I shivered and pulled the blanket tighter around me. At least I knew the police hadn’t found anything worrisome about Katya’s disappearance. But as I turned and tossed, the old fears crept in. What if the cops didn’t know about her boyfriend’s temper? What if he’d learned about Jacuzzi Guy and flipped? Did the police even know about either of them? I pushed the covers back and sat up for a second time tonight. I had to find out when exactly she’d disappeared. The missing-student alert hadn’t been posted until a week after she and I were at the club. Maybe I was driving myself crazy for no reason. I turned on the light and grabbed my phone from the nightstand. How could I not have thought about it until now?
My back propped against the wall with my pillow, I opened Facebook and searched for Katya Dimitrova. I scrolled through the long list, scrutinizing each photo. It was a rather common Bulgarian name. There were also accounts in Russia and Ukraine. I kept scrolling down with my thumb but couldn’t recognize Katya on any of the profile photos. I gave up before reaching the end. Maybe I’d have better luck on Instagram.
Katya was fifth on the list of users with her name. Her profile photo was a stunning close-up of her in a coffee shop, although a quarter of her face was out of the frame and the background was slanted at a sharp angle. She hadn’t exactly aspired to originality with her user name, @BGgirl, where BG of course stood for Bulgaria. I clicked on her feed and the screen populated with a patchwork of square images. She’d been a regular, posting a few times a day. But—as I’d feared—her last one was from Saturday night, more than a week ago.
I stared at the photo of the two of us on the swing in Mehanata. Our faces a bit distorted from the close-up and the lack of light. But our eyes were alive with laughter. Katya’s free hand was lifted in greeting and the more I looked at it, the more I felt like she was beckoning me, imploring me to do something.
I put the phone down and before turning off the light, I reset my alarm for an hour earlier. If I skipped breakfast, I would have just enough time to stop by the police station on my way to work.
19.
KATYA
THEN
“I don’t get Halloween,” I told Josh. “Everyone dresses like a favorite character, right? Little boys want to be superheroes, little girls—princesses. And college girls want to be what? Cats? Sex objects? The other night, on campus, I ran into girls dressed as sexy M&M’s, sexy beer cans, and at least a dozen cats—any excuse to bare legs and boobs. At least college guys go with funny or stupid or I’m-above-it-all hipster costumes.”
There was a suggestion of a smirk on Josh’s face as he asked, “What were you?”
“A Freudian slip,” I said proudly, and told him how I’d found a white lace slip in a vintage shop and had worn it over black tights and a black long-sleeve T-shirt. “I wrote on it with a sharpie: Ego, Id, Super Ego, Oedipal Complex.”
Josh laughed and I wanted to hug him. “It’s funny, right? Most of my classmates didn’t get it. Damian wasn’t impressed, either. But at least I wasn’t half naked, freezing my ass off. And I didn’t see another person who wore a costume even close to it.”
“I bet,” Josh said with a smile. “Maybe I should borrow it next year.”
“Shall I save you the heels, too?”
“Hm, that might be hard on my phobia of heights.”
We were both laughing now. I loved making Josh laugh. He would chuckle here and there when I said something funny, but he had never outright laughed like this or gone back and forth with me like we were a team. Like I was more than just one of his many patients.
Like I was special.
When you spend most of your life fearing that you’re this horrible, unlovable person, feeling special—even for a fleeting moment—is intoxicating. It was the drug I craved. Maybe that was why I liked older guys. They knew how to make me feel loved, adored. Like my father had when I was a kid. Every evening when he’d return from work, he’d pick me up and twirl me around the room and tell me that I was his “one and only Daddy’s girl.”
Tears filled my eyes at the memory and I tilted my head back to keep them from spilling. When I turned to Josh again, he was looking at me with a soft expression. “Have you been sleeping any better?” he asked. He said it like he cared, and that touched me.
I shook my head. I didn’t dare speak or I might start crying. There was something special in the room today, an intense warmth that was making me all gooey.
“You feel like talking about it?”
I shrugged. Truth be told, I felt like I would burst if I didn’t. But I no longer knew if I should do what I felt like doing.
“It might help,” he said.
I was gnawing on my lip, looking at the floor. Thankfully he didn’t claim to know that it would help. I hated it when people told me what I should do to feel better as if they knew shit about what I was going through. All these platitudes on social media. Time heals all wounds. Bullshit. Have you experienced all wounds to know? Or Life is a gift. Really? So why does it so often feel like torture?
“The nightmares you told me about. When did they begin?”
“I was eight,” I said, and lifted my gaze. “And I know why I have them, if that’s what you’re trying to get at.”
“You want to tell me?”
Again, he was giving me a choice. I appreciated the lack of pressure. The freedom to leave it for next time. And I was definitely tempted. Every fiber in my body was screaming run.
“Sure,” I said finally.
He smiled tenderly, encouragingly, like a poet beckoning his muse.
I looked up to the ceiling as if hoping for reassurance from my Roman friend. But the surface seemed white and empty today, ready to swallow me if I stared for too long. I turned back to Josh, and his gaze anchored me.
“I told you I had a brother, right? What I didn’t tell you is how much I hated him.”
I’d never told anyone about it. I’d never thought I would. But once I started talking, I couldn’t stop.
When my father died, I began, my sense of security was shattered and I clung to my mother, terrified that something might happen to her, too. But she couldn’t care less. Before I knew it, she’d brought her lover into our house. Ivan took Daddy’s chair at the table and his place in her bed. Worst of all, he took my mother. Seemingly overnight, she became sick, throwing up all the time. I was sure she was dying, that Ivan had poisoned her. I was five. My imagination was running wild. It got so bad that I wouldn’t let her leave the room without me. I would wrap my arms around her leg, and she had to walk, dragging me.
Finally, she figured it out and to reassure me, she told me the good news: I was going to have a baby brother or sister. The baby was growing inside her belly. That was why she wasn’t feeling well. Was it any surprise that I would hate whatever was making my mother sick? I was hysterical with fear when she went to the hospital to give birth.
She returned with the baby in her arms. “Come see your little brother,” she told me. “Isn’t he cute?” I felt like plucking the bundle from her hands and throwing it out the window. When she came to kiss me good night that evening, I scratched her face.
“I don’t remember that part actually,” I told Josh. “My mother told me about it. But I vividly remember seeing the baby for the first time. His name was Alexander. Alex for short.”
I swallowed. Looked at my feet.
My mother showed him off all the time. “Isn’t he the cutest baby you’ve ever seen?” she’d say to neighbors and friends and even strangers on the street. I thought things would get better when Alex got older, but they didn’t. He went from being “the cutest baby” to “the smartest kid ever.” The more my mother loved him, the more she seemed to hate me. She was upset with me because I wouldn’t let him touch my toys or because I wouldn’t play with him. I lay in bed at night wishing Alex would go away. Once and for all.
I l
ooked at Josh, held his gaze. “I didn’t wish Alex dead exactly. I just wanted someone to come and take him away.”
When Alex was three and I was eight, we went to a beach resort on the Black Sea. I loved swimming back then, maybe because my dad had taught me. I felt at peace in the water, my body relaxed as if I were back in his arms. One hot afternoon—I can still feel the burning sand under my feet—I was bored and said that I was going to the water. Alex started crying. He always wanted to do whatever I did. My mother looked up from her book and told me, as she often did, that I couldn’t go unless I took Alex with me.
“But he can’t swim,” I said.
“Of course he can’t swim. He’s three. You couldn’t swim when you were that age, either. Just take him to the edge and play with him.”
“But I want to swim.”
She told me that I could go again later and so I sighed and headed down, with Alex running behind me, a big victorious smile on his face. I tried to build him a sand castle but he kept stepping into it or kicking it. Soon, I was sick of playing that game. I knelt in front of him in the sand. “Do you want to build a really big fort?”
He nodded. His cheeks were crusted with dry tears. His curly blond hair was caked with sand and so was his blue swimsuit.
“Here, I’ll show you.” I started digging, piling the sand in front of me, smoothing it at the top. He joined me, his little hands, like a doll’s, striking hard but barely making a dent in the hole.
I got up. “Keep digging, I’ll be right back.”
“Where you going?”
I hesitated. “I’ll go look for seashells in the deep. For our fort. You keep digging.”
“I want to go.”
“You can’t swim.”
“I can.” He kicked sand in my direction.
“No, you can’t.”
We went back and forth like that; you know how kids are. Finally, I got tired of it. I stood up and went to the water, splashing my feet in the shallow part. He ran after me, crying, but I refused to turn. I knew he couldn’t swim, no matter what he said, so it wasn’t like I had to worry that he would follow me in. There were so many people around. Kids with inflatable tubes, bobbing in the waves, adults standing there talking or floating aimlessly. I jumped in, the cool refreshing water closing around me like a liquid embrace. I swam breaststroke toward the buoys like I used to with my dad but didn’t dare go all the way on my own and turned halfway, trying out my crawl on the way back.
I barely heard the screams through the splashing of my arms and legs. I switched to breaststroke again, keeping my head above water. That’s when I noticed the commotion. People had gathered on the beach. They were shouting. I saw my mother running.
I will never forget her face, the howling sounds coming out of her.
I rushed out of the water and made my way through the ring of people, my hair dripping, my arms prickled with goose bumps. I saw the guard first, on his hands and knees in the sand. The little boy he was trying to revive had on a blue swimsuit like Alex’s, the same yellow hair. Slowly, as if through a thick fog, it dawned on me—that little boy was Alex.
It wasn’t the first time my brother had been hurt. He would fall and scrape his knee and my mother would yell at me, “You see what you did! How many times did I tell you not to push him?” Or not to lift him. Or whatever it was that she thought I’d done to him. But as I stood there, watching the guard pushing down on Alex’s chest, I realized this time was different. Because this time Alex wasn’t crying. There were no pitiful tears, no sobs begging for our mom’s attention. And when the ambulance came and took Alex away—the way they’d taken Daddy—I knew that was really it.
My mother didn’t say a word to me. I would have rather had her scream at me that I’d killed her little boy than seen her stare into space, mute. There is no worse punishment than a mother’s silence. I don’t think she spoke to me for the rest of the year. She might not have spoken to Alex’s father, either, because Ivan left soon after the accident.
Eventually, she began talking again. She would hug me and tell me that it was just the two of us left.
“Every time she said it,” I told Josh, “it felt like a reproach. Like it was my fault. Which is what I already believed anyway.”
Tears were streaming down my face, and Josh handed me the tissue box.
“I’m so sorry,” he said when I’d finally quieted down.
“I know I didn’t kill my brother,” I said, looking at my hands in my lap. “That my mother shouldn’t have left a three-year-old kid with an eight-year-old. I understand all that. Of course. But you can’t argue with feelings. Every night I go to sleep with the same thought: if only I hadn’t gone into the water or hadn’t teased Alex that he couldn’t swim, he would still be alive and well.”
I blew my nose. Wrapped my arms around myself and stared at my shoes.
“Maybe if I had meant for him to drown, if I had taken him by the hand and dragged him into the water, maybe then I could have eventually forgiven myself, realizing that I’d been too young. That I hadn’t and couldn’t have known better. I would still have to live with the guilt, but it would be guilt over one bad decision. Which is not as horrible as living with the thought that you’re a bad person, period, and everything you touch turns to ashes whether you mean it or not. That’s absolutely terrifying because you have no power to change it.”
I looked at Josh.
“How can you atone for something you never meant in the first place?”
20.
LANA
NOW
Detective Robertson was the stereotypical clean-cut police officer: short, neatly combed hair, white shirt freshly pressed, brown jacket, and blue tie. He sat with his back erect and his chest thrust forward like someone who spent his time off pumping iron. His desk was in the back of a large cluttered room with about a half-dozen desks and twice as many file cabinets. Plainclothes officers were staring at computer screens, speaking on their phones, or leafing through folders. Nothing here resembled the high-tech ambience portrayed on CSI episodes.
The uniformed cop downstairs had already taken a preliminary report before sending me up. Robertson scanned it, fished out a yellow legal pad from under the piles of paper on his desk, and fixed his eyes on me. “Did your friend mention that she was going to take any trips?”
I shook my head. I was sitting on the edge of my chair, ready to bolt. Why the hell had I come? Angie was right. There was no way to explain my relationship with Katya without getting myself in trouble.
“How about that she no longer cared about school? Or that she was struggling under the pressure of classes?”
“She never really talked about school with me.” Of the three times total I’d spoken to her. But I wasn’t going to volunteer that information.
“Was she scared of someone?”
“She did mention that the guy she was seeing had a temper,” I said, and recounted my conversation with Katya.
Robertson took notes as I spoke, barely looking at his pad. “Do you know his name?” he asked. “From what we gathered she’d been seeing a bunch of guys.” He flipped his gaze upward as if to say, If you know what I mean.
“All I know is that he’s in his late thirties and looks like Tom Cruise.”
He jotted something down, then looked back to me. “Do you think she has a reason to want to disappear?”
“I can’t imagine. Why?”
He looked at the report again. “So you last saw Katya on the night before Mother’s Day. Is that right?”
“That’s correct.”
“Where exactly was that?”
I told him about Mehanata. How I’d left Katya there dancing with a stranger.
“And you haven’t heard from her since that Saturday?”
“She sent me a photo and a couple of texts after we parted. It was past midnigh
t, so I guess . . . technically, it was Sunday.”
“Do you still have them?” he asked, and I nodded. “Let me see.” He extended his hand.
I pulled my phone out of my purse and opened the thread with Katya’s texts, then handed it to him. I watched him as he read, my gaze lingering on the wide shoulders and bulging chest under his shirt. What was wrong with me? I was lusting after every man I came into contact with—first, the guy at the nightclub and now, the police detective. It must be all the hormones coursing through my body. Between the estrogen pills, the patches, and the progesterone shots, I was a walking chemical experiment.
He handed back my phone with a smirk on his face. For all I knew, while I was picturing him kissing me, he was imagining Katya in that rooftop Jacuzzi.
“Thank you. We’ll check all this out, of course, but so far all the evidence points toward voluntary disappearance.”
“What does that even mean?”
“Adults have the right to disappear if they wish,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “And they often do. Three years ago I worked the case of another Columbia student gone missing.”
I told him I’d heard about it.
“Right. So that girl turned up in Brooklyn. She’d rented a room, closed her social media accounts, and changed her phone number and bank account without a word to her family, her friends, or the school administration.”
“Why would anyone do that?”
He shrugged. “Cowardice, usually. I had another case—the wife reported her husband missing. Five years later, the guy resurfaced in Florida. Guess what? He had a new family there.”
Her Daughter's Mother Page 11
