I can just hear you now: Calculate your BMI, you’re totally within normal ranges for your height. You have to stop comparing yourself to magazine covers. Those pictures are airbrushed and unrealistic. So fine, I’ll stop bitching about being fat, except for one more thing: having this baby has totally wrecked my body. Don’t even get me started on my stretch marks. They look like the skin graft photos in that presentation you made for a staff lunch-and-learn and made me sit through three times while you practiced. I promise, I will keep pot handles turned inwards on the stove, I will unplug curling irons, I will never go to sleep with an electric heating pad, and I will check that my fire extinguisher is functional on a regular basis by turning it upside down and hitting the bottom with the heel of my hand to make sure the chemical debris hasn’t formed clumps. See, I did listen to some of things you told me.
I never really got to thank you for surprising me the night of my prom the way you did, booking us a girls’ night at the swanky Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel and indulging me with a dinner of caramel cheesecake and virgin margaritas. Virgin margaritas for the pregnant chick. Cue dry laughter. I never really got to thank you because my Cam-loves-Jessica-and-I’m-fat-and-knocked-up funk had shaded my whole world. Can I trade what I feel now for that? Please? Because this feels like a flesh-eating virus.
I woke up the night of my prom to pee—so much for ever getting sleep again—and saw your dress hanging over the back of the desk chair. On my way back from the bathroom, I rubbed my hand over the soft blue satin, the texture of the lace across the bust. You’d hauled that dress all the way to Banff to make me laugh. You put on the dress and we sipped Earl Grey and clinked our tea cups with our pinkies in the air. Cheers to my finishing the twelfth grade. If the baby had been due any earlier, I might not have made it. You’re so smart, you used to tell me, don’t underestimate yourself.
Cam and Jess had probably moved on to the prom after-party. When Jess found out Cam had cheated on her with me, they broke up—for like, a week. Did she even have the right to get mad at him? I mean, honestly, he cheated on me with her first. Technically, Jess was the tit and I was just the tat.
The first day that everybody at school knew I was pregnant, I overheard two girls talking about me while I was inside one of the bathroom stalls. “How stupid do you have to be?” one said. “Like, how hard is it to just use a condom?” And then, the other, “I heard she did it on purpose.” The first, again, “Cam definitely traded up.” My skull felt as though it had filled with warm fluid. My hands shook. I raised my fingers to the pink metal bathroom stall, touched the black permanent marker letters, YOU ARE A PENIS.
That night at the Banff Springs, the night my prom went on without me, you sat up in bed, maybe woken up by my walking around, or the toilet flushing, or the zipper unzipping, or the fact that the AC in the hotel made it feel like sleeping inside of a refrigerator, even with the baby as my built-in heater.
“You okay?” you asked, and yawned, which made me yawn.
I sat down beside you on the edge of your bed. I used to crawl into bed with you right up until that summer after your prom when you moved out and my mother turned your bedroom into an all-white guest room. White kind of begs a six-year-old to make a mess, doesn’t it? Anyway, I sat down beside you on the bed, and the baby kicked, and for a second we could both see the wave of it moving, through my thin white T-shirt. You placed a hand against the bulge.
“Just cold,” I said.
“Use one of the hotel robes,” you suggested, which I hadn’t even thought of. If only all problems could be solved so easily.
Tip #57
July 10, 2002
Uh, yeah, that girl who gone missing, I saw the flier saying to call to report like, suspicious activity and stuff, and there’s been a grey pickup, well, bluish-grey, maybe. It’s parked illegally beside the fire hydrant on my street for three days.
ABBY
WHEN I WAS A KID, YOU USED TO SAY, “DON’T TOUCH MY stuff!” Poor Natasha, former only child, suddenly having to deal with a stepsister and a half-sister taking your belongings without permission. Remember the time Kayla “borrowed” your denim jacket, then forgot her house key, and when she rang the doorbell after school, she found you on the other side? Priceless.
When I borrowed your stuff, even with permission, I somehow always ended up breaking them, losing them, staining them. Honestly, I don’t know why you kept trusting me with your stuff, especially not after I came back from my high school Christmas dance minus one of your Tiffany pearl earrings. I’d just found out I was pregnant, but no one could tell yet, and I’d wanted to show up looking hotter and classier and more confident than Jessica.
The night you went running and didn’t come back, the detective tried to get me to call Dad. I dialled, but then I just held the phone out, and I could hear Dad answer, saying, “Natasha? Natasha? Hello?”
Greg got to the house first, then my parents. Dad’s black dress pants and blue pinstripe shirt looked wrinkled, as though he’d grabbed some clothes from the hamper and fumbled his way into them after Reuben’s call. He’d pushed his sleeves up, and his arms looked bare without his thick gold watch.
And my mother—have you ever seen my mother without makeup? Even when she had her gallbladder removed, I visited her in the hospital and I swear she had on black eyeliner. But she showed up early morning July seventh looking blurry and incomplete, her hair spun on top of her head in a sloppy bun, a black cardigan hanging open over a white T-shirt under which a dark bra was visible. Her hair was blonder than I remembered. Police calling equals real emergency. Come-over-quick- or-you’ll-look-like-an-evil-stepmother emergency. I could just see the relief wafting off of her, like, thank god it was you who disappeared, not me, and certainly not Kayla. Where was Kayla, by the way? I figured my mother would’ve called her on the drive over. Did Kayla not think you were important enough?
My back ached. I put my hand out to brace myself on a chair. Standing in your kitchen, Mom kept staring at my belly. I hadn’t seen Mom or Dad since I told them I was going to keep the baby. You talked to them more than I did, Tash. And I know you wanted me to make up with them, especially after I crossed the three-month mark and abortion was no longer an option. But screw them, they rejected me. I didn’t want to listen to any of their we’re disappointed in you, but we’ll make it work bullshit.
“Where did she go?” Dad demanded, pacing the length of the kitchen. “You saw her leave, Abby!”
“She went for a run! She didn’t tell me exactly where.” Why wasn’t I crying? Why wasn’t anybody crying? Greg, sitting at the kitchen table talking to Reuben, looked like a mannequin. What was Greg telling the cop about you? If Dad would just shut up for one second, I could—
“You should have asked her!” Dad said. He slammed his fist down on the counter.
That made the detective and Greg both get up. Greg pulled a chair out from the table, put a hand on my shoulder, and guided me to sitting, but he didn’t say anything. I wanted him to tell my dad to shut his mouth. Tell him I didn’t do anything wrong. Tell him you would be back any second.
Reuben pulled up a chair in front of me and sat backwards in it, folded his arms over the top of the back rest, leaned in so that his stub-bled chin was close to mine. “What about earlier in the day, did anything seem off? Was she acting different at all?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t—I didn’t notice anything…”
Dad’s expression reminded me of being spanked as a child. “Think, Abby!” he bellowed. “Detective, we’re losing time, here.”
“What about the hospitals?” my mother interjected. “Did you call all the hospitals?”
“I’ve got my guys down at the station checking all of that, Ma’am,” he said.
“Kathleen, please!” As though the word Ma’am made her sound older than she was. Too bad for you, Kathleen, I thought. You’re about to become a grandmother.
“Mr. Bell, Mrs. Bell—Kathleen—these situations are undeni
ably stressful, but if you could please just stay as calm as possible, for now.” Reuben turned back to me. “Let’s take this one step at a time. What did she do when she got up in the morning?”
It felt like rats were gnawing at my brain. “She was up before me. I got up to pee…”
“What time was that?”
“I don’t remember. She was getting ready for work. Maybe seven? I think her shift started at eight, so…she made me breakfast.” Oatmeal, blueberries, turkey bacon. You were scrubbing the pan when I came downstairs. You said good morning. I’m sure I grumbled something. You made me breakfast and for some reason I was still cranky. I didn’t say thank you. I didn’t give you a hug. I plucked a piece of the bacon off the plate with my fingers and ate it. I didn’t even use a fork.
“And then…” What if I mixed up the details? “She said goodbye, she left for work. I went back to bed.”
Reuben nodded. “Did you talk to her at all during the day?”
“Not until she got home.”
“What time was that?”
“…Eight-thirty? She usually works a twelve-hour shift, so…she wasn’t home for very long. She was making dinner. Then she changed into workout clothes.” You’d said hello to the baby, running your hands along my belly. The baby kicked for you. The baby always kicked for you.
I stood, pushed my chair back. Standing all at once, I felt dizzy. The world looked black for just a second, and then everyone came back into focus, all around me. Mom, Dad, Greg, Reuben. A phone rang, but not the house phone.
Mom lunged for her purse. “Kayla? Oh honey, I’m so glad to hear your voice!”
Reuben turned to Dad. “Okay. Mr. Bell, I want you to get started on this list, calling these people, and I’m going to give a ring to my buddies at the station, check in. It’s only been a couple of hours, okay? We’ll get this sorted out.”
I went upstairs and stood in your bedroom but I didn’t want to touch your stuff—the lavender lace bra hanging from your doorknob, the hardcover book with cracked spine face down on your bedside table; the laundry basket at the foot of the bed stacked with folded white towels; the empty contact lens case still partially filled with solution; the plastic grocery bag with unopened twelve-pack of toilet paper bulging out the top; a pair of shiny red heels in the corner by the closet, your desktop computer, screen dark, powered down; a scrawled note on your desk, lined paper torn from something, edge ragged, Dentist 26th 10:30. The detective would want to see this. That’s proof, right there. You intended to come back. You didn’t leave me on purpose.
How much time has passed, now? Two nights? Three? My mother has set up a temporary bed for herself on your living room couch, meaning I’ve had to go back to sleeping in my own room. She doesn’t know I can’t get comfortable anywhere other than that couch. She doesn’t know that my tailbone aches every time I go up and down the stairs. And now she’s phoning my doctors and insisting I take strange rainbow-coloured pills shaped like footballs. She forced me to try one, and I gagged on it, felt it stick in my throat. I’m pretty sure you know better than her about what vitamins I should be taking. I don’t give a shit what my mother’s naturopath says. I’ve never seen my mother sleep on a couch in my whole life. I think she brought her own thousand thread count sheets. And she ambushed me with a hug yesterday, her skeleton arms trapping me, while I just stood there, waiting for it to be over.
I want to go into your room, crawl into your bed like I did when I was little and had a nightmare or Mom and Dad were fighting. You’d rubbed my back, alternating between knuckles, fingers, and the heel of your hand. No matter how much I want to go into your room, I feel like now, I can’t touch your stuff. Not stuff anymore—evidence. That bra hanging from your door? Not just a bra anymore, but something you touched, something that touched you, something that held your scent, tiny flakes of your skin, invisible traces of your DNA. The cops took your computer. The note you scrawled. The stack of bills on the kitchen counter. Your day-planner. The hard drive from your computer. Your camera. Did any of it tell them anything?
I asked the detective if I could have the mixed CDs from your car. You joked that you would play Queen’s “Under Pressure” from your 1981 mix while I delivered. “How about Salt-N-Pepa?” I suggested. “Push It.” 1987.
You were supposed to take me to the hospital. We toured the hospital, talked ahead of time about my options, my birth plan. Like me getting an epidural, ASAP. Maybe I should have let you talk me into prenatal classes, but come on, picture me, lying on the floor with my legs spread apart, huffing and puffing and trying to ignore the stares and judgment from the thirty-something mothers with their polo-wearing husbands and their educations and baby registries? It should be you having this baby. I know that’s what you really want. So let’s trade. You come back and I’ll disappear.
With my mom on the couch downstairs, I shift in my bed, trying to find a position to ease the pressure, knocking the cordless phone and a glass of water off my bedside table in the process. The glass hits the wall, spilling its contents. A dark stain spreads along the carpet. If I leave it alone, it will dry and disappear, like it never existed. I keep the cordless phone with me at all times, now. Because what if the detective calls? What if you call? I take it with me into the bathroom, turn up the volume, just in case.
When I lean and reach to pick up the glass, pain shoots through my lower back, my right kidney. The glass has a fine crack running along the side, but hasn’t shattered. I press at the crack until the glass splinters, revealing a long shard extending to a jagged point. I hold the shard between my thumb and forefinger.
“What CDs?” Reuben had said. He didn’t ask to look in your car that first night—that first morning, technically. At that point, he insisted you would come back. Insisted that missing people get found, like I shouldn’t even worry, like you just needed a break, like you’d just come back, apologetic, when you’d had some time to yourself. I wanted to gag, sitting at the table with him, the kitchen stinking of overcooked beef stew.
“I didn’t see any CDs in the car,” he said, when he finally went out into the garage and looked again for me, because he hadn’t cleared it for me to go in there myself yet. When he came back, he pulled off his blue latex gloves the same way you taught me, by pinching the palm of one hand with the thumb and forefinger of the other hand and pulling the gloves inside out. He said he found “nothing meaningful to the investigation.”
I hold the glass fragment with its jagged edge down. Run the sharp point against the inside of my wrist, softly along the skin, again, again. You are gone. You are gone. You are gone. More pressure now. My joints are swollen, my fingers ripened, my ankles inflamed. You are gone, you are gone. Everything hurts. I press harder. This is where people take a radial pulse, you taught me. Don’t take it with the thumb, because the thumb has its own pulse. You can feel someone’s heartbeat through their thumb. I press harder. Make the first slice. Blood wells in a line. The line burns. It hurts less than I thought.
I need this baby out.
JOSIE
Ms. McKinnon—what can I do for you?
It’s Mrs. McKinnon…Maybe I should have called first, but...I have questions about the investigation. I’m organizing all these search parties, and the police aren’t telling me anything.
Have a seat, okay? You want coffee? Tea?
No thank you—I don’t need a drink, I just need to know, like, why aren’t you doing anything? Following leads? Do you have any suspects?
You know we can’t really give out details about an active investigation. That’s protocol. But, to be honest, we don’t have a lot to go on, here. We haven’t located any evidence that would point us in any specific direction. Until more evidence surfaces...
What do you mean, surfaces? Do you just expect it to show up by itself? You have to look for it! That’s why I’m conducting all these searches and organizing prayer circles!
We’ve conducted a thorough investigation with the information we have
. I know you’re frustrated—
Of course I’m frustrated! She’s my best friend! She’s out there, somewhere. She has to be. Can’t you just interview more people? What about her computer? My brother said he could help you with accessing her files, going through her emails—
We have techs down here at the station doing all of that. So far, we haven’t found anything relevant.
There has to be something.
Come on, we’ve been through this. I mean, if you have more information for me, if there’s something you’ve uncovered, or if you think of something—anything—that could be relevant to the investigation, I’m happy to talk to you about that. But we can’t just expend a bunch of resources and taxpayers’ dollars when there’s no evidence. You knew her. Be honest with me, is there any chance she picked up and left voluntarily?
No.
No?
That’s why you’re not investigating? Because you think she left on purpose? Without telling any of us, making everybody worry like this? No way.
It’s a possibility we have to consider. A lot of things were stressing her out.
Is this about the breakup?
Among other things. The baby—
Look, everything stressful in her life would have blown over. Everybody’s life is stressful. You don’t know Natasha. She wouldn’t have just left. And, anyway, she was the one who broke up with him! If anyone had any reason to be heartbroken, it was Greg, not Natasha!
Was he?
Was he what?
Heartbroken?
Well, yeah, I mean, right after the breakup, he called her all the time, he wanted to get back together—
And she didn’t?
She did, but what was she supposed to do? He wasn’t ready to marry her.
Like, how long did he need, really? If he really loved her, he would want to marry her, especially after how long they’d been together! What kind of person doesn’t want that? My husband and I only knew each other for a couple of months when he proposed. When you know, you know. I just don’t get why he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life with her. She wasn’t going to wait forever. She had a house, she had a good job...do you think he had something to do with it?
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