by Darcey Bell
“Did I wake you up? I’m so sorry!” Why was I apologizing? His wife had gone missing!
“You didn’t wake me,” he said thickly. “Who is this?”
I had the weirdest temptation to giggle because I always wondered if Sean would still have the tony British accent if you woke him from a deep sleep. He did.
“Emily’s friend,” I said. “Stephanie.”
“Stephanie,” he repeated. He had no idea who I was, though he’d met me many times. “What is it, Stephanie?”
“I don’t mean to be alarmist,” I said, “But Emily left Nicky with me, and I was wondering . . . where she is and when she’s planning to come home. I must have heard her wrong. I didn’t know Nicky would be staying—”
I could practically hear his patience run out. Snap!
“She’s traveling on business,” he said evenly. “She’ll be gone for a couple of days.” Very definite, very clear.
“Oh,” I said. “That’s a relief. I’m so sorry I bothered you.”
“Not a problem,” he said. “And do feel free to call again if you need me . . . Stephanie.”
Only after we hung up did I realize that he hadn’t asked how Nicky was. What kind of father was he? What kind of husband? Wasn’t he even a little worried about his wife? But why should he have been worried? They were both away on separate business trips. That was how they lived. Did I believe that a husband and wife had to talk every single night?
Besides which, I’d woken him. Lots of men can stay half-conscious for a long time after they wake up. Another luxury that single moms can’t afford.
Emily didn’t return that night. I didn’t call Sean back, and once more I pretended that everything was all right. A normal evening with the kids. Nicky cried, on and off. I let the boys climb into my bed and watch cartoons on TV until it was time for them to go to sleep. I pushed the bad stuff to the back of my mind, which is something moms learn to do. I just had to be patient. Give it a day. There was nothing to do but wait.
Emily still hadn’t returned by the next evening when Sean got back from England. He phoned me from the airport. Now he sounded nervous too. He dropped his stuff at home, where he must have hoped (or feared!) to find Emily. Then he drove straight to my house.
As soon as Nicky heard his dad’s voice, he came flying out of Miles’s room. He flung his arms around his father. Sean picked his son up and kissed him and hugged him against his chest.
Somehow Sean’s being in my house, holding his frightened but brave little boy, made my watery fears turn to solid ice.
This is real. My friend has disappeared.
Moms everywhere, please help.
Love,
Stephanie
8
Stephanie
Everyone has secrets, my mother used to say. Not a great thing to tell a daughter you want to grow up into a healthy person who can have healthy relationships with other healthy people. But Mom certainly had her reasons.
Four days after my father passed away, when I was eighteen, a stranger knocked on our door. My mother looked out the window and said, “Look, Stephanie! It’s your father.”
I’d heard the expression “crazy with grief,” but Mom was perfectly sane. Of course, she was heartbroken about my dad. They’d loved each other very much. At least as far as I knew.
Maybe neither of us really believed that Dad was gone. He’d traveled a lot, so for a while after his heart attack on the golf course near our home in a pleasant suburb of Cincinnati, it seemed as if he might still be on a business trip. He’d been a pharmaceutical company exec who attended conferences and meetings all over the country.
Anyway, what my mother really meant was, “Look. It’s your father when he was twenty-four. The year we got married.”
I looked out the window.
The young man on our doorstep was the groom in my parents’ wedding photo.
I’d never seen him before, yet I felt that I’d been looking at him every day of my life. Actually, I had. I’d lived with him in the framed photograph on the dusty upright piano.
The only difference was that the stranger was wearing jeans and a denim jacket instead of a white tuxedo, and his dark hair was stylishly cut instead of slicked back, Elvis-style, like my dad in the wedding photo.
My mother said, “Ask him in.” He was so good looking I couldn’t stop staring. My dad had been handsome before the traveling and excessive drinking and airport food caught up with him.
Mom told the young man, “Just stand there. Don’t say a word.” She grabbed her wedding photo off the piano and handed it to him. He stared at the photo. He seemed shocked. Then he laughed out loud. We all laughed.
He said, “I guess we can skip the DNA test.”
His name was Chris. He lived in Madison, Wisconsin. My dad was his father. They used to see each other every six months; my dad rerouted his trips so he could come through Wisconsin and visit his other family: Chris’s mom and Chris.
Chris had seen my dad’s obituary in the online version of our local paper. It had shown up in his Google Alert, which made me think that he’d wanted (poor guy!) to keep tabs on my dad. His dad. His mother had died of heart failure, a year before. Of course, Chris wasn’t mentioned in Dad’s obituary, but we were. And we were listed—that is, my dad was listed—in the phone book.
The fact that this hot guy was my half brother took a while to sink in. I still kept expecting him to say that he was a distant cousin who happened to resemble my dad.
There was another weird detail I should add: At that point, I looked almost exactly like my mother when she was around my age. (I still resemble her, though less than I used to.) I looked like her in the wedding photo, and my newfound brother Chris looked like my—our—dad. And there we were, the happy bridal couple, straight off the top of the wedding cake, cloned and reanimated twenty years later. What can I say? It was hot.
I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but I was conscious of holding my body just like Mom in her wedding gown, my elbows tight against my sides and my hands curled at my chest, like chipmunk paws. When I made myself lower my arms and stand like a normal person, I saw Chris glance at my breasts.
Had my mother suspected the truth? Was that why she talked about everyone having secrets? I could never make myself ask, even—especially—after Chris entered our lives.
She invited Chris to sit down at the kitchen table, and she served him a plate of cold cuts left over from my dad’s funeral. We’d ordered way too much, and though the shock of Dad’s death was magnified by the shock of meeting a brand-new brother, the physical fact of Chris sitting in Dad’s seat and calmly eating mortadella made everything seem almost normal. Almost right.
My mother said, “Chris, we’re so sorry for not inviting you to the funeral!”
Why was Mom apologizing? Because she always did, just like women are supposed to. Everything is always our fault! Even though I felt sorry for Mom, I wanted her to shut up.
Chris said, “Gosh, why would you? You didn’t know about me.”
We must all have been thinking that it was Dad’s fault. But it was a little late to blame him.
Chris said, “I’m the one who should apologize.”
“For what?” my mother said.
“For showing up like this,” he said. “And I guess . . . for existing.”
Chris had a beautiful smile. We all laughed again. It was more laughing than Mom and I had done since Dad died.
“Have more,” my mother said, and refilled his plate without waiting for him to answer. I loved watching how he ate, appreciative and voracious.
Would my whole life have been different if my mom hadn’t said it was too late for Chris to start out on the long drive home? If she hadn’t invited him to spend the night?
What happened was going to happen. Chris and I stayed up all night talking. I don’t remember what we talked about. Our lives, our hopes, our fears. Our childhoods, our dreams for the future. What did I have to say for myself? What did
I know? I was eighteen. A kid.
In the morning, Chris took my cell number. The next afternoon, he called. He hadn’t left for Wisconsin. He was staying at a motel not far from our house.
I already had a boyfriend. I’d gone to the senior prom with him not long before. I’d had sex with him a few times. He was the first guy I’d had sex with, and I wondered what all the fuss was about.
I wasn’t thinking about my boyfriend. I was thinking about how fast I could drive to Chris’s motel without getting a ticket.
Chris had told me what room he was staying in. I shivered as I knocked on the door, and I didn’t stop shaking as I walked into his room and shyly kissed him hello and looked for a place to sit. There was a rickety chair beside a desk. His clothes were piled neatly on the chair. We both knew I was going to sit on the bed.
He sat down next to me. The back of his hand grazed my breast.
“Come over here,” he said, though I was already there.
I can still hear him say it, and when I do, I feel breathless and my knees get weak, just like they did then. After that, I understood what sex was supposed to be about. Why people would do anything for it. Die for it. Once I knew, I couldn’t get enough. There was no going back. Chris and I couldn’t stay away from each other. I wanted, I needed to be there: that thrilling, intensely pleasurable, intimate place we could get to, together.
I have to be careful when and where I let myself remember being with Chris. I can’t think about it when I’m in public, certainly not when I’m driving. That same liquid desire runs through me. My eyelids get heavy, sleepy with longing. I close my eyes against the heat, and I feel myself melting into a puddle of pure wanting.
* * *
The night Sean got home from London, I put the boys to bed in Miles’s room. Nicky cried and didn’t want to go to bed because his dad was home. And (no one had to say) because his mom wasn’t. But Sean went in and stayed with him until he fell asleep.
I asked Sean if he wanted a drink.
“I’ve never wanted a drink so badly in my life,” he said. “A strong one. But I don’t think it’s a great idea to be smelling like a brewery when the police come.”
I was relieved when he called the cops. It meant he was taking this seriously. I hadn’t felt it was my place to call and report a missing friend. I’d been waiting for Sean.
I don’t know why they sent the state troopers, who, in our area, mostly do traffic stops. That’s their field of expertise. And the occasional domestic dispute.
How strange that the cops should have been the ones who looked guilty when they walked in. Sergeant Molloy had red hair and a red mustache like an old-school porn star. Officer Blanco’s lipstick (were female cops allowed to wear that much makeup?) was smeared. It crossed my mind that they’d been fooling around in the patrol car when Sean’s call came in.
Maybe that was why they seemed confused. At first they thought I was Sean’s wife, so why had he reported his wife missing? And then they thought that my house was Sean’s house . . . It took a while to get things straight: Sean was the husband, I was the friend. When Sergeant Molloy asked how long Emily had been gone and Sean had to look at me for the answer and I said six days, Sergeant Molloy shrugged, as if to say that his wife—he was wearing a wedding ring—was always taking off for weeks at a time without telling anyone. Officer Blanco gave him a funny look, but the sergeant was staring at Sean, as if he was wondering why Sean needed to ask me how long his wife had been gone. Or why we’d waited so long to report her missing.
“Sorry,” said Sean. “I’m a bit jet-lagged.”
“Been traveling?” asked Sergeant Molloy.
“I was in London,” said Sean.
“Visiting family?” Brilliant deduction, Sherlock. The accent was the tip-off!
“Business,” said Sean.
The troopers exchanged a long look. They’d probably learned in the police academy that the husband is always the first suspect. But they must have missed the class that explained what to do if the husband was on the other side of the Atlantic when the wife went missing.
“Give it another couple days,” said the sergeant. “Maybe she just wanted a little time off. A little holiday from her life.”
“You don’t understand!” I said. “Emily left her son with me! She’d never go away and leave him and not call or get in touch.”
“All the more reason,” said Officer Blanco. “I got three kids, and believe me, there are days when I dream about how sweet it would be to take a break, check into some nice, comfy spa somewhere, and have a little me time.”
I spaced out for a moment, thinking about my blog and about how I heard things like that from moms all the time. But Emily wasn’t like that. How could I make them understand that something was really wrong?
Meanwhile the cops had moved on to asking Sean if he’d tried to contact any of her friends and family.
“I’m her friend,” I said. “Her best friend. I’m the one she would tell if—”
Sergeant Molloy cut me off. “Family? Close relatives?”
“Her mom’s in Detroit,” said Sean. “But I’m sure that Emily wouldn’t have gone there. She and her mother have been estranged for years.”
I was shocked. Emily had led me to believe that she and her mother had a loving—though not particularly close—relationship. Emily had been so sympathetic when I told her about my mom and dad.
“Any idea why?” asked Officer Blanco. What relevance could that possibly have to Emily’s disappearance? They must have assumed that their badges and uniforms gave them license to ask any nosy question they wanted.
“My wife didn’t like to talk about it,” said Sean. “There were problems from the distant past that have never been resolved. Anyway, her poor mum is suffering from dementia. According to my wife, she isn’t even always sure who or where she is. She drifts in and out of reality. She thinks her husband—who’s been dead for a decade—is still alive. If it weren’t for her caretaker . . .”
“Even so,” said Officer Blanco. “People in trouble often head for their childhood home, their first place of safety.”
“I can guarantee you that my wife isn’t there. That was definitely not where she felt safe. And why would my wife be in trouble?”
Was it possible that Sean was lying? Emily never mentioned the fact that her mother was in poor health. The only complaint she’d ever voiced was that her mother hated the birthmark under her eye and had campaigned to have it removed. Emily had resisted—mostly to defy her mother—but the conflict had left her with a lifelong complex about that little dark spot.
And I’d always believed that we told each other everything.
The troopers couldn’t wait to get out of there and write up their report. Or maybe they were just eager to resume making out in the patrol car. They told us to let them know if we heard from Emily, and that the detectives would contact us in a day or two if she still hadn’t turned up. A day or two? Seriously?
The doorbell rang again. It was Sergeant Molloy.
“One more thing,” he said, like Peter Falk in old Columbo reruns. I almost laughed. “I hope you aren’t planning any more trips to Europe in the near future,” he told Sean.
“I’ll be right here,” said Sean coldly. “I mean at my home. Taking care of my son.”
After I heard the patrol car pull out of the driveway, I said, “I guess we’ll be wanting that drink.”
“Definitely,” said Sean.
I poured us each a double bourbon, and we sat at the kitchen table, sipping our drinks, not saying anything. It felt almost pleasant, drinking, not talking, having a man in the house after so long. But then I remembered why Sean was there. And I was terrified all over again.
I said, “Maybe you should call her mother.”
At least we would be doing something. And I wanted to be there when Sean called. Either Emily had left out some important information about her life, or she had lied to Sean. Or Sean had lied to the police. None o
f it made sense. Why would he lie about something like that? Why would she?
“Sure,” he said. “It’s worth a try. At least I can talk to her mum’s caretaker.”
Sean dialed. I wanted to ask him to put the call on speakerphone. But that would have seemed too bizarre.
“Hi, Bernice,” he said. “I do so hate to bother you. But have you heard from Emily, by any chance? Oh, of course. I thought not. No, everything’s fine. I think she’s traveling for the company. And I just got home. Nicky’s fine, he stayed with a friend. I don’t mean to alarm you . . .” There was a silence. Then Sean said, “Sure, I’ll talk to her if she wants. I’m glad to hear she’s having one of her good days.”
Another silence, then, “Good evening, Mrs. Nelson. I hope you’re well. I’m wondering if you might have heard from your daughter?”
Silence.
“Emily. Well, no, I thought so. Do give her my love if you see her. And you take care. Bye-bye.”
There were tears in Sean’s eyes when he hung up. And I felt awful for having been so mean-spirited and suspicious. Whatever mixed feelings I’d had about Sean, Emily was his wife. Nicky’s mom. Sean loved her. And we were in this together.
“Oh, that poor old woman,” said Sean. “She asked me, ‘Daughter? Which daughter?’”
Hearing that, I was almost glad that my mother had died suddenly, mercifully, before I had to watch her disappear in stages.
“What about the family cabin on the lake?” I said. “Up in Michigan. Where you guys went for your birthday. Do you think she might have gone there?”
Sean gave me a swift, searching look, as if he was wondering how I knew about the cabin, as if he didn’t want me knowing about the cabin. Didn’t he remember that I was the one who’d taken care of Nicky when he and Emily stole away for their romantic birthday weekend?
“No way,” he said. “She loved being there. But not alone. Never alone. She was afraid that the place was haunted.”
“Haunted how?” I said.
“I don’t know,” said Sean. “I never asked. Once she said it was full of ghosts.”