Lost You

by Haylen Beck

  “I need to find my son,” Libby said.

  The woman stepped closer once more, reached for Libby, touched her forearm.

  “Do you want me to get security? I can go down to the—”

  Libby turned away from her. “Ethan! Ethan!”

  She called her son’s name again and again, louder each time, until it burned her throat. And yet she kept calling, even as her voice cracked.

  Charles didn’t fall, she thought. And this time, the idea didn’t turn on itself, it didn’t change. He didn’t fall, he didn’t fall, he didn’t fall. And Ethan isn’t lost.

  Oh God, Ethan isn’t lost. He’s been found.

  Panic took her, finally, totally.

  She fell to her knees, barely conscious of them cracking on the marble floor. Her son’s name tore from her mouth, shredding her voice, until she could no longer shout, could only emit a strangled whisper.

  Somewhere far away, the woman told her husband to get help, quick, now, go, and other voices gathering round, hands on her shoulders, but she was deaf and blind to them all.

  Libby tried to scream his name, but her voice had deserted her, and his name became a long unending exhalation, taking with it all the air in the world, and then everything was quiet and black and sparkling and something cold that might have been the floor slammed into her cheek.

  8

  RAYMOND VILLALOBOS WALKED THE LENGTH of the lazy river pool, following as it looped around to form an ellipse that enclosed a rocky island, which was as fake as the artificial current that carried relaxed guests along its course. It was a favorite among the older patrons, and those with young children. One could hardly imagine a safer place to swim, but Villalobos knew better.

  He could see clearly the tiled bottom lit from beneath the water, the vents, the drains. In his eight years at the hotel, he had found one body out here: a middle-aged man who had decided to go for a late swim and suffered heart failure. There had been other close calls: he once had to pull a teenage girl from the shallowest stretch and pump water from her chest.

  He said a silent prayer that he would not find the boy here or in any of the other pools. The idea was a constant worry for him, that a child would wander away from his parents and into the cold blue. The lifeguards were all well trained, good at their jobs, but they weren’t on duty twenty-four hours. Therefore, he always had one of his own men walking a route around the grounds, from pool to pool, looking for little explorers who’d grown too bold.

  Villalobos’s daughter had drowned at the age of four. He had not long retired from the Naples Police Department on medical grounds, heart trouble, and he and his wife had been renting a place with a bean-shaped swimming pool. Jess had woken early and somehow managed to unlock the sliding doors out onto the patio. He had been jarred awake by his wife’s screams, and stumbled his way out, following the sound of her voice. Jess floated facedown, still in her pajamas, one of her Barbie dolls bobbing beyond the reach of her hand. When he got there, Carmel was wading through the water to her, still screaming her name.

  Their marriage didn’t survive the loss, and they’d drifted out of touch over the nine years since. Last he’d heard, Carmel was in Miami, managing some dive bar, keeping a heroin addiction barely under control. On the last anniversary of Jess’s death, his cell phone had rung, and the number was from that city. He did not answer, and he regretted it still.

  Villalobos left the Lazy River satisfied the boy was not there and followed the winding pathways leading to the infinity pool. A few of the feral cats that lived on the grounds watched him as he passed, their eyes reflecting the beam of his flashlight. Scruffy and fat, they resisted the resort staff’s attempts to get rid of them because the guests were so generous with their leftovers. Villalobos didn’t mind them because they kept the rodent population in check.

  He came to the northern edge of the infinity pool and found Pete Corr there, still in his lifeguard’s uniform.

  “Anything?” Villalobos asked.

  “No,” Pete said. “I’ve been all around, and Tony went in the water, but the kid isn’t here.”

  “Okay, good,” Villalobos said. “Stick around a while longer, will you? Just keep an eye out in case you see him wandering.”

  “Sure,” Pete said, and Villalobos thanked him.

  Pete was a good kid who had dropped out of college two years ago. Villalobos knew he was a pothead, and he stayed in this job because it paid him to hang around a pool all day long, but he was conscientious, and had saved at least five lives that he was aware of.

  Villalobos walked around the shallow end of the infinity pool and its artificial beach, making for the Ladon pool, the one exclusively for the VIP guests who could afford the rooms that opened out directly onto it.

  He was worried about the child.

  No way would he say it aloud to the mother, but the length of time he’d been missing was a serious concern. In his eight years, he must have dealt with hundreds of children getting lost on the grounds. Almost every time, the child would be found within minutes. But the boy had been gone for more than half an hour now, and there were many accidents that could befall a child across a resort such as this.

  The Ladon pool came into sight between the palm trees ahead. An older couple sat on their private swim-up terrace, a bottle of wine between them. With luck, they’d been there awhile and would have seen a child if he’d come near. He was about to call out to them from this side of the water when his radio crackled.

  “Boss? You there?”

  He unclipped it from his belt. “Yeah, who’s that?”

  “Carlos.”

  Villalobos pictured the tubby man, ex-military, who worked at least three different security jobs to support his family.

  “What’s up?” he asked as he turned away from the pool toward the south gate.

  “Me and Tom Landry, we’re in the north tower, in the public stairway, between the fourth and fifth floors. We got an injured man here, looks like he took a bad fall. He was with the mother before the kid ran away. She was here a second ago, then took off. I think you should maybe come up here. Things are getting a little crazy.”

  Villalobos stopped walking and cursed. “You call 911?”

  “Yeah, paramedics are on the way. Shit, listen, something’s going on next floor up. I gotta go.”

  Villalobos turned and started walking back to the north tower. “All right, I’m on my way.”

  Dammit, he thought. Maybe it was a coincidence, but as a former cop, his belief in coincidences only stretched so far. The worry he’d felt before now deepened, creeping into fear. And part of the fear was selfish; he had no desire to deal with a missing-child incident that was worsening by the minute.

  The band played on the terrace as he approached, and he noticed the mood among the guests. They knew something was wrong, that something bad had happened. No one danced, and the guests were gathered in clusters, heads close as they shared rumors.

  God, please don’t let it go bad.

  The quiet prayer surprised him even as the words formed in his mind. He had ceased talking to God after Jess died. He still believed in a higher power, but that didn’t mean he should waste a thought on a being who could kill a child for no reason at all. But there it was, a plea to the God who took his child not to take another.

  He was almost at the doors leading to the lobby, and the elevators and stairs beyond, when the radio crackled again.

  “Boss, you copy?”

  He recognized the voice despite the distortion.

  “I’m dealing with something, Alejandro, I’ll come back to you later.”

  “Boss, you need to come down here.”

  “Dammit, Alejandro, I’ve got a situation in the north tower. It’ll have to wait.”

  “Boss, you don’t understand. I got the kid’s movements on camera.”


  Villalobos stopped. “And?”

  “You gotta come down here and see.”

  “Fuck,” Villalobos said, no longer caring that he was cussing within earshot of the guests.

  It’s going bad, he thought as he turned toward the southern tower and the stairs that led to the control center.

  God help that boy, he thought.

  9

  “I CAN’T DO THIS,” MASON HAD said.

  He said it so many times in those few months, shaking his head, staring into the dim distance. As if he had a right to opt out now that the baby was here, as if he could simply pretend this miracle hadn’t occurred.

  Mason’s drinking increased in those first days, the wine opened earlier in the evening, the stink of it stronger in the morning. He had always taken a drink, as Libby’s Irish grandfather would have said. He’d take a half ’un, that boy, the old man would say in that Derry accent. And yes, Mason would take a drink ever since she’d known him, but she’d rarely seen him sloppy drunk.

  There was their wedding night. Mostly thanks to his best man, Johnny, whom they’d lost touch with since. As soon as the vows had been made, the rings placed on their fingers, Johnny had put a drink in Mason’s hand, and made sure his glass had not been empty the rest of the day. As a result, Mason had fallen asleep still dressed in his suit within a minute of them retiring to their room. Libby had cried that night, feeling a sting of regret that they hadn’t made love. It was all she could do to keep herself from falling into the black, that dark place where she knew she had no worth, would never be good enough for anyone or anything. She had kept that side of herself hidden from Mason so far. She didn’t tell him until years later about the episodes she’d had as a teenager, the downward spirals that she was lost to for weeks at a time. When she did finally gather the courage to talk about it, he was kind and understanding, as she should have known he’d be. Either way, they made love early the next morning, and in the dawn light she admonished herself for her foolishness at being upset at such a thing.

  She could count on one hand the times since then that he’d gotten drunk enough to not be in control of himself. Mason was a man who liked to be in control. Libby had learned that when they first started dating. When she asked one too many times to split the dinner bill, and he bristled, his male pride blistering. And she had liked that, in spite of herself. She liked that he took control when they bought a new car, or applied for a mortgage, or opened a bottle of liquor. Despite every shred of her being that considered herself a feminist, she enjoyed that he, ultimately, took care of her. She loved that she could relinquish control to him, and not hate herself for it.

  Dear God, what her college friends would have thought. She had submitted to the patriarchy, they would have said. She had surrendered.

  If she’d had the nerve, she would have countered: So what?

  In the years since she’d left college, she had looked back on all those long and turgid nights, talking politics and gender, gender and politics, and realized she simply didn’t care anywhere near as much as she thought she did. Within five years of graduating, Libby had reached the middle ground and found herself content there. All those things that seemed so desperately important when she was twenty faded into the background when the necessities of living took precedence. Food, rent, roof, water, power. She learned the human capacity for compromise was near limitless.

  Then along came Mason.

  She’d been a year in her post at the Capitol Building in Albany. Administrator was such a dull title, but it befitted the work. Requisitions, acquisitions, invoices, remittances. Her days were a smear of spreadsheets and coffee breaks. But it kept her alive, saved her from returning to her cold family home, the humiliation of having to crawl back there and withstand her mother’s silent gloating.

  It bothered her that all the years she spent as a child and a teenager, wishing she were an adult, no one warned her what a grinding bore adulthood would turn out to be. She supposed that was the final cruel joke the old play on the young: promise them the world, give them a shared two-bedroom apartment, an eight-year-old Hyundai, and decades of debt.

  Mason, at the time, seemed like a bolt of lightning in her dull existence. Good-looking in a WASPish kind of way, his thirtysomething years beginning to show around his midsection—a dad bod they called it nowadays—and the easy confidence that comes with age. He asked her out after their first department meeting, and she had done her best not to gush and giggle like a schoolgirl, said yes, and spent two whole days in raptures of agony wondering what she would wear.

  He was not difficult to fall in love with. Entirely unlike the men and boys she’d known before. Everything was so easy, so simple with him. They married within a year of that first date, a low-key affair, close friends and family only. She told him she wanted to try for a baby straightaway. He asked, Can’t we just enjoy being married for a few years? They had time, after all, her still in her twenties, him barely in his mid-thirties. But what if it doesn’t work the first time? What if we have to keep trying and trying?

  The specter of her mother’s words hung over her, that she would have nothing to be proud of until she gave birth. Her higher mind knew that was nonsense, generations of inverted misogyny manifested in the imperative to breed, as if that were all she was good for. Yet she felt how deep those words had penetrated, in spite of herself. And all those difficult times, when she had become lost, they loomed in her memory. The times she had been sent home from school, her mother waiting for her, saying not a word as she entered the house and went to her room, the silence that smothered their home. The bitter hatred seeping from her mother. It felt to Libby that those things would fade away in her memory if only she could do the one thing her mother deemed worthy of pride.

  When she was fourteen, Libby had asked if she could start taking the pill to ease her periods. Her first had come when she was twelve, and nothing had prepared her for the pain. When she spoke to her mother about it, she was told to pull herself together, every young woman had to endure it, why should she be any different? It was only when she went to the school nurse one day for a painkiller that she discovered her periods were not the norm, that her bleeding and cramps were unusually severe. Once again she went to her mother, and once again she was told to accept the cost of her sex.

  Her mother refused to take her to the doctor for a contraceptive prescription, even though Libby had read that the pills could ease the torment that struck every twenty-eight days. No daughter of mine goes on the pill when she’s only fourteen, her mother said. I didn’t raise a slut.

  Libby withstood it another two months before she found a local Planned Parenthood clinic. Using a pay phone outside school, she made an appointment, and told her mother she was trying out for the drama club’s latest production. A doctor there gave her a prescription for three months’ worth of pills, and she took them home and hid them on top of the wardrobe in her room. The relief, when her next period came, was immense. She still bled, but nowhere near as much, and the cramps went from agonizing to bearable. Libby thanked God for the clinic and the kind doctor.

  Then one day, when she was fourteen and a half, she came home from school and found her mother waiting for her, Libby’s remaining stash of pills on the kitchen table. Her mother had seldom hit her before, and not hard; her words usually hurt more than her hands. This time, however, the beating was savage and seemed to go on forever. Looking back now, she could remember little of it, only shielding herself from the blows, her mouth filling with blood, then being dragged by her hair to the closet beneath the stairs. The door remained locked, leaving her sobbing in the darkness, until her father came home and let her out.

  Years later, her fears about conceiving were proved right. It took ten years, three miscarriages, and more tears than she could count before Ethan came along. In that time, her demons returned, snapping and biting, telling her, of course she couldn’t c
onceive, not her, why would she ever think herself capable of carrying a baby?

  She spoke to her mother about it once, not long before she passed away.

  It was those pills did it, her mother said, left you barren.

  Libby didn’t go to her mother’s funeral. Nor did her brother, and her father had been long gone by that time. She imagined the lonely graveside, no one there but those who came out of pity, and in a secret part of her, Libby was glad. A month after her mother was put in the ground, her brother called. The first time she’d heard his voice in close to fifteen years. They didn’t talk for long. Enough to find out he’d left the service and become a state trooper in Arizona.

  We’re better off without her, he said.

  I know, Libby said.

  She hadn’t heard from him since.

  There were more dark times in those years. Mason had stuck with her, supported her, kept her afloat. He reminded her that her failure to conceive was not the root of her problems; rather, it had become something for her to focus her negativity on, to obsess over. And on one level, she knew he was right, but in the blacker corners of her mind she believed she did not deserve a child. At Mason’s insistence, she had one session with a therapist who did her best to convince Libby that motherhood was not the be-all of her existence, that she was loved and valued with or without a child. And Libby smiled and nodded along while sorrow festered into anger inside her.

  After Ethan came, it was Mason who went to pieces. The change was so complete and so immediate that it felt like a stranger had slipped into their bed. At first, he became quiet and still, watchful, keeping to the corners and hallways. The heavy drinking took hold and he began staying up long after she’d gone to bed, then joining her hours later—if he did at all—the smell of alcohol following.

  Looking back, she couldn’t remember him ever giving Ethan a bottle. He seldom held the baby, she knew that, and when he did, it was as if his son were some exotic and fearful creature. When Libby tried to talk to him about it, he would simply drop whatever he was doing, walk away, and close the door. And that was what it had been: a gradual shutting down, sealing himself off from her. No shouting, no anger, only a widening distance that she could not bridge no matter how hard she tried.