Where She Went (ARC)

by Kelly Simmons

  She rang the doorbell, listened to it echo. Tile floors, she thought. Marble kitchen. Beautiful-looking but tinny and cold, the acoustics all wrong, and you didn’t realize it until after installation and had people over, and they started talking all at once, and your ears rang. Maggie had been in so many kitchens like that. She’d go back to her small, snug kitchen, with its butcher-block counters and rugs and cheerful lined curtains on the windows and be glad for all the softer, kinder surfaces. When people came to Maggie, she could hear them.

  The woman who answered the door was pretty but ordinary. No makeup, blue eyes. Slight, small as a bird. Her smile was automatic but also miniature.

  “Mrs. Grady?”

  “Yes?”

  The woman glanced at the folder Maggie had in her purse, as if it held a clue.

  “I’m Maggie O’Farrell. My daughter is in your husband’s class.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I never get involved in university business. If you have a problem with the grading curve or an issue, you have to call his secretary.”

  “No, that’s not why I’m here.”

  “Okay,” she said evenly.

  “My daughter is missing.”

  “Oh, I’m so very sorry. How worried you must be.”

  “Your husband didn’t tell you one of his students was missing?”

  She blinked twice. “No, I wasn’t aware.”

  “You don’t think that’s unusual? That he wouldn’t mention all the flyers up outside his classroom? And that the police have interviewed him and searched for his car? The car that’s registered in your name?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m due somewhere in fifteen minutes. You’ll have to excuse me—”

  Maggie put a hand against the door. She knew she was strong, stronger than this small woman. If her head was in Maggie’s shampoo bowl, she could snap her skinny neck.

  “No,” she said, “I will not excuse you.”

  Mrs. Grady flinched, took a small step back. She glanced over her shoulder as if wondering where her phone was, a weapon, something. When she looked back, her polite smile was gone, her face set firmly, her jaw tight.

  “You are going to have to leave right now!”

  “Look, my daughter was investigating your husband, and he was threatening her, and now she’s missing! Do you really think that’s a coincidence? Do you even know the man who lives here?”

  “Look, Mrs.—”

  “O’Farrell. Maggie O’Farrell. Mother of Emma, who is in your husband’s Psychology 101 class, a straight-A scholarship student, daughter of a decorated cop who was gunned down in the line of duty, who sat in the first row and risked her life to write for the school paper.”

  The woman’s face was a mask, yes, but her eyes were frightened. Maggie felt her power and also felt the risk she’d taken. She didn’t know this woman. The car was registered to her, not him. If Mrs. Grady was lying and had found out her husband was involved…if she had misread Emma’s intentions, was she strong enough to hurt her? Would she go that far to protect her husband? Maggie didn’t think so. She saw a softness in her, around the eyes. Not much, but a little.

  “I am begging you, woman to woman, to tell me what you know about your husband and his students. I just want my daughter back, okay? That’s all.”

  Mrs. Grady swallowed hard. “There was a girl who came here a few nights ago, making accusations, paranoid, high—”

  “It must have been another student. My daughter would not be high—”

  “With all due respect, once you drop them off at school, you have no idea what they become. Okay? My husband and I have seen it all. This girl was crazy, off her meds or something—”

  “Well, that’s not possible. Was there someone else with her maybe? Waiting in the car?”

  “She was alone, ranting and raving about my husband, so I called an ambulance.”

  “An ambulance?”

  “Yes. Her pupils were dilated, her clothes disheveled. She needed medical care.”

  “Well, maybe she’d been held prisoner or harmed. You ever think about that?”

  The woman blinked. Didn’t have an answer, but Maggie had hers. No, no, she had not.

  “You don’t have kids, do you?”

  “I have two sons.”

  “Sons,” Maggie said. “Of course.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you walk through the world never knowing what it’s like to worry every time your child goes out for a run or to the gas station at night or to a party filled with drunk boys who outweigh her. You don’t know, and you’ll never know.”

  The woman reached out her hand for the flyer. “Is that her picture?”

  “Yes, this is my daughter.”

  She looked at it briefly and shook her head. “No, that’s not her. The girl who was here had short, ragged hair. Like a little boy.”

  Forty

  Emma

  Emma didn’t know day from night anymore. The light flickered, burned out. No one to replace it. She waited hours for the terrible food to come. She didn’t know who slid it in, who made it, or how long she’d been there anymore.

  She was being punished, and it was her own fault, she knew. When she let her thoughts travel in reverse—because from what she could see, in the murky, hazy present, there was no forward, only back—she saw where she had gone wrong. She could make lists of her own stupidity. No one needed to come in and torture her with idiotic questions. She could beat herself up just fine. Was that the point? Was that what all solitary confinement was for? To point you toward regret?

  Finally, the tiny door opened. Light bled in from outside, brighter than sunlight, and once again, she could see the red marks on her ankles and wrists, from when she fought the shackles. From before she’d given up. Here are your latest mistakes, they seemed to say.

  Squinting into the brightness, she could see there were two people this time, a man and a woman. One wearing white, one wearing black. If she was writing a story, a story that came to her, that detail would be significant. That’s the kind of thing she needed to notice. Concrete, but a metaphor.

  “Emma?” a voice said, floating toward her. No one else had used her first name. So formal with their inmates. So proper as they manipulated your body and asked so much, too much, of your mind.

  “Yes,” she said, in case a rescue was imminent, in case this person was a helicopter sent to ferry her out. In case this voice wasn’t her roommates, her teachers, that asshole RA. She’d stopped saying their names, trying to tell her story, fearing they’d go get them. That speaking them was a summons, a prayer. She’d stopped telling them anything.

  “It’s Mom,” the voice said.

  “Oh no, they got you too,” she said.

  Maggie crouched down and held Emma’s face in her hands. She smoothed her skin, fingered her short hair.

  “It’s okay, honey,” she said.

  “I had to cut it,” Emma said.

  “That’s all right. We can fix it.”

  “It’ll grow back.”

  “Yes, but I kind of like it this way. I can see your eyes.”

  “They took everything,” Emma said. “They took all my stuff.”

  “It’s all right, sweetheart,” Maggie said. “We’ll get you new stuff, I promise.”

  “How did this happen?” her mother said to the other one, the one in white. “How could she have been here for days without the police knowing?”

  “She signed herself in,” he replied. “Voluntary. We had no idea there was a missing girl in the area.”

  “I needed to sleep,” Emma said. “They said I could sleep.”

  “You can sleep,” Maggie said. “There’s plenty of time for everything else.”

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Emma whispered.

  “Me, too, Em. Nig
ht. I love you.”

  “Night. I love you,” she parroted back softly before closing her eyes.

  Forty-One

  Maggie

  Maggie didn’t have much fury left, but she summoned just a drop of it as she spoke to the head psychiatrist at West Pennsylvania Hospital.

  “You blew it, you realize that, don’t you? And the only reason I’m not suing you is because at least she was semisafe here. Although judging from the scrapes on her wrists, maybe not as safe as she could have been.”

  Doctor Rivelli’s voice was calm, but beyond that, his whole body seemed to be contained, free of gesture or movement. As if he wanted to slip inside every situation and not create any waves in the atmosphere. In contrast, Maggie was on the verge of screaming. She spoke with her hands, her eyes, her shoulders, her whole self.

  “Your daughter presented with classic symptoms, Mrs. O’Farrell. She was paranoid, unclean, kicking and screaming and completely out of control. The woman who called the ambulance was absolutely right to do so.”

  His measuredness, his self-possession, only amped her up more. She wanted to shout at him to be real, to be a fucking human being.

  “And it never occurred to you to call the police? No, you let a stranger, a layperson, diagnose my daughter! My child!”

  “Your daughter is an adult, at an age when many illnesses present in otherwise healthy people. Emma appeared to be in the midst of a manic or paranoid schizophrenic episode—”

  “It’s not paranoia when someone is actually following you!”

  “Mrs. O’Farrell, this conversation is not productive in terms of helping your daughter.”

  “She needs to detox from all the drugs you pumped in to her. That would be productive.”

  “If you had seen her the night she came in, I think you would agree that she needed intervention.”

  “She needed the police. No, scratch that, she needed her mother. She needed someone to listen to her story and believe her. And all she really needed was sleep!”

  “Mrs. O’Farrell, an inability to sleep can be a symptom of several psychiatric conditions. Your daughter’s theories and stories presented as obsession and possibly in line with someone experiencing a manic episode. Remember, we were there, and you were not.”

  But oh, what Maggie would have given to be there. If anyone had made the right phone call to the right person, she would have been. She felt tears pool in the corners of her eyes, and she held up her head, sniffing and blinking, to keep them from falling. She would not give him the satisfaction of seeing her weak.

  “So you drugged her,” she said. “That was your solution.”

  “She needed to be calmed down, and after a period of time, we opted to do that chemically. Also, she revealed there was a history of mental illness in your family.”

  “There is not!”

  She felt his eyes hover on her. Maggie’s hair was matted in the back, and her eyes were red and drawn and on the verge of tears. What was the difference between a person who was out of her mind with grief and exhaustion and a person who was out of her mind? How thin, how impossibly thin, was that line?

  “Your mother?” he said gently, more gently, she supposed, than she deserved.

  “It was menopause. She was under a great deal of stress.”

  “Okay, well.”

  “My daughter didn’t know the full situation.”

  He nodded. “And what about your husband?”

  “My husband?”

  “The circumstances around his death were confusing, were they not?”

  “My husband,” she said evenly, “was killed by a drug dealer in a gang retaliation.”

  “Ah. Well.”

  “Did Emma tell you differently?”

  Maggie thought of her daughter’s connection, now, to Salt. Did they know something she didn’t? Her mind lurched, and her head actually hurt, actually pounded with possibility. Frank, a suicide? A suicide they’d covered up so he could be buried with honor? And so she could get his life insurance, his pension, and her daughter’s scholarship? No. She shook her head as if to wipe those thoughts away.

  “She said he was deeply unhappy.”

  “Deeply unhappy? Good god, Doctor, I’m deeply unhappy, too! Show me one stressed-out, overwhelmed, working mother married to a man who’s never home who isn’t deeply unhappy! Deeply unhappy is not the same as depressed, and you of all people should know that.”

  He took in a deep breath, as if he was breathing in her monologue. Was that calculated? To make her think she was being listened to, when in reality she had sucked all the air out of the room, and he just needed oxygen? One of his hands moved, at last, up off the desk to smooth a lock of his hair that had fallen near his right eye. Unruly hair, but nice hair. A nice face. If she was going to be fair about it, she had to at least give him that. Finally, he spoke.

  “That’s true, and yet I also know that families, and children in particular, create many narratives and euphemisms around the reality of depression.”

  “Well, some people do, but I don’t.”

  “Many young people feel tremendous pressure at college.”

  “You don’t know Emma.”

  “No. But I’ve been doing this a long time. So I know a few things.”

  “Yeah, sure, doctor knows best,” she said sarcastically.

  “And I certainly know a closed mind when I see one.”

  Maggie should have been insulted, and she opened her mouth to tell him off but stopped. Her teeth made a small click as she nestled them together. Dr. Rivelli’s eyes stayed fixed even though hers had wandered away. Maybe he was right. Hadn’t Frank always said, when their discussions snowballed into argument, that she’d already made up her mind, so what was the point?

  “As I told Emma this morning, I suggest we release her to the general population of the hospital and let her be monitored for a few days. If she’s better after a few days of sleep and talk therapy, then—”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “She signed herself in, so I’m pretty sure we can convince her to sign herself out.”

  “This should not be about winning, Mrs. O’Farrell. This is not about you being right and me being wrong. But since you seem to be a truth seeker, well, this is about discovery. This is about knowing what is actually going on with her, metabolically, chemically. And yes, a lack of sleep can be hugely disturbing to the body. As I sense you may know yourself.”

  Maggie felt a burning in her throat. Rage? Coffee? Or just anger that he continued to see through her? Well, what a surprise. Now he could see that sleeplessness, anger, disbelief, and jealousy ran in families, too.

  But she nodded her agreement. Especially when he added that there would be a lounge chair brought in, where she could rest right next to her daughter and be with her the entire time.

  She walked outside to get some air. The hospital had valet parking, and people kept pulling up to the circle, handing over their keys. She thought about Michael suddenly and knew that he was the one person she would call besides Sarah. The last two she trusted, the same ones her daughter trusted. She was grateful that after all this had happened, one of them was male. That Emma wouldn’t be ruined forever by a lack of trust. She thought of what Emma had told Michael about walking in on her father. She thought of the photo in Salt’s apartment. She felt sick, suddenly, with the possibility that it wasn’t Maggie and Frank that Emma had walked in on.

  She sat down. How was it possible to know your daughter, your only child, so well you thought you had her memorized—every stubborn cowlick along her part, her earlobes that she always called fat, every mole at the base of her wrist, her right thumb that was so much larger than her left—and not know something essential about her?

  There was much to talk about. And now there was time. There was a whole school year ahead to talk
about this and where to transfer. What smaller school, filled with people more like her, could take her next year. A journalism school? They’d have to see. See if she’d been ruined or inspired.

  A police car pulled in the circle, no lights flashing, no hurry.

  Kaplan got out of the car, closed the door. Moved slowly toward her.

  “I had a feeling you might be here,” he said.

  “That’s funny, because I had no feeling whatsoever that you would be.”

  “Well, it took me a while to think of the wife.”

  “Of course it did.”

  “I’m not sexist, despite what you may think.”

  “Oh, I know. Blame your biology. Blame your caveman DNA.”

  “You know, Maggie, you could have been a helluva detective.”

  “There’s an essential difference between detective and mother,” she said. “And you know what it’s comprised of?”

  “What?”

  “Giving a shit,” she said.

  “Detectives can’t afford to do that. There are too many. It’s too much.”

  “You’re wrong,” she said. “You’re dead wrong.”

  “We have to agree to disagree.”

  “I hate that phrase.”

  “Well, it is what it is.”

  “Hate that one, too.”

  “Well, if you change your mind, maybe you could consider the FBI. Lots of excitement.”

  “And give up the thrill of shampooing hair?”

  He laughed.

  “Kaplan,” she said suddenly, sniffing back tears, “aren’t you going to ask me how she is?”

  “What?”

  “Emma.”

  He swallowed hard, rubbed his chin.

  “Point taken, Maggie. But I already spoke to the doctor. So I know she’s fine.”

  “She’s probably not fine. She’s exhausted, she’s going to be a whole semester behind in school, she’s lost most of her friends, and she’ll have to testify about it all if it goes to trial.”

  “Well, but she’s—”

  She held up a hand. “If you’re about to tell me she’s Frank O’Farrell’s daughter, so you know she’s tough, I will hit you. I will physically assault you.”