Still Missing

by Chevy Stevens

  SESSION FOURTEEN

  Sorry I missed the last couple of sessions, but I really appreciate how understanding you were when I canceled, and I have to say, it sure surprised the shit out of me when you called last week to see how I was doing—didn’t know shrinks ever did that. It was nice.

  After our last session I needed to retreat for a while. Looks like I finally hit the depression stage—or actually, it hit me. And not with some gentle tap. Nope, that bitch hauled off and knocked me to the ground, then sat on me for good measure. I’ve never talked about my feelings around my baby’s death before—cops just want the facts, and I refuse to discuss it at all with reporters. Most people know not to ask about her, I guess people still have some sensitivity, but once in a while a dumbass reporter steps over the line.

  Sometimes I wonder if people don’t ask because it doesn’t occur to them that I might have loved her. When I’d just got back home and was staying at Mom’s, I overheard her and Aunt Val whispering in the kitchen one afternoon. Aunt Val mentioned something about my baby, then Mom said, “Yes, it’s sad she died, but probably for the best in the end.”

  It was for the best? I wanted to storm in there and tell her how wrong she was, but I didn’t even know where to begin. With the pillow clamped against my ears, I cried myself to sleep.

  I feel like a hypocrite, letting everyone believe he killed her and I’m the innocent victim—all the while knowing it’s my fault she died. And yes, you and I already talked about this on the phone, and I liked that article you e-mailed me about survivor’s guilt. It made sense, but I still thought, How nice for the people this applies to. It doesn’t matter how many books or articles I read, I’ve already tried and convicted myself for not protecting her.

  I tried writing my baby a letter like you suggested, but when I got out my note pad and pen, I just sat at my kitchen table and stared at the blank page. After a few minutes, I looked out the window at my plum tree and watched the hummingbirds hover at their feeder, then I stared back at the page. All those thoughts I had about her being a monster when I was first pregnant ate at me—did she feel them in my womb? I tried to focus on my happy memories of life with her and not how she died, but my mind wouldn’t cooperate, it just kept going over and over that night. Finally I got up and made myself a cup of tea. The goddamn note pad and pen are still sitting there. “I’m sorry,” just doesn’t seem to cover it.

  For the first few days after our last session, I didn’t do much but cry. It didn’t even take anything in particular to set me off. Emma and I could be walking in the woods and the pain would hit me so hard I’d be doubled over with the sheer force of it. On one of our walks I heard what sounded like a baby crying, but when I whipped around on the trail, I saw it was a baby crow up in a fir tree. Next thing I knew I was lying in the middle of the trail, hands clawing into the dirt, sobbing into the earth, with Emma trying to shove her nose into my neck and wash my face.

  As if I could outrun my pain, I sprinted for home, and the feel of my feet thudding against the earth felt right and solid. The jingle of Emma’s collar as she ran in front of me brought back memories of us jogging together in the past, another thing I’d forgotten I enjoyed. Now I run every day. I run until my body is coated in sweat and my only thoughts are of my next breath.

  Luke called a week after our last session—he used to leave messages asking me to give him a call if I felt like it, but I didn’t return them. He stopped leaving the messages but he still called at least once every couple of weeks even though I never picked up the phone. It’s been about a month since the last call, just before I saw him with that girl, and I didn’t think he’d try again.

  When the phone rang, I was down in my laundry room and I had to run around to find the cordless. As soon as I saw his number, my already racing heart hit overdrive, and I almost set the receiver back down in the cradle, but my finger was on the talk button and he was saying, “Hello?” before I realized what I’d done. Then I didn’t realize I hadn’t responded until he said, “Annie?”

  “Hey.”

  “You answered. I didn’t know if you would…” He paused and I knew I should say something, something that sounded friendly, something that said, I’m glad you called.

  “I was doing laundry.” Jesus, I might as well have told him I was in the bathroom.

  “Did I interrupt?”

  “No, I mean yeah, but it’s okay. It can wait.”

  “I saw you a few weeks ago and I wanted to call then, but I didn’t know if you’d want me to.”

  “You saw me?”

  “You were just leaving the grocery store, I tried to catch up to you but you were moving too fast.” My face burned. Shit, he did see me leave the store.

  I waited for him to say something about the girl but when he didn’t, I said, “Really? I didn’t notice you. I just stopped to get something in a hurry, but the store didn’t have it.”

  We were both silent for a few beats, and then he said, “So what are you doing these days? I keep expecting to see your signs in someone’s yard.” I fought the urge to be mean and say the last sign I ever had in someone’s lawn was at the open house where I was abducted. I knew he hadn’t meant to hurt.

  “You might have a long wait.”

  “I miss driving by them—your four-leaf clovers always made me smile.” I’d thought I was so clever when I put four-leaf clovers on my signs, business cards, and car door. My logo was, “Annie O’Sullivan has the luck of the Irish.” Luck was my whole damn marketing campaign. Now, that’s irony for you.

  “Maybe one day—or maybe I’ll do something else.” Like throw myself off a bridge.

  “You’ll be successful whatever you do, but if you ever get back into it, you’ll be right up there again in no time. You were so good at it.”

  Not as good as I’d wanted to be, not as good as my mom thought I should have been—the entire time I was in real estate she showed me the ads for every other Realtor in town and asked why I didn’t get that listing. And I wasn’t as good as Christina, who was one of the main reasons I got into real estate in the first place. After high school I had a series of shitty jobs—waitress, cashier, secretary—but then I got one I liked, working in the back room of a newspaper creating ad layouts. There wasn’t any money in it, though, and by the time I was in my later twenties I was tired of being broke. Especially when Christina and Tamara made killer money, which Mom kept pointing out, and hell, I wanted to drive a nice car too.

  “I’ve been seeing a shrink.” Man, first the laundry, now my therapy—all I’d wanted to do was stop talking about real estate.

  “That’s great!” Yeah, now I can pee more during the day, I can actually eat when I’m hungry, and up until I had to talk about my dead daughter, I’d gotten that whole closet-sleeping thing down to a couple of times a week. Wasn’t that great? But I choked back my bitter words—he was just trying to be nice, and who the hell was I kidding? I did need a shrink.

  “You still there?” And then with a sigh he said, “Crap, I’m sorry, Annie. I’m saying all the wrong things, aren’t I?”

  “No, no, it’s not you, it’s just, well, you know…stuff. So how are things going at the restaurant?”

  “We have a new menu. You should come in sometime? Customers seem to like it.”

  We talked for a while about the restaurant, but it felt like having one of our old conversations through a fun-house mirror—everything was distorted and neither of us knew which door was the safe one. I opened an unsafe one.

  “Luke, I never said—and I know I should have before now—but I’m really sorry about the way I was to you when you first came to the hospital. It’s just that—”

  “Annie.”

  “The guy who took me, he’d told me things, and…”

  “Annie—”

  “I didn’t find the truth out until later.” When I kept refusing to see Luke, Mom wanted to know why. Then she told me not only did Luke not have a girlfriend, he actually held fund-raiser
s for searches at his restaurant with Christina right up until a week before I came home. Mom also told me the police questioned him for a few days, but he proved he was at the restaurant when I was abducted. She said that even after they let him go, a lot of people still treated him like he had something to do with it.

  I remembered my reaction when The Freak told me Luke had moved on with another girl—while he’d actually been accused of hurting me and then kept trying and trying to find me. The least I could do was agree to see him.

  I said, “But then I made such a mess of the visit.”

  “Annie! Sshhhhh, it’s okay—you don’t have to do this.” But I did.

  “And then when you saw me at Mom’s…” I didn’t even know how to begin to explain what happened there. Only out of the hospital for two weeks, I was napping in my old room at my mom’s when I heard voices in the kitchen and stumbled out to ask her and Wayne to keep it down.

  Mom’s back was to me as she stood at the stove with a big pot of something in front of her and a man next to her. The man, whose back was also to me, bent down as she fed him something from a spoon. I began to back out of the room, but the floor squeaked. Luke turned around.

  Distantly I heard Mom say, “Good, you’re up just in time! Luke was just tasting some of my Spaghetti Surprise, and he wants the recipe for his restaurant. But I told him, if he wants it, he’s going to have to name the dish after me.” Her husky laugh filled the air already heavy with oregano, basil, tomato sauce, and tension.

  Luke’s honest face had been one of the things I’d loved about him, and now it paled with shock. He’d seen me in the hospital, and I’m sure he’d seen my photo in the paper, but I’d lost more weight and in Wayne’s old tracksuit I probably looked even thinner than I was. My eyes were ringed by dark circles and I hadn’t washed or brushed my hair in days. Of course, Luke looked even better than I remembered. His white T-shirt set off the tan on his forearms and the muscles in his chest. His dark hair, longer than when I was abducted and perfectly tousled, shone in the kitchen’s bright lights.

  “I brought you flowers, Annie.” He waved a hand toward a vase on the counter full of roses. Pink roses.

  “I put them in water for you, Annie Bear.” Mom was looking at the roses, eyes narrowed—slightly, not enough for anyone else to see, but I know my mother. They had been measured against her own roses and found wanting.

  I said, “Thanks, Luke. They’re pretty.”

  For a few seconds that felt like hours, the only sound in the kitchen was the bubbling of the sauce on the stove, then Wayne swaggered in and thumped Luke on the shoulder.

  “Luke! Great to see you, boy. You staying for dinner?”

  Mom, Wayne, and I looked at Luke as a flush rose in his face. He looked at me and said, “If Annie—”

  “Of course Annie wants you to stay,” Wayne said. “Shit. Do the girl good to have some friends over.” Before I could say anything one way or another, Wayne had his arm around Luke’s shoulders and was leading him out of the kitchen. “Let me get your opinion on something….”

  Mom and I were left staring at each other. “You could have warned me he was here, Mom.”

  “And when was I supposed to do that? You never leave your room.” She wobbled slightly and braced a hand against the counter.

  Now I saw it—Mom’s face wasn’t just glowing from the heat of the stove. Her eyelids drooped slightly and one—the right one, as always—drooped lower. My eyes found what they were looking for behind the container of pasta but within reach, a glass of what I knew would be vodka.

  I’d noticed that Mom’s predilection for “blurriness” seemed to have achieved new heights in my absence. After I’d been home for only a couple of days, I surfaced out of my bedroom when I smelled something burning. I discovered a batch of what I think were peanut butter cookies in the oven and Mom passed out in front of the TV, where they were replaying an interview with me—taken when I was just released and shouldn’t have been talking to anyone. I had turned my face to the side so my hair fell like a curtain and shielded me from the camera. I turned the TV off.

  Her pink robe—or, as she would say in a really bad French accent, her peignoir—gaped, revealing the skin of her neck and the upper swell of her small breasts. I noticed that her skin, always her pride and joy, although there weren’t many parts of her body she didn’t consider her pride and joy, had begun to turn crepey. In her hand she gripped a vodka bottle—my first sign things had changed; she used to at least mix the stuff. She must have just fallen asleep, because the cigarette between her full lips was still burning. The ash at the end was over an inch long, and while I stood there it quivered, fell, and landed on her exposed chest. Transfixed by the cigarette cherry glowing closer to her lips, I wondered if she’d even wake up when it began to burn her, but I gently removed it. Without touching her, I leaned over and blew the ash from her chest, then threw the cookies out and went back to bed. I figured her drinking would abate some once I’d been home for a while.

  Now, standing in her kitchen, she spotted my eyes on the drink and moved to stand in front of it. Her eyes dared me to say anything.

  “You’re right. Sorry.” It was just easier.

  Not able to think of a graceful way to get out of it, I soon found myself helping bring dinner out to the table while trying to avoid Luke’s eyes. His hands reached to take a hot bowl from me and I remembered those hands on me, then I remembered The Freak’s hands on me, and I dropped the bowl. Luke’s quick reflexes caught it right before it hit the table, but not before Mom noticed.

  “You okay, Annie Bear?”

  I nodded, but I was far from okay. I sat with Luke across from me and pushed the pasta around on my plate. I was all too aware of the clock above my head telling me I wasn’t allowed to eat at this hour, and my empty stomach curled in on itself.

  During dinner my stepdad was trying to tell Luke all about his latest business idea when Mom interrupted to ask Luke whether he noticed her use of fresh parsley in the garlic bread she’d baked herself. Oh, and did she mention the parsley was from her own garden? Wayne got another two sentences in, then paused to take a mouthful. Mom was off and running. She explained the finer points of creating the perfect spaghetti sauce, which seemed to involve her touching Luke’s arm every twenty seconds and smiling up at him encouragingly when he asked questions.

  After everyone else’s plates were empty there was a pause in the conversation as they all focused in on my still-full plate. Then Wayne said, “Annie’s doing much better.” We all stared at him and I thought, Compared to what?

  Luke said, “Lorraine, that was amazing, and you’re right, ours at the restaurant doesn’t even come close.”

  Mom tapped his arm and said, “I told you, didn’t I? If you’re nice to me I might show you a few of my tricks.” Another throaty laugh.

  “I’d be honored if you’d share your recipe with me, but right now I’d like a few minutes alone with Annie, if that’s okay?” He turned to me, but the thought of being alone with Luke had frozen my blood in my veins and apparently my lips, because they couldn’t seem to form the words, No, it’s not okay, it’s really, really not okay.

  I wasn’t the only one caught off guard. Mom’s and Wayne’s heads rose up in tandem like puppets on a string. Mom’s hand had been resting on Luke’s arm. She pulled it back like she’d been burned.

  “I guess I’ll just start cleaning up the kitchen, then.” When no one moved to stop her, she pushed her chair back so fast it scraped the linoleum and she grabbed a couple of plates. Wayne got up to help, and after they were in the kitchen I heard him say something about giving the kids some privacy while he and my mom went outside for a smoke. Her muffled answer didn’t sound happy, but soon I heard the kitchen door open and shut and both of their feet on the outside deck. For a quick second Mom peeked in the sliding glass door that opened from the dining area to the deck, but when I caught her she moved out of sight.

  I continued to twirl my s
paghetti with my fork. Then Luke bumped my foot under the table with his and cleared his throat. My fork dropped with a clang onto my plate, splashing tomato sauce on me and, worse, on his white shirt like a spray of blood.

  I leapt up to grab a paper towel, but Luke leaned over and gripped both my arms.

  “It’s just spaghetti sauce.” I stared down at his hands wrapped around my arms, then tried to pull away. He released them instantly. “Crap. I’m sorry, Annie.”

  I rubbed my hands up and down my arms.

  “Can I not touch you at all?”

  My eyes blinked desperately to hold back the tears, but one broke free when I saw the answering shimmer in his own eyes. I sat back down with a thump.

  “I just can’t. Not yet….”

  His eyes pleaded with me to explain it to him, to share my feelings as I always had, but I couldn’t.

  “I just want to help you through this, Annie—I feel so damn useless. Isn’t there anything I can do for you?”

  “No!” The word came out angry-sounding, mean-sounding, and his face flinched like I’d hit him. There was nothing he could do, nothing anyone could do. It was that very knowledge that made me hate him in that second, and hate myself for feeling that way in the next.

  His lips curled into a rueful smile. He shook his head and said, “I’m a real dumbass, aren’t I? I just thought if we talked, then I could understand—”