by Kara Thomas
NOW
Dad left my prescriptions on the nightstand before sneaking out to help Mrs. Marcotte with dinner. As soon as his footsteps fade down the hall, I fumble for the bottle of water next to the medication. The dregs of water in it are enough to swallow an Ativan and two ibuprofen. I shut my eyes, my veins warming from the Ativan, and block out everything but the steady plink of raindrops on the bedroom window.
I’m powerless against the riptide of exhaustion. I picture storm clouds rolling over the mountain, the trails turning to rivers as the ground is battered by rain. I think of the blood swirling down the drain in the emergency room bathroom, my fingers tracing the cut on my palm until I fall asleep.
* * *
—
When I wake, it’s too quiet. I realize I’m listening for the sound of my IV machine beeping, the nurses chatting in the hall outside my room.
I blink the sleep from my eyes. Sunlight streams through the cracks in the blinds above the twin bed across the room. The bed is empty and made, the corners of the quilt tucked in. My father’s things litter the shared nightstand between our beds: some spare change, his wallet, a receipt from the hospital cafeteria.
Dad can’t be far if his wallet’s here, but I’m afraid to get out of bed, to move through the house without him as a buffer between Kat’s family and me.
I sit up and crack my neck. In the mirror over the dresser, I catch a glimpse of myself.
I slept straight through the night, through a storm, but the full-length mirror in the room shows me the area under my eyes is so gray it looks bruised. The one shower I took in the hospital made me feel even dirtier; my hair is matted in an osprey nest atop my head.
I head for the bathroom across the hall, the bedroom door groaning when I push it open. From the kitchen, Mrs. Marcotte calls my name. So much for sneaking into the shower. I pad down the hall, praying that my father is in the kitchen with Kat’s mother.
Mrs. Marcotte is at the sink. The time on the stove says it’s seven forty-five, but she’s already fully dressed in a crisp white-and-blue-striped blouse and beige slacks. Her honey-blond hair is in a neat bun. The only thing out of place is a smudge of pale concealer on the inside of her nose.
“I hope we didn’t wake you,” Mrs. Marcotte says.
My gaze locks on the kitchen table at the corner of the room, where the rest of we is seated.
Amos Fornier, Kat’s cousin. He sets down the croissant he’s eating and offers me a grim smile. “Hey.”
My insides feel like they’ve been vacuumed up. I can’t reply, can’t crack through the icy grip of panic to even muster a simple hello.
What the fuck is he doing here?
But then, Amos is family. He has more of a reason to be here than I do.
Mrs. Marcotte wipes her hands on a dish rag. “Claire, you remember Amos, right?”
Amos brushes a flake of dough from his lip with his thumb. He looks the same as he did two and a half years ago—same gray-blue eyes, sun-streaked hair that falls just behind his ears. He looks the same, but better, while I’m braless under a ratty T-shirt and haven’t showered in three days.
“It’s been a while,” he says. He continues to pick at his croissant, giving off no indication he’s thinking of exactly what happened the last time we saw each other.
I swallow against the bile rising in my stomach. “When did you get here?”
“Late last night.” Amos leans back in his seat, drapes an arm around the empty chair next to him. He’s in a salmon hoodie with a sailboat on the pocket. In spite of myself, my gaze travels down his legs, tanned and golden-haired.
“Amos is my knight in shining armor,” Mrs. Marcotte says. “He brought a bunch of things I needed from home, including this.”
She’s holding up a full pot of coffee. It takes me a beat to remember the incident with the coffeepot yesterday, to reconcile this frenetic, smiling Mrs. Marcotte with the mess she was yesterday.
“Would you like a cup, Claire?” she says, already opening the cupboard where the mugs are kept. I’m only half listening, my attention on the stack of papers next to Amos on the kitchen table.
“Sure,” I say, and while Mrs. Marcotte’s back is turned, I edge closer so I can read the flyer at the top of the stack.
Missing: Katherine Marian Marcotte
Kat stares back at me, golden hair radiant even in a laser-printed photo. She’s bent over the counter at Dolce Vita Bakery, her hair piled into a bun atop her head, smiling with her lips closed.
Katherine was last seen on Bobcat Mountain Saturday, June 26. Kat is 5’5”, one hundred and five pounds, and has a small scar over her right eyebrow. She may have been wearing a hot-pink bandana and a gray tank top at the time of her disappearance.
At the bottom, almost an afterthought: kat was last seen with jesse salpietro.
Quietly, from the table, Amos says softly: “Fucked up, right?”
I look over the flyer, pulse pounding in my neck. Amos drops his gaze from me to the phone on the table in front of him as Mrs. Marcotte returns with a cup of coffee for me.
“Thank you.” I bring the mug to my lips. “Do you know where my dad is?”
“He got up a little while ago,” Kat’s mother says. “He said he was going for a quick jog. Do you take cream and sugar?”
My best friends are missing, we’re basically being held captive in this lake house, and my father went for a run like we’re on a freaking cruise?
“Amos brought some pastries for breakfast, but I could also cut you some fruit….” Mrs. Marcotte flits back to the counter and grabs the dish towel absently. I should sit and tell her not to worry about me, I can fend for myself, but she has been this way as long as I’ve known her.
In any case, though, I am not sitting down to have breakfast with Amos Fornier. I glance at Amos, but he’s already scrolling CNN’s home page on his phone, checked out of the conversation.
“Mrs. Marcotte—I, um—actually, do you mind if I take a shower?”
“Of course not,” Mrs. Marcotte says. “Did Kat explain how to adjust the new faucet in the guest bath?”
Her voice cracks on her daughter’s name. I shake my head, my throat tight.
Mrs. Marcotte forces a smile. “I’ll show you, then—it’s tricky.”
I follow Kat’s mother out of the kitchen, probably a little too eagerly. I would do anything right now to put as much distance as possible between Amos and me. I would submerge my body in drain cleaner and dissolve down the tub drain, Russian mafia-style, if it meant I wouldn’t have to spend another second under the same roof as him.
When we get to the bathroom, my heartbeat is so wild I barely hear Mrs. Marcotte as she bends over the clawfoot tub. “There are two controls—you have to put the tub one on first—”
I hang by the vanity awkwardly, as Mrs. Marcotte adjusts the tap until water begins to flow from the showerhead. “Thank you.”
“Of course. The towels are—”
Mrs. Marcotte turns from the tub, pauses. Watches me open the closet door to the right of the vanity.
“In there,” she says, her hand moving to the infinity loop at her neck. A question flickers in her eyes. How did I know where the towels were, if I didn’t take a shower here last weekend?
“Thank you,” I repeat stupidly, even though I feel like I owe her an explanation.
“Of course,” Mrs. Marcotte says, her smile slipping. “Let me know if you need anything else.”
* * *
—
I have been standing under the blast of the showerhead for almost ten minutes, working out the knots in my hair with conditioner that smells like violets and probably costs more by the ounce than white powder heroin.
My thoughts are forming a squall in my head. There are only two closets in this bathroom; the odds were pretty good I’d pick the on
e that houses the towels.
But I’d opened that closet without even thinking what I was doing. Almost like I knew the towels were there because I’d taken a shower Saturday morning before we went hiking.
I close my eyes against the blast. How is it possible I can remember a piece of information—where the guest towels are kept—but not the act of standing right here in this tub?
Does it mean that my memories from Saturday are in a locked drawer in my brain somewhere? The hospital neurologist told me it could take weeks or months to get my memory back, if I do at all. He’d been careful to work that part in: that some people with head injuries like mine never get their memory back at all.
The thought makes me want to crawl out of my skin. I rinse my body, climb out of the tub, and wrap myself in the towel. When I get back to the bedroom, Dad is perched on the edge of his bed, panting, shirt soaked.
“You went for a run?” I hiss, closing the door behind me. “Doesn’t that seem a little insensitive?”
Dad blinks, face pink and sweaty. “Claire, did something happen while I was gone?”
I sit on my bed, opposite him, pulling the towel tight around my body. I’m projecting onto my dad because I’m scared—scared that my friends might be dead, scared I’m missing thirty-six hours of my life, and now, scared that maybe Mrs. Marcotte doesn’t trust I’m telling the truth about what I remember.
Dad wipes sweat from his brow, waiting for me to answer his question.
“I just don’t want to be here,” I whisper. I don’t want to be here without Kat and Jesse; I don’t want to be here when they’re found.
It’s been more than seventy-two hours. I watch Dateline. I know what their odds of being found alive are.
“Oh, baby doll.” Dad puts his hands on his knees, but doesn’t motion to cross to my bed to comfort me. Probably because I’m in nothing but a towel so it might be weird so I just sit there, practically naked in front of my dad, crying.
I fan my eyes with the hand that isn’t holding up my towel, even though it’s too late. I’m probably a splotchy mess. Mrs. Marcotte and Amos will see and wonder what the hell I’m crying about when I’m the one who made it off that mountain alive.
“Can we do something to help today?” I sniff.
“Like what?” Dad frowns. “You’re supposed to be resting.”
“I don’t know, but I can’t go another day being completely useless.” In the hospital, I had a purpose, even if that was just existing as a body for the nurses and orderlies to draw blood from, usher from test to test.
“What about the flyers?” I ask. “Do they need help hanging them or something?”
“They were going to go door-to-door in town with them,” Dad says, watching me stand and paw through my backpack for the spare bra I packed.
“Great, we can help cover more ground then.” I grab the plastic Walmart bag of clothes my mother picked up for me while I was in the hospital. A package of granny panties, black yoga pants, and a cotton T-shirt emblazoned with a peace sign. I step behind the closet door so Dad can’t see me drop my towel and wiggle into my bra.
When Dad speaks, his voice is flat, defeated, as if he knows he’s not keeping me in this house all day. “Are you sure you’re up for all that driving around?”
“Positive.”
Dad sighs. “I’ll go tell Beth and grab a stack of flyers.”
When I’m cleaned up and dressed, Dad already has the car running outside. This is the first time we’ve been truly alone since McAuliffe’s visit yesterday afternoon.
I feel like I need to defend myself. Defend Jesse. All the words wither and die on my lips. Finally, Dad breaks the silence by saying, “Want to try to find NPR?”
I fiddle with the seek buttons on the radio, even though it’s useless; there’s barely a signal up here. I skip over the twang of a banjo, a garbled Aerosmith song, before we opt for total quiet instead.
Dad follows the signs directing us toward Grist Mill, a town south of Sunfish Creek. The roads are winding, prompting me to shut my eyes against the swell of nausea.
“This looks like a good place to start,” he says.
I open my eyes as Dad coasts to the curb and cuts the engine. We’re on a residential street lined with squat single-story houses in various stages of decay. There is no movement around the home we’re parked in front of; on the lawn is a sun-faded kiddie pool, the surface of the browning water strewn with debris from last night’s storm.
Dad plucks a flyer from the top of the stack in my lap. I watch him head to the house. Ring the doorbell, knock. Repeat. Eventually he slips the flyer inside the mailbox beside the door and heads back to the car.
The houses are far enough apart that we have to drive to the next house and gradually we fall into a rhythm that thankfully requires little talking: I hand him a flyer as he gets out of the car, and he knocks on the front door. If no one answers, he sticks a flyer in the mailbox and we move on. I count how many we hit because I think this entire exercise will drive me crazy if I don’t.
Dad climbs back into the car after house number twenty-eight and creeps up to twenty-nine, a ranch with faded brown siding. In the driveway, there’s a pickup truck, its back window plastered with so many decals it’s a miracle the driver can see to back out. Among them: a skeleton giving the middle finger, a Confederate flag, and an assault rifle with the words come and take it.
“I don’t think you should knock on the door,” I say, eyeing the house uneasily. A dark bedsheet is tacked over the front windows.
Dad puts the car in park. “Why?”
I point at the back window of the truck. “I don’t exactly get a welcoming vibe.”
“Don’t be silly,” Dad says, but when he climbs out of the car I notice him glance at the decals, frowning.
I track Dad up the front porch of the house, my heart rocketing in my chest. Watch him knock, wait a beat.
A man steps out, shutting the screen door behind him. He’s wearing jeans with oil stains on the shins and a black T-shirt. When Dad holds up the flyer, the man rests his hands on his hips, head tilted slightly. Listening. He grabs the flyer and nods to Dad.
The entire transaction occupies less time than it takes for me to evict the sneeze lodged in my nose. When Dad starts heading back for the car, the man doesn’t go back inside his house.
I can’t tear my eyes away from him. His hair is reddish blond and he has a scrubby beard shaved low to his jawline. My pulse begins to race.
I know him. But that’s impossible, because I don’t know anyone in this town.
The man’s gaze lands on me. He drops his hand from his beard and cocks his head. Stares back at me in a way that sends gooseflesh rippling over my arms.
He recognizes me too.
He frowns. I tear my eyes away from him and stare straight ahead, heart hammering. When I steal a glance back at the house, the man is gone, and Dad is opening the driver’s side door.
A slick of sweat coats the back of my neck. I fumble for the control to lower the window. It’s too damn hot in here, I need air—
Dad’s hand is on my shoulder. “Claire. Are you okay?”
I don’t know. “What did that man say to you?”
Dad gapes at me. “He didn’t really say anything. Claire—what’s going on?”
“Do you have the sheriff’s number?” I ask. “I need to talk to him.”
NOW
The parking lot of the Sunfish Creek’s sheriff office is worse than a Target’s on Christmas Eve. Reporters, tailgating.
A uniformed sheriff’s deputy flags us down. Dad tells him we have an appointment, and the deputy directs us around a blockade.
“Park in the back lot,” he tells us. “Someone will let you in the back to avoid the vultures.”
As Dad parks, I swallow to clear my throat of t
he rising panic. They’re not here for me; the articles I found online about Kat and Jesse’s disappearance didn’t mention me at all.
Kat is the reason the story is blowing up. An attractive missing teenage girl, the granddaughter of a prominent former congresswoman? It’s their Super Bowl.
“Marian was on the Today Show this morning,” Dad says quietly as we climb out of the car. “She left for her apartment in the city last night.”
The back door to the sheriff’s station is propped open. Dad and I head through it, where Dave McAuliffe waits in the hallway, his fingers working at his belt buckle. “Thanks for coming in,” he says, as if we’re doing him a favor, and I hadn’t grabbed the phone and demanded to talk to him when the receptionist told us the sheriff was at the mountain and she didn’t know when he’d return.
Behind the front desk is an empty chair and a handwritten sign that reads ring bell for dee. McAuliffe ushers us past a row of empty cubicles and through a door with a frosted-glass pane.
McAuliffe lifts the phone on his desk from its cradle before he even sits. He tucks it between his ear and shoulder and says into the mouthpiece: “Hello, Dee? Please, for the love of God, tell them they’ve got to wait at the street.”
In the corner, propped on the windowsill, is a fan blowing warm air at us. There’s barely room for the two chairs squashed opposite McAuliffe’s desk. My father and I stuff ourselves into them, our elbows knocking into each other’s.
“These reporters,” McAuliffe says, his voice deflating. He shakes his head, as if finishing the thought is too exhausting. I almost feel sorry for the poor bastard. He looks like he should be in a pool in some retirement community in Florida by now.
McAuliffe leans forward and props his elbows on his desk. He raps a pen against the knuckles on his opposite hand. “I hear you believe you have important information?”
I swallow, my nerves clogging my throat. “I saw a man this morning, in Grist Mill. I recognized him.”
The pen in McAuliffe’s fingers goes still. “Your memory’s come back?”