by Lisa Tucker
By the time I’d taken the phone into my room, Renee told me she had a surprise for me. “Ian wants you to come to his party tonight.” She paused. “He thinks you’re really cute.”
Ian was one of the stars of the basketball team. Pretty much every girl in school had a crush on him, including Leah. I took some pride in being the exception, but I was obviously not as much of an exception as I thought. My heart was jumping out of my chest at the mere possibility that someone like him could notice me. “I don’t believe it.”
“He asked me to call and invite you.”
“For real?”
“Yeah. It starts at 10:30. Are you coming or not?”
I said I’d think about it, and she said OK and hung up. I let out a long breath and went back into the living room, where my dad was sitting with the DVD paused. Natalie and Nicole were on the love seat, gossiping about some friend, waiting for the birthday cake that my stepmother was frosting. Chocolate with white icing, same as every year. Two of those chunky number candles: 1 and 7.
Back when Renee and I were friends, my stepmother used to say that Renee’s family lived on the “wrong side of the tracks.” We don’t have any tracks in Summerland; we’ve never even had a train. Our idea of public transportation is the school bus, or someone with a car who doesn’t mind letting other kids have a ride. But it’s true that Renee’s family lives on the other side of town, farther away from the river and nearer to the factories. Ian lives in our neighborhood, though, only five or six blocks away. I’d known him long before he became the school’s personal god. His older brother Brett had taken Natalie to the senior dance. When Ian and I were kids, we used to splash each other in the neighborhood pool. I let him play with my cool yellow beach ball.
What if he really did like me? Even though I was a senior now, I’d never had a boyfriend. I’d never even been kissed. Leah and Kevin were in the same boat, so I didn’t feel like a freak, but it did bother me. Leah and Kevin were both thin. My secret fear was that I was too fat for any boy to like.
I was five-five and I weighed 132 pounds. According to the health charts, I was normal. But I was heavier than most of the girls at school who had boyfriends, which wasn’t hard to be: a lot of those girls were so skinny they looked like they’d never smelled a hamburger. Sometimes I tried to diet, but it never worked, partly because I liked food too much, but mainly because my stepmother got offended if everyone didn’t eat huge helpings of whatever she cooked for dinner. But Natalie and Nicole were chunkier than me, and they’d always had boyfriends. And Leah and Kevin told me I was pretty all the time. My dad said I took after your side of the family, Mother, and since you were beautiful, I know this meant I couldn’t be a downright woof-woof.
I felt like I’d woken up inside the plot of a movie. A very cute boy said I was cute—on my birthday. It was a truly magical development. I’d been invited to Ian’s party. Of course I was going!
I told my dad, and he said fine. I think he was relieved that I had something to do for a change. My stepmother said something about Ian’s father being too lazy to keep up his yard, but this was typical for her. She’d said Renee was “white trash” and Kevin was “strange,” and Leah was the worst, because “she thinks she’s so smart.”
In case you’re wondering, I did have a story that explained my stepmother. I actually worked with my shrink to separate what was true and what wasn’t about her. We wrote it all down in a grid.
Story: She grew up so poor she had to eat Cream of Wheat for dinner every night. Truth: She was from a somewhat poor family, but the detail must have come from my own hatred of Cream of Wheat.
Story: Her first husband left her for his secretary. Truth: Her ex did get remarried awfully quickly, but I really have no idea why.
Story: She can’t have any children with my dad for some biological reason. She’s devastated by her infertility. Truth: She has never discussed this in my presence, but I still say it’s probably true, as I know my dad wanted a son and yet they never had a kid. Unless my dad is the infertile one? (This possibility makes me so nervous I can’t think about it. I bet you know why, Mother. You’re the only one who could, right?)
Story: She’s gotten quite old-looking in the last ten years, and she worries that my dad regrets marrying her. Truth: She’s six years older than my dad and she looks it, she says so herself. But I’ve only sensed this worry. So maybe it isn’t real. I don’t know because I can’t know. My shrink emphasized this.
Story: She wishes her daughters had done better in high school and gone to college. Truth: Again, I can’t know, but I sure would wish this, if I were in her shoes.
You get the drift. The story went on and on, until I felt like my stepmother was doing her best considering her difficult circumstances, and so there was no reason to be upset with her. This was the conclusion of most of my stories, actually. Everyone was doing the best they could. People were basically good.
My dad turned off the DVD and went into the kitchen. I heard him tell my stepmother, “It’s her birthday. She should be able to do what she wants.”
Before I left, Nicole and Natalie insisted I change into the short black skirt and tight pink tank top they’d given me for my birthday. They also fixed my hair with one of the ceramic flat irons from the beauty salon. They pressured me into putting on the only shoes in my closet that I’d never worn because the black straps dug into my ankles and the heels made me feel wobbly. When they were done putting makeup on me, they said I looked like a girl instead of a geek for the first time in my life.
I was nervous until I got behind the wheel of the Honda. I was still so amazed that I had my very own car, with a stick shift, no less. Heading down the block, I gunned the engine and downshifted just to have more to do with my hands.
I got to the party at 10:06, according to the clock in the Honda. I left at 10:43. It was only thirty-seven minutes, but it changed my entire life.
Whenever I feel like a wuss because this keeps hurting so much, I think about Gracie. There were three other girls in the same position as me that night: Gracie, Megan, and Marcella. I didn’t know any of them very well, but nobody knew Gracie. She was a quiet girl who was bused to school from her parents’ farm, a twenty-mile ride each way. I wondered later how she got to Ian’s party, and especially how she got home. I didn’t see her there. She’d left by the time I arrived.
It was a few months later, December and already snowing, when Gracie came home from school and took an overdose of her mother’s OxyContin. Her family claimed they had no idea she was depressed. The whole senior class went to a special church service to pray for Gracie, even Ian and Renee and all those popular kids who should have spontaneously burst into flames for daring to sit in a pew and act like they cared. She did recover, but she never came back to school. The rumor is she’s finishing the year in a psych hospital in St. Louis.
I scratched Brad’s face and got suspended less than a week after Gracie took the overdose. My shrink says I did it for her. He also says that I’m still trying to do the same thing to myself that Gracie tried to do to herself, but just taking my time about it.
Like the song says, “Everybody hurts sometimes, everybody cries.”
Blah, blah, blah.
I have to go down to face dinner, but first an interesting fact. You gave me a stuffed turtle, but did you know that female turtles lay their eggs and walk away? The babies don’t grow up with their mothers. They never even meet them.
SEVENTEEN
Finding the “friendly” kidnapper’s note in the backyard had made the police a little more relaxed about the investigation—at least so it seemed to David, who felt himself becoming, conversely, more agitated. Yes, it was good news, as his mother said, that they didn’t think the kidnapper intended to harm Michael, but it was hardly a reason to believe their son wouldn’t be harmed. What if the kidnapper was too unstable to act
in accordance with her supposed intentions? If nothing else, what about the psychological trauma of keeping a child away from his family and his home? David couldn’t understand why they weren’t out looking for his son rather than spending more time questioning him and his wife. Detective Ingle said additional questioning was necessary because of the new assumption that the kidnapper was somehow connected to the family. New to him, perhaps, but infuriatingly not new to David, who’d been telling the police about Courtney since the moment they arrived.
The detective insisted that David and Kyra be questioned separately this time, and so she was upstairs in her study with one of the officers, while he was stuck talking to Ingle in the living room. David was leaning against the wall, and Ingle was sitting on the couch, twiddling his thumbs. Literally. The thumb motion was probably a nervous tic, but David found it extremely irritating. Their discussion had been going on for at least twenty minutes, and David was becoming frantic for Ingle to stop talking and do something.
At the moment the detective was stuck on one phrase from the note: “think of me as a babysitter.” “It just doesn’t sound like something your ex-wife would say, does it?”
“I have no idea,” David said. He was thinking that the detective had even less of an idea. Less than no idea? Yes. The man had achieved the impossible. “The entire thing could have been some self-justifying lie for all I know.”
Ingle cleared his throat. “Was your ex-wife in the habit of lying?”
“Are you joking? Even if she never lied before, she never kidnapped a child before, either. It’s not relevant.”
“That’s right,” the detective said, and gave David a meaningful glance. “She’s never taken anyone’s child, has she?” He emphasized his point by tapping his thumbs together before the twiddling began again.
This was so absurd that David would have laughed in other circumstances. “Surely you’re not implying that whoever took my son must have done this before? That every kidnapper has always been a kidnapper?”
Before Ingle could come up with anything to defend that ridiculous position, the officer who’d been questioning Kyra came into the room. What followed was a veritable code of raised eyebrows and nods: the officer nodded, Ingle raised his eyebrows, the officer nodded, paused, and nodded again, Ingle nodded, the officer raised his eyebrows, and on and on, until finally the two men headed in the direction of the kitchen.
David was about to follow and ask what was going on when Kyra came down the stairs. She sat down on the white-and-blue love seat near the window. He assumed she wanted to talk, and he took a seat on the piano bench across from her. She looked so sad; he wished he could be next to her and comfort her, but the love seat was too associated with their little boy. In the evenings, the three of them usually snuggled there, talking and reading together. If only he could believe their son would be back in his usual place tonight, but as the hideous afternoon dragged on, he knew it was becoming less likely.
He heard the back door slam—either Ingle and the officer going out or the giant officer coming in. The giant had been in the backyard since the note was found, supposedly dusting for fingerprints. David wondered how long it could possibly take. More to the point, he wondered what Ingle had been getting at during his questioning. What was the man up to?
“It’s as if he wants me to admit she didn’t take him,” David said. “It makes no sense.”
He was talking more to himself than to Kyra, who was staring down at her hands. But then he heard his wife’s soft voice, “Unless she didn’t.”
“Ingle has no way of knowing that,” he said, more sharply than he intended. He let his shoulders relax and took a deep breath. “He told me they sent an officer by her house and she wasn’t home. That’s it. They haven’t even talked to her yet.”
Kyra raised her face and looked at him. “But why would she do it? There has to be a reason, doesn’t there?”
He knew his wife deserved an answer, but he simply couldn’t discuss all that. He mumbled some platitude about the difficulty of understanding why anyone does anything, and looked out the window. It was a perfect sunny day, which seemed so incongruous with his family’s distress that it made him want to punch something. But he wasn’t the kind of man who punched things. He felt out of control in a way he hadn’t since he was a hormonally challenged teenager.
“Besides,” he finally said, taking another breath. “It’s not like there are any other suspects. You know they’re wasting their time sending police to question everyone in my family. As if someone like Peggy or Eleanor would take our son.”
Peggy was his former stepmother, who hadn’t seen Michael in years, and Eleanor was a second cousin on his mother’s side. Eleanor was a little crazy, but her craziness took the form of hoarding junk and telling everyone she was about to be famous for some accomplishment she never bothered to specify. She’d been over to the house two or three times, always with Sandra, and she sent Michael a birthday card every year, like most of David’s relatives did. She had no reason to take Michael. As David had told the police countless times, no one he knew was capable of doing this other than his ex-wife.
“Maybe it’s someone in my family.” Kyra wrapped her arms around herself. “Have you thought of that?”
No, he hadn’t thought of it, because it was so obviously false. David remembered going to Kyra’s father’s funeral; it was before Michael was born, maybe seven years ago? The service was attended by over a hundred people. David met old Callahans and middle-aged Callahans and a few baby Callahans. He helped Great Aunt Something-or-Other balance her plate of food. He had his foot stepped on by an overweight guy everyone called Uncle Grumpy. He shook hands with a cousin that had lost his leg in the first Gulf War. He listened to the bragging of another cousin who claimed to be the next Donald Trump. And he spent a lot of time with Kyra’s stepmother, who cornered him not to talk about her loss but to discuss her beloved horses. He remembered because one of the horses was named Sandra. The other was Fletcher or Flicka, something horsey like that.
It was all normal enough, if not particularly pleasant, but what struck David was that not one of these people had come to their wedding, though Kyra had invited them all. Maybe they couldn’t afford the trip, but why hadn’t they sent a present, or at least a card? Even Ray and Peggy had sent a check for two hundred dollars, though Ray’s note was so offensive that David would have been happier if he hadn’t heard from his father. Good luck. You can’t say I didn’t warn you.
The sad fact was that the police didn’t need to question Kyra’s relatives, because none of them had ever shown the slightest interest in Michael or any other aspect of her life. Hell, half the people at that funeral couldn’t even correctly pronounce her name. Her stepmother seemed to care more about her horses than about Kyra; her own mother had deserted the family when Kyra was a little kid, and her only sister had cut off contact with all the Callahans when Kyra was barely out of college. The only family Kyra had—apparently the only one she’d ever had—was the one she’d made with him and their beautiful son.
“No one would want to hurt you,” he said gently. “I’m sure this isn’t your fault.”
He turned to the doorway because he could hear Ingle. The detective was barking orders to one of the other officers, but even the man’s bark was too quiet for David to make out the words. “I think I should go see what they’re—”
“Does it have to be either my fault or your fault?” Kyra said.
“Of course not.” He rubbed his palm over his forehead, wondering where this had come from. “Whoever took him is responsible for this.”
“But you said it’s not my fault, as though if it were my family, it would be. So if it turns out to be Courtney, will it be your fault?” She leaned forward and her hair fell over the side of her face. “Is that what you think?”
He said no, but before he could elaborate, In
gle walked in with the news that two new policemen had arrived. David heard their footsteps on the front porch. Ingle let them in, and a moment later, he announced that he and the original officers were leaving to follow up on leads. Finally.
“I’ll call you as soon as I know anything.” He handed David his card. “You can also call me if you have any questions or think of anything that’s relevant.”
David took the card and ignored the sarcasm. For the hundredth time, he wished they’d been assigned a different detective. But if Ingle found Michael, he would forgive the man anything. He would let the detective come over and twiddle his thumbs in their living room every day for the rest of their lives, if only he brought back their son.
When he turned away from Ingle, he saw that Kyra had slipped out of the room. He went upstairs and found her in their bedroom, sitting at the end of the queen-size bed. He thought about this morning, when he’d been distracted by a phone call while he was making the bed. He’d obviously done a poor job: one side of the pale yellow blanket was scraping the wood floor. His chest hurt remembering this. It was such a normal thing to do. Such a normal morning—until it wasn’t.
