The Waiting Room

by Emily Bleeker

  “It’s like you’re deaf. The judge said you were supposed to let me get my stuff then, but you never showed. I’m getting what’s mine now.” With that declaration, he dropped Veronica onto the concrete, and she slammed onto the slab, hard. Her hip hit first, her skin scratched through the thin fabric of her dress and stretch pants. Throwing her hand down to catch her fall only added another flash of pain through the already-tortured limb and up to her shoulder. She pulled it in to her chest and crawled backward.

  “No, you’re not. Not without an officer present.” Gillian pulled her hand out from behind her back. In it was a snub-nosed .22, small enough to look like a toy gun but glinting in the sun like only metal did.

  A gun. How had this day gone so completely mad? Her father had had a big collection of guns, and when he got drunk, he’d take out his favorites and shoot at cans in the backyard. When he got really wasted, he’d try shooting at moving targets in the acre behind their house, things like squirrels or bunnies. He usually was too smashed to hit the cans, much less the animals unlucky enough to have made the wooded lot their home. But one time just before Veronica went to bed for the night, he came in with Fluffy, the neighbor’s orange-and-white tabby, in his arms. She looked asleep until Veronica noticed the trail of blood on her side when her dad put her on the counter and called for Barb. They buried Fluffy in their backyard, and Veronica spent the next six months averting her gaze when she walked past the “missing” posters that filled the light posts of her neighborhood.

  After that, Veronica couldn’t stand guns or the power such a small handheld object could hold. She had considered getting a gun as protection as a single woman in a big, empty house but couldn’t bring herself to do it, even though she’d learned how to manage a gun very early in her life. But today that fear of gunpowder and metal shifted a bit when she saw the device in Gillian’s hands. They could use a little bit of portable power.

  But then again, Gillian didn’t seem like the kind of person who spent much time at the gun range, and though she pointed the gun at her husband with determination, her hand was shaking with a broad tremor that made the gun wobble up and down uncontrollably. Veronica scrambled backward, intentionally tumbling off the porch this time. She wanted to get away from Carl, but there was no part of her that wanted to get stuck in Gillian’s cross fire.

  Veronica tossed herself behind an overgrown bush on the left side of the yard. She could feel her pulse racing in her nearly useless shoulder. Her phone was in the car, so even if she could make herself dial the numbers, 911 was a risky option. She glanced around at the neighboring houses. Maybe someone was home and watching, or maybe someone would answer the door if she pounded on it. Her attention was drawn back to the altercation at the front door as Carl took a half step forward.

  “You don’t even know how to load that thing,” he scoffed, surer of himself than he had any right to be with a gun pointed in his face.

  “I sure do,” Gillian said firmly, and brought her other hand up to support the gun handle from underneath, and the shaking began to slow. “I know how to fire it too.”

  There must’ve been something about the way she said it, or maybe he could see the bullets loaded in the cylinder, because after another half second of consideration, he put up his hands and backed away from the door. Following his movement, Gillian exited her house and pulled the door shut behind her with one hand while keeping the gun lifted with her other. She tested the door to make sure it was locked and then returned her hand to the gun.

  “Get off my porch, Carl. You got your due.” She took another step and then another until Carl backed down the stairs and had his hands held chest level, begrudgingly resigned. “I won’t let you bully me anymore, you hear me?”

  Carl mumbled something that Veronica couldn’t hear and then stormed off toward a car parked down the street. She fell to the ground, the dust from the dried-out grass coating her skin and gritting between her teeth. If it weren’t for the sirens growing louder with every second, she would’ve stayed behind the shrub and made sure the crazy man who had just sped away wasn’t going to loop back around with new resolve. Instead, she forced herself to her feet, wincing when her arm twisted slightly. Pulling it tightly to her side, she skirted around the foliage and ran toward the house. Gillian was sitting on the front steps, gun dangling between her bent legs, exhausted but wearing a look of relief that Veronica envied.

  “Gillian, you were amazing.” She patted her friend on the shoulder, needing a moment to fully process what she’d witnessed. Gillian had done what Veronica’s mother had never been able to—stand up to a powerful man and say no. At first she hadn’t known how to search for Sophie without her mom by her side, but it was turning out that Gillian might be a better option.

  Sophie, Veronica thought the name again with urgency. They were getting off track. She quickly refocused.

  “We need to go. I think someone called the cops.” But Gillian didn’t budge; she stared at the ground, the gun held loosely in her palm, swaying back and forth. The sirens were distinct now, and with each whir, Veronica’s thinking focused into a sharper point. “You’re holding a gun, Gillian. They think I’m a crazed psychopath. We have to go.” When she still didn’t flinch, something inside Veronica snapped, and she yelled. “Get your ass in the car!”

  Gillian turned to look at Veronica, an amused wrinkle creasing her forehead. “What did you say to me?” she asked, almost chuckling.

  Veronica was not laughing. Her arm throbbed, her heart was racing so fast she worried it was going to burst, and she was about to shove her hand into Gillian’s pants pocket and fish out the keys herself.

  “I said—get your ass in the car.” She put out her hand, refusing to let down her intensity even for a second. “And give me your damn keys.”

  Strange expression still in place, Gillian fished the keys out and handed them over. Without waiting to see if Gillian was following, Veronica ran to the car, clicking the “Unlock” button several times. With a roar, she started the engine and put it into drive just as Gillian flopped into the car and slammed her own door closed. With Veronica’s foot on the gas, they jolted forward. Maneuvering around a few parked cars and one abandoned trike, Veronica followed the street, letting the speedometer rise as rapidly as the four-cylinder engine would allow.

  A loud thump came from Gillian’s seat when Veronica turned a sharp corner so she could disappear from sight before anyone, including the police, could happen upon their speeding escape car.

  “What was that?” Veronica searched Gillian for the source of the sound and then back at the road.

  “What was what?”

  “That thump? Was it my phone?” Veronica took a slightly more well-measured turn onto Highway 42 and glanced around the car for her phone so she could start the GPS app.

  “Sorry, dropped it.” Gillian, pale and calm despite the run-in with her ex, leaned over in her seat and retrieved an item from the floor and placed it in the cup holder between them. Veronica’s gaze immediately fell on the heavy item—the gun.

  “Oh my God, Gillian, you brought it with you?” The handgun rested casually in the cup holder like a ninety-nine-cent Diet Coke from the corner market. Gillian didn’t respond at first, leaning forward in her seat and straining against the seat belt she must’ve put on in their high-speed escape.

  “Yeah.” She grunted a few times, straining forward, as Veronica tried to watch both her and the road. “I’m not letting you go in without some backup.” Sitting back, she produced Veronica’s missing phone and placed it in the empty cup holder closest to the steering wheel.

  “You went back to your house to get that gun, didn’t you?” she asked, not sure if she was impressed or scared by her friend’s particularly aggressive turn.

  “I sure did, sweetie.” She plugged Veronica’s dark phone into the iPhone charger lying between the seats like she owned the device. Then she passed over her own cracked phone with the GPS open on the screen. “Now put the
pedal to the metal. We’ve got to get ourselves to Durham and find your girl.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Fifty-nine minutes isn’t very much time when you have a million things on your mind. At first Gillian tried to talk about what had happened at her house, but that led down a path to her asking for forgiveness over and over again as though it were her fault Carl had assaulted Veronica.

  Then, in an effort to refocus, Veronica would try to tell the story of Sophie’s disappearance with a little more specificity than the rushed texts and brief spurts of information from earlier in the day. But she found that she couldn’t bring herself to explain more than the basics of the morning without anxiety threatening to take over. It was much easier to answer a few questions about the discussion with Mark at the cemetery.

  The rest of the journey she spent in her head, replaying each detail and trying to find any small item she may have missed on her first time working through the scene of Sophie’s disappearance.

  As far as she could tell, Sophie had vanished while Veronica was having dinner with Gillian. Her mom said she’d checked on her one more time at about 9:30 p.m. before heading to bed. If only Veronica could remember if she saw her during her drunken return home. She didn’t remember going into Sophie’s bedroom, so she couldn’t know for sure, but the idea that someone took Sophie right out from under Veronica’s sleeping nose didn’t seem very likely.

  There were still so many questions she couldn’t answer, like why would someone want to take Sophie? Who would want to track Veronica’s every movement and put a private investigator on her tail? Where was her mother, and why hadn’t Veronica heard from her—was she angry or injured or both? How could the police give up so easily on finding who really took a six-month-old baby?

  As they passed the welcome sign for Durham, Veronica’s stomach began to squirm like it was filled with a thousand tiny insects. Not cute butterflies, but the large, juicy grub worms that used to live under her grass and eat at the roots before she got her yard treated.

  “Are you ready?” Gillian asked, breaking the silence. Since confronting her ex-husband, a firm calmness had come over Veronica’s friend. Gillian still had her soft and compassionate underbelly, but now she seemed to be wearing a plate of armor on her back.

  “Of course,” Veronica replied with confidence she didn’t exactly feel. The gun in the cup holder rattled with each bump in the road. She knew Gillian was probably right and she shouldn’t go into such a dangerous situation unarmed, but the day had already gotten so far out of control that she was concerned what she might do when faced with someone who had at the very least taken her baby and at the very worst hurt her.

  The GPS on Gillian’s phone gave her periodic warnings that grew more complicated. The speed limit had dropped progressively over the past few miles from fifty-five to thirty-five, and suddenly she felt like they were crawling along. The houses became closer and closer together and grew from tiny bungalows like Gillian lived in to more architecturally complicated and carefully maintained homes. If it’d been another day and another time, these houses and their history would’ve fascinated Veronica, and she would’ve spent days looking them up, and maybe even knocking on a door or two. But today it was all she could do to keep her foot from pressing harder on the gas pedal as she sped through the town, leaving those historical wonders in a blur behind her.

  Soon the traffic increased, as did the number of stop signs and pedestrians. The town would have been tiny if it weren’t for the bustling university at its center. In fact, from what Nick’s sister had told her, much of Durham’s population was made up of academics and other staff who ran Duke. After going to college in a metropolis like New York City, Veronica thought this college town had a homey feel to it that didn’t match the tense anticipation inside the car.

  All the turns were clustered together now, one swiftly following another. The passing houses became more and more like set pieces to Veronica, her anxiety building and making a high-pitched ringing sound in her ears that she was sure others could hear. Gillian must’ve read the growing tension in the car; she sat upright in her seat like a pole had been fused to her spine.

  “When we get there, I’ll park around the corner from the house, and I want you to stay in the car,” Veronica said.

  “I told you, I don’t like the idea of you going in there alone. What if they hurt you? I mean, they clearly know who you are. Maybe I should go instead. They don’t know me.”

  “You are not going. You don’t know what to ask or what Sophie even looks like in person. If these people are involved in any way, they won’t expect me to show up on their doorstep.”

  “Unless Mark warned them we were coming.”

  Veronica thought back to her discussions with Mark, how the look in his eye when he stared down at her hadn’t changed even when she’d called him out or when he’d learned that she was a suspect in her child’s own disappearance.

  “I didn’t tell Mark where we were headed,” Veronica said, feeling like he had been on their side, but not wanting to bet on it. Her phone sounded, making her jump.

  “You have reached your destination” echoed through the car as she drove past a beautiful new-construction two-story Victorian, brick along the front with white columns and a sweeping front step that led to a striking red door. A white picket fence that looked like it’d be about hip high on Veronica lined the yard, and there was an arch of climbing roses curving over the driveway that went far past the house toward what must’ve been a detached garage in the rear of the property.

  It was lovely, picturesque even, the kind of place you imagined children playing as their mother darned socks on the front porch. For some reason it didn’t look like the beginning of an unusually hot summer. Here it seemed summer’s heat only brought out roses faster and gave children a reason to run in the sprinklers.

  She squinted to see through the gauzy curtains hanging on the other side of the front picture window and only saw the outline of what she imagined was a dining room table. Another light illuminated an empty sitting room where two sofas and a table with a floral centerpiece were clearly visible from the street.

  “Looks like someone is home,” she said, questioning herself only slightly. This place looked so normal, not like a den of child-stealing psychopaths. But it was her only lead. She tapped the screen of her phone to turn off the map and then pulled around the corner, two houses down from the dreamy house with yellowish lights in the window glowing in the early twilight.

  “I don’t like this, Veronica. I don’t like this at all. Can we call someone? If you don’t want to call the police, maybe you can get Mark to come? Or maybe we should call Lisa—”

  “No.” Veronica turned off the car and started to collect her few belongings. “I’ll turn on the phone and leave it on like with Mark, but if we get disconnected and I don’t come back or respond to texts or calls . . . then you can call the police, okay? Give me fifteen minutes.”

  “Fifteen minutes? That’s enough time to kill you and start making a suit out of your skin. Five minutes—or you screaming bloody murder—is plenty.”

  She hesitated, knowing her plan was very limited, including only “bring Sophie home” or “here is another lead.” But she also knew she wasn’t going to leave that house until she knew why these people were having her followed and whether they knew anything about her child.

  “Ten minutes if everything sounds normal and then you can call 911, okay? Good enough?” Without a purse or pockets, Veronica put her phone in her bra and tried to adjust it so the outline wasn’t as obvious against the clingy fabric.

  “Good enough.” Gillian nodded, slumping in her seat for a second before sitting upright again. “If you take the gun. Good enough, if you take the gun. In case of an emergency.”

  Veronica sighed. “Where am I supposed to put a gun, in my bra with my phone? You’re going to be listening to everything; why do you need me to take a loaded firearm?”

  Gillian reached b
ehind the seat and yanked out a grungy-looking bag, pink with white polka dots, stained by what looked like a tan liquid. With an exaggerated shake, she dumped the bag out onto the back seat of the car with a reddish-brown puff of dust, leaving an impact mark on the gray fabric. Scooping up the gun with no trepidation, she flipped a switch on the back of the gun, tossed it into the bag, and forced the zipper shut.

  “Just in case, that’s why.” She held the gun bag out toward Veronica.

  “I don’t feel comfortable . . .”

  But Gillian shook her head, the same look she’d had when Carl tried to get past her into her house earlier pressing into the lines of her face. “Take it or I call the police.”

  “You wouldn’t . . .”

  Gillian shoved the bag toward her. “I would.”

  The streetlight above the car flashed on, and the rest down the street followed like they were playing a game of tag. She wanted to get into the house before it got too late for a knock on the door to still be normal. All this bickering was wasting time. She put out her hand, angrier at Gillian’s stubbornness than resigned to the fact that she was walking into a quite possibly dangerous situation.

  “Fine. Give it to me.” The bag landed heavy in her palm, and Veronica wondered if the gun was pointing right at her. “Please tell me I just saw you put the safety on.”

  “Yeah.” She cocked her head to one side. “Need me to show you how to take it off?”

  “No, I’ve got it.” She placed the bag under her armpit like a clutch purse and opened the car door.

  Just as she was about to slam the door shut on Gillian’s eager face, the other woman called out, “Be safe!” and a deep throb of regret pounded through Veronica. Her feelings had been turned off for so long, numbed by routine and avoidance in an effort to keep away the deep sadness of grief, that any emotions like the ones she’d experienced today felt foreign and overwhelming. The terror and panic that followed Sophie’s disappearance were intense, yet to be expected, but the way she felt toward Gillian was different and uncomfortable. Gillian was her friend. How had that happened in all this madness? Veronica leaned down one more time and made contact with the increasingly hardening eyes of her companion.