I glanced at Abbi in the rearview mirror. Her eyes were closed, but I doubted she was sleeping. She never slept when she was upset. She was the perfect combination of Scott’s and Kate’s genes. She had Kate’s slender build, which, coupled with Scott’s angles, gave her an athletic frame even though she hated sports. There was something wholesome and endearing about her despite everything she’d been through.
My head reeled as it replayed scenes from this morning. The knock at the door had surprised me, since we hadn’t been expecting anyone. I had looked out the kitchen window and had called for Scott. I saw two police officers on our front steps. A loud sigh escaped his mouth when he spotted them as he came down the stairs into the foyer. He had been imagining the moment for years, and he couldn’t hide his relief that it was finally over.
“Are you Scott Bennett?” the officer asked.
Scott nodded, too nervous to speak.
“Sir, Kate Bennett has been found alive in Rittsberg, Montana,” his partner announced.
Scott stumbled backward like he was drunk. I guided him onto the bench lining the entryway wall.
“Lean forward and put your head between your knees,” the officer said in the commanding way all service members spoke.
Scott’s color was off. Pasty. Gray. His labored breathing made me nervous. He leaned over and put his head between his legs. I rubbed his back, trying to get his shoulders to relax. It took a few minutes before his breathing slowed, but it finally did.
“Told you it helps,” the officer said, even though Scott hadn’t said anything.
He must have been in lots of these situations before to be so arrogant. Did you have to get specialized training to shatter people’s lives? Even though he was telling us Kate was alive, I felt the shock waves splinter our former existence. We’d forever live in a distinct before-and-after sequence now.
Questions had been chasing each other ever since. I couldn’t turn them off. I rubbed my forehead, tired of the endless loop. I moved my neck from side to side, trying to release the tension that’d been building in my stress spot since this morning.
“How are you feeling?” I whispered to Scott, just in case Abbi really was asleep.
He shrugged.
I flicked my head backward, motioning to Abbi, and mouthed, “What about her?”
He shrugged again.
“Do you want me to turn on music?”
“Sure,” he said. His voice was strained and hoarse, like it got after he’d been up all night or at the end of a baseball game. His color was still off.
I needed my phone to navigate, so I flicked on the radio. All my preprogrammed stations from back home were filled with static. I flipped through until I found something clear. Classic rock music filled the car. He shook his head. Country music was next, and he hated country.
“Sorry,” I said, quickly trying to change it and accidentally turning up the volume instead. Abbi jolted awake.
“Jesus,” she said.
Normally one of us would have said something about her swearing, but there was nothing normal about this day.
“Should I see if I can find anything on AM? Maybe I can find talk radio or something. Or give me your phone to navigate and you plug mine in, since yours doesn’t work in the adapter. I—”
He interrupted me and laid his hand on my thigh. “Honey, I love you. But can we just be quiet?”
THREE
ABBI
NOW
I stared angrily at the closed door, holding back the urge to pound my fists on it until they let me in. She was my mom, and I deserved to be in there with them, but someone official looking had met us at the emergency room entrance this morning and whisked us through the hospital without ever introducing herself to me. She’d shooed me into the hallway and shut the door behind them before I had a chance to protest. Dad would’ve said something to her about treating me like a little kid, if he hadn’t been in shock. It wasn’t fair that Meredith got to be in there with him and I didn’t. I’d counted every mile until we’d gotten to Montana and never expected to be shut out like this.
I hated being treated like a kid when it came to Mom’s case. They weren’t talking about anything behind their closed door that I hadn’t already thought of. Probably twice. I’d played out every terrible thing that could’ve happened to her over the years, and there was nothing they could say that would surprise me, but it was too late now. I was stuck.
My stomach hurt. I had slept horribly last night, since I never slept well in hotels, and all I’d eaten today was a banana. I didn’t want to, but Dad made me. He hadn’t eaten since yesterday, either, so I had only agreed to eat one if he did. As much as it bothered me that Meredith had gone in the room while I had been left out, at least she was there to support him. He was a mess.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. It’d been vibrating against me since I had switched it back on. I’d turned it off last night because my best friend, Meaghan, had been texting me nonstop, asking how I was and what was going on, until I couldn’t take it anymore. I would’ve left it off, but I wanted Dad to be able to text me from inside if he wanted to.
Was Mom in there too? She couldn’t be, could she? Probably not. Dad had been speaking with an investigator named Marcos ever since we had found out about Mom, and he had said that Mom and the baby had needed to be hospitalized for their injuries, and the room they’d gone into wasn’t a patient’s room. It looked more like a regular office. But she was in the same building. We were officially breathing the same air.
I hadn’t thought about Mom in a long time. Months. Maybe even close to a year. Guilt washed over me. In second grade, I had thought Mom’s kidnappers would murder her if I didn’t think about her every hour—like wherever they had her in the world, her survival depended on my thoughts. I had been obsessed with making sure I did it and had set my alarm at night to wake me up. I had developed a weird form of OCD, and it had gotten me sent back to the psychologist I’d only recently stopped seeing. It felt eerily similar now. Like if I didn’t keep her in my awareness at all times, she’d disappear again.
I eyed the doors leading to the other parts of the hospital. If I wandered past her in the hallway, would she recognize me immediately? Or would it be more of a strange pull toward me without being able to figure out why? For a while after she went missing, I had insisted on getting my hair cut every few weeks so it would stay the same length, because I had been terrified she wouldn’t recognize me if I looked different.
What did she look like now? Nobody had said anything to Dad about her appearance. They’d barely said anything at all. All Marcos would tell us was that she’d shown up at a gas station in northern Montana with a baby, screaming for help, and they’d hospitalized them. He had promised he’d answer all Dad’s questions in person. I eyed the closed door again. It was taking them forever.
And why was nobody talking about the elephant in the room?
What was Mom going to think when she found out Dad was married again? It wasn’t his fault he’d moved on. If he’d had his way, he’d still be stuck journaling to her every morning and laying out her nightgown on her side of the bed every night. He would’ve waited forever. He always said they had the kind of love that only came around once in a lifetime.
FOUR
MEREDITH
NOW
I gripped Scott’s hand underneath the table. We sat in white plastic chairs at the head, like it was some strange formal dinner, and we were the important guests. Harsh fluorescent lighting cast a bluish-green hue across the run-down room, and floral-print wallpaper left over from the eighties peeled from the wall behind me. The lead investigator, Marcos, sat on the right side of the table. He was flanked by his partner on one side and a police officer on the other. An important executive from the hospital occupied the remaining chair, while other doctors lined the walls. There were too many people standing, and it made the small space feel even tinier.
“I just don’t understand why you can’t giv
e me any answers.” I’d never heard Scott sound so angry. He glared at Marcos. Scott had gone from being in a shocked stupor to releasing a series of rapid-fire questions from the moment they shut the door behind us:
“Where has she been?”
“Who took her?”
“How did she get to the gas station?”
“Why was she in Montana?”
Much like he’d been doing since we’d come in, Marcos held up his hand to stop Scott. “I told you—she’s in a state of severe traumatization. We are not pushing her to answer any questions until she’s been cleared by the medical director, but unfortunately she’s been away at a conference and her plane doesn’t get in until after eight.”
“What time does she get in?”
I placed my hand gently on Scott’s arm. “He said eight o’clock tonight, honey.”
This was the third time we’d been around this circle. Scott needed rest. He said he’d slept last night, but I’d felt him tossing and turning next to me all night long. He had crept into the chair underneath the window sometime before three and never came back to bed. He’d barely eaten anything all day. It’d only been a little over twenty-four hours, but he already looked like he’d lost weight. Thankfully, Abbi had gotten him to eat a banana this morning.
“And what’s being done before then?” he asked. His dark hair stuck out at random angles from running his hands through it so much.
Scott had always been convinced that there’d been a series of missteps with Kate’s case from the beginning and that the police hadn’t done their job right—starting with not filing a missing person report until after she’d already been missing for forty-eight hours. He said they had wasted valuable time focusing on him when they should’ve been out looking for her.
“Are you sure you want to be involved with a murder suspect?” my mom had asked me when she found out we were dating.
I had laughed her off. “That was years ago, and they ruled him out as a suspect almost immediately.”
Everyone knew the spouse was always a suspect whenever their partner went missing. The FBI wouldn’t have been doing their job if they hadn’t put Scott through the wringer. He’d come up clean, even passed both polygraphs, but that wasn’t good enough for some people. Nothing ever would be. Thankfully my mom wasn’t one of them, and she had grown to love Scott like one of her own. My brothers had too.
“We have a team on the ground gathering any evidence from the gas station and tracing the forest around it. They’re searching the area for any clues.” Marcos was dressed nicely in a well-cut suit. He had sandy hair and intelligent blue eyes that hadn’t moved from Scott yet.
“When can we see her?” Scott asked.
My breath caught. This was really happening. Kate was alive, and we were going to see her. None of this had seemed real until now.
Marcos cracked his knuckles and kept his gaze steady. “We’d like to get you to see her as soon as possible. A familiar face might help coax her out of her shell.” He cleared his throat. “We’re hoping you’ll work with us in sharing any information she provides you with during your visit. Anything, even if it seems insignificant.”
Scott nodded his head eagerly. “Of course. I’ll do anything that helps figure out who took her.” He pointed at me. “Meredith will, too, and I’ll be sure to let Abbi know.”
“What about the baby? Is she okay?” I asked.
They’d told us the baby was a girl, but they didn’t know much more than that. Nobody knew her name, and Kate wasn’t talking. She hadn’t said anything since they’d brought her into the hospital. They had sedated her in the ambulance because she had freaked out when they’d closed the ambulance doors and had tried to jump out. She’d been mute ever since. The medicine hadn’t just calmed her down—it’d turned her off.
A doctor leaning against the wall stepped forward, as if on cue. “The baby has been thoroughly evaluated by our staff of qualified pediatricians, and except for minor dehydration and a few scratches, she appears totally healthy.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. I glanced at Scott to see his reaction. So far, he hadn’t mentioned the baby once. He didn’t miss a beat.
“Can we see Kate now?” he asked.
Marcos nodded. “I want to warn you about her condition, though. We don’t know what she went through yet, but her body tells us she’s been through a lot. Her time away has aged her significantly. Wherever she lived and whatever she went through, it was rough.”
Scott squeezed my hand underneath the table. “We can handle it,” he said.
FIVE
ABBI
NOW
Dad knelt in front of me. He and Meredith had been the last ones to file out of the room. Everyone else had left, except for Marcos.
“Why don’t you tell her about what we warned you about?” Marcos towered above us. He reminded me of the varsity football guys at my high school, with his broad shoulders and bulging chest. I could tell he didn’t have kids by the way my presence made him uncomfortable.
Dad put his arm around my shoulders. His eyes were wet. “Mom has been through a lot, and it’s going to take her some time to recover. She is going to look very different than you remember, so I want you to be prepared when you see her.”
Dad knew more about me than most dads ever knew about their teenage daughters. Probably more than he wanted to, like my bra size and the brand of tampons I used, since I told him almost everything, but one thing I’d never told him was how little I remembered about Mom. It would break his heart worse than it’d already been broken, and I couldn’t do that to him, but my childhood memories were filled with his face instead of hers. My memories of Mom were more of a feeling—a time in space, etched into me in a way that no amount of time could erase. But they were just pieces. Very small ones.
What I remembered most about Mom was how Dad’s eyes shone with love whenever he talked about her. I had loved going through the things in her closet and listening to his stories about her as he fingered the fabric of her favorite dresses, like he was telling me the world’s most important fairy tale—how they’d been best friends when they were kids and had thrilled everyone when they had gotten together as teenagers. I never wanted to dress up as Cinderella or Snow White, because Mom had been my favorite princess. Over the years, Dad had snapped hundreds of pictures of me in her dresses. Our favorite picture was the one where I stomped through the kitchen in her wedding dress, wearing too-big cowboy boots and balancing an Easter hat on my head. And then one day I just stopped wearing her clothes. Why did I quit wearing her clothes? Was it the same day I stopped believing in princesses and fairy tales?
Her clothes had been stuffed in boxes in the back of the garage for years. We needed to get them out for her. But she couldn’t wear clothes that were that old, could she? What was she going to wear? Why hadn’t anyone thought of that?
“We didn’t bring her any clothes,” I blurted out.
Dad raised his eyebrows. “What?”
“She doesn’t have anything to wear.” Emotions bubbled their way to the surface. It was something so stupid to cry over, but I couldn’t help it.
Dad brought me to his chest and wrapped his arms tightly around me. “It’s going to be okay. We’ll find something for her to wear.”
I giggled through my tears. Meredith handed me a tissue from her purse. I blew my nose and let out a deep breath.
“Everyone ready?” Marcos asked.
Nobody answered, but we stood and followed him out of the room, then down a few short hallways. The hospital was as tiny as the town. Marcos stopped at room 28A. Our movements slowed behind him. He gave everyone a moment before knocking and pushing through the door.
I grabbed Dad’s arm and hung on to his bicep. Her room was filled with people, and everyone moved against the walls, providing a path to the bed for us. My heart leaped in my chest. The air left my lungs.
And then there she was.
Mom.
Her hair wasn’t b
londe anymore, but a mousy gray with patches missing on top and long tattered strands falling down the middle of her back. Her radiant blue eyes, which had shone so brightly from her pictures, were sunken and shallow; her cheekbones were skeletal, like maybe there was cancer eating away at her insides. Angry scars marked the right side of her face.
That wasn’t Mom. It couldn’t be. We were in the wrong room.
I turned to Dad. He was staring at her, unmoving. She brought her hands to her face, covering her mouth with long, shaking fingers. She was smaller than me. How did that happen? She bore no resemblance to the woman whose picture I’d kept underneath my pillow until I was eight years old.
Nobody moved. For a second, nobody spoke, like we needed a moment of silence to recognize the significance of the moment, and then everyone talked at once, and activity swirled around me. Suddenly I was in front of her.
She reached out and stroked my face softly, like she couldn’t believe I was real. “Abbi,” she whispered, barely audible.
I hadn’t heard her voice in years, but the second I heard it, something inside me recognized her. “Mom.” My voice shook with emotion. Tears streamed down my face.
She pulled me close and wrapped her frail arms around me. I could feel each one of the bones in her back. Her ribs pressed against my chest. I was afraid I’d hurt her if I squeezed too hard. Her smell was unfamiliar. Nothing like the perfume she used to wear. She smelled like spoiled milk.
When She Returned Page 2