And Then She Was Gone

by Noonan, Rosalind

  Throughout grammar school, Lauren had been a highflier. Maybe not the most social kid. But Dan and Rachel had vested so many hopes in their oldest daughter, looking toward this day. Graduation day . . . but not for Lauren.

  No, Lauren’s day had been little more than a week ago, the sixth anniversary of the day she’d disappeared, when the grounds of Mirror Lake Junior High had been crowded with people, hundreds of them, assembling to honor the six-year mark of Lauren’s disappearance and continue the search for her. Messages like We will find you! and We love you, Lauren! had been attached to hundreds of balloons that the searchers had released to the sky, shouting: “Find Lauren!”

  Rachel would never forget the sight of those hot-pink balloons—Lauren’s favorite pink—rising into wide-open blue until they became small dots. It had been touching that so many people showed up for her, even six years later. They didn’t think Rachel was crazy. They believed she was out there, alive and waiting to be rescued.

  Dan still went looking every morning as he jogged along the paths that cut through the town’s parks and neighborhoods. Every six months the local television stations broadcasted images of Lauren: photos from sixth grade and computer renderings of how she would probably look now.

  Squinting over the graduates below, Rachel could see her down there, crossing the stage, her honey-blond hair streaming out beneath her mortarboard cap. If her hair hadn’t been cut in these past six years, there would be flaxen gold spilling over her shoulders and down the back of her royal blue graduation gown.

  Rachel could hear the principal calling her name . . .

  Lauren O’Neil.

  Would she be attending U of O, Dan’s alma mater, or Brown? Stanford or Northwestern? Lauren had been an excellent student, more interested in reading and learning how things worked than parties or boys.

  How high can you soar?

  Rachel pressed her lips together, trying to tamp down the swell of emotion. These days, the only things soaring were latex balloons. The memory of those fat pink balloons, swaying and rising, made her mouth go sour.

  She bit her lower lip and turned to Julia. “It’s hard to believe our babies are old enough to graduate from high school.”

  Julia’s eyes glimmered with compassion as she squeezed Rachel’s hand. “Hard to believe. Time really flies.”

  And sometimes it drags, second to second, day to day. Time was a race through molasses when you were waiting for your daughter to come home.

  At the podium Natalie Miller’s name was announced, and Rachel held her breath as she watched Russ and Trudy’s granddaughter cross the stage. The Millers were neighbors, two doors down. The police believed a van that had stopped in front of the Millers’ house had been used to abduct Lauren when she was walking home from school. One woman saw the van at the curb, its motor running. A plain white van, but the man who emerged was wearing a uniform.

  As if that made it all okay. Rachel still seethed over the way our society teaches us to trust a person in a uniform.

  “And I saw him carrying a package,” the woman, Allie Cotter, had insisted. “It was a delivery for the Millers. Just a deliveryman with a package.”

  Nothing out of the ordinary.

  Except that, when the Millers arrived home from their oldest son’s house in Bend, they were mystified by the brown paper package that contained no address, no postage, and no markings whatsoever. The package had been a cover, a way to park a van on Wildwood Lane and drive away without attracting attention. There was a slightly trampled section of the lawn. A section that might have been torn up by a digging squirrel. Had Lauren run to knock on the Millers’ door when she sensed danger, but then struggled with the abductor on the lawn? And somehow, without anyone seeing, he had managed to get Lauren into his van.

  Or at least that was how the theory went. Rachel refused to believe that her daughter would get into a stranger’s van without a fight, but there were other factors involved. Maybe he wasn’t a stranger. And it was too painful to think about the weapons an abductor could use to subdue a girl who fought him.

  Beads of sweat were forming on Rachel’s forehead, and she had to remind herself to breathe. Was the gymnasium hotter than usual? Was she suffering a hot flash at the age of forty-two, or was the heat because of her own voyage to the Inferno, the serpentine layers of hell surrounding Lauren’s disappearance?

  Julia leaned closer. “You okay?”

  Nodding, she swiped the back of one hand over her forehead and accepted a small bottle of water from Julia’s bag. Even tepid water was a relief in this hotbed of community. It helped Rachel focus, helped her remember the positive reason she had come, to celebrate the graduation of Julia’s daughter Nora.

  She took another calming breath and looked to her left to find people watching her, staring, contemplating.

  When she faced them, they glanced away, uncomfortable and nervous. Were they able to do the math and realize that her daughter should be graduating today, too?

  You should be here, honey. Rachel sent the message out the way most people transmitted a prayer to the heavens. Somewhere out there, Lauren was alive and receiving at least a flicker of telepathic activity.

  Like the flyers that shouted DON’T STOP BELIEVING! Rachel held on to the conviction that her daughter was alive. Sure, people thought she was deluded. Living in denial. Let them think what they wanted.

  Lauren was out there somewhere; Rachel knew that. She could feel it. And one of these days, she was going to come back to them.

  Chapter 2

  Sis’s foot twisted in the loose soil, and the pain that shot up her leg sucked her breath away. She braced herself against the hoe and used it to edge back, out of the dirt and against the fence, where she collapsed with a sigh.

  She closed her eyes and let the tears flow down her cheeks. Kevin would be mad if he found her crying, but he was off at the Portland Saturday Market right now, and the tears came automatically when she wrenched her bad leg. Bad because Kevin had made it that way. Even after all these years, six years of minding him most of the time, he still let her have it when he thought she was disobeying him.

  She shifted her leg, and winced. It still hurt, but she couldn’t let it slow her down. Kevin would be mad if he came home to an untended garden. Silly girl.

  She swiped at her cheeks and took a breath. No use in crying. Besides, it wasn’t so bad, out here in the sun. Using the hoe as a cane, she propped herself up, back on her feet. Testing the tool against the moist earth, she imagined herself pushing off the stick and bouncing over the fence like one of those pole vault guys.

  Just thinking of it made her smile. She would bounce over the fence and just keep bouncing from one green hill to another, bouncing into the deep blue sky.

  She had hopped the fence once, jumping from a nearby tree. It had been one of those hot summer days when the sun pounded down mercilessly from a clear sky, and all she had been able to think of was the cool gurgle of the little stream a few yards from their compound. The spring that ran over the rocks at the bottom of the hill had just enough water to cover your body in the summer. When Kevin had found her down by the creek, he had been real quiet as she had explained that she wasn’t breaking any rules. She hadn’t been running away, just cooling off. Later, back behind the fence, he had beat her hard and chopped down the poor little beech tree.

  The sun was hot on her head, and she wished she could slip into the river right now and wash her hair. “Not until Kevin gets back,” Sis said aloud. Sometimes, you needed to remind yourself of the rules. She was limping because she’d broken the rules.

  “You should know better,” Kevin had hissed. “I haven’t had to lay a hand on you for a long time. I thought you stopped trying to git away.”

  Because of Mac . . .

  She couldn’t leave her daughter behind, and even if they could have gotten away, who would take in a teen mother and her baby? She couldn’t risk it. It was her job to protect her baby.

  As pain flare
d in her ankle again, she could still see him, the metal wrench silhouetted over his head as he’d swung it up. And then down on her bad leg.

  The wound that was never allowed to heal.

  “That’s so you’ll remember the rules,” he had told her. It seemed like he’d told her that a thousand times.

  Kevin was a stickler for the rules. With a hack of the hoe, she flashed on the first time she had broken the rules, that day in the beach house when he had pushed her out to the edge of the jetty.

  Her knees still trembled when she thought of the icy shock of the stun gun and the long finger of boulders jutting out into the ocean.

  Sharp, slippery rocks. But Kevin didn’t care. She’d been eleven years old, and he had pushed her out on those rocks.

  The jetty was a long mound of boulders, some of them the size of coffins, many of them pointy and unforgiving. They were lined up at the edge of that beach, as if a giant had stacked his rock collection at the water’s edge. “How did these get here?” The magnitude of the rock pile, with seawater splashing over the jagged stones, had momentarily eclipsed the knowledge that he was mean and angry and hurtful, that she shouldn’t ask him any questions because she didn’t trust his answers anyway.

  “That’s the Army Corps of Engineers for ya. They come in here and build a wall of rocks on the beach and spend millions of dollars doing it.” He loved to show off that way, when he knew something.

  He was mad at her for telling him to mind his business and keep his hands off her. She had tried to slap him away when he’d followed her into the shower and put his hands on her private parts. She wrenched away, slashing at him with her fingernails, and he threatened her with the razor, telling her he could do much worse.

  He’d been waiting for her outside the shower with a stupid flowered dress for her to put on, along with a gray hoodie. And no panties. That was his way of making her feel uncomfortable and naked. She really wanted her underwear back, but she was too embarrassed to ask him for it. Without a word he had stuffed her into the back of the van and driven to the beach. The short ride told her that the house he’d locked her up in must have been close.

  When the van door opened at the beach, he greeted her with a cool smile. His hand held the stun gun, a black object that reminded her of Dad’s electric razor. Only the stun gun held a cold, electric sizzle that made a person curl up and die inside. She knew, because he’d used it on her in the Millers’ yard.

  He held it up to her, an angry squint in his eyes.

  “N-no!” She scooted back on the van’s rough carpet.

  “Then get out of the van, or I’ll zap you good.”

  She scrambled quickly and did as she was told. She pulled her hood up and walked along the packed sand that filled the center of the jetty.

  “Do not look around, and do not walk out of line, unless you want the shock of your life.”

  Knowing she couldn’t take another cold blue shock, she walked out toward the ocean. Were there people on the beach around them? She didn’t think so, not in this cold wind that slammed the water against the rocks, sending salt spray into the air.

  Where are we?

  She didn’t know. They didn’t walk past a sign, and she wasn’t allowed to look around. The jetty curled around one side of the beach and jutted out into the ocean for twenty or thirty yards. She imagined this would be a spot for fishermen on a calmer day, but it was isolated in today’s chilly June gloom.

  At the end, where the packed sand path ended in a ring of jagged boulders, she paused.

  “Keep going!”

  That gun . . . it jabbed her back. Painless, but if he turned on the electricity, she would collapse out here in the wind and ocean spray.

  And then what? Would he kick her body around and toss her into the ocean?

  No. No. Then he would lose power over her. He needed someone to kick around. Someone to yell at. This she knew. She was learning him, faster than he was learning her.

  Because he was wrong about her. He had brought her out here to scare her, and the ocean didn’t scare her at all. The roiling black water was mesmerizing, soothing in a dark sort of way.

  “I said go! Climb down on the rocks.” She left the sand path and scrambled forward onto the rocks, just as a wave snapped over the crest of stone and splashed them.

  “Goddammit!” Hearing him sputter behind her, she wanted to turn and run for help. Wouldn’t someone help her?

  But he had the stun gun, and the path was narrow. She would never get past him. There was no getting past him without getting zapped by the gun. Her nerves tingled at the memory of that terrible pain. Her whole body cramping up. Losing her balance and peeing her pants and hunching up while pain rippled her spine.

  No. She couldn’t risk the stun gun again.

  “Stop right there and take a look. Take a look at where you’re gonna end up if you act up again. Is that what you want? Here I’m giving you food and a warm, dry place to sleep and you thank me by crying and scratching like a mangy cat.”

  Lauren stared out over the dark sea, the roiling waves, shifting and spitting like the bathtub when she and Sierra used to churn it up.

  Maybe the ocean could be her escape.

  She imagined herself slipping into the black water and swimming away like Ariel, the Little Mermaid. Wouldn’t he be surprised when she slid under the surface of the water and never returned? Just like Ariel . . . or Harry Potter, when he grew gills for that competition. In strong, broad strokes she would swim straight down to the ocean floor, beneath the riptides and undertow. In the cold, inky darkness she would wait with her hair splayed out around her. Counting to one hundred . . . to one thousand, she would hide from him.

  “You got to learn that I’m in control. I’m in charge of you now. Do what I say and I’ll take care of you and feed you and make sure there’s a roof over your head. But step out of line . . . any more fighting and you get this.”

  Blocking out his words, she thought about diving into the water. Not the fantasy, but the reality. The water was dead cold. She wasn’t a good swimmer, and she didn’t have supernatural abilities. She would probably drown or conk her head on the rocks, and that wasn’t the point, was it? She didn’t want to kill herself.

  The point was to survive. Get away and get back to Mom and Dad and Sierra.

  A swell rose near the jetty. With a fierce, sudden strike it smacked over the rock where Lauren was standing. Water exploded in the air as the wave swarmed over the boulder, rising up to her knees and shooting up her legs.

  One second she stood there dreaming of escape, the next the water grabbed her like a fist around her ankles and yanked her legs out from under her. She went down, gasping and choking and groping for something to hold on to. The rock surface was slick and she began to slide.

  And then, he grabbed her.

  “Come on. I got ya.”

  She coughed up a mouthful of saltwater and let him help her up as the little kernel of realization stuck in her mind.

  He didn’t want to kill her.

  At least she had that going for her. At least, he wanted her to live.

  Chapter 3

  “I’m getting a little old for this. I’m going to be thirteen in a few months,” Sierra O’Neil told her father as they waited in the queue at the outdoor amusement park. She gave her head a toss, trying to get her side bangs out of her eyes without touching them, because every time you touched your hair, your fingers made it oily. She’d learned that the hard way.

  “Yeah, you’re an old lady,” her dad teased. “Next you’ll be telling me you’re giving up ice cream and burgers because you’ve gone vegan.”

  She knew he meant it as a joke, but it really wasn’t funny. Half the girls in her grade were vegan. Nobody wanted to think that they were eating an innocent animal with a cute face, and if you researched it online, everyone was at least a little bit lactose intolerant. Sierra bit her lips together as she scanned the antique car racetrack for familiar faces. Some of her fri
ends said they would be here. Where were they?

  “See that? The line is moving fast.” Dad nodded as they moved up. “Boondoggy’s is usually packed on weekends, but today, this is good.”

  “It’s pretty empty. Probably because half the town is at the Mirror Lake graduation ceremony.” Where Mom was.

  “Yeah, maybe you’re right. Lucky for us.”

  Sierra wanted to take a shot at Mom for choosing Mirror Lake High over this, but she knew Dad didn’t want to talk about Mom’s obsession. “It would have been your sister’s graduation,” she’d told Sierra last night. Her breath was wispy with forced patience, as if her composure was held together by a few flimsy stitches. That was the way Mom acted when it came to Lauren. Distracted, fragile, distant. Sometimes it hurt Sierra, and sometimes it pissed her off.

  Remember the daughter who is here!

  What about me?

  Am I invisible? Don’t I matter?

  She knew she mattered to Dad. Where Mom kept her focus on the missing person case from six years ago, Dan O’Neil kept a tight leash on Sierra. Way too tight, even if he was just trying to be protective.

  Like now, with his hand on her shoulder as they waited in line. Really, Dad, do you think someone is going to snatch me away from your side if you don’t hold on? She came this close to actually saying something, but she knew it would hurt him, and Dad was the only one who was trying, trying to move on and be a normal family.

  Normal meant making it through dinner without talking about new places to search.

  Normal meant going a whole month without conducting a search in one of the state parks or hosting a fund-raising 10K race to raise money and awareness for the Lauren O’Neil search and recovery effort.

  Normal meant watching one of Sierra’s soccer games from the sidelines without distributing DON’T STOP BELIEVING! flyers to parents and tucking them under every windshield wiper in the parking lot. Ooh, and if Sierra heard that song pumped up loud one more time, her eardrums were going to explode!