by Andrea Bartz
Our burritos arrived, fat rolls in red baskets.
Ted slopped sour cream onto his plate. “Oh, for sure. Does she think she’s hiding it?” He chuckled and even though I’d brought it up, I felt a flare of irritation: I could criticize Hana, but he couldn’t.
I thought back to Hana’s and my walk down Fifth Avenue, how her eyes had flashed at the mention of Ted. I made my voice light: “Be honest, do you two have bad blood? She was weird when I asked about you.” I smiled conspiratorially. “I smell unresolved sexual tension.”
“Oh God, no.” He tossed his head. “Er, I mean, not that she’s not—she’s great! But that’s definitely not it.”
“You’re sure?” I raised an eyebrow and gave my margarita a sip.
“Positive. All I meant was—” He took a breath. “I knew all of them in college. Harvard girls are no joke. And even of the three of them, she was the serious one. Super driven, super focused, like she had something to prove. You can …” He waved at the air in front of him. “I’m not crazy, right? She comes across as determined as shit.”
I stared at him for a second. Did he really not see why she had to work eleven times as hard as her white friends? How she didn’t have the luxury of screwing up? But then I shrugged. “She gets shit done, so I can’t blame her for being controlling. When you’re dependable, everyone depends on you.”
“Which is fine, if you can do it without the martyr complex.” I took a tiny bite in lieu of answering. The mix of salt and fat and spice made my stomach churn. “Anyway, I hear you, man,” he went on. “Siblings are the worst.”
I swallowed. “Does Cameron treat you like you’re childish and incompetent?”
He laugh-snorted. “He’s still living at home and playing video games all day, so he wouldn’t have much of a case.”
My antennae went up—I’d heard very little about this Cameron fellow. “Was he always sort of a slacker?”
“You could say that. He was hot shit in high school. Tons of friends, really good snowboarder. Just kinda effortlessly popular, you know?”
I nodded. “Then what?”
“He didn’t really try in school. Part of his whole cool-guy thing. I was lucky—I was a huge nerd. Robotics club and everything.”
I set my fork down. “So he had, what? A failure to launch?”
“He did fine at the community college for a while. Then halfway through he sorta suddenly announced he wasn’t going to finish. My parents were furious. Mr. Walsh got him a job at his company; they were always close, they bonded over sports and shit. But then a few years later, Cameron managed to fuck that up too.” He stopped short and stuffed the rest of his burrito into his mouth, a gargantuan bite. I waited approximately four hundred minutes as he struggled to chew, then realized he wasn’t going to go on.
“That must’ve been rough. For the whole family.”
With effort, he swallowed. “Yeah, I didn’t mean to start airing out all my family shit.”
“All families are fucked, right?” He nodded, wiped at his mouth with a napkin. So I went on: “Hana and my mom can’t stand each other. They can’t even be in the same room without fighting. They’re like … you know those little fighting crabs?” I pummeled the air up near my chin. “So then my mom got diagnosed with cancer, and when I moved home to help her, Hana was supposed to stay for a couple weeks—she made it two days. I think she considers it her most obvious personal failing and she hates when anyone brings it up.” I was being cruel now, the words like fire, but I couldn’t stop. “Meanwhile, my dad left us when I was ten, just got fed up with Mom always criticizing him and didn’t come home one day, and Hana saw her opening and moved out to L.A. to live with him.” I paused, took a gulp of water. It felt oddly good, prattling on about my own minor difficulties as if everything were normal, as if Eleanor were a few blocks away, hard at work inside her beautiful outfit and office and company and life.
“Whoa,” Ted said. “But you and Hana are pretty close now, right?”
“We get along.” I shrugged. “I don’t know if we’d be this close if I wasn’t separately friends with Eleanor and Mikki.” I didn’t know I was thinking it until I said it, and then it was out, hovering in the air between us, somewhere over the basket of hot-sauce bottles. Scrambling, I tried to pierce it with a joke: “Did I say that out loud?”
He leaned back and smiled. “You don’t need to worry,” he said. “This is a safe space.”
“Oh, good. What the Herd is to women, Benny’s Burritos is to family drama.”
“That’s right. And speaking of the Herd, I looked into what you sent me about the new surveillance system. It’s kinda complex.” He blathered on about video compression and DVRs and digital streaming. “My best guess is that us resetting the router kicked the new cameras off the network. Which sucks.”
“Damn.”
“I know. Hey, were you able to get into the router?”
“Yeah, thanks again for that info.” I leaned forward. “When I called yesterday, you said you and Eleanor are pretty close, right?”
He shrugged. “We’ve known each other our whole lives, yeah.”
I pulled the folder from my bag. “Okay, don’t tell anyone. But I found some stuff about Eleanor that—well, I’m not sure what to make of it.” I plucked out a sheet. “White Plains, New York. Does she have any connections there?”
He sipped his margarita thoughtfully. “That’s in Westchester, right? Nothing comes to mind.”
“Right. Okay, do you know what bank she uses?” He raised his eyebrows and I pressed: “I don’t know, did she ever make you stop at an ATM with her?”
He shook his head. “Sorry. I feel like this is a quiz and I’m failing.”
“It’s okay. I’m just looking for clues.” I flipped to the Chase bank statements, where I’d highlighted all the withdrawals. “I think she was hoarding cash. Can you think of anything she said, or—”
“Is that Daniel?” I was tilting the bank printout toward me and Ted slid out the page underneath. It was Daniel’s Click profile. “Wait, what the fuck?”
I sucked on my teeth. “Yeeeeahhh. He told us about this right away, and the cops—Eleanor had, uh, opened up their marriage. She was actually on the site too.” I flipped around the second printout and he reared back in his chair.
“Are you serious? Was she meeting up with random dudes? Why is this not—isn’t this a huge lead?”
He was so worked up, so quickly. “I’m trying to figure that out. Daniel said it was her idea. And not … not just for meeting dudes.”
Ted missed it—his eyes slid over the page, reading. “Do the cops know you’re doing your own investigation?”
I shook my head and tucked the pages back into the file. “Like I said, it’s keeping me busy so I don’t sit around all day worrying.”
“Your book’s not keeping you busy? I want to hear more about it.”
I crunched at my plastic water cup. “I didn’t tell Eleanor this,” I said, “but I’m not even sure I can write that book. It’s a long story.”
“What happened?”
“It just ended up being … kind of a shitshow.” The shriek of sirens. The spastic light splitting into red and blue. Skin sweaty under my palms as I willed the heart underneath to beat.
“I’m definitely missing something.”
“I really don’t want to talk about it.” My words splatted onto the table between us and Ted looked down, like a chastised dog. I cleared my throat and tried to sound pleasant: “But I’d love to hear more about the weird tech stuff you’re working on. What’s the kookiest thing you’ve had to design?”
As we were splitting the bill, Ted nodded at my bag again. “Can I get a copy of the stuff in that file?” he said. “Maybe I’ll notice something you didn’t.”
“You can take this. I have everything backed up.”
“You sure?” He was already slipping the folder into his backpack. “Thanks. I’m just … I’m worried. Nobody seems that freaked
out; Cameron was like, ‘Whatever, she’s a sensation-seeker, she probably just got bored with her life and moved on.’ ” He put on a surfer drawl, bobbling his head. “But I dunno. She’s a public figure now. Between this and that stupid graffiti I had to wallpaper over—it doesn’t sit right.”
“I know. I feel the same way.” I smiled sadly. “It makes me feel a tiny bit better that we’re both on the case.”
“And you know what, hopefully Cam’s right.” He reached for his coat. “We’ll get a call any minute that they found her, like, boarding a flight to Fiji from LAX.”
Something fluttered, a shadow lurching across my skull. “Say that again.”
“What, that I hope she’s on her way to Fiji?”
It was gone. We hugged on the sidewalk and parted ways. I had a missed call from Fatima and a text that I should call her in an hour. On the subway ride home, I read the Wikipedia entry on White Plains, still a dead end—why had she been looking it up on a map? It played a pivotal role in the Revolutionary War, I learned, and was the birthplace of a certain Mark Zuckerberg. My eyebrows lifted: White Plains was also home to a small international airport, a nerve center for private jets and sleek chartered planes.
Fatima started chattering the second she picked up the phone: “I still haven’t gotten into the dude’s account,” she said, “but MoreFracturedLight? You won’t believe this. She was only talking to one person: a woman in Mexico. About moving there. She called it her, quote, ‘go-to mental escape hatch,’ said she’d always dreamed of starting over there.”
It was so obvious, it was like I’d been nosing around the idea without allowing myself to think it. The relief was intense, a deep bath I plunged into: Eleanor is alive.
“And you think she actually went there? That’s different from a … a mental escape hatch.” That’s outrageous, I wanted to say. But it wasn’t, of course. The secret bank account and email, the cash withdrawals. The airstrip thirty-five miles north of here.
“I don’t know, dude. Read it yourself. It starts out pretty harmless, just kinda flirtatious, but then it’s clear Eleanor has really done her research, talking about these small cities and asking this woman—the other woman’s British, I think—how she made it work. Then suddenly, like a week ago, she asks if they can talk offline. And all their messages were deleted, I found them in a temp folder. That’s a pretty big coincidence, right?”
My phone buzzed, but I kept it pressed against my ear. I stared hard at the ceiling, feeling this new information whorling around my skull. Could Eleanor really do it? Leave it all—leave us all—behind for a new, secret life over the border? To illegally slip down there, hope, absurdly, that no one would notice or look for her … ?
“What cities did she mention?” I asked, sitting up on my bed. Fatima spelled them out and I typed them into separate tabs, and Google helpfully tossed some flight paths at the top of my search results.
Oh God. ESE, Ensenada Airport. GYM, Guaymas International Airport. I scrambled for the shaded Post-it on my desk, and now it felt obvious:
ACA 1010 CUU ESEGYM
Acapulco. Cancun. Ensenada, then Guaymas. She was researching flights.
“Send me everything you’ve got,” I told Fatima. “I need to figure out what plane went from White Plains, New York, to a Mexican airport sometime after Monday Mocktails.”
“Monday what now?”
“Never mind. But thank you. Are you able to tell me anything about the woman she was messaging with?”
“No dice. Whoever it was shut down her account between their last exchange and now, so there’s just nothing to go on.”
“Bummer.” This mystery woman—she knew where Eleanor was, didn’t she?
“I’ll keep working on the other profile you sent me, the guy’s.”
“Maybe hold off—I don’t need to check his alibi if Eleanor really did walk off on her own.”
“You got it. And also … I’m sorry? Er, I guess congratulations that she’s okay?”
“I don’t know how to feel either.” My stomach was contracting as if I’d swallowed something spiky. “But thanks.”
I hung up and then saw Hana’s group text: Guys, I think I know where Eleanor is. I couldn’t call her fast enough, my fingers slipping over the commands.
“Katie. I’m so sorry I wasn’t around today. But I think I figured it out.”
“She’s in Mexico.”
A long silence.
“How did you—”
“Hana, I’ve been trying to find her too. Did you find out about the Click messages?”
“The what?”
A confused beat, and then she told me about her calls first with Cameron, then with Eleanor’s sweet parents. I never thought of Hana as much of a digger, but I was impressed she followed her instincts. She was good at the psychology bit.
“Cameron talking about the forger was obviously a huge red flag,” she went on. “Like, did she find another way to procure a fake passport?”
“Makes sense to me.” I was intermittently taking notes and doodling in a notebook.
“When we were all in their little home office last night, I noticed her Frida Kahlo book on the shelf, and tonight it just snapped into place. I looked again at the numbers I’d spotted sitting, er, out on the desk as Daniel was showing us that weird contract—one looked like a phone number but didn’t connect, and the other was two digits longer. So I Googled the first two digits of the longer number with the words ‘country code.’ Mexico. The two numbers were for burner phones.”
“Smart.” I’d looked hard at that desk too. When had Hana snatched up some random phone numbers? And why would they be sitting out where Daniel could see them?
“What about you? What’d you—hang on, Mikki’s calling.”
A few beeps, the usual swirl of you-theres and hellos.
“So where is she? Is she okay?” Mikki sounded frantic.
“We think she’s okay,” Hana said. “She left voluntarily. Moved to Mexico.”
“Oh, thank God.” A crazed laugh. Then: “What the fuck?”
“She’s been planning it for a while,” Hana noted. “I’m … so relieved, and yet so furious?” She said it curiously, like she was neither of those things.
“I’m so glad she’s okay, oh my God,” Mikki said. “But why would she—especially when the Herd—” Her voice cracked, like it was stuck at the top of her lungs.
“I guess maybe things weren’t as good as they seemed?” Hana said.
“That cunt!” Mikki sounded amazed. “That fucking brilliant, horrible cunt. Do we know for sure she’s down there?”
“I hope so, because it would mean she’s alive and fine,” I broke in. A surprised silence, like they’d forgotten I was there.
“Katie, you were about to tell me what made you think she was in Mexico,” Hana prompted.
I quickly assessed: There was no reason to mention Fatima, or the bank records, or my meeting with Ted, or anything other than the smoking gun, really. “She was figuring out how to ditch her identity and move to a town called Guayabitos. Described her plans to a stranger online.”
A stunned silence.
“Well, you probably should have led with that,” Hana said.
“I just found this out. She—”
“Who was she talking to?” Mikki interrupted.
“A stranger on Click,” I said. “She had a profile, and it wasn’t too hard to reset the password and access it.” I gave them the CliffsNotes version, implying I’d worked alone.
“I really, really want you to be right,” Mikki said carefully, “but also … goddammit, Eleanor. That bitch didn’t even say goodbye. And she left behind her two companies without warning or any plan to keep them going? That … that doesn’t sound like her.”
“I guess this is a PR nightmare,” I said. I didn’t mean to sound flippant, but.
“Not to mention … hurtful? That she just thought it was fine to abandon us one night?” Mikki’s voice rose to a scratch. �
��I can’t believe it. Those smug-ass cops were right.”
“What do we do now?” Hana asked, always the mom, always the planner.
“I guess tell the detectives?” I said after a moment. “Will they still look for her if she left voluntarily?”
“I don’t think so,” Hana said slowly. “If she has debts here, her creditors can come after her. And if she’s in the country illegally, that’s Mexico’s issue.”
I let out something between a laugh and a groan. “I just can’t believe this. It’s Eleanor we’re talking about. Would she … could she really do this?”
No one spoke. The static on the phone line seemed to swell.
“I know it’s shocking, but I think it’s true,” Hana said. “She’s so intelligent and strong-willed and … can’t you kind of see it?”
Give it a few days, maybe weeks, and Eleanor would reappear at the Herd, her swishy hair glistening, a smile molding her cheekbones, the wildest story on her berry-colored lips—
“I don’t really know what else to say.” The voice was rickety and it took me a moment to decide it was Mikki, not Hana. “Actually, I gotta go. I think I’m gonna throw up.”
Hana and I tried to jump in with something sympathetic, but when the kindness cleared we realized she was already gone.
“Well, I guess I’ll call Ratliff,” Hana finally said.
“Has anyone told Daniel?” I asked. “Or her parents?”
“I think we should leave that to the police. I’ll call Ratliff now and just say this is what we think happened. Her parents might have contacts down there. People who can look for her. They were always taking her there growing up.”
We ran out of things to say, like it was the awkward end of a Q&A session, and I hung up, jealous of Hana with her assigned tasks. I still had things I could do—chasing down the White Plains airport, rereading the messages from Eleanor’s new British friend in search of overlooked clues—but suddenly I was tired, my bones turning to lead. I felt the tears brewing and let the weird combo of relief, anger, exhaustion, and self-pity swirl: Eleanor’s alive and safe. Eleanor left you, a week after you came back into her life. I let myself cry, felt the cold tears collect in my ears. At one point Samantha, my roommate, knocked softly on the door, but I ignored her and she went away.