“Each one targets something else,” I said. “The last one focused on forgiveness.”
“You spent three days in the desert forgiving?” She smirked, trying not to crack a joke.
“Shut up.” I playfully smacked her arm across the table. “It’s not even like that. The whole purpose was to gain a new perspective on forgiveness. I didn’t realize there were so many people I needed to forgive.”
We’d gone into an abandoned house and spray-painted the names of everyone we’d ever resented on the walls. Then we’d taken turns beating them down with a bat. We destroyed every wall in the house, and the final ceremony was setting the house on fire while we chanted songs of release. It was one of the most powerful experiences of my life, but she’d never understand it because it was too irrational for her logical, pragmatic brain. That was one of the reasons she and Scott were such good friends and why both of them were amazing at their jobs. They’d met in English class during our freshman year at college. He’d brought her back to our apartment to study one night, and the three of us had been friends ever since.
“Are you working on a follow-up story?” she asked.
I shrugged. My story had gone to press over two weeks ago, and when I’d gone back to talk to Ray about all the backlash and what he thought about it, he’d invited me to become a member of Love International. I was considering his invitation but hadn’t made up my mind yet, and writing another article would be the same as saying no.
“So what are you still doing there?”
“I just like being there, and you would, too, if you’d give it a try. Just come with me this weekend.”
She shook her head, draining what was left in her glass. “No way. Jerry is coming into town this weekend, and you know there’s no way I’m missing out on that good loving.” It’d been less than a year since she’d divorced her husband, Rick, and she hadn’t wasted any time getting back into the dating scene. She complained they hadn’t had sex for the last two years, so she had to make up for lost time. I didn’t know any guy could go that long without sex, but she swore she wasn’t exaggerating. “Just promise me that you’re not going to turn into Rita and get all born again, okay?” she asked.
I took the first bite out of the piece of chocolate cake in front of us. “That I can promise. This is completely different.”
Rita was my oldest friend from high school, and I’d introduced the two of them over a decade ago. Rita had always liked to party, and after she had had her second child, she’d hit the pills hard too. So hard that coupled with the bottles of wine she drank every day, she had started showing up at preschool pickup smelling like booze. It wasn’t long before her family had sent her to rehab. She’d started attending a born-again Christian church after she got out and had become so involved that her former self was almost unrecognizable.
“Too bad you couldn’t just take Scott,” she said.
I’d given up asking him to go with me, which was what always happened whenever I did anything new—he tolerated it from me but he didn’t want any part of it.
“Are things getting any better for you?” she asked.
I’d spent our last two visits opening up to her about how much I was struggling in my marriage. I rarely talked about our relationship with anyone, but I hadn’t been able to keep things in any longer, and talking with Scott about stuff had gotten me nowhere. He said the same thing whenever I brought up how stagnant I felt—“I love you. Every part of you. I want you to grow and change, experience new things. I support you.”
But I wanted him to grow and change, experience new things too. His contentment with sameness was more maddening the older I got. How could we live our lives based on decisions we’d made when we were seventeen?
It wasn’t like he hadn’t tried to understand how I was feeling, but those discussions ended with his other favorite saying, “I just don’t get it. Our lives are perfect.”
That was just it. Our lives were perfect—too perfect. I’d explained it to Christina, and she’d understood. I didn’t understand why he couldn’t.
She was looking at me with hopeful eyes from across the table even though she tried to hide it and pretend like she didn’t want me to answer a certain way. The problem with having a fairy-tale relationship story was how much other people were invested in keeping the fairy tale alive. It wasn’t just our story—it was everyone’s.
I shifted my gaze away from hers. “Things are getting better. Getting back to work has been a huge help. I’m interviewing one of the girls from my soccer-coach story next week, so I’m excited about that.” I tried to sound convincing as I prattled on. “Scott and I are connecting again. All that weirdness between us is gone.”
“See? I told you everything would be fine. You guys always work things out.” Her smile lit up her face. “You always do. That’s what happens when it’s meant to be.”
It was my first cleansing session with Ray, and I was more nervous than when I met him. He had refused to do a cleansing session with me while I was working on my article—said we’d be lacking the level of honesty that was necessary for it to be successful—but we didn’t have to worry about that anymore. I wouldn’t be doing any other articles on them. Not after the last angry letter we’d gotten in opposition to my defense of their movement. Leo wouldn’t even consider it. We’d expected some opposition to covering such a controversial story, but never the magnitude we’d received. Whoever it was had been sending Ray hate mail too.
Our talks had changed since they were no longer on the record, and he was able to speak freely with me. But neither he nor anyone else talked about what happened in the cleansings. So much of the internal work at Love International was that way—deeply personal and private. Everyone shared the insights and lessons they’d taken away from their cleansing sessions, but there was never any mention of the process. Did it work the same way with everyone, or did he change his approach depending on the individual? What was his plan for me? People gushed about their spiritual breakthroughs afterward, but not all of them ended on a positive note. Some people came out of their cleansing emotionally wrecked. I hoped I wasn’t the latter.
Cleansings were held in one of the detox rooms, which was less comfortable than his office, but I was pretty sure that was the point. I’d lost track of how many times we’d met together. It didn’t matter, though, because my nerves still jumped every time. I was glad I wasn’t alone. He had that effect on everyone. It wasn’t just because of the way his eyes pierced into your soul. It was more about the way he cut straight to your core issues, stripping you raw within minutes.
“Hi, Kate.” He rose from his position on the floor when I walked into the room. He hugged me before kneeling back on the floor. I sat across from him. I held back the urge to giggle as we sat cross-legged in front of each other, like we were back in elementary school about to have a shoe-tying race. “It’s okay. You can laugh. Release any feeling that comes up,” he said.
I blushed. “Sorry. I don’t think it’s funny. I j—”
He held up his hand. “Stop. Don’t go any further with that statement. We do not justify or rationalize any of our emotional expressions during a cleansing.” He looked at me sharply. He’d never been so serious.
“Got it.” I nodded.
“The point of this cleansing is for you to get in touch with all those things you’ve pushed down and ignored. Those things that have been filling your heart and soul with cancer.” The light in his eyes was gone, replaced with hawklike precision as he peered into my eyes. It took every ounce of willpower I had not to look away from his intense stare. “Why are you here?”
“I want to rid myself of my cancer,” I recited, like I’d heard others do so many times before at retreats and in meetings.
“Bullshit.” He shook his head in disgust. I’d never heard him swear. I pulled back, shifting away from him. “Why are you really here?” he asked. My mind drew a blank, his dramatic shift throwing me off. “Would you like me to help you?”
&n
bsp; “You know what? I don’t appreciate the way you’re speaking to me right now,” I said, straightening my back.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Would you prefer that I tiptoed around you?” he sneered.
“What’s wrong with you today?” I’d never seen him act this way. He’d been confrontational before, but never like this, and certainly not mean.
“Were you expecting this to be easy?” Challenge filled his eyes.
“No, but I didn’t think you’d act like this,” I said.
“All I want is for you to be honest.”
“I am being honest.”
He shook his head. “Please. We both know you’re lying.”
“What are you talking about? I love my life.” I scooted as far as I could until my back was pressed up against the door.
“Bullshit,” he said again.
“You know what?” Anger surged through me, bringing me to my feet. “I didn’t come here for this.” I turned around and reached for the knob.
“If you leave out that door right now, don’t plan on coming back.” His voice was steady, calm.
I whipped back around. “What happened to ‘You can come and go as you please’? I thought you weren’t anybody’s dictator?”
He remained seated. “Every individual who walks through these doors is unique.”
“And I’m the one that you chose to be a controlling jerk with?” I glared at him. “Thanks. Truly flattered.”
“Fear is ruling your heart right now. If you leave, you’re letting fear win, and we can’t have that here.” His face was set in stone.
“I’m not afraid,” I said, but I didn’t believe myself any more than he did.
“Are you sure you want to leave?” he asked. I hesitated with my hand on the door, and he jumped on my uncertainty. “You’re here because you’re bored with your life and want more. The things you used to love are stifling you to the point where you feel like you can’t breathe.” I slowly slid down the wall onto the floor, crossing my arms on my chest to protect myself from his truths. “You are tied to the life you created when you were a teenage girl to survive, but that life no longer serves you. Yet you can’t let go of it. Am I getting close?”
I stuck my chin out like a defiant toddler. “You don’t know me.”
He shook his head. “It’s you, Kate, that refuses to know yourself.”
Tears welled in my eyes. I brushed them away. I didn’t want to cry because then he’d know he was right. My skin itched with the threat of exposure.
“What happened to make you feel so indebted to this life?” he asked.
It wasn’t the life—it was the man. Images of how Scott had taken care of me after my parents died when I was seventeen passed through me in snippets—the hours he’d spent sitting with me at the hospital long after they’d been pronounced dead. He’d kept everyone away from me until I had been ready to leave. He’d been my emotional container for the fits of rage that I had unleashed for years as I had struggled to process how I’d been robbed of so much.
“He saved my life.” I swallowed the tears in my throat before remembering that he’d instructed me not to hold back my emotions. I let go, and suddenly I was crying in a way I hadn’t done since I was a kid. Ray didn’t move from his spot. He didn’t reach out to comfort me or say anything to make it better. The awkwardness of it all slowed my emotional outburst. “I don’t know who I am without him. I’ve always wondered who I might be on my own. But I feel like the world’s most terrible person for even having the thoughts.”
I’d never admitted that to anyone before. Not Christina. Certainly not Scott. I’d barely acknowledged it to myself. What else would he pull out of me that I’d never told anyone?
ELEVEN
ABBI
NOW
My eyes burned. I stared at the coffeepot, wishing I could grab a cup like everyone else, but Dad hated me drinking coffee. He still believed the old wives’ tale that it would stunt my growth. He didn’t care that all my friends drank coffee when we went to Starbucks during open period. Sometimes I sneaked it anyway, and I was never going to make it through this day without some caffeine, since Shiloh’s crying had kept me up most of the night.
My bedroom was next to theirs, and Mom had tried to soothe her all night, but nothing had worked. She hadn’t stopped crying for longer than a few minutes. I had wanted to help Mom, but I didn’t know anything about babies, and I didn’t want to do anything to make the crying worse or embarrass Mom. I had ended up just lying in my bed, wishing them to sleep and scrolling through the older threads on the Vanished forums for anything I might have missed. Hopefully, Dad and Meredith had slept through the crying. They had been so exhausted last night Meredith almost fell asleep eating her pizza, barely making it through one slice. Mom had made up for Meredith’s lack of appetite. I’d never seen someone eat the way she did. She had wolfed down an entire large pizza herself. She’d just kept shoveling it into her mouth, piece after piece, until suddenly it was the last piece and she’d looked mortified.
She was still upstairs getting ready. Meredith had tried to give her something of hers to wear again and Mom refused. I wished Meredith would stop offering her clothes, since she obviously didn’t want them. Would I want to wear my husband’s new wife’s clothes? Probably not. Dad was going to drag a few of her boxes of old clothes out of the garage today, so at least she’d have something until we could go shopping.
Dean and his team of investigators would be here in an hour to interview her. The ones who stayed last night were in the dining room drinking their coffee. Their hushed whispers permeated the rooms downstairs. I didn’t know how any of them planned to get anything out of Mom when she mostly said one-word phrases—yes, no, please, thank you. I’d barely heard her string more than two sentences together. Not sleeping wasn’t going to help either. She’d fallen asleep at some point, though, because I had peeked in on them when I had woken up at six to use the bathroom. Everything on the bed had been untouched, and they had been curled up on the cold wooden floor, even though there was a rug in the center of the room. She hadn’t even taken a pillow to sleep on. I had shut the door quietly and tiptoed back to bed, but I hadn’t been able to fall back to sleep again because I couldn’t get the image of them sleeping on the floor out of my head. Why would she sleep on the floor like that?
Dad’s alarm had gone off at seven thirty, and Meredith had been running around the house all morning. She was determined to have breakfast on the table for everyone by nine, but I had a feeling people weren’t going to eat much. But that was how she was. Any time we had company, no matter what the occasion or how long they were staying, she made sure to feed them. She was at the grocery store picking up a few things for the omelets.
“Dad, can I have a cup of coffee?” I asked, leaning against the counter.
He looked up from his phone. He’d been lost in his screen since I sat down, barely glancing up when Meredith left.
“You know—” He stopped himself. “Sure. Go ahead.”
“What?” I asked in disbelief. The joke was always that I asked, he said no, and I begged until he promised me something sweet in return.
He shrugged before going back to his phone. I stood slowly and walked over to the refrigerator. Part of me wanted to cry. It wasn’t about the coffee. I didn’t care about the coffee. It wasn’t even like it was the first cup of coffee I’d had in this house. He’d quit playing our game. Mom was back, and everything was going to change, even the parts of our life that I loved.
Some of my favorite traditions were when we celebrated Mom. Her birthday was one of my favorite days of the year, right behind Christmas. It was a vacation day whether we had obligations or not, and we spent most of the year planning it. One year we had gone on a hot-air-balloon ride and released balloons carrying messages we’d written to her after we were in the sky. Dad kept saying we were already halfway to heaven, so he was sure they’d make it there. Another year we went to Disneyland. They weren’t alway
s such huge deals. Sometimes they were smaller. Once we stayed in bed in our pajamas all day watching videos of her and eating chocolate ice cream. We picked out gifts for her at Christmas and included her name on our New Year’s Eve lists. So much of our world had revolved around recognizing and remembering her. What would we do when she was here?
“Abbi, are you drinking coffee?” Meredith asked as she breezed into the kitchen. She didn’t give me time to answer. “Everything in the living room is picked up. I just want to go through the bathroom down here one more time.” She turned to Dad. “And can you make sure to empty all the trash cans?”
“Do you really think they’re going to care about the trash cans being dirty?” he asked.
They’d been having the same argument since she’d moved in. Nothing ever changed. Dad knew Meredith was going to want the trash cans emptied in all the rooms before company arrived. She asked every time, and each time, without fail, he made some comment about it. Why not just empty the trash cans and avoid the drama? But before they got into their same old argument, there was a knock at the front door. We all froze even though we were expecting them.
Dad shot us an encouraging glance before getting up and heading to the door. We followed behind him as he opened it. Dean stood on the porch with a woman who I assumed must be the FBI expert Dad had told me about last night. She was almost as big as he was. Three men stood behind them holding equipment and various-size bags. Normally Dean would’ve rushed into the house and scooped me into a big hug, but he stayed in his spot, waiting for Dad to lead the way.
“Come in,” Dad said, ushering them inside. “How are you?”
“I’m good, thank you,” Dean said, shaking his hand.
“Hi, Uncle Dean,” I said. All of this was so weird.
He tousled my hair. “Hey, you. Once all this is done, I’m taking you out for ice cream, okay?”
I smiled. Our relationship had started because of ice cream. Dad had to juggle being a grieving husband, father, and suspect all at the same time, so he had always been dragging me with him to important meetings and interviews. Not because there hadn’t been people who’d volunteered to babysit me. There had been plenty of people who would’ve helped, but one of the downfalls of a recently disappeared parent was that you didn’t let the other one out of your sight. And Dad had never pushed me to do anything I wasn’t ready for. He had let me stay with him because he had understood how much it meant to me, but it had definitely made his life harder than it already was.
When She Returned Page 7