A Morning Like This

by Deborah Bedford

  “Ab.” It just slipped out, the endearment he always used with her when something was wrong. He called her his pet name with no hint of appraisal or judgment; he said it only with a sense of deep need.

  “I don’t know what to say, David. I’m sorry.”

  “Do they have any idea where she could be?”

  “No. Nothing really. Her mother’s posted all the information on an Internet site. And she’s making up posters, getting them out the minute she can.”

  He raked his fingers through his hair, stared at the ceiling as if it would give him an answer. “I want to go out there.”

  “David,” Abby said. “You could have told me you had written Susan a letter.”

  Like an elk caught in headlights, he froze. “What?”

  “That letter. You could have told me about it. You’ve finally told me about everything else.”

  “She said I’d written a letter? She told you about that?” He was reacting all wrong to her finding out, and he knew it. He was playing a game—offense, defense, then offense again, trying to keep his footing.

  “I’m tired, David. I’m tired of fishing, asking questions, trying to figure out what you haven’t told me.”

  “Well, you know the truth?” he asked. “I’m tired of it, too.”

  “Samantha may be trying to get to you.” David realized how odd it must feel to her, being the one who knew of Susan, being the one to talk to him about his child, his mistress. “The letter’s gone, and Susan thinks she might have taken it. Susan hadn’t told Sam about you.”

  “Oh, man.” He stared at the wood grain of his desk. “Oh, man.”

  “David, I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what? Sorry to tell me? Or sorry that she’s missing?”

  “How dare you? How dare you ask such an unfair question at a time like this?”

  Yeah. Abby was right. “She’s out there alone somewhere. That or worse. I could get in the Suburban. I could drive west, see if I could find her.”

  “The state patrol told Susan to stay home where Samantha can reach her. I’d imagine they would tell you the same thing.”

  He stopped wrangling over it for a moment and looked at Abby hard. “Thank you for being willing to get involved. Thank you for coming to tell me this.”

  “Maybe I’m not willing,” Abby said. “Maybe I don’t have any other choice.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  There were probably over a dozen places one small girl could conceal herself inside the lockable nooks, crannies, cubicles, and bins of a twenty-seven-foot Jayco camping trailer, especially when that trailer was packed for a camping vacation with blankets and pillows and at least fifty pounds of tuna cans, Rice-A-Roni, Ritz Crackers, and marshmallows for S’Mores.

  Especially when a friend was helping her.

  “Okay,” one small girl whispered to another. “This will work. You can hide here.”

  “Are you sure? Are you sure they aren’t going to find me?”

  “It’ll be fine. Dad’ll be home right after five and then we’re driving all night long. He never stops except to get gas. And Mom will be sleeping.”

  “Will we be there in a day?”

  “No. Sixteen hours, that’s what Dad says. It’s perfect. You hide here all day, we leave tonight and get there tomorrow about eleven in the morning.”

  “What if I make noise or something? What if I sneeze?”

  “Last time we went on a trip, we hid Jess Cavender’s Welsh Corgi in here for two days. They never knew a thing until we got to California and it was too late to send him back. I think he probably barked. Of course, he peed on the floor. You won’t pee on the floor, will you?”

  An insulted shrug. “It’ll be hard, but I’ll try to do my best.”

  “If you have to go, push this button before you do.” She gestured toward a little plastic panel on the wall behind the tiny sink. “And after you’ve gone, you have to punch it again to turn the pump off. Dad always gets mad when we forget to turn the pump off. It wastes water if you don’t.”

  “I’ll turn the pump off, I promise.”

  “Okay.” A deep sigh of conviction. “I guess that’s it, then.”

  “I guess.”

  “We’ll leave in about an hour, I think. Right when he gets home.”

  “I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.” But then they stood staring at each other, knowing how wrong those words were because, yes, Samantha was going somewhere. She was going to Wyoming as a stowaway.

  When the door shut, Samantha Roche waited alone, a deserter from camp, locked inside her best friend’s trailer. She looked around for a place to get comfortable and decided on the corner of the bunk bed, propped in a corner with a pile of corduroy pillows. She unzipped the front pocket of her Camp Plentycoos backpack and pulled out the letter, tattered and pressed flat, with a Rock Springs, Wyoming postmark. She pulled the blue stationery out, unfolded it once more, and read the words her mother might never have showed her.

  “Even if she’s never wanted a father, do you think she might want one now?…I can give her good things.”

  Samantha held the letter to her chest with both hands and squeezed her eyes shut. She held all of her uncertainty and all of her fear and all of her hope in one small, bursting bosom.

  “What do you think?” she whispered aloud to no one. “What do you think about this?”

  And from somewhere, into her, the sureness came.

  As the setting sun silhouetted the Tetons and scalloped the underbellies of the clouds with gold, Abby poured lemon oil on a rag and began to polish the coffee table. Tonight, horror of horrors, it was the Treasures’ turn to host prayer meeting. Tonight an onslaught of committed couples, including Nelson and Sarah Hull themselves, would arrive on their front doorstep shortly after six-thirty p.m. After a fifteen-minute round of visiting, they would get down to business, petitioning the heavenly Father for everything from new shelves in the church pantry to protection for the church missionaries in Benin and Somalia and Uzbekistan. After that, they would lean in to the circle and get very personal, laying hands on the ones who requested it—some of them weeping with joy or grief, some of them giving praise reports on what the Lord had done this week in their lives.

  And here we are, Abby thought. So many layers of damage and danger and deception in our lives, and people are starting to know about it.

  She made careful circles over the table with the cloth, smelling the sharp incense of the oil, watching the deepening richness as it soaked into the pine, and thought of how even dead wood could be polished and refurbished with a loving hand, but hearts sometimes got weather-beaten beyond repair.

  She refolded the towels in the guest bathroom, put out a fresh box of tissue, and thought, Why had it been easy to discuss David with some friends and be silent to the ones in church?

  She lit a candle in a holder shaped like a moose and thought, How easy to light a flame in wick and wax, when the light has gone completely from our lives. In came the prayer group at seven and there they sat, and the whole time they were holding hands and singing—a part that Abby always loved—the questions wouldn’t stop sounding in her head.

  What are we going to do if Samantha comes, Lord?

  What are we going to do if she doesn’t?

  Oh Lord Oh Lord Oh Lord.

  As their church family circled hands in their living room, she noticed that David sat as stoic and motionless on the sofa as she did. When someone began reading Scripture, he didn’t follow along in his Bible; he stared at the gold wedding band on his knuckle instead.

  Several times she noticed Nelson watching David. Once during the evening, Betty Sailors said, “It’s such a shame David resigned from the finance committee. That was such a nice letter he sent. We’re really going to miss his expertise.”

  “He’s resigned?”

  Betty nodded. “From the presbytery committee, too. From all of it. You didn’t know?”

  Abby shook her head.

&nbs
p; “Well, that’s a surprise,” Betty said. “You’re his wife.”

  Well, he didn’t tell me.

  That night, they laid hands on Nelson and Sarah and prayed for the power of Nelson’s Sunday messages. They prayed for Sarah’s sister who had been diagnosed with diabetes. They prayed for Joe Anderson who had gotten laid off from his job at Sunrise Lumber. They prayed for Victor Martinez who was looking for a new place to live. They prayed for Hannah Saunders who was in angst, listening for God’s instructions, trying to decide whether or not to move her mother into an assisted-living center.

  From the reflection in the window, Abby could tell that the candle in the little holder in the bathroom was burning low. “Is there anyone else who has needs?” Nelson asked, his Bible held clenched between two able hands. Abby saw her pastor glance pointedly at her husband.

  Nelson knows. David’s been talking just like I have. Something caught in her throat.

  But, has he been talking to be transparent with his sin? Or has he been talking to win others to his side?

  They had both lost so much. She didn’t even know what David was thinking anymore.

  There is nothing emptier than an empty profession of the mouth when the words spoken aren’t what is inside your heart. So Abby sat in painful endurance, her ears roaring as she kept a stiff upper lip and said nothing.

  Samantha Roche had checked her Fossil watch three times before she finally heard the family loading up and the slamming of doors and the revving of the engine. The camping trailer jerked as they started off down the sloping driveway, and something crashed onto the floor. Samantha pressed herself into the corner of the bunk, thinking she could burrow beneath pillows if anyone came searching.

  But no one did and eventually she must have fallen asleep because when she opened her eyes next everything had gotten dark. Through the window, reflected off the walls and the windows of the camper, she could see arches of amber light as they passed beside ramp exits and the beginnings of towns. In the clacking of the tires on the highway, something seemed to be whispering, “Your father… your father… your father.” Wind buffeted them. It washed all the way over them each time another vehicle passed.

  They must have turned off the highway at some point because she felt them slow and turn and stop. Sam lifted her head just high enough to see the glaring hooded halogen tubes of a service station. She could hear the gas pump clicking. They’d parked right beside a sign that read TUMBLEWEED’S THRIFTI SAVE AND GAS! WELCOME TO HOPE, IDAHO! RESTROOMS FOR PAYING CUSTOMERS ONLY!

  The power of suggestion. Oh, my. If she did this, she would have to turn on that button. She’d promised. She waited until the car door shut and they pulled away again and, when she punched the little button on the wall, she felt like she had performed a magical feat. She did what she’d wanted to do. She was terrified to flush but she held her breath and did it anyway. She kept thinking of Jess Cavender’s dog. She burrowed into the corner of the bunk again and had just touched her father’s letter, hidden beneath the folds of her sweatshirt where she’d put it for safekeeping, when the horrible banging started, vibrating beneath her.

  Blee lee lee lee lee.

  For long minutes she held her breath, waiting for the trailer to pull to the side of the road, waiting for something to be wrong and for them to be stranded, waiting to be discovered and punished, waiting to be told she’d never get where she wanted to go.

  Oh what do I do what do I do what do I do?

  Then she remembered. The button on the wall behind the sink! She’d never punched it, never turned it off.

  Samantha scrambled down and hit the panel. The awful vibration stopped. Silence roared in her head. Someone had to have heard that; she was sure of it.

  But the twenty-seven-foot Jayco trailer didn’t stop. The miles kept rolling beneath them. For all the fear, this plan was working! And Samantha Roche felt for the envelope still hidden inside her sweatshirt, warm and wrinkled and safe against her breastbone.

  When the telephone rang at nine p.m., David was staring at the Weather Channel on cable television. The meteorologist pointed to a high-pressure system moving down from Canada that would hold rain at bay for at least another four days.

  “David?” Susan’s voice. He recognized it now without having to grasp for it.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry to phone so late.”

  “It doesn’t matter. No one is sleeping here anyway.” He’d heard Abby turn off the shower only moments before.

  “I just… needed to talk.”

  For an inkling, David felt that flash of guilt again, that awful touch of a cheater’s unwarranted fear. But that disappeared inside the vast worry that played inside him now, this thing that had consumed him since Abby had come to his office and told him his daughter was missing.

  Lord, You gave this child life through me and now You’ve got her where she might lose her life again. I don’t understand. I don’t understand You!

  He remembered a woman in the Bible who had grabbed the prophet Elisha’s feet and cried out to him because her son had died.

  I didn’t even ask for this child, Lord, but my hopes are crushed. Why would You do something like this? Why?

  Elisha had laid upon the boy, mouth to mouth, eyes to eyes, hands to hands, but nothing happened. Elisha had turned away in disappointment and had paced back and forth in the room. Then he’d climbed on the deathbed a second time and stretched out upon the boy and the child’s body had grown warm with life.

  “Have you heard anything, David?”

  “No. Have you heard anything there?”

  “No.”

  “If I find out something here, I’ll call you. I promise.”

  “David, what if something awful has happened to her?”

  “Don’t think that, Susan. Don’t think the worst. Neither of us can afford it.”

  “I can’t help it, David. With everything else that’s happened, I can’t think anything else.”

  “Susan.”

  “There’s a whole Web site, did you know that? It tells you what to do next if you’re looking for a missing kid.”

  “I don’t—”

  “I made posters with her picture on them. The police will circulate some, but that site said they don’t get them out as fast as they ought to. Every minute counts, that’s what the site says.”

  “This camp ought to be helping you look,” he said.

  “They’re afraid I’m going to sue them.”

  “They ought to be. Losing a camper. Just like that.”

  “There’s no courier service tomorrow because of the July 4 holiday. If I fly some to you tonight, would you put them up?”

  “Of course. Tomorrow’s the day all the tourists are in town. Maybe someone has seen her.”

  “Delta has a freight service. A hundred and sixty-nine dollars and they’ll have it to you at seven in the morning.”

  “Did they tell you that on the site, too?”

  “No,” she said. “I called Delta myself.” Then, with a softening of voice, “David, is Abigail nearby?”

  That tinge of guilt again, as he listened for the whereabouts of his wife. “No. She’s in our—” She’s in our room, where I used to sleep, too, until she found out about you.

  “She prayed for me, David. She prayed for me and Sam both. Did you know that?”

  “Who?”

  “Abigail. Your wife.”

  “Abby? Abby prayed for you?”

  “Yes. And I can’t help thinking maybe it helped. I just… maybe Sam’s going to be okay because of it.”

  How can she be living in her faith like that, after everything I’ve done to us? How can Abby be living in her faith like that, after everything she’s said to me?

  Long after Susan had hung up the telephone, David sat in his chair, helpless, thinking about how uncalled for it was. Abby wouldn’t forgive him, but she was praying for Susan?

  This thing he’d found out about Abby. It rocked him. One more thin
g to think about as he laid awake nights feeling every lump and loose spring in the cushions, his soul like an empty mine cavern, ready to cave in.

  For the past twenty-four hours, law enforcement agencies all the way from Lincoln County, Oregon, to Teton County, Wyoming, had done everything they knew to do. Calls went out as far north as Canada, as far south as McAllen, Texas, as far west as Washington State, and as far east as Quoddy Head, Maine.

  Everybody was looking for the little girl with the long brown hair flying over her shoulders and the little-girl grin as broad and open as the Powder River Pass.

  On July Fourth morning, Samantha Roche’s mother sat by the telephone in her home near Siletz Bay, gazing out over a gray mirror of backwater, billows of marsh grasses, and tiny birds leaving fanlike feather etchings where they’d taken off from the sand.

  On July Fourth morning, Samantha Roche’s father, who had just returned from a trip to pick up posters at the airport, gazed out at a mountain he’d set his feet upon as it stripped mightily toward the sky. As the sun rose higher, it mantled the Grand Teton in pink light, draping lower and broader over the pinnacles and snow-fields as it spread toward the trees. David sipped hot chocolate with Brewster flopped beside his feet. The giant lab’s ears flopped over his paws. He wasn’t asleep; his eyes stayed halfway open to keep watch. He didn’t quite relax as his master scratched his neck, because dogs know when their households are unsettled.

  In front of them Braden Treasure, armed with the packet of billposters, laid them out meticulously in rows on the floor. “The earlier we can get these out, the better, don’t you think? Jake can take this many,” he said to his dad. “Wheezer said he’d put one up at the START Bus stops on the square. Chase said he’d ride his bike to the stores in town. And Charlie’s putting these up over by the skateboard park.”