No Time for Goodbye (9 page)

“I know what his name is,” Grace said. “And your dad was Clayton, and your mother was Patricia.” She rattled off the names like it was a classroom exercise.

“Grace!” Cynthia snapped.

I felt my heart begin to pound. This could only get worse.

“I’m going to talk to him,” she said.

Bingo.

“You can’t,” I said. “Look, it doesn’t make any sense that it’s Todd. For Christ’s sake, if your brother was just out and about, going to the mall, eating Chinese food in public, you think he wouldn’t have gotten in touch with you? And he’d have spotted you, too. You were practically Inspector Clouseau there, wandering around him as obvious as all hell. It’s just some guy, he’s got some passing resemblance to your brother. You go over to him, start talking to him like he’s Todd, he’s going to freak—”

“He’s leaving,” Cynthia said, a hint of panic in her voice.

I whirled around. The man was on his feet, wiping his mouth one last time with a paper napkin, crumpling it in his hand and dropping it onto the paper plate. He left the tray sitting there, didn’t take it over to the wastebasket, and started walking in the direction of the washrooms.

“Who’s Inspector Cloozoo?” Grace asked.

“You can’t follow him into the can,” I cautioned Cynthia.

She sat there, frozen, watching the man as he wandered down the hall that led to the men’s and ladies’ rooms. He’d have to come back, and she could wait.

“Are you going into the men’s room?” Grace asked her mother.

“Eat your ice cream,” Cynthia said.

The woman in the blue coat at the table next to us was picking at her salad, trying to pretend she wasn’t listening to us.

I felt I only had a few seconds to talk Cynthia out of doing something we’d all regret. “Remember what you said to me, when I first met you, that you were always seeing people you thought might be your family?”

“He’s got to show up again soon. Unless there’s another way out. Is there another way out back there?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “It’s perfectly normal to feel this way. You’ve spent your whole life looking. I remember, years ago, I was watching Larry King, and they had that guy on, the one whose son was killed by O. J., Goldman I think it was, and he told Larry that he’d be out driving, and he’d see someone driving a car like his son used to drive, and he’d chase the car, check the driver, just to be sure it wasn’t his son, even though he knew he was dead, knew it didn’t make any sense—”

“You don’t know that Todd is dead,” Cynthia said.

“I know. I didn’t mean it to come out that way. All I’m saying is—”

“There he is. He’s heading for the escalator.” She was on her feet and moving.

“For fuck’s sake,” I said.

“Daddy!” Grace said.

I turned to her. “You stay right here and do not move, you understand?” She nodded, a spoonful of ice cream stopped frozen en route to her mouth. The woman at the next table glanced over again and I caught her eye. “Excuse me,” I said, “but would you mind keeping an eye on my daughter, just for a moment?”

She stared at me, unsure what to say.

“Just a couple of minutes,” I said, trying to reassure her, then got up, not giving her a chance to say no.

I went after Cynthia. I managed to spot the head of the man she was after disappearing, descending the escalator. The food court was so crowded it had slowed Cynthia down, and there were half a dozen people between her, as she got onto the top step of the escalator, and the man, and another half dozen between Cynthia and me.

When the man got off at the bottom, he started walking briskly in the direction of the exit. Cynthia was straining to get around a couple ahead of her, but they were balancing a stroller on the precarious steps, and she couldn’t get past them.

When she hit the bottom, she broke into a run after the man, who was nearly to the doors.

“Todd!” she shouted.

The man was oblivious. He shoved open the first door, let it swing shut behind him, threw open the second, proceeded on to the parking lot. I’d nearly caught up to Cynthia as she went through the first door.

“Cynthia!” I said.

But she was giving me no more attention than the man was giving her. Once she was out the door, she called “Todd!” again to no effect, then caught up to the man, grabbing him by the elbow.

He turned around, startled by this out-of-breath, wild-eyed woman.

“Yes?” he said.

“Excuse me,” Cynthia said, taking a second to catch her breath. “But I think I know you.”

I was at her side now, and the man looked at me, as if to ask, “What the hell’s going on?”

“I don’t think so,” the man said slowly.

“You’re Todd,” Cynthia said.

“Todd?” He shook his head. “Lady, I’m sorry, but I don’t know—”

“I know who you are,” Cynthia said. “I can see my father in you. In your eyes.”

“I’m sorry,” I said to the man. “My wife thinks you look like her brother. She hasn’t seen him in a very long time.”

Cynthia turned angrily on me. “I’m not losing my mind,” she said. To the man, she said, “Okay, who are you then? Tell me who you are.”

“Lady, I don’t know what the fuck your problem is, but keep me out of it, okay?”

I tried to position myself between the two of them, and using as calm a voice as possible, said to the man, “This is a lot to ask, believe me, I understand, but maybe, if you could tell us who you are, it would help put my wife’s mind at ease.”

“This is crazy,” he said. “I don’t have to do that.”

“You see?” Cynthia said. “It’s you, but for some reason, you can’t admit it.”

I took Cynthia aside and said, “Give me a minute.” Then I turned back to the man and said, “My wife’s family went missing many years ago. She hasn’t seen her brother in years and you, evidently, bear a resemblance. I’ll understand if you say no, but if you were to show me some ID, a driver’s license, something like that, it would be a tremendous help to me, and it would put my wife’s mind at ease. It would settle this once and for all.”

He studied my face a moment. “She needs help, you know that,” he said.

I said nothing.

Finally, he sighed and shook his head and took his wallet from his back pocket, flipped it open, and withdrew a plastic card. “There,” he said, handing it to me.

It was a New York State license for Jeremy Sloan. An address up in Youngstown. It had his picture right on it.

“May I have this for one moment?” I asked. He nodded. I moved over to Cynthia and handed it to her. “Look at this.”

She took the license tentatively between her thumb and index finger, examined it through the start of tears. Her eyes went from the picture on the license to the man in person. Quietly, she handed the license back to him.

“I’m very sorry,” she said. “I’m, I’m so sorry.”

The man took the license back, slid it into his wallet, shook his head again disgustedly, muttered something under his breath although the only word I caught was “loony,” and headed off into the parking lot.

“Come on, Cyn,” I said. “Let’s get Grace.”

“Grace?” she said. “You left Grace?”

“She’s with someone,” I said. “It’s okay.”

But she was running back into the mall, across the main court, up the escalator. I was right behind her, and we threaded our way back through the maze of busy tables to where we’d had our lunch. There were the three trays. Our unfinished Styrofoam bowls of soup and sandwiches, Grace’s McDonald’s trash.

Grace was not there.

The woman in the blue coat was not there.

“Where the hell…”

“Oh my God,” Cynthia said. “You left her here?
You left her here alone?
”

“I’m telling you I left her with this woman, she was sitting right here.” What I wanted to tell her was that if she hadn’t run off on a wild-goose chase, I wouldn’t have been faced with the choice of leaving Grace on her own. “She must be around somewhere,” I said.

“Who was she?” Cynthia asked. “What did she look like?”

“I don’t know. I mean, she was an older woman. She had on a blue coat. She was just this woman sitting here.”

She had left her unfinished salad sitting on her tray, along with a paper cup half filled with Pepsi or Coke. It was like she’d left in a hurry.

“Mall security,” I said, trying to keep panic from taking over. “They can watch for a woman, blue coat, with a little girl—”

I was scanning the food court, looking for anyone official.

“Did you see our little girl?” Cynthia asked people at surrounding tables. They looked back, their faces blank, shrugging. “Eight years old? She was sitting right here?”

I felt overwhelmed with helplessness. I looked back toward the McDonald’s counter, thinking maybe the woman lured her away with the promise of another ice cream. But surely Grace was too smart for that. She was only eight, but she’d been through the whole street-proofing thing and—

Cynthia, standing in the middle of the crowded food court, started to shout our daughter’s name. “Grace!” she said. “Grace!”

And then, behind me, a voice.

“Hi, Dad.”

I whirled around. “Why’s Mom screaming?” Grace asked.

“Where the hell were you?” I asked. Cynthia had spotted us and was running over. “What happened to that woman?”

“Her cell rang, and she said she had to go,” Grace said matter-of-factly. “And then I had to go to the bathroom. I told you I had to go to the bathroom. Don’t everybody freak out.”

Cynthia grabbed Grace, held her close enough to smother her. If I’d been having qualms about keeping to myself the information about those secret payments to Tess, I was over them now. This family did not need any more chaos.

No one spoke the whole way home.

When we got there, the message light on the phone was flashing. It was one of the producers from
Deadline
. The three of us stood in the kitchen and listened to her say that someone had gotten in touch with them. Someone who claimed to know what might have happened to Cynthia’s parents and brother.

Cynthia phoned back immediately, waited while someone tracked down the producer, who’d slipped out for a coffee. Finally, the producer was on the line. “Who is it?” Cynthia asked, breathless. “Is it my brother?”

She was convinced, after all, that she had just seen him. It would have made sense.

No, the producer said. Not her brother. It was this woman, a clairvoyant or something. But very credible, as far as they could tell.

Cynthia hung up and said, “Some psychic says she knows what happened.”

“Cool!” said Grace.

Yeah, terrific, I thought. A psychic. Absolutely fucking terrific.

11

“I think we should at least
hear what she has to say,” Cynthia said.

It was that evening, and I was sitting at the kitchen table, marking papers, having a hard time concentrating. Cynthia had been able to think of nothing else since the producer’s call about the psychic. I, on the other hand, had been somewhat dismissive.

I didn’t have much to say through supper, but once Grace had gone up to her room do some homework of her own, and Cynthia was standing at the sink, her back to me, loading the dishwasher, she said, “We need to talk about this.”

“I don’t see much to talk about,” I said. “So a psychic phoned the show. That’s only a step up from the guy who thought your family disappeared into some rip in the fabric of time. Maybe this woman, maybe she’ll have a vision of them all riding atop a brontosaurus or something, or pedaling a Flintstone car.”

Cynthia took her hands out of the water, dried them, and turned around. “That’s hateful,” she said.

I looked up from a dreadfully written essay on Whitman. “What?”

“What you said. It was hateful. You’re being hateful.”

“I am not.”

“You’re still pissed with me. About today. About what happened at the mall.”

I didn’t say anything. There was some truth to what she said. We hadn’t said a word on the way home after scooping up Grace in the food court. There were things I wanted to say but felt I could not. That I had had enough. That it was time for Cynthia to move on. That she had to accept the fact that her parents were gone, her brother was gone, that nothing had changed because this was the twenty-fifth anniversary of their disappearance, or because some second-rate news show had shown some interest. That while she might have lost a family long ago, and that it was undeniably tragic, she had another family now, and that if she wasn’t willing to live in the moment for us, instead of in the past for a family that was in all likelihood gone, then—

But I said nothing. I couldn’t bring myself to say those things. But I found myself unable to offer comfort once we got home. I went into the living room, turned on the TV, flipped through the channels, never settling on anything for more than three minutes. Cynthia went into a tidying frenzy. Vacuuming, cleaning the bathroom, rearranging soup cans in the pantry. Anything to keep her too busy to have to talk to me. There wasn’t much good that came from a cold war like this, but at least the house ended up looking ready for a spread in
House & Garden.
This call from the psychic hotline, by way of
Deadline,
it just pissed me off even more.

But I said, “I’m not pissed,” riffling my finger through the stack of papers I still had to mark.

“I know you,” she said. “And I know when you’re angry. I’m sorry about what happened. I’m sorry for you, I’m sorry for Grace. I’m sorry for that man, for what I put him through. I embarrassed myself, I embarrassed all of us. What more do you want from me? What more can I say? Aren’t I already going to see Dr. Kinzler? What do you want me to do? Go every week instead of every other week? You want to put me on some sort of drug, something that will numb the pain, make me forget everything that’s ever happened to me? Would that make you happy?”

I threw down my red marking pen. “Jesus Christ,” I said.

“You’d be happier if I just left, wouldn’t you?” Cynthia asked.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“You can’t take any more of this, and you know something? Neither can I. I’ve had enough of it, too. You think I like the idea of meeting with a psychic? You think I don’t know how desperate it looks? How pitiful it makes me look, to go down there and have to listen to what she has to say? But what would you do? What if it was Grace?”

I looked at her. “Don’t even say that.”

“What if we lost her? What if she went missing someday? Suppose she’d been gone for months, for years? And there wasn’t a clue as to whatever happened to her.”

“I don’t want you talking like this,” I said.

“And then suppose you got a call, from some person who said she had a vision or something, that she’d seen Grace in a dream, that she knew where she was. Are you telling me you’d refuse to listen?”

I ground my teeth together and looked away.

“Is that what you would do? Because you didn’t want to look like a fool? Because you were afraid of looking embarrassed, of looking desperate? But what if, what if there was just one chance in a million that maybe this person knew something? What if she wasn’t even psychic, but just thought she was, but had actually seen something, some clue that she interpreted as a vision or something? And what if finding out what that was actually led to finding her?”

I put my head in my hands, my eyes landing on, “Mr. Whitman’s most famous writing was ‘Leaves of Grass,’ which some people think is probably about marijuana, but it was not, although it’s hard to believe that a guy who wrote something called ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ wasn’t stoned at least some of the time.”

The next day, Lauren Wells wasn’t wearing her traditional tracksuit. She was in a snug black T-shirt and a pair of designer jeans. Cynthia would have known, at twenty paces, what kind they were. We were watching
American Idol
one night, on our tiny, non-high-definition screen, when she pointed to a contestant screeching out her own version of Bette Midler’s “Wind Beneath My Wings,” and said, “She’s wearing Sevens.”

I didn’t know whether Lauren was wearing Sevens, but she looked nice, and the male students were craning their necks around, getting a peek at her from behind as she made her way up the hall.

I was coming the other way and she stopped me. “How you doing today?” she asked. “Better?”

I couldn’t recall admitting to feeling anything less than perfect the last time we’d spoken, but said, “Yeah, I’m good. You?”

“Okay,” she said. “Although I almost took yesterday off. This girl, who was in my senior class in high school, she was killed in a car accident up in Hartford a couple of days ago, and this other friend I keep in touch with on MSN, she told me, and I just felt so bad about it.”

“She was a close friend, was she?” I asked.

Lauren offered up half a shrug. “Well, she was in my year. It took me a couple of minutes to place her when my friend mentioned the name. We didn’t actually hang out or anything. She sat behind me in a couple of classes. But it’s still a shock, you know, when something like that happens to someone you know. It makes you think, makes you reassess, which is why I almost didn’t come in yesterday.”

“To reassess,” I said, not sure Lauren’s predicament warranted an outpouring of sympathy. “These things happen.” I feel as bad as the next guy when someone dies in a traffic accident, but Lauren was using up my time to discuss a tragedy involving someone that not only did I not know, but it was becoming evident she didn’t know all that well herself.

Kids shuffled past, dodged and weaved around us as we stood in the middle of the hall.

“So,” Lauren said, “what’s she really like?”

“Who?”

“Paula Malloy,” Lauren said. “From
Deadline
. Is she as nice as she seems on TV? Because she seems very nice.”

“She has wonderful teeth,” I said. I reached up, touched her arm, motioned her toward the wall of lockers so that we weren’t blocking traffic.

“Listen, um, you and Mr. Carruthers, you’re pretty tight, right?” she asked.

“Rolly and I? Yeah, we’ve known each other a long time.”

“This is kind of awkward to ask, but in the staff room the other day, he was there, and, well, I think he might have, what I’m saying is, did he mention seeing me put something in your mailbox and taking it out later?”

“Uh, well, he—”

“Because, okay, I did leave something there, but then I thought about it, and thought maybe it was a bad idea, so I took it back, but then I thought, oh great, Mr. Carruthers, Roland, if he saw me, he’d probably tell you anyway, and then I thought, shit, I might as well have left it there because at least then you’d know what it said instead of wondering what it said—”

“Lauren, don’t worry about it. It’s no big deal.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what the note said. I didn’t want any further complications to my life at the moment. And I was certain I didn’t want complications with Lauren Wells, even if the rest of my life was as smooth as glass.

“It was just a note to you and Cynthia, that maybe you’d like to come over sometime. I was thinking of having some friends over, and thought maybe it would be a nice break for the two of you, with all you’ve got to think about. But then I thought, maybe I was being a bit pushy, you know?”

“Well, that’s very thoughtful,” I said. “Maybe sometime.” Thinking to myself,
Not a chance
.

“Anyway,” Lauren said, her eyebrows bobbing up for a second. “You going to the Post Mall tonight? They’re having some of the stars from the latest
Survivor,
signing autographs.”

“I had no idea,” I said.

“I’m going,” she said.

“I’ll have to pass. Cynthia and I, we have to go into New Haven. It’s about the TV show. No big deal. Just a follow-up.”

I immediately regretted telling her. She brightened and said, “You’ll have to tell me all about it tomorrow.”

I just smiled, said I had to get to class, and once I was away from her gave my head an invisible shake.

We had dinner early to give us time to drive in to the Fox affiliate in New Haven, and had intended to get a sitter for Grace, but Cynthia said she had called around and been unable to get any of our regulars.

“I could stay home on my own,” Grace said as we were getting ready to go. Grace had
never
stayed home on her own, and we certainly weren’t going to make this her first night for going solo. Maybe in five or six years.

“No way, pal,” I said. “Bring your
Cosmos
book or some homework or something else to do while we’re there.”

“Can’t I hear what the lady says?” Grace said.

“No,” Cynthia said, before I could say the same thing.

Cynthia was edgy through dinner. I’d gotten over being pissed off, so it wasn’t my doing. I attributed it to anxiety over what the psychic would have to say. Having someone read your palm, tell your fortune, lay out some Tarot cards on a table before you, it could be entertaining, even when you didn’t believe it. That was under normal circumstances. This was going to be different.

“They want me to bring one of the shoeboxes,” Cynthia said.

“Which one?”

“Any. She says she just needs to hold it, maybe hold some of the things inside, to pick up more vibrations or whatever about the past.”

“Sure,” I said. “And they’re going to be filming all this, I suppose.”

Cynthia said, “I don’t see how we can tell them not to. It was their story that brought this woman forward. They’re going to want to follow it through.”

“Do we even know who she is?” I asked.

“Keisha,” Cynthia said. “Keisha Ceylon.”

“Really.”

“I looked her up on the Internet,” Cynthia said, then added, “She has a webpage.”

“I’ll just bet she does,” I said, and gave her a rueful smile.

“Be nice,” Cynthia said.

We were all in the car, backing out of the drive, when Cynthia said, “Hold it! I can’t believe it. I forgot the shoebox.”

She had taken from the closet one of her boxes of family mementos and left it on the kitchen table so she wouldn’t forget.

“I’ll go get it,” I said, putting the car in park.

But Cynthia already had her keys out of her purse, the car door open. “I’ll just be a second,” she said. I watched her go up the walk, unlock the house, and run inside, the keys left dangling from the lock. She seemed to be in there for a while, longer than it would take to grab the shoebox, but then she reappeared, shoebox tucked under her arm. She locked up, took the keys out of the door, got back in the car.

“What took so long?” I asked.

“I took an Advil,” she said. “My head’s pounding.”

At the station, we were met at reception by the ponytailed producer, who led us into a studio and to a talk-show set with a couch, a couple of chairs, some fake plants, some cheesy background latticework. Paula Malloy was there, and she greeted Cynthia like an old friend, oozing charm like a runny sore. Cynthia was reserved. Standing next to Paula was a black woman, late forties I guessed, dressed impeccably in a navy blue suit. I wondered if she was another producer, maybe a station manager.