by Wendy Walker
“Yes, of course, sweetheart,” Mrs. Martin said. “I always loved your cards.”
“But the rocks were so slippery. You couldn’t see it, this film of slippery stuff covering the rocks. Bill told me back at the house that day that the rocks are covered with diatoms, which are like algae. He told me after he’d stopped yelling at me because I fell on those rocks trying to catch up to him and I slid down a large one and into the surf. Even though it was low tide, once you go to the water’s edge, it got very deep very quickly, which is why you can fish there because the fish like to hide in the deep pockets between the places where the rocks stick out. I fell in and went under quickly. The current was so strong. I had no idea. You could not swim from any point off the island, so I had never been swimming and had never felt it before. When a wave came in, I got slammed against one of the rocks, and then when it went out, it pulled me with it and my head went under. And it was so cold because it was just early spring and the water never gets warm there anyway.
“Bill had to jump in to save me. I thought I was going to drown. The rock was too slippery for me to grab hold, so I just got slammed up and then pulled under like a rag doll. It was horrible. And then I felt his hand grab my arm. Bill had waded in from the other side, where he could stay standing, and he held on to this little tree that was trying to grow between the rocks, and then he grabbed me with the other hand. He held me while the water tried to pull me back under, and then when the wave came back in and pushed me, he used that force to bring me to his side and then up onto the rock. I lay there crying and gasping for air. Bill sat there staring at me, shaking his head with disapproval, but then he scooped me up and held me so I would stay warm.
“I don’t know why I told that whole story. The only important thing is to know that Bill would never have suspected I would make my escape there, by those rocks. And that made it the perfect place to meet Rick in his boat. We did it at high tide. He threw me a life jacket with a rope tied to it, and I put it on and got in that water, even though I could still remember almost dying there. I just closed my eyes and then let him pull me to the boat. He grabbed the top of the jacket and hauled me up until I was on the deck, shivering. He had dry clothes for me and a hat and a blanket. He drove the boat along the side you couldn’t see from the house and then he dropped me off up the coast, not inland where the harbor was, but definitely on the shore. His friend was waiting with the truck. I got in, and that was that. I think I told you the rest this morning.”
This story made my father cry because of the part about wanting Bill to be my father and it made my mother unnerved because she still could not understand how I did not know where this island was. She said we should wait until the examinations were complete before any more stories were told. She said this as if I were not in the room, but then she stroked my hair and kissed my forehead and told me, “Everything will be all right, sweetheart.”
My parents fought that day about where I should stay. My mother won. In spite of the excitement and stress that my homecoming had provoked, the irony of this did not escape me. I slept the first night in the guest room. My mother had turned our rooms into a study and a den. She said it had been too painful to see my things every day, so she put them all in the attic for a while and then finally gave them away to charities.
As I walked down the hallway, whose walls were now adorned with modern art, I remembered the second rude awakening I had in this house.
It happened the third weekend in April when Hunter was home from boarding school. He’d brought a friend whose name was Joe, and he was a junior like Hunter. Emma was a freshman. She had just turned fifteen.
On Fridays when it was Mrs. Martin’s weekend, Emma and I would try to make plans with our friends, even if we had to invite ourselves to the friend’s house. Sometimes Emma would let me sit on her bed and watch her pluck her eyebrows or put on makeup before she went out. And sometimes she would tell me things about her life because she had no one else to tell them to who wouldn’t gossip about her or judge her or try to steal her plan. On this Friday, we were staying home because Emma had a plan to make Joe her boyfriend.
I’m having Natasha Friar over because Hunter said she was hot and that will keep him busy. And while he’s busy with Nat, I’ll be busy with Joe.
Our mother and Mr. Martin had already left to go to the club for golf and dinner with their friends. They told us to be good and not to leave the house. Emma leaned into the mirror to finish putting on her mascara. I was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, thinking about her plan, and how clever she was, and how beautiful she looked when she put on her tight clothes and red lip gloss. I must have been too quiet, or maybe I stared so long that she started to feel my eyes burning a hole in her skin.
She stopped what she was doing and turned to look at me, one hand gripping the mascara wand and the other waving a finger at me. Stay out of the way, Cass. I mean it! You can have one drink with us but that’s it. If you mess things up for me, or Hunter, one of us will kill you!
Hunter and his friends arrived in a car service at 9:12. Nat had been at our house since 7:14 and was already drunk on Mr. Martin’s apricot brandy. Emma was too nervous to be drunk, though she’d made us both a fuzzy navel. I went upstairs to my room.
I don’t know what time it was when I came out of my room, because I had fallen asleep but then woken up. I felt unnerved, like I couldn’t get back to sleep until I knew if our mother and Mr. Martin had come home, and whether anyone else was asleep, and where they were all sleeping, and also what had happened with Emma’s plan. It’s strange to fall asleep after drinking and then to wake up and not know what’s going on outside your own door, in your own house. And so I went out, not with the intention of ruining Emma’s plan with Joe or Hunter’s plan with Nat, but just to get my bearings so I could go back to sleep.
From outside my room, I could see down the hall to the master bedroom. The door was closed and there was no light coming from the crack at the bottom. Hunter’s door was open and his room was dark, which meant he was downstairs in the TV room, probably, maybe with Nat. But across the hall, in the guest room, the door was closed and a light was flickering at the bottom.
I could tell you that I thought maybe someone had left it on and I needed to check. I could tell you that I was worried about Nat and thought she was in there, passed out with the light still on. I could tell you I thought the same about Joe, or the other couple Hunter had brought home. But none of that would be true. The truth is that I knew Emma was in that room, and although I had no need to open that door, I had an unstoppable desire to do it.
I will never forget what I saw in that room that night. Yes, Emma was having sex with Joe. She was on the bed and he was on top of her, between her legs, his face buried in the nape of her neck. And, yes, it was the first time I had ever seen people having sex, so it was shocking. But that image faded over the years. What lingered and became indelible was my sister’s face when she turned and looked at me. It was that expression, the one I tried to describe to my father and Mrs. Martin and the agents when I told them about how she looked at me from that window across the courtyard, like she was certain that what she was doing was the best thing anyone could ever do and that she was exactly where she was supposed to be, doing what she was supposed to be doing. That night, as I closed the door and went back to my room, where I waited for my nerves to settle, I was still a believer in Emma’s certainty. I remember thinking that she was always right—she said she would make Joe her boyfriend, and she had done just that.
But the next time Hunter came home for a weekend, he did not bring Joe. Emma tried to hide her disappointment. We went outside to smoke and get away from our mother and Mr. Martin. We were out by the pool house. Hunter told Emma she had made a fool of herself calling and e-mailing Joe when he never responded and obviously had just used her for the weekend. Emma called him an asshole. Hunter called her a whore. Emma told him Nat had said he didn’t know how to kiss. Hunter said Nat was a skank.
It went on like this for the entire cigarette until finally Hunter told her Joe had a girlfriend. Emma went quiet. Her face quivered but she did not cry—not then, anyway. Hunter was smiling as he put the cigarette out with his shoe. He seemed satisfied, as if he had just won a battle. Emma ran back to the house ahead of us, and as I walked back with Hunter, I could see his satisfaction fade. A war had begun in our home, and it would not end until the night we disappeared. Hunter had not wanted to defeat Emma, because defeat meant the war was over. And Hunter never wanted anything with Emma to be over.
Still—Emma had been defeated in that one battle. That knowing look on her face that night when Joe was on top of her did not mean she was right. In fact, she turned out to be very, very wrong about him and her plan to make him her boyfriend. That was the second rude awakening—the moment when I saw Emma defeated, when I realized that she could be defeated. I did not like knowing this. Not one bit.
* * *
A light from down the hall pulled me back from the image of Emma on that bed with Joe. My mother had come from her room. She seemed startled to find me still in the hall and not tucked away and sound asleep.
“Are you all right, sweetheart?”
She walked toward me, and I let her. She put her arms around me, and I let her. She smelled of face products and Chanel No. 5, and I will admit to feeling a warm current rush through my body. It was the same current I had felt that morning, only it had grown stronger. Loving our mothers never goes away, and I was surprised to learn this at that moment when I was having this memory of Emma and her defeat.
“Sweetheart, I think you’re confused about that night when you left. No more stories about Emma and that island until we get you checked out, okay? I think you might be having dreams or fantasies, and if you tell them something that’s wrong, then it could make things worse. Do you understand? You were in your room that night, Cass. After you and Emma had your fight. You were in your room when Emma left the house, not in the back of Emma’s car. Don’t you remember?”
Mrs. Martin was stronger than I had ever imagined, and now she was turning the tables on me, on my story, and I felt desperate because that meant we might never find Emma. The agents were already questioning why she had not escaped with me.
Still, even through my desperation and rage, I was that same victim I’d been as a child, the one who gave in to her extortion, who paid whatever price was set for her love and who let Emma draw fire so I could run for cover. I thought I’d built walls these past three years to protect myself from Mrs. Martin, but if I had built them, they were made of sand and they crumbled in her arms.
“The things you’re saying can’t be true, Cass. I’m so scared that something is wrong with your mind.”
I wanted to hate her for saying these things to me. But I couldn’t. I still needed to love her.
And so when she whispered one last thing in my ear, “I love you,” and when she tried to hug me tighter, I allowed this third rude awakening in, and I let her.
EIGHT
Dr. Winter
It was not easy to leave the house, to leave Cass. Abby was haunted by the fear that she would disappear all over again.
The fear was irrational. The state police had agreed to leave a patrol car at the top of the driveway, day and night, until the Pratts were found. Judy and Jonathan Martin would be there, and her father would be ten minutes down the road. But more than anything else, Cass had no reason to leave and every reason to stay. She was desperate to find her sister.
Still, on the rare occasions when optimistic thoughts had beaten their way into Abby’s consciousness, when she had allowed herself to imagine this moment when the Tanner sisters were found, this was not how it played.
They interviewed Cass for three more hours before Judy finally asked them to leave for the night.
“She’s not well. I know it!” Judy had spoken about Cass as if she had not been right beside her. “I would have known if Emma was pregnant. And if she was, I would have helped her. She knew that. You know how close we were. You did all those interviews. None of this sounds like my daughter!”
She had insisted that Cass have some rest, and she won out over and above the objections of Abby and Leo. Abby agreed to do a formal psychological examination the following day, and Judy agreed to take Cass to the doctor first thing in the morning with one of the forensic agents.
And that was that. The excitement had quieted with the mundane tasks of assignments and logistics. Field agents in New Haven, Maine and Alaska had begun their work. Leo went back to the city to get some sleep. And Abby went home.
She walked into her house the same way she did at the end of every day, dropping her keys in a small ceramic bowl shaped like a hippopotamus that sat on a table next to the sofa. Her niece had made it in kindergarten and sent it in the mail last Christmas, neatly folded into plastic Bubble Wrap. Her dog was soon upon her, his entire body wagging with anticipation of food and attention. She reached down and rubbed his ears.
Her house, the dog, the reminders of her family—they had all been here, waiting for her to return from this miraculous day. But all of it seemed indifferent, unchanged by the momentous event of Cass Tanner’s coming home.
Maybe because there were still so many questions. As much as Abby hated to admit it, Judy Martin was not wrong. Emma was not the kind of girl to let anyone tell her what to do, especially not with something this important, this intimate. Owen would have supported whatever decision she made, and Judy would have matched his generosity with something even grander just to prove she was the better parent. They were far more likely to fight over Emma’s child than make her get rid of it.
Maybe that’s what Emma feared—another fight that would never end.
Leo had pushed hard on every front to get something, anything, that would help them find this one island in the thousands of islands off the coast of Maine. In all the conversations with the Pratts and the boatman, the groceries and packages he delivered, the lobster boats and sailboats and motorboats all off in the distance—was there not one name of a harbor or a yacht club? Cass said she had tried to find out where they were. She’d asked questions; she’d sifted through garbage. The Pratts were very careful. And all she could recount from the boats were names she could see on the larger sails, Hood and Doyle and Hobie Cat. Abby could see her face as she said the words over and over: “I tried! Every minute of every day, I tried!” She said the island felt enormous to her, like everyone saw it and knew it, only they were never close enough to see her, or hear her. It had felt unique to her, this prison, and so she always imagined it would be easily found. She knew the town where she got in the truck. She had counted the minutes to Portland. Abby’s impression was that she was telling the truth.
Cass had also insisted that the story of that first year and her first attempt to escape were important, and so they had let her tell it. She said it explained how she came to understand how difficult it would be to leave, and why it took so long. She said it explained how she came to know that the boatman would eventually help her find her way home, but that it would take time. And planning. But the story would not be finished before Judy made them leave, so Abby arrived home with more questions than answers.
She went to the kitchen and fed the dog. Then she opened the fridge. She took out some leftover pasta and put it in the microwave. She felt sick and was hoping it was from hunger. She hadn’t been able to eat all day.
At a small table in the corner, she set down the plate and a glass of water. Then she pulled out her phone. There were three texts from Meg, which she’d answered dismissively throughout the day. She removed her sister from her thoughts and played the recording she’d made of the interview with Cass.
She started it where Cass had left off in the morning.
“I wanted to leave the morning after we arrived. I only slept for three hours and twenty minutes that first night and when I did, it was short, like an hour at a time, and then I would wake up in a panic. I hear
d the lobster boats—though I didn’t know what kind of boats they were at the time—they were trolling some time after the sun came up. It sounded like a faraway hum. I got up and looked out the window. I could see Emma in her room and I started to cry. She rushed out of her room and came to mine and sat on my bed. ‘I want to go home!’ I told her. That was when she told me she was pregnant, and that we couldn’t go home, at least not right away. She said Bill would take care of us and that we would have a good life there. I got very angry with her, I yelled at her and she yelled back, telling me she wouldn’t let me mess up her plan to have her baby.
“I already told you that in my mind I had to choose between Emma and home. And so I chose Emma.”
Judy barged into her story then. “But three years, Cass? You chose to stay for three years? Tell us why you couldn’t leave. You still haven’t explained it.”
Cass continued.
“It’s hard to explain. I think there are two reasons we stayed. First, while the days went by slowly sometimes, the years went by fast. There is something about living that close to the ocean, surrounded by the water, that changes time. Hours can pass just staring at the waves and feeling the wind on your face. And there is so much work to deal with the wind and the water, to keep it from ruining a house, especially without regular electricity.
“Second, there were the good things I’ve been trying to explain. Emma talked to me more and more. We became friends and I didn’t want that to end. Not ever. Sometimes I thought about how much I wanted to be home. But then there were these other things, like being close to Emma and how nice Lucy and Bill were to us. So there were these good things and the time passing so fast … but then the bad things started to come, after Emma had her baby.
“They wouldn’t let me near her when it was happening. She went to them first, in the middle of the night, because she was still very close to them and she trusted them. I didn’t even wake up until I heard Emma screaming. I could also hear Bill yelling at Lucy and Lucy yelling back like they were both scared and angry at the other for not making it easier. I thought she was going to die. I really did. There was so much screaming—and it was screaming from pain that was coming out of Emma. Like she was being tortured. And in between the screaming from pain, there was crying and sobbing from desperation because she knew it wasn’t over. And I couldn’t help her! I tried to go to her, but Bill pushed me out of the room, with both hands and this red face that looked like it was on fire. Emma yelled at me, too. She told me to leave because I would only make it worse. It went on for most of the night until finally it just stopped. I sobbed into my pillow because it was so terrible. Not being able to help her. Not being wanted for my help. And not knowing if she was even going to be okay.
