by Lisa Unger
“Your room is ready and waiting for you.”
Peggy walked around the desk and took Merri’s bag from her. Merri let her take it, because it just seemed rude not to, and followed her up the stairs.
The room was lovely (no pun intended), a plush four-poster bed with a cozy sitting area around a small fireplace. A writing desk by the window, on which sat fresh flowers—bright pink Gerber daisies—in a vase. The bathroom had a claw-foot tub and black-and-white tile floor.
“If there’s anything we can do for you, Merri,” said Peggy, looking suddenly solemn as she put Merri’s tote on the luggage rack, “please don’t hesitate. We want to help any way that we can.”
When Merri made her reservation, she hadn’t told anyone why she was coming and why she’d need a room indefinitely. But she had informed Detective Chuck Ferrigno of The Hollows PD that she’d hired Jones Cooper, and he promised to cooperate fully (apparently they knew each other well). She should have known that word would travel fast in a place like this. She remembered how the town had rallied around her family, how the volunteers had helped search, feed them, manned the hotline, organized vigils.
Merri barely remembered those early days—caring for Jackson and Wolf in the hospital and searching for Abbey. Every nightmare she had was unfurling around her in a blood-soaked blur—her daughter missing, her son and husband shot. The whole world was a stuttering horror reel. But as shattered as she had been, she remembered the feeling that arms were around her, holding her up. Strangers comforted her, ran errands, brought food and flowers. The owner of the cabin let them stay free of charge, as long as they needed. If the rest of the world had grown disconnected and lonely, people happier in front of a screen than with each other, the opposite seemed true in The Hollows.
“There’s a safety net here that can only be seen when tears are shed,” someone had said to her in those early days. Even for outsiders? Merri had wondered aloud. If you’re in The Hollows, you belong here, the person had replied. She couldn’t even remember now who it had been.
“Thank you,” Merri said now.
“I hope you don’t mind my saying that we’re all still praying for your daughter, that she’ll come home safe to you.”
Merri nodded, wanted to thank her again, but she lost her voice to a sudden rush of tears.
Come home safe to you. It was such a benign phrase, implying that all could so easily be well again. Merri was holding on to that. Only Wolf had dared to ask who Abbey would be if she came home. If all this time she’d been missing, alive somewhere, what horrors had she endured? How would it have changed her? Would she ever be well and whole again? Merri became obsessed with the women in the news, the ones who had been abducted and held for years, watching their interviews, reading their ghostwritten stories. The girl who had been taken from her home and held in the woods, walking through the town where her parents lived with her captors, never calling out for help. They all had the appearance of wellness in varying degrees. But what cracks, what fissures lay beneath the media-ready surface? Who will Abbey be if she comes home to us? It didn’t matter. Whoever she was, Merri would hold her until she was well again. They would all be changed, irrevocably. But they would be together.
The girl—what was her name?—hovered by the door, looking at Merri uncertainly. How long had Merri sat there, lost in her thoughts?
“Thank you,” Merri said, trying to recover herself.
Peggy—that was it—smiled sadly, seeming to understand, and turned to leave the room.
“Of course,” she said. “Again. Anything you need.”
People—Wolf, her doctor, even her mother—were starting to treat Merri like a crazy person, someone too delusional to move forward from tragedy, grasping at the very slim hope that Abbey was still alive. It was such a relief to not be treated that way. In The Hollows, it seemed like people were hoping along with her. No one here seemed to think she should have moved on by now.
They’re just being polite, Merri, Wolf would surely say. No one says what they’re really thinking.
Maybe so. But the world could do with a few more kind, polite people—even if it was fake.
Her phone pinged, and she drew it out of her pocket to see a text from Wolf.
Arrived safely?
He knew she had. They each had a Find My Friends app on their phone, so he could have easily seen that she was in The Hollows. Although service up here was spotty.
Yes.
She slid her wedding ring up and down her finger. She didn’t wear it all the time anymore, had grown quite careless with it, leaving it on the edge of the sink, the kitchen counter, the dresser in the bedroom. Wolf was forever returning it to her, looking injured. As if he had any right to look injured about anything.
What now?
That was Wolf. What now? What’s next? What should we do? A man in perpetual motion, always on to the next thing.
I don’t know. I see Jones Cooper in an hour.
Sure you don’t want me to come up?
She did want Wolf to come up. She wanted the man she had first loved. The Wolf who was strong but kind, funny but sensible. The world traveler—his work as a travel writer had taken him to places of which she’d never even heard. She’d found that so exotic. She loved how he could just pack a bag and go anywhere without a hint of stress. He was so calm in every circumstance, always seemed in control. To Merri who was scattered, a worrier, the one who got lost and showed up late, he was a steady hand to hold on to. She followed him places that she never would have dared to go on her own, homebody that she was—trekking on the Inca Trail, scuba diving in Belize, an eco lodge in the Amazon. When she was with Wolf, at first at least, she was less afraid of the world. Of course, that was before the children came. And before he had all that trouble with work. Before she discovered that in their fifteen years together, he had never been faithful to her for more than a year at a time.
No, I’m okay, she typed. I’ll keep you posted.
I love you.
She didn’t doubt his love for her, odd as that was to say of a faithless husband. But she didn’t say it back anymore, though she did still love him. More than she wanted to.
She flipped open her laptop and logged on to the free wireless offered by the guesthouse. On the ride up, she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about what Jackson told her, about the missing man. It was nothing, of course. Jackson was a worrier, a ruminator like Merri. Still.
She found a small item in the Times. Real estate developer missing. Gerald Healy, forty-four, left his Manhattan office for a meeting with a construction company in The Hollows. He never arrived. His car hadn’t been found, cell phone signal lost. Family—wife and two small children—were pleading for any information. There was a picture of a handsome man with dark hair and glasses, wearing a bright smile and a green-and-white checked shirt. She felt a rush of impotent urgency.
The wallpaper on her laptop screen was an image of Abbey. She was the wild child, the kook. When you first got to know her, you might think she was cautious, even fearful. But in her heart, she was an adventurer like her father, a warrior. After she’d hung back a bit and assessed the situation, she dove right in. The image was a shot from above with Abbey looking up at the camera, her mouth wide open in laughter, her purple skirt twirling. She was unabashed joy, raw energy in that captured moment. How could she not be here with them—all that wild love, all the crazy little kid energy? How could her Abbey, those other two children, this man, just disappear and not be found? It just didn’t seem right. Was the world that big, that dark, like a maw that could swallow you whole?
She scrolled through the few articles, which were all similarly lacking information. It was less of a news story when adult men went missing, probably more likely that he’d just abandoned his family than come to any harm. But he didn’t look like the type to run off. He had a goofy smile, was cute in a geeky sort of way. In fact, he reminded Merri of their friend Blake. Blake, who was the consummate good father,
a loving and faithful husband, always honest and upright. In all their years of knowing him, Merri had never seen his eyes stray in the direction of a pretty waitress when Claire was around. It wasn’t even that he was not staring; it was that he did not notice. Not in the way that Wolf noticed every tight piece of ass within a certain radius, the way he was always browsing.
It was actually Blake whom Merri had met first on the night she met Wolf. She’d been getting her MFA at Columbia. Blake was studying law. And Wolf was at the journalism school. She was at some sports bar that she’d gone to with a guy she thought she liked. But he’d quickly revealed himself to be an arrogant asshole—like most male MFA students who invariably thought that they were going to be the next F. Scott Fitzgerald.
“No offense, but your date is a jerk.”
Her date—What had his name been? So long ago—had left her at the bar to go to the bathroom, and Blake had slipped in beside her.
“I couldn’t help but overhear,” Blake said apologetically. “His voice was booming.”
“Really?” she said. “Because I stopped listening an hour ago.”
Blake asked her what she was drinking and ordered her another vodka soda. Then they just started talking, and he felt strangely familiar, one of those people who feel like an old friend before you’ve even exchanged names.
“Don’t look now,” Blake had said. He nodded in the direction behind her with a mischievous grin. “But I think your friend has found a more enthusiastic audience.”
She glanced over and saw Bruce (yes, that was his name) leaning into a woman from their short-fiction class. The woman was as talentless and dull as he was; they were a perfect couple.
“Good for him,” she said.
“You can’t keep the pretty ones all to yourself, Blakey.” Wolf had joined them.
Just the sight of him, even that very first moment, lit her up inside. Those silky curls, those glittering eyes, those muscled forearms. Something else, too, of course. What had it been in him that made her choose Wolf over Blake? Was it something good? Or was it something bad?
Whatever it was, Blake, however sweet and good looking, immediately receded from her view. And it was Wolf she wound up going home with that night. Blake and Claire had broken up, just briefly. (He was single for the first time since high school the night they met.) The following week, however, Blake and Claire got back together. And they were married before Blake had graduated law school. Merri and Wolf were married two years later. But there had been one night when she could have chosen between them. She’d spent a lot of time over the years thinking about how things would be different if she’d kept talking with the man she’d liked, instead of sleeping with the man she wanted.
But then there would be no Jackson, no Abbey. And that had always given her comfort because her children were the center of her universe, the right things that made every other mistake and mishap okay. Until. Until their failings as people and parents were harshly punished with the loss of Abbey.
It was that thinking, that mental maze that had led Merri to her nervous breakdown in the months after Abbey’s disappearance. This idea that if she could atone for all the mistakes she made, maybe she could stop the fall of dominos or even reverse it. It was easy to see from which parent Jackson had inherited his obsessive thinking.
Her phone pulsed on the table, startling her.
Mom! Aced my math test. 99!
Good job, Jacko!!
She scrolled over to see him on the little map on Find My Friends. There he was, at school where he belonged.
Are you okay up there? She could see his worried frown.
Don’t worry about your Mom, kiddo. Let me worry about you.
Okay. Love you.
She glanced back over at her computer screen. The missing man stared out at her. Merri’s psychiatrist told her that the most stressful condition for the human mind is simply not knowing. Even if the worst thing happens, the mind recovers eventually, returns to its natural baseline of happiness. But the wondering, the crushing weight of disappointments, the violent swing between poles of hope and despair. It’s almost more than a person can endure.
She was attuned now to the wobble, that edgy feeling that meant she was losing her grip. She forced herself to close the computer and lie down on the bed, breathe deep. Let go. Let God. It was such a simple phrase that did bring comfort if you let it. But not as much comfort as those smooth, fat white pills, which she still thought about every day.
ELEVEN
This Penny was different from the other ones. It took him a while to figure out what it was. He’d seen it the very first day when Poppa had noticed her in town. Poppa hadn’t said anything. He had just stopped his work and went very still, and Bobo followed his gaze to the family moving up the street. They drifted right past without even seeing Poppa and Bobo.
The pretty woman, with her raspberry-colored tee-shirt and faded blue jeans, holding the hand of a boy with white blond hair. The man had strolled up ahead, was looking in the window of a shop and pointing at something. The girl trailed behind, licking ice cream from a cone. She gazed up at the trees, spun around—daydreaming, in her own world. Then it was like she sensed him looking at her. She turned slowly, and she saw him. Looked right at him, not through him or over him or around him, like most people. She smiled, white teeth a little crooked. Then she ran ahead, back to her family, taking her daddy by the hand. She didn’t look back at him again, though Bobo kept watching her.
Poppa gathered up his things, even though they weren’t near done. He threw everything carelessly into the back of the pickup. Then they were driving slowly down the street, following a distance behind the family. Poppa smiled, waving to folks as they called out to him—the old lady from Orchard Street, the owner of the hardware store, Mr. Jenkins. Everybody knew everybody in The Hollows.
The family walked a while, and finally all piled into one of those big, expensive cars. It was shiny and blood red. They were like a television family, too perfect. They weren’t real. Especially the girl with her round cheeks and pretty mouth, golden hair. She was like a doll.
“You know how much one of those things cost?” asked Poppa. Bobo didn’t answer.
“You could feed a village in Africa for a year,” he went on.
Poppa couldn’t care less about villages in Africa. He just hated rich people, people who thought they were smart because they had money and lived in the city. People who came in from outside and bought land that they had no business buying and built big new houses that didn’t belong in The Hollows.
He followed them out of town. Poppa wasn’t worried about being noticed. Normal people didn’t think about being followed. And Poppa’s truck made him invisible; no one ever noticed them. The family drove slowly, then sped up, then slowed down again like they were looking for something. Finally they turned onto a drive that led to one of those new big houses.
Poppa kept driving, silent, his jaw working. He wore a faded blue baseball cap over his tangle of white and gray hair, which he pulled back into a ponytail when he was working. With his free hand, he twisted at the bottom of the full beard that was the shape and color of a gnarled old tree branch. Bobo knew just what he was thinking. Bobo was thinking about her, too. That little doll of a girl, that crooked smile that was pretty anyway. She wasn’t the first little girl Poppa had noticed.
They went back to work after that, worked until the sun started to get low in the sky. Doing what needed doing, then collecting cash at the end of each job.
Poppa liked to think of them as living “off the grid.” We don’t exist, he always said. They lived in a house that Poppa’s poppa had built with “his own two hands” on property that had been in his family since The Hollows was settled. They didn’t have a phone, or a computer, or a television. There was a generator and a fuel tank on the property, so there were no dealings with the electric company. In the winter, when the snows came, the roads became impassable except for Poppa’s snowmobile. He could get
into town if he needed to; but mainly they didn’t need to. They worked hard all spring and summer, and in fall stocked the food cellar. And Poppa liked to hunt.
Up way back in the woods, there were other people like them. Folks who lived off the land. They lived in houses that didn’t have a street address; they hunted, fished, and gardened for their food. They schooled their children, not just with books, but by teaching them how to survive like the men and women who first settled The Hollows. They buried their own dead. The townies called them hill people. But Poppa said that the people in the hills, they were “true descendants of our founding fathers.” The Hollows belonged to them.
New Penny cried at first, but not like the others. The others whimpered quietly, went limp with fear, obeyed right away, got used up and discarded. But New Penny, she screamed, she raged and fought. There was a something deep inside her that couldn’t be touched. Even when she had decided to be good, there was a wild sparkle in her eyes. Bobo liked her better than the others, even though she made more trouble. A lot more trouble.
But Momma and Poppa were getting tired of her now. She had been there longer than anyone. There had been another, too. But she was gone.
Poppa was angry about the man with the Bimmer, as Poppa called it. Poppa was skinny, so skinny that you could see the shelf of his collarbone and the dip behind it. His knees were rocks in a sock, elbows hard as hammers. But he was strong. He didn’t need any help lifting the stranger into the trunk of his car. There was a neat black suitcase in there, which Poppa took. He searched the stranger’s body, lifted his wallet from his pocket.
“There’s nearly five hundred dollars in here,” Poppa said, pocketing the cash. Bobo wondered if that would make him less angry at New Penny. But it didn’t seem to. In fact, it just seemed to make him more agitated.
“Real estate man,” he said. Though how Poppa knew that, Bobo couldn’t be sure. Maybe because all the new rich people up here were either buying, selling, or tearing down what was already here and building something new. “Developer.”
