A few nervous hands went up around the room. I was glad they hadn’t asked that at my first meeting, because the last thing I had wanted was to be singled out. My goal was to blend in.
“Whether this is your first meeting or your last, I hope that you will take something away from our time together that you can use to help you during your week. Remember, when you change yourself, you change the world around you.” Those who could finished his sentence along with him: “Change yourself, change the world.”
There was a group of people sitting on his right who weren’t in good shape. Two of them lay curled on their sides in their chairs, with their legs hugged against their chests. Sweat dripped down the blonde woman’s forehead. The man next to her shook and moaned every few seconds. I hadn’t realized the ones being detoxed were allowed to come to the meetings. I figured you had to get sober first, but there they were, sweating it out. Each of them had a bucket at their feet. They wouldn’t actually throw up in the meeting, would they?
And then there were others like me whose faces were as blank as the walls. What were they doing here? Were they new? Old? Trying to become members? I’d expected the others, but I hadn’t expected so many normal-looking people. Most of them had jobs too. Like real jobs in the community. Yesterday I’d spoken with two lawyers and one of the chemical engineers down at Sumner. They’d been taking classes and attending gatherings for months. Their families had recently started coming with them, and they loved it too. I had to remember to get them to sign a release today. Leo would kill me if I didn’t. He wanted to use one of the lawyers’ statements from yesterday. What had he said?
Oh yeah, “We are a community that feeds each other’s souls.” It was a great line. I couldn’t disagree with him on that, but it was useless unless he gave me permission to use it. He probably would. Most people loved seeing their name in print.
Someone cleared their throat next to me. A guy with half his face covered in tattoos. He looked irritated, like it’d been a while since he’d been trying to get my attention. He handed me a stack of papers.
“Take one and pass it on,” he said.
So much for everyone being nice and friendly. I fumbled to grab a paper, realizing there were multiple papers stapled together, and it was a packet I was supposed to be taking. I took mine, placed it on top of my notebook, and passed the stack to the next person in line.
I stared at the heading on the paper:
Are You Happy?
NINE
ABBI
NOW
Mom scurried to the car, ducking her head and trying to keep Shiloh covered with a blanket in case any media had sneaked to the private entrance at the back of the hospital. She opened the back door and jumped inside, clutching Shiloh against her chest. Dad hurried behind her and motioned to the car seat he’d bought last night.
“Do you remember how to use it?”
She acted like she hadn’t heard him. She was doing that thing where she went far away somewhere. She couldn’t hear you when she was there and definitely didn’t know what was going on around her. Yesterday one of the nurses had missed her vein when she had been switching her IV, sending blood spurting from Mom’s arm, and Mom hadn’t even flinched.
“Kate, you have to put the baby in the car seat,” Dad said tenderly. “Here, let me help you. These things are so hard to mess with. They always have been. Remember how frustrated you used to get with Abbi’s?” He moved toward her, and she jumped back, eyeing the car seat like it might attack Shiloh. She scrambled to the other side, crawling over the car seat in the middle and smacking her head on the roof. Her entire body trembled. Shiloh stirred within her arms. I held my breath, hoping she didn’t wake up. We were trying to keep her asleep for as long as possible. Nobody wanted to deal with a screaming baby in the car.
Dad looked baffled at Mom’s reaction to the car seat, but it wasn’t about the car seat. It was about putting Shiloh down. She hadn’t put her down yet, not even when she slept, and she’d only given her to the nurses because she had to, but I’d watched how hard it was for her every time she did.
I walked to the other side of the car and opened the door. I reached for the seat belt and pulled it across Mom and Shiloh. “I’m sure this is fine. There was a time when nobody rode in car seats, and they all survived.”
Relief washed over Dad, and he took his spot in the driver’s seat next to Meredith. He’d insisted on driving this time. At least that felt normal. I climbed into the back seat with Mom.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
“You’re welcome,” I said, trying to look at her without making direct eye contact. I didn’t like looking at her directly because most of the time she started crying whenever I did. I’d never seen someone look so sad—grief carved into every line in her face. Or anxious. She always looked like she was getting ready to crawl out of her skin. Did they test her blood for drugs when they took it?
Drugs were always one of the possibilities discussed in her thread on the Vanished forum. I’d stumbled on the website in middle school, and it had been filled with missing person cases like Mom’s—the kinds of cases where the person disappeared into thin air, and there was never any sign of foul play or anything amiss. They were just gone. Just like her.
There were hundreds of threads, and sometimes I browsed through them to read other people’s stories, but mostly I focused on Mom. She had a huge fan club of people devoted to solving her case. Dad despised all of them—said they were all quacks—but I liked their postings. They really knew her. They discovered things about her that Dad didn’t tell me, like how she’d gotten a misdemeanor for shoplifting when she was twenty or that she’d almost been held back in tenth grade because she failed advanced algebra. I’d always wondered why I sucked at math when Dad was so good at it and had secretly hoped it was something that I’d gotten from her. I never would’ve known that if I wasn’t on the boards.
The members gave me new perspectives and went down roads Dad wasn’t willing to go on. The consensus was that she’d had an affair and run off to be with her lover, which was why Dad felt the way he did about them. He was more likely to entertain the idea that she’d been abducted by aliens than he was that she’d been having an affair. He insisted she was happy, that their marriage was stable, and life was good. He always said the same thing whenever he was questioned. His story never wavered. Most people pitied him and took her happiness as the major piece of evidence proving she was having an affair, because no one believed anyone could be that happy with someone they’d been married to for that long.
Shiloh let out a whimper, and Mom pulled up her shirt and lifted her to her breast. She wasn’t wearing a bra. I tried not to blush or act embarrassed, but it was hard. I’d never seen a woman’s breast out in the open like that, so exposed. The only time I’d seen other women naked had been in locker rooms, and even then people had tried to cover themselves. Not that I minded breastfeeding. It was best for the baby. Everyone knew that. It was just weird.
She reached over and grabbed my hand while she nursed, which only made it odder—the three of us connected in this intimate moment in the back seat of the car. Was this too weird? I tried to catch Dad’s eye in the rearview mirror, but he was too focused on driving. At least he’d have something to do during the fourteen hours stretching in front of us. I wished he’d installed TVs on the back of the seats like Meaghan’s dad had. At least then we’d have something to look at. My phone was useless, because I got carsick if I read it in the car. I hated awkward silences, and so far that was pretty much all it had been when the five of us were together.
Dad had promised things would get easier after we got home. He was convinced a familiar environment would help Mom feel safe, but that was the thing—our house wasn’t familiar any more. Three years ago? Yes, she could’ve walked into our house, and it would’ve been almost like she’d never been gone, since we kept our home as a shrine to her. But Meredith had ceremoniously changed things. The house wa
sn’t hers anymore.
What if being at home was more traumatic for her? I’d tried to tell the investigators about my fear, but none of them were interested in what I had to say. I would be glad when we were home and Dean was involved. He had been out of the country on another case but was flying home to meet us tomorrow.
Dean was the lead FBI investigator on Mom’s case. He’d stayed in our house during the weeks following Mom’s disappearance. He’d worked with us for so long he’d become like family. I even jokingly called him “Uncle” sometimes. At least he knew how to smile. Marcos had been so stuffy and uptight he made me nervous, and I hadn’t done anything wrong. No wonder Mom was so tight lipped.
My phone buzzed, startling Mom. She whimpered beside me. I rubbed her back with my other hand. Tears streamed down her cheeks. I wanted to help her but didn’t know how. Her time in the hospital hadn’t seemed to make her much better. All her blood work was slowly going back to normal, and her doctors expected it to continue improving, but she still seemed scared all the time, and the harder they pushed her to talk, the more she shut down. It was like she didn’t know how to live away from wherever she’d been. Dean was bringing someone who specialized in getting people in Mom’s situation to talk. I hoped they could help her, because I hated seeing her this way and wasn’t nearly as confident as Dad that being home would make things any better.
TEN
MEREDITH
NOW
I raced through the house, trying to pick up the mess we’d made before we’d left. Everything was in disarray because we’d gone so quickly. We definitely weren’t prepared for guests. The guest room was cluttered with things we wanted to sell in our garage sale, but they’d been stacked in the corner for the last two years. Scott was carrying them out to the garage while I made up the bed. I’d left Abbi and Kate sitting awkwardly on the couch next to each other downstairs. Kate had started crying almost every time she had tried talking to Abbi, and it was crushing to watch.
Where did I put the new pillows I had bought a few months back? I’d gotten two on sale at Target. Where were they? I was so scatterbrained. None of us had gotten any sleep since yesterday. Scott had insisted on driving through the night, convinced getting to California and back home was the key to getting Kate stable. Marcos and the other officers hadn’t gotten anywhere with her for the last three days we’d spent in Montana. The doctors had diagnosed her with acute posttraumatic stress disorder with depressive features. Basically it meant she alternated between being agitated with fear and sobbing inconsolably. The goal was to help her feel safe by surrounding her with familiar things.
But I didn’t know how any of us were supposed to feel safe when two unmarked squad cars sat in front of our house, and a team of FBI agents and officers were setting up their office in our dining room. Were they planning on staying up all night? Where would I put them to sleep if they weren’t?
I gave up on finding the missing pillows and headed to our bedroom to grab the extra ones in my closet instead. The master bedroom had changed as much as the rest of the house. I hadn’t wanted to erase Kate from the house, but there was no way I could go to bed every night with the framed photo of the two of them exchanging rings on their wedding day staring back at me, or the one above the dresser with Kate’s naked body swollen in pregnancy and Scott behind her with his arms circled underneath her. Those were the first to go, followed by the rest of their professional wedding photos scattered around the house. I’d cleaned out her closet next because I needed a place for my clothes. We had packed her things in lined fabric boxes just like we’d filled her coffin with her violin, letters, and photos when we’d buried her. They’d been moved to the garage and hadn’t been touched in years.
Other things followed from there. We updated the kitchen almost immediately after I moved in. They’d been planning on doing it right before Kate went missing, so it was in desperate need of help by then. I talked Scott into gutting the entire thing, and I’d gotten the kitchen of my dreams. But what would Kate think of it? It was a far cry from her traditional, farmhouse-style kitchen.
We’d all watched her when we’d walked through the front door even though we had tried to pretend we weren’t; at least Abbi and I had. Scott’s eyes were glued to her. He didn’t bother to hide his eagerness at her reaction to their home. The desperation in his eyes at wanting something to spark her back to life was unmistakable, and so was the pain that followed when she reacted to it like she had to everything else around her—terrified.
I was glad to be home and out of the car, though. I couldn’t have endured another moment of silence. Scott wasn’t much of a talker on road trips, so we usually listened to music or audiobooks, but he had said something might trigger Kate, and we weren’t equipped to handle her if she had an episode in the car. What did that even mean? And if we couldn’t handle her episodes in the car, how would we handle them at home? Her psychiatrists kept referring to episodes, but they wouldn’t come right out and say what that meant, and so far I hadn’t seen one. Was she dangerous? Scott had assured me she wasn’t, but how well did he really know her?
Kate coming home changed everything. That went without saying. But it changed my entire view of her as a person too. I had been sure she was dead. No part of me ever believed she was alive, no matter what Scott had said about it or how he had felt. Never. I had only seen him as a grieving man refusing to accept that his wife was dead from the first moment he’d shared his story in group. I had never told him, though, because it would’ve hurt him, and as time went on it was one of the things that drew me to him. I’d never seen a man so unapologetically in love with a woman even long after she was gone. James hadn’t loved me that way, and he’d never once looked at me the way Scott looked when he said Kate’s name.
How was it possible she’d been alive all this time? I’d always been as convinced of her love and devotion to Scott as he was, but was it possible he’d been mistaken? Maybe there was someone else. What if she’d gone willingly?
Don’t be ridiculous, I admonished myself.
“Meredith?” Scott called from downstairs, interrupting my thoughts. “Where did you put the extra batteries?”
I hurried back downstairs to get them myself, since it would be easier than trying to direct him to them. I dug through the back of the junk drawer in the linen closet until I found them. He plopped them into the flashlight and handed it to me. “Give her this so she can find her way through the house at night if she needs to,” he said. “I’ll pick up a packet of night-lights tomorrow to put in the hallway and bathrooms, but it’s too late to run out now. Everything is closed.”
Abbi and Kate were in the same spot in the living room as they’d been when I’d left. Abbi tickled Shiloh’s feet, sticking out from underneath her yellow blanket.
“Her toes are so tiny,” Abbi squealed. Her dark, wavy hair was pulled into a long ponytail underneath the Dodgers cap she’d been wearing for days. “I’ve never seen anything so small.”
Kate smiled hesitantly, unsure of herself. I cleared my throat, announcing my presence so I wouldn’t startle her. I’d already made a mental note to make noise before I entered rooms, because she startled so easily.
“Abbi, why don’t you go brush your teeth and get ready for bed? I’m going to show Kate the guest bedroom and bathroom upstairs.” I felt like an idiot as soon as I said it because, obviously, she knew where the bedrooms were, but she got up and silently followed me upstairs. I pointed to the bathroom. “Still right through there,” I said, trying to sound as normal as possible. The guest bedroom was next to it. She eyed the door leading to the master suite at the end of the hallway. Something passed through her eyes. Recognition? Sadness? Some kind of memory? Whatever it was, it was gone that quickly, and she shuffled into the guest bedroom. She perched on the edge of the bed. She kissed the top of Shiloh’s head, nervously rocking back and forth.
I pointed to the lamp and the bottle of water I’d put on the nightstand. “There’s
water, but if you’d like something else, I can bring that up too.”
She lowered her head. “Water is fine.”
I gave her the flashlight. “Scott thought you might want this. It’ll make things easier if you get up in the night.”
“Thank you,” she said softly, keeping her head down as she took it from me.
“I wish we had more things for the baby, but . . .” My sentence hung in the air awkwardly.
She searched for something to say. “Thank you,” she repeated herself.
“You’re welcome,” I said. “Are you sure I can’t get you anything else?”
I’d offered her a pair of my pajamas, but she had refused. She was wearing clothes that were donated to the hospital after no one picked them up from the lost and found. There was an entire storage room in the hospital filled with lost items that they recycled through to patients. Her gray sweatpants were two sizes too big, and she was wearing a faded shirt with a taco on the front. She shook her head.
I wanted to hug her. I couldn’t help myself when she looked so fragile and frail, completely lost. What had they done to her? I had to go, because if I stayed in her room a minute longer, that was exactly what I’d do, and I knew it was the last thing she wanted.
“Good night,” I said as I stood. “Please wake me up if you need anything.”
KATE
THEN
“Are you seriously going to another retreat?” Christina threw her head back and laughed, her black hair spilling down her back. We’d already had too many drinks, and I’d pay for it in the morning, but I didn’t care. I only got to see her twice a year since she’d moved back to Texas. “Haven’t you already been to one?”
I drained the rest of my mojito and waved down our server for another. “Three, but this one is different.”
“How different can they be?” she asked.
When She Returned Page 6