Our (considerably smaller) garage is stacked with Tupperware bins of my baby clothes and stuffed animals, blurry photos of a youthful Ma Ma and Grandpa Scott, Halloween decorations we haven’t untangled in a decade. Old and mostly useless things Dad never looks at but couldn’t bring himself to get rid of when Lindy moved in and we needed the space, so now it’s out there, exiled but preserved. No pictures or sweaters or fishing poles from Sidonie Faye, though. Believe me, I’ve checked.
“You sure you don’t want to stop by your place and grab your stuff real quick?” Jessa asks once Chad’s out of the car.
“Very sure.” There is no chance of a “real quick” stop. I left a voice mail on Lindy’s cell a little while ago, when I knew her precise bedtime schedule had placed her in the shower. Easier to stay away and stay mad about our ill-fated road trip if I don’t have to hear my stepmother’s voice.
We let ourselves in through the garage door that leads into the big metallic kitchen. The lights are off; Dr. Van Tassel’s shift won’t end till eleven and Mr. Price is in bed already, still adjusting to US time after his business trip. Jessa stops to grab us Cokes out of the fridge while I wave off Chad, who heads down to his basement. We make our way to Jessa’s room on the second floor, every part of it familiar. Her pastel peach walls are plastered with photos of the Prices’ vacations—the whole shimmering blond family glowing and sunburned on a cruise to the Bahamas; kid-Jessa and Chad sword-fighting with baguettes in front of the Eiffel Tower; her parents canoodling in a gondola in the narrow green waterways of Rome. Jessa reserves her vanity mirror for pictures of her and Jeremy. Her shelves are stocked with souvenir snow globes and tiny dolls and little statues Mr. Price brings home from trips. Her shirts and dresses and skinny pants have overflowed the closet and crept into the corners of her room, draped over an armchair patterned in bright red lips, flung into her satin laundry hamper, balled up on the white writing desk.
I could describe it as easily as my own bedroom after all these countless nights when we were supposedly hanging out, though mostly we were coexisting: Jessa doodling in notebooks or lip-synching to Taylor Swift, and me reading or daydreaming about how Chad’s and my future wedding table numbers would be printed on pages copied from old medical textbooks. It was a solemn and sacred pastime, always.
While Jessa unzips her coat and boots, I dig through her pajama drawer. Pushing aside the Victoria’s Secret stuff—why would anyone want so many pairs of sweatpants with PINK stamped on the butt? That’s the real secret—I settle on a pair of striped drawstring pants and a tank top with cupcakes hugging on the chest.
“So,” Jessa says, and claps. “Let’s do this.”
“Can I—can I wash up first?” I ask.
She shrugs. “You know where everything is.”
I pad down the hall and into Jessa’s bathroom, where I grab a new toothbrush out of a basket under the sink and wash my face with her twilight-roses cleanser, then take my time dabbing on her midnight-violets toner. I brush out my ponytail and loop my hair into a loose bedtime braid, patiently smoothing out the bumps. When I’ve run out of grooming tools I know how to use—though lilac under-eye butter and cashmere-infused hair lotion sound intriguing—I lean over and grip the sides of the sink, the porcelain slick and cool on my shaky, sweaty palms.
It’s funny—all night I’ve wanted nothing more than to dig into my mom’s file, and now that it’s time . . . I want to be ready, but I feel like . . . I feel exactly like handsome forensic pathologist Miles Faye in A Bitter Taste, the fourth book in Dad’s series. Miles is investigating the death of a grade school buddy, a guy he hasn’t seen in ages. Just before he opens the postmortem report, where he’ll find massive amounts of illegal drugs in the blood panel, he sees this clear picture of him and his friend lying around in the scruff of the overgrown ball field by their childhood homes. He sees the bare blue sky and the sun streaming pink through his closed eyelids, and he feels the warm dust under him thirty years later, and his own breathlessness from the race they’ve just run across the field. Idyllic, right? As Miles picks up the report, he knows that what he’s holding has the power to tarnish that snapshot, so he’ll never again call it to mind and remember being so young and warm without feeling the cold breath of time on them both.
Not that I think my mom’s file will tell me she’s a drug addict or anything. Besides, it’s seventeen years old, so the info won’t exactly be current. It’s just that I’ve been imagining her for so long, and this is the end of imagining and the start of knowing. It’s kind of terrifying.
But I stare into my own brown eyes in the bathroom mirror and grit out, “Don’t be an asshole. You’re doing this for Dad.”
I make myself march to the bedroom, where I sit cross-legged on Jessa’s floral bedspread and pull the manila folder out of my bag. Avoiding Jessa’s eyes as she eases onto the bed beside me, I touch the stone heart in my front pocket.
I open the folder.
Inside are maybe a dozen slightly yellowed papers, crisp with age. The first is a maternity preregistration form, stamped with the shepherd’s crook logo of Good Shepherd Hospital. It’s dizzying how much is here. I read through the patient information section greedily.
Patient’s name exactly as it appears on ID: Faye, Sidonie Gene
Date of birth: 1/22/1977
Pausing to do the math, I realize my mother is fourteen years younger than my father, who’ll be fifty-two this year. When I was born, she was only four years older than I am.
Expected date of delivery: 4/9/1998
Race: Caucasian
Marital status: Single
I stop, reread. That can’t be right. When her file showed up under “Faye,” I figured Mom had pulled a Dr. Van Tassel and kept her name. My parents were married. Dad told me so, and he told Lindy . . . except even as I think it, I wonder if Lindy’s ever seen the divorce papers. It’s possible he lied to both of us. I can feel myself start to sink, because if Dad lied about this, then everything I thought I knew becomes a little less certain, and the few facts I’ve accumulated in my life aren’t stone, but sand.
But I can’t start doubting my dad. He always told me the truth, even the few times when I wished he wouldn’t. So this must mean something. It’s what Miles Faye would call an “inconsistency in the story,” and inconsistencies are valuable. They’re the smoke that warns of fire. It tells me there has to be something here.
“Find anything?” Jessa asks.
I shake my head, keep reading.
Patient’s home address: 42 Cedar Lane, Sugarbrook, MA 01703
Patient’s current employer: Boston Museum of Fine Arts
Patient’s occupation: Assistant to the curator of prints and drawings
To think, all the school trips we’ve taken to the MFA over the years. What if Sidonie Faye was somewhere in those halls, in one of the offices, grabbing an overpriced lunch in the cafeteria? Finding her can’t be as easy as a trip to the museum, and it has been seventeen years. She can’t still be there. But it might be worth a visit.
I skip past her social security number—I know it would be useful if I was actually a detective, but alas—down a few unhelpful lines to Emergency contact. I expect it will be my dad, but it isn’t.
Emergency contact: Lillian Ward
Home number: 978-555-8761
Relationship: Cousin
That’s something I can use. Everything else on the form is under Insurance information and some category called a Guarantor. That last one is my dad, and none of it is new info.
Next in the folder are a lot of notes from her admittance to Good Shepherd. How many weeks pregnant, date of last menstruation, para and gravida births (zero and zero, whatever that means), vital signs, dilation and effacing (ugh). Contractions, CBC results. I skip through most of it, until—
Is the patient on any prescribed medication? Nortriptyline (Pamelor)
“Hey, can I look something up on your—”
“What do you need?” Jessa
asks, browser up on her phone, thumbs at the ready.
“Um. Can you find out what Pamelor’s for? It’s a—”
“A second-generation tri . . . tri-cyc-lic? Antidepressant used in the treatment of major depression, and for childhood nocturnal ensu . . . ensur-esis? Whatever, bed-wetting.”
I grind my bottom lip between my teeth. “I’m guessing she wasn’t a bed wetter.” Flipping ahead through the pages, most everything else is about my birth. Something called an Apgar score. A copy of my tiny, inky footprints. PKU results. When and how I breastfed, baby’s first pee and poo. Yikes, it’s thorough. There’s a note at the very bottom of the last page that catches my eye:
Patient is bonding with infant.
I put the papers away and close the folder gently, then pull my legs up and hug my knees, breathing in and out.
“Sooo . . .” Jessa clears her throat. “Are you okay?”
Nodding, I breathe in and out and in. Maybe I shouldn’t be okay. The information is somewhat ominous. But honestly, it explains a lot. It’s like I’ve been driving through fog and rain and now the weather is starting to clear, the road just ahead of me sharpening, coming into focus. Before tonight, I had only my dad’s word to go on, my bedtime story, and of course I trust him. But here’s real evidence that my mother was sick. That she needed saving. And whether or not Lindy wants to believe, I’m starting to get why my dad is searching for her.
“This is good,” I say, to myself and to Jessa. “This helps.”
“Awesome! So where do we start?”
“No offense, but I think I want to just do it by myself. You know? But . . . thanks,” I finish lamely.
She snorts. “Okay. Except maybe you should’ve figured that out before you, like, dragged me to the hospital.”
“I didn’t—” I start to protest.
“Oh, whatever!” She jumps off the bed and plops dramatically down on a nest of leggings in her lips chair, arms slicing the air. “You think I’m an idiot, right? Jeez, sorry I didn’t get 2230 on my SATs. But you’re not as smart as you think, because I know you lied about your dad—you’re lying to the police, and Lindy, and I know you lied to my mom. You lied to me about shopping. And you lied about your car being in the shop all weekend, ’cause I saw it at your house just now when we drove by, oh most brilliant genius. Don’t deny it—I’m a way better liar than you. You could’ve gone to the hospital by yourself. You decided you needed me, but, what, you don’t trust me?”
The rough edges of the stone saw into my fingertips. “So what if I lied? I’m the one that has to find him.”
“By you, you mean the cops, yes?”
“Yeah, right. They don’t know my dad.”
Jessa’s bright blue eyes are so wide, they’re almost floating. “I’m not trying to be a bitch, Im, but he never told you anything about your mom, and he didn’t tell you he was peacing out, and he hasn’t told you where he is. So maybe you don’t know him either.”
“He did tell me!” I say, shoving the file into my bag and tumbling the heart in after it. “He’s looking for my mother. My real mom, I mean. I think he’s trying to help her.”
“But why now, after this long?”
“I haven’t figured that out. But if I can find her, I’ll find him.”
I never should’ve come to the Prices’. I stand to leave, to walk home and slip in the back and sneak to my bedroom, where I can lock myself in alone, like I wanted from the start.
“Okay, okay, okay, wait.” Jessa vaults up and into my path. I start to slink around her and she blocks me. I fake right, but she spreads her arms and beats me to the left. “If you really think that’s where your dad is, I can help. And I am a better liar than you.”
I hover between the bed and the door. “Why do you even want to help?”
“Isn’t that what best friends do?”
I pause, because honestly I don’t know. It seems true. I sigh and drop the bag, if not my doubts. “I guess.”
“Great! And anyway”—she shrugs and twirls a strand of hair—“it’s February break. There’s nothing else to do. Except Mackenzie Winn’s party.”
“Wait, what party?”
“At Mackenzie’s. Next Saturday?”
“No one told me about a party,” I say, a little hurt. I’m in mock trial with Mackenzie.
Jessa purses her lips, has the grace to look guilty. “I was going to.”
SEVEN
I wake the next morning with a shirtless vampire eye-sexing me. Puzzling, when I’m still dragging myself out of my dream by my fingertips. In the dream, I was driving down a road striped with power lines and stippled with leaf-light through the trees. It was peaceful until I came raging through, swerving and clipping the guardrail like I was drunk, that dizzy feeling I remember from the night Lee Jung and I hijacked his parents’ Goldschläger. But in the dream I was clear-headed, just unable to control the car, or my foot like a fifty-pound weight on the gas, or the spasming steering wheel. I knew there was somewhere I need to be, something I needed to get to, and might, if only I could drive in a straight line.
Maybe my dreams are trying to tell me something.
It’s a short, muddled moment before the whys and the wheres coming floating back out of the fog. I’m in Jessa’s bed, smashed against the big Vampire Diaries poster tacked to her bedroom wall. I’m here and not in my own bed because Dad is missing, has been missing for four days. As I realize this an ache settles in my chest; not a weight, but an absence. A pocket of nothingness inside me.
Then I roll over and see Jessa drooling on her floral pillowcase, uncharacteristically rumpled. Weirdly I feel shy, remembering the night before, my tantrum, and afterward in the quiet bedroom, the sounds of her breathing so close to me when we’d turned the lights out. It was nice, having a friend there in the dark while I pieced together an imperfect picture of my mother.
My mother bonded with me at birth.
My mother was once an assistant to the curator of prints and drawings at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
My mother wasn’t even twenty-one when she gave birth to me.
My mother was taking pills for major depression. My mother has a cousin.
I remember our project for the day and sit up with a start. I catapult off the mattress, careful not to catch a foot on my friend.
She curls into the sheets. “Ugh,” she groans. “What are you doing?”
“We have an emergency contact to find.”
“It’s Sunday. It’s seven o’clock. On a Sunday.”
“I can’t sleep anymore.”
“You could if you tried. I even gave you the Damon Salvatore side of the bed. What a waste.” She jabs her finger at the fanged blond on the poster. Rolling, she reaches out and caresses his pale paper face. “Good morning, lover.”
“What does Jeremy think of the Damon Salvatore side of the bed?”
She sits up and half smiles, arches her back, catlike. “He wouldn’t give a shit if it was a Yankees poster. I have a bed and a door that locks.”
“What a prince.” I squat and dig through her pants drawer, hoping for something, anything, in a size bigger than two. Taking Jessa’s help? It’s . . . difficult. Taking her pants? Not a problem.
“Oh, whatever. I’m, like, seventeen.”
I choose not to ponder the fact that although I’m also seventeen, the “highlight” of my sex life has been a few heavy-breathing-and-pants-rubbing sessions in Lee Jung’s TV room, while Reservoir Dogs played and shouted and bled on the big screen and my head fizzed with the Goldschläger.
Jessa watches me root through her pants. “I take it you’re not going home.”
I stiffen. “I can go home. If you’re busy or something—”
“You know that’s not what I’m saying. Here.” She takes mercy on me and tosses me a pair of black leggings with zippered ankles draped across the headboard.
I lift them tentatively.
“They’re totally clean! And slimming!”
; “Oh gosh, thanks.”
“With this, with this!” Jessa leaps up and plunges into her vaulted closet, emerging with a slouchy red sweaterdress, a big black heart glittering across the back. “And this!” She thrusts a necklace at me, a long black chain with little gold charms and red beads and doodly-bobs jingling on the end. I have to admit it’s a cool ensemble, but this seems like a strange day for dress-up. Maybe sensing this, she shrugs. “If you think you look good, you’ll be more confident and stuff.”
Who am I to argue? It works for Jessa.
I take my bounty and my purse and leave Jessa alone with Damon Salvatore. Darting down the hall so I won’t be caught by Chad with happy cupcakes on my breasts, I shut myself in the bathroom. Strange day for dress-up though it may be, I pull and clasp and stuff myself into Jessa’s outfit like it’s armor. I brush my hair into a careful sleek ponytail, swipe on some not particularly daring brown eyeliner I found rolling around my purse bottom, and stare myself down in the mirror. Embarrassed by last night’s cowardice, I tell myself that for the next twenty-four hours I am an unstoppably brilliant badass detective. I’m Emily Pollifax, Lisbeth Salander, Annika Bengtzon.
I’m Miles fucking Faye.
When I get back to the bedroom, Jessa’s still under the covers, but zipping a finger across her iPad screen like the professional she is. Neither of us could find a Sidonie Faye online, because of course it wouldn’t be so easy so soon. But hers isn’t the only name I’ve got. Officer Griffin and the police will be talking to Dad’s limited family—a fistful of cousins scattered across the West Coast, an uncle in Chicago, Grandpa Scott in a nursing home for Alzheimer’s patients, for what that’s worth.
But I have my mother’s family.
“Okay, so there’re a few Lillian Wards on Facebook,” Jessa says. “But I don’t think they’re the right ages.”
“Huh. What’s that 978 area code?”
Tap, tap, swipe. “Shrewsbury. That’s like half an hour southwest, right?” Swipe, tap, tap, type. While she works she chews the inside of her lip, a familiar and (almost) unattractive tic that only escapes when she’s concentrating too hard to worry about looking unattractive. “Okay, nothing about her in the White Pages. But here’s something else for Lillian Eugene, maiden name Lillian Ward.” She tilts the screen toward me.
The Mystery of Hollow Places Page 6