by Kelly Rimmer
beer rose off him in waves. Like his youngest daughter, he’d seen
what he expected to see and mistaken me for his wife.
“Patrick,” I whispered, glancing frantically down at Beth. He
stopped his path toward food, and turned to face me. The sur-
prise in his gaze quickly cleared, and was replaced with disgust.
“You,” he said, his nostrils flaring. “Baby killer. Get your fuck-
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ing hands off my daughter. And you dragged me and my wife
into your filthy—”
“Have you seen Grace?”
Patrick blinked at me, the scowl clearing, and confusion tak-
ing its place. It was then that I realized he was rolling drunk,
and this was going to be both easier and harder than I’d feared.
I immediately abandoned my plans to ask him to put Beth to
bed, fearing that he’d drop her.
“She’s…” Confusion flickered over his features. “She took
you to…”
“I came back from the…the procedure,” I whispered thickly.
“She wasn’t waiting for me like she said she would be. I can’t
find her anywhere.”
I was lying on the fly. Despite the hours I’d had to come up
with a cover story, my panic had been so intense that I’d failed
to script a plan for how to handle Patrick or even my parents.
But as the words left my mouth, I realized that Grace’s lie to
Patrick could help me, and for just a moment I felt relief.
Until, of course, I realized that the only way my lie would
actually help me was if we never found Grace, because if she
turned up in a hospital injured from her procedure, the truth
would be revealed.
I was already assuming that she was dead.
Subconsciously, maybe I already knew she was . I started to
feel sick all over again and I was sobbing before I even realized
there were tears in my eyes.
“Where…” Patrick shook his head, clearly trying to gain
some clarity. He looked from me to Beth, then from Beth to
the kitchen, then he pointed right at me. “Don’t you dare fuck-
ing move.”
He walked to the kitchen, and I heard him puttering around.
He ran the faucet. Soon I could smell coffee in the air. The fridge
door opened and closed. The bread bin opened and closed. And
soon he returned to the living area with a mug of coffee and a
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thick, dry piece of bread in his hand. He sat opposite me, gulp-
ing at the coffee between large, messy bites of the bread. The
coffee was steaming hot—far too hot to drink—but I could see
that Patrick was quite desperate to sober up, because he drank
it anyway, his eyes watering with every sip.
When he’d finally finished, he stood and walked toward me.
For just a moment I thought he was going to hurt me, and I made
a sound like a whimper. But he ignored me, instead bending
to take Beth from my arms and to walk her into her bedroom.
Then he returned, sat heavily opposite me and looked right
into my eyes.
“Tell me exactly what happened.”
The lie took on a life of its own after that. I told the truth
about the day’s events—only I swapped my role with Grace’s.
By the time I finished, he was sitting with his head in his hands.
“You’re sure this has nothing to do with your…” He looked
up, lip curled scornfully, and waved vaguely at my abdomen.
“Your business.”
“They didn’t even know I was meeting her,” I said thickly.
Patrick began to pace, tension in the heavy fall of his foot-
steps and the locked set of his broad shoulders. “I need to call
the police, but I can’t tell them what you were really doing be-
cause if they find her she’ll be charged, too. And Jesus Christ, I gave her the money! We could all end up in prison!”
He stopped abruptly, and shot me a withering glance.
“I can’t believe you’d get us involved in this kind of shit.
Grace is a good girl. And she was so determined to help you and
now look! Who knows where she is?” He ran his hand through
his hair, and then puffed out a frustrated breath. “I don’t even
know where to start.” He stopped pacing abruptly, then turned
to me again. “You’ll have to stay with the children. I’m going
to go look for her.”
“No,” I protested, standing. “I know where she was last time
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I saw her. I should be looking for her. I don’t know the first
thing about children, so you need to—”
“It’s time to stop playing games, Maryanne,” he said, cut-
ting me off. “I know you live in some fantasy world where you
think you can do anything a man can do, but this is the real
world. This is our lives you’ve thrown into chaos. You’ll do as I tell you to do!”
He slammed the door as he went out, and I was left sitting
alone in their dingy little house, and the hours began to drag
past me.
I didn’t know if my sister was dead or alive, but her ghost
haunted me in those hours. Her scent was in the air, and her
style was in the sparse decor, and it was her books on the wooden chest they used for a coffee table and her hands that had last touched the television set. Her life didn’t seem like much to me,
but in my terror and my grief, I had my first taste of humility.
Grace had struggled and she’d suffered, but she’d loved her
children and somehow, she’d loved Patrick, and those aspects to
her character that I had shrugged off as a “waste of a life” were
the very things that gave her life worth and meaning.
I couldn’t sleep, but I was too tired to keep my eyes open,
so after a while I lay on the couch and I gave in to the pull of
exhaustion to close my eyes. This made my anxiety so much
worse, because without visual distraction, all I could do was let
god-awful scenarios play out in my mind. But I couldn’t prop
my eyelids up, and so I lay there awake and let myself feel the
sheer terror of my situation.
When Patrick came home at dawn, that’s where he found
me; lying on the couch, wide awake and shaking with grief and
shame. When I opened my eyes, I saw that he was alone, and I
knew for sure then that my worst fears had come true.
Patrick went to Mrs. Hills’s house first thing the next morn-
ing and called the police, and two officers came about an hour
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later. They sat in Patrick and Grace’s living room, one on the
threadbare armchair, one on the end of the sofa beside me. When
they asked us what happened, Patrick looked at me, and I spun
the lie out further.
Shopping in the city. She went to look at shoes. I went to the
diner
to get a table for lunch. Separated. She never came back.
Patrick corroborated the story in dull, flat tones.
It was evident from the first moment of that interview that
the police had looked around the ragged house, seen the four
tiny children squabbling at the kitchen table, smelled the stale
alcohol on Patrick’s skin and assumed that Grace had decided
to take herself on a little vacation. They assured us she’d turn
up sooner or later, and advised us “not to worry too much” in
the meantime.
I went back to Mrs. Hills’s house as soon as they left and called
the phone number scrawled on that now-tattered piece of paper.
I was entirely unsurprised when it rerouted to the operator.
“Hello, the number you’ve dialed has recently been discon-
nected,” the operator said brightly.
“Can you tell me who the number belonged to?”
“Of course I can’t, ma’am. I don’t have access to that infor-
mation. Can I route you elsewhere?”
“No,” I said hollowly. “No, thank you.”
She was just gone—disappeared. When that man put the
blanket over my sister in the backseat of that car, he didn’t just
hide her. He erased her.
I took Dad’s car and drove to my parents’ house after that, but
I’d forgotten all about the promise I’d made—I had told Mother
I’d be home in time for dinner. Father sat up all night, and when
I opened the front door that morning, the look of sheer relief on
his face was a punishment in itself. I was often hard on my par-
ents for their focus on money and reputation, but that day was
a vivid reminder that they did actually feel a depth of love for
us. If I had forgotten that truth until I saw how happy he was
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to see that I was safe, I was entirely certain of it by the time I’d
finished explaining that they’d been worried about the wrong
daughter entirely.
Shopping in the city. She went to look at shoes. I went to the diner
to get a table. Separated. She never came back.
Mother stopped me halfway through my explanation so that
she could fetch a container of pills from the kitchen, and after
that appeared numb with some combination of medication and
fear. Father seemed to be on a roller coaster of emotions, and as
soon as I’d finished spinning my story, he snatched up his keys
and sprinted to the car to go look for her in the city.
For the first few days fear was a buffer. It insulated us from
the real world and from each other. Father took off work at
the bank, and both parents were soon lingering at Patrick and
Grace’s house, apparently still convinced that she was going to
walk through the door at any given moment. Father went out
and purchased three stretcher beds so we could all try to sleep
there, and we jammed all four kids into one of the bedrooms
so we could set the stretcher beds up in the other.
I slept in short spells. I’d drift off then wake up and leap out
of bed, convinced I’d heard her coming in the front door. The
children cried constantly, especially sweet little Bethany, and I
spent much of those early days trying to console them with hugs
that didn’t feel at all natural to me.
“You’re hurting me, Aunt Maryanne,” Tim protested at one
point. The next time I hugged Ruth, I was apparently too gentle,
because she leaned back and stared at me in disgust.
“Cuddle me,” she said, frustrated. “Properly. Like Momma
cuddles me.”
My parents were no help at all, although they tried their best.
They spoke to the children as though they were adults, and the
children reacted by avoiding them at all costs. I knew that a big
part of their distance from the children was self-inflicted due
to their stubborn disapproval of Grace and Patrick’s life choices.
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But my heart ached when I saw my mother watching with a
confused, hurt expression when the children came to me for
comfort, not her.
“They hardly know us,” she said at one point, her chin wob-
bling. “But they don’t know you, either, and you’re not exactly
the most maternal stranger they’ll ever meet. Why are they so
willing to come to you for a cuddle when they’ll barely speak
to me?”
“I don’t know,” I lied, because it was obvious that my moth-
er’s cool, formal engagement with the children terrified them.
But she had always been that way, and she was hardly likely to
change her mannerisms anytime soon, so there seemed no point
explaining the problem to her, especially when she was already
so distraught over Gracie.
Patrick, too, was in a fog, walking around as if he was half-
asleep, barely reacting when the children spoke to him…not re-
acting at all when they asked after Mommy. Father snapped at
him about that, and Patrick stared back at us with hollow eyes
as he explained that he just didn’t know what to say.
I’d felt confused and I’d felt guilty since Grace went missing,
but her disappearance seemed to have broken Patrick entirely and
it was an awful thing to see, even in a man I had long despised.
“I think you should try to explain to the kids what’s going
on,” I whispered to him later, when my parents were out of
earshot.
“I can’t,” he said, and his eyes filled with tears. “I just can’t.”
I took the children out to the backyard after that. I sat them
in a little semicircle on the grass and I sat right there on the grass
with them, heedless of stains on my beige cigarette trousers.
“I need to explain something to you all,” I said. I scanned
their confused little faces and blinked hard, determined not
to cry in front of them. Timothy’s gaze narrowed on my face.
“Mommy is lost. We don’t know where she is, but we’re try-
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ing to find her. We all need you to be good little boys and girls
until we do. Any questions?”
Tim’s suspicious gaze cleared. The skin on his cheeks paled,
but he didn’t say a word. Jeremy reached for Ruth’s hand. Beth
looked from her siblings to me, then burst into noisy tears. Be-
fore I could comfort her, Tim stood, shot me a glare, then slipped
his arm around her shoulders and led her away.
Days soon became weeks, but life couldn’t remain paused
forever and we fell into something of a routine. My parents and
I would all climb out of our “beds” when the children woke.
Mother and I took turns preparing breakfast, and then dressing
the children and sending them into the backyard to play. Fa-
ther and Patrick would pull out the street directory and agree
on a plan, then
each would go to their designated section of
the city to show a photo of Grace around and to ask if anyone
had seen her.
Mother made trip after trip to the department store in search
of items to freshen the place up, as she put it, returning each af-
ternoon with bags or boxes or deliveries of furniture and knick-
knacks. I couldn’t help but wonder if we’d have been in this
situation if Mother had paid such close attention to Grace’s com-
fort and safety at any point over the recent years that had passed,
but I couldn’t discourage my mother’s shopping sprees. I needed
to be alone in the house during the day.
While the children played in the backyard, I searched high
and low for Grace’s notes. It did seem likely to me that she’d
hidden them somewhere in her cleaning supplies or even the
kitchen—after all, she said she’d left them in the last place Pat-
rick would think to look. At first, I was optimistic—the house
was small; there were only so many places she could have hid-
den them…but the days began to pass, and I had checked and
double-checked every conceivable spot. I considered so many
possibilities. Had Patrick found them already? Had my parents
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stumbled upon them? That seemed unlikely, too. They wouldn’t
have called the police, but they’d have certainly let me know
about it. I decided the letters must still be there somewhere, only
hidden in a place I hadn’t thought to look.
I had to keep searching, just in case—I had no option to stop.
Besides, searching for the notes and keeping busy with the chil-
dren were effective ways of prolonging the immense grief and
shame I knew would bury me the minute I let myself be still.
In the second week Father arranged for the telephone to be
connected, and then he returned to work. I called Professor
Callahan and explained my situation.
“The week after your grandmother died!” He clucked his
tongue. “What rotten luck. Take another few weeks.”
Mother’s days at Grace’s house became shorter and shorter
over the third week. And then Patrick’s boss Ewan came to the
house, his hat in his hand, muttering something about needing
Patrick at a building site.
Patrick, who was spending his days driving around the city
searching for Grace and his nights sitting up pouring over maps
