Strings Attached

by Joanne Lipman

  Eight hundred miles away, Ed is performing Beethoven, too. For him, the timpani part to the Missa Solemnis is no match for the distraction of worrying about Steph. Minutes after completing one of the worst performances of his career, he jumps into the car and heads for Steph’s apartment outside of Rochester, New York, driving through the night.

  The next day, I get on a plane—abandoning my job—to join him.

  “Stephanie! Stephanie!”

  A little girl with her nose in a book almost bumps into me as her mother tries to get her attention. For a moment, I think that the voice in my head has become real. It’s the first time I have noticed my surroundings in twenty-four hours.

  The woman grabs her daughter by the hem of her shirt. “Watch where you’re going!” she admonishes the child.

  I have somehow gotten myself to the Rochester airport. Before I leave my house, I tape a note to Stephanie on the front door. It’s a slim hope, that she might just turn up on my doorstep, but that is all I have right now. As the plane is landing in Rochester, my head is pressed against the window, my eyes scouring the landscape. I wish I could swoop down and fly over every inch of the earth until I find her. Lack of sleep combined with an icy-cold fear deep in my chest gives the world around me a surreal, dreamlike quality.

  Ken’s brother-in-law meets me at the airport with Ed.

  “I found Stephanie’s car,” he blurts out.

  “Where?”

  “The airport, long-term parking,” he replies. “The police aren’t really taking this seriously. They keep saying that she probably had a fight with her boyfriend or something and just ran off.”

  He drives us to Steph’s apartment. Inside, the kitchen countertops overflow with heaping platters of food—casseroles, breads, salads—dropped off by anxious friends and neighbors. Just like at a funeral. I shake off the thought. The food is untouched; no one can think of eating.

  The rest of Ken’s family is there, too, turning out en masse to help. As the hours ticked by with no word from Stephanie, they had begun their own search of the area. After the car was found, they asked the police to check whether Steph had taken an unscheduled plane trip. The absurdity of the situation crashes over me, and I feel hysterical laughter rising in my throat, while Ken’s family looks on, perplexed.

  “If she did drive to the airport, it would have been for the first time!”

  Steph, like me, inherited our dad’s awful sense of direction. My dad wouldn’t let her get her driver’s license at first, he was so worried about her. After he relented, she routinely got lost going to even the most familiar places in our hometown. “I doubt that she could even find the airport. She always takes a cab!” I say. The idea of her arranging a secret trip and driving her car to the airport is ludicrous.

  The police had searched the car, too, of course. “My heart almost exploded when they opened the trunk, I was so afraid she would be inside,” Ken’s brother-in-law admits.

  Thank God she wasn’t. But where is she?

  As the hours wear on, and then days, I bury myself in the details of the search. Horrible, graphic images keep working their way into my mind, threatening to consume me. What if someone is holding her in a cellar somewhere, even as I sit here at her kitchen table? What if she is lying in a ditch, bleeding, on the side of a road? My imagination tortures me, playing one more unspeakable image after the next vividly in front of me. When my eyes are open, the awful images play out like a sick horror-movie reel on an endless loop. When my eyes are closed, they’re worse.

  Every time those images work themselves into my mind, I try to discipline myself, to push them away. The police have told us that the odds are that Steph ran away. She had been prescribed Prozac for depression during a long, lonely winter on Martha’s Vineyard and had stopped the medication once she moved to Greece. Maybe she is depressed again, the police say, or maybe she had a fight with her boyfriend and bolted. That’s what happens in most of these missing persons cases. I know that isn’t the case with Steph. But I have to be strong; I won’t allow myself to ponder the alternatives.

  My dad, still in New Jersey, is engaged in the same struggle against his thoughts. The night before she disappeared, at 10:30 P.M., the last call Stephanie made was to him.

  My father can’t forgive himself for not answering the phone that night. He was just finishing up teaching his last student of the evening, and he let the answering machine pick up. By the time he noticed the message light flashing, he figured that Steph was in bed.

  Now I call my father several times a day to update him. He stays in New Jersey, hoping that somehow she might find her way to him. He tries with no success to get the Federal Bureau of Investigation interested. With what little savings he has, he hires a private detective.

  My mom, confined in her hospital room, feels even more helpless. She is convinced Steph has been kidnapped and is being held against her will somewhere. She refuses to contemplate any other scenario. One day she receives several hang-up calls in a row and insists that they are “clues” from Stephanie.

  At Steph’s apartment, Ed and I go through her garbage, laundry, clothes, shoes, and cosmetics. With Ken’s family, we search her bills and schedules. We hunt for her purse and checkbook, both of which are missing. I even go through her violin case, looking for evidence.

  Ed and I drive around aimlessly, looking for we know not what, and walk through wooded areas calling her name. Thrashing our way through the undergrowth near her apartment complex, desperately calling out, “Stephanie! Stephanie!” Ed breaks down and weeps.

  In Rochester, we speak to police, detectives, reporters, and psychics. We trace every lead. When someone calls to say something pink is lying in the median on the highway, we race over immediately. It turns out to be a shower curtain. Friends and local volunteers go out searching with dogs and on horseback. We go to church and pray and pray.

  We meet with the police and the private detective on a daily basis. We retrace Steph’s steps from the last day, and speak to the health club staff and the mechanic who serviced her car. We speak to her neighbors, her students and their parents, her ex-boyfriends and former teachers, and call hospitals and police stations across New York State. We print up flyers to distribute all over town. We go to bars frequented by local lowlifes to eavesdrop. We speak at length with her landlord, who had received a note from Stephanie on the day that she disappeared saying there was a leak in her bathroom.

  I’ve always taken strength from my dad. Now, I try to be strong for him. Everything he has tried to teach me—about discipline and focus and persistence—suddenly becomes useful and urgent in a way that, in my worst nightmare, I could never have imagined. Since I was a little girl, I’ve had this feeling that infinity exists, that there is always something more you can do. It’s true for practicing the violin. I pray it is true as we search for Stephanie.

  When the police ask for Steph’s passport, I call my dad. He has been holding on to it for safekeeping after a trip he and Steph had taken the previous month to his native Ukraine. His beloved country has finally gained its independence. Traveling back there for the first time since he was a young boy, and bringing Steph to experience it with him, had been one of the greatest joys of his life. They brought along an extra suitcase full of toddler clothes and medicine donated by a doctor who was one of his former violin students. My dad had never forgotten the Russian music teacher with the ill child whom he had met during the Chicago Symphony’s Soviet tour. With the help of that medicine, the child will grow up healthy.

  My dad is at work when I call. He is running his summer ASTA program, now held at Glassboro State College, more than an hour from home.

  “The police need Steph’s passport. Can you get it?”

  “I’m een the middle of the conference. Can’t eet wait?”

  I explode. I can’t understand how he can work at a time like this. “Daddy! I cannot believe you’re hesitating. How can the conference be more important than your own daughter?”
I accuse him of not taking this seriously, of not caring enough about Stephanie.

  There is a long silence on the other end of the line.

  Oh my God! What have I done?

  “Daddy? Daddy! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it! I know you love her, too. I’m just so scared… What if she’s being held prisoner, or lying hurt somewhere…” I break down, sobbing into the phone, unable to finish my sentence.

  “Melanie. Stop! Pull yourself together. Do not allow yourself to imagine the worst,” he orders me. “I haf a job to do here. But I weel get the passport.”

  As I hang up the phone, it occurs to me that my dad is coping with Steph’s disappearance in the same way I am. At his music conference, surrounded by his closest friends and colleagues, most of whom have known Steph since she was born, he doesn’t have to be alone. Like me, the music is his escape, his deliverance. It helps push the most horrible thoughts out of his head. He can lose himself in the music that has given him strength since he was a little boy.

  For him, his salvation is teaching music; for me, it’s playing it. It is the only way to keep both of us sane. Teaching music at the ASTA conference for him; playing Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony at the Ravinia Festival for me. They are one and the same.

  We are in Rochester for a few days before we realize that Steph’s bed has no sheets—only pillowcases and a quilt. Steph is just as gloriously sloppy as she had been as a child, and her apartment in the best of times is a mess. Her furniture is borrowed and makeshift: milk crates, baskets, TV trays. Nothing is contained, and piles overflow on every surface. The novel she was reading lies open, facedown on the nightstand. At first we didn’t notice the bedsheets stacked next to it.

  “Here, she must have been intending to put these on the bed,” Ken’s sister says. When she holds up one of the sheets and starts to unfold it, the room suddenly falls silent.

  “Wait, this is a single bedsheet, and that’s a double bed…,” she begins in confusion.

  The realization washes over me in a rising tide of fear.

  “She was packing.” Those are the sheets she was bringing to my dad’s ASTA conference in New Jersey, where the dorms have twin beds. The bed in her apartment is full-size.

  I can barely say the words: “Her sheets are missing.”

  Up until that moment, we all have been hanging on to the hope that Steph would call and tell us she was ready for us to come pick her up. She would tell us she was sorry she left without telling us. She would explain that she needed to get away to think and to have time alone. She would beg us to forgive her—she would smile sheepishly and shower us with hugs and kisses—and of course we would.

  But as we look from one to another in Steph’s bedroom, the single sheet draped over her bed like a flag draped over a soldier’s coffin, the fantasy dims and goes dark. Why would Steph pack up her sheets and leave everything else behind? Why change the sheets but not the pillowcases?

  The horrific mental images of my sister and what could have happened with the bedsheets that are now missing cue up again in my head. Eyes shut, eyes open, it doesn’t matter. The images are playing out in an endless loop. I do my best to discipline myself, to make the images go away. I can’t.

  JOANNE

  The first thing I noticed about Mr. K, when I got the phone call at my desk while on deadline at the Wall Street Journal that August, was how vulnerable and uncertain he sounded. The man whose image was seared into my brain—I pictured him always with a conductor’s baton or an unsharpened pencil clamped in one hand—was an intimidating giant. He had a loud, booming voice and a presence that loomed so large in my mind’s eye that he blocked the noonday sun streaming full on through a window.

  It took me a moment to reconcile the daunting teacher of my youth with the disembodied voice, hesitatingly asking for me on the telephone.

  “It’s Jerr…”

  “Yes?” Impatiently.

  “It’s… your Mr. K.”

  He sounded small, and scared. And old. As he started telling me about Stephanie, he spoke in halting cadences, stumbling over his words, and you could feel the pain in his voice each time he uttered her name. I twisted the coiled cord around my finger and felt my face redden. I was ashamed. I hadn’t spoken to him in years. At that moment, I couldn’t have told you where my old viola was. I hadn’t thought much about Mr. K at all since I left East Brunswick more than a decade ago.

  I had lost track of Melanie and Stephanie, too. My waking hours were consumed by work and the demands of one baby, with another soon on the way. I was writing a daily column now, and each day was a fresh frenzy of searching for a topic, reporting it, then pushing the deadline as late as I could possibly get away with. My schedule was so tight that I slept in earrings and wristwatch to save time in the morning, but still ended up arriving at the office late most days with baby spit-up stains on my shoulders.

  My lawyer husband’s hours were even longer. We put our one-year-old daughter, Rebecca, on our schedule, so she napped all day long and woke up in time to eat dinner with us, often at midnight. We had moved to a new apartment a year before, when Rebecca was born, but our lives were so hectic that our few pieces of artwork—if that’s what you could call our college-era framed posters—were still leaning against the walls, waiting to be hung.

  As Mr. K filled me in on Steph’s disappearance, I stared across the chaos of my desk at a photo of Rebecca. The picture was encased in one of those dime-store paperweights, and in it she had a ribbon in her dark hair and a smile playing across her little cupid’s-bow lips. It was incomprehensible, unimaginable, to think of a child just disappearing.

  How could Stephanie vanish? How could he bear not knowing where she was, at this very moment?

  “Maybe she hit her head,” Mr. K was saying. “Maybe she has amnesia.”

  He told me about her teaching job outside of Rochester, New York, about how much she loved her young students and how she had found a nice apartment and was dating a violin maker. How she had gone to the store to buy cookies for her violin students, then disappeared. How her groceries were still in the kitchen.

  How the sheets were missing from her bed.

  I tried to get my bearings. As a reporter, you are taught to be in control of a conversation. That’s your job. But hearing Mr. K’s voice, I became a kid again. I was twelve years old, with frizzy hair and glasses.

  I was tongue-tied. I was of no use to anyone.

  I had to pull myself together.

  “Maybe she’s somewhere that no one knows her. If we could get the word out, maybe someone weel recognize her,” he was saying.

  I shook myself out of my childhood stupor. I could do something, I realized. I pulled out a fresh reporter’s notebook, picked up a pen, took a deep breath, and steeled myself.

  For the first time in my life, I was about to give my old teacher instructions. “Tell me everything,” I said. “Tell me your story.”

  In between deadlines those next few days, my cubicle-mate Kevin put Mr. K in touch with some true-crime TV producers he knew. I called friends at the New York Times. It was late summer, and we didn’t know who, if anyone, might be interested in writing about the case of the missing violin teacher.

  On Labor Day, my parents came to visit. The last blast of humid summer weather was pushing the temperatures up into the stratosphere. We spent the day swimming in the freezing-cold pool of our upstate New York weekend house, a fixer-upper we’d bought the year before and hadn’t yet had the time or the money to fix up. Rebecca splashed happily with her grandparents, sitting on the top step in the shallow end, wearing the Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm bathing suit that was a gift from Tom’s dad.

  At the end of the day, after we barbecued hot dogs and hamburgers and fresh Jersey corn, my parents walked with me to their car in the driveway. My dad popped open the trunk, and my mother reached inside, retrieving a copy of the local Home News newspaper, dated the previous Thursday. “I didn’t want to upset you before,” she said.

 
; The paper was folded neatly to an article inside. A large photo of Stephanie stared out at me. She was older than the last time I saw her, but not by much. She looked beautiful, with her wide dark eyes, pale skin, dark hair, and, of course, a smile on her face. It was one of those studio pictures, the kind they take in school, where the photographer sits you against a backdrop and tilts your head at all kinds of awkward angles and then tells you to act natural. But even so, you could see in the photo that she wanted to laugh. Stephanie always wanted to laugh. The next frame after this photo she no doubt ruined the picture by collapsing into giggles.

  The headline over her photo made my heart sink into my stomach. “Police Perplexed by Disappearance of Ex-Area Woman,” it said. The article quoted Mr. K. “I think she was abducted,” he said. “But I’m pretty tough. As long as the worst doesn’t happen, I feel she will turn up somewhere, somehow.”

  A few weeks later, a fat manila envelope arrived at my office. Mr. K had sent the police report, some news articles, and the missing persons report. He had enclosed a two-page handwritten letter. It was written on lined paper in small, neat script, unlike the big, sloppy instructions he always used to scrawl across my music—“AGAIN!” in a dark splat of big block capital letters. This letter had obviously been carefully thought out, perhaps written and rewritten several times.

  “Your kind words reassure me that human beings are basically good and that my existence on this planet has not been totally pointless,” he wrote. He talked about how the police and the private investigator he hired had run into a dead end. He tried to get the Federal Bureau of Investigation interested, but ran into a wall. Perhaps if there were some news reports, the FBI would be convinced that the case was worthy of its time. “Dearest Joanne,” he wrote, “whatever you can do will be very much appreciated. I will be eternally grateful…”