His “Hello?” was cautious, and when no one answered right away, he said, “Gilly?” His mind was leaping on the possibility that she’d had a dream, one of her middle-of-the-night visions, or whatever the hell they were, and had called to tell him where he could find Zoe. Desperation did that. It left no space for rationality.
The silence deepened. His pulse slowed. His head felt full of the demand for the caller to speak, but he couldn’t work his tongue off the floor of his mouth to put a voice to it. And then he heard her, Zoe, and he realized he’d known—in some deep recess of his mind he’d known it would be her.
“Daddy?” She sounded woolly, the way she did in the morning when she first wakened.
“ZooRoo?” Jake’s chest swelled with soaring elation, and for a single moment he had her back, safe in his arms. He could smell her, her sleepy morning smell, fading notes of laundry softener and baby shampoo. He could feel her warm bulk in his arms. But he knew better, knew she was not here, not safe, and his heart burned with his fear for her even as his brain scrambled for sense, an answer, the way to get her back. “Are you all right? Do you know where you are? Is anyone with you?” He knew even as the questions shot from his mouth that he was too intense, talking too fast, and he made himself stop, clenching his jaw.
“I want to come home, Daddy.” She sounded on the edge of a meltdown.
“I’m coming to get you right now, snickerdoodle. Where are you? Do you know? Can you tell me?”
But she was gone, and the voice that replaced hers was singsong, whispery. “She’s mine, my little girl now,” it said. “You never deserved her. After what you did to me, you never deserved anything good in your life. You didn’t want her anyway.”
You didn’t want her anyway. The words cut through his heart.
Jake shot to his feet. “Who is this? Where is Zoe? Tell me. Tell me where she is!”
No reply.
“Do you want money?”
Nothing.
“I’ll give you whatever you want. Please just give Zoe back to me. Please . . .”
The silence was as deep as the ocean, as fathomless as the sky. He took his phone from his ear and realized the connection was broken. The caller had hung up. He couldn’t have said precisely when.
“Jake?”
He held up a finger to his mom, hitting the redial on his phone, but whoever had called him didn’t answer. They’d said all they cared to say, scared the hell out of him. But what was the point?
“Jake! What is happening?”
He looked at his mom, framed in the doorway of the den. She looked rumpled and frail—old, suddenly. What if he lost her, too? His knees weakened, and his mind went loose, but it was only a moment before reality kicked him in the head. Get a grip on yourself. A cold voice spoke in his brain. “Someone has Zoe,” he said, and he was scrolling through his directory. “They let her talk to me.”
“Who? Where is she?”
“I don’t know. They took the phone away before she could tell me. They said—” But he didn’t want to repeat what the caller had said. You didn’t want her anyway. It shook him—the awful reminder of his ambivalence when he’d learned Zoe was on the way. His brain wanted him to look at it, how when he’d learned of her existence, he’d wished she’d never been made. But other than Stephanie and his parents, no one knew he’d had doubts, however momentary and stinging. And no one but Steph knew how badly it had pissed him off when she’d ended up pregnant.
How? he had demanded. You said you were on the pill.
The discussion had ended with Stephanie’s decision to abort. Jake had felt relieved. He’d be done with it. He and Steph would be done with each other. Just as his parents had known, the relationship had been a mistake from the start. But then Steph couldn’t go through with it. Jake had driven her to the clinic, a nurse had prepped her for the procedure, but at some point, lying on the table waiting for the doctor, she’d changed her mind. Jake had driven her back to her apartment, and a few weeks later, they’d gotten married. Six months after that, it was only Steph who had seen Jake tear up at his first sight of their daughter cradled in her arms. He’d touched Zoe’s cheek, put his fingertip into the fragile pink cup of her hand, feeling it close, a tiny clamshell over a pearl. Mine, it said. And he was hers. Zoe had owned him from that moment on, body and soul.
“Did Zoe say who she’s with?” His mom took a few steps, coming closer, peering at him in the half light of a new morning.
“No.” Jake punched Clint’s number into his phone. “If she knows, she couldn’t—Clint?”
“Jake, what’s up?” If the police captain had been sleeping, it didn’t show in his voice. He sounded wide-awake.
Jake met his mother’s glance. He took her hand to reassure her and himself. They would help each other stay sane, stay in control. He repeated for Clint’s benefit and his mother’s the little Zoe had been allowed to say, and he registered the sharp intake of his mother’s breath when he replied in answer to Clint’s question that someone—he couldn’t say if it was a man or a woman—had taken the phone from Zoe, and speaking to Jake, had said he didn’t deserve her. It ripped him up, repeating it now, hearing in his own voice a truth he’d carried inside himself for almost five years. But the caller had it right. He didn’t deserve his daughter, the joy she had brought him, which grew daily. If he’d been any kind of dad—any kind of man—he would never have let this happen to her.
But there was nothing to be gained from dwelling on regret. He was all Zoe had, her only hope, and he swore to himself he would get her back or die trying.
Clint asked for the caller’s number, and Jake, putting Clint on speaker, checked his screen and rattled it off. “I don’t recognize it.”
“It’s probably a burner anyway. But maybe we’ll get lucky.” Clint went on, talking about plans to widen the search area. He mentioned the taps on Jake’s phones again and said he was meeting later with a couple of agents—child abduction experts—from the FBI. “They’ll get on this now they know it’s not a custodial issue.”
“Holy Christ,” Jake muttered.
“Yeah. Look, try to hang in there, okay? Hey, while I’ve got you, we could use a few more photos. The more we can get Zoe’s face out there, the better. Think you could arrange it?”
Jake looked at his mom.
“I’ve got pictures of Zoe on my phone,” she said. “I’ll get it.”
She came back in a few minutes, as Jake was lacing up his shoes.
“I printed out three.” She showed him the top one. It was the photo of Zoe she’d taken over the weekend when they’d weeded the garden. In it Zoe was holding up for display a fistful of green, dirt-caked roots dangling. Her grin was pure sunshine. She couldn’t have been more triumphant if she had vanquished a dragon.
Jake couldn’t look at the image longer than an instant. He grabbed his keys and his phone.
“Where are you going?” His mom followed him from the den to the front door.
“Dallas,” he said. “I have to see Steph. Can you run those over to Clint? He’s at the police station. He said he’d wait.”
“Yes, of course. But, honey, is it necessary for you to go? Wouldn’t Steph have told the police there if she knew anything? It’s not even light out yet. You should eat something first—”
“I need to talk to her myself. She’s Zoe’s mom, no matter what she’s done.” That was only part of it. The rest of it was what he’d done, his own source of shame. You don’t deserve her, the caller had said. You didn’t want her anyway. The words—that ugly truth—uttered in a breathy, high whisper, hung in his mind, mocking him, accusing him.
“Jake? What is it? What’s wrong?”
Beyond the obvious, his mother meant. Jake didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t want to add to her worry, and bending his head, he kissed her cheek in the hope of distracting her, of shielding her from his turmoil.
It startled her.
When he straightened, she was looking at h
im, nonplussed. They weren’t kissers, barely huggers. Even the handholding they’d done a while ago wasn’t usual. A simple touch, an encouraging look, a joke shared—that was their way.
He waited, willing her not to press him, and she didn’t. Instead she asked when he’d be back, and he told her he wasn’t sure. “It’s possible they might not let me in to see her. Clint said there are all kinds of rules about jail visits. He’s calling in some favors, trying to get it arranged.”
“Be safe,” she said, and she let him go.
16
Psychic.
It was so wrong, calling her that. A total lie.
Now it was out there. Again. Her picture and her name associated with that label. The one thing Gilly dreaded most.
She brushed her teeth, fuming, elbow jerking, wondering if she had grounds for a lawsuit. Didn’t what was reported in the news have to be accurate? If you were going to be labeled in some way, shouldn’t you be consulted first? Didn’t the media have to get permission before they paraded your photo across the television screen? That girl at Bo Dean’s the night before—the one who had recognized Gilly—she was just the start. Everywhere Gilly went now, she’d have to be prepared. People would comment, give her looks. That’s her—the psychic. The weirdo. The fake, the fraud. And on and on it would go, and no matter how she responded, she would be an object of interest, or pity, or revilement. She would lose her privacy. Her very life would be up for discussion, debate, and judgment.
But that wasn’t the worst that could happen. Gilly met her glance in the mirror. The worst would be if the media dug into her past and discovered she had taken someone else’s child before. Then, digging further, they would find out why. They would dig Brian and Sophie right out of their graves and talk about them, Gilly’s family, and what had happened to them as if they knew. Gilly would be forced to relive it again. And again. The demons would come, and this time she wouldn’t have the will to fight them. She just wouldn’t . . .
Come home. Her mother’s plea surfaced in Gilly’s mind. She imagined it, sleeping down the hall from her mom in her girlhood bedroom, the two of them having dinner at the table in the kitchen. They would do the dishes after. It would be fine as long as their talk never dipped below the surface. Gilly remembered her mother’s happiness the day Gilly had been awarded her degree in architecture. Finally she had done something normal: she’d managed to graduate from college. Even Gilly’s dad had come to the ceremony. After years of Gilly’s weird dreams and dire predictions, her drama drama drama, as her dad characterized it, here was something to be proud of. Something her parents could talk about related to their daughter that didn’t elicit advice to get Gilly to a shrink.
The day of her wedding had been another occasion for joy. Her mom and dad had loved Brian.
Now you have someone in your life strong enough to keep your feet on the floor.
Her mother had bent toward Gilly’s ear and whispered that to her as she’d fastened the row of tiny buttons on the back of Gilly’s wedding gown. No doubt she and Gilly’s dad had felt gleeful, handing Gilly off, relieved of the responsibility for her, the constant concern. They had never known what to do with her. The only difference between them was that her dad had left, pretty much washing his hands of her, while her mom had stayed. Out of duty. Because one of them had to. That was Gilly’s guess. Her father’s retreat had scared her. She’d been afraid her mom would desert her, too, or put her out on the street and change the locks. She’d tried very hard not to dream once her dad was gone, and if she did wake terrified in the night, she’d slapped her hands over her mouth to keep from calling out. Sometimes her mom had heard her anyway, or she’d known somehow.
You could control your mind, if you’d try, she would say the next morning at the breakfast table. Once she had taken Gilly’s chin in her hand, and locking her gaze, she had said, What you see in your head, what you dream, it isn’t real. Tell that to yourself enough times, let it be your mantra, and I promise this nonsense will stop.
Gilly had done as her mother advised, repeating the phrase it isn’t real, it isn’t real, when a dream showed her some alarming event. She’d tried not to remember, not to speak of the experiences, and while the frequency of the dreams and visions lessened, they never left her entirely. She was aware of them, of her brain’s capacity to see the future, but it was like looking at a shadow sidelong, there but not there.
She intended to tell Brian early in their relationship, but then she fell headlong in love with him. It frightened her that, like her father, Brian would leave her, too, once he knew. She might never have confessed if fate hadn’t forced her. While they were still dating but serious enough they were talking about marriage, her thrashing and whimpering had wakened him. He’d held her, and once she grew quiet, she’d turned, spooning against him, and told him, whispering in the dark. That time she had dreamed about her mom.
“She’s going to fall and break her wrist. If I tell her to be careful she’ll be annoyed. She hates that I have this—do this. She thinks it makes me seem crazy.”
“It is kind of crazy,” Brian said, “but in a good way.”
Three days later they were doing the dinner dishes when Gilly’s mom called to say she’d had an accident.
“She’s in a cast up to her elbow and mad as a wet cat.” Gilly set down her phone. “Mad that I dreamed it, that I told her.”
Brian tucked the dish towel over the oven door handle. “Well, I don’t pretend to know how it works.” He came to Gilly, cupped her face then pulled her into his embrace. “But I love your mind, every firing neuron and cell.”
That had been the difference between him and Gilly’s folks. His approval hadn’t been conditional; she was herself with him. “Some people have migraines,” he’d said. “You have visions and dreams, which is way more interesting.”
But then he was murdered, and the media heard from somewhere—the police? The hospital? A so-called friend?—that Gilly had dreamed it would happen, and along with her, Gilly’s parents were dragged into the ensuing backlash of media hype.
Now she was back in the news. From what she could tell, the coverage so far was local, limited to KTKY’s audience. But how long would it be until other, bigger news outlets picked up the story? How long before her mom—or worse, Carl—heard?
Gilly rinsed her mouth and spit forcefully into the sink. She dressed and snapped on Bailey’s leash, giving his ears a distracted scratch, barely registering his tail-wagging happiness, which on an ordinary day gave her such joy. Outside, the street was quiet, the light dim. Shadows as thick as sheep’s wool huddled under the trees. The air was cool, and she walked quickly. Bailey kept pace, keeping his forays to either side of their path to a minimum, as if he sensed his mistress’s anxiety. Because underneath her fury and the indignation she had so little right to feel, she was scared. It had always scared her—this so-called gift. Her parents had never understood that Gilly was as confused by her mind as they were. She didn’t want the ability any more than they had wanted it for her.
Maybe you should be more open to it.
Julia had offered Gilly that advice last night as they were leaving Bo Dean’s. Just go with it, she’d said. Instead of fighting, let the dream, the vision of Zoe’s whereabouts become clear.
Suppose what you see could find her? Julia had said. Suppose for whatever reason the universe has tapped into your mind and given you the knowledge of where she is? I don’t mean to make you feel responsible, she had said. But . . .
But nothing.
Whether Gilly did or did not “see” Zoe and her circumstances, she would feel responsible. It was what she hated most about being labeled psychic. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. There were no winners. Ever. Last night, Gilly had told Julia and Marybeth Cargill the same thing she had told Jake. She couldn’t go into a trance, and poof, behind her eyes have Zoe appear along with the kidnapper, as if by magic. But it had been as if she hadn’t spoken. Marybeth had quoted the news rep
ort as if it were the gospel, and Julia had reiterated her suggestion that Gilly had only to allow the vision to take form for Zoe to be rescued.
Gilly had called Jake after she left Bo Dean’s, and she’d done her best to keep from sounding angry. She’d left him a message when he hadn’t picked up. I know you’re desperate, she had said, but you’ve got no idea the trouble you’ve caused me, telling the media you’ve hired me to find Zoe. He had returned her call a while later, but by then she’d seen him on the ten o’clock news, pleading for his daughter’s safe return. She had heard him say he would do anything to have her back. He’d looked directly into the camera as he spoke, seemingly straight into Gilly’s eyes, and he’d said, “Zoe, if you can hear me, Daddy loves you, sweetheart. I’m coming to get you, I promise.”
His anguish had reached into Gilly and taken her heart in its cold, panicked grasp. It had jerked open the door to her own ghosts, letting them out of the cellar in her mind where she kept them. What would she do to have Sophie back for one day, one hour, one minute? Like Jake, she would beg. She would go to her knees, promise anything. It shook Gilly, seeing Jake’s vulnerability that was the mirror of her own. And when her phone had rung a short while later, and she’d seen it was him, she hadn’t been able to answer.
He had left a voice mail in return: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
She left the bathroom for her bedroom now, where she pulled on linen crop pants, a loose shirt, slipped her feet into her sandals. She wished she could help him, but her compassion for him was bound by a perimeter of rage at his nerve in dragging her into his drama, making her part of it, as if she didn’t have her own panic and grief to shoulder. There were days when she could barely hold herself together, keep herself from sinking—drinking. Days when the monkey danced, grinning, asking: What’s the point?
Gilly prayed Jake wouldn’t learn what it was like. She prayed Zoe would be found safe and wasn’t gone forever like Sophie. But he needed to understand—people needed to realize—that Gilly wasn’t the key. What she had seen in her dream, or what she might see should she have another one, was useless.
What Lies Below: A Novel Page 16