Before the Returned

by Jason Mott

  Sometime in the past couple of weeks Lisa had come home from school with a bottle of nail polish. And, somewhere along the line, she’d taken up the odd—yet endearing—habit of painting one of his toenails or fingernails while he was sleeping. It was usually something he never noticed until he was out in public somewhere. And, in spite of himself, he couldn’t help but chuckle.

  Which is what he did now.

  This was his life: a thirty-five-year-old father with nail polish on his finger. Wasn’t it just yesterday that he was a flustered, shaggy-haired kid picking up Tracy Whitland for their first date?

  Tracy. Tracy Whitland.

  They’d grown up together, in much the way Peter imagined Lisa would grow up with the Johnson boys next door. Almost every one of Peter’s memories of his childhood was punctuated by Tracy. When the Fall Festival came around each year, Tracy had gone with him. When he was eight years old and took Communion, so had Tracy. The time he got lost in the swamp near his house, it was Tracy who’d trudged alongside him through the mud and muck. It was Tracy who’d kept him from letting fear get the better of him. “It’ll be okay,” she’d said over and over again, and it had annoyed him at first, her repetition. But then it became an incantation, something that he eventually believed. So much so that, when they finally made their way out of the swamp, almost eight miles from home at nearly ten o’clock at night, with frightened and angry parents searching for the both of them, it was he who turned to her and said, “I told you it would be okay.”

  When they were both twelve, she became his first kiss. And, a few years after that, the two of them fumbled over one another clumsily in the back of his father’s car and lost their virginity together.

  It was one year later, when Peter had just turned seventeen and was certain that he would spend the rest of his life with Tracy, that she disappeared.

  The entire town searched for her, and the police worked around the clock. Hours rolled into days, days into weeks, weeks into months. And she was never heard from again. She left behind two devastated parents—parents condemned to spend years searching the faces of others for their daughter—and one confused, guilt-ridden boy who loved her.

  But that was over fifteen years ago. Closer to twenty when Peter really stopped to think about it. And, over the years, he had learned to forget. Learned not to think about her. Learned not to remember the way things had been, the way the two of them had imagined things would eventually be.

  He stayed in touch with her parents. He had been as close with them as he had been with his own parents, and when Tracy disappeared, they’d clung to him as a way of clinging to her. They came to his high school graduation, then his college graduation. They sent him Christmas cards and, once in a while, he would visit them. Their faces would light up as he came through the door and the two of them would put their arms around him and Tracy’s mother would hold his face in her hands and kiss his cheeks and ask him to tell her all about his life.

  Deep down inside, Peter knew that it was not him they were welcoming home but Tracy. His life was her life now. His successes her successes. His stories her stories.

  But all of that had been manageable. All of that Peter had gotten used to. It didn’t bother him anymore. Didn’t keep him awake at night. Not until now, at least.

  * * *

  “Why didn’t I check here first?” Samantha asked herself as she entered Lisa’s bedroom. In the corner, next to Lisa’s stuffed animals, was the bottle of aloe. She couldn’t imagine what Lisa was doing with it—probably salving some imaginary burn to Paddington Bear. She rubbed the lotion on her finger and sighed as it began to cool. “Why does this keep happening?” she asked herself. She wasn’t the clumsy type. But now she and Peter were arguing all the time and it was infecting everything else and she wasn’t quite sure what was causing it.

  She sat down on Lisa’s bed and thought about her husband. She replayed their arguments over the past few weeks, looking for patterns. He was distracted, that much she could identify, but by what, she couldn’t nail down. She didn’t think it was another woman—he never seemed like that type of guy—but she was getting close to being able to believe anything.

  As she sat thinking, suddenly she felt one of Lisa’s stuffed animals begin vibrating. Samantha moved the animal aside and found Peter’s phone. The display on the incoming call read “Evelyn.”

  Evelyn was the mother of the girl Peter had dated in high school. The girl he’d grown up with. The girl who disappeared all those years ago.

  She called from time to time, and Peter usually took the calls in private. Mostly it was just catching up, talking about what he was up to these days. Samantha had never wanted to intrude, feeling, somehow, that this was something sacred to the woman, so she left Peter to his conversations.

  Samantha couldn’t have said what caused her to answer the phone just then. She could have just as well let it go to voice mail, but some part of her forced her hand.

  “Hi, Mrs. Whitland,” Samantha said. “This is Sam.” She felt a kick of adrenaline, but she wasn’t sure why. She had spoken to Evelyn before, but this time it seemed different.

  “Oh, hello, darling,” Mrs. Whitland replied after a pause. She had obviously expected Peter to answer the call. “How have you been?”

  “Busy,” Samantha replied. “Struggling to keep pace with a six-year-old. Children are a handful.”

  “Yes they are.” Then: “Listen, is Peter there?”

  “No,” Samantha answered without hesitation. She didn’t know why she’d lied. “Can I take a message? Is there anything I can help you with?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Probably not. I just wanted to talk to him about…well, about something.”

  “Yes.” Her heart beat faster. “This is all something, isn’t it?”

  Evelyn let out a heavy, sudden breath. “Oh, thank goodness,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if you knew. I wasn’t sure if he would tell you. I mean, it’s all just so complicated.”

  “Of course it is,” Samantha said. She hated herself just now. She wasn’t the type of person to take advantage of someone this way, but there was something going on here that she wasn’t aware of. There was a secret, and for as long as she had known Peter, she had never known him to keep a secret. “We’ll get this sorted out,” Samantha continued, hoping the reply was empty enough, yet valid enough, to keep Evelyn talking.

  Just to be safe, Samantha stood and closed Lisa’s bedroom door.

  Evelyn laughed uncomfortably. “I don’t think anybody knows how to deal with this. I can’t really believe any of it. But, at the same time, I haven’t got it in me to not believe it. I mean, I’ve got my daughter back. I’ve got my Tracy back!” She laughed again, as if she had only just said the words for the very first time.

  There was silence on the line then. A long, harrowing silence. Somewhere in the midst of it, Evelyn must have realized her mistake. “Samantha?” she said softly. “Honey, he didn’t tell you, did he? He didn’t tell you Tracy had returned?”

  There was not much left to the conversation after that. Samantha barely heard anything else the woman said. She rushed the call to an end and sat in her daughter’s bedroom, reeling.

  When Samantha’s stomach betrayed her, it was only good fortune that she managed to find Lisa’s unicorn-bedazzled trash can in time. She bent in half and vomited the same way she had when Peter had proposed to her.

  It was just the way her body reacted to her world changing.

  * * *

  That evening, after soccer practice was done and the evening mayhem of dinner and homework and all the other small matters of the household were resolved, Samantha asked Peter to join her in the garage. Immediately after Lisa was born, the two of them had made an agreement that they would never fight in front of their children. Samantha had grown up in a loud, dish-throwing household and, as much as anything, she blamed it for her bad nerves.

  It was nearly midnight and here the two of them were: sitting in a parked ca
r in the garage with the oldies station murmuring softly.

  “When were you planning on telling me?” Samantha asked. She sat in the passenger seat with her hands in her lap.

  “I don’t know,” Peter replied. “I planned on telling you half a dozen times but the timing was just never right.” He reached forward and gripped the steering wheel. Then he looked down at the speedometer, as if he had to be sure that the world wasn’t moving beneath him. “I know how it looks. But I just needed a little more time.”

  “Is this the reason we’ve been fighting so much lately?” Samantha’s voice went through highs and lows, swinging from accusatory to forgiving in the space of just a few syllables. The truth of the matter was she didn’t know how mad to be about any of this. Having a husband with a childhood sweetheart who’d died nearly twenty years ago but then miraculously returned from the dead wasn’t exactly something she’d ever prepared for.

  In her lap her hands began to fidget and she could feel a knot forming in the pit of her stomach. “I just want to hear what you think, is all,” she said. “I just want to be included in this…whatever it is with you. You’re not the only one going through this. It’s the both of us. It’s Lisa. It’s all of us.”

  “I know,” Peter said. He stared ahead through the windshield. The garage was cluttered with all the things that moved through the life of a family and, inevitably, came to rest in the garage: an outgrown tricycle, tools sporadically used, a box of toys fallen out of favor, Christmas decorations, various pieces of lawn equipment.

  Looking at it all now, he could see that, in a certain sense, all these things represented the “other life” he’d begun to lead. He couldn’t put his finger on exactly when it happened—he had clung to Tracy’s memory for years before finally being able to love someone else—but, at some point, he had succeeded in letting go. At some point, he had bandaged up the wound inside himself and, eventually, healed.

  After that, he’d started another life.

  But it wasn’t the life he had always imagined for himself, not really, not when he stopped to think about it. This had become the life that he had learned to love, the life he had learned to want. In those early days, when he and Tracy were both young and prone to dreaming, he had imagined a life of travel and adventure. A life where they awoke in France only to fall asleep in Italy. Sure, they were the excessive and exotic dreams that all children have, but they had been his. Truly and genuinely, they had been his dreams.

  “So where do we go from here?” Samantha asked.

  “I don’t know. She’s asking for me,” he said in a low voice. “Evelyn says that when she showed up again, when she returned, I was the first thing she asked about.”

  “What did they tell her?”

  He shrugged. “They told her that I moved. But then she asked them where I’d moved and they wouldn’t tell her. They kept their answers vague, I guess. But she knows that they’re hiding me and she can’t understand why. There’s lots of fighting from what I hear.”

  “I don’t want you to see her,” Samantha replied. Her stomach continued its quiet turmoil. Her throat clenched and she swallowed again. She closed her eyes and breathed slowly. “That’s not your life anymore. She’s not your life anymore.”

  “You don’t mean that,” Peter replied. “Hell, you still get together for lunch with Daniel.”

  “That’s different and you know it.”

  “Is it?”

  Samantha did not reply.

  “You know what I mean,” Peter continued. “She’s a part of me. That time of my life when she was a part of my world—that’s a part of me, too. All those moments, they’re just kind of stacked up inside me, like sediment. They’re always there. That’s how it is for everyone, I think.”

  “Do you still love her?”

  Peter paused. A half-dozen possible replies swam through his head. This was the question he knew was coming even before Samantha had called him out to the garage. It was a question that, in a sense, was always coming. Samantha had always been respectful of his feelings for Tracy: his tragic first love. She never pressed him when he talked about her—which was rare. She had always been easy with him, willing to let him carry as much of it inside as he wanted, share only what he needed to share.

  “Yes,” he said finally, refusing all the other possible answers he could have given, all the lies and avoidances. “I do still love her. I’ll always love her.”

  “Then I want to meet her,” Samantha said.

  * * *

  The arguing between Samantha and Peter carried on for another week. And things were no easier for Evelyn and Nathaniel, who were running out of ways not to tell their returned daughter about the boy she’d once loved.

  On more than one occasion Evelyn called Peter, speaking of one thing but seemingly desperate to talk of something else—some large and important topic that she couldn’t quite bring herself to broach. Sometimes when she called, she whispered, as if hiding in a closet, desperate not to be found out. Peter could imagine Tracy—still a seventeen-year-old—somewhere in the house, trying to eavesdrop on her mother’s conversations. Peter imagined how much of being a parent Evelyn had forgotten over the years. Tracy had been their only child, their one shot at parenthood, and it had been truncated in a way that gave Peter nightmares. Sometimes he dreamed that Lisa did not come home from school. It was always a strange dream, a dream full of waiting. An experience marked not by great terror but by a persistent, inexhaustible foreboding. And that was worse than abject terror. Terror vanished with the dawn. This particular feeling—that things would not be okay—never left.

  Maybe that’s what life was like when a child went missing. Maybe that was how the time since Tracy’s disappearance had been for Evelyn and Nathaniel. He tried not to think about it.

  Then one night Evelyn called, crying.

  “Please,” she sobbed, “something has to be done. I hate to put you in this position, but I can’t keep doing this. It can’t go on like this.” Evelyn was pleading. “I haven’t been a mother for so long. I just don’t have the strength to hold out like I used to.” She cleared her throat. “I’m going to tell her where you live soon. I just know I am. I don’t want to, but I can’t keep looking into her eyes. I can’t keep telling her no. I love her too much. You can understand that, can’t you, Peter? You can forgive me, can’t you?”

  It was then that Peter made the decision to meet with Tracy.

  * * *

  The night before they were supposed to leave for Evelyn’s, Peter and Samantha found themselves sitting in the car in the garage once more. This time Samantha sat in the driver’s seat. “My mom will be here in the morning to babysit,” she said.

  “Good,” Peter replied. “It shouldn’t be too long of a trip.”

  “Did you book the hotel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what you’re going to say to her?”

  “I haven’t got a clue,” Peter replied. He tilted his seat back and looked out the window: more reminders of his marriage, his family, his life as it now was.

  “You should tell her you love her,” Samantha said. It was her turn to squeeze the steering wheel and stare out through the windshield. For once, her stomach was completely settled. “She deserves the truth.”

  Peter wiped his face. “There’s a time and place for the truth,” he said. “And there’s a time and place for holding on to something other than the truth. I’m not exactly sure which one relates to Tracy just yet.”

  A silence settled in the car between them. On the far side of the garage the deep freezer kicked on with a rattle.

  “When I think about all the people I loved before I met you,” Samantha said, “I realize that I never stopped loving them. Not really. But it’s a different kind of love. Or maybe it’s got something to do with timing. The time for me to love them has passed, and the time for me loving you is now.”

  “That’s poetic,” Peter said.

  “Heard it on an epis
ode of CSI.”

  They laughed together. Then the silence returned. When it became too uncomfortable to bear, Samantha finally spoke. “I’ve been seeing Daniel,” she said.

  “I know,” Peter replied. He said it so quickly that his words fell atop hers.

  Samantha nodded. She tightened her grip on the steering wheel until her knuckles were white and her fingers hurt. She had promised herself that she would not cry during this, and she was determined to hold on to that promise.

  “How long have you known?”

  “A few months,” Peter replied. He looked down at his feet. “I don’t want to know how long it’s been going on. Please.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Do you love him?”

  “Yes,” Samantha said. “And no. It just happened by accident. We were getting coffee, just the same way we had been doing for years. It was perfectly innocent. And then, at some point, it wasn’t perfectly innocent anymore. At some point I was excited and ashamed when I sat across from him. I’m not sure why. I don’t really know what was happening or not happening between us to make me feel like there was something with him that I couldn’t find with you.” She waved her hand dismissively. “But maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe it wasn’t anything like that. I think, on a certain level, it was just the excitement of a different type of love. Something I thought I’d let go of but never really did.”

  Peter cleared his throat. “Aren’t you wondering why I never said anything to you about it? Even though I knew?”

  Samantha nodded.

  “I didn’t say anything because, on a certain level, I think maybe I’ve been cheating on you for a lot longer.” He made an awkward motion with his hands, as if wanting to scratch his head but then forgetting it just as quickly. “I just think that I never really let her go. She was always there, always in the back of my mind. Maybe if something definite had happened to her, if a body had been found, maybe it would have been different.