That Month in Tuscany (Take Me There)

by Inglath Cooper

“That’s probably going to be our only chance,” Erin says.

  Kylie hears the resignation in her voice, as if she can no longer think about the likely outcome of their situation. But fight flares up inside her, and she tells herself they can’t just give up and let themselves be taken somewhere far away where they’re probably going to do horrible things to them. Think Kylie, she tells herself.

  She knows she has to be smarter than those two thugs. They need a plan. She leans her head back against the bed, closes her eyes and tries to concentrate. She notices she is sitting in some kind of liquid. She looks down, sees the spot on her dress and realizes she has wet herself. It is only then that she begins to cry.

  43

  Ren

  IT TAKES US almost three hours to get to Rome. The traffic is nearly non-existent since we’re driving through the night. I drive while Lizzy stares out the window with Sophia curled up on her lap.

  Several times, I try to find words that might comfort her. But I don’t have any. What can I say that will stop all the scenarios I know must be going through her mind? All the possibilities based on the horrible things we learn about on the news every single day.

  At one point, I reach across and take her hand, linking my fingers through hers and holding on tight because I can’t think of another single measure of comfort to offer her. And with every mile that slips past on the car’s odometer, I feel an approaching sense of loss, like a hole of quicksand in my heart.

  I know it’s not really possible to lose something that was never really yours, but I feel the loss all the same.

  ~

  LIZZY ASKS IF I will drop her at the terminal in the interest of saving time.

  “I’d like to walk you in,” I say.

  “I appreciate it, Ren, but it’s probably better this way.”

  I know she means that Ty will be waiting inside, and I know that she’s right. I nod my okay and drive to the United Airlines dropoff, pulling over and putting the car in park.

  We both sit, staring out the windshield, waiting for the other to speak first.

  “You’re going to blame yourself for what’s happening to your daughter, aren’t you?”

  She bites her lower lip, and then says, “If I hadn’t been here, she might have come home, or—”

  “Don’t do that, okay? Promise me you won’t do that.”

  “Even if it’s true?”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I know I’ve been acting like something I’m not.”

  “Please don’t belittle what we’ve been to each other here.”

  “That’s not my intention.” She hesitates, before adding, “I don’t know how to thank you for—”

  “You have nothing to thank me for, Lizzy. I’m the one who should be thanking you.”

  “No,” she says, shaking her head. “I think we both needed a friend and just found each other at the right time.”

  I turn then, wanting to see her face when she answers my next question. “Is that how you see me, Lizzy? As a friend?”

  Her eyes fill with tears as she stares back at me. “We both know it can never be more than that.”

  “Do we?”

  She nods, biting her lower lip. “I think I just got caught up in feeling desirable again.”

  I look into her eyes. “You are desirable. You are desired.”

  We study each other for several long moments, and it feels as if we’re both trying to store away this memory of each other.

  “You will never know,” she starts.

  I reach across and put my thumb to her jaw line, rubbing back and forth. “I know,” I say. “I hope you know.”

  “I do,” she says.

  I lean in then and kiss her, a whisper of a kiss that lets me taste her tears. She kisses me back, deeper, with open longing and regret. And it’s just as I reach for her to pull her closer that she moves away, crying openly now.

  She lifts Sophia, kisses her face on both sides and then hands her to me. “I’ll get my things from the back,” she says.

  “Let me help, Lizzy,” I say.

  “No. Please. It’s easier this way.”

  She gets out of the car, closes the door and quickly opens the hatch, lifting her bags out, and then shuts it. I watch as she walks through the airport’s sliding doors. I wait for her to look back, but she doesn’t.

  44

  Lizzy

  TY IS WAITING at the ticket counter. Before he spots me, I see him looking at his watch, the impatience that flits across his face.

  He looks up then, catches sight of me, leans over and says something to the woman behind the check-in counter. She nods and begins typing on the computer.

  Ty doesn’t look at me when he says, “She needs your passport.”

  I pull it from my bag and hand it to the woman who continues punching keys.

  “We’ll be lucky if we make the boarding,” Ty says in a clipped voice.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “Are you?” he says, his voice low, and I hear the accusation underscoring the question.

  The woman looks up and then quickly back at her computer screen. I feel my face heat up. I press my lips together and don’t answer.

  We don’t speak again until the plane is in the air.

  The seats are in business class, but I can tell that Ty finds them less than satisfactory based on the way he glances toward the first-class cabin, as if that’s where he belongs.

  “Did you speak with anyone else after we talked?” I finally ask.

  “No,” he says abruptly. “I did check her credit card usage. There have been no charges since the bar Peyton said they went to.”

  My stomach drops with this information. Kylie constantly uses her credit card. Starbucks a couple of times a day. Amazon. The mall.

  “Where could she be?” I ask, my voice breaking on the words.

  “I don’t know,” he says in a tone that I do not recognize as the Ty of recent years. Confident. Arrogant. This is the Ty from long, long ago. A version of him that I’m not sure I even remembered once existed.

  “What if we don’t find her?” he says.

  “Don’t,” I say. “Please. Don’t say that.”

  He stares at the seat in front of him for a minute or more before he looks over at me and says, “How did we get here, Lizzy?”

  I let myself meet his gaze and see in his eyes someone I once knew. “One choice at a time,” I say.

  “And you think I’m responsible for all the choices that got us here?”

  “No,” I say. “It takes two people to mess up a marriage.”

  “I know I’m more to blame than you are,” he says, surprising me with the sincerity in the admission. “And both of us have plenty of reason to be mad at each other right now.”

  For emphasis, he runs the palm of his hand over his bruised jaw. Guilt stabs at me. I start to respond, but he stops me with, “When we get back to Virginia, Lizzy, we’re going to need each other. We both need to be there for Kylie. Can we do that?”

  I think of our daughter, and a dozen different scenarios of horror try to overtake my deliberate calm. I know that Ty is right. And that nothing else in the world matters right now except getting our daughter back. Making sure she is safe.

  “We’ll do whatever we need to do,” Ty says, and I hear that some of his confidence has returned. His belief that if you push back hard enough, the world will give you what you want. “Okay?” he asks, reaching over to take my hand in his.

  “Okay,” I say, and force myself not to pull away.

  45

  Lizzy

  I WANT TO SLEEP. I long for the oblivion it would bring. The blanking out of everything that is happening right now.

  But I can’t. And I know I won’t. It feels as if every muscle in my body is strung tight with worry. The fearful kind that overtakes every cell, every thought.

  As a mother, it’s something I’ve thought of countless times. What if someone took my child?

&n
bsp; When Kylie was a little girl, I was anxious about it to the point of overprotectiveness. In public places, the grocery store, restaurants, I wouldn’t let her out of my sight.

  Ty said I smothered her and that I needed to loosen the apron strings. As she grew older, I forced myself to be more reasonable about my fears, but it wasn’t easy, and even after she became a teenager and started going out with friends, this was something I struggled with.

  So I did everything I could think of to increase her ability to protect herself. Anything I could think of to encourage her to be careful.

  I stare out the window of the plane at the clouds below, feeling numb with disbelief.

  I think about how little we actually know and consider other explanations for where Kylie might be. Ty said she left the bar with the singer from the band.

  The irony of this does not escape me. Instead, it pries the lid from the guilt waiting to get a foothold alongside the worry. Maybe Kylie is with him. It’s not outside the realm of possibility. The past week of my own life is evidence enough of that.

  But why wouldn’t she be answering her phone? Why would she not tell Peyton where she was going?

  I don’t think she would do that. Even if she completely lost her head over a boy. She would let someone know where she was.

  This reality pushes hard against my heart, and I feel the bruise starting to form.

  Would this have happened if I hadn’t gone ahead and taken the trip to Italy by myself?

  Logically, I know these dots do not connect. But I also know I made a choice to step outside my regular role of wife and mother. I was somewhere I shouldn’t have been. Doing something I never should have been doing.

  Ty shifts in the seat beside me. He raises his head, looks at me with sleep-cloudy eyes. “You should try to get some rest.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “I keep thinking,” he says, resting his head against the seat. “She wanted to come home this weekend. If I hadn’t come to Italy to find you—”

  He stops there and shuts his eyes. But he doesn’t need to finish. I know what he was going to say. If he hadn’t come to Italy to find me, none of this would ever have happened.

  46

  Ty

  THE PLANE LANDS at Dulles almost exactly nine-and-a-half hours after leaving Rome. You feel like you haven’t slept in a week and realize that you probably look like it, too.

  You slept a couple of hours, at least. You’re pretty sure Lizzy didn’t sleep any.

  As soon as the plane lands, you start trying to call Peyton but only get her voice mail. You dial the number the detective left for you, but get a message there as well.

  You’re among the first off the plane, and you lead the way down the corridor, checking the signs for baggage claim. After getting your luggage and forging your way through customs, you notice a group of photographers standing up ahead. You stop, and Lizzy bumps into you from behind.

  “What is it?” she asks.

  “There,” you hear one of them say. “That’s them.”

  Lizzy shakes her head. “They’re not here for us, are they?”

  But then suddenly, the photographers and what appear to be reporters with microphones, rush toward them, all speaking at once.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Harper, could we have a word with you, please?”

  A tall blonde woman in a pencil thin, navy dress steps out from the throng and says, “Mrs. Harper, we understand that you’ve been spending time in Italy with Ren Sawyer, the lead singer with Temporal.”

  “And Mr. Harper,” another man behind her speaks up. “Is it true that you had an altercation with Mr. Sawyer while you were in Italy?”

  You reach for Lizzy’s hand and start pulling her through the pile of media people. Someone from the airport begins to shout at the reporters, telling them they need to back away from the corridor so that other passengers might exit.

  You lead Lizzy through the crowd, both of you with your heads down, even as you feel the flash of light and sound of cameras clicking away.

  “Is it true, Mr. Harper, that your daughter is missing, or was that just a ploy to get your wife away from Ren Sawyer?”

  You start to stop and give the reporter the swing he deserves. But now it’s Lizzy pulling you, past the airport gates, walking faster and faster until finally, they are out of sight. Only then do you let go of her hand.

  47

  Lizzy

  IT FEELS AS if the drive from D.C. to Charlottesville takes days, when, in actuality, it’s only a couple of hours.

  Ty drives the rental car at the speed limit and over when he can. About halfway there, he finally gets Kylie’s roommate on the phone, only to learn that there’s still no news, no sign of her anywhere.

  “What do we do when we get there?” I ask, as soon as he finishes talking with Peyton. “How do we even know where to begin?”

  “We’ll start with the police,” Ty says. “We’ll just start there, and we won’t stop until we find her.”

  I stare out the window at the green pastures we’re passing, and I can’t help but think of other parents I’ve seen interviewed on the news. Their optimism in the beginning. Their determination to bring their children home. And then later, down the road when they still haven’t been found, those same parents, weary and beaten down, defeated.

  I close my eyes and I start to pray. I know in my heart there is absolutely nothing else I can do.

  48

  Kylie

  “WE’RE PROBABLY NOT going to get out of this, you know.”

  Erin’s voice rouses Kylie from half-sleep. “Don’t say that,” she says.

  “Well, you know it’s most likely true.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  They both get quiet, and Kylie begins trying to leaf through her memory for something, anything that might help them.

  She thinks through the self-defense class her mom had made her take. Each of the tactics taught to her by a male instructor who insisted that if they knew the right things to do, it wouldn’t matter how much stronger a man was. Smart trumped strength every time.

  Except, Kylie realizes now, when the element of surprise is involved.

  It’s only then that she remembers the documentary she and her mom had watched together the year before Kylie left for college.

  She hadn’t wanted to watch it. She’d had plans to go out that night, and the last thing she’d wanted to do was stay home with her mom and watch TV. But her mom had already watched it, and she’d thought it was the kind of thing young girls could benefit from seeing.

  It was about some teenage girl in California who had been abducted from her home by a man who took her to his house, and for the first couple of days, repeatedly raped her and told her he was going to kill her.

  The point of the documentary was that for whatever reason, the girl felt that the best thing she could do was try and be a friend to her captor. Hope that he wouldn’t see her as an object but as another human being.

  So she forced herself to talk to him. Ask him questions about himself. Tell him things about herself. Personal things that she sensed they would have in common.

  In doing this, she eventually gained his trust and was able to get away.

  Kylie remembers sitting on the couch with her mom, watching the story unfold. Remembers how resentful and defiant she had been. Regret swoops through her for the way she’d spoken to her mom, for how she’d belittled the thought that there was anything to be gained from her staying home and watching the show.

  She thinks then about the two men who had kidnapped her, the one who had said he didn’t see anything wrong with sampling the goods.

  And from there, Kylie begins to come up with a plan.

  49

  Ren

  SOPHIA AND I wander around the villa for the first few hours after we get back from the airport.

  I finally settle into a chair outside by the pool, a book on my lap. The words refuse to process though, and I close it, dropping my head back t
o stare at the blue sky above.

  The house feels completely empty now. The only thing I can compare Lizzy’s leaving to is losing my brother. Knowing I would not see him again in this life. Watching Lizzy walk away from the car at the airport felt final in the same way.

  It hardly makes sense, given how little time we actually spent together. But the connection I feel with her is one I’ve never known with any other woman. And I’ve known a lot of women.

  The difference with Lizzy is that she knows next to nothing about the life I’ve lived in the spotlight. When she looks at me, I think she sees the me before all of that, without all of that. And yet, I’m not diminished in her eyes.

  As for her reaction to the truth about my brother’s death, I had expected her to look at me completely different. To see me as I see myself.

  But that hadn’t been the case.

  I could see that she felt compassion for me. But not blame. Only the quiet insistence that I eventually needed to forgive myself.

  I want to.

  I want to go on with life.

  That much I do know now.

  I look down at the puppy snuggled in the curve of my arm. I think of what a small thing it was to offer her safety and a home. A small thing for me, but a big thing for her. Doing that for her has given me a satisfaction I haven’t felt in a very long time. And I realize that I want my life to be more of that kind of thing and less of what it has been for the past dozen years. If I’m going to stay on this earth, I’d like to work at changing things for others, making lives better in whatever way I can.

  I have more money than I will ever be able to spend on myself. Money that can do a lot of good. I realize that continuing my career in any way will only mean something to me if I use it as a catalyst for good. And somewhere, deep in my heart, I think Colby would agree.