by Tess Stimson
“How are you going to force him?” I demand. “I mean, all these conventions and stuff are fine, but haven’t we actually got to find him first?”
“There’s a Port Alert in place, Jenna,” Nicholas says. “As soon as he arrives, they’ll hold him. Don’t worry, they’re very much on the ball. One of the more helpful by-products of all the 9/11 security,” he adds wryly.
And if he’s not in Canada? I think. What then?
When Rowan and Marc have been missing for twenty-four hours, the police finally take Clare seriously. An alert is issued, but it’s as if Marc’s vanished into thin air. He doesn’t use his credit cards, an ATM, or even his mobile phone. I start to wonder if Clare’s right, and Marc has done something terrible.
For three days, we don’t leave the house, jumping every time the phone rings. If Clare loses any more weight, she’ll snap. I wish I could get in touch with Xan. He’s the only person I can think of who might help Clare through this.
On the fourth day, Nicholas calls.
“I’ve just heard: Marc and Rowan were on a British Airways flight to Lebanon three days ago,” he says wearily, when I pick up the phone. “I’m afraid we’ve lost him.”
I feel sick. This is my fault. I was the one who left Rowan at the swim class. I didn’t tell Clare about the money. He must have taken the suitcase out of the house before she threw him out. I let this happen.
Even Nicholas sounds defeated. He explains that Lebanon isn’t a signatory to the Hague Convention. If Marc doesn’t bring Rowan back of his own accord, Clare will never find him. She may never see her son again.
Davina hires a private investigator with contacts in Lebanon, but we have so little to go on. We have no idea which part of the country his family is from, or even if he stayed there. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack full of needles.
In desperation, Clare calls Marc’s parents in Montreal, but they either won’t, or can’t, help us. I wouldn’t be surprised if his mother put him up to this. According to Clare, she’s never approved of her career-oriented daughter-in-law.
With every day that passes, Clare gets quieter and more withdrawn. It’s as if the life’s being sucked out of her. She’s lost all interest in her shops; desperate to distract her, I insist on driving the three of us to Fulham every morning, and we sit and watch Poppy playing at our feet in her baby gym, blissfully unaware of the drama going on around her. She misses Rowan, but she’s only seven months old. She has no comprehension of what has happened. How could she?
For her sake, I try to stick to our old routine as much as possible. I take her to Baby Swim (Clare sits at the side of the pool, taut as a bowstring, constantly scanning the water) and to the park. Every night, I bathe her and put her to bed, trying not to notice the empty space where her brother should be. Clare won’t let me wash Rowan’s sheets or make up the crib properly. It’s as if Rowan has died.
One night, four weeks after Rowan has vanished, I’m upstairs dressing Poppy in her pink pajamas, trying to tame her dark curls with a soft teddy-bear hairbrush. A particularly wild tendril keeps getting in her eyes, so I reach for the nail scissors to trim it for her.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
I jump. Clare stands in the doorway; Rowan’s blanket, as ever these days, is in her hand. She watches me coldly for a few moments.
“I said, what do you think you’re doing?”
“Her hair was getting in her eyes—”
“Did I say you could cut it?”
“No, but—”
She crosses the room and snatches the scissors out of my hand. “I’ll decide if I want my daughter’s hair cut, thank you. I’m Poppy’s mother, not you. You work for me. You’re not her family. You have no right.”
“I just thought—”
“I don’t pay you to think. I pay you to do your job.”
I pick up the hairbrush again. She can’t help it. Given what she’s going through, it’s amazing she’s still sane.
I read somewhere once that ninety percent of parents split up after they lose a child. They’re so consumed by their own grief, they don’t have time for each other. They turn in on themselves, and instead of being drawn closer by their shared loss, they’re driven further apart.
Clare doesn’t seem to understand that I’m hurting, too. She barely speaks to me; she’s like a stranger these days. She’s always been self-controlled, but she’s so tightly wound now, I’m terrified what might happen if the dam breaks.
She doesn’t apologize for her outburst the next morning, or even ask if I mind working yet another Saturday; I haven’t had a day off since Marc took Rowan. Instead, we go to the Fulham shop as usual. I flick on the computer in the corner of the shop and go through the staff roster, while Clare sits on the floor and plays with Poppy. After a while, I swivel and watch her. She doesn’t have an ounce of patience to spare for anyone else these days, but she’ll sit and thread flowers on a fine wire for her daughter as if she can think of nothing else she’d rather be doing. Two months ago, the idea of spending ten minutes entertaining Poppy would have scared the shit out of her.
I’m distracted by the door bell, and look up.
Clare gets to her feet as Cooper Garrett walks in, still wearing his long leather duster, apparently heedless of the summer heat, as dusty and travel-stained as if he’s just ridden across the desert with a vital message to save the world.
“I’ve found your son,” he says.
Juilliard
DANCE DRAMA MUSIC
60 LINCOLN CENTER PLAZA
NEW YORK, NY
10023–6588
(212) 799–5000
Mr. C. Garrett
Garrett Plantation
St. James, NC 28777
August 21, 1978
Dear Mr. Garrett,
It is with deepest sympathy we offer our condolences on the recent sad loss of your parents. We accept your withdrawal from our program for the upcoming semester with regret. We hope you and your family are able to draw comfort from one another at this time of such sorrow.
Naturally we understand your decision to postpone your studies to care for your brother, particularly in light of his youth. It will doubtless be a great consolation to him to have you at home. However, you show great promise as a pianist, and we would like to assure you that a place will remain open here for you, should you decide to take it up at a later date.
Once again, we extend our warmest sympathies to you and your family.
Yours sincerely,
Sarah Greene
Director of Admissions
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Cooper
Lolly was right. She tends to be; the advantage of eighty-some years on this planet. She’s taken care of me since the day I was born: If she says there’s such a thing as love at first sight, I believe her.
I walk into Clare’s flower shop on a bright May morning, my head filled with Ella. I’ve thought of nothing else since she pitched up two months ago in North Carolina, my brother’s ashes in an urn tucked under her arm. Jackson’s mysterious widow: the woman who was married to him for eleven years, and cheated on him for most of them.
I fucked her out of revenge, and then found I couldn’t forget her. Trying not to think about Ella is like telling someone not to think of pink elephants: Suddenly it’s all you can imagine. I’m so eaten up with anger, I have nothing else left. Anger at Jackson, for dying at forty-two and making a mockery of everything I’ve given up; anger at Ella, for stealing my breath and robbing my soul. Anger most of all at myself, for letting any of it matter a damn.
And Clare looks up, her sad smile reaching her tired eyes, and my anger evaporates like it never was; and I realize: Lolly was right.
I’m forty-nine years old: cynical, battle-hardened, bitter, and weary. I have no one, love no one, bar Lolly, an eighty-two-year-old black spinster who has nowhere else to go. I lost my parents in a fire at seventeen; I turned my back on music and Juilliard to look after
my brother, and now I’ve lost him, too. In my years as a journalist, I’ve seen human nature in all its forms; I’ve witnessed the best and worst it has to offer. I’ve grieved for the charred corpses of children bombed in Baghdad and interviewed a mother in New Orleans who gave birth to her baby in a tree during the floods. I’ve been there, done that, and I thought I’d lost my ability to be surprised.
“How can I help you?” Clare asks pleasantly.
Words are my living. Every intelligent one deserts me.
“Flowers,” I blurt.
Flowers? Dear God, is that the best you can do? You’re in a flower shop, for Chrissakes. Of course, flowers! Flying carpets are next door.
Clare moves towards a bank of pink peonies; and suddenly I hear my mother’s slow Southern drawl as she guides me, an itchy, impatient boy of nine, around her hothouse, “The peony grants its recipient the power to keep a secret. Be careful who you give them to, Cooper.” Forty years later, and the memory is sharp enough to make me feel the punch of loss in my gut.
“Not those,” I say. “She has enough secrets.”
Clare looks at me properly for the first time. Suddenly it’s important she doesn’t see me as another customer, an ignorant American. It’s important that she sees me. I almost forget why I’m buying flowers at all.
“Yellow tulips?” she suggests, with a dryness I only notice later.
“Hopeless love and devotion? Hardly. And not,” I add, as she reaches for anemones, “abandonment.”
Wedding ring on her finger. I’m ambushed by a blaze of disappointment.
A clerk babbles behind me. I still can’t take my eyes off Clare; though of course I don’t yet know that’s her name. I only discover later that she has twin babies, a boy and a girl, whose existence amazes and terrifies her in equal measure; and a husband she talks of as if he’s a third child. I don’t know that she’s the most honest, trustworthy person I will ever meet, that she’s exhausted, bled dry, with the effort of trying to take care of everything and everyone, that her worst enemy is herself. All I know is that I’ve met the woman I was meant to marry, and she’s married to someone else.
I only learn these details of her life later, but by then they don’t matter; the bell has rung. I return to her flower shop two and three times a week, unable to keep away. I don’t fail to appreciate the irony: In order to see Clare, I have to feign obsession with Ella. I turn down an important assignment from Time magazine. I spend a fortune on London taxis. I apologize to Jackson a thousand times in my head for not getting it: for not understanding what you would do for a woman, the right woman.
I know from the start it’s pointless. A woman like Clare would never cheat on her husband. If she did, she wouldn’t be the woman for me.
I can’t stay in London forever, I tell myself, pushing open the door to Clare’s shop and stepping into the damp gloom one afternoon in mid-June. Sooner or later, I’ll have to pick up my life. I’m used to being alone. Jackson’s dead, but he lived half a world away. Nothing’s really changed. So why in hell do I feel so lonely?
Clare emerges from the back room, and I savor her smile of recognition. The small things.
“How’s Ella this week?” she asks.
“Recovering at home.”
“Oh, I’m so pleased.”
Ella’s just gotten engaged to William. To my surprise, I find myself wishing them well. I glance at a bucket of zinnias. Not my favorite flowers, but they’re cheerful, and I imagine Ella’s tired of lilies. The zinnias, bold and brash and colorful, seem appropriate.
I never know how to talk to Clare, and so I just watch as she bundles up the flowers with a twist of raffia wrapped around her wrist. She always works fast, not wanting to keep me waiting; but it’s the waiting I come here for. She’s lost more weight, I note with concern. I can count the knobs of her spine through the thin knit sweater.
I remember the irritating assistant telling me about Clare’s daughter last time I came in. Jackson had meningitis at fourteen. Lolly and I thought we’d lose him; it was the longest forty-eight hours of my life. Even the doctors were amazed at the speed of his recovery.
I fumble over the words. “How’s your daughter? Poppy, isn’t it?”
She smiles. “She’s much better. How did you—”
“Your colleague. Craig.”
“How kind of you to remember. She had us terribly worried for a few days, but she seems over it now. She had so much salt in her body, they thought I must have given it to her.” Suddenly, her voice cracks. “The police came … it was so dreadful—”
I don’t know what to say. The police in this godforsaken country must be fucking idiots. It has to be obvious to anyone with half a brain that this woman would never poison her own child.
She rubs at her eyes like a child and hands me Ella’s zinnias. Ella. One of the top pediatricians in London. I can do something for Clare, I realize. Finally.
I bolt for the door, already dialing Ella’s number on my cell. (“She’s the one, isn’t she, Cooper?” Ella says, surprising me. “The one you’ve stayed here for?”) It doesn’t occur to me that I’m changing everything. I’m crossing the line, breaking my own cast-iron rule: Never get involved.
Lunch, I suggest to Clare, seizing my chance when I come back a few days later. You can thank me then.
I don’t for one minute expect her to say yes.
I feel like a fox in a henhouse in that flashy restaurant. I take her instead to the park—or to what passes for green space in this miserable, overcrowded island—and she slips off her shoes and walks in her bare feet on the browned grass. I tell her I’ve been assigned to chase down a Taliban story in the North-West Frontier Province; though I don’t add that I called Time magazine that morning and volunteered. It’s time to get my head straight. I can’t sit around London for the rest of my life, mooning over Clare like a lovesick teenager.
I tell her, though not quite in so many words, that I love her.
I’m not made of fucking stone. I can’t go off and risk my neck while Clare thinks I’m in love with Ella. I’ll probably never get this chance again; I want to lay down my marker now, just in case. Life’s uncertain. If nothing else, Jackson’s death taught me that.
How did my brother bear it, knowing his wife was in love with another man? I couldn’t share, I realize. If Clare was mine, I couldn’t share her.
Through the next three brutal weeks in Afghanistan, I think of her, often. She gave me no encouragement, made no promises; I didn’t expect it. But her image is like a talisman in my pocket, a stone to touch when I need to experience something honest and real. I don’t bother to explore the implications for the future of my love for her. I don’t overdramatize it, or make the mistake of thinking it means anything cataclysmic. It just is.
I return to London thinner, browner, and calmer. In an hour’s time, I’ll be on a plane back to the U.S. Jackson’s death is still raw, but the shock has passed; I’m no longer raging at the world. Ella has slid painlessly into the past. Clare … Clare I will always carry with me. Surprisingly, the thought is comforting.
My plane has barely touched down at Heathrow before my phone starts buzzing with texts and messages that have floated around the ether, unread and unheard, while I’ve been skulking in damp caves. I listen to the first one, and don’t bother with the rest.
Before Ella has finished explaining to me about Rowan, I’m collecting my bag from the luggage carousel at Terminal One, slinging it over my shoulder, and taking the subway straight to Terminal Four. Screw Time. Their story can wait.
“Cooper, this is crazy,” Ella exclaims. “You can’t just get on a plane to Beirut!”
“Why? Think they’ll be overbooked?”
“I left you a message because I thought you’d want to know about Clare and Marc, not so you could drop everything and disappear off on a wild-goose chase. Don’t you think there are already people out there looking for Rowan? I’ve had the police interview me twice. No one even knows
if Marc’s still in Beirut. He could be anywhere with Rowan by now.”
I slap my credit card on the British Airways ticket desk.
“I’ll find him.”
“You don’t even know where to start!”
“I’ll find him,” I repeat.
The plane to Beirut is empty. I stretch out on three seats, balling my coat under my head. I’ve worked the Lebanese story for twenty-five years: the pitiless civil war, the Western hostage-taking, and the fragile renaissance—before the car bombs and assassinations started again—of the last decade. I know how easy it is to disappear here. Ask Terry Anderson, held hostage in plain sight for seven years. To the West, it was as if he’d vanished off the face of the earth. No one knew if he was dead or alive until he was released.
But I also know that if you ask questions in the right places, eventually answers find their way back. No one ever truly disappears. There are always ripples.
Marc Elias may have been born in Lebanon, but he’s a foreigner by all but blood. The ripples he makes will be noticed more than he realizes. Sooner or later, I’ll find him.
I refuse to allow myself to think of Clare, grief-stricken and desperate for her child; Clare, newly separated from her husband. I can’t afford any distractions. What matters now is finding Rowan. Everything else can wait.
It takes me six days.
Josef, my driver, comes to me. “Habibi,” he says. “I have a friend.”
It works the way it always does. His friend, Mehdi, has a friend. Zahir has a brother, whose wife has a cousin. Cousin Antoine meets me at a seafront café for coffee and man’oushi zaatar. We smoke cigarettes and stare companionably over the Mediterranean. I have a friend, says Antoine, in perfect English, who lives in Jounieh, a few miles from here. More of an acquaintance, really. This acquaintance was recently asked to find a baby-sitter for an uncle. A widower, newly arrived from America. Or London. Perhaps Canada? His friend, or acquaintance, recommended his sixteen-year-old sister, who came home that night with stories of a sad baby with big blue eyes. Antoine shrugs. It could be nothing. It could be something. He’ll arrange for me to meet the sister. It will be expensive, he warns.