Last Seen Leaving

by Caleb Roehrig

  The French doors slammed shut behind him, and silence descended on the patio, the only sound the turbulent movement of the heated water that roiled around our hips. January had turned away from me, her blond hair pasted to the wet skin of her back, her posture stiff and ramrod straight. For a long moment, we simply stood there while I tried desperately to think of something to say. “He didn’t mean it” would be both inadequate and untrue.

  Finally, my girlfriend turned around, her expression a studied blank, and she sank down into the Jacuzzi until the bubbles frothed around her collarbones. Tilting her head back over the lip of the tub, she returned her attention to the stars.

  After a little while, in a thick, small voice, she whispered, “I really wish we could just move to California already.”

  ELEVEN

  “FLYNN?” THE SOUND of my name snapped me back to reality, and I jumped up from the Adirondack chair with a start. Mr. Walker was standing in one of the French doors, his patrician features looking drawn and tired. He wore a white oxford shirt, and his necktie was loosened at the collar. “Why don’t you come inside, son? It’s freezing out.”

  Silently, I assented, following the man into the house. The door closed and locked behind us, and I found myself standing in the morning room, a squared-off space that housed an antique dining table with matching chairs, a nearly wall-to-wall throw rug, and a chandelier made from a wrought iron wagon wheel that threatened to bring down the ceiling supports. The grand room connected through a door to one side, and the keeping room—with its voluptuous armchairs, stone fireplace, and Impressionist art pieces—extended off to the other. I had no idea what the names of the rooms meant; only that the differences were apparently very clear and very important to January’s mother, if to no one else.

  For a terribly awkward moment, Mr. Walker and I simply stood there in silence, listening to a giant wall clock keep score of our discomfort from the keeping room. I didn’t know what to say, wasn’t sure if I owed him my condolences or if it was even appropriate; further, I was afraid to hear one more person assume the worst, out loud, about the discovery that had been made by the search team—even myself.

  Self-consciously, Mr. Walker placed a wide hand on my shoulder and, nodding as if we had already shared a Deep Understanding, said, “Thank you for coming today, Flynn. It meant a lot. To both of us.” I mumbled something in reply, and stared at the shining surface of the nearby table. I could see my own reflection in the gleaming wood, my face warped and elongated. “I … it’s hard to believe that … well, it’s just … awful,” he continued, his voice sounding exhausted and uncertain. For the first time, possibly ever, January’s stepdad seemed to be at a loss for exactly the right thing to say, and I could smell alcohol on his breath despite the fact that it was only the afternoon. “Mrs. Walker … Tammy is taking it pretty hard.”

  I mumbled a reply, scarcely able to imagine what Tammy must be going through, as I flashed on the bloody sweatshirt and its kite tail of twisted duct tape.

  “She asked for you,” Mr. Walker added, and I glanced up in surprise. His expression was both grave and removed at the same time, someone hearing a sad story that had nothing to do with him. “I would appreciate it if you’d talk with her a little. I think … I think it might make a difference.”

  I had no idea what this could possibly mean, but I nodded anyway, and Mr. Walker led me to the mahogany door that marked the entrance of the grand room. It was a spacious den that rose up two stories, one wall composed entirely of bowed glass windows that let in a flood of natural light and allowed a view of the pool, the gazebo, and the grassy fields that undulated off to the distant trees. A second stone fireplace dominated another wall, and above it hung a massive portrait of some whiskered military commander from the seventeenth century—probably an ancestral Walker. A third wall was open space, an unobstructed passage into the central hallway, where a double staircase swooped gracefully up to the second floor.

  Eddie Sward leaned over an oak desk in a corner of the room, speaking forcefully into his cell phone; when he saw me he scowled unhappily but didn’t miss a beat of his one-sided conversation. Slouched forward on an overstuffed sofa upholstered in creamy beige fabric, January’s mother had her face buried in her hands. On the low table before her sat a half-empty tumbler of scotch.

  As Mr. Walker shut the door behind us, he cleared his throat. “Tammy? Flynn is here.”

  Mrs. Walker looked up with a jerk, her eyes swollen and rimmed with red, and when she saw me she attempted a smile that fluttered like a leaf about to blow away in a stiff breeze. “Flynn.”

  She reached both arms out to me, and I moved forward to take them, sinking onto the sofa at her side. Her hands were cold, her grip viselike and desperate, and her once-precise coif of white-blond hair was a bristling mess. She looked like she’d aged a hundred years since the morning, and in her narrow, haggard face, I tried to find traces of the warm, scatterbrained woman I’d met when January and I first became friends. It was hard to believe she was even the same person.

  “I d-don’t—” I started to say, but just like that my chest ballooned, my throat squeezed shut, and the words stumbled out in a pitiful squeak as I began to cry. Tammy yanked me against her, smashing my face into her shoulder, and held on to me like we were on a plane spiraling into the Atlantic.

  “What happened?” January’s mother rasped plaintively in my ear, her voice a herky-jerky whine through the thickness in her own throat. “What happened to my baby? What happened to our precious girl?”

  Her chin dug sharply into my shoulder as she began to sob, great, racking cries that wrenched her entire body, her fingers buried into my back so fiercely it was like she was trying to reach past my rib cage to my heart. After a moment, Mr. Walker intervened, prying us apart and placing Mrs. Walker’s drink into her hand.

  “Try to breathe, sweetheart.” He guided the drink to Tammy’s lips, and she swallowed a mouthful of booze, choking and then gasping for air. She slumped back against the cushions, and Mr. Walker set the glass on the table again.

  “Why is this happening?” Tammy moaned at last, staring out the towering windows at the magnificent view. Her hand found mine, and she turned to me with glazed, forlorn eyes. “Why my baby? It isn’t fair!”

  “I don’t know why,” I whispered.

  She let out an exhausted breath, squeezing my hand so hard I thought the setting of her baroque diamond ring was going to draw blood, and tremulously averred, “All I’ve ever wanted was for her to be happy. That’s all a parent ever wants. It’s the only thing. You … you have this perfect, little, tiny person in your hands, and you say, I will never let anyone hurt you, I will never let you be sad, I will do anything in my power to make you happy. And then…” She shrugged, then shuddered, and then coughed violently. “I don’t understand. I just … don’t.”

  “We don’t know anything for sure yet,” Mr. Walker pointed out with automatic diplomacy, although even I could tell his heart wasn’t in it. “Try to remember that.”

  “It was so hard when her father walked out on us.” Tammy ignored him, speaking listlessly to the windows. “I was young and alone and scared, and it was such a struggle. The sleepless nights, the double shifts, the sacrifices … it took everything I had in me to hold us together, to give her the best life. And now … this. It feels like a punishment! What did I do to deserve this? Why is this happening?”

  An uncharitable shadow passed across my sympathy for Tammy Walker as I watched her lay effortless claim to center stage in the unfolding drama—a move no less disappointing for its familiarity. I couldn’t count the number of times her skirmishes with January had ended with the tearfully self-involved demand, Why are you doing this to me?—as if the girl’s every quasi-insubordinate act were part of some grandiose revenge plot against her mother, rather than a simple expression of her own independence.

  “It isn’t your fault, Tams.” Mr. Walker sounded exhausted. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”r />
  Narrowing her eyes at her husband through a cloud of tears and alcohol, Mrs. Walker snapped, “She hated it here.”

  “That’s not your fault, either,” Mr. Walker returned, a little more firmly, “and it isn’t the reason she . . the reason for … for any of this.”

  “I wanted her to be happy, and now she’s—” Tammy choked on the end of her statement and shuddered, unwilling or unable to finish the thought. “She hated this house, she hated her school, she hated me … and you tell me that I didn’t do anything wrong?”

  “All teenagers resent their parents,” Mr. Walker returned shortly, his eyebrows drawing together. “It doesn’t mean anything! I’m sure January knew—knows how lucky she is.” His gaze turned to me, and I finally understood the real reason I’d been summoned into the house. “Isn’t that right, Flynn?”

  He wanted me to tell Tammy that January’s anger was just a by-product of meaningless, pop-psych-approved Teen Rebelliousness, and that—deep down—she was truly appreciative of all the unstoppable changes overtaking her life. Maybe I didn’t entirely get why my ex-girlfriend loathed this mansion and her gorgeous new school so much, but the fact was that I didn’t have to spend any more time in them than I wanted to. No one had forced me to move and leave my friends behind; no one had demanded my gratitude for making peremptory decisions about the way I would live my life, and no one had treated me like my opinions on the subject were irrelevant obstructions. I couldn’t pretend that January hadn’t been filled with legitimate resentment, because she had.

  Lucky for me, I didn’t have to reply. Savagely, Mrs. Walker hissed, “She wasn’t all teenagers, she was my daughter! My little girl! And she hated it here!”

  “She was difficult!” Mr. Walker finally snapped in return, slipping firmly into the past tense while grabbing his own glass of scotch from the desk, where Eddie was still jabbering into his cell phone. “There was no making her happy, because she didn’t want to be happy! I don’t see why you can’t grasp that.” He guzzled what was in his tumbler and then immediately refilled it, booze sloshing out of a bottle of Glenmorangie. “Nothing you did would ever be good enough, because she didn’t want it to be.”

  “As if you know anything about her!” Tammy fired back, rings clacking against her own glass as she picked it up with her free hand, amber liquid nearly spilling over the side when she thrust it into the air at her husband. “You never even tried! She was just an object to you. Neither one of you made any effort—I had to do all the work.” She turned to me then, her eyes almost manic. “I did all the work. Every peace that had to be brokered in this house fell on my shoulders, and not just the ones with January, either. Ask him about his criminal of a son! They’re bribing him to stay out of trouble while the campaign is on, and he’s still nearly impossible to control—”

  “Tammy, calm down,” Mr. Walker ordered through gritted teeth.

  “Jonathan’s never even here,” Mrs. Walker continued acidly, still keeping her focus on me, even if her words were obviously for her husband’s benefit. “Ask him where he was the night my baby didn’t come home! The night I needed him! The night I spent all alone, sick to my stomach, until the sun came up and my daughter was missing and I finally had to call the police all by myself!”

  “I have already apologized a thousand times for that!” Mr. Walker slammed his glass back down on the desk, making framed photos, campaign buttons, and other detritus jump with the impact. “I had drinks with some boosters and couldn’t drive home, so I got a hotel room! I won’t be made to feel guilty about it anymore!”

  “That or anything else,” Tammy retorted cryptically. Before Mr. Walker could respond, though, Eddie intervened.

  Covering the phone with his hand, the campaign manager stated, “John, we really need to put together an official statement about this. Fritz is practically drowning in calls right now.”

  “I already gave a statement to the press this afternoon,” Mr. Walker snapped.

  “It’s not good enough.” Eddie was impatient. “You know what these situations are like; they need more, something substantial.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Eddie!” Mr. Walker finally exploded. “They just found her clothes two hours ago! Can’t we take a day to process before we start planning press conferences?”

  “Not a week out from the election, you can’t,” Eddie replied bluntly. “You disappear now and voters start to wonder whether you can handle the pressures of the job.”

  “Yes, you certainly don’t want to disappoint your voters, Jonathan,” Tammy intoned frigidly, one finger circling the rim of her glass. Her husband eyeballed her for a moment before seizing his campaign manager by the shoulder and dragging him out of the room.

  “Not in here, at the very least,” he muttered brusquely. As the pair disappeared around the curving staircases, their dress shoes clacking loudly against the marble tiles, Tammy tossed back the remnants of her drink.

  The footsteps died out immediately, and I suspected the men had disappeared into the carpeted library that opened off the foyer on the other side of the stairs; perforce, however, my attentions were now occupied by January’s mother. Returning her tumbler to the coffee table with almost delicate motions, she placed her hand on the side of my face and smiled with muzzy fondness. “You’re such a good boy, Flynn. You made my daughter happy.”

  It wasn’t true, and I knew it. Guiltily, I mumbled, “I tried, Mrs. Walker.”

  “Call me Tammy,” she implored. I always felt weird calling adults by their first names, but January’s mother had insisted upon it at first, saying it made her feel young. Then, after she’d married Mr. Walker, she suddenly had to be called “Mrs. Walker” all the time, and I wondered what that had made her feel. Important, I suspect. Her rings were cold and hard against my cheek as she said, “You were about the only thing that still made her happy, you know.”

  Shame muddled my insides, and I looked down. “I think … I’m sure she—”

  “Do you remember that night you came over to the condo and the three of us made cookies?” Tammy apparently hadn’t heard me. “It was before you two were ‘official,’ but even back then you were all she talked about.” She gave me a sly, maternal smile, and I felt myself blush. “We were all out of eggs, and January suggested we use peanut butter instead, remember? And everything stuck together, and the cookies came out like charcoal briquettes, and I nearly burned that damned condo to the ground when the third batch burst into flames in the oven, but you kept cracking all those jokes and I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard in my life.” Tears welled in her eyes and she swiped at them with a long, slim finger. “January was walking two feet off the ground for a week after that, she was so charmed by you.”

  “I remember that night.” I smiled in spite of myself.

  “Life was such a mess back then,” Tammy said in a dreamy, agonized way. “It was a constant battle every day, trying to keep us afloat, trying to keep us alive. Jonathan was the best thing that happened to either of us in a long, long time.” She gave me an apologetic look. “He really is a good man—an important man. He’s done so much for us. I just don’t understand; how could she be happy when things were so awful, and so … angry and destructive when they were finally going just right?”

  January and her mother had competing ideas of perfection, of course, but I didn’t think it was the right time to explain that to her. So, instead, I offered, “Sometimes it’s just hard to deal when your life changes so much overnight. Even if it seems like it’s changing for the better.”

  “I’m glad she had you, Flynn.” Tammy beamed at me, her expression pitiful, and she clasped both my hands in hers again. “I’m so glad she had you, at least.”

  Again, it was like a knife in my gut. I loved January—honestly loved her—but I hadn’t made her happy. And it hadn’t been the kind of love she’d wanted, or the kind she’d had the right to expect from a boyfriend. There had been so much unsaid between us, and the words were an albatros
s around my neck as I looked at the expression on her mother’s face. Finally, I said, “I’m the lucky one.”

  “Tell me about her,” Tammy begged suddenly, her voice a broken whisper. “Tell me about January.”

  Tell me about California, okay?

  I took a breath. “For our two-month anniversary, we planned out this big ‘perfect date’ evening.” It was a story Tammy had to have heard a million times before, but she listened quietly anyway, a poignant look of grateful expectation on her face as I continued. “We rented a limo, and we made reservations at this fancy restaurant on Main Street, and January’s favorite indie band—the Disasters—was doing a show at this place downtown. We got all dressed up, like for homecoming or something, and we couldn’t stop talking about how awesome it was gonna be. And then the limo didn’t show up.

  “I called them, like, a zillion times, but the phone just rang and rang and no one ever answered, and eventually we realized that they weren’t coming, and we ended up having to walk six blocks to the bus stop—all dressed up—and take this stinky, death-trap bus downtown.” Tammy chuckled at the image, and I did, too, remembering the crazy old woman with facial warts and filthy hair who’d sat across from us the entire trip, telling January, You look just like I did when I was your age! “Anyway, by the time we got there, we were so late the restaurant had given away our table, and we figured maybe we’d just eat at the bar where the concert was going to be … only we didn’t even get in to the concert because our fake—um, I mean, because we looked too young.

  “So, our so-called perfect date is completely falling apart, and I’m starting to get really upset, but January won’t give up. She leads me to this dirty little parking lot in back of the bar, where we find the band in the middle of unloading for their show. Without even stopping to think, January walks right up to them, introduces herself, and tells them that they’re her favorite band in the world, and it’s her birthday, but they won’t let us into the show—and then she tells them about the limo and the bus and dinner and by the time she’s done talking, they’re pulling out acoustic guitars, and they do January’s favorite song for us right there on the spot.