Since She Went Away

by David Bell

  Jared jogged after Tabitha. “Wait. If that’s your dad, I can tell him it’s my fault. I’ll say my mom was talking to you—”

  She wheeled around. Even in the dark, he saw the tears glistening in her eyes, about to spill over. She jabbed the air with her index finger, the stubby nail pointing directly at his heart.

  “Go,” she said. “Please. Go. Now.”

  She didn’t wait for a response but turned back around and kept walking away. Jared turned and left, not sure if the smoking man—Tabitha’s father—had seen them together or not. And if he had seen them, what would it mean for Tabitha when she entered her house?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Jenna saw Celia again.

  Her best friend walked along the edge of Caldwell Park, wearing a white nightgown. Celia’s hair was down, lifting in the light breeze. The trees were colored by autumn—vivid reds, oranges, and yellows—even though it was dark. The trees practically burned. And on the porch of every house a jack-o’-lantern glowed.

  Jenna knew when the scene was taking place. A week after Halloween. The week Celia disappeared.

  Jenna watched her friend through thick hedges, the leaves and branches jabbing at her and tickling her face. She tried to extract herself but couldn’t move. She couldn’t slip out of their grip. She couldn’t step forward onto the sidewalk where her friend walked.

  And then the car. Always a different car. Sometimes a white van, sometimes a hearse. It pulled alongside Celia, and a hand reached out to grab her. Never a full body. Never a face. Only that bone-white hand, reaching through the dark to take her friend.

  Celia looked back. She knew Jenna was there, trapped in the bushes. Celia didn’t speak, didn’t scream or call for help. But she looked back, terror etched on her face like a frozen mask.

  Jenna couldn’t make a sound. She tried to shout, tried to scream, but she couldn’t make a sound. Her voice was choked off, silenced—

  • • •

  The chiming of her phone woke her on the couch.

  Her heart thumped, even though she’d had some version of the dream . . . how many times? Fifteen at least. She vowed to stop counting, vowed to not let the image of Celia’s terrified face haunt her anymore.

  But how could it not? How could she not contemplate, in her darkest, most desperate moments, what must have happened to her friend?

  Jenna sat up on the couch. Her neck ached from the crooked angle. She felt lonelier than ever, the dull ache of Celia’s loss worming through her body. She missed Celia so badly. Missed her laugh, missed the sound of her voice. It felt as if someone had cut a piece out of her on that November night.

  An empty beer bottle sat on the coffee table, and her head swam a little. Good work, Jenna, she told herself. Puke. Don’t eat anything else. And then drink a beer. And you’re a nurse. Shouldn’t you know better? For the twentieth time since November, she promised herself to drink less. To maybe—just maybe—stop drinking altogether.

  The phone chimed three straight times. She checked her watch. Six ten. How long had she slept? Thirty minutes or so?

  The house around her was quiet. She replayed the events that had occurred right before she dozed off. Jared left to walk his girlfriend—girlfriend?—home. Jenna’s face flushed with embarrassment, and she had to laugh. What an introduction for that kid. Nowhere to go but up.

  “Jared?”

  She scrolled through her texts, but they didn’t make sense. They came mostly from her group of friends and a cousin who lived in Ohio.

  Nice one, Jenna!

  Whoa, you were pissed!

  Way to stick it to the media.

  Um, call me?

  And one from Jared: I’m staying at Tabitha’s for a while.

  Jenna wrote back. Okay, but not too late. Call if you want a ride.

  She hoped things went better on that end than they had gone on hers. Maybe the girl’s dad was cool and smooth, the kind who played old music for the kids and told stories about the summer in college when he followed U2 across the country, hitchhiking and chasing girls. Or maybe he and Jared would talk about sports or cars or Stephen King novels, and the guy would send him away with some poetry by Rimbaud.

  “I think you’re ready for this now,” he’d say, clapping her son on the back and shaking his hand, and Jared would go along, accepting his lesson on masculinity.

  Someone knocked on the door, and on her way to answer it the landline rang.

  “Good God,” Jenna said. “Now what?”

  She grabbed the phone first, and before she could even say hello, her mother’s voice came through.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Mom? Hold on.”

  “You really didn’t look that great—”

  She laid the phone aside and went to the door. She peeked through the window, and in the glow of the porch light—not burned out, just not turned on while Jared swapped spit with Tabitha—she saw her coworker Sally. Jenna hustled to undo the locks, and when she pulled the door open, her friend stood there with a bottle of wine in one hand and a large grin across her face.

  “What’s the occasion?” Jenna asked, and Sally stepped past her and into the living room. “Did you say you were coming over and I forgot?”

  “I figured you needed a pick-me-up.”

  “Because of today? Sure, I guess. Hold on, my mom’s on the phone.”

  Jenna picked up the receiver again. “Mom? Can I call you back? Sally’s here.”

  “That’s fine. You don’t have to call me back. I just want you to know, I have no problem with women speaking their minds.” Her mother’s voice was rough and gravelly, a by-product of years of cigarette smoking. “I taught you to do anything a man can do, you know that. I didn’t raise a shrinking violet. I just wish you wouldn’t be quite so assertive in public that way. It’s . . . coarse. People judge you for those things.”

  Jenna said, “Am I supposed to know what you’re talking about?”

  Just then her phone received a few more texts, the chiming sounding more urgent.

  “You weren’t watching?” her mom asked. “Oh, boy.”

  • • •

  Jenna watched herself on the television several times. Reena Huffman seemed to be enjoying playing the clip. Jenna saw herself on camera, her face paler than she could ever have thought possible. The lights from Stan’s camera hit her at such an angle that she looked like something that had just crawled from beneath a rock.

  “How the fuck do you think I feel, Becky? Jesus.”

  The offending words were replaced with long, angry bleeps, leaving it up to the viewer’s imagination to wonder what she had really said.

  “I didn’t know they would show that, Sally. I’d literally just puked. I thought they were carrying Celia’s bones out of that barn.”

  “I don’t think people around here will mind the ‘fuck’ as much as they’ll mind the ‘Jesus.’ If they can read lips . . .” Sally poured herself another glass of wine. “Everybody’s on edge around here. Everybody’s scared. It won’t take much to make them angry.” She wore loose-fitting jeans and a bulky sweater, and her hair was piled on top of her head and held in place with a pencil. A pair of glasses dangled from a chain around her neck. Sally was fifteen years older than Jenna, and since Celia’s disappearance, she had been increasingly playing the roles of both mentor and friend. Jenna had a mother, but the phone call about her appearance on TV epitomized their relationship—it never lost its air of judgment, the sense that Jenna needed constant correction and guidance.

  Sally held the wine bottle up. “More?”

  Jenna shook her head, which still hurt. She always drank with Sally. It was one of the pillars of their friendship—alcohol consumption. The glass of wine on top of the beer made Jenna’s head feel as if it had been stuffed with cotton.

  “I’ve told you before that Becky McGee
is a pill,” Sally said. “I knew her older sister in high school. She was a brat when she was a little kid, and I bet she still is.”

  “She’s always seemed decent.”

  “As long as the story is flowing her way, she’s decent,” Sally said. “But there haven’t been any new leads. The story has to go somewhere.”

  Jenna saw a freeze frame of her face on the screen. “Oh, God. That’s the worst image ever. I’m going to turn it up.”

  “Jenna—”

  “I want to hear it.”

  Reena Huffman was ranting in her high, grating voice.

  “. . . been holding off on saying some of these things. I always try to be respectful of the friends and family members of a crime victim. And make no mistake, what happened to Celia Walters is a crime. It’s a tragedy. But someone knows something about it. A young, beautiful woman like this, this Diamond Mom, doesn’t just disappear without a trace without someone knowing something about it.”

  The images on the screen shifted. Jenna’s pale, ugly photo remained, but it was joined by a portrait of Celia, the one most widely distributed in the wake of her disappearance. In the photo, Celia looked radiant. Perfect smile, shining brown hair. Wide brown eyes. She looked like everybody’s sister, friend, daughter, girlfriend. The all-American dream.

  “This friend, this Jenna Barton, I’m starting to wonder if she has been entirely forthcoming about the events of that night, November the fourth. She says the two women, who had been best friends since junior high, were just going out for some girl time. But why were they going out at midnight? Who does that? Why did Jenna call Celia up that night and invite her out for a drink at midnight? Jenna says they were just reliving their old glory days when they were wild and free young people. But who does that? Who does that when they’re parents? Both of these women are parents to teenagers. And Jenna is a single mom, so who was home with her son when she went out that night? Who does those things at that age? I think there’s much more to know here, and I hope . . . no, I pray that the police start asking these questions of Jenna Barton. This language she used today . . . it tells me this is not a normal person.”

  Jenna groaned.

  Sally fumbled around, looking for the remote.

  But Reena shifted gears.

  “As if this case wasn’t getting strange enough,” she said.

  “Wait,” Jenna said. And Sally stopped looking.

  “There’s another piece of news breaking about this case, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll finally get some light shed on these events.”

  Jenna’s mind raced. What else could be going on besides the bones in the barn?

  “This is breaking news,” Reena said, “something we are just learning as we went on the air. Apparently the earring, the match to the earring that was found near the park where Celia Walters is believed to have disappeared, has been found.”

  Jenna stood up, her hands hanging limp and useless at her sides.

  “We’re still learning about this, and we’ll have more to report as the show goes on here. But what we know is that someone was taken into custody just this evening for trying to sell that earring, the match to the one that belongs to Celia Walters, at a pawnshop. Police have taken a man into custody, and that’s all we know right now. But we’ll keep you up-to-date. And we’ll be right back.”

  “No,” Jenna said, stepping toward the screen. “No. You can’t do that. You can’t just start and stop like that.”

  “It’s a commercial,” Sally said. “She’ll be back. She’s teasing us because she doesn’t know anything.”

  Sally muted the TV. Jenna stared at the images. The president talking at a lectern, a teaser for a foreign affairs show. And then a commercial for orange juice.

  “Honey.” Sally came up beside her and placed her hands on Jenna’s shoulders. “It will be okay. They’ll come back.”

  “What if they found the guy?” Jenna asked, not really addressing her words to anybody. “What if this is it?”

  Sally guided her to a chair. Jenna dropped into it, her body moving without any conscious thought on her part. She felt like a robot, an automaton.

  “We’ll know more in a minute,” Sally said. “Well, maybe not even then. They’re piecing the story together. Becky is probably running around bugging the shit out of the cops.”

  “I should call Detective Poole.”

  “Why don’t you wait and see what Reena says? Here.” She handed Jenna a glass of wine. “Let’s see if it comes back on.”

  Jenna finished the little bit of wine in the glass.

  The show returned, but Reena went to another story, something about a woman who discovered she had a sister she didn’t know about until her mother was murdered.

  Sally muted it. “Let’s talk while they go through these other things.”

  They sat in silence for a moment, and then Jenna grabbed the wine bottle and filled her glass. She needed it. She could slow down tomorrow. She took a long drink and then said, “I haven’t eaten anything.”

  “Do you want to order something?” Sally asked. “Or do you want me to make you some eggs? Or a sandwich?”

  “I’m good.”

  “Do you want to be alone?” Sally asked.

  “No. No way.” Jenna gave Sally a smile that she hoped conveyed the depth of her gratitude. “I like your company. I like having someone to talk to. It’s been hard to talk to some of my other friends about all this. It’s so freaking awkward.” She pointed to the TV screen. “I think this is what everybody thinks about me. People I’ve known for years. They have these questions. They blame me. You just said that everybody’s scared and on edge in town. You’ve felt it. When people get scared, they look for someone to blame. No one will say it, but they do blame me. I wish they’d actually just say it instead of dancing around it.”

  “I doubt they feel that way about you. I think a lot of this is in your head. It’s guilt talking.”

  “I don’t know. . . .”

  Sally took a swallow from her own glass. She looked thoughtful. “I’ve never asked you anything about the case because I figured you’d had your fill of talking about it. And we’ve only started to get to know each other well.”

  “You asked me to your book club the month Celia disappeared.”

  “Was that rude?” Sally asked.

  “It was a lifesaver,” Jenna said. “You were the first person to treat me like I was normal. That’s all I wanted, for people to act normal.”

  Sally laughed. “No one ever accused me of that,” she said. “Well, there is something I’ve always wanted to ask you.”

  “What’s that?” Jenna asked.

  “What the hell were you doing going out that night?”

  Jenna took another big swallow of wine. She nodded, ready to go on.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Jared froze on the sidewalk in front of Tabitha’s house.

  The curtains were drawn, the porch light out.

  He’d started home, cursing himself for letting Tabitha run late and cursing himself for not having the guts to walk her all the way to the door. All he had to do was stick out his hand and introduce himself to her father. Wasn’t that what boyfriends were supposed to do? Go to the door, shake hands with the dad? Times like that, he did wish he had a father, someone who could guide him through the complicated waters of manhood. But Jared knew he made a good impression on adults. He was clean-cut, well dressed, polite, and friendly. He needed to take the heat so Tabitha wouldn’t have to.

  But he couldn’t will himself up the front walk to the door. He couldn’t stop thinking about the look on Tabitha’s face, the combination of fear and sadness. She’d shoved him with a force he couldn’t have guessed she’d have in her body, almost knocking him down. What if he rang the bell like an idiot and made it all worse? He didn’t want to be like his mom, barging into any situ
ation and then thinking about the consequences later.

  Jared needed to go home. His mom would be waiting, and he had homework to do, things he would have been working on except he spent that time with Tabitha. But he wouldn’t hear from her all evening. There’d be no texts or calls, no messages. He’d have to go home and work, all the while wondering if she ended up in trouble with her dad—and if she did, what kind of trouble might inspire so much fear? If the guy was so strict about everything else, might he hurt her if she came home late? And what if he had happened to look up the street and see her saying good-bye to a boy?

  Jared looked to the houses on either side of Tabitha’s. They were dark, as still and quiet in the night as empty tombs. Jared took a few steps up the city sidewalk, moving parallel to the houses, then turned to his left, cutting across the grass between Tabitha’s house and their neighbors’. It was getting colder, and he’d forgotten to bring gloves. His fingertips tingled, so he stuffed his hands in his pockets.

  The door of Tabitha’s house came open, a shaft of light spilling across the lawn.

  Jared acted without thinking. He dropped to the grass, face-first. He pressed his body against the ground, hugging it as tightly as he could. The blades of grass tickled his face, and the cold seeped into his clothes, clinging to his skin like a tight suit.

  He risked a look, moving his eyeballs slowly to the left. The man stood on the porch, his large body obscuring most of the light. He tossed a cigarette out into the yard, its glowing tip landing ten feet from Jared’s head.

  Jared waited. Every atom in his body clenched. A pressure rose in his bladder, a painful surging of liquid. He gritted his teeth until he thought they’d chip.

  Then the door closed. The man was gone, back inside.