Where They Found Her: A Novel

by Kimberly McCreight

  But I don’t want to do that, not this time. This time I’m going to try for something else. Something like other girls have. Who says I can’t have a regular boyfriend?

  Anyway, this time, instead of looking away when I got close like he usually does, the Captain raised a hand in a kind of wave. And he said it: Hi. Out loud. I thought Tex’s girlfriend was going to barf on her shoes.

  Sandy

  In the end, it was the pain in Sandy’s thighs that helped the most. The harder she pedaled, the more her legs ached, the less she thought about anything—Jenna, Hannah, what had happened the last time she’d been out on the bike. That sick feeling of her body flying one way and the bike flying the other, like two halves of an exploding bomb. Or the vicious-ass burn of the concrete ripping a long strip of skin from her forearm.

  For two hours, Sandy rode everywhere in town she thought Jenna might be: Sommerfield’s (the only bar other than Blondie’s that Jenna could stand), past the park up on Stanton Street where Jenna had had at least one hookup (the details of which she’d seen fit, as usual, to share with Sandy), and that shitty dump on Taylor Ave. where Jenna bought pot sometimes. There was no sign of Jenna or her car anywhere. Sandy was panting, her throat on fire, by the time she turned in to the parking lot of Blondie’s, where Jenna worked.

  Blondie’s was the least fancy place in the fanciest part of downtown Ridgedale. It had a faded green awning and frosted glass windows. Inside wasn’t much better, with stained carpeting, cracked leather benches, and St. Patrick’s Day decorations up year-round. The bartenders were as old-school as the decor. Monte, with his big belly and tight white crew cut, had owned the place for thirty years. He worked there most nights with his son Dominic, a thinner, younger version of himself. Both Monte and Dominic were big, sweet guys, the kind Sandy wished Jenna would fall for. But they’d always treated Jenna way too nice to be the least bit interesting to her.

  For decades, Blondie’s had been a favorite of blue-collar locals, people just like Jenna. But in the past few months, the bar had gotten popular with kids from Ridgedale University. Some campus blog had called the usual student hangout, Truth—a bar with a small dance floor, oversize chaises, and a “mixologist,” whatever the hell that was—“cheesy poser bullshit.” After that, the university kids wanted someplace “real” to get loaded. And Blondie’s was it.

  “You know what one of those kids said to me tonight?” Jenna had told Sandy as they were driving home one night after Jenna’s shift bartending and Sandy’s waitressing at Winchester’s Pub—avoiding the bike for the past week had meant getting rides from Jenna. “That Blondie’s is ironic. What the hell does that mean?”

  “That they’re dicks,” Sandy had said, slipping her shoes off in the passenger seat. Her feet always ached so much at the end of her shifts that she could feel them pulsing.

  “Ha, that’s funny.” Jenna had laughed hard, smacking the steering wheel. “You’re right, baby. They are dicks. Every last one of them.”

  Sandy tucked her bike into the sliver of an alleyway next to Blondie’s. Her phone chirped as she headed up the steps. Jenna, it had to be. Pulling it out by the skin of her teeth at the eleventh hour, like she always did.

  Are you okay? I’m worried.

  Hannah, not Jenna. Jesus. Sandy took a deep breath and blew it out hard. But she couldn’t lose it on this girl, no matter how bad she wanted to.

  I’m fine, Sandy typed, her fingers banging hard against her phone. I promise.

  Are you sure?

  The texts were making the whole thing worse. They might have been the worst part of the entire situation. Actually, no, they weren’t. They were bad, but they weren’t the worst part. Not by a fucking long shot.

  The first time the two of them had met to study, Hannah had picked the Black Cat.

  Sandy got there ten minutes late and totally out of breath. She’d had to haul ass on her bike to make up the twenty minutes she’d spent sitting around thinking she might not go meet Hannah after all. That she might bag the whole GED thing, honors or not. But then she’d remembered how Rhea had looked at her: that hope. No one had ever looked at Sandy that way. Like they had expectations.

  She spotted a girl she thought might be Hannah, sitting there in the window with books spread out in front of her. She was tall and real pretty, with shiny shoulder-length brown hair and bright blue eyes. Her long legs were folded kind of awkwardly under the little table, and she was wearing an oversize Yale hoodie. She was smiling a little, too, like she was enjoying some kind of funny private joke.

  “Sandy?” Hannah had asked, standing as she made her way over. “Are you okay?”

  Sandy was sweating and still breathing hard. Her face was probably beet-red. “I’m fine,” Sandy said, dropping herself down into the chair. She thought about mentioning her bike but decided against it. Hannah had probably gotten there in a chauffeur-driven limousine.

  “Oh, okay,” Hannah said, but she looked a little worried still as she shuffled around her books and papers. “Should we start with the math? Maybe that would be fun.” Sandy must have made a face, because she watched Hannah’s smile sink. “Sorry, it’s not fun, I know. None of this is fun. I’m just nervous. I’ve never tutored anyone. I can try to be less annoying.”

  “That’s okay,” Sandy had said, smiling for real. Because it was kind of funny, the way Hannah had said that. Maybe she wouldn’t end up hating this girl after all. “Anyway, what do I know? I’ve never had a tutor.”

  Before they could start, Hannah’s phone rang. She stared at the screen, smiling in a way that made her seem the opposite of happy. “Sorry, hold on just a second.” She answered the phone, sticking a long finger in her ear to block out the sounds of the café, even though it wasn’t that loud. “Hi, Mom.”

  Her voice went all high, like a little girl’s, and she said “Uh-huh” a lot. “Sorry, I forgot,” she said finally. “Okay, yeah. Okay. Mom, stop. Okay, yes. An hour.” After she hung up, Hannah kept smiling, but she seemed sad. “Sorry about that.”

  “Everything okay?” Sandy asked. And she was curious. She always wanted to know what kids like Hannah—good, regular kids—fought with their moms about. She was always the one riding Jenna for screwing things up. She couldn’t imagine it being the other way around.

  Hannah looked embarrassed. “My mom’s just kind of, you know”—she shrugged—“intense sometimes.”

  “About what?” Sandy needed details to be able to picture Hannah’s regular-girl life. “What did you forget?”

  “To clean out my junk drawer.”

  Sandy’s eyebrows lifted. “What the hell is a junk drawer?” There was no end to the things other kids had that Sandy did not.

  “You know, where you keep all your—” Hannah moved her hands around, as if trying to figure out how to describe it.

  “Shit you should throw out?” Sandy offered.

  “Yeah.” Hannah had laughed. “I guess you’re right.”

  “That’s intense.”

  Hannah looked confused. “Having a junk drawer?”

  “Your mom hunting you down to bitch you out about it.” For the first time ever, Jenna calling Sandy all the time and begging her to come home because she missed her didn’t seem so bad.

  “I guess. Sometimes it feels like I can’t do anything right,” Hannah said. Then she shrugged and smiled like she was over it completely. “But I know that’s just the way my mom is. She likes things a certain way.”

  Sandy had laughed for real. “Don’t they all, sister. Don’t they all.”

  Blondie’s was dark and mostly empty when Sandy got inside. There were two old guys at the far end of the bar, listening to one of Monte’s loud stories. Straight ahead was a younger guy with his back to the door. He had longish brown hair and was wearing some kind of suit jacket and a big expensive-looking watch. It was the watch that stood out. It wasn’t the kind of thing you saw in Blondie’s, not even on those ironic assholes. He was good-looking, too, Sandy could te
ll even from behind. It was the way he was sitting—like he owned that stool.

  “Hey, kiddo!” Monte boomed, heading over to meet Sandy. “What are you doing here?”

  Sandy loved when Monte called her “kiddo.” Men never treated her that way anymore: like a kid. Monte always seemed so happy to see her, too. Suddenly, there were tears at the back of Sandy’s throat, trying to break free. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t cry.

  “Have you seen Jenna?” Sandy asked.

  Monte frowned and shook his head, wiping the bar with a white cloth that looked tiny beneath his huge hand. “She’s not on the schedule this morning, kiddo.” His brow wrinkled. “You know how she bitches about the crap tips on the day shift. And you know, there’s only so much of Jenna’s bitching any one man can stand.”

  “Yeah.” Sandy forced a laugh. It didn’t even sound like her voice.

  “There something wrong, Sandy?”

  Monte only called her Sandy when he was worried. Like that time he gave her a talk about staying away from strangers as if she’d been five years old. There had been a lot about puppies and candy. Totally useless and totally sweet.

  “I can’t reach her, that’s all. Her phone’s probably dead or something,” Sandy said. “I just thought I’d check here for her.”

  “Hmm.” Monte narrowed his eyes, then ran his tongue around the inside of his cheek. His antennae were already up. He waved Dominic over. “Hey, Dom, you seen Jenna today?”

  Dom shook his head, his fleshy cheeks trembling. He looked worried, too. “No, why, Pop?”

  Dom and Monte knew Jenna was messed up. Lots of people did. It didn’t take a genius to figure that out. But they were the only men in her life who’d never tried to take advantage of it.

  “I’m sure she’ll be home soon,” Sandy said. “But I— Our landlord called and this thing came up and I need to ask her something.” That was almost sort of true, and it sounded a lot better than them getting thrown out on their asses.

  “The last time I saw her was at close last night,” Dom said.

  “Did she say where she was headed?” Monte asked.

  “Nah, she was talking to some friend of hers,” Dom said. “I told her she could cut out a few minutes early.”

  Dom was being polite. Most of Jenna’s “friends” were the kind she took home for only a night. But there was a chance Sandy could track him down, whoever he was. “What did he look like?” she asked.

  “She, not he,” Dom said. “And I didn’t look at her real close.” Which meant she wasn’t pretty. “You could try asking Laurie. She was in last night. I saw her talk to them for a minute.”

  Laurie, a senior at Ridgedale University, was the only student who worked at Blondie’s. Laurie came from nothing, needed the job to pay for tuition. So far, it was taking her a couple extra years to make it through. She was twenty-three and a few credits away from graduating, but she swore she would. Sandy believed her, and it gave her hope. Laurie was proving it could be done even when you started at less than zero. Laurie lived in an apartment a few blocks away with her roommate, Rose, who was in Blondie’s all the time, even lately, when she was super-pregnant. People gave her crap about it—pregnant and in a bar—never bothering to notice that all Rose ever drank was water.

  “Okay, thanks,” Sandy said. “If you see Jenna, could you tell her to call me?”

  “Of course we will, kiddo,” Monte said. “And if she doesn’t turn up soon, you come back here, okay? We’ll help you find her.”

  “Okay,” Sandy said, though she already knew she wouldn’t. Asking for help never ended up being worth the humiliation.

  As Sandy headed for the door, she got another text—not from Jenna. But at least it wasn’t from Hannah. It was Aidan. Meet up after lunch?

  Don’t you have class? Sandy wrote back.

  Nah, that’s in the fuck-it bucket.

  That bad?

  Worse. Come on. Hang out with me. I’ll let you share my bucket.

  Sandy laughed a little. Even with everything else—Jenna being MIA, getting kicked out of their apartment, and, well, that most-fucked-up thing she was working real hard to forget—Aidan had made Sandy laugh. That was why she liked him so much. It was right after Sandy met Aidan that she’d started thinking about tomorrow and even the day after that. It was a fucking risk for sure. But it was nicer than she’d thought it would be.

  Not like Sandy and Aidan were Romeo and Juliet or some shit. Sometimes it even felt like there was this huge hidden canyon between them. Like one wrong step to the left and one of them would disappear forever. Because it was one thing when your fuck-it bucket was filled with stupid, worthless crap like Sandy’s, but if she’d had even a quarter of everything Aidan did—the house, the money, the perfect future—she wouldn’t have ever joked about trashing it.

  Sandy had no idea how different their lives were until she went over to Aidan’s house for the first time. It was like not knowing you’d stumbled into a foreign country until you couldn’t understand a fucking word.

  “Come back to bed,” Aidan had said that day.

  He was lying naked on the bed, hands tucked behind his head against the pillow, a woven bracelet on his wrist and a faint tan, both souvenirs from his family’s summer in Nantucket. He was watching Sandy walk around his room in just her panties and his plaid shirt. She was checking out all his fancy kid stuff: trophies for basketball, swimming, tennis, the books on his shelves, the pictures and certificates tacked up on his bulletin board.

  “Super-sporty, huh?” she asked, like it was something he should be ashamed of.

  Really, she was jealous. Ever since she’d bought her bike at the Salvation Army and had it tuned up, Sandy had seen this glimmer of what might have been. She was fast as shit on that bike. And strong. And that was without any training or the right kind of gear. Who knew what she could have been if she’d had all the opportunities that Aidan did? And there he was, shitting on them. She reached forward to finger a frequent-customer card from Scoops, the local ice cream shop, tacked to Aidan’s bulletin board. It was half filled with stamps but faded and wrinkled. “Really holding out for that free cone, huh?” Sandy asked.

  Her eyes moved on to a postcard from Barcelona signed Much Love, Aunt Eileen, and three pictures of some boys jumping off a dock into a lake, then huddled in a smiley pile under a bunch of towels. Aidan was in the center, with the biggest smile of all.

  “My dad and I go there when he visits,” Aidan said. His voice sounded weird. Weird enough that Sandy turned to look at him, but he was staring up at the ceiling. “It’s been a while.”

  “Oh, that sucks,” Sandy said. And now she felt like an asshole.

  She wasn’t trying to make Aidan feel bad about his deadbeat dad. She could be too casual about dads in general. It was because she’d never had one of her own. He’d been a marine Jenna had dated for a few months before he died in a car accident on his way back to his base. Jenna didn’t find out she was pregnant until after the funeral.

  “Whatever,” Aidan said. “Fuck him.”

  “Yeah,” Sandy said. She wanted to make it better, but she had no idea how. “Listen, I should go. Your mom’s going to be home soon.”

  “Whatever. Fuck her, too.”

  “Easy for you to say. I’m the one she’ll bitch-slap.”

  But it wasn’t what Aidan’s mom would do that worried Sandy. It was the way she’d look at her. Like she was a piece of shit. People looked at Sandy that way a lot. That included the men who wanted to fuck her and the women who wanted her to go fuck herself. Hard to say which was worse.

  “Why do you care what she thinks?” Aidan said.

  “Right, and you don’t? Seems like you want me to stick around just to piss her off.” Sandy hoped that wasn’t what Aidan was doing. She’d been trying to stop herself, but she’d already started liking him. “Tell me something. What the hell’s so bad about all of this?”

  Aidan had surveyed his room for a minute. “Looks can be
deceiving,” he’d said finally, his face serious when he turned back to her. “You should know that better than anybody.”

  Sandy read Aidan’s text again. He wanted to meet, but seeing him wasn’t what she needed right now, no matter how much easier it would have been to pretend that it was.

  Stay in class, Sandy wrote back. Text me when you’re done.

  “Terrible, isn’t it?” someone said.

  When Sandy looked up from her phone, the guy with the fancy watch was looking at her, his brown eyes catching the light from the front windows. He wasn’t as young as she’d thought, but she’d been right that he was good-looking. In a dickhead kind of way. The look on his face as he stared at Sandy made her want to take a shower. “What did you say?” she asked.

  “I said it’s terrible, isn’t it,” he repeated, nodding toward the TV over the bar.

  Sandy looked up. Police cars on the midday news. Maybe a car accident? Sandy told Jenna all the time not to drive when she’d been drinking, but she did it anyway. Jenna did so many dangerous things. And their car was such a piece of shit. The brakes had been making this fucked-up noise for weeks, and they didn’t have the money to get them fixed.

  “You need something else, friend?” Monte asked, appearing out of nowhere.

  He didn’t like strange guys talking to Sandy. Anytime anyone tried to chat her up in Blondie’s, Monte would turn up like magic. That was usually enough. He was a huge guy. He had a way of scaring people away without saying a word.

  The dickhead seemed to get the message loud and clear. He held up his hands and ducked his head. “I’m good, thanks,” he said. “I was just about to leave.”

  Sandy turned back to the TV, to the police cars in front of all those tall trees. Suddenly, the camera panned backward to the Essex Bridge. And Sandy felt the earth beneath her give way. She wrapped her hands around the brass bar rail to steady herself. “What happened, Monte?” she asked.