“Just let me know if you hear anything else,” said Abigail, moving slowly toward the door. Her daughter’s face was all over town, and her daughter’s business was all over town, and her daughter was missing, wasn’t this enough? Couldn’t she just come home now? Abigail looked through the window—she could see the fence and her own backyard from here. Frank’s car was pulling in. Maybe she should leave.
“I will, I will,” said Jane. She was worrying a linty piece of folded paper from the laundry in her hand.
• • •
Abigail didn’t know the contents of these houses. She knew their faces: brick and mortar, lights on the flanks of the red front doors, aluminum siding, stained wood, one a yellow as pale as a goldfinch’s belly feather, she’d seen it painted three times since she’d lived there, the trucks and ladders; the tarps; and the sharp, sour paint smell as she’d driven past with her windows open.
The cell phone rang, and Abigail leapt off the sidewalk, lifting with adrenaline.
“Abby,” said Margaret. “I have a new list of possibilities for you. And I have this amazing new crème from Shiseido—how are you, babe?”
“I’m—” She stood, unable to say it. Looking for my lost daughter. A wreck. Help. “Okay,” she finished.
“You’ll be better once you start brainstorming with me. Cupcake Café is looking for kitchen prep help—I know that’s really not your thing, and it wouldn’t be for long. Probably would cost more than it brings in given the commute but, honey, you could learn so much for your own café. What do you think of cupcakes?”
“I . . . I don’t think cupcakes are right?” I’m going door-to-door asking for leads. My Linsey is missing. If she told Margaret, it would be too real to bear. She should. She couldn’t.
“Okay, don’t worry, some of this is closer to home. There’s even real estate. I know that’s a stretch for you, too—”
Abigail laughed, a fake laugh. “No way, not real estate, that’s not me,” she said, letting this be about her, letting herself be important to her friend. She was crying as quietly as she could.
“Okay, gotta go, but I’m e-mailing you this list. Don’t pooh-pooh everything, open mind, my dear, open mind.”
“Okay.”
“Are you okay? You sound stressed?” Margaret had to go, she would let her go. It would be in all the papers soon, and then there’d be no choice but to talk with everyone about it. All the time. Until Linsey came home. And probably after.
Margaret signed off and Abigail tried to swallow the lump in her throat. It was like lying, but she couldn’t tell her friend that Linsey was gone. Then Abigail stared at her phone again, wondering whether Linsey had ever really talked with Margaret, whether she would have confided—no, Margaret couldn’t be so blithe if she knew anything. It was awful—everyone suddenly seemed suspicious. Abigail was walking, faster and faster, feeling her body move, the muscles stretched with unaccustomed effort. How long had it been since she abandoned her car, how long had it been since she’d walked long and far in this neighborhood, past the houses she knew, into the storybook realm of unknown neighbors’ lives? The last time she remembered walking here, it was with the baby, one week old, and Linsey, just four. She’d let her daughter push the stroller; the baby had been hard asleep, his eyes winched shut against the world. It had been summer, late summer, like this, and she’d never expected what had come next, only had watched her daughter peel a Band-Aid off her finger and tighten her mouth in concentration as she pushed the carriage, a heavy thing from Joe’s mother, with shock-absorbing springs and its own mattress. Linsey had to reach overhead to grip the bar.
She jogged down the path into the woods, as if she might find something there. The trees stood like sentries on the riverbank, and she walked faster, faster, peering into the water. They should drag the river, she thought, horrifying herself by imagining her daughter’s bloated face, a severed limb. No, no, no. There was occasional litter on the path, a half-flattened beer can, the glitter of crushed glass. A flyer for a new Japanese restaurant in town. A note about band practice. But mostly, just the lobed leaves of jewelweed, shiny poison ivy swaddling the shrubbery, oaks and maples and sycamores casting long shadows across the path. What did she expect to find in here, she wondered—a tree house, a shack, a secret tunnel? Three times she’d come down here, looking in the little strip of woods. Once alone, once with her husband, once with Barq, who kicked over stones as if her daughter might be hiding with pill bugs and earthworms. She had read that more than half of runaways stay close to home, that some abducted teens were held within a mile of the place from which they’d been taken.
Abigail stopped; someone was coming. Her heart kept up its work, though she wasn’t breathing. Then an elderly man passed, his basset hound on a leash, his ears pink and his cheeks bristly, her ears dragging the path like a net. The path ended, and Abigail was back on the street in the gloaming. She started running. Her legs felt good, that ache. The leaves leaving the early maples, yellowed, with green still gripping their veins, tumbled into the street. It was windy now, as if the ending day was full of breath. The leaves ran away from her, fast down the street, and then Abigail was running, too, stretching her legs long, remembering what it felt like to be a dancer in high school—her mother had wanted her to be a dancer, had sat through lessons when mothers were long since gone during the instruction, had hoped for Clara in the annual Nutcracker, though Abigail was once the nutcracker itself, because she was limber, fast, could jump high, and was never going to be tall. She had a good body for comedy, her teacher had said. Not drama. Why hadn’t God listened to that? Where was the comedy in her life right now? Only Frank, only her husband, who joked about the detective’s funny eyebrows to keep her from weeping. She was running hard now, and had left the sidewalk for the street, running past the turnoff for town, toward the reservoir path, wearing her sensible, nonthreatening clothes for interviewing neighbors. The blouse buttons strained as she swayed her arms, her khakis were ridiculous for running, but she had to keep going. On the path, she passed a man from her neighborhood, Reeva’s husband, Mr. Sentry. He looked at her, the quick passing-jogger glance, then nodded his head to the music attached to his ears. He wore embarrassing Lycra shorts and a tank top—tank tops on middle-aged men seemed like such a desperate thing, she thought, though Frank wore tank-top undershirts, but he’d never wear them around the backyard like a Jewish mafioso. He’d never jog, either, though just before they married he joined a gym for two months, worked out, and returned home wearing zipper-front sweatshirts and looking proud. He should work out, she realized, he needed to be in better shape if he was going to live long enough for her. Everyone left her, everyone. She took the cutoff from the reservoir, the one that linked to the Long Path, which linked to the rails-to-trails project that followed the highway up to the New York border. She kept running. Her legs burned and her lungs hurt. She couldn’t stop, so she shoved the few notes from her clipboard in her pocket and threw away the board itself and the pen, childlike in her pride as she dunked them into a trash can without stopping. She would make it to New York, she would keep running, she would run through states and across the surface of lakes and into Canada and across oceans until she found her daughter. Then her leg cramped. A fist of muscle. She couldn’t keep running. She stopped and leaned on a spindly birch limb, breathing and breathing, her lungs burning, rubbing her ridiculous calf.
She turned to hobble toward home. When she got there the mail would be in the box—and she would have to unfold the paper; she would have to see what everyone was about to learn of her family’s private despair.
444 SYCAMORE STREET
Timmy did not trust Jordan House, the boy who worked at Starbucks—who supposedly breezed through college with all sorts of wunderkind skills but now attended coffee and sugar addictions and denned up in a garage behind the Hopsmiths’ house as if he had no use for all that education. It wasn’t that Timmy was a snob—if people had different talents, different inte
llects, different ways of living, that was one thing, but this was a sort of fringe choice, a hanging on, an arrested development.
Timmy had observed Jordan eyeing Linsey at one of those parties the kids on Brook Street had, too much space and parents away, too much money and booze and drugs and all the kids who looked for entertainment in the bad behavior of others clustering like vultures to a kill. He had gone because Linsey begged him, but then he’d convinced her to leave. It was one thing to visit with friends when they were a little drunk, but this was beyond a little—kids passed out on the lawn, two eighth-graders having awkward sex in the hostas—he was disgusted that so many people had no respect for themselves. And Jordan had been sitting on the porch watching people come and go, his legs spread too broad on the step as he leaned back and observed. It wasn’t adult, and it wasn’t child, and he almost went up to kick the bastard for looking at Linsey, lascivious, but he wasn’t like that, he didn’t fight over imagined slights—at least not in real life.
Timmy was sitting in the Starbucks wishing he hadn’t handed his money to Jordan. Jordan handed him, in return, his coffee and a flyer about Linsey.
“I know, dude,” Timmy had said. “She is—she was my girlfriend.” His mouth burned with acid.
“Sorry, kid,” said Jordan, trying to smother Timmy’s “dude” with condescension. He was too handsome, Jordan. He was suspect.
Timmy breathed deep. He breathed deep again. He was probably heaving with breath here in Starbucks, but he knew better than to trap himself in suspecting this guy. This guy was a looker, not a doer.
“Peace, man,” he said, and went to sit down in the nasty blue velvet chairs that smelled of banana peel.
Timmy had walked toward Linsey’s house this morning, but stopped when he saw a small crowd of people and six cars parked in front. He could face Abigail, but he couldn’t face a whole army.
Timmy sat with a notepad and wrote down all the people he didn’t trust—Jordan House, Markos, the boy from Brown, himself. He didn’t trust himself. That was part of the breakup, in fact. He had wanted Linsey too much—wanted what their bodies did together—to see staying with her, together, apart, together, apart, without needing to fill the longings between, the empty space. And he’d rather be apart than be a cheater.
“Hey,” said the kid—Geo. Timmy wasn’t used to the flow of people during the summer—during the year you rarely saw teens out during the day on open campus periods. Elementary school kids were in school.
“Hey,” said Timmy.
“I have some ideas,” said Geo. “And pictures,” as if they were continuing an ongoing conversation.
Geo pulled out a file folder. A mosaic of photos of Linsey. Timmy started looking right away—he knew this one, from graduation, he knew this one, from a Science Saturday, in fact, when she’d come to help out with the World’s Largest Domino Topple attempt (they’d made it to 1,652 before the dominos splayed and stopped).
“Tell me,” said Timmy.
“She could have gone to visit her dad.”
“Good guess, but that’s out. He wouldn’t hide her—he wouldn’t want to go to jail.”
“Okay, so what about this?” Geo pointed to a photo in the cluster—Linsey on someone’s shoulders. He couldn’t recognize the shoulders, and the boy’s head was out of the picture. Not Markos—someone in a leather jacket. Pretentious, Timmy thought, then he sighed. It wouldn’t help anyone if he was paranoid.
Geo took out a notebook—one of those marbled hard-covered single-subject notebooks Timmy thought of as writing journals, since they’d had to keep them since third grade. He wondered whether there would be anything good in Linsey’s, though usually people didn’t write anything too personal, since the teachers, while they promised not to share with others, sometimes pointed out something they thought was terrific, and even read one aloud to class, only it was an awful story about wearing your pants backward in the fifth-grade play and struggling not to cry. He’d had some amazing teachers; he’d also had some bullies disguised as teachers. Timmy was awed when he’d gone along to see Linsey teach the kids in Paterson, respecting people regardless of age or ability. It was something his parents admired, too, and something innate, and probably why everyone thought she would become a teacher, for sure, though she’d told him she loved it but thought there might be more, other things she wanted to do.
“I’m still a kid,” she’d said, leaning into his chest, making his fingers ache to take off her shirt. His body was a problem sometimes.
“So,” said Geo. He’d been writing while Timmy thought about Linsey’s body. “I’ve got the father, the music teacher, the guy from Brown—”
Timmy looked down and saw this list in bright blue Sharpie pen.
“I don’t think any of those people is really suspect,” said Timmy. “I get sick at the idea of anyone doing anything to her, but seriously, Geo, I think the main suspect you should have on that list is Linsey, just Linsey.”
“Hmm,” said Geo. “I appreciate that. But should I keep going? I was planning to ask at the Ridgewood Times whether I could look through old photos and see if there’s anything there.”
“You’re a good kid, Geo,” said Timmy, though he was already feeling sick, knowing what he had to do.
“Look,” said Geo. “There’s something there.” He pointed, obtusely, at the coffee counter, where Jordan the barista was leaning over toward a woman Timmy knew. Mrs. Sentry, he thought. He looked at Jordan’s face, his hand over hers on the coffee cup.
“You’re right,” Timmy said, “there’s something there.” Linsey babysat for Mrs. Sentry. “Put them on the list,” he said, sighing.
“I’ll look for photos,” Geo said. “I have a lot.”
“No harm in looking,” said Timmy, thinking maybe there was potential harm to cheaters and slimeballs. Helping, he was helping, but when you dig in the dirt, sometimes you find pill bugs, stinkbugs, worms, and bones.
Timmy and Geo walked back from town together; Geo pushed his bike and they shared a companionable silence for almost the entire mile. Timmy knew he had to tell Abigail that Linsey had secretly applied to Berkeley, Stanford, and Mills, considering transferring even though she’d always wanted to go to Cornell. The acceptance letters to Berkeley and Mills (“Stanford’s too sunny anyway!” she said, crumpling their thin envelope) followed the portal lists and came to his house, because she’d wanted to keep this all to herself. For two weeks, she’d decided on Mills. “Think of all the women’s studies!” she’d said. “I can learn to be a woman!” In a way, it had been funny, but in a way, it was true—college was that step forward, learning to live in the world.
The day they broke up she told him she was still going to Cornell, that her parents had paid the first tuition bill, griping as if they hadn’t expected it—her mother, anyway. Her stepfather, she said, had told her, over poached breakfast eggs, Please know you can call if you need anything, even money. Timmy liked that guy. But maybe even he belonged on the list.
She’d said she wasn’t considering Mills anymore, that she wasn’t going to transfer, ever. But it occurred to him that she could have gone to visit—not to see him, but to see the other coast, to take in an alternative through her senses and not just pictures and ideas. He may have been the only person to know that she was far from sure about what she wanted to do when she grew up—everyone assumed she would be a teacher. Sure, maybe she’d get a Ph.D. in education, but that was where everyone thought her heart fit, her future. He knew Linsey wasn’t sure about her future, about teaching, even about college—he knew she made a beautiful mask, but that she was insecure where other people thought she was sincerely smiling.
Geo wanted to help him—he could see something in that kid, a loop tape of Velcro looking for the hook side, a slipping up against the world that wanted purchase. Things had mostly been easy for Timmy, except for knowing, all his life, that he’d kept his parents from doing all the things they wanted to do, last child, last anchor. His olde
r brother had spent two years with them in a slum in Peru; his sister had volunteered at the Paterson shelter starting when she was ten, and now she worked for social services, but he was born later, and they were distracted, and instead of surrounding him in the yolky food of their need to help other people, he was on the outside of the shell, wishing he knew what they really wanted of him.
Never mind that, Timmy thought, because he wasn’t one to feel sorry for himself. He looked at Geo, who was flipping through a file folder of photographs as they walked; Timmy had assumed the handlebars of Geo’s bike, and thought perhaps they had more in common than the kid could imagine.
“This one,” said Geo, holding a photograph of three girls in heavy jackets by the brook. No one was smoking, but their breath puffed out of mouths like speech bubbles.
“Those girls went with her to visit Brown—when she was applying,” Timmy said, leaning close to the screen, as if he could touch her.
“Elizabeth and April,” he continued. “April is actually going there in the fall.” All this mattered so much before, who went where. What Timmy and Linsey had was surety, early decision, an immunity from the posturing and rabid checking of portals at certain hours to see who got into Yale, who got into Emerson, who got into Julliard, who was wait-listed at Swarthmore. It all seemed silly to them then, until she starting thinking about the other schools.
He remembered something she’d told him about that trip. They’d still been together, they were going to be together forever at that point; he was busy pitying people who hadn’t found their other half, who didn’t get to press their bodies against the bodies that needed theirs. She told him about the guy they stayed with, Cliff—the same guy in that photo from the party. Elizabeth was friends with Celia Savage and Cliff was Celia Savage’s stepbrother, and Linsey told Timmy she hadn’t known anything, really, about the arrangements, she’d just known that when they arrived, Cliff—who was obscenely handsome, in Timmy’s opinion, handsomer than the slightly smarmy Jordan House, but he didn’t say that then, he just reminded Linsey that Cliff seemed arrogant—was their host in his off-campus apartment. She’d told him everything, though it was awful, and made him want to hurt this Cliff, and worry about Cliff, and think much more about Cliff than he’d ever wanted to think about another man. His parents had taught him jealousy was like some sort of disease—it damaged people inside, it hurt them and did nothing to give them the objects they desired. Not that Linsey was an object. She said his feeling jealous was cute. He kissed her too hard.
When She Was Gone Page 13