Missing Pieces (2 page)

Jo Lynn, she adds wearily, was another story.

“I wish on you a daughter just like you,” I still hear my mother shouting at Jo Lynn in exasperation, something I’ve had to bite my tongue to keep from saying myself on more than one occasion. But whether out of spite or fear, my sister remained childless through three failed marriages, and I ended up with the daughter just like Jo Lynn. It doesn’t seem fair. I was the one who played by the rules. If I was rebellious at all, I did so within all the prescribed parameters. I stayed in school, got my degree, didn’t smoke, drink, or do drugs, and married the only man with whom I’d ever had sex. By contrast, Jo Lynn stayed in college only long enough to tune in, turn on, drop out, and was sexually active early and often. I became a family therapist; she became a family therapist’s worst nightmare.

Why am I going into all this? Is this really the sort of thing the police will feel is relevant? I don’t know. In truth, I don’t know much of anything anymore. My whole life feels like one of those giant jigsaw puzzles, the kind that takes forever to put together, and then just when you’re coming to the end, right at the point where you finally think you’ve got it, you discover that all the key pieces are missing.

With age comes wisdom, I distinctly remember hearing in my youth. I don’t think so. With age comes wrinkles, I’m sure they meant. And bladder problems, and arthritis, and hot flashes, and memory loss. I’m not handling aging very well, which surprises me, because I always thought I’d be one of those women who grew old gracefully. But it’s hard to be graceful when you’re running to the bathroom every ten minutes or breaking into a sweat just after you’ve finished applying your makeup.

Everyone is younger than me. My dentist, my doctor, my daughters’ teachers, my neighbors, the parents of my children’s friends, my clients, even the police who came to
question me—they’re all younger than I am. It’s funny because I always assume that I’m younger than everyone else, and then I find out that not only am I older, I’m
years
older. And I’m the only one who’s surprised.

Actually I surprise myself sometimes. I’ll be all dressed up, feeling good, thinking I look great, and then I catch my reflection unexpectedly in a store window or a pane of glass, and I think: Who is that? Who is that middle-aged woman? It can’t be me. I don’t have those bags under my eyes; those aren’t my legs; surely that’s not my rear end. It’s genuinely frightening when your self-image no longer corresponds to the image you see in the mirror. It’s even scarier when you realize that other people barely see you at all, that you’ve become invisible.

Maybe that explains what happened with Robert.

How else can I explain it?

I’m doing it again, digressing, going off on one of my famous tangents. Larry says I do it all the time. I explain that I’m working my way up to the main point; he claims I’m trying to avoid it. He’s probably right. At least, in this instance.

I’m about to have a hot flash. I know because I just got that horrible feeling of anxiety that always precedes it, as though someone has emptied a glass of ice water down my throat. It fills my chest, lies like a puddle around my heart. Ice followed by fire. I’m not sure which is worse.

At first I thought these feelings of anxiety were related to the chaos that was going on around me. I blamed my mother, my sister, Robert, the trial. Anything. But gradually I realized that these feelings of dread were immediately followed by tidal waves of heat that surged upward from the pit of my stomach toward my head, leaving me perspiring and breathless, as if I were in danger of imploding. I marvel at the strength of these interludes, at how
powerless I am to stop them, at how little control I have over my own life.

My body has betrayed me; it follows an invisible timetable all its own. I wear reading glasses now; my skin is losing some of its elasticity, rippling like cheap fabric; there are thin lines around my neck, like the age lines of a tree. Things grow inside me, uninvited.

I was at the doctor’s recently for a checkup. During the course of a routine pelvic examination, Dr. Wong, who is tiny and delicate and looks all of eighteen, discovered several cervical polyps which she said had to be removed. “How did they get there?” I asked. She shrugged. “These things happen as we get older.” She gave me the choice: she could schedule an operation in several weeks under a general anesthetic or she could snip them out right there and then in her office, no anesthetic at all. “What do you recommend?” I asked, not thrilled with either alternative. “How high is your pain tolerance?” she answered.

I opted to have the polyps out in her office. As it turned out, it was a relatively simple procedure, taking less than ten minutes, during which time the doctor explained clearly, and in more detail than I really needed, everything she was doing. “Now you might feel as if you have to go to the bathroom,” I remember her saying seconds before my stomach began twisting into a series of tight little knots.

When she was finished, Dr. Wong held up a small glass jar for my inspection. Inside were two little round red balls, the size of large cranberries. “See,” she said, almost proudly, “these are your polyps.”

Twins, I thought giddily, then burst into tears.

I was supposed to call her office two weeks later to find out if there was a problem. I can’t remember now whether I did or not. It was in the middle of all the craziness. It’s quite possible I forgot.

Something is happening across the street. I can see it from the window. I’m sitting at my desk in the den, a small, book-lined room at the front of the house off the center foyer. Do the police want a description of the house? I’ll include one, although surely they know it. They’ve been here enough times; they’ve taken enough photographs. But for the record, the house is a relatively large bungalow with three bedrooms and a den. The girls’ bedrooms are to the right of the front door, the master bedroom to the left at the back. In between are the living and dining rooms, four bathrooms, and a large open space consisting of the kitchen, the breakfast nook, and the family room, whose back wall is a series of paneled glass windows and sliding glass doors overlooking the kidney-shaped backyard pool. The ceilings are high and dotted with overhead fans, like the one turning softly above my head right now, the floors large blocks of ceramic tile, interrupted by plush area rugs. Only the bedrooms and den have wall-to-wall broadloom. The predominant color is beige, with accents in brown, black, and teal. Larry built the house; I decorated it. It was supposed to be our sanctuary.

I think I know what’s going on across the street. It’s happened before. Several large boys bullying a couple of smaller boys to come over, to knock on my door. The big boys are laughing, taunting the smaller ones, pushing them and calling them cowards, daring them to cross the street. Just ring the bell and ask her, I can hear them say, although no sound reaches my ears beyond their cruel laughter. Go ring her bell, then we’ll leave you alone. The two younger boys—I think I recognize one of them as six-year-old Ian McMullen, who lives at the end of the street—straighten their shoulders and stare at the house. Another push and they’re off the sidewalk and on the road,
creeping up the front walk, their small fingers already stretching toward the buzzer.

And then suddenly they’re gone, running madly down the street, as if being chased, although the older boys have turned and run off in the opposite direction. Maybe they saw me watching them; maybe someone is calling them; maybe good sense got the better of them. Who knows? Whatever it was that made them turn and flee, I’m grateful, although I’m already half out of my chair.

The first time it happened was just after the story hit the front pages. Most people were very respectful, but you always get a few who aren’t satisfied with what they read, who want to know more, who feel they’re entitled. The police did a good job of keeping most of them at bay, but occasionally young boys such as these made their way to my front door.

“What can I do for you?” I hear myself say, recalling their presence, feeling it still.

“Is this where it happened?” they ask, giggling nervously.

“Where what happened?”

“You know.” Pause, anxious glances, trying to peer around my stubborn bulk. “Can we see the blood?”

It’s around this time that I shut the door on their curious faces, although I admit the perverse temptation to usher them graciously inside, direct them toward the back of the house, like a tour guide, my voice a melodic whisper, to point out the area on the family-room floor that was once covered in blood, and even now shows faint traces of blush, despite several professional cleanings. Probably I’ll have to have those tiles replaced. It won’t be easy. The company that manufactured them went bankrupt several years ago.

So, how did all this happen? When did my once steady and comfortable life begin careening out of control, like a
car without brakes on a high mountain road, gaining speed and momentum until it crashes into the abyss and bursts into flames? At what precise moment did Humpty-Dumpty fall off the wall and shatter into thousands of tiny pieces, impossible to repair or replace?

Of course, no such moment exists. When one part of your life is coming apart at the seams, the rest of your life doesn’t just sit back and patiently wait its turn to continue. It doesn’t give you time to cope, or space to adjust and refocus. It just keeps piling one confusing event on top of the next, like a traffic cop rushing to make his quota of tickets.

Am I being overly dramatic? Maybe. Although I think I’m entitled. I, who have always been the steady one, the practical one, the one with more common sense than imagination, or so Jo Lynn once stated, am entitled to my few moments of melodrama.

Do I start at the very beginning, announce myself like a label stuck to a lapel: Hello, my name is Kate Sinclair? Do I say that I was born forty-seven years ago in Pittsburgh on an uncharacteristically warm day in April, that I’m five feet six and a half inches tall and one hundred and twenty-five pounds, that my hair is light brown and my eyes a shade darker, that I have small breasts and good legs and a slightly lopsided smile? That Larry affectionately calls me funny face, that Robert said I was beautiful?

It would be much easier to start at the end, to recite facts already known, give name to the dead, wipe away the blood once and for all, instead of trying to search for motivations, for explanations, for answers that might never be found.

But the police don’t want that. They already know the basic facts. They’ve seen the end results. What they want are details, and I’ve agreed, as best I can, to provide them. I could start with Amy Lokash’s disappearance, or the first
time her mother came to my office. I could begin with my mother’s fears she was being followed, or with the day Sara’s teacher called to voice her growing concerns about my daughter’s behavior. I could talk about that first phone call from Robert, or Larry’s sudden trip to South Carolina. But I guess if I have to choose one moment over all the others, it would have to be that Saturday morning last October when Jo Lynn and I were sitting at the kitchen table, relaxing and enjoying our third cup of coffee, and my sister put down the morning paper and calmly announced that she was going to marry a man who was on trial for the murder of thirteen women.

Yes, I think I’ll start there.

I
remember it was sunny, one of those perfect Florida days when the sky is so blue it seems artificial, the temperature balancing on the comfortable side of eighty, with only a warm whisper of a breeze. I swallowed the balance of coffee in my cup, inhaling it as lovingly as a chain-smoker with her last cigarette, and stared out the back window at the large coconut palm that curved from behind the pool toward the terra-cotta tile roof of the house. It was the kind of picture you see on postcards that trill, “Having a wonderful time, wish you were here.” The sky, the grass, even the bark of the trees, were so vivid they seemed to vibrate. Diamondlike sparkles of air reflected from their surfaces. “What a day,” I said out loud.

“Hmm,” Jo Lynn grunted from somewhere behind the morning paper.

“Look at it,” I persisted, not sure why I was bothering. Was I looking for confirmation or conversation? Did I need either? “Look at how blue that sky is.”

Jo Lynn’s eyes flashed briefly over the top corner of the local news section of the
Palm Beach Post.
“Wouldn’t you just love a sweater in that shade?” she asked, her voice a lazy Southern drawl.

Somehow this wasn’t quite the response I’d been hoping
for, although it was typical Jo Lynn, for whom nature was merely backdrop. I lapsed back into silence, debated whether to have another cup of coffee, decided against it. Three cups was more than enough, although I do love my morning coffee—my only real vice, I used to say.

I thought of Larry, out on the golf course since before 8
A.M.
with prospective clients. Larry was relatively new to golf. He’d played a bit in college, was actually quite good at it, he confided, but gave it up for lack of time and money. Now that he had substantially more of both, and clients and business acquaintances were always inviting him out for a round, he’d taken it up again, although he wasn’t finding it quite as relaxing as he remembered. The night before, he’d spent almost an hour practicing in front of the full-length bathroom mirror, trying to recapture the effortless swing of his youth. “Almost there,” he kept repeating, as I grew tired of waiting for him to come to bed, and allowed myself to drift off to sleep, vague stirrings of frustration teasing at my groin.

He’d already left by the time I woke up. I got out of bed, threw on a short pink cotton robe, ambled into the kitchen, made a large pot of coffee, and sat down with the newspaper that Larry had been thoughtful enough to bring inside before heading out. The girls were still asleep. Michelle had been out with her girlfriends till after midnight. I didn’t even hear Sara come home.

I was reading the movie reviews and enjoying my second cup of coffee when Jo Lynn showed up. She was in a lousy mood, she announced in lieu of hello, partly because she hadn’t slept very well, but mostly because she’d been stood up the night before. Apparently her date, a former football player turned sporting goods salesman, who she said looked like a weathered Brad Pitt, had begged off at the last minute, claiming a sore throat and achy limbs. So she’d gone to a bar and who should show up, looking
healthy as a horse? Well, you know the rest, she told me, pouring herself a cup of coffee, settling in.