Don't Try To Find Me: A Novel

by Holly Brown

  He said, almost calmly, that he didn’t know if he could trust me anymore. He wanted to search the house. I thought of you—my journal—and it was like you’d become a person to me. You’ve become my only real friend, and I would do anything to protect you. You’re the one thing that’s truly me and he doesn’t control it. I won’t let him control it, so I did something I never did with him before, something I never did with anyone. He knew I’d never done it before, and that’s part of why it calmed him the rest of the way down. That, and it’s a blow job. I don’t think you can get one of those and stay angry.

  It was gross, like I expected, and even grosser because I knew that I was doing it for survival. I can’t explain it, but it felt like if he found you, he would have taken everything from me. This way, I was giving it willingly. It was my choice, warped as it sounds.

  But I really hated him afterward. I especially hated him because he was staring down at me with this look on his face, like he possessed me.

  He went to take a shower and while he was in there, I grabbed you and put you in the empty cabinet where the beer used to be. I was gambling that he wouldn’t look there twice, that he wouldn’t think I’d dare to stash anything where I’d already been caught.

  My gamble paid off, for the moment. When he came out of the shower, he searched the rest of the apartment, including my backpack. He checked the history on the Internet browser. He even looked under the mattress.

  Finally, he was satisfied. He said, “Don’t hide anything from me again, okay?” and kissed the top of my head. It made my follicles crawl.

  I wanted to get up and walk right out, daring him to stop me, but I’m pretty sure he would have. He could get arrested for what we’ve been doing. He can’t just let me walk away.

  I think he’s asleep now, but he might be pretending. Waiting to see if I’ll try to leave, and then he’ll leap up to stop me. I don’t want to think about what he’d do to stop me.

  So he’s sleeping (or pretending to, I wouldn’t put it past him, he lies about everything else) and I’m crouched in the bathtub, fully dressed, with the door locked. At least I have you. I can’t put you back in the cabinet. I can keep you near me, but it’s not a long-term solution. I’ll need to think of something. I probably can’t sleep again, not until I get out of here.

  Don’t panic. Take slow, deep breaths. You can handle this.

  I just need to wait for him to go to work tomorrow. Work, as in, not school. As in, he’s been lying to me since the first time he wrote to me. I found his uniform in his backpack. It was an impulse, going in his backpack, a tit-for-tat thing. He invaded my privacy, so I invaded his.

  Inside his backpack were dark blue coveralls with the name of the college stitched on them. It makes sense that he’s a janitor there, not a student. He never has homework; he’s never studying for tests. He made it sound like that’s because he’s so smart that he can do it all on campus, in between classes, but no one is that smart. I think he’s been leaving each morning with the coveralls in his bag and then he must change into them at work.

  Stupidest of all is that when I saw them, a part of me felt sorry for him. He must be ashamed if he’s lying about it. He wanted me to think he got away from his loser parents, defied the odds or something, but he hasn’t. He works with his hands like his dad did. He lives in the same town.

  But that’s not the worst part. The worst is that I found his wallet in the backpack, and I looked at his driver’s license, and he even lied about his name. His real name is Brandon Guillory, and he’s twenty-eight years old, and he has two convictions for assault; for the second, he served time. (After he went to bed, I snuck on the computer and did some quick Googling. I figured he wouldn’t wake up, or wouldn’t pretend to, not unless he heard a door open. No password on the computer—I guess he thinks I’m too cowed or too stupid to piece it all together.)

  Three years ago, he would have been one of the ex-convicts riding the Greyhound, his eyes crawling all over the young girls. No girl too young, apparently. He was twenty-seven when he first wrote to me, and I was thirteen. Right now, right this instant, he’s twice my age.

  I can’t go back to my parents. B.’s not who I thought he was, but he’s right about them. They only care about the surfaces of things. How would they see me, after everything that’s happened? How would they love me?

  No, that’s not it. I don’t love them anymore.

  I need to start over by myself. Go on Disappeared.com and make the rest of my life happen. I can head to New York; isn’t that where most people go? The melting pot. I’ll melt right in.

  I’ll be free of B. and free of my parents. No phonies or liars are allowed in my life anymore. Dr. Michael would be proud.

  Day 22

  “YOU NEED TO TELL the complete truth,” Candace says. It’s a statement that betrays her youth. She thinks there is a complete truth and that we always know what it is.

  We’re sitting together on the window seat. The volunteers have gone home for the day, and Paul is out somewhere. I think he and Candace decided it would be best if she prepped me alone for tomorrow’s press conference.

  She’s softer and prettier up close. Those sapphire eyes, pale unblemished skin, an expression that appears to exude genuine care—I can’t blame Paul for enjoying their hushed conferences. I can imagine his wanting more, saddled with a wife like me, but for the first time in my presence, she let a personal detail slip. She has a boyfriend in Sacramento.

  I don’t entirely trust Candace and her motivations for being here, but I might need to listen to her rules. I’ve seen what happens when I don’t follow them.

  Also, she did get rid of all the media out front, allowing me to reclaim the window seat, however briefly. Even beret guy has taken off for greener pastures. I’m not kidding myself, though. They’re probably lying in wait in San Francisco, gearing up for tomorrow’s press conference.

  “Imagine that Marley is watching,” Candace says. “This is your chance to tell your side of the story, in a way that she’ll understand. That everyone will understand. We need to get their sympathy again. Everyone makes mistakes.”

  “We had their pity for a while,” I say. “Now we’re the train wreck that they’re all watching.”

  She nods in a way that is supposed to convey that she already understands me. It’s the masses she’s concerned about. Oh, and Marley. Of course she’s very concerned about Marley.

  “I looked on your website,” I say. “I know you’re listing this as one of your campaigns. You’re not doing this out of the kindness of your heart.”

  “People often have more than one reason for doing something.”

  “But you want me to simplify my life. To tell my story like there’s just one reason.” Telling my story. The very notion makes me cringe. I have never in my life wanted to be a public figure. “How come you get to have multiple reasons and I don’t?”

  “You can have all the reasons you want to in private. But in public, you need to distill it down to something people will relate to.”

  “What if I can’t?”

  “Then people will stop helping. Have you noticed that the websites are getting a ton of hits, but we’re not generating solid leads? It’s all just talk. Your story has eclipsed the story.”

  The story is supposed to be Crusading Parents Will Do Anything to Find Missing Daughter. It’s not supposed to be Mother Was Having Affair and Behaving Suspiciously. That doesn’t motivate people to look for Marley. It gets them wondering where my lover and I might have buried the body.

  I shiver at the thought, and Candace sees that. “I know this is terrible for you.”

  How can she possibly know?

  “No, really. My brother used to run away all the time when I was growing up. I saw what it did to my parents. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to help.”

  “What happened, with your brother?” Please don’t tell me he was found dead on the streets. My eyes traipse out the window hopefully. At any s
econd, she could still walk across those fields, like some beautiful dream.

  “He ran away and came back, over and over again. And when he was eighteen, he left for good. Sometimes he shows up unannounced for Christmas. Or he shows up when he needs to borrow money. Not that it’s borrowing if you never pay it back.”

  It’s not the most heartwarming ending, but it could be worse. He’s alive. Maybe that’s what’ll happen with us and Marley. She’ll be off, living, and sometimes she’ll show up for Christmas.

  Candace hands me a tissue and I dab at my eyes.

  “It’s not how things were supposed to turn out for us,” I say. “We tried to be decent parents and give her all the advantages. How have things gone this wrong?”

  “See, that’s good. That’s the story you need to tell.”

  “I wasn’t rehearsing. I was just talking.”

  “Paul loves you a lot, you know.”

  It’s not what I expected her to say.

  “He’s pretty devastated.”

  “He should be. His daughter’s been missing for going on a month.”

  “No, by the talk about you and Dr. Harrison.”

  I blow my nose. “He’s humiliated.” I feel a twinge of guilt. He may be narcissistic and controlling and not much fun to talk to; he may have launched a media campaign without my enthusiastic consent. But he hasn’t done anything to deserve this kind of humiliation. At least, nothing I could find out by searching his closet and his computer.

  She leans in, like she really wants me to get this. “No, Rachel. It’s not about anything other than the two of you. He really loves you. He didn’t know you were so unhappy.”

  “That’s what he said?” But I think of our talk at the fair. He didn’t care about my happiness then. He’s probably just manipulating Candace, selling her on the story of his great love for me. He did a PR job on the PR person, knowing she’d turn around and sell it to me, hard.

  Before Marley ran away, I used to think of Paul as a straight shooter. Predictable, to the point of dullness. Nothing’s predictable anymore.

  “Paul said that it’s okay if you want to talk about being unhappy in the marriage and making the mistake of seeking comfort outside of it.” Ah, so the new rule is: Tell the complete truth, but let Paul write the script.

  “The hitch is,” I say, “I didn’t sleep with someone else. I didn’t have an affair.”

  “The perception is—”

  “I’m well aware of the perception.”

  “If you go out there and deny the affair, no one’s going to believe you.”

  “And if I go out there and admit to the affair, I’m lying. You said not to lie. You also said to think of it as if Marley is watching. I particularly don’t want to lie to her and confirm an affair with her psychiatrist.”

  “If you deny it, she probably won’t believe you either.”

  Did Candace really say that? Didn’t she lead with “tell the complete truth”? She’s in over her head on this campaign, clearly.

  “Americans love to forgive,” she says. “They feel magnanimous. Let them forgive you.”

  Apparently, my public image and the search for Marley will benefit more from a lie than the truth. I wish I was Canadian.

  I stand up. I have a lot to think about. “Thank you for your help. And for telling me about your brother. I’m sorry for what your family’s been through.”

  “We haven’t really settled on your story.”

  “I’m going to have to do that on my own.” I walk out of the room, leaving her concerned face behind.

  I’ve changed my mind about Candace. I think she might really care about finding Marley, as well as getting a line on her résumé or a reference or whatever else Paul has promised her. That means that I could be wrong about other people, too. The volunteers, for example, and the people who have been following us on Twitter and liking us on Facebook and whatever and wherever else. Maybe they’ll have more compassion for me than I’ve been anticipating. Maybe, for once since Marley left, things will turn out better than I expect. Sometimes unpredictable is good, right?

  With all the media types gone, the farm is mine again. I pull on my jacket and some warm boots and take a walk outside. The fields still have the appearance of neat rows, though nothing’s planted. There are no in-ground crops and no almond trees left. The trees were all razed a few owners ago. It’s still pretty, in its way, like Kansas can be pretty. Rows and order and the horizon riding low. Ten minutes from town, with nothing to tend and no encroachment from nature, we’re pseudo-rural. We’re trans-suburbia.

  I haven’t done this enough, just walked around the property. The bite in the air feels cleansing. It’s a good place to decipher the complete truth. I need to figure that out first before I can select which parts to tell. It’s true, what Candace said, about how people have a lot of motives. Rarely do you do something for one reason only. Rarely can you be so sure of what your own motives are. The subconscious is very powerful, didn’t Michael always say that?

  But people don’t want a story that’s too complicated. They want heroes and villains; they want to know who to blame. PR really is a distillery: boiling things down to what’s most digestible.

  I guess I don’t really like my stories complicated either. It’s why I prefer dispensing information to practicing therapy. It’s why I didn’t ask Marley any hard questions. See where that got me?

  That’s what I’d like to say in the press conference: I love my daughter painfully, yet I failed to ask the hard questions. I was too absorbed by my own discontent to see hers. I wrote it off as typical teen angst. I was too quick to find her typical; I always needed her to be normal, for my own peace of mind. Marley, forgive me.

  I remember our strategy on the morning show, though it seems like a hundred years ago. Candace wanted us to be aspirational. We were supposed to be the parents in a terrible situation handling it with aplomb. Parents at home would want to be us, if they ever found themselves in that same situation. It’s a very different strategy now. Paul and I are supposed to “look human,” which is a lot harder than it sounds. Our humanity needs to correspond with that old quote “To err is human, to forgive, divine.” I’ve erred, and now the viewers need to feel divine.

  I didn’t know I was erring at first. Coffee with Dr. Michael seemed innocent. He was so much older, and, initially, paternal. He was a child psychiatrist who still did therapy, who’d rather help kids than make tons of money medicating them. It was like finding a unicorn. He’d helped Marley. How could I not feel a connection to him?

  Enough justifying. Tell the complete truth.

  I felt distant from Paul. He’s a good provider but we’ve run out of things to say. We’ve grown apart; isn’t that the oldest story? It’s not untrue. I stopped trusting that he had my back if it conflicted with his own notions of how things should be. My distrust crystallized the day at the fair.

  Not that I can say any of that. The audience still wants to believe in Paul, in the good dad who’ll tweet twenty-four hours a day and travel the country to bring his daughter home. I can’t take that away from them. They’ll only punish me for it, say I’m blaming others for my own bad deeds.

  When I first started spending time with Michael, I didn’t think it had anything to do with my marriage. That’s how out of touch I was with my own feelings. In my mind, I’d happened upon a friend, who already knew lots about Marley and me from this other context. I loved Michael’s company but I didn’t desire him. And yes, I started to realize that he had romantic feelings for me, and that was part of what I enjoyed. When I walked into Starbucks, his face transformed; it was like I twinkled for him. I was the Northern Lights for Michael. With Paul . . . it hadn’t been that way for a long, long time.

  That sounds like an excuse: I was with Michael because my husband didn’t pay enough attention to me. That’s not how it was, not exactly.

  Michael told me things about my marriage that I’d failed to grasp. He pointed out how subtly co
ntrolling Paul was. Paul reached a conclusion, and he didn’t bother telling me how he’d arrived there. It’s like a math problem with only the solution visible—he never showed his work. Michael diagnosed Paul as a narcissist, and when he outlined his reasoning, it seemed to make sense. He was so sure, even though he’d only met Paul once. But he’s had so many years of training and experience. Diagnosis is like breathing to him.

  Soon after, Michael told me he was in love with me. “You’re just along for the ride in your marriage,” he said. “It wouldn’t be like that with me.”

  I hadn’t thought of my marriage as unhealthy. It was something I didn’t really think of at all. It was like when I first got my Lexus, and I loved it, and I took it to the car wash once a week, and then it was once a month or longer, and after a while, I didn’t even notice the dirt. I barely noticed the car itself; it was just transportation.

  Michael thought my marriage was toxic, that Paul was, and he was so convincing. I didn’t think I could love Michael, but I wasn’t sure I could love Paul either, not after Michael drew back the curtain. My anxiety spiked. That’s when I started using Klonopin and Ativan, not at the same time usually. I needed to numb out and stop thinking so much.

  I knew I was getting into dangerous territory, and that’s why I initiated the move. Paul had been offered a promotion at work, and even though it represented a good salary bump, he wasn’t thinking at all seriously about taking it. The high school in our old neighborhood was one of the best in the state. Paul’s change-averse—if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

  I manipulated him into the move, surprisingly skillfully, I thought. I used all his own language against him, his own dreams: I convinced him that it would be good for Marley to be in a less competitive high school environment, where she would shine. A higher salary, a lower cost of living, and after Marley went away to college, we could move to San Francisco, not the suburbs but the city proper. Nob Hill, maybe. He’d always loved Nob Hill.