“Oh,” I’d answered, “I believe it’s hardwired in the male chromosome,” but I’d learned not to do it when I was with her. Not that other women interested me once I had met Sophie. It had been easy to be faithful.
A memory came. A snowy February night. The three of us watching some mindless rerun of a rerun, a docudrama about a woman who had disappeared and her husband who, it turned out, had been having an affair with her best friend. The show was narrated by that writer who died, the one whose daughter had been murdered after which he had become famous for covering murders and scandals of the famous and the wealthy. The name came to me. Dominick Dunne.
During the commercial break, Sophia had gone to the kitchen to make cocoa and get a bowl of cheese popcorn. Lucy turned from the screen and fixed her eyes on mine. “Jeannie’s dad is cheating on her mom,” she said.
“Wow,” was all I could think to say. “That’s rough.”
“She hates him. Jeannie does, I mean. Not her mom. She doesn’t think her mom knows.”
“Wow,” I said again, wondering how much longer Sophie would be. She knew how to field things like this.
“You’d never cheat on Mom, would you, Da?” Lucy said.
“Jesus, Lucy.”
“Well, you wouldn’t, would you?”
“Of course not. I can’t believe we are even having this conversation.”
“Well, people do.”
“Not this people, honey. No worries there. Your da’s a two-woman man. Just you and your mom. Forever.” How smug that sounds now. An innocence bordering on arrogance, as if there were some kind of protection from the human condition, some prophylactic against the pain, loss, and betrayal in store for all of us. But of course if we knew what awaited—the losses and disappointments and grief that are inevitable, the unthinkable things we will prove capable of—the knowledge would paralyze us.
The bartender returned with the draft and set it in front of me along with a plastic bowl of salted nuts. “Anything else you want?” She emphasized anything in a way that seemed suggestive, but I had to be imagining it. I had a good twenty years on her.
“I’m good. Where’s Gilly?”
“His night off. I usually have the weekend shift, but they asked me to cover for him today.” She lingered, belatedly sliding a coaster under my glass. “So what do—” Her question was cut off when one of the customers farther down the bar signaled for her and she strode off, walking with what Sophie would call attitude. I took a deep swig of the beer. It helped wash away the taste of sherry but did little to erase my lingering anger. I stared up at the TV, watched the Sox botch a double play, finished the beer, thought about heading home.
The bartender returned. “Another?”
I stared at the glass, surprised to find it empty. “Why not?”
In an efficient motion, she tilted my glass beneath the tap, filling it until foam spilled down the sides. “I haven’t seen you here before,” she said.
“I don’t come in often.” Her hair was pulled back in a low ponytail, revealing ears that were well shaped and flat against her head, a row of silver studs piercing the lobe of each. I thought briefly of telling her what pretty ears she had, but I rejected the idea immediately, knowing how it would sound. “How long have you been here?”
“I started about a month ago. I used to work up in Portsmouth. At the Strawberry Banks pub. You know it?”
I shook my head.
She extended her hand across the bar. “Jessica.”
I took it, registering the softness of her skin, the firmness of her grip. “Will,” I said.
She smiled. “So will you or won’t you?”
Will you or won’t you? What did that mean? Or had I not heard her correctly? I no longer trusted my ability to clearly understand simple conversations. I was saved from responding by another customer calling for service from the far end of the bar.
“Don’t go away,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
I stared up at the TV, felt the presence to my right as someone slid onto the stool.
“Evening, Mr. Light.”
I recognized him. “Detective.” A silence stretched between us, both unsure of how to open a conversation, an awkwardness broken only when Jessica returned.
“What can I get for you?”
“Coffee. Black.” Gordon turned toward me. “I’m on the evening shift this week. My wife and daughter are visiting her parents on the South Shore, so I’m on my own for the week.”
I nodded, could think of nothing to say. Our relationship—if you could call it that—had always been strained, as if from first glance he had detected a capacity for violence in my face.
Jessica set a mug in front of him. The steam curled up, scenting the air with richness of coffee. “You want something with this?” she asked.
“What’s the special?”
“Chicken burrito or fish tacos.” She lowered her voice. “Not that I’d recommend either one.”
Gordon laughed. “I’ll have a bowl of chowder. And a burger. Medium.”
“Anything on the burger? Cheese? Onion?”
“Have them throw a slice of swiss on it.”
She punched the order in the bar computer.
Gordon grabbed the sugar dispenser, poured a steady stream in his coffee. I remembered that detail: the amount of sweetener he liked in his coffee. And that one specific image triggered a flood of memories. I remembered Gordon sitting in our kitchen, adding spoonful after spoonful into his coffee, remembered the horror of that first night. The night Lucy hadn’t come home.
CHAPTER TWELVE
It had taken less than five minutes from the moment I called the station to report Lucy missing to when a patrol car pulled into our drive.
Before the two patrolmen even got out of the car, I had the front door open and was waiting at the threshold while they crossed the walk and up the steps. I led them in and introduced myself and Sophie. Both men were large, and their presence, magnified by the holsters on their hips, crowded the hall. The taller of the pair, the more fit, took the lead. “I’m Detective Gordon,” he said. “This is Officer Slovak. We’re responding to a report of a missing child.”
“Yes. Our daughter. Lucy.”
“Full name?”
“Lucy Light. Lucy Leigh Light.”
Slovak, a man with a beefy build but not soft, as if he spent his spare time power lifting in the gym, stood to one side and let Gordon take the lead. The detective pulled out a pad, flipped it open, retrieved a pencil from his jacket pocket, and scribbled down some words without looking at me. I noticed his ring finger was bent at an odd angle as if he had broken it at some point and it had not been properly set. Sports injury, I guessed.
“Age?”
“Fifteen. Lucy is fifteen.”
“When did you notice that she was missing?”
I checked my watch, amazed to see that nearly an hour had passed since we had found Lucy’s room empty. “A little after five.”
Sophie spoke for the first time. “She didn’t come home after school.”
“When was the last time either of you had contact with her?”
“This morning. At breakfast. Before school,” I said.
“I saw her at lunch,” Sophie added. “We passed in the hall when she was walking to the cafeteria.”
“You were at the school?”
“I teach there. We both had lunch at the same period. I was on my way to the teachers’ lounge.”
“What time would that be?”
“Twelve thirty.”
“Did you speak with her?”
“Yes. I asked how she was feeling.”
Gordon raised an eyebrow. “How she was feeling?”
“Yes. She hadn’t felt well yesterday, and we thought she might be coming down with something. But she said she was better. She said she was going to the hockey scrimmage and would get a ride home.”
“And that was all?”
“I made her promise if she felt s
ick at all to skip hockey. I told her to call home so Will could come and get her. She promised she would.”
Gordon turned to me. “And where were you?”
“Here. I work at home.” That evening neither of them asked me the pointed questions—if I had gone out at all during the day, if there was any way or anyone who could verify I had been home alone all day—those would come later.
“And she didn’t call you?” Gordon said.
“No. I assumed she was coming home with her mother.”
“What about siblings? Brothers? Sisters?”
“No. Lucy is our only child.”
Slovak looked up from his pad. “Have you contacted her friends? Chances are she’s with one of them and just forgot to call home.”
“Of course we’ve called her friends. It’s the first thing we did.” I fought to keep irritation from my tone, but Jesus, did they think that we hadn’t already thought of that?
“What we’d like to do is search the house,” Gordon said.
“Why?”
“To make sure she isn’t here.”
The thought of them going through our home was so invasive I couldn’t conceal my reluctance. “We’ve already done that. I’m telling you, she isn’t here.”
A swift glance passed between the men. “We understand,” Gordon said. “But it’s standard procedure. We’d just like to check to make sure.”
“You’d be surprised,” Slovak added. “Sometimes a kid will fall asleep in the basement. Or curled up in a closet while talking on her cell. Or texting.”
“I’m telling you, it’s a waste of time. Lucy isn’t here.” My voice rose, tightened. Sophie touched my arm, silencing me.
“We’ll just check. Like we said. Standard procedure.”
“Where is her room?” Slovak asked. “We’ll start there.”
“I’ll show you,” Sophie said.
“That’s okay. We can find it,” Gordon said.
“If you don’t mind, we prefer to do this alone,” Slovak said.
And if I do mind?, I thought.
“It’s upstairs,” Sophie said. “On the second floor. Third door down the hall on the left.” We waited in the kitchen, listening to doors open and close as the two men made their way through the house. I closed my eyes, imagining them in Lucy’s room, remembered seeing her pink panties tossed atop the laundry basket when I’d checked the room earlier, and I felt helpless that I was unable to protect our daughter from this violation. I stared through the kitchen windows, out at Lucy’s swing. The sky was turning from dusk to dark.
“Where do you think she can be?” Sophie asked.
I didn’t want to give voice to my fears but wondered if she was having them too. An accident? Some kid in school who’d offered her a ride. Use your seat belt, Lucy. Always use your seat belt. Seat belts save lives. The promise we had extracted from her that she wouldn’t drive with Jared Phillips, that boy who had been driving the car that had killed a classmate, a girl, the year before. I pictured a mangled mass of steel, a tree.
“I asked them all—Rain and Christy and Jeannie and the rest—to start a phone chain,” Sophie said. “To check with everyone they could think of.”
“Good. That’s good thinking.”
“Upperclassmen, too,” she said. “Everyone with a car.”
Again I thought of the Phillips kid, imagined a wreck. Darker, more atavistic fears I didn’t contemplate. Back then, before I knew better, when I was still protected by a glorious ignorance, it was incomprehensible, unthinkable, to imagine that those kinds of things could possibly happen to people like us. The sound of doors closing grew distant, and I realized the men had reached the top floor. I waited. Narrow bands tightened across my skull, signs of a headache onset. I thought about going for aspirin but stayed seated, reluctant to leave Sophie waiting alone in the kitchen.
“Do you want some coffee?” she asked.
“No. Thanks.”
A minute passed, and then she got up anyway and measured out grounds, started the machine. I understood her need to do something, anything. Twice she tilted her head, said she thought she heard a car in the drive and, before I could move, went to check only to return and shake her head. The waiting stretched on. We heard the men as they descended the stairs, went down into the basement, wasting time. Lucy was somewhere out in the night.
Eventually, the men returned.
“She’s not in the house,” Gordon said.
“We already told you that.”
“Are there any other buildings on the property? A shed or garage?”
“There’s a garden shed in the backyard.”
And so more minutes passed as they went to check the shed. It hadn’t occurred to either Sophie or me to look there. Why would we? Lucy had no reason to go there, a small structure crammed with all the gear for outside maintenance. A lawn mower, emptied of gas, serviced and retired for the past season, two ladders, tools, a couple of snow shovels, a five-pound bag of salt left over from the previous winter, all manner of odds and ends. Within minutes the men returned, the futility of their search plain on their faces. I rolled my head from side to side, trying to reduce the tension. The pain was settling in, the pressure mounting behind my eyes, and I rubbed my temples.
“You all right there?” Gordon said. “You look kinda pale.”
Was I all right? Jesus, what the hell should I have looked like? Our daughter was missing. I don’t think I realized how even that first evening, even while they were maintaining that Lucy was probably out with friends, that seeds of suspicion were already taking root.
Uninvited, Slovak took a seat at the table while his partner went out to the patrol car, returning moments later with a laptop that he set on the table and flipped open. “We’ll start by getting her info in the system,” he said. “It will go out to other stations in the area. And to hospitals.”
Hospitals. Sophie reached over and took my hand. I could feel her tremble. Our once-safe kitchen, the hub of our domestic life, had been converted to something alien and cold.
“We’ll need a physical description. Color of eyes and hair. Height. Weight. Distinguishing marks.”
I answered for both of us.
“What was she wearing when she left home this morning?”
I could picture Lucy clearly. I described the sweater, the short skirt.
“That’s good,” Gordon said. “You’d be surprised how many parents can’t describe what their kids wear.”
How many times had the police had to ask parents these questions? What kind of parents didn’t pay attention to their kids?
“But she would have changed for hockey,” Sophie said. “Blue sweat shorts and a white tee. And maybe her gray Boston College sweatshirt.”
Gordon took down the info.
“Except—” Sophie paused.
“Except what?” Gordon said.
“We checked with the coach, and she didn’t go to hockey. She didn’t even see him about getting excused from the scrimmage. So maybe she hasn’t changed clothes.”
Unable to sit any longer, I crossed to the counter and got out some mugs. The lamb tagine, long forgotten, lay cold and congealed in the pot. The memory of that afternoon—of chopping vegetables, preparing dinner—seemed far distant. It belonged to Before.
“We’ll need to have a list of her friends, starting with the ones she is closest to. Also her teachers. Her coach. The other members on the team. Anyone you can think of she might be with. Neighbors. Maybe a family she babysits for. Relatives who live nearby.”
I let Sophie handle this, listened as she gave the names, watched Slovak write them down. Names of friends I recognized. Rain LaBrea, of course. And the Hayes family, our neighbors she used to sit for before they divorced and Ellen moved away with their son, a boy so disabled he couldn’t walk, a fact Sophie believed led to their divorce. A few names I didn’t know, specifics of our daughter’s life I’d missed. I checked my watch and saw another hour had passed since the police
had first arrived.
“Would anyone like coffee?” Sophie asked.
“Please,” Gordon said.
“Not for me,” Slovak said. He picked up the list he’d made of Lucy’s friends, her teachers and coach. “I’m going to follow up on some of these.”
We watched him leave. I poured three mugs of coffee, brought them to the table. One of the mugs had a slight chip on the lip, and I gave that to Gordon. “Sugar?” I asked.
“If it isn’t a bother.”
Sophie started to rise, but I rested a hand on her shoulder, squeezed gently. “Sit,” I said. “I’ll get it.” We both watched as he shoveled spoonful after spoonful into the cup until I couldn’t imagine how it could be drinkable. He took a sip, then returned to the questions.
“Have you noticed anything unusual lately?”
“What do you mean?”
“How has Lucy been acting? Has there been any change in her mood or behavior? Has she been depressed?”
“Lucy? No. Not at all.”
“Any problems at school? Have her grades dropped?”
“No.”
“What about at home?”
“What do you mean?”
“Any reason she might be upset? An argument with one of you?”
The idea was ludicrous. “No,” I said, my voice tight.
“Maybe something she wanted to get back at you for. Has she wanted to go to a party or a concert, something you’ve forbidden?” Gordon smiled, as if to say, You know how teenage girls can be.
Not Lucy. Not our teenage girl. “No. Nothing like that.”
“Does she use social media?”
“What?”
“Twitter. Facebook?”
“She’s on Facebook,” Sophie said.
Again I remembered that morning, Lucy texting at the breakfast table.
“Do you know her password?”
“No,” I said.
“Selkie,” Sophie said.
“I didn’t know that,” I said, feeling a spark of what?—jealousy—that Lucy had shared this with Sophie and not with me.
“Selkie?” Gordon said. “Could you spell that?”
“S-E-L-K-I-E,” I said. “From the Irish myth.” Sophie and I exchanged a quick look, and I knew she was remembering too. Lucy swimming, her long hair plastered against her scalp as her arms knifed though the water, and then emerging. You’re like an otter child, Sophie had told her. Or a selkie, I’d said and told her about the mythological sea creature who shed her sealskin to take the form of a woman and how a fisherman had hidden the skin and taken her for his wife. How enchanted Lucy had been by the tale, and being Lucy and curious about everything, she had researched the subject until she knew every version of the myth.
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