by Rea Frey
“Amy? It is so nice to finally meet you after so much correspondence.”
Twenty-three. They’d exchanged twenty-three emails about what to expect for today, what she would get out of it, how it worked, just how exactly each dollar would be spent. She had cashed part of her last three checks, so Richard wouldn’t see this on the credit card statement.
“Do I pay now, or…?”
Barb waved her off. “Oh, my. Heavens no. You can pay after we have a successful session. Please, right this way.”
She opened the door to a slim hallway and led her to the office in the back. The lights were dim, the gray curtains drawn, and it took Amy a moment for her eyes to adjust. There was a diffuser in the corner spitting out essential oils.
Barb saw her eyeing the diffuser. “I find that the oils really help people relax. This work can be a bit overwhelming.”
She showed Amy to the couch. She sized up the sofa and prepared, as she always did, by squatting three-quarters of the way down before sitting. She did this for wooden chairs, old couches, and God forbid, stools. The couch moaned as she made contact, and she coughed in a simultaneous apology for her weight. She clutched her purse tighter in her lap and darted her eyes from left to right like a giant, mushy cuckoo clock.
“Amy, dear, relax. You’re safe here. This is going to be … educational.” Barb reached for a timer and wound it to sixty minutes. “And fun.”
“Fun?”
Barb patted her chest for her reading glasses and then absently pulled them from the front of her sweater. She sat in a chair a few feet opposite Amy, adjusting her slacks, her blouse, and her glasses. “Well, if you were a murderer in a past life, not so much, but you know … yes, it can be fun.”
Christ. What if she’d been a murderer? She hadn’t even thought of that. What if she was just as bad in a past life as in this life? What if that life was even worse and she was paying for all of the awful things she’d done then in the here and now? Out of everything she’d researched, that seemed to be likely.
Amy opened her mouth and then closed it. She set her purse by her left hip. “So, how do we do this, exactly?”
“Well, as we discussed, normally we’d do an introductory interview, but we seem to have done that already via email.” Barb chuckled. “So today, I’m going to guide you through a gentle meditation. We might stop there if I sense any resistance, or we could go a bit further if you’re open.” She removed her glasses and leaned forward. “But if you’re uncomfortable at any point, we’ll stop, and the first session will be over. Okay?”
Amy nodded. “Do I lay down, or…?”
“I find that usually helps. It allows the body to sufficiently relax.”
Amy weighed her choices. Half her body would spill off the couch if she laid down; the couch just wasn’t deep enough. And then she’d never get comfortable and would worry about toppling onto the floor like a bowl full of jelly.
Barb sensed her uncertainty. “But if you’re more comfortable sitting, that’s fine too. You can just relax back a bit. Let your head and shoulders rest. This is your time, not mine. So you decide what feels best.”
Amy wished she’d stop saying that. Nothing was her time—it was never her time. Even here, she was faced with the obstacle of herself, the mountain of herself, the insecurities of her own body, and the constant, persistent scrutiny of the outside her, rather than the calmer, prettier, thinner inner her. God, she was so exhausted by constantly leading with her weight, her looks, and the unhappiness that made her yell, hide, and eat. She was cut from the same cloth as her own mother, who had been large and sturdy too, but while her mother had used that to her advantage, Amy retreated her way through life. She had disappointed her mother in that way, and herself. Why couldn’t she be stronger and just deal with what God had given her?
Because she couldn’t, that’s why.
She cleared her throat, willing them to start. She’d never wanted more of a break from her own mind than right this second, on this skinny couch.
“I can sense you are ready.” Barb leaned forward in her chair, hands on her knees, staring. “Are you ready, Amy?”
Amy nodded and leaned back, letting her eyes flutter closed. What was she supposed to do with her hands? She let them fall to her sides, palms open, and exhaled for a full five counts.
“That’s good. Very good. I want you to take some good, long, deep breaths. Don’t worry about the length of your inhales or exhales. Just let the rhythm of your own breath guide you. I want you to look up, as if you’re trying to roll your eyes to the back of your head. With your eyes still up, imagine you are standing at the top of a staircase, and you’re going to start taking steps down.”
And so it began. She started to slip away, to retreat, her mind breaking apart like a dinosaur egg, layer by layer, in hopes of revealing something different, old, and sacred.
* * *
Amy woke as though she’d just taken a delicious nap via a sleeping pill. “Is it over?” Her tongue felt like a slug inside her mouth. She remembered nothing. Had it not worked? Had she not gone under?
Barb smiled. “It is over. For today, at least. You were extremely receptive to the therapy, Amy. That’s very good.” Barb leaned over and extracted a small tape from a recorder, popping it into another handheld recording device.
“This is for you. So you can listen to the session. See where we went.”
“Where we went?” Amy felt foggy, her mouth thick with too many syllables.
“Yes, my dear. We went back. We weren’t going to, but as you went under, it was immediately evident that you were open and receptive to the therapy.” She flicked her watch around to see the time. “It’s been almost three hours.”
Amy sat all the way up. “Three hours?” She had to get home. She hadn’t allotted for this much time away. “I thought we were just testing to see if I was responsive?”
“Oh, Amy, you were very responsive. Eager, in fact. We just went with it.”
She could feel the everyday agitation coursing back already. This woman had taken her time, and she hadn’t even been aware of it. Three hours were gone, and she had nothing to carry home with her besides a little tape?
“Why don’t I remember what we just did?”
“Well, some people are in a very light trance state while others are aware the entire session. The subconscious mind can be different for everyone. Even when it doesn’t feel like it, you’re still aware of what’s going on. Sometimes, it just takes a little while to reorient to the here and now and then”—Barb snapped her fingers—“it will just come to you. Often, when you listen to the tape, you become fully aware.”
Amy wanted the tape. She extended her hand and Barb handed it over. “I’ll just need the recorder back on your next session, okay? We have a lot of interesting work to do here.”
Amy stood and the room swayed. She sat back down.
“Let me get you some water, and you can sit here as long as you need before you drive home, all right?”
Amy nodded and flipped the recorder over in her hands. She drank the small paper cup of water and then was ushered out the front, but not before paying and booking her next three sessions.
In the car, she fumbled with the recorder’s tiny buttons and pressed play. Static blasted the silence, and she cranked the volume down. Then she heard Barbara’s voice, soothing and sure, leading her under with a string of words. After a few moments, she heard herself, in a voice entirely deep and measured, being taken back to 1963. Her name was Greg. She, Amy Marie Townsend, was a meek, calm man named Greg! And then she talked. And talked. About life as a newspaper editor, about parents who had abandoned him when he revealed he was gay, about his crippling, debilitating depression, and then, about his final day, with a glass of scotch, snotty tears, and a Smith & Wesson balanced on his pressed gray slacks.
Amy talked about the cold steel entering her mouth, but it wasn’t her mouth, it was Greg’s. She could feel, as she talked, her own teeth, which
were small and square, gripping down on the barrel like those X-rays at the dentist. A man’s guttural anguish ripped through her throat. She closed her eyes, then opened them, and her fingers, Greg’s fingers, pulled once on the trigger. There was a loud, fiery pop, a warm blast at the back of her throat, and then blackness.
She burst out of her memory, gasping and choking, and Barbara came to her rescue, talking to her in a succession of commands to bring Amy back to calm.
She pressed stop, one hot hand over her mouth. She remembered. She could feel it. She rewound the first part and listened again, and then again. Is this why she hated loud noises and guns? Is this why she cringed more than others when she heard about anyone who had committed suicide? Why those stories stuck with her for days, nights, sometimes even months afterward, haunting her with their gory details, while others brushed them off as cautionary tales? She had committed suicide in a former life. She had pressed the barrel of a gun into her throat and dared to pull the trigger … didn’t that tell her everything?
Her fingers fumbled as she shoved the tape recorder into her glove compartment and checked her phone. She had four missed calls from Richard. He rarely texted and never left a voicemail, so she never knew if something was wrong or if he was just being impatient. She put the car in reverse and struggled to come up with an excuse for where she’d been and how shaken she felt. She wanted to know more about who she was, and if that person, Greg, was any better than who she was now and what she was returning home to.
after
“Are you sleeping?” Richard stirred beside her, removing and then replacing his legs under the blanket every minute or so. Amy wanted to scream.
She blinked into the dark, as she had so many times over the years, though tonight, the worry was far from trivial. Her child was out there somewhere, and they were in here. “Of course I’m not sleeping. I don’t know if I’ll ever sleep again.”
Richard sat up, grappled for his glasses among the sea of books, nose spray, and magazines littered on his nightstand, and then slid them on. She heard something pop—knee? hip? shoulder?—and resettle as he got out of bed. “I just can’t sit here all night. Where’s the AMBER Alert? Why hasn’t it hit yet?” He went to the bathroom, and she could hear his powerful stream of urine hitting the toilet bowl. Was he sitting or standing? Lately, he’d taken to sitting while peeing, which had given her an entire new wave of judgment to contend with.
Amy glanced at the alarm clock beside them. It was 4:00 A.M. Barry, Stan, and Frank had stayed with them most of the night and were taking next steps. They’d cased the neighborhood and had put out local alerts. A detailed woods search would follow, but not until daylight.
Amy sat up too, pulled her robe from her dresser, and walked to the kitchen. She’d been up so many times at this exact hour for different reasons: heating bottles, crying babies, pregnancy cravings, pregnancy indigestion, colic, racing heart, labor, stomach flus, food poisoning, hangovers, unexplained adrenaline. She put the kettle on and rummaged in the cabinet for tea.
Amy was good in a crisis. She memorized necessary information and detached herself from everything else—namely, emotion—a lucky trait picked up from her tough-as-nails mother, and her job as an executive assistant at a high-powered firm. Barry had left a sheet about AMBER Alert criteria—at Richard’s insistence—because, as far as her husband was concerned, their child was the only one who’d ever gone missing in the history of the world, and it demanded everyone’s attention.
“What are you doing in here?”
She startled. “Jesus, Richard. You gave me a heart attack. What do you think I’m doing? I’m making tea.” She shuffled through the loose bags: Earl Grey, Darjeeling, passionflower, hibiscus, chamomile, black. She held up a few, fanned out like condoms in her fingers. “Want some?”
He nodded and picked up the stack of pamphlets Barry and Stan had left. They were titled “When Your Child Goes Missing: A Family Survival Guide.” Amy had almost laughed when they gave them each a copy, as though it were a test they had to study for and then hopefully pass. There was a twenty-four-hour-period to-do list, and then the “long-term” search, which meant anything over forty-eight hours. But Richard was fixated on the AMBER Alert criteria, going over and over each numbered point.
“Number one: Law enforcement has to believe our child was abducted. I mean, what else can we do? She’s gone! Number two: Law enforcement has to believe Emma is in serious danger of injury or death. Well, it seems any child who’s disappeared is at risk of that. Let’s see, let’s see.” He pulled his finger down the page. “Ah. Number three: They must have enough descriptors to issue the alert.” He grew silent at this one, because they both knew they didn’t have many recent photos. Simply saying a child was beautiful with brown hair and big gray eyes did little to help provide those minute, intimate details only a family would know. “Okay, so we’re working on this one. So we don’t take a lot of photos. So what? People take too many photos these days. Think about when we were kids. I think I have like three photos from childhood. Okay, here. Number four: The child is under seventeen. Well, of course. If a kid runs away over seventeen, I think they call it moving out. Am I right?” He gave his speech to a party of one, while Amy waited for the kettle to whistle. “And lastly: The child has been entered into the NCIC system. What is that? How are we supposed to know what that is?”
“It’s the National Crime Information Center,” Amy explained. She brought down two mugs. “And she hasn’t been entered into that yet.”
The papers fell to a defeated slump by his side. “How do you know what that stands for? How could you possibly know that?”
“Because I have the same handout as you. And because I read it.” Secretly, she was just as frustrated as Richard. There was a ridiculous process to it all, just like getting your license or doing taxes. Paperwork, intake forms, waiting, and questioning—often, the same questions posed a million different ways. Couldn’t they just record it once, so they could be left alone to do the important stuff? Barry, Stan, and Frank assured them they were doing everything they could. It had only been ten hours. There was still hope. She could still be out there.
“Why would she just disappear like this? Do you think she ran away?”
Amy recoiled. She couldn’t think about their last exchange, couldn’t share the ugly truth of it—those awful words she’d said, the actions taken—how that might prompt a child to get as far away from home as possible and never return. Whoever picked her up would have seen the ugly handprint across her face, and then what? Panic squeezed her throat. Would she then become a real suspect?
She was good with Robbie. She’d never hit him or even yelled at him. She could prove she was a good mom; that she was just tired, cranky, and had a shit-for-brains husband who literally—in less than twenty-four hours—was barely functioning.
She grabbed the kettle before the whistle came to a full whine. Richard was weeping over the survival guide, mouth open, snot running, his torso folding over onto itself.
“Richard. Richard. Here.” She dunked a teabag in his mug and handed it to him. Why wasn’t she crying too? Why hadn’t she cried yet?
Because she knew Emma. If she’d run off on purpose, she was probably hiding in a place even the cops couldn’t find her. She was a clever girl. Amy took a sip of chamomile and thought about her child’s handful of years on earth. Emma never told Amy anything. She never answered questions about her days, her friends, or her teachers. She felt like a perpetual outsider to her daughter’s life, which made her angrier, and made Emma more closed off.
“Richard, sit down. Let’s just sit down.”
They both sat and his tea sloshed onto the table—another mess. She sighed, wanting to just go back to bed and to sleep until this whole thing was over. But she couldn’t. “Look, I—”
The landline pierced the silence and Richard lunged to get it, huffing as he stretched to grab it on the first ring. “Yes? Hello? Hello? Did you find her?”
He pinched his lips together with his thumb and index finger until his lips were bulging and purple. “Okay. Okay, yes. That’s good. That’s a start. Thank you. Yes, we’ll be right there.”
He hung up, his eyes rabid. “They’ve issued the AMBER Alert. Locally. If they need to coordinate with other states they will, but … it’s issued at least.” He exhaled like this was a huge relief, but all this meant was that the criteria were serious enough to warrant Emma as missing. This was no longer a game of hide-and-seek.
“What else did they say?”
He was already heading to the garage to put on his shoes. “They need us to come to the station to answer questions. Take a polygraph.”
“What? A polygraph? Now? What are you talking about? It’s four-thirty in the morning! Why would we have to take a lie detector test?”
“I’m sure it’s standard procedure. Just to weed us out of the equation. It’s not like we have anything to hide.”
She would look like a liar. She knew it. They would ask her about the events of tonight and she would be telling the truth—but a selective one. She couldn’t reveal that she’d hit her daughter, that she’d said those horrible words. She should have told them already, but she hadn’t. And she couldn’t tell them now, after the fact. It was a vital omission in Emma’s disappearance. “Richard, we have a sleeping toddler in the other room. We can’t both leave. What if Emma comes back?”
He shrugged on his windbreaker for the second time. “I’m going to go. I’ll ask if someone can come and man the house. I’m sure they’re all over the neighborhood already. You stay here with Robbie. I’ll call you. Keep your cell on.”
He was out the door, a man on a mission, something she’d never seen from her husband in all their married years.
She took a sip of tea, but it was already cold. She startled as Robbie began to cry and she went to him, finding solace in a bit of normalcy.
She kissed his cheek and tucked him back in. He rolled to his side, a girthy thumb wedged between parted lips. He was the easy one. He’d been a total pregnancy surprise—the one time they’d had sex in at least a six-month window—but he’d shown her tolerance. She was kind to him.
