Missing Pieces

by Joy Fielding

  Silently, she fell against me. My nose immediately buried itself inside the folds of her soft brown hair, her smell as sweet to me as a newborn baby’s. The heat from her slender body burned into my side, as fierce as a branding iron, welding us together. “I love you,” I repeated, kissing the top of her head, once, twice, as many times as she would allow.

  Michelle swiped a few errant tears away from her face, but she made no attempt to disengage. “I love you too.”

  We sat this way for some time, enjoying the intimacy, neither wishing to be the first to break away. For the first time all day, I was truly calm.

  The peace was shattered with the sound of Larry’s voice. “Kate?” he was calling. “Kate, where are you?”

  “It’s okay,” Michelle said, squirming out of my arms, taking all tranquillity with her. Immediately, I felt my anger returning. What was Larry yelling about? Why did we have to go out tonight when all I wanted to do was stay home? Where was Sara? What was she trying to pull this time?

  “What’s the problem?” I asked, greeting Larry at the doorway to Michelle’s room. He was wearing a large beige towel around his waist and rubbing his wet hair with another.

  “No problem.” His deep voice filled the space between us, spilled over into Michelle’s room. “Did Michelle tell you I broke a hundred?”

  “She did.”

  “It was hot as hell out there, I tell you,” he continued enthusiastically, following me back to our bedroom, an overgrown puppy at my heels. “But I don’t know, all that humidity seemed to work for me. It made me really focus or something, I’m not sure. Whatever it was, it worked. I hit a ninety-eight. I would have gotten even lower if I hadn’t blown up on the last two holes.” He laughed. “I guess that’s golf. It’s a game of could-have’s. How was your day?”

  “Terrible. Do we have to go out tonight?”

  He looked at his watch, still wet from the shower. “Sure do. In fact, we should be leaving in about ten minutes.”

  “Ten minutes? I have to take a shower, get dinner ready for Michelle.”

  “You don’t have time for a shower, and Michelle can order a pizza.”

  “I’m not going anywhere without a shower,” I said stubbornly, “and what about Sara?”

  “You can take a long, leisurely bath when we get home from dinner, and what about Sara?”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “Should I?”

  “Somebody should,” I said testily, knowing I was being unfair. “Apparently she didn’t show up for school today.”

  Resignation replaced the elation on Larry’s face. “Did you check the answering service to see if she called?” he asked.

  I walked around the bed to the white phone that sat on the large, curved end table, quickly pressing the appropriate numbers to retrieve my messages. There was only one message. It was from Jo Lynn. “Call me,” was all it said.

  Calling my sister was the last thing I wanted to do. Today was the day, after all, when Beauty was scheduled to meet the Beast, and I had no desire to hear the blow-by-blow. Already I knew more details than I cared to, that the meeting was to take place directly after court recessed for the weekend, that the place of assignation was to be the Palm Beach County Correctional Center on Gun Club Road, and that Romeo and Juliet would be separated by a wall of glass, speaking to each other through specially constructed phones. Just like in the movies, I thought, shaking my head at the irony of situating a penitentiary on a street named Gun Club Road. I closed my eyes, trying not to picture my sister and Colin Friendly, their hands pressed together against the glass of the partition that divided them.

  “Well?” Larry was asking.

  “No messages,” I said. It was easier that way.

  “Better start getting ready,” he advised, already in his underwear and black knee-high socks.

  “How can we go out without knowing where she is?”

  “Easy.” He slid his arms into a blue-and-white-striped shirt. “We just go. I am not about to let an inconsiderate child control my life. We’ll deal with Sara when we get back.”

  He was right and I knew it, but I was in no mood for rational thought. “But we don’t even know where she is.”

  “Even if we did,” Larry said, “we don’t have time to deal with her now. So, let’s just get ready. This dinner is in Jupiter, and you know what the traffic’s going to be like.”

  “Jupiter?!”

  “Jupiter,” he repeated, his lips curling into a smile. “Not Mars. It’ll only take twenty minutes.”

  “Then I have time for a shower,” I insisted, already on my way to the bathroom, pulling off my clothes as I walked, leaving them in a careless heap where they fell. Just like Sara, I thought, quickly locking the door behind me, and turning on the shower, welcoming the onslaught of hot water as it rained down, like tiny hailstones, on my head.

  “Excuse me, can I use your phone?” The words were out of my mouth as soon as we walked through the door of our host’s brand-new home in the gated golfing community of Windfall Village in Jupiter.

  “Of course.” The startled hostess, a plump brunette in toreador pants, pointed the way through her cavernous living room toward the kitchen. Deliberately ignoring Larry and the look I knew was taking root on his already unhappy face, I walked briskly across the marble-tiled floor, briefly nodding at the half dozen guests assembled around the grand piano and hurrying around the sweeping spiral staircase—one of two on either side of the house—to the marble-and-steel kitchen at the back. Two uniformed maids were preparing canapés and looked startled to see me. No more startled than Michelle was at the sound of my voice.

  “Sara’s not here,” she told me, petulantly. I’d dragged her away from the umpteenth rerun of Roseanne. “Don’t worry about her, Mom,” she advised before hanging up. “You know she’s fine. Don’t let her ruin your evening.”

  It was already ruined, I almost confided, returning the phone to the waiting palm of one of the maids, who replaced it in its carriage, as if I couldn’t be trusted to do it myself. And maybe I couldn’t, I thought, catching sight of myself in the steel trim of the double oven, looking like a slightly deranged matron, my face distorted with aggravation, my hair still slightly damp from the shower, and not properly combed out. Who is that? I wondered.

  Larry had stood over me like an impatient father while I applied my makeup, pointedly checking his watch as I fussed with the side zipper of my black cocktail dress. “It’ll dry in the car,” he’d protested when I reached for the hair dryer, taking it out of my hand and returning it to the drawer, ignoring my shrieks of protest. “You look fine,” he insisted then, and again, repeatedly, in the car on the drive over, “fine” not being a word given to inspiring great confidence.

  Not like “beautiful,” I thought, thinking of Robert, knowing that he’d think nothing of being a little late for a dinner party, deciding that he would have given me all the time I needed to get ready, probably even jumped in the shower with me, delaying us further. Or maybe we wouldn’t have gone at all, I fantasized, reluctantly returning to Larry’s side, allowing myself to be introduced to the general gathering, to be taken on the obligatory tour of the house that Larry built. “Beautiful,” I said, then again: “Beautiful. Just beautiful.”

  We’d fought all the way to the party and we fought all the way home. “I can’t believe how rude you were,” he said as we raced along Donald Ross Road.

  “I wasn’t rude,” I insisted.

  “You don’t call excusing yourself to use the phone every ten minutes rude?”

  “I used the phone exactly three times.”

  “Four.”

  “All right, four. I used the phone four times. Guilty as charged.” I thought immediately of Colin Friendly and Jo Lynn. According to Michelle, my sister had called a second time. I knew I’d have to call her in the morning, get the gory details of her jailhouse tryst whether I wanted to hear them or not.

  “And what did it accomplish?” Lar
ry persisted. “Nothing. Sara still isn’t home, and you know what? She isn’t going to be home when we get back, which is probably a good thing, since if she’s there, I’m likely to kill her.”

  “I don’t know how you can be so indifferent,” I said, deliberately misinterpreting what Larry was saying. But I was angry, and it was easier to pick a fight with Larry—one I felt I stood a chance of winning—than to wait and have it out with Sara, where there was no chance at all.

  He wouldn’t rise to the bait. No matter how low I descended, and I descended pretty low, at one point accusing him of being more concerned about his clients than his daughter, he wouldn’t bite. He wouldn’t engage. The more he withdrew, the more I pushed. The tighter his hands gripped the steering wheel, the looser my tongue became. I yelled, I cried, I carried on. He said nothing.

  What I wanted him to do, of course, was to stop the car and take me in his arms. Just pull over to the side of the road and hold me, tell me that I was a wonderful mother, that I hadn’t failed Sara, that everything was going to be all right, that I was beautiful. But of course he didn’t do this. It’s hard to tell someone she’s beautiful when she’s insulting your manhood, your profession, your fitness as a father.

  When we got home, Larry went straight to our bedroom, not even bothering to check on Sara. He knew she wasn’t home, as did I, though I insisted on checking anyway.

  “She didn’t phone,” Michelle said from her bed. It was almost midnight and sleep was curled around her voice, like a kitten in a basket.

  I approached Michelle’s bedside, leaned over, and kissed her forehead, smoothing some hair away from her delicate face. She sighed and turned over. “Sleep well,” I whispered, closing her door behind me as I left the room. If there were fireworks later, I didn’t want Michelle to be disturbed.

  Larry was already in bed, feigning sleep. My anger was spent; depression was settling in. “I’m sorry,” I said, and I was, and he knew it, although that wasn’t much consolation. What difference does it make that you don’t mean the hurtful things you say? The fact remains that someone else hears them. And words hurt more than sticks and stones after all. They echo in the stillness of the mind long after other bruises have healed.

  I lay down beside Larry on top of the covers, fully clothed for when I heard Sara come home. I wanted our confrontation to be on an even footing. Since Sara already had youth on her side, I didn’t want to compound my disadvantage by being dressed in a nightgown.

  Sara’s curfew was two o’clock, although I’m not sure why I expected her to be on time. Does someone who skips a whole day of classes worry about being late for their curfew? Did Sara ever stop to weigh the consequences of any of her actions?

  At this point, I wasn’t really worried. I was angry, depressed, and disappointed, at her, by her, and in her, but not really worried. It wasn’t the first time, after all, that she’d pulled this sort of stunt.

  When the hour of her curfew came and went, I got out of bed and went back to her room, staring through the darkness toward her unmade queen-size bed. “Where are you?” I whispered, still fighting off worry, trying desperately not to think of all the awful things that could have happened to her. I tried not seeing her lying bleeding in a ditch, the victim of a drunk driver who’d hit, then run; I tried not imagining her lying broken in an alley, the victim of a mugger’s angry fists; I tried not hearing her screams as she was attacked by some sadistic rapist. I tried not seeing a photograph of her beautiful face, ashen and still, as she lay on a cold steel slab in the back room of the medical examiner’s office. I tried, and I failed.

  I stretched out across her sheets, the odor of stale cigarettes settling quickly on my skin. What was the matter with her? Didn’t Sara know how many lunatics were out there just waiting for innocent young girls who thought they were invincible? Men like Colin Friendly, I thought with a shudder, obliterating his image by burying my face in the soft darkness of her pillow.

  Surprisingly, I fell asleep. I dreamed of a girl I’d known in high school. She’d come down to Florida a year ago on holiday and I’d run into her at the Gardens mall. It was the first time I’d seen her since our graduation, but she still looked startlingly young. Full of energy and enthusiasm and proud stories about her family. Six weeks later, I heard she’d been killed in a traffic accident shortly after returning to Pittsburgh. Apparently she’d lost control of her car on an icy stretch of highway and hit a guardrail. The car had flipped over, killing her instantly. In my dream, she was waving at me across the frozen foods section at Publix. I’d lost my grocery list and she was laughing, telling me to stay calm, it would all work out.

  When I woke up, Larry was sitting at the side of the bed, staring down at me. “I think we should call the police,” he said.

  Chapter 11

  We decided to try Sara’s friends first.

  This wasn’t as easy as it should have been. The people in Sara’s life kept changing. Every year brought with it a fresh set of names. Old faces disappeared; new faces popped into view. No one seemed to stay around very long.

  This was a pattern that had been established early in Sara’s life. I remember her nursery school teacher taking me aside one afternoon during a get-acquainted tea and confiding that she’d never seen a child attack a classroom quite the way Sara did. Apparently, every afternoon Sara would climb off the little yellow bus that transported her from home to school and announce, “Today I’m going to play with so-and-so.” Every day she chose a new playmate, and every day she was successful in winning that child over. The next day, she moved on to someone new. Sara never formed a lasting bond with anyone in particular, although these temporary attachments were intense and heartfelt. But when each new day came, she moved forward, without ever looking back.

  The move from Pittsburgh to Palm Beach hadn’t affected her in any noticeable way. Sara, unlike Michelle, left no real friends behind. Several classmates wrote letters; Sara never answered them. She threw herself into her new life with typical enthusiasm and abandon, quickly making a new set of acquaintances, and sliding from one year into the next without the unnecessary encumbrances that lasting friendship often brings.

  And so it was difficult to even think of whom Sara might be with. “Jennifer,” I offered, mentioning a name I’d heard Sara mutter from time to time.

  “Jennifer who?” Larry asked, a not unreasonable question.

  I shook my head. I had no idea. Just as I had no idea what names went with Carrie, Brooke, or Matt. “I know Carrie’s last name,” I insisted, conjuring up the image of a young girl with waist-length blond hair and black jeans pulled tight across an ample backside. “She was here a few weeks ago. You remember her. Carrie … Carrie … Carrie Rogers or Rollins or something with an R.” The fact that I couldn’t recall the last name of even one of our daughter’s so-called friends made me feel guiltier than ever. How can you call yourself a good mother, I could already hear the police declaim, when you don’t even know who your daughter’s friends are?

  “Does she have an address book?” Larry asked finally, and we began searching through Sara’s scattered belongings, as one might search through the rubble of a bombed-out building. We gathered up clothes from the floor, some dirty, some freshly laundered, picked up discarded tapes and closed open books. We found pencils and pennies and scrap pieces of paper, not to mention a half-eaten bran muffin under the bed.

  “Look,” I said, hearing a strange note of wistfulness creep into my voice as I held up four empty packages of cigarettes. “She’s still collecting.”

  “Here it is.” Larry pulled a tattered, black leather-bound book in the shape of a motorcycle jacket out from underneath several tubes of makeup. He opened the book, and we watched as flecks of baby powder drifted toward the carpet, like snow. “There’s nothing under R,” he said.

  “Try C,” I offered.

  Sure enough, there was Carrie, scrawled across the page in dark green ink. No last name accompanied it. Maybe, I thought, Sara didn
’t know it either.

  We returned to our bedroom and phoned Carrie. The voice that finally answered was heavy with sleep and smoke. It mumbled something unintelligible, more a prolonged sigh than an actual hello.

  “Carrie?” I asked, my voice loud, demanding, the auditory equivalent of hands on her shoulders, shaking her awake. “Carrie, this is Sara’s mother. Is Sara there?”

  A long pause, then: “What?”

  “Is Sara there?”

  “Who?”

  “Sara Sinclair,” I shouted angrily. Clearly, this was a waste of time.

  “Sara’s not here.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “What time is it?”

  “Eight o’clock.”

  “In the morning?”

  I dropped the receiver into its carriage. “Sara’s not there.”

  We tried six other names before giving up. My hand was on the receiver, about to call the police, when the phone rang. “Sara?” I all but shrieked.

  “Jo Lynn,” came the unwelcome response.

  My shoulders slumped forward; my head dropped to my chest. My sister was the last person on earth I wanted to deal with. “Jo Lynn, I’m sorry, I can’t talk to you now. Sara didn’t come home last night …”

  “Of course she didn’t come home,” Jo Lynn said. “She’s with me.”

  “What?” I barked. “Sara’s with Jo Lynn,” I told Larry quickly. He shook his head and collapsed on the bed.

  “You’d know that if you bothered to return your messages.”

  “What?”

  “I called you twice last night.”

  “You didn’t say anything about Sara.”

  “I assumed you’d call me back.”

  I was about to protest, decided not to. The important thing was that we knew where Sara was and that she was safe. I was so grateful that I almost forgot that Sara had skipped a whole day of school. How long had she been with my sister? I wondered, seized by a different fear. “What’s she doing with you?” The words emerged slowly, almost reluctantly, as if they had to be pushed from my throat.