When She Was Gone (14 page)

“Mom?” she said, into the phone, though
of course
it was her mother; her mother answered the phone with her same hello. A vocal mirror.

“Abby,” said her mother, the only one who called her Abby. “How is my girl?”

“She's missing, Mom. I mean, she went somewhere, and we don't know where, or something happened—”

“I meant you,” said her mother. “I assume you mean my granddaughter.”

“Yes,” said Abigail. “And I didn't mean to sound hysterical—”

“You didn't sound hysterical,” said her mother. Something was clicking on her end. Was it knitting needles? Was she surfing the Web while they talked?

“But this is indeed a problem. I assume you've contacted all her friends?”

“All her friends,” said Abigail. “And the police.”

“Oh, my. What about the boyfriend—Timothy?”

“Her ex. He doesn't know. We have a private detective.” It
felt like failure, like confession. Why was she always the one with problems?

“Well, she's not that impetuous. Have you called the boy's college? What is it—University of Oregon?”

“California.”

“You do that,” said her mother. “How are the boys? Do you need me there?”

Yes,
Abigail thought.
Yes, yes, yes
. But her mother was old, and needed more care than she gave, at last. Suddenly old, too. It had been six years since her father died, and for the first four, her mother was a seventy-something adventurer, free to go on senior tours of Europe and to learn new things; she took Investing Online at the library, she did genealogical research for herself and her friends, she learned orchid breeding but decided it was too expensive and besides, she wanted to be free to come and go, without heeding the whims and needs of flowers. She went on tours of China, Brazil, with her friends. She took tango lessons with mostly women in the class. Mardi Gras—something Abigail could hardly imagine: bare breasts, beads, bourbon, her turtleneck-prudish mother. Then she had a mild stroke—Abigail had gone to stay with her for two weeks, Linsey had come for a few days, too, better at tending than Abigail, more patient with bedpans and circular conversations—and now Abigail's mother was an old person. She sold the house and moved to an assisted-living facility.

“No, Mom, but thank you.”

“Find the boy,” she said.

Find the boy,
Abigail thought. Ask the boy over and pretend I wasn't hateful to him. She walked upstairs to Linsey's room again, her legs heavy. When had stairs become such an effort? She ran her fingers through Linsey's clothing in the closet, looked inside her shoes. She found a bracelet she thought she'd lost inside an old boat shoe, something Linsey hadn't worn since junior high school, perhaps. Turquoise and silver beads. Joe had bought the bracelet for her in New Mexico, on their last trip together, before the divorce. She'd felt like an invalid there; Joe was doing research for a photo essay he was trying to place with
Car and Driver
—he was out most mornings in the rented Mustang (only silver was available instead of the red Joe had hoped for, and Abigail thought he might cry at the rental agency) taking preliminaries of rural routes. She lay in bed in the hotel suite, thinking about how much money was ticking away with each hour in that room, the rented spaces and the car, the babysitter she'd hired to help her mother with Linsey, since her mother's back had been bothering her and Linsey required chasing. Since she didn't trust anyone with Linsey, not really, not even her mother. Her stomach hurt every day on that trip, and when she and Joe made love, every evening, after too much food at another Zagat-rated restaurant, too much red wine and chocolate flourless desserts that tasted like soil to Abigail, it felt like a horrible sort of work. Still, when Joe gave her the bracelet on the plane on the way home, she had felt a tiny flower of hope opening in her chest. She knew it was probably just because they were going home, but she'd kissed him, and his
mouth was soft enough against hers, for once, and when the bracelet disappeared she mourned it just a little. She fingered the smooth silver beads, then put it in Linsey's trunk instead of back into the shoe. If her daughter was going to steal her things, let her know her mother would notice. But she could have it, she could have the bracelet, she could have all her jewelry, she could have her emerald engagement ring from Frank, she could have her car and her refrigerator and her journals and her letters from her father, if only Linsey would come home.

She checked in with Barq again, and then the police. It was like swallowing bitter pain pills.

“Providence isn't panning out. Nothing even happened with this guy—it was just her friend's idea, the picture. I'm coming back to your neighborhood, but you may get the best intel there if you talk to all your neighbors. Oh, and I've got an agent tracking your boyfriend now,” Barq said. His voice like his name. “God bless.”

•   •   •

“Thanks for checking in, ma'am,” said the police detective assigned to them, Martin Wooster. She didn't like his eyebrows, they looked plucked. She tried to listen to him, picking at her cuticles, it hurt, but he never said anything. “Don't forget, the best tips come from gossip, from door-to-door. We'll keep you posted, though.”

Posted on what? The lunch on his desk? Who took this kind of job? Who could eat lunch when daughters were missing?

Door-to-door. She felt like a Girl Scout, selling cookies, with her clipboard with three questions, so she wouldn't forget, only instead of a uniform, she wore khakis, a button-down blouse. Still formal, still awkward. The detective had suggested she should keep things light with the neighbors, that they'd be more helpful if they were less worried, that worried people closed up, snap, he'd clapped his hands into a clam. But she didn't want to wear a dress, too feminine, she didn't want to wear jeans, too casual, too unconcerned. She thought of all the famous cases of murder within a family; wondered if anyone wondered about her. Would she, would she think her neighbors capable of the worst kinds of things? Could she suspect any of her neighbors of hurting Linsey? Her town had its history—two or three teen suicides; a mother, down the street, who killed herself with her policeman husband's handgun, suffering from postpartum depression—this was during Abigail's year of the bed, she hardly knew anything about it, just that it took ages for the house to sell. And it hadn't seemed real to her—the case against the football players who molested a retarded girl two towns over. There were blue ribbons on the houses of the people who thought the boys were innocent, yellow ribbons on those who believed the girl had been abused. It was strangely political, all these personal and private tortures.

3 CEDAR COURT

H
e was looking at her photos again—looking for clues in Linsey's expression at a birthday party last year, the twins', to which Geo had not been invited, but which he'd observed over the fence. He wanted to be on the other side of the fence—not that he minded his own home, not that he didn't have enough people here, but he always felt that he could belong over there, too, with Toby, anyway, with the stepfather, with Linsey herself, who understood being part of and being different.

He wouldn't tell anyone this, because it would sound creepy. He wasn't creepy. Linsey was laughing as a blindfolded Cody swung a bat at a piñata shaped like a football. Really they were already too old for piñatas last year, but Cody clearly enjoyed the destruction, the impact.

Geo preferred to put things together.

In one shot the candy was a shower landing on the lawn, pink and red wrapper rain. Linsey's mouth was open with words or joy, Geo wasn't sure which. He sorted through another stack. Linsey was leaving the house. Linsey was in the crowd at the Fourth of July, a shock of bright hair and
smooth light skin—you'd think he'd been watching her, but really, he had photographs of all his neighbors. Circumstance; her bubble beside his bubble.

Maybe she ran away; it made sense for the first time to Geo. There were no menacing men in a single photograph—and she was hardly ever with anyone other than her family and Timmy. Of course, she had whole sections of life he could never record, but he could see how she might feel missing within this very concrete one—the girl whose father no longer lived in the house.

He wondered whether she loved her stepfather. He was so steady, such a tripod of a man. In a way, Geo wished his own father was more like that, thicker, less vulnerable. He looked at Linsey on Timmy's shoulders at that same Fourth of July. They were both wearing blue shirts and red bandannas. She was tall enough that she looked like she'd topple them both. If she didn't have Timmy, who did she have here? Of course, she was about to go to college. About to leave anyway. He stared into the laughing photo face. She had something under her arm—a notebook. If he looked hard enough, maybe he could see inside.

Downstairs, wondering whether Timmy might stop by again, Geo fidgeted with the sea beans in the mancala board—gifts from his well-traveled uncle. The sea beans came from Florida, but they fit in the African game board, sliding smooth between his fingers; he wanted two in each little cup, but there weren't enough. It hurt him a little, the imbalance, one omitted from a cup on each side. He picked at the place where the stems once attached.

His mother hadn't noticed the bruise on his neck, a good, hearty purple already, which would evolve into the strange maroon specific to Geo's bruises, when he bruised, which he only did when he fell or something struck him very hard, something sharp enough, swung with force, but not so sharp as to cut him, to spill his blood, to break him. Geo hated bruises, but his mother hated them more; she always checked them hourly, like a broody hen examines her eggs.

He'd been caught up in thinking about the Stein family—about Linsey, about how they needed help and maybe he could do something, maybe there was something in his photographs, or something he'd seen and hadn't remembered. He didn't think it could happen so quickly with Cody Stein. He'd always worried about Cody, who never bullied him in school, never directly, but who always looked at him nervously. Cody's best friend Banks said things about Oreos and pretended Geo was a basketball player. Geo was terrible at basketball. When Cody and Geo were paired up to complete electrical circuits in science, Cody had tried to zap himself with the wires, and Geo had stopped him, his own hands over Cody's, not sure why, maybe because it seemed like a waste of electricity, maybe because his father stopped others' pain whenever he could. Cody had peeped, “Hey!” but not much else, and they'd finished their circuit together, saying almost nothing.

This time he could've avoided the whole business with Cody, only he didn't want to leave his own backyard just because his neighbor threw a football over the fence. He
didn't want to throw it back, either, which was all Cody had asked. His neighbor was playing with Banks, whose mother dropped him off at school in a red Jaguar. She wore gloss-slick lipstick to match the car and blew kisses like an aging movie star.

Maybe Cody was especially nervous about Linsey disappearing. From what Geo had learned about boys, sometimes fear turned to anger, and sometimes fear turned to a sort of paralysis. He wasn't sure he'd ever seen his father afraid, and he wasn't sure he ever wanted to. But boys, they were often afraid.

The article about Linsey had just been in the
Ridgewood Times
today, and the kids at school were talking about reporters from the
Bergen Record
who interviewed people right in town in front of the post office as if there'd been something civic happening, instead of a private disturbance. The headline in the local paper said “Family Desperate for Leads.” Her high school yearbook photo, a family photo, Linsey squeezing one half brother on each side. Timmy had been texting him for the past few days, and he'd stopped by the house, and talked to him like he was a much older kid. Respectful. He gave Timmy a scanned copy of the photo collage of Linsey; they'd watched it print out slowly on glossy paper Geo had gotten for his birthday from his great-aunt, sheet by sheet he used it, and the expensive ink, a good print.

The ball had bounced twice before it landed in his mother's hosta. Geo liked the shape of a football, such a strange turd of a ball, those pointed ends and all the weight in the
middle. He played touch football sometimes with his uncle Dan, his mother's brother, who let him ride on his shoulders still, so Geo felt tall and relaxed around Uncle Dan. He threw well, his uncle said, and he ran well, just not at the same time.

“Dude, I know you're back there making your weird art project,” Cody called over the fence.

He hadn't needed to say
weird
. Geo wasn't setting bottle caps, anyway, he was just cleaning them, with cotton balls and rubbing alcohol from his sisters' bathroom. He had pilfered a bottle of clear nail polish, too; he was thinking about lacquering the tops of the whole lot of them, to keep them a little cleaner, to keep them from rusting.

“Dude! Throw the ball back, okay?” Cody yelled. He could see his neighbor's blue Giants tank top through the slats of the fence. Slices of his skinny arms. He felt a shock of something, loss, perhaps—he almost wanted to comfort the boy. His sister, she was missing.

Geo didn't say anything. He was working on a Sam Adams Winter Wheat. There was no dent at all in the cap, but it didn't look like a twist off. He liked the smell of beer.

“Dude!” Cody yelled again.

“Just climb over, dude,” Banks instructed his friend.

When he was little, he could forget he was black from time to time. Most of the faces he looked at were white, though Minal's wasn't; most of his world was the same as theirs. Except for the distance. Everyone kept a distance from him. Ordinary people, those who didn't know him, that is. The teacher touched him, a bit too much. The gym teacher
patted his back and gave him high-fives, the same way, only he noticed then, the contrast in the colors of their hands. But on the sidewalk, people spread around him when he walked. Especially now that he was older, it was as though he walked inside parentheses, keeping him from the other words of the sentence, just a bit off from everyone else. He knew the store detectives followed him in Lord & Taylor when he went with his mother for a blue blazer for his sister's graduation. He knew they watched him in the bug-eye mirror at CVS, keeping tabs on the whereabouts of his hands. He knew people expected just a little less of him, and just a little more.