Good as Gone (2 page)

By the time we knew Julie was gone, her fate was sealed.

The inevitability of it has spread like an infection or the smell of gasoline. To make myself know that Julie is dead, I tell myself she always was—before she was born, before I was born. Before Wordsworth was born. Passing the pines of Memorial Park, I picture her staring upward with sightless eyes under a blanket of reddish-gold needles. Driving by Crestview Apartments, I see her buried in the azalea bed. The strip mall with the SunRay Nail Salon and Spa yields visions of the dumpster behind the SunRay Nail Salon and Spa. That’s my visionary gleam.

I used to want the world for Julie. Now I just want something to bury.

My class—the last before summer break—passes in a blur. I could teach Wordsworth in my sleep, and although I’m not sleeping now, I am dreaming. I see the crystal blue of the pool, shining like a plastic gem, surrounded by a freshly sanded deck under the tall, spindly pines. The girls were so excited about the pool, and I remember asking Tom, the accountant, whether we could afford it. The Energy Corridor District, with its surplus of Starbucks and neighborhood country clubs, wasn’t really our style—especially not mine. But the girls loved the pool even more than they loved having their own rooms. They didn’t seem to notice that we were moving out of shabby university housing to a part of town with two-story houses and two-car garages and green lawns studded with signs supporting high-school football teams. There are several reasons why we did that, but the one you want to hear, of course, is that we thought it would be safer.

“Class dismissed. Don’t forget, your final papers are due in my box on the twenty-eighth, no later than five o’clock.” By the time I get to “Have a nice summer,” most of them are out of the door already.

As I walk down the hall to my office, I feel a light
brr
against my hip. It’s a text from Tom.

Can you pick up Jane? IAH 4:05, United 1093.

I put the phone down, turn to my computer, and look up the University of Washington academic calendar. Then I check the university directory and call up a University of Washington administrator I know from grad school. A brief conversation follows.

I text Tom back.
Should I get dinner too?

A few minutes later:
Nope.
And that’s apparently all Tom and I are going to say to each other about Jane coming home early from her freshman year of college.

It’s tricky picking Jane out of a crowd these days. You never know what color her hair is going to be. I stand close to baggage carousel 9 and wait until a tall girl with burgundy-black hair emerges from the crowd of passengers, a lock of faded-out green dangling in front of her eyes, having survived yet another dye job intact.

“Hi, Mom,” she says.

“Hi, Jane.” We hug, her heavy satchel thwacking my hip as she leans over, and then the empty baggage carousel utters a shuddering shriek and we both turn to look at it while I decide how best not to ask about her unexpected arrival.

“You changed your hair again,” I observe.

“Yep.”

Everything Jane says and does is a variation on the slammed door that first became her calling card in middle school, a couple of years after Julie was taken. In high school, Jane added loud music, hair dye, and random piercings to her repertoire, but the slammed door remained the centerpiece of the performance. Tom used to follow her dutifully up the stairs, where he weathered the sobs and yells I heard only in muffled form. I figured she needed her privacy.

“Did you have a good flight?”

“It was okay.”

It was long. I suspect Jane chose the University of Washington because of its distance from Houston. When she was a little girl she used to say she wanted to go to the university where I teach, but the pennants came down around the same time the door slamming began. She might have ended up in Alaska if she hadn’t insisted on going to a school that had quarters instead of semesters—every possible difference a crucial one. All typical teenage behavior, no doubt, but with Jane, it made a particular kind of perverse sense—as does the fact that, according to the registrar, she took incompletes in all her spring-quarter classes.

This after she’d stayed in Seattle through the entire school year. I didn’t think much about her not coming home for Thanksgiving; it’s commonly skipped by students on the quarter system, since the fall quarter starts so late. But when she explained to us over the phone in mid-December that she was just settling in, that one of her professors had invited her to a holiday dinner, that our family never really celebrated Christmas anyway, did we?, and that she felt like it would be good for her sense of independence to stay, I could practically hear Tom’s heart breaking over the extension. I covered for his silence by saying the sensible thing, the only possible thing, really: “We’ll miss you, of course, but we understand.”

Now it seems the whole holiday situation was yet another slammed door to which I’d failed to respond properly.

“So,” I say, starting again. “You still enjoying U-Dub?”

“Go Huskies,” she says with a limp fist-pump. “Yeah, Mom. Nothing’s really changed since last time we talked.” The bags start dropping onto the conveyor belt, and we both lean forward.

“Was that coat warm enough for January up there? Winter stuff is on clearance, we could go shopping.”

She picks self-consciously at the army jacket she’s worn since she was sixteen. “This is fine. I told you guys, it doesn’t get that cold.”

“Classes going okay?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Why?”

“Just making small talk.”

“Well, they’re going really well,” she says. “Actually, they’re going so well, my professors are letting me turn in papers in lieu of exams.”

In lieu of exams! That sounds official. I wonder how she got them to agree to give her incompletes rather than failing her. My students usually just say “Family emergency” and hope I don’t press them for details.

Carefully, I ask, “Is that something they do a lot at U-Dub?”

“Mom,” she says. “Just say ‘University of Washington.’”

I give her shoulder a quick squeeze. “We’re just glad you’re home.” I lower my arm and we stand there, side by side, staring at the shiny metal chute, until half the passengers on the flight have claimed their bags and wheeled them off, their absence making the juddering of the conveyor belt sound even louder. Finally, Jane’s rolling suitcase somersaults down the chute and thunks onto the belt in front of us. It was a graduation present—apple green and already dingy from its maiden voyage to Seattle and back, it almost matches her dyed-green streak. She grabs the suitcase before I can make a move but lets me take her satchel when she stops to peel off her army jacket in the blast of humid air that hits us outside the automatic sliding doors.

“I see we’re in swamp mode already.”

“No place like home,” I reply and am rewarded with a half smile of acknowledgment.

The ride home is rocky, though. I’m shooting blanks on college life despite spending most of my time in a university.

“How are the dorms?”

“Pretty good.”

“You still like your roommate?”

“She’s fine. We stay out of each other’s way.”

“Are you going to room with her next year?”

“Probably not.”

Finally I resort to a subject I’m sure will get results, although it pains me. “So, tell me about this English professor you ate Christmas dinner with.”

“Her name is Caitlyn, and actually she’s a professor of semiotics.”

Caitlyn.
“I didn’t know they still taught semiotics in English departments.”

“The course is called Intersectionalities. It’s an English class, but it’s cross-listed with linguistics, gender studies, and anthro. There are supposed to be all these prerequisites, but I went to Caitlyn’s office hours on the first day and convinced her to let me in.”

I can’t help but feel a glow of pride. A true professor’s kid, Jane knows all the angles. Moreover, this is the longest string of consecutive words she’s spoken to me without Tom around for ages. “Tell me more about it, what did you read?”

“I think I’d rather wait and talk about it with Dad too,” she says.

“Of course,” I say.

“I don’t want to say it all twice.”

“Sure, sweetie.”

I turn on NPR, and the measured, comforting sound of rush-hour news commentary fills the car as we inch past a firing range and a gym where an Olympian gymnastics coach is probably even now yelling at ponytailed girls in formation. Jane stares out her window. I assume she is wondering why Tom didn’t come to pick her up instead of me. I’m wondering too.

A few minutes later we both find out. Pulling into the driveway, the sky just starting to glow with dusk, I spot Tom through the kitchen window, making dinner. As I open the door and walk in, I smell Jane’s favorite pasta dish: fettuccine Alfredo tossed with breaded shrimp and grilled asparagus, a ridiculously decadent recipe Tom got off the Food Network and makes only on special occasions. An expiatory salad of fresh greens is in a bowl next to the cutting board, ready to join the bright Fiestaware on the dining-room table.

“Janie!” Tom opens his arms and steps forward, and Jane throws her arms around him, squeezing her eyes shut against his chest. I slip off to the bathroom, then to the bedroom to change out of my teaching outfit into more comfortable jeans, loitering for a few minutes to put away some laundry that’s been sitting, folded, in a basket at the foot of the bed. When I return, they are talking animatedly, Tom’s back to me as he chops heirloom tomatoes for the salad, Jane resting the tips of her fingers on the butcher block as if playing a piano.

“Dad, you would not believe the names people were throwing around in this class,” she says. “Derrida, stuff like that. Everyone was so much smarter than me.”

“Hey, she let you in, and she’s the MacArthur Genius lady.”

“Every time I opened my mouth I sounded like an idiot.”

“At least you opened your mouth,” he says, resting the knife to the side of the cutting board for a moment while he looks her in the eye. “I bet there were some people who were too scared to talk.”

Jane’s grateful smile, just visible over Tom’s shoulder, curdles me like milk. As if he can sense it, Tom turns around and sees me standing there. He throws a handful of chopped tomatoes onto the pile of greens and picks up the salad bowl.

“Everything’s ready!” he says. “Grab the pasta, Jane. Let’s sit down and eat our first family dinner in God knows how long.”

And that, believe it or not, is when the doorbell rings.

The first thing I see is her pale hair, all lit up in the rosy, polluted glow of the Houston sunset.

Then her face—ashen skin stretched thin over wide cheekbones flushed red across the top so that the dark circles stand out under her sunken eyes. The face looks both young and old. She wears worn-out jeans with holes at the knees, a T-shirt. She opens her mouth to speak, and I see that her feet are bare.

There’s something familiar about her, but it’s like my entire body has become fused with my surroundings, my brain rewired to resemble blind hands fumbling, the sensory data bumping uselessly around in search of something to latch onto:
Hair. Eyes. Young. Bare.

Her eyes widen, and the color drains from her face.

My hands stretch out in front of me, palms out, fingers spread wide, ready to shield me from the nuclear sunset or as if I’m about to fall down, but it’s the girl on the porch who falls, her knees buckling so that she folds up neatly as she collapses onto the mat, blond hair catching lightly in the azalea bushes on her way down. I open my mouth and I think I must be yelling for Tom, although I can’t hear it because my brain is still blinded by the sunset glancing off her face. He comes running up behind me, stops, and then thunders through the doorway. When I look again, the girl has all but vanished into his arms, the loops and tangles of her hair crushed between his fingers as he hugs her to his chest, rocking back and forth. “Julie, Julie, Julie,” he is sobbing, like the chorus of the nightmares that I now know have never stopped but have been unreeling every night for eight years, and perhaps all day long as well, in a continuous stream I have simply chosen to deny.

The sight of Jane standing stock-still in the hallway flips the light switch back on in my head. “Call 911,” I manage to say. “Tell them we need an ambulance.” To Tom, who is making strange, animal sounds of grief I have also heard in my dreams, I say, “Bring her in.”

And just like that, the worst unhappens. Julie is home.

The first twenty-four hours after Julie’s reappearance are oddly similar to the first twenty-four hours after her disappearance, a mirror symmetry that lends extra significance to every detail. There’s the humidity of the long, hot summer’s beginning, the crape myrtles that were already dropping their flowers when she was taken in early fall just now starting to put out blossoms like crumpled scraps of tissue paper. There are the sirens blaring their way through the neighborhood up to our house, just like last time, but bringing EMS rather than the police and at sunset rather than sunrise, so the neighbors who open their front doors to see what’s happening are wearing work clothes rather than bathrobes, holding oven mitts rather than newspapers. Everything is backward, like a photo negative of tragedy.

Only one of us can ride in the ambulance with Julie, and Tom immediately steps forward, so Jane and I climb into the SUV and follow behind. When we pull up to the ED, they are unloading her gurney, now connected to a rolling IV, and she is wheeled inside and installed in a curtained-off room with that excruciating combination of slowness and urgency native to emergency departments.

The next thirty minutes pass like hours under the fluorescent lights. Julie wakes, mumbles, sleeps again. Tom sits by the bedside, holding Julie’s hand and murmuring something unintelligible; I pace; Jane leans; nurses come in at odd intervals, never telling us anything but instead asking for details about insurance or Julie’s medical history, questions that seem so useless and redundant that I become convinced some of these people just want to see the famous Whitaker girl in the flesh. One nurse comes in to draw blood, and Julie starts awake at the cold wet cotton swab on her inner forearm, keeps her eyes open just long enough to nod vaguely at the nurse’s bright questions, then fades as soon as the needle is in. The curtain that separates us from the hall flutters as people rush by and does nothing to block out the cacophony of squeaking wheels, indecipherable PA announcements, and hallway conferences punctuated with loud sighs and occasional laughter.