by Jeff Shelby
Elizabeth tugged at the collar of her purple dri-fit shirt. The color looked good on her, complemented her tan skin and blue eyes and the smattering of freckles that had sprouted on her nose since she’d moved back to California. “Hey, did you see the mail on the table?”
I shook my head. “I didn't look.”
“Something for you to sign,” she said, squinting into the sun. “Life insurance, I think. A policy renewal or something? You have to send it back to them.”
I had stopped checking the mail. It was a coping mechanism, a poor one, but there had been a deluge of letters and condolences after Lauren’s death and I couldn’t look at them so Elizabeth had taken over the task. She didn’t say so, but I thought it might be her way of connecting with Lauren, of trying to be a part of her mother’s life even though she had died. She’d missed out on years of knowing who her mother was, in the same way we’d missed out on her life. So she’d dutifully sorted through things, tossing junk mail, reading the letters and cards that arrived, and alerting me to mail that needed my attention. Sometimes I ignored things, and sometimes she would need to prod me to pay bills or fill out forms. It was one of those areas where our roles as child and parent had shifted, and I didn’t know how to feel about that. I wavered somewhere between gratitude and guilt.
“Okay,” I said. I hated that it was a life insurance policy we were discussing—my life insurance policy that I’d finally gotten around to renewing—because it once again reminded me of Lauren.
“And there was a letter from the Corzines.”
My back stiffened. “Oh?” That word, that name, still had the same effect on me, no matter how many times I heard it out loud or in my head.
She nodded. “Just a quick note to see how we’re doing. They mentioned the possibility of a visit…either me coming to Minnesota or them coming here.”
My gut clenched and I forced a neutral expression. “What do you want?
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, it would be nice to see them again, I guess. I…I know you and Mom blamed them for what happened but—”
“We didn’t blame them,” I said.
But we both knew it was a lie. Alex and Valerie Corzine had essentially bought Elizabeth off the black market. Paid cash for her and claimed her as their own. They’d never checked the credentials of the “agency” they worked with, never questioned the story they’d been given about Elizabeth’s true parents. I absolutely held them responsible for ripping apart my family, for destroying my marriage to Lauren, for sending me into a near decade-long obsession of searching for my missing daughter.
Elizabeth didn’t see them that way, though. And after Lauren died, they’d reached out. Tentatively, at first. A card. Flowers. Elizabeth had asked if she could write back. And then, later, if she could call them. My head and heart had screamed no but my mouth said yes. Because I’d already deprived her of her mother; the last thing I wanted to do was offer more pain and heartache, and keeping her from two people who had loved her—I’d grudgingly give the Corzines that—seemed like the worst thing to do when she was hurting.
“Anyway,” she said, bringing me back to the present. “They asked about a visit. I thought maybe we could look at the calendar and see about the end of this month? Before school starts back up?”
I swallowed the “no” I wanted to scream and nodded instead. But even I knew that it came off with hesitation.
“And if it doesn’t work out, it’s fine,” she said quickly. “I don’t need to see them. I really don’t.”
Guilt stabbed at me. “You should see them. If you want to.” The words killed me to say, but I meant them. If she needed to see the people who had filled the roles of parents for a good chunk of her formative years, then she should. I could deal with it. I could try.
“We can talk about it later,” she said.
“Okay.” I hated the feeling of relief that washed over me. I tried to switch gears. “Didn't mean to snap about the phone.”
“What? They didn’t call, they sent a letter.”
I realized I was jumping around, both in my head and in our conversation, and Elizabeth had no idea what I was talking about. But I was desperate to change the subject.
“I know.” When I was still met with a blank stare, I added, “The dolphins. Learning how to text…”
Elizabeth smiled with recognition. “You didn't snap. It's fine.”
“I did,” I said. “But thanks for saying it's fine.”
She shrugged. It was a movement, a tic of hers I’d gotten used to over the last year, and I wondered when it had developed. Sure, everyone shrugged, but Elizabeth’s was different. I could read the pitch of her shoulders, the stiffness of her back. Her shrugs were like a window into her emotions. And this particular shrug was telling me everything really was fine.
“You want to see if Aaron wants to have dinner with us?” I asked, my attempt at furthering the apology and distancing us even further from the conversation we’d just been forced to have.
She shook her head. “He's gone. He's camping.”
“Camping?”
She leaned back on her elbows, her eyes closed as she basked in the sun. A seagull squawked overhead, crying for attention, but she didn’t open them. “Yeah, I guess.”
I nodded even though she couldn’t see me and watched the dog hop the waves again. There were new people on the beach—a couple walking hand-in-hand with a dark-haired toddler, two teen girls holding towels and beach bags, a gray-haired, bespectacled man carrying a sketch book, his free hand shading his eyes as he scanned the beach, searching for something—and the woman had disappeared, a small speck down the beach. I relaxed a little.
“Did he go with his family?” I asked.
“No, with Tim. Just out toward the desert or something.”
I didn’t know Tim but I jumped to the obvious conclusion that he was a friend of Aaron’s. “Things are okay?”
She sighed, eyes still closed. “We're not married, Dad. It's fine.”
When Elizabeth had first asked if she could go on a date with Aaron, I'd instinctively paused, thinking I should consult with her mother. Until I remembered that Lauren couldn't answer that question. So I asked several dumb questions instead. Who he was, where he was from, how she knew him. She'd answered all of them—a classmate. From here. They had history together and he’d run track last year—and since I didn't have a reason to say no, I said yes. He'd come to pick her up and seemed nice enough, but I knew better. I had too when I was his age, and I knew the stuff I’d done. But he'd shaken my hand, called me sir, and looked me in the eye.
Not much to go on, but a good start.
They'd gone to see a movie and to get something to eat, and I’d sat on the back patio, a six-pack of Pacifico on the table next to me. I nursed one beer for each of the three hours Elizabeth was gone, having silent conversations with Lauren in my head. About our daughter and boys and growing up and how the hell I was going to do all of it without her.
I'd seen Aaron only a couple other times, as they spent most of their time at the beach or doing things that didn't require my presence. I didn’t think they were too serious—they only saw each other a couple of times a week over the summer, and Elizabeth was still spending more time with her friends than with him—but I knew that could change in a heartbeat. I tried to give her some space without prying too much, but the overprotective, paranoid father came out of me more often than either of us would have liked. I didn't mind the constant texting and communicating as much as I minded the fact that he might let her down in some way or break her heart. Because first loves were like that. Heartbreak was inevitable. And Elizabeth had already had her fair share of that.
“Glad to hear you didn't run off and elope,” I said.
Her eyes were open now, staring out at the water, and they narrowed. “Funny. As if I would leave without telling you.”
I swallowed. We couldn’t even joke about things without coming back to her kidnapping. It was
this constant presence, like it had been infused into the very air we breathed.
“What are his plans after school?” I asked.
“After we graduate?”
I nodded.
She thought for a moment. “I don't really know. He hasn't really said. Probably college.”
I nodded. “Okay. You thought any more about yours?”
She shrugged. “Not a ton, I guess.”
“It’s August,” I said, trying to keep my voice gentle. “Application process starts in October, right? Have you looked at the Common App?”
“I know. And yes. And the state schools here don’t accept the Common App.”
“So, still schools around here?” I said, trying not to sound too happy about it. “UCSD is still tops on your list?”
Something flickered through her expression. “Well, yeah. I guess.”
“Or somewhere else?” I wondered if she wanted to go to USD and immediately started calculating the cost of a private school education.
“I don't know.” She dragged her index finger through the sand, drawing small lines and whirls. “I've really only lived one other place, so I don’t know what else is out there.”
My gut pinched. “You mean Minnesota?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I mean, I just sort of looked around up there, just to see what schools were there. I went to the U one time.”
“The U?”
“Of Minnesota,” she explained. “It's super big. They have two campuses, one on either side of the river. We went one year with our sixth grade class, a tour of the engineering building. They showed us this virtual reality lab and some cool robots.”
I stuck my toe in the sand, but I wished I could stick my head in it instead. “So you want to go look there?”
I knew we were behind the curve with colleges. We should have been touring campuses this summer. I should have been helping her make decisions, and forcing her when she dragged her heels, which she was always apt to do when it came to making decisions. But Lauren’s death had kept us stuck in neutral. I didn’t know how to push forward and look toward the future when I’d been socked with another reason to remain stuck in the past.
“I don't know,” she said, finally answering my question. “I haven't decided anything yet. But maybe I should look online or something?”
I nodded and looked away. The thought of her returning to Minnesota—for any reason—made me feel nauseated. But I didn't want to stand in the way of anything she felt she needed to explore, whether it was the people she'd once lived with or someplace she might want to go to school.
I didn't have to like it, though.
“We should probably get going. Get you those onion rings,” I said, changing the subject for what felt like the hundredth time. I patted my mid-section. “My stomach walls are touching, I think.”
“Mom hated onion rings,” Elizabeth said. She flicked sand off of her calf. “She told me that one time when we were having lunch.”
“She did,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about Lauren, but I knew I needed to for Elizabeth’s sake. “She hated nearly anything breaded. The texture bothered her.”
“I remember she said that about fried chicken, too,” she said. “Like if it was the last thing on the planet to eat, she would just eat the planet instead.”
I smiled. That sounded like Lauren. And a little bit like her daughter.
“It's okay that I talk about her, right?” she asked, squinting at me. It was eerie how well she could read me and my thoughts, as if she could sense just how uncomfortable it sometimes was for me to think and talk about her mother. “I mean, it's okay with you?”
I nodded. “Of course. I want you to. Your time with her...it got screwed up. Cut short.” This felt like the understatement of the year. The decade. The century. “So you can talk about her all you like and ask me anything you want about her. Always.” They were hard words to say, but I knew she needed to hear them.
She just nodded and looked out at the ocean, and I wondered if she was feeling as melancholy as I was. She hadn’t seen the woman on the beach who looked like her mother, but she didn’t need to. She had different triggers.
I watched her, her expression solemn, and I wondered if she blamed me for Lauren's death. I wouldn't have faulted her. I still blamed me. Elizabeth had already suffered too many losses in her life, too much trauma for one single teenager, and I didn't blame her for anything she felt.
I just wanted to make sure that she kept feeling, even if it made me uncomfortable or made me think about and talk about things I’d rather avoid.
She'd been tough after Lauren's death, tougher than I'd been. Maybe that's what the abduction and the lies she'd had to live with had done for her. I wasn't sure. She'd had her moments, of course, but she'd cried far less than I had.
I wondered if that meant she was okay or if she was just hiding it from me. It bothered me that I didn’t know, that the time we’d spent apart meant I didn’t know my daughter as well as I could have. As well as I should have.
She stood and brushed more sand from her legs. “You wanna walk to Danny's or go home first?”
I nodded. “We can walk.”
She held out her hand and I took it. She leaned back and pulled me up. Her grip was tight, her fingers wrapped around mine, and I wondered who was helping whom.
Maybe we both were helping each other.
THREE
We were halfway through the onion rings and burgers when I noticed the expression on Elizabeth's face.
She'd been good about keeping her phone out of her hand during the meal, but it had vibrated repeatedly for a minute and she'd sighed, finally picking it up. Her expression had shifted from mild annoyance to confusion to something I couldn't read.
I set down my beer. I should have been drinking water, but I was hot and thirsty and the conversation on the beach had stressed me out. I could force myself to talk about individual issues, but all of them—Lauren, the Corzines, Aaron, college—mashed together? That called for alcohol.
“What's wrong?”
“Huh?” she said, her eyes still on her phone. “Oh, nothing. My texts aren't going through to Aaron.” She set the phone down. “No biggie.”
I picked up my burger. The mayo and ketchup I’d squeezed onto the bun oozed out the side and I licked it. “Might not be service wherever he is. Desert doesn't have the best coverage, depending on where they are.”
“Maybe, I don't know. Oh well.” She grabbed her last onion ring and tore it in half. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Always.”
“Are you going to get a job?”
I swallowed the bite in my mouth and washed it down with the beer and wondered if Mike had somehow managed to get in touch with her. “What?”
She decided which half of the onion ring she wanted and set the other piece back down on the plate. She dragged it through the puddle of ketchup next to her half-eaten burger. “I don't know. Like, a real job, in an office or something like that.”
I set the beer down. “You been talking to Mike?”
She looked at me, puzzled. “What? Mike Lorenzo?”
Her confusion was genuine, which gave me my answer. She’d come up with the question without any prompting from anyone.
She wasn’t asking an unfair question. Since I'd brought her back to California, we'd been caught up in truly getting closure, and I hadn't really worked on anything but that. I hadn't needed to. Lauren made more than enough money as an attorney, and I concentrated on Elizabeth. Getting her set up with school, with therapy appointments, with time for us as a family. Lauren and I had been working on repairing our relationship, too, and the baby had sort of brought us back to the same page. Even after the miscarriage, when we realized we’d be a family of three instead of a family of four, we’d only grown closer. I thought I’d have time to figure everything out, including a job. I wasn't wrong, but I was having to figure out different things now.
Without Lauren.
“Do you want me to get a job?” I asked.
She paused, as if she were considering her words carefully. “I just...I don't know. Don't we need money? Insurance? Things like that?”
“We're okay,” I told her. “You don't need to worry about it.”
She stared at the onion ring in her hand, then popped it into her mouth. “But I sort of do. I mean, that's like normal life stuff and I...I don't see it at home, so I guess I worry about it.”
Normal life. Those words stung a little. Elizabeth hadn’t had a normal life in years. Thinking her parents had died, living with the Corzines, and then the time spent getting her back to me and Lauren. And then…then that had all gone to hell, too. She didn’t know what normal was because normal didn’t exist for her. For either of us.
I sighed. “Okay, that's fair. Your mom had a fairly significant life insurance policy. She also had a retirement account and some investments. Your mom was very smart with money.”
Elizabeth nodded. “And that's all yours now?”
“Ours,” I corrected her. “It's ours. And my plan is for most of it to be yours.”
“Mine?” Her brow furrowed. “Why?”
I thought for a moment. “Because that's what she would've wanted. For college, for whatever. I'm capable of taking care of myself. That money wasn't for me; it was for you.”
She studied the other hunk of onion ring. “I don't need it all. She would've wanted you to do whatever was smart with it.”
I appreciated her saying that, but my plan really was for Lauren's money to go to her. I'd already talked to an attorney about setting up a trust where I could place the bulk of it for her. I'd lived cheaply in the years I'd spent looking for Elizabeth, and while the money I'd earned helping other people wouldn't last forever, I was fine. And there was just something that didn't feel right to me about living off of Lauren's money.
“We're fine,” I said. “Our bills are paid. There is nothing to worry about in that department. You have my word. But to answer your question, yes, I will eventually be getting a job. I'm not sure what or where, but it'll happen.”