouth like a wad of cottonballs. “Things always get better.” Unless they get worse, she added silently.
“I don’t have the courage to kill myself,” Faith was saying.
“You think it’s a question of courage?”
Has she been depressed lately?
“I know some people consider suicide the coward’s way out, but I never thought of it that way. I mean, to do something as drastic as taking your own life, I think that requires tremendous guts. More guts than I have, that’s for sure.”
“Good.” Cindy suppressed a shudder as she settled into the chair across from Faith, vaguely recalling an article she’d read about the ripple effect of suicide, how the suicide of one family member often served to validate another’s, that such action came to be seen as an acceptable alternative, a viable option for solving one’s problems. She shook her head. The women in her family might be emotional, headstrong, and impulsive, but they were definitely not suicidal. And they were far too interested in having the last word to take themselves out of the argument early. “Because you have everything to live for,” Cindy heard herself continue. “I mean, it’s hard now. You’re going through a very difficult time. You’re exhausted. Your hormones are raging. But it’ll get better. Trust me. A year from now, you’ll feel so much better about everything.”
“Do you think Ryan will leave me?”
“Ryan’s not going anywhere, Faith.”
“He says he wants three more children.”
“What do you want?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about your job?”
“I’m on maternity leave till the new year. But I don’t think I should go back.”
“Why not? I thought you loved teaching.”
“How can I possibly handle twenty-five kids when I can’t take care of one?”
Cindy watched ominous clouds gather in Faith’s eyes as she sipped steadily at her tea. “Well, you don’t have to make any major decisions right now.”
“I guess that’s right.”
“You have plenty of time.”
Faith’s eyes filled with tears. “Ryan’s so busy these days. I hardly see him anymore.” She lifted her shoulders to her ears in a prolonged shrug. “When he first started working at Granger, McAllister, it was just this tiny firm. Now there are seven architects, secretaries, assistants, so many people, and they’re busy all the time. He’s always having to rush off somewhere. This tea is really good,” she said, finishing what remained in her mug.
“Would you like some more?”
“Oh no, thank you. I should be getting home. I promised Ryan I’d try to straighten things up a bit. He says the house is a pigsty.”
“Why don’t you take a nap first?” Cindy suggested, hearing a car pull into the driveway. Julia! she thought, running to the door, opening it in time to see a cab backing into the street and her mother walking up the front steps as Elvis ran down to greet her.
“What’s the matter?” her mother said, ignoring the dog. “And don’t tell me nothing. I can see it in your face. Who’s this?” Cindy followed her mother’s eyes to the woman standing behind her.
“Mom, this is Faith Sellick, my neighbor. Faith, this is my mother.”
“Pleased to meet you.” Faith stepped outside, shielding her eyes from the sun. “Thanks again for the tea.”
“You don’t have to leave on my account,” Cindy’s mother said.
“No, I have to go. I have so much to do.”
“First, you have to take a nap.”
“Right.” Faith ambled down the steps.
“There’s something not quite right about that one,” her mother remarked as soon as Faith was out of earshot.
“She’s the one I was talking about yesterday. With the postpartum depression.”
Her mother nodded. “So, are you going to invite me in, tell me what Tom was doing here?”
Cindy led her mother into the kitchen, motioned toward the recently vacated chair. “I think you better sit down.”
ELEVEN
AT exactly 2:29 A.M. Cindy bolted upright in her bed and cried, “Oh no, I forgot!” She jumped out of bed and rushed into the bathroom, Elvis jumping excitedly into the air beside her, as if this were some great new game they were playing. Almost tripping over him as she lunged toward the medicine cabinet, Cindy tried to focus on the assorted bottles of headache remedies, half-empty boxes of Band-Aids, partially squeezed tubes of ointments, abandoned spools of dental floss, and discarded brands of hair gel that met her half-closed eyes. The detritus of everyday life, she thought, reaching into the cabinet, hoping she wasn’t too late. The doctor had warned her that if she didn’t take her pills at the same time every day, she would die. How long ago was that? Weeks, months, years? How long had it been since she’d last remembered to take her pills? Oh no. Oh no.
“What the hell am I doing?” Cindy suddenly asked herself, coming wide awake and staring at her reflection, regarding the woman in the glass as if she were some alien being. “What is the matter with you? What pills?”
Slowly, Cindy took stock of the situation, her panic gradually subsiding, her heartbeat returning to normal. She was standing naked in her bathroom in the middle of the night searching for pills that didn’t exist on the advice of a doctor who also didn’t exist. Obviously she’d been having another nightmare, although she couldn’t remember a single detail. “It’s that damn herbal tea,” she told the woman in the glass. “That stuff’ll kill you.”
Her reflection nodded.
Cindy watched the woman run a tired hand through her lifeless hair, her eyes filling with tears. “Would somebody please just shoot me now. Put me out of my misery.”
In response, her reflection dropped her chin toward her chest, the silence buzzing around their respective heads like determined mosquitoes.
“You’ve got to get some sleep,” Cindy muttered on her way back to bed, but even as she was climbing back under the covers, she knew sleep was lost to her, that the hours between now and seven o’clock would be spent in restless tossing and turning, that if she slept at all, it would be in fits and starts, and that she would wake up feeling even less refreshed and more tired than before. She closed her eyes, trying not to picture her daughter hog-tied and bleeding on the dirt floor of some abandoned shack in the middle of nowhere. “Please, no,” she whispered into the pillow, feeling it wet against her skin. “Please let Julia be all right. Please let this whole thing be nothing but a bad dream.” A terribly long, bad dream, Cindy thought, flipping onto her other side, hearing Elvis groan beside her, knowing that this nightmare was horribly real, and that if her daughter didn’t come home soon, she would most assuredly die, as the imaginary doctor of her dreams had warned.
“Oh God.” Cindy sat up only to flop back down. She rolled onto her other side, sat up, turned on the light, reached for the paperback novel on the nightstand beside her bed, and glared at the phone. Undoubtedly Tom and the Cookie were having no such trouble sleeping. She pictured the cottage on Lake Joseph, the large, rustic bedroom she’d once shared with Tom, the long, side window open to allow the cool Muskoka breezes entry. The image of her former husband in bed with his young wife pasted itself across the pages of her book. Cindy brushed it aside with a disdainful swipe of her hand, accidentally ripping off the top corner of the page. She read, then reread the first few paragraphs of the chapter before tossing the novel to the foot of the bed in defeat. How could she read when she couldn’t concentrate? “Where are you, Julia?”
Had she really considered her parents’ elopement so romantic? Was it possible she might have pulled the same stunt herself? With whom?
Just come home, Cindy prayed. Please. Come home.
When she comes home, Cindy vowed silently, I’m going to buy her those brown suede boots she was admiring in David’s, the ones I told her were way too expensive.
When she comes home, I’m going to take her to her favorite sushi restaurant for dinner. And lunch. And even breakfast, if that’s what she wants.
When she comes home, I won’t yell or complain or get on her case about inconsequentials. I’ll be more understanding of her problems, less judgmental, more patient, less critical. I’ll be the perfect mother, the perfect friend. Our lives will be perfect when she comes home.
When she comes home, Cindy repeated hopefully in her head, as she’d been repeating for so much of Julia’s life.
She’d already lost her daughter once. She wasn’t about to lose her again.
Cindy pushed herself out of bed, slipped a pink cotton nightshirt over her head, and tiptoed down the hall to Julia’s room, Elvis at her heels. She stood in the doorway, and peered toward Julia’s bed.
“Is someone there?” a voice asked, cutting through the darkness like a laser.
Cindy gasped as a figure sat up in the bed, reaching for the lamp on the night table just as Cindy flipped on the overhead light. “Julia!” she cried, arms extending into the room, then dropping heavily to her sides, her feet coming to an abrupt halt, as if she’d just waded into cement.
“Sweetheart,” her mother said softly, getting out of Julia’s bed and walking slowly toward her. “Are you all right?”
Cindy shook her head, dislodging a steady flow of tears. “I’m sorry. I forgot you were here.” Her mother had insisted on spending the night after Cindy confided that Julia was missing. “Did I wake you up?”
Her mother led her to the side of Julia’s bed, sat down next to her. “Not really. I heard some kind of noise a few minutes ago. I thought it might be Julia coming home.”
“That was probably me. I woke up in a sweat because I’d forgotten to take my pills.”
“What pi
lls?”
“There are no pills.” Cindy raised her hands helplessly in the air. “I must be losing my mind.”
Her mother laughed.
“Something funny about that?”
Norma Appleton took Cindy’s hands in hers. “Only that I remember going through a very similar experience years ago, constantly waking up in the middle of the night, convinced I’d forgotten something terribly important. I think it has to do with menopause.”
“Menopause? I’m not in menopause.”
“Close.”
“No way. I’m only forty-two.”
“All right, dear.”
“That’s all I need to worry about right now.”
“You’re missing the point here, darling.”
“The point being?”
“The point being that I think this is pretty common in women of a certain age.”
“Mother.…”
“I used to call it the OFIFs.”
“The what?”
“The OFIFs—‘Oh, fuck—I forgot!’ ”
“Excuse me?”
“What—you think you’re the only one who knows words like that? Close your mouth, dear. A bug will fly in.”
Cindy stared at her mother in disbelief. So that’s where I get it, she thought.
Here comes the mouth, Tom used to say at the start of any argument. You and that mouth, he used to say.
Sorry for the language, she’d apologized to Neil earlier.
What language? he’d asked.
“What are you thinking?” her mother asked now.
“What?”
“You’re smiling.”
“I am?” God, her mother didn’t miss a thing. “Must be gas.”
“She’ll come home,” her mother said, her eyes on the distant past, her voice heavy with experience. “You’ll see. Tomorrow morning she’ll come waltzing through the front door as if nothing’s happened, amazed at all the fuss, angry you were worried, furious you called the police.”
A flush of shame bowed Cindy’s head. “I put you through hell when I ran off with Tom,” she acknowledged.
“You were young and in love,” her mother said generously.
“I was willful and self-absorbed.”
“That too.”
Cindy shook her head. “What was I thinking?”