by Anita Shreve
“The police were here already.”
Sydney notices two mugs with spoons, a cream pitcher, and the sugar bowl. None of the Edwardses take sugar or cream with their coffee.
“They came, they left,” Ben says, gesturing with a flick of his fingers. “Julie’s eighteen, apparently went willingly. Frankly, they’re not all that interested. They said wait until morning, she’ll probably call.”
“Did Dad tell them that Julie’s. . .?”
“Slow? Yeah, Jeff, he told them Julie’s slow.”
Ben’s anger will show itself in sarcasm, then, Sydney thinks, making it hard to know what the Edwardses have or have not said to the police.
Jeff flings his windbreaker into the air. It comes to rest in front of the sink, where Tullus, curious, noses it.
“So, where have you guys been?” Ben asks casually.
“This is serious,” Jeff says.
“So I gather,” says Ben, deliberately misreading his brother.
Sydney sits at the table and draws the note toward her. As she reads, something flits across her brain and then immediately drifts away. She scans the note again, trying to retrieve the thought, the image. She shuts her eyes and tries to think. “Where did she leave this?” she asks.
“On her pillow,” Ben answers. “No one noticed it until we went looking for her.”
Jeff sticks his fingers into his hair, the gesture of a wild man. “We should be. . .”
“What, Jeff?” Ben asks. “Driving around, looking for her? In which direction should we go? North? South? To Portsmouth? To Boston?”
Jeff lowers his hands. “Dad must be beside himself.”
“You think?”
Ben balances on the hind legs of the wooden chair. He holds his drink and appears to be studying the tension of its oily surface. “You know, Jeff, you’re good.”
Jeff grabs a dish towel from the fridge handle, dries his face and head.
“You told Vicki, what, Tuesday night? Yeah, Tuesday, because she called me at work Wednesday morning. So, let’s see. . .this is Friday night, was Friday night, and you’ve already. . .well. . .nailed, so to speak, old Sydney here.”
(Ben will be furious.)
“Shut up, Ben.”
“Works fast,” Ben says, turning to Sydney. “Always did. You impressed? You ought to be impressed.”
“Julie’s missing,” she reminds the brothers. Somewhere out there, Sydney thinks, Julie is driving in a car or Julie is eating a hamburger or Julie is laughing.
“Yeah. So. We’re fucked,” Ben says, sitting forward, slamming the chair legs against the floor. Sydney flinches at both the word and the sound.
Jeff tosses the towel onto the granite counter. “You’re drunk, Ben. Go to bed.”
“Yeah. We’re fucked. This whole family is fucked.”
Sydney’s skirt feels wet and gritty against her bare legs. She slides the slicker from her arms. When she glances up, Ben is staring at her blouse. Did she misbutton it in the dark?
“I’m glad Julie’s gone,” he says, looking up at Jeff. “What kind of a life did she have here? She was a prisoner. Oh, she painted. Big fucking deal. Oh, she worked in the rose garden. She was a prisoner in her own house. She was never going to get free.”
(I think the man will find her.
Not too soon, I hope.
No, not too soon.)
“Let’s just work this through,” Sydney says.
“She wants to help now,” Ben reports to Jeff.
“That’s uncalled for,” Jeff says with the odd politeness of an academic.
“Uncalled for? Uncalled for?” Ben snaps his glass upon the kitchen table. “Then I say, call for it!” He hitches himself forward in the chair. “Julie takes off, and where is Sydney, her new best friend? Fucking my brother in the sand, that’s where.”
With one swift motion, Jeff upends the kitchen table onto Ben’s lap. Ben scoots back, and the lip of the table hits the floor. The bottle of Maker’s Mark breaks at Sydney’s feet. Sydney watches as Julie’s note flutters onto the puddle of bourbon. She bends over and snatches it away.
As if summoned by the commotion, Mr. Edwards opens the kitchen door. He holds it for his wife. “What. . .?”
Both parents, Sydney notices, are red-eyed, either from lack of sleep or weeping.
“Is Julie back?” Mr. Edwards asks.
The brothers, full of hate a minute earlier, swiftly become a team. Sydney suspects years of childhood practice.
“What did the police say?” Jeff asks, deflecting a question with a question.
Mr. Edwards steps into the room. “What the hell happened here?”
His wife, shoulders hunched, clutches her purse to her chest.
“I stumbled,” Jeff says. “Knocked against the table. Ben, hand me that box over there, will you? I’ll get this glass.”
Sydney, astonished, watches as the brothers work like janitors to erase the explosion of moments before. At the counter, Sydney gently blots the note with a paper towel.
When Sydney turns, the table is upright.
“I think we should all sit down,” Mr. Edwards declares, holding on to the back of a kitchen chair. Already, fear has diminished him.
There aren’t enough chairs. Ben, who suddenly seems remarkably sober, leans against the island.
“Sydney,” Mr. Edwards says. He is a decade older than he was at his birthday celebration. Did he wish for too much when he blew out the candles? Did he make the gods angry? Cruel fate that they should so soon upend his good fortune.
“I know this is a confusing time,” he says, “but just think back. Did Julie leave the house on a regular basis? To meet someone perhaps?”
Sydney is aware of all eyes upon her. She wants, for Julie’s sake, for Mr. Edwards’s sake, to be as clear and as precise as possible. “I wasn’t with her every minute,” she begins. “There were times when I would go for a walk or to my room. I suppose it was possible. But not on a regular basis. And I never saw it happen.”
“Think!” Mrs. Edwards commands.
“She is,” Mr. Edwards says, putting a hand over his wife’s fist on the table.
“You should have kept your eye on her,” Mrs. Edwards snaps. “It’s what we paid you for.” Her face appears to have closed in on itself, forming a neat square with squat lines where the eyes and mouth should be.
“Mom,” Ben says.
“Every minute?” Jeff asks.
“Well, I find it very difficult to believe that my daughter could have struck up a relationship with someone without Sydney’s noticing.”
For a moment, the accusation lies on the table—unanswered, undefended—while behind them the wood-and-brass barometer goes on recording atmospheric pressure.
“What I don’t get,” Mr. Edwards says, “is why Julie didn’t say where she was going. Why the secrecy?”
“Because you’d have gone and gotten her,” Ben says simply, “and then brought her home.”
“Oh, I hate to even say this,” Mr. Edwards suggests, putting his head in his hands, “but do you suppose she was forced to write the note?”
Sydney, who has the note in front of her, reads it again. Most of the letters are blurred and wavy, but knowing what it says makes it possible to decipher it.
“This is Julie,” Sydney says. “I don’t just mean her handwriting. This is how she would write. What she would say. Even the misspelling of my name.”
“So, you knew her well enough to know how she wrote,” Mrs. Edwards accuses, all but Frisbeeing the words across the table, “but you didn’t know her well enough to know she was about to run away?”
The woman’s anger makes her head shake.
Sydney attempts an explanation. “After that first incident, there was no reason to think—”
“What incident?” asks Mrs. Edwards, sharp-eared even in distress.
Too late, Sydney remembers that Mrs. Edwards doesn’t know of Julie’s drunken binge.
“One night, two weeks ago,” Jeff offers
quickly, “Julie came home late and she’d been drinking.”
“Drinking what?”
“We’re not sure.”
“She was drunk, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Why wasn’t I told?”
No one answers the woman.
“You all knew?” Mrs. Edwards asks, her voice rising. “Mark, you knew?”
With reluctance, Mr. Edwards looks his wife in the eye. Sydney can see how much the effort costs him. “Yes, I did,” he says. “Sydney came to tell me one night when you were out.” (Not quite the truth, Sydney thinks. Mrs. Edwards was lying on the sofa, reading.)
Mrs. Edwards presses her lips together and then lets out a small explosion of air. “I do not understand why I, her mother, wasn’t told. And I don’t understand something else. Why”—she snatches the note from Sydney—“why does Julie thank Sydney? Thank her for what?”
“I think for the—” Sydney begins, and then she has a thought. “Did the police go into Julie’s room?” she asks.
“They did.”
But they might not have known what to look for. She rises from the table. “I’ll be right back,” she says.
She leaves the kitchen and heads up the stairs. The door to Julie’s room is open. Sydney steps inside and scans the contents.
Light-headed, she reaches behind herself for the bed and sits at its edge. For the first time, she feels the full blow of Julie’s disappearance. She wraps her arms around her stomach.
Images of Julie laughing in the front seat of a car entangle themselves with recent memories of Jeff laughing on the floor of the gazebo. At the urgency, the absurdity of passion, now fulfilled. A grown man and woman fumbling through wet clothes to make each other naked. She remembers Jeff’s cheekbone pressed hard into hers. Something he said into her neck that she couldn’t quite hear. The exquisite tenderness with which he covered her. As he pulled her close to him, her slicker released a rivulet of water that ran down her neck and along her collarbone. She shivered. Her feet were cold. She could feel the rain on her bare skin. She brought them up and tucked them between Jeff’s thighs. He reached down with his hand and held them there.
“This should have been such a happy night,” Jeff says from the doorway.
Sydney tries to smile.
He joins Sydney on the bed, the weight of the two bodies making a deep V in the soft mattress. “It was impetuous what I did,” he says. “Even careless. But I felt very certain.”
Sydney nods.
“What do you feel now?” he asks, and Sydney can hear the tiny hitch in his breath. Is he nervous about her answer?
She takes his hand so that he will understand that she is still with him. “I feel sad,” she says. “Julie’s really gone.”
“How do you know?”
“She’s taken the canvases. She’s taken the paints.”
Jeff turns his head in the direction of the corner where the easel should be. She can feel his sigh in his shoulders.
She releases his hand and walks to the window. Through the glass, she sees a sunny afternoon, Julie standing in the water. Sydney snags the thing that was in Julie’s note, the thing that flitted across her brain.
I’M OK.
A young woman in a wet suit catching a wave.
“What is it?” Jeff asks.
“I think I know who Julie ran off with,” Sydney says.
“Who is he?” Jeff asks from the bed.
“It might not be a he,” Sydney says, turning.
2003
Chapter 8
A greenish sheen on the surface. The water thick and jellied. Overhead, yellow clouds trap the heat. Sydney waits through a succession of waves, picking the tallest one. Her timing is off. She cannot get her rhythm.
Tonight and tomorrow, guests will arrive at the beach house. There will be a caterer, a girl named Harriet from the village who does “this sort of thing,” though surely there cannot be enough weddings in the village and in the beach houses, Sydney thinks, to keep a caterer in business. Harriet must cook for cocktail parties as well, the ones at which spouses sometimes do not speak to each other.
The weekend weather will be iffy, the word batted around like a badminton birdie. Sydney hears it from the upstairs hallway, from the kitchen. Beyond that, no one is willing to say.
If the weather is simply iffy, the wedding will be held on the porch. If worse, the ceremony will take place in the living room, the furniture temporarily removed. It is to be a small affair, family and close friends only. The phrase makes Sydney uncomfortable, reminding her of a funeral.
Sydney’s parents will arrive separately. The wedding will be conducted by a minister from Needham who has happily accepted the best guest room upstairs. Sydney’s friends Emily and Becky will come tomorrow. Jeff will be better represented by Ivers and Sahir and Peter and Frank, an excess of groomsmen.
Sydney calculates that there will be eleven tonight at dinner. Technically a rehearsal dinner, though the rehearsal itself will take all of ten minutes. The wedding not paid for, as is customary, by Sydney’s parents, who, in any case, might not have agreed on a venue. Instead, both the wedding and the rehearsal dinner will be underwritten by Mr. and Mrs. Edwards and organized by Mrs. Edwards, who has made it clear, by a series of clever suggestions and a Rolodex of service personnel, that she can handle all the annoying little details.
Though they have insisted that Sydney call them Mark and Anna now, she cannot think of them as anything but Mr. and Mrs. Edwards.
“There won’t be any yarmulkes or anything,” Mrs. Edwards announced early on to Jeff, thereby decisively settling the Jewish question. Not acceptable.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jeff said.
Sydney spots an exceptionally tall wave in the distance. She knows she ought to retreat, let the surge catch her on the backs of her knees, push her hard into the sand. Or she could take her chances diving headfirst into its face, aiming low to miss its rolling power. Sydney glances to her left and right. No one else in the water today, which, in any case, looks unappealing and filthy.
The wave advances. Sydney can hear its anger. She turns her back and waits. The trick always is to catch the crest.
A wild recklessness, perhaps even anger of her own, makes her raise her arms and put her hands together. A fierce undertow nearly buckles her legs. A beach, a cottage, and a seawall are all before her, but she sees nothing. It is as though she hears with her eyes.
She cannot hesitate. Her timing has to be perfect.
The wave upon her, Sydney leaps. Too late, she understands that she has miscalculated. The wave hits her square in the back, and the water slams her face against the sand. Sydney tries to stand and can’t. There is no ocean floor.
With little breath left to hold, Sydney lets the wave take her. The water, indifferent, dumps her sideways onto the beach, rolling her down the steep slope as it recedes. She is a toy, a plaything.
Spent, Sydney cannot outrun the following wave, and she is again submerged in water. She digs her fingers into the sand. She gasps for air and is hit from behind. She lets the fourth wave push her forward on her belly. She crawls out onto the sand, beyond the reach of the worst of it. When she rubs the stinging salt from her eyes, a man she knows is standing with a towel.
Jeff wraps her in bubble-gum pink, gently rocking her from side to side. He nestles his chin at the side of her neck.
“You’re a goddess,” he says.
“I’m off my timing today. It’s not working.”
“It’s nerves,” he says.
“You think so?”
He slips his hand into the hip band of her bikini. The old tank suit is gone. Jeff insisted.
Mr. Edwards, frantic at the disappearance of his daughter, put up homemade posters at the lobster pound and the general store. Within an hour, a young woman with a French Canadian accent called. “I saw the girl on the poster,” she said. “She was at a party with Hélène.”
“Hélène who?” Mr. Edwards
asked, his breath tight.
“She surfs. I think she lives in Montreal.”
Mr. Edwards staged a sit-in at the Portsmouth police station, persuading the authorities to bring their considerable technological expertise to bear upon the suspected kidnapping—note notwithstanding. Hélène Lapierre, who had crossed the border on the night in question, was remembered by a border guard for her exceptional smile as well as her comment that she’d spent her vacation surfing on the coast of New Hampshire. She was tracked down and briefly questioned, the need for further interrogation unnecessary, as Julie Edwards, focused, intent, and clearly unharmed, was painting pears in a corner at the time of the unexpected arrival of the Canadian police. Julie, apparently surprised by the fuss, said readily, “Oh, I’ll call,” and went immediately to the telephone.
There were tears, the father’s contagious. Within minutes, Julie was reduced to sobs. “Let me speak to Sydney,” Julie said through ragged breath.
Sydney took the phone.
“They want to come, but I think it should be you,” Julie said. “I want you to see Hélène’s apartment. And meet Hélène.”
How like Julie, Sydney thought, to rearrange the priorities.
A short family meeting was held and a decision made.
“Sydney and Jeff will go to Montreal,” Mr. Edwards said. “Julie will respond to Sydney best, but I don’t want her to have to travel alone.”
Jeff readily nodded his assent.
Ben was absent from the family meeting, having left for Boston within hours of the fight with his brother.
Sydney had to guess at Mr. Edwards’s reasoning: were he or Jeff to go alone to Montreal, Julie’s autonomy, not to mention Hélène’s physical safety, might be in jeopardy.
Jeff and Sydney drove to White River Junction, just across the border from New Hampshire in Vermont. From there, they took the train to Montreal. The circumstances of the journey—the sense of mission, the rhythmic clacking of the rails, the fast receding lights in the distance—created an odd and wildly inappropriate sense of honeymoon.
