by Jean Stone
“She’s not home yet,” he said. “I assumed you’d told her and she’s angry and decided to stay with one of her friends.”
Why did he assume that Riley would be angry? What if, unlike him, Riley understood? She stopped poking at the green leaves. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Riley’s not home yet?”
“No.”
“She hasn’t called?”
He puffed his cheeks, then pushed out a whoosh of air. “It’s worse,” he said. “I think some of her things are gone.”
Hannah steadied herself on the makeshift shelving. She stared in disbelief. “What?”
Evan unlocked his arms. His hands fell to his sides. He tipped his head up to the ceiling and silently closed his eyes.
Hannah took a step back. “What are you saying?”
He looked tired, gray, and older, as if he were the one who was undergoing chemo. “I guess we need to call her friends,” he said. “She must be with one of them.”
Hannah kept staring at him. Then she sort of laughed. “Oh, Evan, stop overreacting. This is simple teenage rebellion. Riley hates me because I have cancer, that’s all. She thinks if she asserts her independence everything will be all right.” As she said it, Hannah tried hard to believe it.
“No,” Evan said, “there’s more.”
Whether from instinct or experience, Hannah had a sudden urge to press her palms against her ears and block out the words that he’d say next. Whatever they were going to be, the words would not be good.
“Her clothes are gone,” he said, and she knew that she’d been right, she did not want to hear this, not now, not ever. “Donna Langforth stopped by tonight and asked if Riley was sick, because she didn’t go to school today.”
And Hannah did exactly as she wanted. She threw her palms against her ears and ran out of the greenhouse, the plastic-covered door slapping shut behind her.
She ran upstairs because she did not know where else to go. She ran upstairs and wanted to close her bedroom door and rip off her hideous wig and climb under her covers and never leave her bed. She wanted to do those things and yet, in order to get there, Hannah had to pass by Riley’s bedroom.
Which, of course, she could not do. She could not pass by without going inside. Without seeing for herself that Riley’s things were gone.
Her cropped tees: gone.
Her hip-huggers: gone.
Her favorite clogs: gone, too.
Worst of all, her backpack with her favorite CDs—Britney, *NSYNC, and, yes, Katie Gillette—gone.
Hannah leaned against the white bureau that she and Mother Jackson had stenciled with bunnies and baby lambs right after Riley was born. Three or four times she’d asked Riley if she wanted the bureau changed: Her daughter had said no; she liked it as it was.
She hadn’t taken the bureau, of course, but it seemed she’d taken everything else that mattered, at least to her.
• • •
The last time Rita had driven to Joe Geissel’s house in West Chop truly had been the last of many times, when she’d gone practically with hat in hand because she’d learned that, on top of everything, she owed the IRS twenty grand. She had not told Joe, of course, because Rita Blair was far too proud. Instead, she’d tried to make him list his summer house with her so the commission would bail her out.
When he’d not agreed she’d gone after his wife.
The next day he’d shown up on her doorstep, spewing obscenities at her like, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” when he’d known what she’d been doing all along.
“I thought you wanted to sell your house,” Rita had maintained.
“I hadn’t planned on getting a divorce in the process,” the angry, red-faced man replied.
“You should have thought of that before you slept with me.”
He had steadied his eyes on her and said he should have been more careful in his choice of partners. Then the zinger came when Joe added, “I thought I could trust you.”
With all the men who had come and gone from her lonely, lonely life, Rita had never done anything to warrant anyone’s mistrust. With those words that Joe sputtered, she’d realized just how low she’d gone, just how scared she had become.
And now, in the darkness, she was headed along Beach Road, straight toward Joe Geissel’s house again, this time not for heated sex, but for a confrontation with his wife … because Rita knew if she was ever going to sleep again, she needed to clear this matter up. She could not have Katie or Hannah or the whole damn island of women yet to come, miss out on the Women’s Center because she’d been so stupid long ago.
Rita only hoped that Faye was home and that she was not too late for amends.
Katie wondered if she’d ever see her father again, and if she did, what she would say.
You destroyed our family, then you said it was my mother’s fault.
You paid people to be nice to me so I’d do everything you said.
My whole career is a joke.
I hate you for what you’ve done.
But did she really hate him?
She sat in the living room at the piano, looking over Joleen’s songs, plunking out a note, a chord or two. Joleen had gone to bed; Katie had tried that, too, but a nagging ache inside her stomach kept her from falling asleep. Perhaps she’d had too much herbal tea at the meeting, perhaps the baby was feeling the same angst that Katie was, a gnawing loneliness that she’d been lied to by so many she had trusted, except, of course, Joleen, who’d simply never told her about Cliff and Ina, who’d never warned her to watch out for herself.
Her eyes moved from the keyboard to the telephone that sat on the table by the sofa. What was her father doing now, with his lover buried in the ground? What about Miguel? Had he run back to his daughter’s mother and begged for her forgiveness?
She plunked another chord. Tears ran down her cheeks.
Closing the lid of the piano, Katie rested her forehead on the top. She wondered what would happen to her father if she never sang again.
A small cramp gripped her stomach. Katie hugged it tightly and looked at the phone again. He’d been a good and decent father who had worked hard for her career, who protected her from others by paying Miguel to love her.
She supposed it wasn’t criminal.
It was, however, painful, like the pain she felt right now that did not leave her stomach.
Then a long cramp squeezed her gut. She stood up quickly; and an odd warmth oozed between her legs. A whimper cried from deep inside her. She did not have to check to know the warmth was wet and it was blood.
“I know it’s late, but I need to speak with Lindsay,” Hannah said into the phone.
Lindsay Jordan’s mother—a woman Hannah barely knew—said she was sorry, but Lindsay was asleep. She asked if she could help.
Hannah wound the cord around her fingers. The Jordans’ house was the eleventh that she’d called and there was the remotest possibility that Riley had gone there, because they lived out in Aquinnah where Riley rarely went, simply because it was too far.
“My daughter, Riley,” Hannah said, her voice slipping into a cracking, garbled sound. She lowered her head. She could not stand to hear one more person—one more mother or one more father—say “Sorry, I haven’t seen Riley today.” Hannah shook her head and said, “Never mind, Mrs. Jordan. I’m sorry to have bothered you.” She reached across the round, maple kitchen table and hung the receiver up on the wall.
“That’s it,” she said to Evan, who sat across from her, his face as pale as hers, his body now as ravaged with dis–ease as Hannah’s was with cancer. He turned back to the papers and notes and the phone book that lay open on the table. He flipped the pages, searching for another schoolmate’s name, another number, another address of someone who might know.
“Forget it, Evan. We’ve been through everyone. Everyone who might know where she’s gone.”
“No,” he insisted. “We must have missed someone …”
“She didn’t sh
ow up at school today. No one except Carlie Daggett has seen her since school on Friday. And Carlie saw her leave the library Saturday afternoon. She came home after that, remember?”
Evan nodded, though Hannah would have bet that he did not remember. Details such as that seemed unimportant at the time, when you had no idea you’d be called upon to remember each iota of every minute and each coming and going of every child at a later time.
“She isn’t hurt,” Evan said. “You don’t think she’s hurt?”
“She ran away, Evan. She’s fourteen and she’s confused right now. I will not believe that she’s been … hurt. She ran away, that’s all.” That’s all. As if it weren’t the big deal that it was, as if it was as harmless as going to the beach to look for wampum or to dig for clams.
“We need to call the police,” Hannah said the words that she’d been trying to avoid.
Evan moved his eyes away from her. “I guess,” he said.
They sat there for another moment, as if neither wanted to be the one to do the deed, to make the act official that Riley, indeed, was gone.
Rita was dead asleep when the telephone rang. She woke up with her heart hammering in her throat, with the dreaded fear that something bad had happened—Charlie!—to someone she loved.
She raced into the hall, because she’d never had an extension put in her bedroom. She collided with Mindy who rounded the opposite corner simultaneously. Their eyes flashed at each other; they reached for the receiver. Rita got there first.
“Rita?” a breathless voice, a woman’s voice, quickly asked.
It could not be about Charlie. Please, God, don’t let it be about Charlie …
“Yes?”
“Rita, it’s Joleen.”
Joleen. It was not about Charlie. The hammering inside her eased a tiny bit. She ran her hand through her mass of hair, then put her arm around Mindy’s small shoulders and held the child close to her.
“Joleen,” she said, “is something wrong?”
“It’s the baby. Katie’s baby.”
“Oh, no,” Rita moaned, loosening her hold on Mindy.
“I’ve brought her to the hospital. The doctor isn’t here yet. She’s bleeding, Rita. I’m sorry to bother you, but Katie’s really scared.”
“Of course she is.”
“Can you come over? I tried calling the woman, Hannah, but her line’s been busy. And I get nothing but an answering machine on the other woman’s line.”
The other woman, Rita thought and could not bring herself to think of the irony in that. Yes, Rita knew that Faye was not at home. Returned to Boston, Rita had deduced a short while ago when she’d found the house locked up and dark, when her plan to apologize had been thwarted because the other woman wasn’t home.
She blinked her selfish thoughts away. “I’ll be there,” she said. “Give me ten or fifteen minutes.” Quickly she hung up the phone. She took Mindy by the shoulders and looked squarely in the girl’s eyes. “I have to go out for a little while. Will you keep an eye on Hazel and the twins?”
Mindy looked at Rita with those knowing eyes. “What happened to Katie?”
Rita brushed back a lock of hair from the worried scowl on Mindy’s face. “I can’t say anything, honey, you know that. But I’m sure she’ll be all right.”
“What about the baby? Is it about the baby?”
Rita kissed Mindy on the cheek. “Please, honey,” she said. “I’ll tell you everything I can when I come home.”
TWENTY-ONE
“We’ve called her closest friends and even some who aren’t,” Hannah explained to Sheriff Talbott, who had come with Officers Harrington and Solitario because the Vineyard made the safety of its children a top priority. At first they’d sat in the living room, but then moved to the kitchen because that was where the phone was and because it was more comfortable there.
Hannah poured coffee for the men and sliced a cranberry-orange bread, not that anyone would eat it. She sat down next to Evan, who had barely said a word except to shoo Casey and Denise back to bed. Hannah would have bet, however, that the two younger kids were sitting on the stairs, straining to hear the grown-ups’ conversation. It was a trick they’d learned from Riley several years ago.
Riley, the smartest of their children, the most clever, the most difficult to raise.
Riley, with the black, Mexican hair.
“We’ll need a list of names,” Hugh Talbott said, “and addresses if you have them.”
“You won’t go to the houses tonight will you?” Hannah asked. “It’s so late …”
“Your daughter’s missing, ma’am,” Officer Harrington added. “Time can be important.”
Hannah looked away from him. She picked up a slice of bread and put it on a napkin. She wondered if she felt worse now than when Doc Hastings said that she had cancer, and decided that she did. Faye had said cancer paled compared to losing a child. Hannah wanted to scream.
“This is a difficult question,” Hugh asked quietly, “but have you noticed a change in Riley’s mood lately? Any behavior differences?”
Hannah stared down at the slice of bread, at its chunks of nuts and berries, the things that, before the cancer and the chemo, had always tasted so good; morsels of calories and fat that had helped stuff down her feelings and help dam up the hurt.
“Our daughter is fourteen, Sheriff,” she said. “Her mood changes from day to day. But lately, yes, she’s been more quiet than usual. And more rebellious, too, if that makes any sense.”
Hugh nodded as if it made sense to him.
He thinks she’s taking drugs, Hannah deduced. She sighed. She pushed the napkin away. “It’s not what you think,” she said. She told him about her breast cancer and about the loss of Mother Jackson. “When I say I’m not going to die, Riley does not believe me. She’s been very angry at me for getting sick.” Now that Hannah had said it out loud, it made total sense. But Hugh and the policemen just looked at her as if she were dreaming.
They asked a few more questions, drank their coffee, then said they’d do their best to find her.
Then Hannah went to bed, but not to sleep. Evan said he’d be in the greenhouse if any word came through.
• • •
Rita wondered if she held the record for the person who’d spent more off-hours in the hospital than anyone else on the island, except the nurses and the orderlies who worked the oddball shifts. She walked into the emergency room, hating the familiar smell, hating that she knew exactly where to go.
The receptionist—Diane Leyfred, a woman Rita had known for many years and never liked—would not let Rita see Katie until she went down to the “very private” room and checked it with Joleen.
“Regulations,” Diane said. “We used to only have to worry about the media in these situations. Now there are other concerns. You understand.”
Not exactly, Rita thought, but knew that now was not the time to challenge anyone.
Diane took her sweet time.
“… Excessive trauma to the baby …” Rita clearly heard the familiar voice of Doc Hastings’ say when she finally was granted clearance into the designated “very private” room.
Not that anyone, including Rita, would have recognized the superstar. Katie was huddled under the sheet, her frightened eyes peering out just above the hemline, her hair tied back from her pale face. Joleen didn’t look a whole lot healthier.
All eyes turned toward Rita. “Evening, Doc,” she said. It was the first time that she’d seen him since he caught her in his files, the naughty child who’d been scolded by someone else’s parent. “Katie,” she said and went to the side of the bed. “How’re you doing?”
Katie’s small hand escaped from beneath the sheet and reached out to Rita’s.
“She’s had a scare,” Doc said, “but I think she can go home in a few days. We’re going to do some tests and an ultrasound. My guess is that the stress that Katie’s been under may have been the cause. In any event, the crisis seems to have passed w
ithout harm to the baby. We’ll know more in the morning when the ultrasonographer is here.”
Rita did not ask if an ultrasonographer would be available around the clock if—when—the island had the Women’s Center.
Katie’s eyes filled with tears. “I probably have to stay in bed for the rest of my pregnancy.”
Doc smiled. “It’s not so long,” he said. “A few more weeks.”
Rita squeezed Katie’s hand. It was damp and cool. “I’ll have to dig into my bag of goodies and see what I can find to keep you occupied.” She turned to Joleen. “Any chance we can have our meetings at your house?” From the corner of Rita’s eye, she detected an approving nod from Doc. Perhaps she’d just atoned for her office break-in sin.
“I’ll even bring refreshments,” Rita added, because she was on a roll. Maybe Hazel could help her bake them. Or Mindy. Yes, Mindy would love to do something for Katie Gillette.
“Of course,” Joleen replied, the recluse opening her home for her daughter’s sake. “I’ll fix a bed up in the sunroom. Then Katie won’t be stuck upstairs.”
Rita smiled at Katie. “Can you be counted on to stay in bed for weeks?”
“Maybe fewer than we thought,” Doc said.
Fewer?
Though none of them said anything, fewer weeks could mean much more: less chance of complications; an earlier chance for radiation; and, of course, there was the billboard in Times Square that read: JULY 4TH, CENTRAL PARK.
• • •
Just before noon, Hannah took a shower. Casey and Denise were still in bed, as she’d suspected they’d stayed up late listening on the stairs until Hugh Talbott and his officers had left. Hannah said she didn’t want the kids to go to school on such little sleep. The truth was, she was terrified to let them from her sight.
In the shower, she soaped up her bald head as if it still bore hair, a small, but significant gesture that she made daily for herself. The hair will grow back, the gesture said. The hair will grow back and you’ll be well again, not that it mattered now.