“And it’s always the same?”
“I’m little. A little kid. And it always starts the same way, above the bridge.”
“The bridge?”
She nodded. “There’s this bridge, down below me. It’s a real bridge. I’ve seen it. But I’m, like, floating above it. And I remember these dancing shadows, all curvy, moving around like the hands of a clock. And then I’m in the dark, and there’s water everywhere—”
Melissa gasped, a reflex. Christensen remembered a long-ago, late-fall afternoon picnic when Molly dared him to jump from a high rock into West Virginia’s Cheat Lake. He felt like he’d landed in a cold fist that squeezed the breath from him—that kind of gasp. He wondered again about his daughter’s life before adoption, five years that were mostly a puzzle to him. The few pieces he had came from his brother-in-law, who as an American diplomat during the Reagan years was able to arrange her expedited adoption through a Buenos Aires orphanage. But this wasn’t the first time Melissa had described strange and disturbing images of early childhood—scary strangers, angry voices, desperate adults.
“You’re alone?” he asked.
“No. There’s people—I don’t know them. They’re talking, yelling, but I can’t understand what they’re saying. And a baby—a tiny little baby—it’s crying. But mostly it’s just the cold and dark and I can’t breathe.”
Melissa finally opened her eyes. She was still breathing fast, but during the next minute her respiration slowed. A minute after that, Christensen gave her hand an encouraging squeeze.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m living someone else’s life,” she said.
“How so?”
“There’s things I can’t make sense of, things that don’t fit.”
Christensen was all too familiar with the psychological condition known as confabulation—when someone creates a false narrative of their past as a subconscious way of dealing with a contemporary trauma too painful to confront on a conscious level. Everyone did it from time to time; some of his clients made it a way of life. With his daughter, he chanced a calculated question.
“Do you want everything to fit?”
Melissa shrugged. “Sometimes.”
He took another chance. “Have you been taking your meds?”
She looked away.
“It’s just, you’ve been so down these past couple weeks, ’Lis. I can see the change in you. What do you think is going on?”
She sipped the ice water and set the cup on the nightstand beside her bed. The room was growing warm as the morning sun angled through the room’s narrow window. Melissa studied the parallelogram of light that was inching across the floor, and then looked him in the eye.
“I’m pregnant,” she said, and Christensen waited as long as he could before he looked away.
Chapter 5
When it was over, after she’d poured out her anger and fears for nearly two hours, after she’d expressed so eloquently the colliding emotions of an adopted child facing an unwanted pregnancy, Melissa simply fell asleep. Christensen had let her vent and then watched her drift away, trying to remember what life was like before last night.
He stepped through the door into the hospital corridor, surprised to find Carole cross-legged and leaning against the opposite wall. A sleepless night showed in the dark patches beneath her eyes, but fatigue had not dimmed his older sister’s personal sheen—every hair in place, posture perfect, even her casual clothing custom fitted to her gym-cut size six. There was something almost pathological about the image of success and control she’d cultivated since childhood, but he was happy to see her. He didn’t talk easily to many people; he was a listener by nature and profession. But he couldn’t wait to talk this out with Carole.
“You’re still here?” He reached down and pulled her to her feet. They ended up in a spontaneous hug.
“Just me. Michael had to leave.”
“New York?”
Carole shook her head. “He’ll go later this week. Said he had to meet somebody, but he should be back soon.” She cocked her head toward the door into Melissa’s room. “How’s she doing?”
“Hard to say. Asleep for now.”
Carole nodded. “You look like hell.”
“You look like Martha Stewart.”
“You need bad hospital coffee, lots of it.”
She cupped his elbow and steered him past the nurse station, toward the elevators. “Grabbing some breakfast,” Carole explained to the woman in charge. “She’s sleeping.”
Christensen stopped and scribbled his cell phone number on the back of a business card for his private counseling office. “We’ll be in the cafeteria if you need us.” He handed the card to the nurse.
The nurse smiled and clipped the card to Melissa’s chart. “We’re checking her every fifteen minutes. She’ll be fine.”
Christensen was stepping onto the elevator when the implication sunk in: His daughter was on suicide watch. He leaned his head against the elevator wall as it dropped to the third-floor cafeteria.
“It’s Monday?” he asked.
Carole nodded.
“Rosemary chicken.”
How many hours had he spent eating or drinking coffee there in the months after Molly’s accident, waiting for her damaged brain to flicker? He knew the daily specials by heart.
His sister stared until the elevator doors rumbled open. “You’ve had a rough night, so I’m going to pretend that made sense.”
They turned left off the elevator, then right onto the cafeteria corridor. They were met there by the rustic scent of oven-roasted rosemary chicken, hospital-cafeteria style. Carole stopped and sniffed. “How’d you—” Then she realized. She pulled him into another hug and held him a long time, scratching the center of his back the way she used to do when he was a kid.
“She’s pregnant,” Christensen whispered.
Carole’s hand stopped suddenly, then resumed its slow track along his spine.
“Well, shit,” she said.
“Ten weeks. She’s been seeing some guy at work. It’s over already.”
“Married?”
“Bingo.”
Carole pulled away. “Poor kid. That explains a lot.”
Christensen shrugged. “I’m sure that’s a lot of it. She’s so conflicted right now. Not about this relationship or whatever it was, but about the baby. She didn’t plan it, obviously, but with her history—”
“Oh God, yes,” Carole said. “Can you imagine the pressure? Men are swine, by the way.”
He smiled, grateful for his sister’s irreverence. “There’s some other stuff, too. Can’t tell if it’s relevant, but I’m guessing this thing is more complicated than we know at this point. I’m not even sure the pregnancy explains what happened last night.”
“More complicated?”
They moved along the corridor arm in arm, not talking, until they reached the entrance to the cafeteria. Christensen grabbed two trays and handed one to his sister. “There’s so much about her I don’t know. Still.”
“Pre-adoption, you mean?”
He nodded, moving toward the coffee spigot. “Those first five years are so—a blank slate, really—and she’s been having these dreams. Or flashbacks. Hard to tell at this point what they are, but she’s convinced they’re early childhood memories.”
Carole drew a steaming cup of pale coffee. It looked like someone had dipped a brown crayon in hot water. “Pregnancy does that, or so I’ve heard. Weird dreams. Water dreams.”
Christensen released the spigot, his cup only part full, and turned to his sister. “Really? Water dreams?”
Carole tore two sugar packets and dumped their contents into her cup. “Secondhand information, you understand,” she said. “But I’ve had friends who—”
“That’s common with pregnancy?”
“I’m not exactly an expert, sport, what with my lifelong addiction to birth control pills. But I’ve heard it more than once. Maybe it’s a folktale.”
Chr
istensen filled his cup and stared at its pale contents. His hopes for decent coffee dashed, he dumped the brownish water down the drain and opted for a Coke. He seldom drank the stuff, but at least it offered guaranteed caffeine.
“So, the fetus is OK? Melissa lost a lot of blood.”
A strange wash of emotions flooded Christensen. Remembered grief about the night before. Guilt. Depression. And, mixed in, an unexpected concern for an unborn child he didn’t know about just two hours before—his grandchild—whose existence was going to complicate their lives for a long time no matter how Melissa decided to handle it.
“I hadn’t even thought of that,” he said.
“Her doctors should know, Jim. If she’s going to carry the pregnancy through to term, they’ll want to make sure the baby’s OK.”
For years, Christensen’s anxiety chart had included only two names: Melissa and Annie. He was all they had after Molly died; the pressure of that gave him nightmares of his own. He’d willingly added Taylor after he and Brenna got serious. But now there was this other, this unknown thing exerting an undeniable pull—not there but, somehow, there.
Her doctors should know.
“Something else you should consider,” his sister said. “Genetic testing. Melissa can get blood drawn while she’s here, and probably get the results before she has to make a decision. Poor kid’s got no family medical history to go on.”
Christensen set his Coke on his sister’s cafeteria tray and fished a ten from his pants pocket. “Go ahead and sit,” he said, pressing the money into her hand. He slid his tray beneath hers and kissed her forehead. “Be right back.”
Chapter 6
Cobras & Conquistadors was a tapas bar on one of Oakland’s side streets, the latest addition to the city’s never-ending parade of hipper-than-thou ethnic restaurants. Dorsey had only been there once, but recently. It was the first name that came to mind when Ramon Guerra asked him where near the hospital they should meet. He hoped it was open for lunch.
Dorsey maneuvered his bulk through the front door with the bumping clumsiness of a man who needed sleep. He’d been in the same clothes for more than twenty-four hours, the same suit he was wearing yesterday when he saw Guerra on the bridge. Souring sweat stained the armpits of his white linen shirt, so he’d put the jacket on and intended to wear it until he could change. He’d reknotted his tie in his car’s rearview mirror.
“Michael Dorsey!” the hostess said. “Oh my God!”
He flushed as his hopes for anonymity evaporated. He glanced around the blonde wood interior to see if anyone had heard.
“Geez, you look just like the billboards!”
“Only bigger, right?”
Her hand shot up to her mouth as she suppressed a laugh. “Yep, it’s you.” She raised her hand as if during a roll call. “Longtime listener.”
“Thank you.”
The hostess scanned her reservation book.
“You won’t find me there,” Dorsey interrupted. “I’m meeting someone, a spur-of-the-moment thing. Has he arrived?”
“A gentleman with an accent?”
“He’s here, then?”
She motioned across the crowded restaurant. “Lunch is pretty busy, but we had a table in the back, one of the private rooms. It wasn’t reserved, so I just snuck him in there.”
“Sounds great.”
He ignored the eyes following him across the restaurant as she led him through the crowd. Pittsburgh was starved for media celebrities, especially since Mister Rogers died two years before. The hostess paused at an open door and stepped to one side.
Guerra was alone, a stemmed glass of red wine centered perfectly in front of him. He was motionless, but seemed to be pressing the base of the glass to the tabletop with the fingertips of both hands. The skin beneath Guerra’s fingernails was dark, as though he’d been working on his car when the lunch invitation came. He smiled as Dorsey entered and offered a hand in greeting.
“Twice in twenty-four hours, Michael.”
Dorsey pulled a chair away from the table and eased himself into it. “Appreciate you coming, Ramon.”
Guerra sipped the wine, moving it slowly around his mouth before swallowing. “There was worry in your voice, my friend. How could I not?”
“Hell of a night,” Dorsey said.
Guerra waited. The small room was dim, muting the effect of his startling eyes. Despite that, or maybe because of it, Dorsey got a rare glimpse at the emotion behind his expression. Guerra had the wary look of someone expecting bad news.
The table was already set with two glasses of water. Dorsey grabbed the closest one and drank almost all of it, suddenly aware of his thirst. He only stopped because the ice in the glass collapsed and crumbled into his lap. “It’s Melissa,” he said, brushing the cubes onto the floor.
“The girl?”
Dorsey dabbed at his mouth with a linen napkin. “I told you I was headed to their place for dinner last night, right? For dinner with my brother-in-law’s family?”
“Her father, yes. I’ve forgotten his name.”
“Jim Christensen,” Dorsey said. “Psychologist. Good guy. Long story short, Melissa slips away from the table. She’s gone for maybe thirty minutes. When Jim checks on her, he finds her in the upstairs tub with—Ramon, she’d cut one of her wrists wide open.”
One of Guerra’s eyebrows arched, but otherwise his expression didn’t change. “She tried to take her life?”
Dorsey nodded.
“Sad,” Guerra said. “Just twenty-seven, you said?”
“She’s never been an easy one, Ramon. Got a bit of her mother in her, and it gave Jim and Molly fits as she was growing up. I’m not sure how he’s done it, but I thought Melissa had settled down these past few years. Now this.”
Guerra swirled his wine, watching it paint the sides of the stemware. He sipped again, but said nothing. It occurred to Dorsey that Guerra was waiting, wondering why, after so many years out of touch, he’d asked him to lunch. To share news of a family trauma?
“Do you believe in signs, Ramon?” he began.
“Signs?”
“Instincts, maybe?”
“Michael,” Guerra said. “It’s not like you to talk around what you wish to say. What is it you tell the callers on your show? ‘There’s but one rule here—be clear.’”
A waitress arrived, refilled both water glasses, presented menus, and pledged to return shortly with the wine Dorsey ordered. He drained half of his water glass again.
“The thing is, Ramon, I’ve always had pretty fair instincts. The older I get, you know, I’ve just learned to trust those little signals that sometimes pop up along the way. And for various reasons—nothing I can really articulate right now, just a slow accumulation of things out there in the ether—I think we may have a problem.”
Guerra lifted his menu and scanned without purpose. Just as quickly, he set it back down. “We?”
The room suddenly felt smaller and airless as Guerra volleyed back the word.
“Maybe that was a bad choice of words, Ramon.”
Guerra forced a thin smile. “The famous Michael Dorsey? Choosing words unwisely?”
“It happens.”
“Never that I’ve heard, certainly never on the air, my friend. I believe you choose your words with a great deal of thought.” He cocked one eyebrow again. “So tell me why ‘we’ have a problem.”
Dorsey took a moment, pretending, like Guerra, to read the restaurant’s lunch offerings. “Maybe it’s the plane—finding it now—that has me spooked,” he said, cutting his eyes over the top of the menu. “Pulling it up from the river, it’s like they’re pulling up everything. Everything that happened in Argentina. Everything that happened here. Everything that could happen. Does that make sense?”
Guerra shook his head. “I would be lying if I told you I have not had these thoughts as well these past two weeks, since this business with the river. But those times—so long ago. Twenty-two years. Past lives, for you, me, ev
eryone. But the plane?” He smiled, easy this time, not forced. “Junk, Michael. Just junk, buried in mud.”
Since last night, Dorsey had imagined a dozen more complicated possibilities, none of them good. He’d heard Melissa shout the boy’s name over and over in his head, heard it echo like a raven’s call. He weighed his next words like gemstones. “Memories can be buried, too, Ramon. My brother-in-law, Jim, understands that. It’s what he does, working with people’s memories. What happened last night—”
“With the girl, you mean?”
“Melissa, yes. It was frightening, for a lot of reasons. At the hospital, Jim told me details of what happened, things she did, things she said. I heard things, too. Add it all up, read the signs—if my instincts are right, all this news about finding the plane, all the speculation about what happened—”
“You believe she is remembering?”
“Or misremembering,” Dorsey said. “Or piecing together dreams and nightmares and fragments of things she remembers into who knows what. But the timing, with the plane and some of the things she said and did—I just wanted to give you a heads-up. It’s a dangerous time, I think. We want to be very careful.”
The plural “we” again. Dorsey expected Guerra to react, and drained what was left of his water while he waited. Finally, his tablemate leaned forward. “Our history together is untidy, Michael. So please tell me what ‘careful’ means.”
Dorsey offered his most reassuring smile. “No one but us remembers that history, Ramon, or has enough information to put it all together. The guy at State who helped me after the crash is dead. Those connections—all gone, save for us. You trust me. I trust you. End of story.”
“End of story,” Guerra repeated. “Let us hope that is true.”
After a long moment, Guerra lifted the menu and studied it carefully. “So tapas comes to Pittsburgh,” he said. Guerra’s face suddenly brightened. “Michael, look! Under ‘cervezas.’ I cannot believe it. They serve Quilmes!”
The Disappeared Girl Page 3