Left

by Theanna Bischoff

  “It is,” Abby said, and slid the plastic glass away from him, stacked it with her own, disappeared into the kitchen again. “Summer gets her thin hair from you,” she called out. “Your hair’s thin and uneven.” He heard the tap start to run. “Aha, sink’s working!”

  “You think you could do a better job?” Cam challenged.

  Abby returned, wiping her hands on her shorts. “Yeah, I could.”

  Afterwards, he had to admit, she was right, his hair did look better shorter. And, at the end, she’d squatted in front of him, held his face in her hands, stared at him, taking it all in, making sure everything was even. Her fingers vibrated hot against his jawline. Then she let go, and Cam could hear his daughter waking up in the other room. He stood up, brushing the hair, like evidence, from his T-shirt.

  Now Summer lingers at the front door to his house, waiting for Cam to let her in.

  “Your mom said you had a nightmare. What was it about?” Cam asks her. His daughter squints at him, putting one hand to her forehead to shield the sun. They do kind of have similar hair.

  “I didn’t have a nightmare,” says Summer.

  So much for that. “You like spaghetti, right?” says Cam. “With tomato sauce?” He won’t be snobby and call it Marinara.

  But Summer darts ahead of him, making her way inside the house, and doesn’t hear the question.

  NATASHA

  DECEMBER 1988

  Looking over the railing down onto the party, Natasha spies Greg by the dessert table, choosing a Nanaimo bar. She feels like a child sitting in the grass, having discovered a ladybug on her arm, wondering how long she can sit there, holding still, before the wings eventually perk and the ladybug lifts up, into the blue sky, away from her.

  She and Greg are ten months and three days old.

  Natasha has come to Josie’s family’s New Year’s Eve party every year since she met Josie and Jason in the second grade, but this is the first year she brought a boyfriend. She reaches up and touches the thin silver chain with a small, hollow heart pendant at her neck, her Christmas gift from Greg. She loves that he’s chosen to wear the sweater she bought him for Christmas to the party. He looks great in forest green, she thinks, as he takes a bite of his dessert. Her first time at Josie’s family’s annual NYE party, eight years ago, Natasha had come with her mom but not her dad because her parents had had a big fight. Natasha had helped her mother pick a nice red sweater and long black skirt for the party and stuck her arms into all Mom’s pantyhose until she found some without runs. It wasn’t fair that Dad screamed at Mom—Mom hadn’t been feeling good ever since she had surgery for her knee. She still had to take medicine for it. Sometimes Natasha helped her get the medicine from the hiding place in the tampons box and brought her a cup of water to help her swallow. Natasha chose to wear her Christmas dress with the red puffy sleeves. She and Mom matched. Mom told her to get some of the cookies they’d baked earlier in the day from the fridge and put them on a little plate to take to Josie’s house, and then her dad had come in, slammed the front door, went to the bedroom, slammed that door, came back out, slammed another door. Natasha picked shortbread with powdered sugar and some chocolate with peppermint chips and licked the crumbs off her fingers after she put them on the plate. At Josie’s house, the grown-ups let them stay up until midnight, and the grown-ups started counting down ten, nine, eight—and then everybody said, “Happy New Year!” and all the grown-ups kissed their husbands or wives except where was Natasha’s mom? Natasha couldn’t see her.

  Natasha stands at the railing for a moment longer, watching below—look, it’s her boyfriend at the party. Her boyfriend takes a bite of his Nanaimo bar. Her boyfriend picks a Styrofoam cup and moves towards the punch bowl.

  Kathleen had actually had the nerve to ask Natasha if she would stay home this year to babysit Abby, because the sitter they had lined up had decided to go to a party and cancelled last minute. When Natasha complained to Greg, he said they could be alone together at the house and make out. Except no way was Natasha going to skip out on her first annual holiday event with a boyfriend. Instead, she’d brought her little sister with her, let Abby eat too many treats and play with some of Josie’s younger cousins. Then, she’d fed Abby warm milk and tucked her into Josie’s bedroom. The last time Natasha checked, Abby was still asleep, one thumb in her mouth.

  Twenty minutes to the countdown.

  “What are you doing up here?” Jason asks, coming up behind her. Jason has on grey sweatpants and a black T-shirt. Jay had a seizure on the twenty-eighth and dislocated his shoulder—he’d had to go to the hospital for a couple of days while his neurologists reworked his meds. His arm hangs across his chest in a sling.

  “Just checked on Abby,” Natasha says. “She fell asleep in her dress.” She glances at Jason’s sling. “How are you feeling?”

  “Better question. Why are you at this party?” Jason scratches at his sling arm with his opposite hand. “If my brain wasn’t so fucked up, I’d be anywhere but here.” He follows her gaze down to the partygoers. “New boyfriend?”

  Not new, she thinks. Ten months and three days, a long time, almost a year.

  “Hey,” Jay says, “can you do me a favour? Bring me up a plate of snacks. If I go down there, my parents are going to trap me and make me be social.”

  “Okay,” Natasha says. Better get this over with, since the countdown is going to start soon. Greg has left the table. Natasha goes downstairs and plucks goodies off the various trays and assembles a plate for Jay, fills a red plastic glass with punch. She carries the plate back upstairs quickly, but carefully, so as not to spill.

  “Thanks,” Jay says, and bites into a cookie. “I can check on the kid for you if you want.”

  Natasha glances back down the stairs. “Nah, she’s okay. I uh—I hope you’re feeling better.”

  “New meds. So far, so good.” Jason smiles. “You can go, you know. You don’t have to stand here making small talk with me when you have a new boyfriend downstairs to make out with.”

  All boys ever think about is making out. Natasha blushes. “I—”

  Jay jabs her in the hip with his good arm. “I’m kidding.”

  Natasha can’t find Greg, but she finds Josie talking to some older girls she doesn’t recognize on the front steps. Both of the older girls hold lit cigarettes; one has unnatural looking black hair, permed and puffy, and the other has short blonde hair, like Princess Di. She’s noticeably pregnant, her belly a red silk mound protruding from her unzipped winter parka. Natasha wrinkles her nose as the pregnant girl takes a drag and exhales smoke into the cool night air. Josie’s mother pokes her head outside with a tray of cheese cubes on toothpicks. She oohs and ahs over the pregnant girl, gives her belly a little rub. Tells the girls that they should come back in soon, tells them it’s only minutes to midnight.

  “Have you seen Greg?” Natasha asks Josie. What if she misses her first midnight New Year’s Eve kiss? Who are these girls? And the pregnant one—doesn’t she know smoking is bad for the baby? Natasha just saw an ad for this, about “breathing for two,” it’s what the new studies are showing. She’s probably only smoking outside because Josie’s parents made her.

  “I think he went to the bathroom,” Josie says. “Tash, these are my cousins.” Josie goes on to give their names.

  Josie and Jason have so many cousins, Natasha can’t keep track. She says, “hi,” and goes to extend her hand, but both girls kind of wave their cigarettes in the air instead. The pregnant one finally extends her opposite hand and shakes Natasha’s limply, sneers, like who shakes hands these days? Natasha pulls her hands inside the sleeves of her dress to keep them from freezing. “I’m going to go back in.”

  “Your boyfriend is cute,” says the not pregnant one.

  “Thanks,” Natasha says, her hand hovering over the doorknob. Did they not just hear what she said? She doesn’t want to be rude, but she’s going to freeze to death and probably miss her first midnight kiss, all for these
girls she doesn’t even know.

  “Does he work out?” the pregnant one asks, tapping her cigarette and releasing ash onto the front steps.

  Josie chimes in—“He’s a swimmer.”

  The pregnant girl takes one last drag, drops her cigarette to the ground, snuffs it out with her rhinestone-studded high heel. “Hot.”

  These girls can’t be more than five years older than her and Josie. And the pregnant one—where is her husband? Natasha looks at the girl’s hands—no ring. “Um, thanks,” Natasha says, because what do you say to that? She turns the front doorknob.

  “Use a condom,” the non-pregnant one says, smirking.

  Natasha feels herself blush. Her icy fingers fumble with the cold metal knob. Josie giggles.

  “Yeah,” says the pregnant one, reaching into her purse and procuring another cigarette. “Or you’ll end up like me.” She leans in, and the other girl lights the tip with her Zippo.

  Great. Natasha is going to reek of smoke when she kisses Greg at midnight. When she and Greg get pregnant, they’ll be married, and they won’t go partying for New Year’s Eve, they’ll sit at home and watch It’s a Wonderful Life even though Christmas is already over, and Greg will rub her swollen feet and she’ll fall asleep by the fireplace.

  Before she can go back inside, the door opens and it’s Greg! Thank God. “Hey!” he says, and puts his arm around her waist. “Abby woke up and she’s crying.”

  Oh, Abby—not right before the ball drop!

  They head upstairs, Natasha taking the lead, to the bedroom where Abby, her party dress crinkled, her puffy ponytail askew, sits perched next to Jason on the edge of the Josie’s bed.

  To Abby, Jay says, “Cheer up, kid, it’s all good.”

  Natasha can hear counting downstairs. Ten, nine—

  She hates her father, she hates Kathleen, and in this moment, she even hates Abby. Why can’t she be a normal teenager?

  Abby snuffles and Natasha forces herself to go over and pick up her sister. She feels like a robot, Abby heavy in her arms. She hears the cheers downstairs. The moment is gone.

  “There goes another shit year,” Jay says. Clearly he doesn’t care at all about swearing in front of a little girl. “See ya, kid,” he tells Abby, on his way out, and Abby snuffles and wipes her snotty nose on her sleeve, buries her sticky face in Natasha’s shoulder.

  Greg puts his hand on the small of her Natasha’s back, but she cannot see his face. “Happy 1989,” he says.

  GREG

  MAYBE GREG SHOULDN’T HAVE CONFESSED SO MANY DETAILS about Natasha in all those police interviews six years ago. But Reuben kept asking and asking. Kept saying all they needed was that one fact. A single piece of information could give them the insight they needed to crack the case wide open. He’d actually said that, those exact words, “Crack the case wide open,” making him sound like a cheesy, television cop, the kind who solves the mystery, catches the bad guy, all within the span of an hour-long episode, not including commercials. Reuben probably thinks this bullshit post that showed up on the message board is exactly the piece of info he’s been looking for. Even though it’s a complete lie. Greg never touched her. Never.

  He hadn’t even seen the post until he went back into the station—again, voluntarily—and Reuben slid a printed version of it across the table at him. “Anything you want to tell me?” Reuben had sneered.

  Reading the words, Greg had felt his stomach seize. He looked up and met Reuben’s gaze. “I want a lawyer.”

  What if, he had thought so many times, after all the interviews stopped, what if something he said had thrown the investigation off track somewhere? What if all his rambling just made things worse, reinforced their theories? This thought, this regret, plays often during moments like this, moments he can’t numb with work, or TV, or sleep, or meds.

  And now his car has finally crapped out. In the mechanic’s waiting area, Greg pops a stale-tasting honey-flavoured donut hole into his mouth and braces himself for the estimate. He’ll just wait here. When he arrived an hour ago, the mechanic did a quick walk around of Greg’s Chevrolet Craptastic and noted the dented right rear. “You want us to fix this, too? Or just the engine?”

  Greg has held off on having the dent fixed since March 2002, since the night it happened during a snowstorm. That night—or, morning, more accurately—four months before she went missing, Natasha had phoned him at two a.m.. He couldn’t tell if she sounded drunk, or just upset. Or both? “Can you come get me?” she said, “Please?”

  Of course he would go get her. But what was she doing downtown at two a.m. on a Thursday night? And why was she calling him? She’d broken up with him almost a year ago, and had refused all his pleas to give him another shot.

  They both had weird schedules; he could arrange most of his graduate research when he wanted, and she had such irregular shifts. This had created an ideal situation during their relationship—his flexibility allowed him to work around her timetable. They’d joked about getting great seats at movies because they went to matinees; they could get into their favourite restaurants without reservations because they went on weeknights instead of weekends.

  Was she in trouble? Hurt? He’d kill anyone who...

  He was getting ahead of himself. His car’s gas gauge hovered near empty. Unsure which gas stations in the vicinity might be open all night, he pulled his car out of his condo’s underground parkade and into a swell of fresh snow. He drove up the ramp and made a right turn, squinting against the blur of wipers and fog on his windshield.

  Five minutes into the drive, he spotted a gas station. He rolled down his window to see whether the pumps were open. No luck. He put the car in reverse to back out, shoulder-checked. This kind of situation called for a rear wiper, he thought. Then—crunch!

  He quit the ignition and got out of the vehicle, ran around to the back. Sure enough, he’d hit a concrete pillar with his rear right corner. He wiped away mud and snow from the point of impact with his bare hand, Natasha’s voice in his head telling him to be more prepared, to carry gloves in his car, and an emergency kit—blanket, flashlight, granola bars, that kind of thing. He couldn’t fully assess the extent of the damage. He’d probably wasted more gas taking this little diversion, and he still didn’t know whether Tash was even okay.

  The car was still driveable, just dinged up. Back in his vehicle, he inched forward, turned his wheels, and backed out properly, avoiding the post, and pulled onto the main road, hoping for no more roadblocks—literal or figurative. He’d have to get gas once he had Tash safely in the car—she would probably know where the twenty-four-hour gas stations were. If anyone would know, it would be Natasha.

  There she was, standing outside, waiting at the corner she’d identified on the phone. Snow had collected in her dark hair and she had her hands jammed into her coat pockets. She darted forward upon recognizing his car, and he unlocked the passenger door for her. What now? Should he give her a hug?

  “Thanks,” she said, and she sounded a bit stuffed up. But at least she seemed calmer than when she’d initially called him. Her seatbelt made a little click as she did it up.

  “No problem,” he said, and leaned back into his own seat. Awkward! “I’m just glad you’re okay.” But was she? “What happened?”

  “Nothing.” She looked out the passenger window. She turned back towards the dash. “You’re out of gas.” Her cheeks and nose appeared flushed.

  “I know.” Greg nudged the heat up. “I just...is everything okay? When you called, you sounded—”

  “There’s a gas station about two minutes ahead...just turn right at the intersection.”

  Of course she knew where it was. He slowed at the stop sign, and then made the turn as instructed. The snow had started coming down harder as he pulled into the station. He ducked out and filled the tank a quarter, then got back in. “So am I just taking you back to your place? Or did you leave your car somewhere?” Was she okay to drive? Had she been drinking? Why had she called him
instead of just calling a cab? Had it not been for the time, he would have suggested they go grab a coffee, maybe push a little more for her to tell him what happened.

  She sniffled. Smudged some of the fog off the passenger window with her parka sleeve. “Can we just go back to your place?”

  Really? Most of the time, they’d hung out at her place, what with her having a big fancy house and him still renting a condo. But Tash had taken Abby in; they had stayed in touch enough after the breakup for Greg to know about the pregnancy. Abby would be at the house, probably asleep. Okay, so they would go to his place. But then what? When he glanced over, Natasha looked like she was biting back tears. She rubbed one of her eyes, smudging her purple eye makeup.

  “Um, okay,” he’d said, waiting for more. Did she want to talk? Why wouldn’t she just tell him why she’d called? Did she want to get back together? No, she’d been the one who called it off, and Natasha rarely changed her mind.

  They’d driven back to his place, and Natasha said she wanted to take a hot bath. Pretty standard. She often took hot baths before bed, and Greg couldn’t stand the water as hot as she liked it, so he had always sat beside the tub while she lounged, her feet up on the tub’s edge.

  But sitting beside the tub felt too weird. Seeing her naked was off the table, now, right? Greg paced around the condo while Tash bathed, and then she came out already changed into one of his T-shirts, wet hair falling over her shoulders, and she started crying, asked him if he’d hold her. He’d agreed, still waiting for an explanation, and they’d climbed into bed, but she’d cried herself to sleep. And he eventually fell asleep, too, but only after he was sure she was asleep. It felt so good to hold her again. She felt warm, her skin soft from the bath, her bare legs tangled with his. Her breathing was slow and even. She would tell him what had happened in the morning, right? He’d actually slept that night, no nightmares, no migraines. Miracle!