The Vanishing Year (26 page)

• • •

Sunup, sundown, faint lights through the curtains, switch arms, a sponge bath. His hands roam my naked body but he can't keep it up, so he gives up. More foreign clothing: track suits and gym clothes, baggy and falling off, I'm wasting away. I'd rather just starve to death. That will come faster than three months, surely.

“I got you a present.”

A smaller syringe, a faint yellow liquid.

“It won't make you sick.” He smiles. This is my present. A drug that will kill me slower. I need to do something.

“Henry, wait. Hal.” I recall the name on the back of the picture.
Hal and TJ.
My voice is thick, molasses coated, stuck like tar on my tongue. I feel the edge of my dress, a summer garden dress, fit for bridal and baby showers, sweet-smelling perfume, and flutes of champagne.
Pizzelles
.
Where did that come from?
I remember my sister's picture, smiling in front of the library on her college graduation day. A flower dress.

“What?” He stands at the foot of the bed, his fingers tapping against my bare foot impatiently. I struggle to sit up. Between doses, I retain a shocking amount of lucidity. Like the drug doesn't so much seep from my system as much as it dumps out, the fog lifting like a heavy stage curtain.

“Hal,” I repeat.

“Don't call me that.” His eyes narrow, his wrist, holding the syringe, flicks.

“Why? Isn't it what you want?” I inch forward, suddenly sure-footed. Steady. I reach out, the handcuff pulling against my skin like a vise and I touch his arm. It's warm under my fingertips and I close my eyes, remembering when, not that long ago, I would have made this gesture sincerely. Loving. The flat bones in his wrist are unyielding. He meets my gaze and falters. “Let me try.”

I see him consider this. I see him think about me, in
her
clothes, reading Ruth Rendell and Sherlock Holmes in peep toe bedroom slippers and calling him
Hal
, picnics in the woods, patiently waiting in our towering apartment for him to arrive home, excited to see him, jumping up, wrapping my legs around his waist. A lifetime of missionary positions and dinners determined by what Henry ate for lunch, or what day of the week it is. Me, being content with this. Obedient. Compliant. He wavers. I see it in the way the syringe wobbles in his hand.

“Hal.” I say it again, but softer, coy, and I avert my gaze. Demure. How I would act if I were truly submissive, try to channel this
twin intuition
I've seen on
Oprah
. Even think, for a crazy second, if she can see me or hear me,
Give me a goddamn sign, Joanie. What would you do?
“What if I could do this, we could be happy, couldn't we? We were once, right? Remember, the day in the woods? The picnic, I wore that purple shirt? We made love against the tree?”

I take a chance here, remembering the force at which he pushed me against that tree, the bark gouging into the soft skin on my back. I think back through our marriage. All the moments of the highest intensity, sweetest romance: Paris, the rooftop. Washington Square Park. Were they all repeat performances? His attempt to revive Tara, relive his past? I'd venture yes, by the way his eyes cloud and narrow and he's studying me, torn between his logic and his base-level desires. His face softens, loses an edge.

He shakes his head, says nothing. I continue, “Paris? Our honeymoon?” And here, he breaks a bit, I can see it. His eyes widen and his jaw slacks. Henry is a rational man, but he
wants this.
Most people forgo logic when faced with something impossible that they viscerally want
.
“Let's go to Paris. Again. You and me. We'll relive it. Again. This time for real. Hal and TJ,” I choke out, lower my voice, dip my chin to my
chest, and whisper, “You can help me, Hal. Show me. How to act, I mean. All I've ever wanted is for you to take care of me.” I realize with a sickening jolt that it's actually true.

He doesn't speak, he simply backs out of the room, his hand clutched tight around the syringe, his knuckles and his face an identical shade of white. He doesn't agree. Yet. But he will.

At the very least, I'm here, still chained, but clearheaded. All I have to do is wait.

•  •  •

“Hal. Hal.” I shake him, gently. It's midnight, or later, I can't tell. “I have to go.” He mumbles something against the ­pillow.

He hasn't drugged me in a whole twenty-four hours. He avoids me, and this is either very good or very bad. He's considering my offer. He hasn't talked to me, but I chatter at him, rattling off every little thing I can think of that I saw in his boxes, on his corkboard. I talk about our wedding, my plate of scallops, the ornate centerpieces, how it was all
just for us
, which was the most romantic thing I'd ever seen. I pretend to swoon and I'm girly. Excited, even. We could reenact it. Renew our vows, in Paris! He pretends to ignore me.

It's brass tacks time, I blather about whatever comes to mind, about all the things I might have said, if I had been myself, but completely and totally under his thumb, meek and in love with him. It's not even hard, like my brain has blocked out the mental images that should come naturally.
Remember that day on the boat?
I vaguely remember a boat, I don't even know if Tara was on it. He has yet to speak. I'm becoming one person in his mind, I can feel it in the way he looks at me when I say certain things and he's not sure:
Tara or Zoe?
Or rather, even if he
knows
that we can't possibly be the same person, he sees the possibility exist for the first time. That I could pretend this, and stay. That maybe if I did that,
became his preferred reality, we could be happy the way he and Tara were happy.

I see him doubt his own sanity. But sometimes, I see the way he draws a breath, quick and sharp, and I know my wildly flung guesses are occasionally hitting bull's-eyes. I just have to throw out enough of them.

I nudge him with my unchained hand. “Hal. Please. I don't want to wet the bed again. Remember how mad you were?” I try not to remind him of
Zoe
, only
Tara.
I try to morph into her, but biology trumps psychology. I have to go to the bathroom.

He staggers up, grabs a key off the dresser, and without a word, unlocks me. He studies me as I use the toilet, and I even find myself wondering if Tara would do this, this way. I wash my hands. He clears his throat in the doorway, the bathroom low lit with the vanity bulb.

On the vanity sits a wide, flat candle. I slather the soap between my fingers and stare at it. It has three wicks. Five pounds? Maybe two? I don't have a plan, I just have the vague formation of a plan.

I dry my hands completely—I don't want them wet slick. I glance at Henry, who is studying the handcuff key. Waiting in his boxer shorts. He glances back toward the bedroom.

I pick the candle up, over my head, and bring it down, fast and hard, right on Henry's forehead. The edge hits the bridge of his nose and blood explodes everywhere.

I think he screams. I don't wait to see if he's conscious or knocked out.

I just run.

•  •  •

I'm out the front door and pounding across the lawn. The woods slap at my arms, my legs, my stomach. My stomach is bare. I'm in Henry's T-shirt and women's underpants that are falling down my hips. The branches scratch my face, but
I run. I'm faster than Henry, who runs his five miles a day. I'm weak and small now, winded, out of breath, but I'm still fast. I cut a zigzag, off the path, and run in what feels like circles and the rocks dig at my heels. I'm barefoot and when I look down, my legs and my feet are bleeding. My hands are covered in blood that might be mine or Henry's.

I can't tell if he's behind me. I can't hear anything over the huff of my breath. My lungs burn and my stomach aches, a cramp pulling at my hip. I step on a rock, and I feel it break the skin, right in the bottom of my foot at the arch. I don't scream, I don't stop.

In the distance there's a light. A soft beacon. A house. A tiny clapboard Cape Cod, a night-light shining in the window. I don't know if it's empty or if everyone is sleeping. I risk a look behind me, nothing but inky blackness. I stumble up the porch and fall, hitting my face on the step. Pain shoots up my nose and when I put my hand over it, it comes away bloody. More blood. God, so much blood.

I pound on the door and finally, I scream. “Help me! Please open the door! God, open the door!” I'm crying, the snot and the blood and the tears all mixing together in my mouth and it tastes like salt and metal. I pound harder, “Please answer the door, please please please please.”

The door flings open. Bare, red painted toenails, gray hair pulled back in a bun, her mouth open in an
O
, small and petite, her eyes wide with terror.

Penny. She pulls me inside, dead-bolts the door.

“Call the police,” I say, blubbering, still crying. She wipes my face, my hands with a towel and can't stop murmuring
Oh my God, Oh my God.
When she picks up the landline, it's dead. Her cell phone has no service. “We have to leave. He's coming after us.”

“Who?” she whispers, her face chalky.

“Henry. He's trying to kill me. Just please, we have to
go. Get your car.” I pull at her sleeve, her arm. Panicked and wild, checking out the front window. He won't announce his arrival. He'll be armed. I say all this.

“I can't leave, Zoe. Frank is upstairs.” Her face is horrified.

“Who's Frank?”

“He's my husband. He's quadriplegic. I can't leave him. Take my keys, go. Get help.” Her eyes dart from the front porch and back, to the stairs and back. I take the keys from her. “I have a gun,” she says.

Right as she says this, the front window cracks—spiderwebs, the glass implodes, and instinctively I duck down. I hear Penny scamper behind me, across the hardwood floor and into the kitchen. She leaves me here. Henry stands on the porch, framed by the hole in the glass.

“You think I'm stupid, Zoe.”

“Henry, you can't fix this now. You can't kill us all. Just put the gun down.” I'm calm now, I'm not crying. I can't do anything else. This will be how it all ends, with Henry and a gun and me in my underwear pretending to be my dead twin sister. This is how I will die.

The crack behind me barely registers before Henry falls, thrown backward, his toes pointed up almost comically before settling back down to the earth. I smell the gunpowder and the blood before I see anything.

Penny stands, framed in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen, holding a shotgun up on her shoulder.
A hunter. Everyone hunts.
When it falls to her side, her face looks blank, unlined and white with shock. She trembles. On the porch, Henry's leg twitches, just once, like one of his dying deer.

“Now. Zoe. Go get help, now.”

CHAPTER
27

A steady
beep beep
pulls me from sleep, heavy and dragging. I want to sleep, I'm so tired. The dark is comforting, a warm electric blanket that I want to burrow under, but instead, my eyes twitch under bright lights.

Someone stage-whispers, “She's waking up! Hurry!” There is a commotion, a rustling of arms and legs, and I blink. A face appears. A nurse. Round and pink, the kind of no-nonsense demeanor others might call plucky. She chatters on, telling me it's Tuesday, that I slept through Monday. I want to speak but there is an oxygen mask over my mouth. I tug at it, my arms are connected to tubes and wires, the
whoosh-hiss
and muffled bleating of hospital sounds. Machines for monitoring heartbeats and blood pressure. I wonder what the side effects of my drug use will be.

She moves the bed to sitting position and takes the mask off my face. She asks me questions I know the answers to—my name, my age—and she bubbles up,
Oh, you've passed!

I look around the room, which is empty, save for a chair at the foot of the bed. Cash is leaning forward, watching, waiting. When I meet his eyes, he smiles grandly and waves
his arms around like a game show host:
L
ook at all this!
I smile weakly back.

“Why are you here?” The question comes out unintentionally rude and I flush.

He shrugs. “I was frantic, I can't even tell you, Zoe. I knew something was wrong when you wouldn't take my calls, answer any of my texts. I called Yates. We'd been looking for you.”

“How long was I . . .” I don't know how to finish the sentence. Missing?

“Ah. Two weeks.”

Two weeks. It's unfathomable. I close my eyes,
white negligee, Henry's hands
. My eyes fly open and I grip the nurse's arm.

“I need a rape kit,” I rasp, urgently.

She leans forward, smelling like lavender. “It's been done, sweetheart. It was negative.”

Thank God. I fall back against the pillow.

“Henry is dead,” I whisper. It's not a question. I think of his leg, Penny with that gun.

“Yes,” Cash says softly, almost reverently.

“Penny saved me,” I murmur.

“Yes,” Cash agrees.

“I want to see her. Can I see her?” I struggle to sit up, pinned down by the needles and the tubes.
A little pinch.
My forehead sweats. I want to cry, I'm so relieved.

“I'll find her. You can't go anywhere. Yates is on her way.”

“God, two weeks.” It's all I can think of to say.

“We were going crazy, Zoe. Yates couldn't find you, Henry said you left him. It wasn't until I uncovered who Joanie was married to that Yates agreed to fill out a missing persons report. She was this close to applying for a search warrant. I thought he was going to kill you.”

“You knew? That Joanie was Tara?” I'm incredulous.

“We just put it all together yesterday. I had Yates con
vinced that something terrible had happened. Remember when you texted me? You asked me to look into who Joanie married?”

I nodded.

“That was the ticket. You knew it, didn't you? Deep down?”

I shake my head. “I don't know what I knew. I didn't think she was married to Henry. I couldn't shake the feeling that it was all connected. I had no idea how, though.”

I'm just so tired. All I want to do is sleep.

The doctor comes in and Cash gracefully waits in the hall. I'm pushed and prodded, latex gloves examine my mouth, my throat, my eyes. My vitals are monitored, oxygen, heart rate, blood pressure, muscle function.

The doctor pulls a chair up to the bed, tents his fingers under his chin, asks me if I have any questions. I don't. Then he talks. Through him, I learn all the things that Henry did to me. He'd kept me barely conscious for more than fifteen days on a mixture of Dilaudid and Benadryl, a narcotic injection. They'd found oxycodone and hydrocodone in my blood, as well as a drug called midazolam, a highly potent sedation drug primarily used for its amnesic properties. I wasn't likely to recover many memories from my two-week ordeal at Fishing Lake.

How did Henry get all these drugs? Don't hospitals
control
this kind of thing?
I am angry, demanding, slapping the hospital mattress with my palm.

The doctor is kind and apologetic. Men with money, it seems, can obtain almost anything they'd like. I, of all people, know how easy it can be to find narcotics on the street. I shudder to think of the drugs in my veins, cut with God knows what. I think of Henry's collection of prescription pain medication. Henry, who knew my history, my past.

My only external injuries are the stitches in my foot from
running through the woods, and my left wrist where Henry's handcuffs sheared the skin. I have matching scars now, thin lines on the top of each wrist, a physical reminder of what I've been through. Literal scratches on the surface, I suspect.

Yates follows closely on the heels of the doctor and takes her place by my bedside. She tells me about their investigation, a formality because of Henry's death. They are trying to trace the root of the drugs.

As much as Yates can figure, Henry solved the crime of Tara's murder when the police could not. He admitted as much to me. He tracked me down, planning to kill me out of revenge. But the idea that he could have Tara back, a stand-in who looked just like her, was too tantalizing. Who cared if we were different people? He could simply turn me into her. He'd nearly succeeded. I remember his relentless pursuit, his almost overwhelming attraction. I question myself, really. Only someone desperate for love wouldn't recognize the insincerity in it. He'd proposed after four months. He'd never felt love for me. Obsession? Yes. Hatred and blame? Yes. But love? Yates thinks a man like Henry is incapable of love. Sometimes I still dream of his hands. I wake up, disgusted with myself.

A few days later, Yates brings a criminal psychologist to the hospital who can explain Henry. He is a behemoth of a man, folded into one of the hospital chairs, dwarfing it like a piece of dollhouse furniture. He tugs on his beard as he talks, his thick fingers combing the edges of the wiry hair, and I watch, fascinated.

“It doesn't make sense to me that Henry would go through all the pains of trying to run me over. Break into his own house. For what? It makes no sense,” I protest, helpless and weak, sinking back onto the pile of pillows behind me.

“It makes perfect sense.” Dr. Reginold taps a pen against his notepad. “All your talk about finding Caroline, this
pushed him over the edge. Did you ever walk an unruly dog, Ms. Whittaker?”

“I'm sorry?”

“When you walk a dog that isn't trained, it wanders. The longer the leash, the more erratic it becomes, sniffing here, crossing in front of you, tripping you up, darting after cars. But when reined in, it'll walk straight and with purpose. It can still be unruly on a short leash, but it won't. It's psychological. A short leash sends a message.”

“I'm the dog, here?” I am numb, tired.

“Yes, unfortunately, you are. I'm sorry.” He coughs briefly, then recovers. “To him, you were spinning out of control. If he could rein you in, he could resume the role of protector. He knew your past, why not just simply use it? If you're scared for your life, you're not gallivanting the countryside looking for your biological mother. If you find her, there's a good chance his secret comes out. It was all distraction. And then, when you rebelled, there was rage. Do you understand why?”

I shake my head no.

“Sociopaths are coldly, almost blindly, logical. He'd never think twice about plowing down an intersection full of people if it accomplishes his goal. They care about one thing and one thing only: their objective. Their agenda. His goal was to replace his beloved Tara.”

“Was he capable of love?”

“Tara was his obsession. Someone well below his station in life, whom he could easily manipulate. Someone happy to be isolated. Or at least compliant.”

Tara was so compliant. You are defiant. Unlovable.
I wonder if my sister knew she was being manipulated and remember her poem to Henry. A subtle, coded thumbed-nose gesture, almost assertive in the knowledge that he wouldn't get it. Could it have been her first step in breaking free? Maybe.

“So, it was all an attempt to control me, keeping me under his thumb.”

Dr. Reginold nods. “There is endless psychological research on evil people. But in my experience, the average sociopath has no idea they are wrong. They're born this way, not made.”

As for Mick, Henry wasn't lying. There was another trial, one I hadn't known about, where Mick testified against Jared Pritchett and then later implicated men several rungs higher than Jared in both drug and sex trafficking, in exchange for a lesser sentence. He never went to prison. Jared was out in five years, thanks to overcrowding laws and some kind of a deal. The reason Jared tracked me down and inadvertently killed Tara is unclear. Revenge of some kind. They're looking into it.
Following all leads,
I'm assured. Jared killed Tara, Henry killed him, I killed Henry. There was a circle of life feel to the whole thing but it left an acrid burn in the back of my throat if I thought about it.

Mick, on the other hand, never had a knack for catching the right break, always a half beat behind, lagging in the wake of the wave. That he'd eventually succumbed to drugs didn't surprise me. That he ended up testifying against Jared did.

There is still one remaining mystery. Tara had been living in New York City with a controlling man who refused to call her by the name her family had used her whole life: Joanie. He called it low class. Blue collar. (I could see him saying this with a slightly curled lip, a subtle roll of his eyes, that dismissive wrist flick.) Tara had been borderline agoraphobic, unable to work, ridden with such anxiety that she had to take a myriad of medications just to control it. Or at least she thought she did. I suspect Henry simply liked his women medicated.

In Henry's room, they found a bottle of Dexedrine, a medication for treating hyperactivity disorder known to
cause paralyzing anxiety in patients who did not have ADD. The prescription was for forty pills. There were seven left.

Yates tracked down Maslow, and he filled in a few blanks. Tara had found him, through the public records, six months or so before she was killed. According to Maslow, Tara called him, begged him for information on Hilary Lawlor. He refused, but the call always nagged at him. Truthfully, he said,
I
always nagged at him.
My
story. Everything that had happened and how it all went down. He hated how I left town, didn't trust him to do his job. He lost sleep wondering if I'd survived. He checked up on Jared and Mick. As long as they were in their rightful places, he left well enough alone.

He was retired as it was, gave sunset sail tours off the coast of North Carolina. When he was invited to a wedding in the city, he called Tara back, agreed to meet her. He could never shake that call, he'd said. Not that he knew a whole helluva lot, but he was drawn to her because of me.

He said he nearly fell over when he met her at a diner, she looked so much like me he thought she
was
me. He told her what little he knew about me. My name was likely Zoe—I'd told him that before I left. I was headed east, as far away from San Francisco as possible. He still had my note.
Bright lights, big city
. He suspected New York, but didn't have a lot to go on to back it up. As much as I can figure, shortly after that, the feature in
New York
magazine ran with that silly group shot at La Fleur d'Elise. It would have been a lot of luck, I suppose, but a sister might recognize a sister, no matter how small the face.

The idea that Joan was there that day looking for me wakes me up at night, panicked and profoundly sad. I brought all of this to her. Me. All of this was my fault.

Likely, Jared had been watching me for a while, waiting for the right time to make his move. By sheer chance, he'd followed through on the wrong sister. She was killed only a half
dozen blocks up from the flower shop where I was working that day. She was alone, contrary to Henry's story. He hadn't been with his wife, going out to dinner, married one minute, the next not. It was all a ruse, a ploy, specifically tailored for me. It's all a theory, and mine alone, so Yates tells me.

It all seems so serendipitous, except whatever the exact horrible opposite of serendipity is. I actually went so far as to look it up once:
zemblanity
. That's the word. Coined by William Boyd, it means “unpleasant unsurprise,” which doesn't seem quite terrible enough. I caused my sister's death, and the whole resulting chain reaction led to Henry's almost two-year-long psychotic break and his eventual death. There were buckets and tracks and pulley systems in place, but I was the moving piece that set it all off.

Sometimes I imagine an alternate universe. The idea that I could have stumbled on her by chance, fetching Elisa a ribbon the exact color cornflower blue as the latest batch of hydrangeas.
No not that one, try again, that shop uptown?
Maybe we'd order the same thing at the coffee shop.
Extra whipped cream, extra caramel.
She'd be so happy she finally found me, I'd be shocked she existed at all. I imagine showing her Elisa's and my apartment with Lydia. I imagine a friendship with her, someone I can be myself with, whoever that may be. I imagine I'd never married Henry at all. It's a nice little fantasy and I allow myself the indulgence.

Then sometimes, very late at night, I have to nip the bud of happiness that threatens to bloom at the idea that anyone was looking for me at all. I realize it makes no sense. In the daytime, I'm gutted by the whole thing.
My fault,
I wail to therapists and doctors. I'm not acting. I feel these things. But at night, alone, sometimes my mind wanders. My sister, wanting to meet
me,
scouring the city, her anxiety-ridden heart hammering at all the noise and the traffic and the subway. She braved that for
me.
For a second, if I let it, my heart
swells a bit at this. This whole time, I'd had a tether, some invisible thread linking me to someone else.