by Heidi Pitlor
She stayed to the outside of the rotary and passed the prison and the stout farm stands with their pumpkins and gourds all laid out in the sun and eventually the turnoff for Walden Pond.
On the highway to Boston—that wide, flat road, the sky uninterrupted—cars and minivans surrounded her, so many cars and strangers right beside and behind and in front of her. Any one of them could jerk their steering wheel—or she could, just like that, in less than a second.
She entered Fresh Pond, the switchback road between those proud old houses. On Storrow Drive, cars flew through the quick turns as if on a racetrack, and her knuckles tight on the steering wheel, she took the Copley Square exit, which led her inside the motor of the city, businesspeople rushing across streets, clothes stores, bookstores, banks and more banks, cabs, tourist buses meant to look like ducks filled with mothers and fathers and kids quacking at the pedestrians, and the park, more silky, drooping willows, those poignant trees, the swan boats now tied together for the season. The empty boats floated on the water, drifting apart, then knocking back together.
She turned and drove through Chinatown, passed its glossy red facades, the stores and sidewalks throbbing with people, the shiny chickens upside down in the windows. As a child she had once found a dead frog on the seat of her bicycle, the still little thing belly-up to the sun, its rubbery arms and legs splayed out. Leah had left it there. Hannah hollered for her mother. “It’s just a frog,” Leah said, laughing, but Hannah sprinted away down the street, her heart in her stomach. It hadn’t gotten any easier over the years, the sight of a dead animal. She had dropped that lobster into the bubbling pot and slammed on the cover, raced barefoot down the hallway and into the coat closet. She had wedged herself between the winter jackets and snow pants, hiding until her father came to find her, her kind, generous father, who said, “I couldn’t do that as a kid either, sweetie.” She didn’t know anyone else as shaken by the sight of something dead. No one else had had to be exempted from dissecting frogs and fetal pigs in middle school. She had never gone to an open-casket funeral, even her grandparents’. “It’s odd, I know,” she explained to Lovell soon after they met, and he seemed more bemused than anything else. “You’re cute. I loved dissection,” he admitted. “Does that make me odd?”
She fixed her gaze on the rear window of the car ahead of her until she left Chinatown. She drove above the lumpy black water, past the Children’s museum, the Westin, and onto the surprisingly clean and quiet streets of Southie. Hadn’t it been here where, just last week, that elderly woman had been robbed and then beheaded? Or was it Roxbury? But what a naive suburbanite she was—it could have happened in Beacon Hill, for all she remembered.
The daylight glittered around her, and a crumpled paper bag blew past her windshield. She tried to ignore a rising disquiet. If she turned the car around now, she might be only twenty minutes or so late for work, and if she hit traffic, well, no one would mind all that much. She could tell them Janine was home sick, or that Ethan was, or anything, really.
At last she approached the beach and its long, narrow parking lot. Carson itself had been cleaned up, the water now devoid of garbage and broken old boats bobbing on the tide. She sat for a while facing the dark mirror that led to the sky and the tall grass and thought that it was pretty and seemed far from home here. If she turned her face from the buildings behind her, she could have been anywhere—Seattle or Savannah, Portugal or France, Duncannon Beach near her father’s childhood home or even dreamy La Concha in San Sebastián, where she had gone with her family when she was fifteen.
Chapter 13
Janine came home one afternoon bald, only a shadow of stubble across her head. When Lovell first saw her as she walked into the kitchen, he dropped the glass plate he was holding. “Hair,” was all he could say.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s no longer with us.”
He could see the contours of her skull and the dark raised birthmark at her hairline. “You thought about this first?” He reached for the shards of glass on the floor. He had gotten back from the West Coast a few days ago.
“How about ‘It looks good.’ How about ‘That was so brave of you, Janine.’”
“OK, OK, give me a second.”
“Go ahead and say it: I don’t conform to your ideas of what a girl should look like, and that scares the shit out of you.”
“Oh, please, give me a break,” he said. “It’s not like you went out and just bought a boy’s sweater or something.” It occurred to him that Hannah had disappeared a month ago today. “Is this some sort of reaction to what’s happening with Mom?” In movies, at least, girls and women so often shaved their heads—or at least cut their hair—when they were angry or sad.
“You can sound like a total dick when you want to.”
“Janine.” She looked just awful. Was that sexist to think? He couldn’t help it. In her gray sweatshirt and old jeans, she looked like one of those hostile boys who sat on the curb outside the 7-Eleven every day.
“Stop staring at me like I’m some freak.”
“I’m staring at you because you are my daughter and you don’t look like you right now. I’m trying to get used to what you do look like.”
Ethan appeared in the doorway. “What happened to you?” he asked.
“Take a good look, Eth,” Janine said. “Get used to it.”
He glanced over at Lovell, confused.
“Janine Ruby Hall,” Lovell said.
“What?”
He could only think to find the dustpan and broom and clean up the pieces of glass scattered around him.
“Can I touch it?” Ethan asked her.
Janine bent over so that he could run his fingers across the top of her head. “That is sick.”
“He means he likes it,” she said to Lovell.
“I know what he means,” Lovell said, although he hadn’t been so sure.
“Can I do that to my hair?” Ethan asked.
Lovell said, “No.” He almost asked both of them, What would your mother say right now? But he thought better of it and left the kitchen.
In the living room, he ran his eyes past the framed pictures on the mantel. Since Hannah had disappeared, he had avoided looking directly at the one photograph of her, that picture of her kneeling in the garden. Nearly all the stations teased the story with this photograph. It was the first one that he gave them.
Janine had taken the picture. She’d had to write an essay for school about someone she admired. Lovell had been a little surprised that she had chosen Hannah, with all her questions about his work and weather at the time. But Janine had also studied Hannah as she blow-dried her hair in the mornings and dabbed makeup on her face, and asked her why. Why did she think she needed it? How do you shave your legs, how did you meet Dad, how much do you love him? How much do you love me? Because I love you so much, Mom, more than music, more than Ethan. Lovell had melted, listening from the next room. Hannah had certainly earned these moments. She was still toilet training Ethan then, still scrubbing his accidents from the carpet in the hallway, still cooking three different meals for them at dinner, getting up each time Ethan had his night terrors and then finally just past dawn, when the boy typically woke for the day—and Lovell tried to when he could, but without his sleep he was hopeless and could hardly be expected to work the next day. He let her sleep in sometimes, when he could, on weekends. Once, he brought her breakfast in bed on her birthday. But these things that Janine said—“I love you to infinity”—these were the real prizes, and it was good to see Hannah flash a secret smile at him and finally savor the feeling of being adored.
And then, almost overnight, Janine could hardly tolerate her mother anymore.
The picture—Hannah’s widemouthed laugh, her abandon—gave the sense that you and Hannah were in on some hilarious secret. What had Janine said the moment before the shutter clicked? Behind her, a row of sunflowers tilted back and faced the sky. He reached for the frame. Tu. Smiling with her flowers maybe five years ago. Hannah�
��s face, her long hair, those dimples.
Lovell held the photo in one hand as he tidied some books on the coffee table and moved Ethan’s sneakers to the bottom of the stairs. At least Hannah had Ethan. At least one kid still looked up to her. Lovell finally left the photo on the side table near the front door, where it would be seen each time someone stepped inside.
Janine appeared right behind him. “I heard about the scratch marks, you know.”
He froze. “The marks on the pier?”
“What, did you think we wouldn’t find out?”
“I don’t know what I’m thinking anymore. I guess I was trying to protect you.”
“Well, you should stop doing that.” Her disdain for him was even more apparent without any hair to obscure it.
“We are not in some TV show here. This is real life. This is your mother. You’re allowed to be sad sometimes. You don’t always have to be this tower of strength, this warrior princess, you know?”
“Warrior Princess?” she snorted. “What, like Xena? I don’t remember her ever shaving her fucking head.”
“You know what I goddamned mean. Instead of being pissed off at me, maybe stop and have a good cry once in a while.” He looked over at her. He himself had yet to cry in front of them. Had he ever?
“Don’t tell me what to feel,” she said, but something in her face sank a little.
“Listen,” he began. “There could be plenty of explanations for those marks.”
“Right.”
“We don’t know everything yet. We don’t. It makes no sense to panic before we have all the answers.”
“I so disagree.”
He looked at her eyes. “You’re not going to tell Ethan.”
“Don’t you think he should hear it from us and not someone else?”
He sighed. “Maybe.”
“Dad,” she said, “what is going on here? I’m just going to come out and say it because obviously you’re not going to. Did you do something? To Mom?”
“Jesus. Do you really think that?” he said. “You don’t really think that.”
“I don’t want to think that. Believe me. But you go away and then pull this shit and that night you went ballistic, and I mean, well, all of it, and you’re so fucking stupid, Dad, because if you didn’t do anything wrong, then you really, really, really need to stop acting like you did.”
He stared at her. How did she become this person? When had it happened? Had she always been this wise and bold and thoroughly obnoxious?
“I’m going to go tell Ethan,” she said. “And from then on, you can feel free to become the parent here again.”
Chapter 14
This beach had been the site of so much bad behavior back in college. Why had they come here? Southie was always in the news then, not that she had paid much attention, but she and Doug had been aware of the lingering unrest after the riots and Whitey Bulger and the bodies that kept turning up. Carson was close to BU, sure, but there were plenty of other places they could have gone. Was it the danger itself that drew them? Danger was a sort of drug when she was in college. They were still infallible, not yet responsible for all that much. She had first tried coke here, huddled around a bonfire with Doug and a handful of other guys. She had skinny-dipped with Doug here, made love in this water, which was filthy then. When she told friends where they had gone and what they had done, the look in their eyes was worth it. “Do you have a death wish?” Sophie asked her once.
Hannah now saw an elderly couple walking their dog on the beach. Two women with white-blond hair stood at the water’s edge and watched her lift one foot over the curb and step onto the path that led to the sand. She hugged herself against a bitter breeze. Down a ways, a man sat cross-legged with his chin to his chest. He had his eyes on her too.
Summer was gone. She would probably not step foot on a beach for at least another eight or nine months.
The women walked along the sand. Hannah glanced at her watch. She had to get going. She had to drive the half hour to work; if she left now, she might still be on time.
And if not, well, the girls at the store would easily forgive her. She should have drunk in their respect, their compliments about her new shirt or haircut, her lip gloss. “Can you teach my mom a few things?” Marcy had asked Hannah the other week.
But such words were so often lost on Hannah, and on a bad day they could make her stomach churn, the men in stores who stole glances at her and tentatively asked her the time or where the post office was, the moms at the kids’ schools who fawned over Ethan’s assist during a soccer game or Janine’s viola playing at a school concert or Hannah’s handbag or scarf or sunglasses. Hannah was no better, no smarter or kinder than anyone else. She was not unusually interesting or amusing. She was attractive and it got her things that she did not deserve.
Please, Hannah might have said to Marcy or the men or one of those moms. Please stop.
Please don’t stop. Because without these words, this attention and empty praise, what was there?
Chapter 15
Janine tapped a text into the new cell phone that Lovell had just bought for her to share with Ethan. She had not touched her cereal. Five weeks had passed since Hannah had disappeared. Five weeks and one day.
“I’m going next door after school,” Janine said without looking up. “I’m having dinner with the guys.”
“Again?” Lovell said. “Is Penelope there?”
“No, although she was there last night. She and Jeff and I played the Princess and the Frog. I was the frog and they were two princesses. It was the cutest thing. She had on this pink-and-purple totally frilly dress that she had brought and they were talking in French and I was dying. Stephen took pictures. I kept thinking about how unfair it is that in a lot of places, gay people can’t get married and have families. I mean, what the fuck, what kind of messed-up world is this?”
She had spent nearly every evening that week at the neighbors’ house, every evening except one, a few days ago, when the five of them had gone out for pizza. Jeff had not stopped complaining about everything from the greasy pizza crust to the loud group of old men behind them to the sweat stains on the cook’s T-shirt, which made Janine explode laughing once she saw the shirt for herself. “Ignore Jeff,” Stephen told Lovell. “He forgets that he too is imparfait.” Lovell was more than a little surprised when both Stephen and Jeff let him pick up the bill.
“Why do you have to go there so much?” he asked Janine now. “What if news about Mom comes in?”
“Then walk next door and tell me.”
“We miss you here.” It might not have sounded genuine, but it was. “Jeff can be a little negative, don’t you think?”
Her face changed. “Hey, did I tell you that they are thinking of having a baby?”
“Oh?”
“I might offer to help.” She slipped the cell phone into her pocket.
“You mean as a babysitter?”
“Something like that,” she said, dropping her eyes as she headed out to her bus stop.
An alarm went off inside Lovell. She could not have meant what he was now thinking. Could she? No. She had just turned fifteen. He was losing it.
Ethan sat across the table, lost in The Hobbit, probably unaware of the absence or presence of any of them. These Tolkien books had been the only ones to hold his attention over the past year. Hannah would have wanted to see this, her son sitting and reading a book, Janine next door with some friends, no matter their age or attitudes. Hannah had worried that Janine focused too much on her studies and her viola. She had so few friends—one or two with whom she discussed homework, but no one else. She never got calls from other girls. She skipped the school dances and class outings. Regardless of how many times Lovell tried to reassure Hannah and remind her that many parents wished their children studied or practiced more, she remained unconvinced.
“Maybe it’s her age. Teenagehood is hard,” he tried once.
“She’s always been uninterested in the
other kids.” Hannah eyed him, insinuating something.
Well, yes, he too did not have all that many friends, but he had his colleagues. He stayed in loose contact with his college roommate, as well as a couple of other guys from MIT. But Lovell had her, after all, and the kids, and his parents.
SIX WEEKS AFTER Hannah went missing, Detective Duncan called to tell Lovell that an arm bone—a humerus—had been found on Carson. “We can’t ID it yet. It’s at the lab now. Testing could take a couple months.”
Lovell swallowed his breath. “You can’t ID it.”
“Not yet. Lovell, the case was transferred to Boston Homicide this morning. But it’s just a formality. They’re better equipped for this sort of thing.”
“Oh? Oh.”
“The bone? I should probably tell you that it was a woman’s. But that’s all we know. It could easily be someone else.”
It was as if this man kept holding a torch to Lovell’s face, retracting it, then pushing it closer.
“Hello?”
“I’m here,” Lovell said slowly. “It’s really going to take a couple months to get a match?”
“The testing is slow. The labs are backlogged.” Duncan went on to explain that the Suffolk County DA’s office would assign him a victim witness advocate to give him any more news when it came in and to help him understand it all. “She—or he—will be the next one to call.”
More was said over the phone and then nothing and it was time to hang up. The dial tone droned, and then came an abrupt ringing and the brusque schoolmarm’s command, “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and dial again.”
Lovell reached up to the counter and set the receiver back in its cradle.
Ethan, his dark hair fluffed at the crown of his head, sat at the table drawing a robot, oblivious. Lovell watched him for a moment. He was a beautiful kid. He would be a handsome man someday. Ethan turned to him. “Dad? Who called?”
“No one,” Lovell said. The words came as if from a recording inside him: “It was a friend of your mom’s.”