by Joy Fielding
“Nothing. I just asked him a few questions.”
“What sort of questions?”
“I just asked him … if there was anything he thought I should know.”
“About what?”
“About Julia.”
“About Julia? Why would you ask him about her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why does everything always have to be about Julia?” Heather demanded suddenly. “I am so sick and tired of everything always being about Julia. This isn’t about her. It’s about me. Heather. Your other daughter. Remember me?”
“Heather, please. Your sister is missing.…”
“Julia’s not missing.”
“What?”
Heather looked toward the ground.
“What are you talking about? Are you saying you know where she is?”
“No.”
“What are you saying?”
Heather reluctantly met her mother’s gaze. “I didn’t think she was serious. I didn’t think she’d actually do it.”
“What are you saying?” Cindy repeated, her voice a low growl. “Tell me.”
“The whole thing is just so stupid,” Heather began. “Julia was mad at Duncan because he wouldn’t give her a lift. She was calling him names, accusing him of being selfish and ungrateful. She said if he was going to live here free of charge, the least he could do was make himself useful. He told her he wasn’t her chauffeur; she told him to get the hell out of the house. I told her to get the hell out, that everyone was sick and tired of her stupid tantrums, and she said she couldn’t wait to get out, that she hated me, that I was ‘the bane of her existence.’ And then she said that maybe she wouldn’t wait until she’d saved up enough money to get her own place, maybe she’d move out right away. Today, she said. Maybe she wouldn’t even bother coming home after her audition.”
The words pounded against Cindy’s consciousness like a boxer’s fists. “What?”
“I didn’t think she really meant it.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“When? When the police were here? You got so angry when Fiona suggested Julia might want some time to herself. You said she was trying to sabotage the investigation. I didn’t want … I mean, just in case … I didn’t know …”
Cindy fought to make sense of her daughter’s words. Was it possible Julia had simply taken off in a fit of pique? That she could be so vengeful, so thoughtless, so cruel? That she could disappear as a way of making a point?
No. It wasn’t possible. No matter how angry Julia was at her sister, no matter how selfish and self-absorbed she might be, she would never put her family through this kind of prolonged torture. She might have stayed away a few hours to teach her sister a lesson, possibly even overnight. But not this long. Not this long. “No,” Cindy said out loud. “Julia would never pull a stunt like this. She knows how worried we’d all be.”
“Mom, wake up,” Heather said forcefully. “The only person Julia has ever worried about is Julia. She …”
Whatever else Heather was about to say was lost as the palm of Cindy’s hand came crashing down against the side of her daughter’s face. Heather gasped, fell back, staggered to the ground.
“Oh, my baby, I’m so sorry,” Cindy cried immediately, reaching for her daughter in the darkness, the sliver of moon spotlighting the trickle of blood slowly spreading across Heather’s mouth like lipstick carelessly applied.
Heather recoiled from her mother’s touch. “No, you’re not.” She pushed herself to her feet and ran up the back steps to the patio. “Face it, Mom,” she said, clinging to the sliding glass door, “the only thing you’re sorry about is that I’m standing here and Julia isn’t.” The simple sentence tumbled down the steps, then ricocheted off the damp grass to hit Cindy right between the eyes.
Cindy stood at the bottom of the outside steps, too weak to move, too numb to fall. This must be what it feels like to be shot, she thought, as Heather disappeared inside the house. The moment right before you collapse.
Cindy looked up at the moon’s thin arc, searching for stars in the cloud-carpeted sky. But if there were stars, they were hiding, she thought, her eyes drifting toward the house next door.
Faith was at her bedroom window, staring down at her. It was too dark to read the expression on her face.
NINETEEN
THE phone rang at seven o’clock the next morning, abruptly pulling Cindy out of a boxing ring in the middle of a close match with a faceless opponent. Blood seeped from her bandaged fingers as she stretched her hand toward the phone, the dream receding as she opened her eyes, disappearing altogether at the sound of her voice. “Hello,” she said, trying to sound as if she’d been up for hours, and not, as was the case, as if she’d just fallen asleep.
“Cindy Carver?”
Cindy pushed herself into a sitting position as Elvis adjusted his position at her feet. “Who is this?”
“It’s Elizabeth Kapiza from the National Post. First, let me say how very sorry I am about your daughter.”
“What’s happened?” Cindy grabbed for the remote control and turned on the television, rapidly flipping through the channels, her heart pounding wildly against her chest, as if trying to escape before the dreadful news descended.
“Nothing,” Elizabeth Kapiza assured her quickly. “There’s nothing new.”
Cindy fell back against her pillows, fighting the urge to throw up, her forehead clammy and bathed in sweat.
“I don’t know if you’re familiar with my work,” Elizabeth Kapiza was saying.
Cindy pictured the thirty-five-year-old woman with the pixie haircut and gold loop earrings that were her trademark smiling at her from the side of newspaper boxes across the city. “I know who you are.” Everyone knew Elizabeth Kapiza, Cindy thought, even if they didn’t read her columns. Her increasingly high profile was the result of a canny mixture of talent and self-promotion, achieved by carefully injecting herself into the middle of every tragedy she covered, be it a local case of child abuse or a case of international terrorism. In theory, she wrote human interest stories. In actual fact, she wrote about herself.
“I was wondering if I could come by and talk to you.”
“It’s seven o’clock in the morning,” Cindy reminded her, glancing at the clock.
“Whenever it’s convenient for you.”
“What is it you want to talk about?”
“About Julia, of course,” Elizabeth answered, the name sliding easily off her tongue, as if she’d known Julia all her life. “And you.”
“Me?”
“What you’re going through.”
“You have no idea what I’m going through.” Cindy brushed an unwanted tear away from her cheek, felt another one rush to take its place.
“That’s what I need you to tell me,” the woman urged gently.
Cindy shook her head, as if Elizabeth Kapiza could see her. “I don’t think so.”
“Please,” the reporter said softly. “I can help you.”
“By exploiting my daughter?”
“Cindy,” Elizabeth Kapiza said, the name wrapping itself around Cindy’s shoulder like a lover’s arm, “the more publicity there is in cases like this, the more chance there is of a happy ending.”
A happy ending, Cindy repeated silently. How long had it been since she’d believed in happy endings? “I’m sorry. I don’t think there’s anything I can tell you that would help.”
“You’re her mother,” Elizabeth said simply.
“Yes,” Cindy agreed, unable to find the strength to say more.
“Would you at least think about it, and call me if you change your mind?” Elizabeth Kapiza relayed her office telephone number, her home number, and the number of her cell phone, then repeated them all again as Cindy obligingly scribbled them across the bottom of a Kleenex box, although she had no intention of calling the woman back.
She barely had one foot out of bed when the phone rang again. This time
it was a reporter from the Globe and Mail, calling for a quote. Cindy mumbled something about just wanting her daughter back home safe and sound, then mumbled roughly the same sentiments to the reporters from the Star and the Sun, both of whom phoned just after she’d emerged from the shower. How long has your daughter been acting? they asked. What are some of her credits?
Cindy combed her wet hair away from her face, then pulled on a pair of blue jeans and a white T-shirt, and went downstairs, Elvis running along ahead of her, impatiently pacing back and forth in front of the door as she opened it.
Julia’s face stared up at her from the front pages of both the Globe and the Star. ACTRESS, 21, MISSING 6 DAYS, read the copy beneath the familiar black-and-white photograph. From the kitchen, the phone started ringing. Cindy ignored it as she walked into the room, and spread the papers across the table.
Police are investigating the disappearance of beautiful aspiring actress, Julia Carver, 21, missing since last Thursday. Ms. Carver, daughter of prominent entertainment lawyer Tom Carver, vanished without a trace after a meeting with renowned Hollywood director Michael Kinsolving.
Cindy read the paragraph once, then read it again out loud as the phone continued its stubborn ringing.
“ ‘Police are investigating the disappearance of beautiful aspiring actress, Julia Carver, 21, missing since last Thursday. Ms. Carver, daughter of prominent entertainment lawyer Tom Carver.…’ ”
Cindy smiled, pushing the Globe out of the way, and reaching for the Star. The phone stopped ringing, started up again almost immediately.
ACTRESS GOES MISSING AFTER AUDITION WITH HOLLYWOOD DIRECTOR, read the caption underneath Julia’s picture. Julia Carver, 21, the beautiful actress-daughter of entertainment lawyer Tom Carver, has been missing from her Toronto home since Thursday, August 29.
“No,” Cindy said, reading it again, and then again.
Beautiful actress-daughter of entertainment lawyer Tom Carver.
Daughter of prominent entertainment lawyer Tom Carver.
As if Julia has only one parent, Cindy thought, a feeling of outrage growing inside her stomach, like a malignant tumor. When had she become nonexistent? When had she ceased to matter? It was almost as if, like her daughter, Cindy Carver had suddenly and without notice vanished from the face of the earth. The newspapers, with a couple of careless phrases, had erased her from the landscape, swept her from her daughter’s life.
Once again, Tom had stolen Julia from her. This time, without even trying.
The press had made it official: Julia was Tom Carver’s daughter.
Her mother was nowhere in sight.
The phone stopped ringing.
“I don’t exist,” Cindy told Elvis, whose response was to lift his leg and pee against the side of her chair. Cindy stared at her daughter’s scruffy terrier, torn between crying and laughing out loud. “It’s okay,” she said, grabbing some paper towels from the counter and soaking up the mess, quietly accepting the blame for the dog’s errant behavior. It was her fault, after all. She should have taken him out. Everything was her fault. She was as lousy a mother to Elvis as she’d been to Julia. “Julia Carver,” she whispered, staring at her daughter’s picture on the front pages of the papers, “daughter of Cindy. Daughter of Cindy, damn it.” And I will not be brushed aside again, she added silently. I will not just disappear.
I don’t think there’s anything I can tell you that would help, she’d told Elizabeth Kapiza.
You’re her mother.
“Yes, I am,” Cindy said, pushing herself to her feet and walking to the phone, quickly punching in the last of the numbers she’d scribbled on the bottom of the Kleenex box earlier, and had no trouble recalling now. “Elizabeth Kapiza?” she asked the woman who answered on the first ring, as if she’d been waiting for Cindy to call. “This is Cindy Carver.”
“When can I see you?” the reporter asked.
“How’s nine o’clock?”
BY EIGHT-THIRTY, Cindy had changed her clothes three times and was on her fourth cup of coffee.
“You look nice,” her mother told her, coming into the kitchen, neatly dressed in varying shades of blue. “Is that a new blouse?”
Cindy smoothed the front of a pink silk shirt she’d bought on impulse at Andrew’s the previous summer, but had never worn because it wasn’t really her. Was it her now that she was no longer a person of substance? she wondered, securing the button at the top. “You want some breakfast?”
“Coffee’s fine for now,” her mother said, helping herself. “Who’s been phoning so early in the morning?”
“Who hasn’t?”
Her mother shrugged. “I take it nothing’s new.”
Cindy pushed the morning papers toward her. “See for yourself.”
Norma Appleton scanned the front pages of both papers. “Oh, my,” she said, sinking into one of the kitchen chairs.
“Elizabeth Kapiza’s coming to the house in half an hour to interview me.”
“You think that’s wise?”
“I phoned the police,” Cindy told her mother. “They said they don’t have a problem with it as long as I don’t talk about the investigation. They said it might even help.”
Her mother sipped her coffee slowly, ran shaking fingers along her granddaughter’s grainy cheek. “Where’s Heather off to so early?”
Cindy regarded her mother quizzically. What was she talking about?
“Where’s Heather going?” Norma Appleton asked again.
“I don’t understand.”
It was her mother’s turn to look confused. “When I got up, she was packing.”
“Packing? What are you talking about?” Cindy ran into the front hall just as Heather appeared at the top of the stairs, an overnight bag in her hands. “What are you doing?”
“I thought I’d stay over at Daddy’s for a few days,” Heather said, proceeding slowly down the steps, dropping the black leather overnight bag to the floor as she reached the bottom. “Hi, Grandma.” She waved to the woman watching from the kitchen doorway.
“Hi, sweetheart.”
“Why are you doing this?” Cindy asked.
“What’s going on?” Norma Appleton’s eyes darted back and forth between her daughter and her grandchild.
“Things are pretty intense around here. I thought Mom could use a little space,” Heather explained. “And it’s been a while since I spent any serious time at Dad’s. It’s just for a few days,” she said again.
“Heather, please, if this is about last night.…”
“What happened last night?” her mother asked.
“I’ve already called Dad,” Heather said. “He’s picking me up in a few minutes.”
“You know how sorry I am. You know I didn’t mean to slap you.”
“You slapped her?” her mother said.
“It’s not that,” Heather said.
“Then why are you going?”
Heather hesitated, her eyes filling with tears. “I just think it’ll be better for everyone if we take a small break.”
Cindy shook her head. “Not for me.”
Heather hesitated, her body swaying toward her mother. “I’ve already called Dad.”
“Call him back.”
The doorbell rang.
“Please, darling,” Cindy continued, following Heather to the front door. “Tell him you changed your mind. He’ll understand.”
Heather took a deep breath, opened the door.
“I take it you’ve seen the morning papers,” Leigh said, her hair a war zone of conflicting curls. She dropped a small suitcase to the floor at Heather’s feet.
“What’s this?” Cindy eyed the beat-up, brown leather suitcase suspiciously.
“I’ve been calling you for over an hour. Either the phone is busy or nobody answers. I finally got fed up and told Warren that’s it. I can’t stand not knowing what’s going on. He’ll have to manage without me for a while. I’m moving in with you guys until we know what’s what.”
“No,” Cindy said quickly. Then, “That’s really not necessary.”
“Heather and Duncan can sleep downstairs. I’m sure they won’t mind. My back’s too fragile for sofa beds.”
“Actually, I’ll be staying at my father’s for a few days.”
“Well, then, that worked out perfectly, didn’t it?” Leigh said.
“No,” Cindy protested again, as outside a car horn honked twice.
“That’ll be Dad.” Heather glanced out the open door as Tom’s dark green Jaguar pulled into view.
“Please, Heather,” Cindy tried one last time.
“Don’t worry, Mom. It’ll be okay. I’ll call you later.” Heather’s lips brushed against her mother’s cheek. Then she ran down the front steps, throwing her overnight bag into the backseat of her father’s car, and climbing into the front seat beside him.
(Flashback: Julia carries her new Louis Vuitton luggage to Tom’s waiting BMW, waits while he puts it inside the trunk, then slides into the front seat next to him.)
Cindy watched as Tom’s car pulled away from the curb.
She was still standing at the front door staring down the empty street when Elizabeth Kapiza showed up at precisely nine o’clock, tape recorder in hand, photographer in tow.
THE NATIONAL POST
Thursday, September 5, 2002
A Mother’s Anguish
BY ELIZABETH KAPIZA
TORONTO, SEPTEMBER 5—She sits in the living room of her spacious, art-filled home in midtown Toronto, a woman whose pale face is ravaged by uncertainty and fear. Tears are never far from her expressive blue eyes; they stain the front of her stylish, pink silk blouse. “I’m sorry,” she apologizes repeatedly, twisting an already shredded tissue in her lap. She offers me coffee and a bagel, inquires after my health, asks if I’m comfortable. A typical mother, I find myself thinking. Except sadly, Cindy Carver is anything but typical.
Because Cindy Carver is the mother of Julia Carver, the stunning twenty-one-year-old actress who went missing a week ago, and whose father is well-known entertainment lawyer Tom Carver, from whom Cindy has been divorced for seven years. Cindy smiles at the mention of her ex-husband’s name, and it is obvious that whatever their past differences, their daughter’s disappearance has brought them closer together.