by David Bell
“Where do you even live, Erica?”
“I’m in Trudeau. On the west side.”
Michael still held Erica’s phone. He tapped it with his index finger, bringing the photo of the girl back onto the screen.
Yes, she looked like Robyn.
Yes, she could very well be his daughter.
And Michael knew Erica was right that time was critical for a missing child. Everyone knew that.
He handed the phone back to her without meeting her eye.
“Michael,” she said in a pleading tone.
“Go to the end of the driveway,” he said. “Wait there. I’ll be right out.”
chapter
six
Quiet pervaded the first floor of the house.
Michael peeked into the dining room and then the kitchen, seeing no sign of Angela. He saw the dirty dishes he needed to wash. He smelled the remnants of their dinner: grilled onions and peppers, chicken for fajitas. A half-full glass of wine, Angela’s, sat by the refrigerator, the cabernet strangely reminding Michael of blood.
He headed upstairs, his feet brushing the carpet as he moved past the unused bedrooms—one of which, they hoped, could someday become a nursery—and walked toward the entrance of the master.
Angela looked up when Michael came to the doorway. She sat on the bed with her phone in her hand, scrolling through either news or social media. A lamp cast a soft glow on her face, but the set of her jaw was hard.
“Is she gone?” she asked.
“Can I talk to you for a second?”
“So, she’s not gone, is she?” Angela asked.
Angela’s forehead creased with frustration. Her light brown hair was still pulled back, but a strand had worked its way loose and hung alongside her face. She tucked it away, her lips pressed into a tight line. Michael knew she had a lot to say, a lot of questions to ask, but he recognized the restraint she displayed. She excelled at patience, remaining calm in just about any storm, and possessed an inexhaustible ability to wait to hear what other people said before she responded. It made her a good salesperson at work and a good partner at home.
But in that moment, her patience felt spiderlike, a sticky spun web Michael saw no way to avoid tangling himself in.
“I’m going to go with her,” Michael said, “up to Trudeau. Where she lives now.”
He waited. Angela stood up, placed her hands on her hips, her face impassive. “Okay,” she said finally. “Why?”
On his way through the house and up the stairs, Michael spent time rehearsing exactly how he would tell Angela what Erica had told him about her daughter and the possibility he was the child’s father. He had found no good way, and as he stood in the bedroom, facing his wife, the words were slow to come.
He started with the part he knew would elicit Angela’s empathy. As a mother. As a person.
“Apparently, Erica has a daughter,” he said. “And the daughter has been missing since this morning.”
Angela lifted her hand to her mouth. “Oh, no. That’s awful.”
“Right. I can’t imagine. And when someone, a kid, disappears like this, the first forty-eight hours or so are the most crucial. If they want to get the kid back . . . alive.”
The hand fell away from Angela’s mouth, and her eyes narrowed as she processed the news she’d just been told. “Is she married? Why is she here if her daughter is missing? Shouldn’t she be out looking, or else waiting for the kid to come home?”
Michael answered the first question because it was easy to answer. “I don’t know if she’s married. I don’t know anything about that.”
Angela waited, her patience back.
Michael considered telling her something else, leaving out the most damning and painful part of what Erica had told him on the porch.
But he couldn’t lie to her. He just couldn’t.
So he told her.
chapter
seven
Michael gathered his keys, his wallet, and stuffed them into his pockets while Angela hovered behind him.
“She can’t be right, Michael. She can’t just show up here and say you’re the father of her child and then you just believe her. It’s not logical.”
“We were having sex up until the day we separated.”
“I know,” Angela said. “But you used protection, right? You’re smarter than that.”
“The pill. She was on the pill. It’s not perfect.”
“If she was even taking them,” Angela said. “Hell, the way we’re struggling with having a baby, maybe it’s a long shot. The doctor said your—”
“Okay. I know the doctor says I have a low sperm count. But it’s not just me with issues, remember?”
But the first part of her statement brought Michael up short. He didn’t know for sure whether Erica took the pills. He never checked. He took it on faith that Erica swallowed one every morning. What husband would want to have to check on that?
“Where does she want you to go?” Angela asked. “Do you even know what she’s getting you into?”
Michael made a calming gesture with his hands, holding them out before him, the palms toward Angela. As he did it, he knew it was a bad idea. No one liked to be told to calm down when they were angry. Angela certainly didn’t.
“Michael—”
“I’m sorry. Just . . . There’s a guy she wants to talk to, someone who might know where the girl is. She wants me to go along. I guess she might feel safer with a man by her side.”
“And you’re the man? Not some other friend or a cop?”
“She might be lying or I don’t know what, but she thinks the kid is mine. That’s why she wants me to go.”
“Do you hear this, Michael? Do you hear this?”
“Erica had issues, just like we all do, but she wasn’t a liar. She was always forthright.”
“Except she didn’t tell you about this child. Or she’s lying.”
“We’ll sort that out, I guess.”
Before Michael could move past her and through the door of their bedroom, Angela reached out and placed her hand on his arm, stopping him from moving forward. She tightened her grip, an affectionate squeeze, a reminder that the two of them were connected in ways that didn’t need to be spoken out loud. Years together. Mostly good, but even the bad. Together. Connected. “You should call the police right now. Go over to the phone and call them. Tell them Erica is here and she’s upset about her daughter. She wants you to confront a witness or a suspect or whatever, and they need to come and talk her down. That’s their job, not yours. It’s understandable that she’d be upset if her kid is missing. I get that. The cops will understand.”
“I can’t do that.”
“This is your life now. You and me. Our house, our future.” Angela’s brown eyes widened, beautiful dark pools. “We have plans for next week. We have plans for tonight, remember? The time of month, what we’re trying to do. That’s for our future together.”
Michael reached down, took her hand off his arm, but held it between both of his. He loved the feel of his skin against hers, even in the most casual way. After a decade together, he found her touch could still send jolts of electricity coursing up his arms. Even with the strain of both of them working, trying to have a child, he still felt it. It was also true that over the past year, they’d snapped at each other more, neglected the little things that had once made them feel so intimate. He tried to remember that all working couples went through these things, that life sometimes felt like an out-of-control merry-go-round, and they were both desperately hanging on
“It’s an hour or so up to Trudeau and then an hour back,” Michael said. “A little chat with this guy. Or maybe I can talk her down from the ledge before we go very far. But if something happened to your child, if we couldn’t find her, wouldn’t you want anyone and everyone on earth to help you
get through? Wouldn’t you want the whole world to stop if you were living in that hell and hearing that clock tick?”
Angela looked down at their joined hands. “I wouldn’t go to someone I hadn’t seen in a decade. I wouldn’t call up any of my ex-boyfriends.”
“I’m not her ex-boyfriend. I’m her ex-husband.”
Angela broke free of his grip. She stepped back, her gestures and movements short and sharp. After a moment of looking at the floor, she tilted her head up, her eyes locking with Michael’s again, her breath coming through her nostrils. “How do you know I won’t call the police the minute you walk out the door? I can tell them your name and her name and where you’re heading. How do you know I won’t do that?”
“I’m asking you not to,” he said.
“You’re trusting everyone tonight, aren’t you?”
“What if she is my daughter?” Michael asked.
Angela winced, then looked away. “Yeah, I don’t know about that. I’m not sure I can think about you having a child with someone else when we can’t.”
“But if she is . . . She showed me a picture downstairs. She looked like . . .”
“Like who?”
“Like my family,” Michael said.
Angela’s eyes narrowed. She’d discovered something. Like a terrier, she held it in her mind’s teeth and worked it over. “How old is this kid? The missing one?”
“Nine.”
“Nine? Oh, Michael. Do you think she looks like Robyn? Is that it?”
Michael’s anger broke, his words exiting his mouth like a whip crack. “Don’t make me out to be a sap. I’m worried, and I’m helping. This isn’t buying magazines. This is a kid’s life.”
“Michael, you’re not a sap. You’re nobody’s fool. But this issue, Robyn, I know the weight you still carry from it. I know you have the dreams. I know your mom isn’t close to being over it. . . .” She paused, gathered her thoughts. “I’m sure Erica knows all about what happened to Robyn. You must have told her when you met. She must have seen how your family acts about it.”
“I’m going.”
He tugged the bedroom door open and stepped through, heading down the hallway toward the stairs. He wondered how any parent bore the burden of losing a child. He’d seen the toll it took on his parents over the years, his father’s inability to even say Robyn’s name until the day he died. The pictures of Robyn that went into a closet, the fragility and protectiveness that his parents displayed. Michael wouldn’t have wished it on his worst enemy.
Angela followed him down the stairs to the front door. Before he went through it, she said, “Be careful. You don’t know where she’s taking you or who you’re going to see.”
“I will.”
“No, really. Be careful. Remember when you two split up. You told me about her calls, the threats.”
“Not threats. She was hurt.”
“I saw the e-mails, Michael. If she lied to you about birth control and then kept this child from you, if she sent you those messages when you left her, then are you sure you know everything she’s capable of?”
Michael paused for a moment, taking in the house. The cleanliness and the comfort. Problems and all, this was the life he loved. The life he held close.
He flashed to the picture on Erica’s phone. The blond girl, the one who looked so much like Robyn.
“An hour there and an hour back,” he said as he went out the door.
chapter
eight
Michael stepped onto the porch, noting the two ground-up cigarette butts, the scattering of ashes. He briefly considered sweeping them away with his foot before Angela could see them, but he knew he’d just be wasting time. Angela was upset enough, and with good reason, so why worry about something small like the mess Erica made on the porch?
She paced at the end of the driveway. She wasn’t smoking, but she held the phone to her ear, and as Michael approached, she gestured wildly with her free hand. It shook as though stricken with palsy.
She ended the call and looked up as Michael approached.
“The cops,” she said, her voice shaking. “Nothing. They still don’t know anything.” She checked the time on the phone screen. “Almost twelve hours, Michael. It feels like twelve years. We have to get moving so I can get home sooner.”
At the end of the driveway sat a white Camry parked at an odd angle to the curb, as though the driver had been in a hurry.
“I’m driving,” Michael said. “You’re too upset, and it’s going to be dark soon.”
“Fine, fine. I don’t care. I’m happy to let someone else do something for a change. Let someone else worry.”
Michael went around to the driver’s side of his Honda SUV. He unlocked the door but saw Erica walking back to her car. “What are you doing?”
“I need something.”
“I thought we were in such a hurry.”
Michael stood by the open door as Erica walked to the Camry. She fumbled around inside, the dome light showing her movements, and then came out with a jacket that looked too heavy for the hot June weather. She walked back up the driveway and then climbed into the passenger seat of his car. Michael backed out of the driveway, watching his home recede behind him.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to just take you to the police?” Michael asked. “Maybe if you talked to them again, they would be more responsive. Or they could give you more information.”
“This guy’s name is Wayne Tolliver. I have his address right here on my phone. Go north on Route 128. That’s the way. He lives in Trudeau, not far from where we used to. Almost to the east side.”
“What do you need the jacket for? It’s eighty degrees.”
“I just need it.” She held the jacket on her lap, tucking it close to her body like a security blanket.
Michael did as he was told, heading for the state road that led to Davenport County. It felt awkward in the confined space of the car. Michael sensed her fear and anxiety, like being in close proximity to a jittery wild animal. She looked and smelled like she’d recently showered, but she wore no makeup, and Michael could see the worry and pain etched on her face like the work of erosion. He had next to no sense of what her life had been like over the past decade. A number of times over the past year he had checked her Facebook page, but she allowed little information to be made public, and Michael never felt right sending a friend request. Not because he didn’t think he could be friends with his ex-wife, but because he didn’t feel right opening that door to the past. He’d broken things off so cleanly and clearly with Erica that he felt he couldn’t be the one to initiate.
And he’d never seen a photo of a child on her social media pages. Never.
“How did this happen?” Michael asked. “I mean, where was the kid taken from?”
“Felicity. Not ‘the kid.’ Can I smoke in here?”
Michael started to say no but relented. “Crack the window, please.”
Erica did as she was asked, opening the window before lighting up. “You’re more uptight than you used to be. I used to smoke in your car without you saying anything. Of course, your dad paid for that car. And the house too. It’s pretty nice. A minimansion now. You and I lived in that little apartment. How many bedrooms does it have?”
“Five. And four bathrooms. You didn’t answer my question.”
“You must be working for your dad, right?” she asked, a trace of surprise and disdain in her voice. “You said you never wanted to do that. You wanted to get out of Cottonsville and not work in his company.”
“Things change. They needed me when he died.”
“So, you just started working there when he died?” she asked.
Michael hesitated, watching the oncoming vehicles pass. “No. I started shortly after I got married again.”
“Why?”
Michael lifted
his right hand as he spoke. “I wanted to help my family. They matter to me. I was young when I said I never wanted to work there or live there.”
“I’m sorry, by the way. About your dad. How long ago did he die?”
“Fourteen months. And how did you know about it?”
“Facebook. Where else? Is your mom okay? She must have taken it hard.”
“Yeah, she did. They were together since college. I think she’s a little directionless. So much of her life was tending to him. Now there’s no one for her to take care of.”
“And it was hard on you too,” Erica said. Not a question but a statement. “I know you really loved him. And admired him.”
“I’m okay,” he said. “Life goes on. It was just sudden, that’s all.”
“And your family certainly already knows about losing someone. It must have brought things back up from the past.”
“Okay, just, let’s just not talk about Robyn and all that. Okay?”
“Sure.” They rode in silence for a minute. “But you always carried that burden with you. If you ask me, they let you carry too much of the weight. Just because you were kind of watching her—”
“Erica. Can we drop it? Please?”
“Okay, okay.”
Michael ignored her. He gripped the wheel tighter, staring at the road. He didn’t want to think about that day or to think of his father dying. He pushed it away. It was all too much to think about, too much to remember.
It was too big.
“Boy, your dad didn’t like me, did he?” she said. “Imagine if he knew we were riding around together now. He thought I was such a loudmouth. Which I am.”
“You didn’t answer my question from before.”
“I know. I’ve answered it twenty times today. It makes me tired and hurt every time I have to say it. God, I’ve never felt so drained.” She rubbed her eyes with her free hand. She rubbed so hard, it looked painful. Michael wasn’t sure he’d ever seen someone look so weary and tired, as though she carried an unseen thousand-pound burden. “It’s why I’m sick of talking to the police. But I guess you deserve to know, since I’ve brought you into this.”