When She Was Gone (25 page)

“We have to go—” But she said it so quietly he didn't hear her. She left the store and sat in the car revving the engine, because Linsey was out there, or at least someone who was
named Linsey, who had looked like Linsey. She honked twice into the quiet. Three times more.

“Sorry,” Barq said, getting in. She pulled out so fast he spilled a small splash of coffee onto the lid of his cup. A drop on his lap. Then she calmed. She might have burned him. And she needed Barq right now, even if it didn't seem that way, minute to minute. She needed this man, this hired help, as much as she needed Frank to be at home with the boys, to be Frank, waiting for her with his barrel chest and the slight smell of pickles on his breath. Without her, Frank would serve them salads for breakfast, salads and doughnuts. He required her, in a way Joe never had.

This was why Barq had to come with her. Because alone, she wouldn't have found the house, she'd have driven in circles through the night. Because alone, she wouldn't have been able to stanch the wound of her own sobbing.

The road was so rough, Abigail's teeth hurt.

“It's pretty here,” said Barq, gripping the oh-my-gosh handle so she could see how tense he was. “The birches, the cardinals, the stupid scenic deer.”

She grinned a little despite herself.

“We used to go up to a house near Lake George. Rented, but it felt like it belonged to us. Once I hit a deer. I don't think my kid ever forgave me—even though the deer ran away, she'd seen it bleeding, and she was about six, right smack in the
Bambi
phase.”

“I hate that movie,” said Abigail. “And
Snow White,
too. You have a kid?”

“I have three.” Barq with three kids. Abigail tried to imagine them, redheads with amber eyes. “I hate the way popcorn kernels stick in your teeth. You're at the movies, and your kids are there, so you have to surreptitiously pick at your teeth and not let them see.”

“Oh,” said Abigail. “I'd let them see.”

•   •   •

“Here,” said Barq, his voice as raw as his red eyes. “Turn here.” She would've missed the little wooden sign.

The house was closed, even the shades drawn tight, but Abigail had been so certain Linsey would be inside she kept knocking. There was no bell, as if no one ever came to visit. She stepped up on a planter filled with black-eyed Susans, almost all dead, and tried to peer in the top of the door.

“I'll try the windows,” said Barq. He fished out a pocketknife and tried to pry open the double-hung windows in the front, but they were metal, and only bent.

“HELLO!” screamed Abigail, as if whoever was in there was just deaf. The ride she'd accepted had just been a boy. Some twenty-something who had apparently gotten mad that Linsey didn't have that much money, or that Linsey didn't want to sleep with him, when they were this close to California. It was Abigail's own fault, whatever Timmy said, it was because she tried to pry them apart that Linsey went after Timmy, even if Timmy had been at home, hoping to help find her.

Linsey had just left with this ride, this friend of a friend, or come to him, or however she got here, there had obviously
been some deception, and Abigail, sitting down on the planter and starting to sob, knew it was her own fault, because she'd made her daughter break up with Timmy, because she'd been so worried about being left in the most ordinary way—college—she hadn't had time to notice what was going on right in front of her.

“There are tire tracks,” said Barq, rubbing his toe on the grass like a bear tracker.

“I get no signal here.” Now he was holding up his phone.

Horses shuffled like shadows in a paddock behind the house. There was frost on the grass. It was four in the morning.

“This isn't the house!” said Barq. He took her hand and they ran like children down the dirt track until a farmhouse popped out of the dry landscape like a desert flower.

“Welcome,” said Lila, opening the door wide. “I've just put on coffee.” She wore a plaid shirt and jeans and Abigail could see her collecting eggs and rounding up cattle and she felt ridiculous in her clothes, ridiculous in her body, this stranger who had given her daughter a roof was full and flesh and helpful.

“I get it,” she said. “One of my boys left last year—he didn't go far, just to work in Vail at a ski place—a ski place! He came home on his own, but I get it. They grow up, but they're always babies. Come in.”

“Thank you,” said Abigail, looking past the woman into the house. She wanted to see Linsey, she wanted to leave.

She was weeping now, fully weeping, crying for her daughter, who she'd expected to have in her arms now like a baby. Only Linsey hadn't been a baby for so long, even when
she let Abigail brush her hair, even when she let Abigail straighten the prom dress she wore when she went as Timmy's date her junior year, and Abigail had wished she hadn't shown so much cleavage, but had only said,
You're so beautiful,
and Linsey had given her that awful embarrassed look, even then, Linsey hadn't been her baby for so long. Abigail had been the needy one, the negative part of the equation.

“Abby.” Now Barq was holding her, turning her forward. It was okay for him to call her Abby.

“God bless,”
he whispered.

Her impossibly tall daughter was walking down the hallway, wearing someone else's pajamas, someone's old blue terry-cloth robe, holding her arms around herself. She had an odd, deep purple bruise on her cheekbone. Oval, like a thumbprint. She shined. Abigail pulled free of Barq, rushed down the hallway, because Linsey was waiting for her mother the way she'd waited after kindergarten, holding herself together, waiting to be collected.

DAY TEN

22 COTTAGE PLACE

G
eo's photo of the vigil—before the pie—had made the front page of the
Bergen Record
. Tina Sentry's face was eerily lit with candlelight, and a boy was laughing behind her. It ran with an article about how the private investigator had tracked Linsey down more than halfway to California, and the headline said “Girl Gone Missing Coming Home.” Geo knew there were other possible headlines, and luck made this one right. He wanted to be like the PI, someone who brought people together again. He wondered what it had felt like to run away from the plan, to escape the ordinary possibilities—though he was glad she was coming back, was going on to college, was in the time line intended for her. He thought about how Timmy had helped him sort through photographs, how people choosing to love other people was so much riskier than the requisite love of family.

Mrs. Sentry was sitting in the metal chair beside her husband, her hands wrapped through his with the determination of a dowager holding her purse on the subway. Mr. Sentry was unfamiliar to Geo, just the man in a dark blue suit with weary eyes. Mrs. Sentry's face was oddly sweet, open in a way
he hadn't seen before. Perhaps the music opened her. Geo could tell it called to Mr. Sentry, who might not weep, but clearly wanted weeping. Geo's parents held his hands, one on either side, as though they'd known Mr. Leonard well. He wished he had his camera. The Sentry children were at school, only a smattering of other kids sat in seats performing their rituals of distraction—nose rubbing, jittery legs—he thought it would have pleased Mr. Leonard, students at his last recital.

Jordan House played the music without a hint of anxiety, without losing his way. Geo felt the gift of each movement as Jordan's bow etched the notes into the air. Geo felt him. The strange apricot and amber smell of the old man, the smooth and brittle skin, the passion, the great size of it, the density of pleasure and loss made palatable, made comprehensible.

His father leaned toward Linsey Hart's stepfather in the way a friend might, their shoulders gossiping like birds on a wire. Jordan held them all with the music. The pianist was a lovely woman in her forties, and she seemed to love Jordan's notes with her own. Jordan, rough at the edges to Geo, out of place in the ordinary world, fit when he was playing.

And this was the right word for it, “playing,” the way children played, making patterns and designs. It was exactly the kind of work Geo needed to do.

Geo took photographs of Jordan as he went door-to-door with invitations to the service, just as Mr. Leonard had asked him. Jordan handed out the little cards printed up at Kinko's:
Please honor the passing of Mr. Amadeus Leonard from this world by attending a service. Music and refreshments
.

Jordan told him it was supposed to be like a party, that Mr. Leonard had said, “I want them to eat.” As instructed, Jordan and Geo taped lollipops to each invitation. At some of the houses he'd just stuck them in the mailbox.

They all knew the story now. She'd gone west with some guy, hoping to see her boyfriend when he got to California. Geo had read it,
California,
but by the time he tried to tell, she was found. This didn't bother him as much as the fact that no one wanted the tracing he'd made of the note, so he felt compelled to keep it in his box of trimmed-up photo faces. He texted Timmy, but by the time Timmy read the text, Abigail was on her way. When Timmy's plane landed, Geo got a text back,
You got there first
.

People were strange with ideas—there was talk of a rape, but then he heard she wasn't pressing charges against anyone—that nothing had happened except that she'd been dropped off partway to California, without money. Just a mistake. Just luck that she was unharmed. A youthful indiscretion. But it was no such thing; it was the desire to be missing, if only for a day or two—a need Geo recognized, to walk on the edge so someone would grab you back again before you fell.

Geo stood on the sidewalk while Jordan took the invitation to the Sentrys' house. Reeva's daughter, Tina, had answered their door. She wore a miniskirt and she had Reeva's eyes.

“Hey,” she said to Jordan. “I know you.”

“I work at Starbucks,” he said.

“That's all?” She was rubbing the door handle. It made Geo's lungs hurt, the way she wound herself around.

“This is for your parents,” Jordan said.

“Ooo, a lollipop,” she said, still flirting.

“I think you'll be in school,” he said.

“Who's that?” asked Reeva, coming down the stairs. Jordan turned quickly and joined Geo out on the sidewalk.

“No one,” said Reeva's daughter, and her door closed behind them both.

•   •   •

They clapped between movements, which showed how little they knew of music. Geo knew you were supposed to wait. Still, Jordan smiled at the pianist, because it was sweet. Because it meant they wanted to appreciate Mr. Leonard now as they never had when he was living.

Mr. Leonard had left his house to the Musical Society in town, stipulating that they should start a music school if they had the funds. There was even some money for the project.

Linsey Hart's mother, Abigail, was notably absent. Geo could tell her husband's hand ached for hers, that he was pulled into the same longing Mr. Leonard was calling out, sweet longing. She was staying for a few more days at Cornell, everyone had seen them going, just the two of them in the wagon, riding low with a trunk in the back and a bike on the roof. Linsey held her arm out to test the current of the air, riding the wind like a child. Geo had been helping Jordan lug Mr. Leonard's garbage out to the curb. Jordan was going to give Geo music lessons—maybe even teach him to write his own music for movies. He'd asked, and Jordan told
him Mr. Leonard had said the symphony wasn't for Linsey, but of course it was for her as well. And in the end, there was the music, calling out secrets and truths. There will always be sorrow, the composer told his students and his neighbors, and it is only a choice of sharing it this way, or letting it go.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
hank you to the exquisite queens of the written word Jen Carlson and Emilia Pisani, and to the good folk of S&S who work to make a beautiful book and bring it out into the world, including Jennifer Bergstrom, John Paul Jones, Chris Sergio, Stephanie DeLuca, and Sally Franklin.

Thank you to my friends and writing students, including Cindy Starr, Lisa Roe, Suzanne Samuels, Maria Oskwarek, Joanne Nesi, Ardith Toomey, Lisa Summers, Phyllis Rosenthal, Annie Cami, Lisa Williamson, Kris Linton, Jane Paterson, and Sandy Desmond. Thank you to brilliant first reader Veera Hiranandani. Thanks to the folks at Saddle Ridge Riding Center, who fill our days with horsey happiness. Sammy gave me the original title. Thank you to the Gross, Rosenberg, Herman, Colao, and Rose clans and all their branches and twigs.

And thank you to my family: Jacob, Carina, Josh, you bring me cosmic joy.

   GALLERY READERS GROUP GUIDE

WHEN SHE
WAS GONE

GWENDOLEN GROSS

INTRODUCTION

W
hen seventeen-year-old Linsey Hart goes missing just days before her scheduled departure for college, a typically quiet New Jersey neighborhood is left peeking out windows and into backyards for clues. There's Linsey's mother, Abigail, whose door-to-door searching makes her social outcast status painfully obvious; stay-at-home mom Reeva, whose primary concern is covering up the affair she's been having with the Starbucks barista; Mr. Leonard, a reclusive retired piano teacher—and the last person to see Linsey alive; George, an eleven-year-old gifted loner who is determined to find out what happened to Linsey; and Timmy, Linsey's ex-boyfriend, who is left grieving as he embarks on his own college career.