Lost

by Joy Fielding

  “I don’t think you were.”

  “I was actually angry at you for having worried?”

  “You were livid. How dare I call your friends! How dare I embarrass you like that! How could I involve the police? You were gone less than forty-eight hours! You’re a grown woman! A married woman, no less! What was the matter with me? Oh, you went on and on.”

  “Is it too late for me to apologize?”

  Her mother draped a protective arm around Cindy’s shoulder, hugged her to her side. “It’s never too late,” she whispered, kissing her daughter’s wet cheek.

  “You think this is payback time? God’s idea of poetic justice?”

  “I like to think that God has better things to do with His time.”

  “Do you think Julia could have eloped with some guy?”

  “Do you?”

  Cindy shook her head. When Julia spoke about getting married, she talked about Vera Wang dresses and a photo spread in People magazine. “It’s not her style. Besides, she broke up with her boyfriend.” She thought of Sean Banack. “You don’t think she was overly upset about that, do you? I mean, upset enough to do something stupid.”

  “Julia hurt herself over a man?”

  Her mother’s question was answer enough. “Then what’s happened to her? Where is she?”

  “I don’t know, sweetheart. I do know you need to get some sleep or you’re not going to be in any shape to yell at her when she comes home. Come on,” her mother urged, pulling down the covers on the other side of Julia’s queen-size bed. “Why don’t you sleep with me tonight? I could use the company.”

  Wordlessly, Cindy climbed into Julia’s bed, burrowing in against her mother’s side, her mother’s arm falling across her hip, as Elvis flopped down between their feet. The lingering aroma of Julia’s Angel perfume on her pillow filled Cindy’s nostrils. She closed her eyes, sucked at the scent as if she were a baby at her mother’s breast. When Julia comes home, Cindy recited silently, I’ll buy her the biggest bottle of Angel perfume they sell. When she comes home, I’ll get her a Gold Pass to the film festival, so she can attend all the galas. When she comes home, I’ll hold my tongue, hold my temper, hold my baby in my arms again.

  When she comes home, Cindy repeated over and over again in her mind, until she fell asleep.

  When she comes home. When she comes home.

  “MOM? GRANDMA?” Heather asked from somewhere above their heads. “What’s going on?”

  Cindy opened her eyes, saw Heather looming above her, the pull of gravity distorting her sweet features. Cindy pushed herself up against the headboard, rubbing her eyes as Elvis bounded over to lick her face.

  “My heavens, what’s that?” Cindy’s mother asked, as the dog poked his nose under the covers. “Get out of here,” she groused as Elvis’s long tongue flicked toward her lips. “He stuck his tongue in my mouth! Get away from me, you silly dog.”

  Heather shooed Elvis off the bed. “I didn’t know you were here, Grandma.”

  “I was in bed before you came home.”

  “I thought Julia was back.”

  Cindy felt her heart cramp. “No. I take it you haven’t heard anything.…”

  Heather shook her head. “Why are you sleeping in here?”

  Cindy and her mother shrugged in unison. “What time is it?” Cindy asked.

  “Almost nine o’clock.”

  “Nine o’clock?” When was the last time she’d slept till nine o’clock, even on a weekend?

  “What’s the matter?” Heather asked. “Do you have to be somewhere?”

  “No,” both women answered.

  “But I have a lot to do,” Cindy added quickly.

  “Like what?”

  Cindy brushed the question aside with an impatient wave of her hand. “Is Duncan still asleep? I need to talk to him.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “Where is he?”

  Heather shrugged. “Not here.”

  “Heather.…”

  “Look, Mom, I’m real sorry, but I don’t know where Duncan is every minute of the day.”

  “Really sorry,” Cindy and her mother corrected together.

  “What?”

  “It’s an adverb,” Heather’s grandmother explained.

  Heather nodded, backing slowly out of the room. “I think I’ll take Elvis out for his walk now, if that’s all right with the grammar police.”

  Cindy smiled. “Thank you, darling.”

  “I made coffee,” Heather said.

  “Thank you,” Cindy said again, marveling at her daughter’s easy grace. Even dressed in tight, low-fitting jeans and a navel-baring, candy-apple-red tank top, she somehow managed to look elegant.

  “She’s a very sweet thing,” her mother said after Heather had left the room.

  “Yes, she is.”

  “Like her mother.” She kissed Cindy’s forehead.

  Cindy felt her eyes fill with tears. “Thanks for being here, Mom,” she said.

  BY TEN O’CLOCK, Cindy had showered and dressed and was on her fourth cup of coffee.

  “You should eat something,” her mother advised.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You should eat something anyway. You have to keep up your strength.”

  Cindy nodded, irritation beginning to mingle with gratitude. While it was nice to have her mother here, to feel her love and support in this difficult time, Norma Appleton had an annoying tendency of taking up more than her fair share of oxygen. Prolonged exposure to her company rendered breathing increasingly difficult. Grown women had been known to run screaming from the room, overcome by intense feelings of suffocation. Was that how Cindy made Julia feel? As if there weren’t enough air in the room? “Don’t feel you have to stay here with me, Mom,” she said delicately. “I’m sure you have a million other things to do.”

  “What things?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s more important than this?”

  Cindy shook her head in defeat, finished the coffee in her cup, poured herself another.

  “You should eat something,” her mother said.

  Cindy pulled several crumpled pieces of paper out of the pocket of her gray sweatpants, glanced at the phone.

  “What’s that?” her mother asked.

  “Just some phone numbers I found in Julia’s room.”

  “Whose are they?”

  Cindy studied the numbers on the scraps of paper, tried willing them into familiarity. “I don’t know.”

  Her mother reached across the kitchen table, turned the pieces of paper in Cindy’s hand toward her so that she could read them, then repeated the numbers out loud. “Are you going to call them?”

  “Should I?”

  “Might as well.”

  “What’ll I say?” Cindy crossed the room in three quick strides, then lifted the phone to her ear, her fingers already pressing in the first of the numbers.

  “Start with hello.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” Cindy said as the phone was answered on its first ring.

  “Esthetics by Noelise,” a woman’s voice announced.

  “I’m sorry. What?”

  “Esthetics by Noelise?” the woman repeated, as if she were no longer sure.

  “Oh. Oh, I’m sorry. I must have the wrong number.”

  “No problem.”

  “Esthetics by Noelise,” Cindy told her mother, hanging up the phone.

  “What’s that?”

  “Where Julia gets her legs waxed.”

  “Try the next one.”

  The second number belonged to Sushi Supreme, the third to a local talent agency Julia was hoping to sign with. “Last one,” Cindy said, punching in the final set of numbers, listening as the phone rang four times before being picked up by voice-mail.

  “You have reached the offices of Granger, McAllister,” the taped message began. “Our normal hours of operation are from nine to five, Monday through Friday. If you know the extension of the person you wish
to speak to, you may enter it now. If you would like to access our company directory …”

  Cindy hung up the phone.

  “What’s the matter?” her mother asked, already at her side.

  “Granger, McAllister,” Cindy repeated. “Why do I know that name?”

  “A law firm?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” Cindy pictured the name written in broad strokes across the beige tile floor.

  When he first started working at Granger, McAllister, it was just this tiny firm.

  “They’re architects,” Cindy said flatly, hearing Faith’s voice.

  “What would Julia want with an architect?”

  “I have no idea.” I think Ryan has a girlfriend. Was it possible Julia and Ryan were involved? “But I’m damn sure going to find out.”

  The phone rang just as she was reaching for it.

  “It’s Julia’s line,” Cindy said, her finger hesitating over the key for line two.

  “Answer it,” her mother urged.

  Cindy took a deep breath, pressed the appropriate key, picked up the phone. “Hello.”

  “Julia, it’s Lindsey. I’m at The Yoga Studio. What’s taking you so long?”

  “I’ll be right there,” Cindy replied in Julia’s breathy whisper, then hung up the phone, her heart racing. “I’ve got to go.”

  “What do you mean, you’ve got to go? Where are you going all of a sudden? What are you doing?”

  Cindy didn’t answer. The truth was she had no idea what she was doing, or what she would do when she got to The Yoga Studio. She grabbed her purse from the front closet and was already at the door when the phone rang again. Her line. She turned toward the sound, Julia’s name freezing on her lips, as her mother picked up the phone.

  “It’s Leigh,” her mother said. “She’s calling to see if you know where I am.”

  Cindy opened the front door, swallowed a deep gulp of air. “Don’t tell her anything.”

  Her mother nodded understanding. “I’m sorry you were worried,” Cindy heard her say as she was closing the front door. “But something’s happened here. Julia’s missing.”

  TWELVE

  THE Yoga Studio was located in an old six-story building on the north side of Bloor Street just west of Spadina, across the street from a large grocery store and the central branch of the JCC. For some reason, in the last several years, this nondescript studio in an unfashionable part of town had become a favorite spot for visiting celebrities to unwind and work out, which was the main reason Cindy knew her daughter frequented the place. Occasionally Julia had regaled her mother with tales of stretching out beside the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Elisabeth Shue. One day, she’d vowed, other girls would be telling their mothers they’d worked out beside Julia Carver.

  There was nowhere out front to park, so Cindy spent almost fifteen minutes navigating the area’s frustrating arrangement of one-way streets before ending up back on the main road. Spotting someone pulling out of a space on the south side of Bloor, Cindy promptly executed an illegal U-turn, causing the driver in the car behind her to jam on her brakes, and eliciting a raised middle finger from the driver in the oncoming lane, a middle-aged man who pulled up beside Cindy’s tan-colored Camry as she was backing into the freshly vacated spot and sat on his horn until she turned off her engine. Cindy sat staring out her front window, refusing to look at the man in the car beside her, knowing he hadn’t left her enough room to open her door, and that if she wanted to leave her car, she’d have to climb across the front seat and use the passenger door. She checked her watch, feeling the man’s eyes burning acid-powered holes through the car window.

  “What’s the hurry, lady?” she heard him shout through two layers of glass. “You have a bladder problem?”

  Oh dear, she thought, not sure what to do. So many angry people in this world. So many crazy people. She shuddered. What if Julia had encountered such a man? Suppose she’d inadvertently said or done the wrong thing, offended someone in some innocent, unforeseen way?

  “You almost got us both killed back there,” the man raged.

  Cindy saw his arms waving with much agitation around his head, as if he’d stumbled into a nest of bees. She pictured a knife in those hands, heard Julia’s distant screams. Her eyes filled with tears. Behind the man’s car, horns began beeping, urging him forward. Still he didn’t move. Was he planning to sit there all day?

  Cindy pushed the tears from her cheeks and rechecked the time. It was getting late. The yoga class would be half over by now. Lindsey might have already given up on her tardy friend and gone home. She couldn’t just sit here all morning waiting for this lunatic to leave. “I’m sorry,” she said sincerely, turning in the man’s direction, noting that fury had reddened his complexion and distorted his features, like a clumsy finger through clay. “I didn’t mean to cut you off.”

  “Lady, you should be shot,” came the man’s instant retort. Then he pulled away, extending his middle finger high out the window in a final blistering farewell.

  Cindy pushed open her door, hearing the blast of another horn, and feeling a hot gust of exhaust on her legs as a red Porsche barely missed running over her toes. Another middle finger waved back in her direction. She fought back the renewed threat of tears as she waited for a break in the traffic. A man begging for change in front of a nearby convenience store shook his head in dismay as she scurried across the street, then turned away as she approached, as if repelled by her carelessness. “Fine, then,” she muttered, returning a fistful of coins to her pocket. “Don’t take my money.”

  Cindy pulled open the outside door to The Yoga Studio and approached the ancient elevators, pressing, then re-pressing the call button at least four times before she heard the old wires groan somewhere above her head, signaling the elevator’s excruciatingly slow and shaky descent. She pushed her way through the elevator’s heavy metal doors before they were fully open, then realized she didn’t know what floor the studio was on. “What’s the matter with you? How could you be so stupid?” she asked out loud, exiting the elevator just as a sloppily dressed young woman chewing an enormous wad of gum shuffled in. “Excuse me, do you know what floor The Yoga Studio is on?” she asked the girl, who stared at her blankly and continued chewing her gum. “Could you hold the elevator a minute, please?”

  Cindy raced to the directory on the wall to the left of the building’s entrance. She quickly scanned the list, noted the correct floor, and ran back just as the elevator doors were drawing to a close. “Could you hold the door …?” she began, but the girl chewed her gum and stared right through her, as if Cindy didn’t exist.

  “I don’t believe this! Would it have killed you to wait two goddamn seconds?” Cindy’s voice followed the elevator’s ascent as her fist slammed repeatedly against the call button. “Oh God, I’m losing it.” She looked around for the stairs, taking them two at a time. So many angry people in this world, she was thinking again. So many crazy people. “And I’m definitely one of them,” she acknowledged, reaching the fourth-floor landing, her thighs quivering, her knees about to give way, the tips of her fingers brushing against the concrete floor as she collapsed from the waist, gasping for breath.

  What was the matter with her? Where was she going in such a hurry? And what was she going to do when she got there?

  Cindy pushed damp hair away from her face, straightened her shoulders, and waited until her breathing had returned to normal before stepping into the hall, and winding her way past the offices of several small companies, until she found the door to The Yoga Studio. She pressed her forehead against it, listening to the silence.

  Suddenly the door opened and Cindy fell into the room.

  “I’m so sorry. Are you all right?” A middle-aged woman in an unflattering black leotard reached out to block Cindy’s fall. “I had no idea anyone was there.” Wild gray hair shot out at right angles from the woman’s worried face, as if she’d been struck by lightning.

  I did that to her, Cindy
thought. “Forgive me,” she said. “It was my fault.”

  “Can I help you?” a voice asked from somewhere behind the shock of gray hair.

  Cindy’s eyes swept from one end of the long, rectangular room to the other. An old brown sofa and a couple of shabby beige chairs were hunched around a low coffee table in one corner, a high glass cabinet containing yoga-related books and merchandise stood in another, and a cluttered reception desk sat in the middle. Several styles of white, gray, and black T-shirts imprinted with The Yoga Studio logo were pinned to one wall, like artwork, and the scent of oranges, courtesy of several plates of freshly cut orange quarters, filled the air, like cologne. Two women were sipping bottled water and eating oranges on the sofa; another woman was straightening a bunch of yoga mats that were stacked beside the doors to the inner rooms.

  “Can I help you?” the receptionist asked again. She was a pale young woman approximately Julia’s age, with fine reddish-blond hair and a smattering of oversized freckles that was smeared across her nose like peanut butter.

  “I’m looking for Lindsey.”

  “Lindsey …?”

  “Lindsey,” Cindy repeated, as if the simple repetition of the name was enough. “I was supposed to meet her here at ten o’clock. She may already be in class. I’m very late,” Cindy added unnecessarily.

  The receptionist nodded. “We have several classes going on at the moment. Do you know who her class was with?”

  “No. But how many Lindseys can there be?”

  “Actually, we have several Lindseys, and I believe two of them are here this morning.” The girl checked the register. “Yes. Lindsey Josephson and Lindsey Krauss.”

  Lindsey Josephson and Lindsey Krauss, Cindy repeated silently. Neither name was the least bit familiar. “She was waiting for my daughter, Julia. Julia Carver.”

  A smile danced across the receptionist’s face. “Julia’s your daughter?”

  Cindy nodded, feeling a surge of motherly pride so strong it brought tears back to her eyes.

  “She’s so gorgeous.”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “Julia’s going to be famous. Then I’ll get to say ‘I knew her when.’ ”