The Mystery of Hollow Places

by Rebecca Podos

  “Oh.” I shrug. “You know. I broke into a hospital. Stole your medical files. Tracked down your cousin. Phony-called your old boss. Got money for a fake prom. Talked to your old neighbor. Found your husband’s address. Took a bus.”

  One delicate eyebrow shoots upward. “You knew how to do all that?”

  “I read a lot.”

  When she and I are seated at opposite ends of the kitchen table, Todd kisses her temple through the curtain of her hair. Illuminated in the chandelier light from above, it’s not as dark as it seemed in pictures, but a kind of dirty blond.

  He sets down a glass of juice in front of my mother (she had no interest in pizza bites or pot stickers) and says, “I’m going out. See if old Mrs. Walters doesn’t need help salting her front walk. You two . . . call if you need anything.” There’s the shuffle of fabric as he zips on layers in the front hallway, and then he’s gone. Aside from gnawing on her thumbnail, my mother’s been frozen since Todd sat her down in her seat, but at the sound of the door she comes to life again. She starts to slide the drawing pad under the table.

  “Can I see?” I ask.

  She pauses, then hands me the pad, as long as my arm at least, and as I flip through the sketches I try to look as if I don’t care, like I’m just checking eggs in a carton for breaks, the way I do when I grocery shop for me and Dad. They’re good, though none of them are complete. Like, on one page is a woman’s face and breasts and belly, perfectly realistic, then just a brown chalk squiggle where her spine should be. In another, flat blocks of all colors make up a man’s body, and at the end of two straight stalk arms, two beautifully detailed and shaded hands. Here is an older woman’s finely drawn head perched on a simple pear-shaped outline of a body. There, two feet stick out from a long cloud of blue chalk.

  “Do you draw?” she asks me.

  I close the pad and shove it away from me. “No. I write. Like Dad.” Not exactly true, but I’m going for the wound here.

  She nods. “I bet. That’s good. I read his books, you know? A couple of them. You look like him, too.” She stares across the table at me and I know what she sees: the dark, flat hair, the Asian stamp of my features, the downward curve of my lips, like his. She sighs and folds her hands in front of her. They’re small, but not delicate or anything. The fingers are slim, but the knuckles are round like bolts, the skin chapped and callused. They’re the oldest-looking part of her. “Whatever you came to say to me, I deserve.”

  “You have no idea what I came for.”

  If she’s stung by my words, she doesn’t show it. “I’m guessing it wasn’t to give me a World’s Best Mom mug.” She laughs, and it’s an empty sound. “I know Todd filled you in on my story, but I’m guessing it doesn’t help much. I wasn’t there with you. I should’ve been, but I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t well. I know that now. I wanted to be better for you.”

  This is it. My chance to ask the big question, the all-consuming, zero-room-for-anything-else-until-the-mystery-is-solved question, which I always thought would be a simple one: Why did you leave Sugarbrook? But what comes out surprises me: “So why couldn’t you be better?”

  She reaches for her glass, stares into it but doesn’t drink. “I don’t know.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “I want to give you what you need, Imogene, but there just isn’t an easy answer. Sometimes it’s chemicals, or shitty memories. Life wasn’t easy with my mom . . . even before she left. And sometimes it just is. On and off my whole life, it’s been that way. Before you came along, I guess I was miserable. Part of it was Mom’s death. But I hadn’t even really known her. . . .” Here, she looks up at me through her eyelashes, then quickly away. “And it didn’t start with her. Then time went by and there wasn’t even sadness.

  “You know how another patient put it? She said this feeling inside her was . . . it was anti-feeling. Like a black hole in space, and everything—happiness, anger, hope, meaning—it would all get sucked in, tipped over the event horizon, and she couldn’t feel any of it. That’s the way it was for me. I walked around like everyone else, and had this wonderful opportunity at the museum, and came home to this brilliant guy who loved me and was nothing but sweet. Your father tried so hard. But I felt . . . empty. If I could’ve filled that space up with anything, I would’ve. If somebody had turned to me and said, ‘It’s easy, just pour some dry cement in there and you’ll be a normal human girl,’ I would’ve done it like that.” She snaps her fingers. “But I couldn’t. And your father couldn’t do it for me. Then . . . then I was pregnant, and it all happened so fast. I was only twenty-one, and we weren’t even seriously talking marriage! But I thought . . .”

  “I would fix you?” I finish the sentence, and she doesn’t deny it. “Maybe you should’ve gotten a dog or something. Eased into it.”

  Her thin mouth twists.

  What did I expect from the elusive Sidonie Faye? One single, perfect answer to all the questions I’ve ever had, all the mother-daughter days I’ve missed, all the nights I’ve stayed up wondering if I was cursed like my mom and her mom before her, if I was doomed to turn into a woman who could be lonely wherever she went?

  Those sorts of answers exist, I suppose. But only in stories.

  “So. You left us in the middle of the night and never came back. Never called. Never sent a Valentine’s Day card. Not even now that you’re blissfully happy and married and in freaking art class.”

  Her swollen knuckles are white around her juice glass. “I was terrified. I knew you’d hate me. I was afraid to hear I’d ruined your life.”

  “My life was fine. We were just fine without you. Almost like nothing was missing,” I lie, assembling one arched eyebrow and a slight sneer into Jessa’s trademark mask of icy disinterest, usually reserved for enemies.

  “I hoped you would be okay,” Sidonie answers in a small voice, looking down through the curtain of her hair. All at once, it’s like she’s the kid and I’m the grown-up.

  I like it that way. I want to keep control while I have it—it’s better than letting in the old rotten-tooth pain. “It doesn’t matter. I didn’t come so you could apologize. I already knew pretty much everything before I came. There are just a couple questions I have, and then I’m leaving.” Might as well go for the big one right off, though by now I don’t expect to get much out of it. With a deep breath, I ask, “When was the last time you spoke with my dad?”

  “About a week ago, I guess? No. Exactly a week ago, actually.”

  I can feel every muscle in my body seize up and stiffen, my heart leading the charge. “Seriously? You’re telling me you spoke with him?”

  She hesitates, chewing on her thumbnail and its chipped blue polish. “Not directly. But I thought you knew. I thought that was why you came to see me. Imogene, what’s going on here?”

  “Just, please tell me what he said.”

  “It was a message he left on our machine. Last Thursday. Todd was already gone—he had an early department meeting. I got out of the bathroom and saw the machine blinking, so . . .” She chomps on her nail again. “I hadn’t heard from him in so long. He used to send letters, and sometimes they got to me, but I never wrote back. Then, there his voice was, coming out of the speakers. He said he wanted us to meet.”

  “On Valentine’s Day,” I finish.

  “Yes, I guess it was. He told me he needed to see me and he’d be waiting for me by the water. That was it.” She shrugs helplessly.

  “So what did you do about it?”

  “What could I do? He didn’t leave a number. And I couldn’t leave my husband to traipse around every body of water in Massachusetts.”

  I’m not so much listening to her excuses as digging through Dad’s message. By the water? Did he mean the Charles River in Boston? It’s not far from Good Shepherd Hospital. Or did he mean . . .

  “Do you think he could be talking about Victory Island?”

  “Oh my god.” Her eyes are hazel moons. “I haven’t thought about tha
t place in almost twenty years. We only went once, you know? We stumbled onto it on a long drive and stayed the night in this hotel down by the shore. This silly little tourist trap, the cheapest place on the beach I bet. The room was such a laugh. It had this Hawaiian theme. But as soon as we walked into the lobby, I knew it was the right place to be.”

  “And it was important to you guys?”

  “It was where we, um, decided to . . . keep the baby. You. That was the whole point of the big, long drive. To decide what to do.” She nods. “It was important. I even kept our old room key. They were still using keys then, you know? I bet I still have it in my jewelry box.”

  Jesus. This whole time. The police drove out there and found nothing, and neither did Lindy and I. Then again, how could I have? I was so convinced he was running toward my mother and not holed up alone, I didn’t even really look for him. Besides, the beach was our place and belonged to us, to my dad and me. At least, I thought it did.

  The list of what I know is shrinking by the second.

  I want to walk right out the door and not stop until I get to Victory Island, but that would be stupid beyond stupid. It turns out I’ve been a fairly bad detective thus far, so I have to get serious. A good detective would get all the information she could before running off. Reaching into the bag at my feet, I extract the stone heart and place it gem-side-up on the kitchen table. It rolls slowly along its curve until it’s tilted, winking at my mother in the chandelier light from above.

  “Where on earth did you get that?” She leans for a closer look and hugs herself, fingertips digging into her arms.

  “From my dad. I want to know where he got it and what it means.”

  “It was my mother’s,” she says, and crazily, my pulse skips a beat. “I had a collection of these things when I was a kid. My father worked for this company—they made screws for everything. Jewelry, ovens, vending machines, just everything. They would send him to visit their big buyers and he’d always bring one of these back for me. Geodes, I think they’re called. I don’t know why he started, but he went away enough that I had drawers of them. But this one”—she reaches out and brushes the rind of stone around the crystals with an index finger, and it rolls on its axis—“they found in her coat pocket when she died. The police thought maybe she was on her way to Fitchburg . . . or on her way from. I don’t know.”

  “She was bringing it to you?” I ask.

  My mother leans back in her chair. “Maybe. It was too late. I wasn’t there anymore, so she never found me.”

  “Dad said you took the other half with you when you left us.”

  “I did, but that, I don’t have anymore. It’s back home.” She flinches. “In Fitchburg, I mean. That’s where my parents are buried.”

  I hate to ask anything else, because I’m still trying to pretend I don’t care about anything but Dad. But I came all this way. “Would you ever have tried to find me? I mean . . . I thought you were a total broken mess, but here you have this, like, perfect life. Did you just forget about me?”

  She gives me this pitying look, and it makes me feel like the kid again. “Imogene, you don’t just forget your daughter. There were times when I had to fight, every damn day, just to be here. I wish I’d gotten help sooner. But sometimes, all I could do was . . . I would draw.”

  “Monsters, right? Made-up shit?” I think of Lil and my mother in their tent in that tangled backyard, of the shredded butcher paper balled up and stuffed in my garbage can at home.

  Silently, she rises and leaves the kitchen. After a few minutes I think I’ve chased her away for good, and I’m not sure how to feel about that. But she comes back in and thumps a sketchbook down on the table. A thick cream one, much smaller than her drawing pad, bound like any book, with a deep seam down the spine. The cover’s splattered with pen and paint and god knows what else. It looks like my much-abused copy of Rebecca. She slides it across to me. I waver for a second before opening it.

  Inside are drawings of little girls. Except they’re not all little. There are babies, and toddlers, and kindergarten-age girls and school-age girls and teenagers. After studying them, I realize they’re actually all the same girl, just at different ages. And they’re all familiar. They all look sort of like me.

  Not exactly like me. The toddler is chubby and smiling, where I was thin and always looked a little angry/creepy, thanks to the frowny mouth. The ten-or-so-year-old has too-long hair and a ski-slope nose like Sidonie and wears braids, which I never did. Dad didn’t know how to braid. And the teenager is infinitely more stylish, and doesn’t have my kind of pear shape. They’ve all got thinner lips than mine, and the teenager’s hands look like smoother, younger versions of Sidonie’s.

  These drawings aren’t of me, but of the way my mother imagined I might be. And there are pages and pages and pages of them. A whole book of them.

  I paw at my eyes with the back of my hand.

  Sidonie takes the book from me and slowly reaches for my arm, like she’s afraid I’ll jump away. “Were you really, honestly all right? Were you telling the truth when you said you and your dad were okay on your own?” Her eyes are huge in her small face. “You don’t have to make me feel better. I don’t deserve it.”

  I try to think of an answer, but instead I find myself thinking of handsome forensic pathologist Miles Faye. The first thing he tells you about himself is how he can read bodies like they’re books. The plot of A Time to Chill kicks off with a simple, fascinating case that Miles solves easily. One of those gambits that shows us how brilliant he is, so that when the real mystery hits, we know it’s a big deal. Seven be-suited businessmen are pulled from Boston Harbor on a winter night, the luxury cruiser they’d inexplicably rented for twilight sail having sunk miles out. Though they floated for a long time, the men were A-OK when they came out of the freezing water, chatting happily with the Coast Guard aboard the rescue boat, accepting cups of coffee. They went below decks to dry off and wrap up, and every one of the seven dropped down dead.

  Miles looked at those blue-lipped bodies and knew immediately that:

  1) All of the men had been drugged—by poisoned complimentary champagne aboard the rental boat, it later turned out, which is how they ended up in the water in the first place.

  2) The men suffered from rewarming shock, wherein their icy hearts, once warmed, failed in the absence of blood. “The heart can take the cold,” Miles said. “Sometimes it’s the thaw that kills it.”

  The bodies told him everything he needed to know. And so when a crime comes along that he can’t solve by looking, that’s when the mystery begins.

  There’s no mystery when I look at my mother. The way she bites her thumbnail, the way she looks up at me through her eyelashes or, when she does turn away, the slight swing of her hair shielding her from view—in all of this, I can read the guilt and loneliness and sadness of the past, and how afraid she still is. I find every way I might hurt her. Everything I could say to smash the life she’s built, to tear her apart where she’s stitched herself together. The possibilities scroll through my mind and for a second, I think maybe there really are two kinds of girls, and I’m one of those girls: the kind who’ll use what she knows to wound her mother in the worst way. To make her feel the way I felt when Dad was at his worst.

  But no. I really don’t think I am. At least, I don’t want to be.

  I smile, making sure it’s a real one and not the icy kind my best friend uses to protect herself. “Yeah. We were okay. Dad . . . he wasn’t perfect, but he was a really good dad.”

  It’s true, after all. I had more than a lot of people have. More than Sidonie had when she was a little girl. I had Lindy, and Joshua Zhi Scott, who loved me so much and tried to be his best for me.

  I think I can do this. I know it. If anyone can get him home, it’s me, on my big shoulders.

  EIGHTEEN

  The outside world has changed in the past few hours. Thick snow coats the hedges and caps the ornate lampposts. Slowly, Todd backs
his car up through inches of powder in the parking lot. As we pull away, a curtain resettles in the glowing window of 56 Pines Road.

  Rather than leave me by a bench outside the Quick Mart, Todd insists on driving me all the way to Hartford, where I can catch my connection directly. It means a forty-minute drive with my mother’s husband, but I don’t mind so much. It’s a quiet ride. Todd plugs in his MP3 player and lets me deejay, which gives us something to do besides talk about our pasts. I’m kind of over that subject, anyway. I shuffle through his favorites playlist, and by the time we pull up to the bright, bright lights of Union Station, I’ve been introduced to the best of West Coast jazz.

  “Now, somebody will be waiting for you in Sugarbrook, yes?” he asks sternly as I collect my stuff.

  One more lie. Just one more. Then I can take off my liar pants and pack them away, only break them out later for stuff like, Don’t worry, I haven’t even been inside a boy’s dorm room since I started college. “My friend Jessa will be at the station,” I promise. “She knows what time my bus gets in.”

  “Good. Don’t be a stranger, all right? I’d give you our number, but I guess you already have it.” He pats my puffy coat sleeve, and it’s only slightly awkward.

  “Right. Yeah. Thanks.” I crack the door open, then on second thought, unbuckle the straps of my bag and pull out A Time to Chill. Letting it fall open to the bookmarked page, I peel off the battered sticky note holding my place and hand it to Todd. “Can you give this to Sidonie? It’s her cousin’s number. I think Lil would like it, you know, if they talked.”

  He tucks it into his pocket and grins. He has a nice smile. “You’re really something else, aren’t you, Imogene?”

  If we had the time, I’d be in danger of liking my technical stepfather. We could compare favorite books. I could tell him about Dad’s novels, and The Hound of the Baskervilles. The Woman in White. Rebecca.

  Oh well. Maybe next time. “See you,” I say, and shove out of the car into the snow.

  At the Greyhound counter I buy a ticket to Boston. I know I can get to Victory Island from there—once, when Dad’s car was in the shop, we rode the rail into Boston, switched from South Station to North Station, then took the Newburyport/Rockport Line. Just southeast of Newburyport, the tiny slice of land that makes up Victory Island juts out into the Atlantic, connected by one road to the mainland. It’s maybe five miles from the station to the shoreline where hotels and motels overlook the water.