by Tish Cohen
And what if she hadn’t?
Oliver didn’t return. Dr. Upton came in instead, to lay Elise’s clothes at the foot of the exam table, to sit on Oliver’s stool and take Elise’s hands in hers. There wasn’t a chance the news would be good. “You are pregnant. About seven weeks. But I’m afraid the gestational sac is empty. There is no embryo, no yolk sac. We call this a blighted ovum. A phantom pregnancy. I’m sorry.”
Elise struggled for a place to put this information in her brain. All she knew was she had to get dressed and go. Find her daughter.
“We can book an appointment for you at the hospital in case you don’t miscarry on your own and need a D&C.”
This pregnancy was zero to sixty in three seconds, it seemed. Motherhood was instant like that. The prospect of losing your baby, even at the worst moment of your life, was devastating.
“I can’t book anything.”
“I hear you. So I’m going to let you get dressed and step back outside to face what to any mother is the pits of hell. You’re not going to be giving yourself and your health a single thought, and that’s just fine. It’s the way it has to be until you get your daughter back. But I want you to promise me this, Mrs. Sorenson—if you develop a fever, or if the bleeding gets too intense, you’ll get yourself back here or to the ER. Are you okay with that?”
Elise nodded. She started to sit up, pulled the blankets over her belly. “Can I ask you a favor?”
“Of course.”
“Can you use my name—Elise?”
The doctor came around the other side of the table to set the stack of clothes on Elise’s lap. She placed her hands on Elise’s shoulders. “You are in the worst of this. Your heart is broken, you’re afraid for your daughter’s life, and you’re questioning every decision you’ve ever made. I expect every day until you find your daughter will be infinitely worse. And you may not have even reached bottom. When you do, you will stumble. You will fall. But after that, you’ll climb. It’s what we do as mothers. Because no matter how vicious that inner voice can be—and, holy hell, what a heartless bitch it is—we are made to survive. And you will survive this.” She removed her hands. “Elise.”
The door clicked behind Jennifer Upton when she left.
Chapter 19
Expecting to find Elise inside, Matt had walked into a police station abuzz with muted voices, shouted orders, ringing phones, buzzing radios, and the zigzag energy of search dogs in yellow vests being led in or out of the building. And, every few minutes, the authoritative and promising squeak and rattle of cops marching past, vests loaded with pistols, Tasers, handcuffs, and mobile phones.
He tried his wife’s phone twice, but she didn’t pick up. Incredulity turned to fury, which turned to alarm. Had she found something? Was she hurt?
Inside the bare bones office that was the polygraph suite, the din was a faraway bustle that Matt could almost convince himself was happening because of someone else’s tragedy. Elise had been booked to go first. When she didn’t show, they brought Matt in to be attached to a blood pressure cuff, rubber tubing on abdomen and chest to record breathing, and metal plates strapped to two fingers to measure perspiration.
From the moment the examiner—a gawky young male with razor burn on his neck—hooked him up, Matt couldn’t get his lungs to fill, not completely. He felt he was sucking every breath through a furnace filter. Gracie was gone—could he be in a bigger panic to begin with? The control questions made him panic more: Are you wearing a green shirt? Are you in New York State? Is your name Matthew Sorenson? Then his panic created still more panic. What if his upset read as lies on the machine? The combination of shallow breathing and racing heart surely must’ve shot his blood pressure skyward. The examiner kid was poker-faced, let out a muffled sigh as he unstrapped Matt’s fingers and chest, wound up the cords, and slid them into a drawer. “That’s it. You’re done.”
Matt didn’t dare ask if he’d passed. It seemed like a question only a guilty person would think of.
Elise ran in, pale and breathless, as Matt came out. “Hey.”
“Where’ve you been?”
“Is there any news? Have you seen Dorsey?”
“There’s nothing.”
“Ronnie called on my way here. He’d heard on CNN.”
“Please tell me you’re not going to Toronto.”
She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. “Of course I’m not going to Toronto, Matt. Our daughter is missing.”
Before he could reply, the examiner was at the door, ushering her inside. “Mrs. Sorenson? We’re ready for you now.”
Matt stepped outside to wait for Elise. The air beneath the doors’ overhang was a curious mix of cedar and old cigarettes. The former because most of the building was covered in cedar shakes, the latter because of all the crushed butts tossed into the grass. He looked down at them. In a place like this, a good many of those smokes would have a story—most of them better than his.
The moment he sat on the stone bench, his phone vibrated within his pocket. He pulled it out to tap open a text from Cass. It was a photo he hadn’t seen in decades. Cass and him, about thirteen years old, lying on the grass, heads touching, amber sunlight making them squint. He remembered the day like it was yesterday. That she was hanging out with him at all was a miracle. By that age, every boy in town was after her.
Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young” had been playing from a little radio on the grass, and they both knew all the words. Matt had just gotten his braces off. Cass had a single daisy in her hair and Matt was plucking the petals off another, wondering aloud if she loved him. Or loved him not. Cass had stood up, saying she didn’t want to be there for the last petal because “You have to leave some shit in life unknown” and sauntered inside to get ready to go to a movie with Adam Lerner—a sophomore jock at Lake Placid High. After her screen door slammed, Matt had pulled off the last petal to “she loves me,” rolled onto his back, and grinned.
These other guys were just a phase, he’d thought. She’d come back to Matt one day.
To marry Cass had always been his dream. Their juvenile plan at one point had been to build a little place up at the lake. He’d be a lawyer in town. She’d take pictures. They’d spend their summers canoeing and their winters skiing. It had always slayed him how she was so kind. Once, she found three newborn squirrels after a storm, and when their mother never returned, raised them in her bedroom, taking them outside every day to grow accustomed to the forest. They lived out their lives in her yard—or so Cass charmingly believed. He used to tease her—who the hell could tell one squirrel from the next?
They would’ve had a slew of giggling kids running around underfoot—all growing up with German shepherds and rock collections and the ability to point out the Little Dipper in the night sky. Cass’s goals would have aligned with Matt’s. Family first.
If Cass were Gracie’s mother, not only would she be around every day, but Gracie would grow up with room to shine. She would take center stage, as every child should.
As it was in the Sorenson family, there was only room for Elise to shine. Gracie and Matt hovered around like devoted fans. They waited for Elise. They swelled with rare sightings of her. They clapped. They held their breath with anticipation. They stood up and cheered. It had always been clear that the stage belonged to Elise and there was no understudy.
Now, a male voice called out from the parking lot. “Matt?”
Alan Dionne, an old friend from camp, had morphed from wiry soccer player with black hair and sunburned skin into a stocky man with a silver crew cut and a face that had toughened into leather. But the thick black brows were the same, as was the nose bent from Alan’s end of the canoe crashing down onto his face while they were portaging one summer. Clearly a cop now, he was in full uniform. When Matt rose, Alan slammed him with a hug, held him close. He still smelled of the same Polo cologne that had attracted mosquitoes all those summers ago. “Buddy. I couldn’t believe when I heard. I can’t imagine how you
’re coping.”
God, to be able to step back into those simple days. “You know.”
In Alan’s hand was a crumpled white bag—a takeout breakfast he was bringing to work. “Yeah. I’ve got three boys.”
“They brought us in for polygraphs.”
“That’s just to be by-the-book on this. It’s a good thing, trust me. Every name that gets cleared narrows the search.”
“Will the neighbors be cleared today? What about Cass and her boyfriend? I’d like to know they don’t have this looming over their heads.”
“They all have appointments later this morning.” The breeze kicked up and the lake behind them churned gray, dotted with whitecaps. Alan fished around in a pocket and pulled out a card. “My cell’s on the back. When I say use it anytime, I mean it. Middle of the night, you need a shoulder? I’m there for you, man.”
Matt took the card, nodded.
“Hell of a thing you did. Quitting law to stay home and raise your little girl. Admirable.”
“I didn’t quit law.”
“Huh. I thought you were doing the stay-at-home-husband thing while your wife is riding.”
“No. I’m . . . no. I work. Every day.”
“Ah. Well. Rumors, right?” He motioned toward the doors. “I’d better head in. But I mean it about my cell. Stay in touch.”
As Alan started inside, Matt called out, “Hey, Al. That forty-eight-hours thing. Is that true? If you don’t solve a crime within the first forty-eight hours, it’s pretty much over?”
“Shoot, no. It’s bullshit conjured up to sell papers. All you need is a viable lead in that time.”
Matt felt his stomach drop. They didn’t have anything close to a viable lead and they were barreling toward the twenty-four-hour mark. “And if you don’t have one?”
“Sure doesn’t mean you aren’t going to find her. Don’t be filling your head with that.”
“But what are the odds?”
“Seriously, Matt. Every case is unique.”
“Just level with me. If we have no lead, what happens to our chances? Do they go to nil?”
Alan waited a minute, his collar fluttering in the breeze. A low buzz came from the radio slung from his vest.
“Please. Alan. I need your honesty here.”
“You’re still looking at a fifty percent chance of success. Which is a lot. It means your chances of finding her are every bit as strong as . . .” Alan’s voice trailed off. There was an awkward moment in which he raised his breakfast in goodbye and marched through the metal doors.
Matt dropped back down onto the bench. As the doors swept shut, he set his gaze somewhere over the treetops.
Every bit as strong as . . .
“Babe?” He looked up to find Elise staring down at him, hair blowing in the wind. He had no idea how long she’d been standing there. She sat on the bench beside him and pulled on her jacket and baseball cap.
“How’d it go?”
His wife pushed her hands into her pockets. “Can we talk?”
“Of course.”
Her eyes followed his, hovering over the tree line. “It feels like . . . we’re so far apart right now, and it’s making this doubly painful. If we’re broken at the same time as her being gone . . . I mean, how are we going to do this?”
He didn’t answer.
“We need to be together. On the same side.”
“We’re her parents. Of course we’re on the same side.”
A strand of hair caught in her mouth and she tucked it behind her ears. “I need to know you love me.”
“I will always love you.”
She mulled this over, saying nothing. A pair of police cruisers pulled out of the driveway and sped toward 86. She zipped her jacket to the chin and turned to him. “You know I’m sorry, right? You know I’d never have left if I’d thought there was even a one percent chance of anything—”
As Elise went on, what Cass had said on the ski jump that morning came back to him. That he wouldn’t have made the choice Elise had made. Not in a million years, with all the trees and the cabin set so far back from the road.
Nor would Cass.
Chapter 20
After Warren left them for Briony and her expensive blouses, the hangers that had held his clothes never hung still again. There must have been a vent in his closet that kept them huddled together, softly shivering. Or else they, too, were saddened and needed the comfort of bumping shoulders. It drove Rosamunde out of her bed. She began to sleep in the spare bedroom.
Warren’s financial support was steady but meager. Elise’s part-time pay from working at a local tack shop on weekends helped. And Rosamunde continued to work her Tuesday and Thursday shifts. But she gradually stopped driving. She walked to work and back, and Elise now got herself home from school and the barn on the bus.
Rosamunde’s old Tercel sat in the garage, green paint filmy with dust.
Seeing Briony at school had become an issue for Elise. The woman made painful attempts to befriend her. Elise had taken to arriving late and bolting at the last bell. When weather permitted, she ate her lunch in a nearby park. Warren’s suggestions that she come over for pizza and tone-deaf assurances that she’d “really like” Briony if she gave her a chance were flatly ignored. Eventually, in some sort of gift from the gods, Briony left the school.
All this came at a time when Elise’s competitions took her away most weekends, often funded by Ronnie, as Elise was showing his horse. Breaking the news to her mother every time she was set to go had become worrisome. Rosamunde would arrange her face into a smile. Tell her daughter she was happy for her.
But as the edges of Rosamunde’s world began to fray, as holes grew where her husband’s fishing trophies used to be, as Elise’s ribbons piled up, she stopped coming to her daughter’s room to stare at the sky. She began spending more and more evenings on the back porch, drinking Sanka on her own.
Then the divorce papers arrived; Warren wanted to get remarried. And everything about Rosamunde began to shrink back. Elise couldn’t tell if her mother was losing weight from not eating or if her skeletal structure was getting smaller, but one thing seemed certain. Her mother was vanishing.
Elise skipped horse shows. She took over the shopping, the bill paying. She cooked the meals and cleaned the floors. Eventually, Elise began to lie in bed next to her mother. Rosamunde had become the child. Elise would smooth the hair off her gaunt face and point to the stars out the window. For months, Rosamunde refused to look. Then, one Thursday night, her gaze lifted to the garage roof, its outline illuminated by a streetlamp. “I can’t go back. Not ever.”
“Back where?” Elise asked.
“I can never go back.”
Nothing she said made sense. Elise shushed her. Held her mother close until she calmed, eventually fell asleep.
Later, as she was tidying the foyer, Elise gathered up the things her mother had left on the hall table: house keys, wallet, sunglasses, and a manila folder. Curious, Elise opened the file. It was a patient’s test results: HCG levels of 118,082. Even at sixteen, Elise knew she was looking at a positive pregnancy test.
The name at the top of the report was Briony Lagasse.
Elise took the file outside and dropped it into the trash can, now able to see that it wasn’t a streetlamp illuminating the fence and the trees and the roof of the garage. It was the moon—big and white and unabashedly full. She marched inside and yanked all the curtains in the house shut.
With a slam of the screen door, splattered with the rain that had just started to fall again, Elise stepped into the Sorenson back porch with a hammer from the shed. Methodically, she unrolled a huge world map and, holding nails between her teeth, hammered the map into the log wall that was the exterior of the original house. She reached for a tiny container of pins with colored heads and scanned a printed email on the table.
Sightings had begun to pour in to the police hotline, and Elise had decided she’d keep track herself. It gave her something
to keep busy with.
She divided the pins by color. Navy was a credible sighting. Purple was a “way-out-there” sighting. Pink was a psychic vision.
A couple in a Savannah flea market had seen a girl with crutches with a swarthy man who didn’t speak English. She was overheard asking him when she could see “Mommy.” Into Savannah went a navy pin. On a bleak, windswept road outside of Wichita, a girl who “had to be Gracie” was spotted hanging her head out the window of a Hyundai while a nervous couple changed a tire. Another navy. At Disneyland in California, a freckled girl started to cry as she waited in line for Pirates of the Caribbean and the woman with her smacked her hand. This one had a photo, and the child looked nothing like Gracie. Purple pin. A spiritual counselor in Chicago had a vision of a canal, of Gracie on a long, low barge in what she swore was Amsterdam. Pink.
That there were so many sightings was good. Through social media, the story had already spread around the country, along with Cass’s photo of Gracie—freckle-faced and grinning, her scrunched nose giving her smile a mischievous look. Gracie in on her own secret joke.
There was one bright green pin on the map. This one Elise put slightly to the right of Lake Ontario, south of Montreal. Partway up the east side of Lake Placid. On this spot, she’d written 217 Seldom Seen Road, Lake Placid, NY.
Little Green, back in the cabin where she belonged.
She looked around for her phone to take a picture of the pin. It should be the home screen on both her phone and Matt’s.
Her search brought Elise through the kitchen, where fruit and food baskets and cards of well wishes were beginning to pile up. She’d already opened a cheese and cracker box sent from the parents at Summerhill Prep, from Deborah, Melanie, and Jackie, who proclaimed, “We just adore your little girl, Matt.” And a tin of store-bought cookies from Andy Kostick that his note boasted were homemade.
Matt’s phone was lying on the counter, so Elise grabbed it and walked back to the map, quickly typing in his password as she stood in front of the colored pins. The phone unlocked to a text exchange between Matt and Cass. It had started at 5:17 that morning.