“Sondra? No, I don’t believe so. Who is she?”
“No one,” Abby answered. “It’s nothing.” But if it was so nothing, why hadn’t she tossed the matchbook?
Louise smoothed the tablecloth. “Am I a bad person?”
Abby frowned. “Why would you ask that?”
“There are people on this earth who are truly evil, yet I’m the one who is punished. Like Job, I suppose.” Louise sighed.
“I don’t understand.”
“God took Philip,” she explained as if Abby were dim. “Now He’s taken Nick.”
It wasn’t true. Nick’s father wasn’t dead. Even Louise knew it. But she preferred to think of him as dead. She preferred the role of widow to that of jilted wife. It was more socially acceptable. Abby had been appalled when Nick told her the story, that his father had left on a business trip one day and never returned. Nick and his mother hadn’t known what had happened to him, and police efforts to find out had proven fruitless. Finally, seven years later, when Nick was sixteen, Louise had the man declared legally dead, clearing the way to cash in his one-million-dollar life insurance policy. She’d been living like a queen ever since. Nick had been in law school when he’d learned the truth, that his father was alive and well and living off the coast of Tampico, Mexico on a yacht with a second wife and three children. Abby could not imagine how hurt and angry Nick must have been, but he’d also felt sympathetic to Philip.
My dad had debt up to here, Nick had told Abby, slicing his hand across his neck. He had my mother on his back. “I don’t know why he didn’t take me with him,” Nick had said that, too. He’d been wistful, and Abby had felt incensed on his behalf, that his parents had treated him with so little regard. He’d mentioned the love of sailing he shared with his father. Abby had seen how saddened he was to have lost that along with everything else. She’d wanted so badly to make it up, to love sailing, too. At least that.
But she didn’t. She’d tried, but she couldn’t take the sun; she was afraid of the water. Nick had finally given up on her and sold the Blue Daze. He had said he was fine about it, but suppose he wasn’t? Suppose he had left her the way Philip had left Louise, because Abby harped on him and acted the queen and forced him to give up things he didn’t want to, like his boat.
Abby turned to Louise. “Do you think Nick is like his father? That he could have—?”
“Could have what, dear?”
But Abby shook her head and said, “Never mind.” It wasn’t possible. She wasn’t Louise and Nick wasn’t his father, and Nick’s disappearance wasn’t a matter of genetics or history repeating itself. He wouldn’t have left her, or if he had, he wouldn’t have taken Lindsey. When a man did such a thing, when he left his wife, he didn’t take his child. Like Nick’s father had done, he left his child at home.
* * *
At first Abby didn’t know what was making the noise. The sound was bleating, dissonant, and she bolted upright, gaze bouncing wall-to-wall in the night-darkened room. She couldn’t think where she was. Dreaming? She climbed out from the narrow twin bed where she’d slept all through her girlhood and crossed to the vanity stool where she’d left her purse.
She watched herself pull out her cell phone, place it against her ear. Did she speak, say hello? She wouldn’t remember anything except the static that greeted her and then out of that, a voice.
A small voice, a definitely female voice, whispered: “Mommy?”
“Lindsey?”
More words came, and Abby struggled to filter them from the background noise. Then, breathily—singing? Crying?—“You’ll never find me, find me, find me….”
The hair rose on the back of Abby’s neck, on her arms. “Lindsey, honey, please, just tell me where you are.” She pressed the phone harder to her ear.
But there was nothing. More static. That same liquid-sounding sigh as last time.
“Lindsey, talk to me! Where are you?” Abby could have sworn she was screaming loud enough to wake the dead, but no one appeared. Not Jake and not her mother. Shaking badly, she lowered herself to the side of the bed, fighting for composure.
“Please, Lindsey,” she said more calmly. “Is Daddy there? Can he tell me where you are? Mommy will come, I promise.”
Nothing. Breath. Abby heard breathing and the low-grade interfering static that was like the hum of insects, like fever. “Lindsey? Please, sweetheart, please, talk to me.”
But she didn’t, and just as before, after what seemed an eon had passed, but was probably only a matter of moments, there was a click, the softest click, and the connection was severed.
Abby whimpered and pressed her fingertips to her mouth; she kept the phone in place, waiting, waiting, but Lindsey didn’t come back. Abby looked at the ID. Out of Area. She hit call-back. Nothing. She went into the living room to tell Jake that his sister had called. See, Abby intended to say, I knew they were alive, but then watching Jake sleep, she couldn’t bring herself to waken him. Abby had the same reaction when she looked in at her mother.
And they were both kind the next morning when she told them, when she showed them a call had, indeed, come in at 3:42 a.m. They didn’t disagree, but Abby saw in their eyes that they didn’t believe it had been from Lindsey.
“A wrong number?” her mother ventured.
“Some crank.” Jake was more definite.
But Abby couldn’t imagine it. Who would be so cruel?
Chapter 10
Out of desperation, Abby turned to Dennis for help, but he said Abby’s conviction that it was her daughter who had called her wasn’t enough to persuade a judge to issue a warrant for the phone records. A judge would need something more concrete. Dennis regretted it; Abby knew he did. She also knew he didn’t share her conviction that it was Lindsey. Wasn’t it possible that while Abby had received the phone call—no doubt about that, no one was arguing that—she might have dreamed the rest? Out of terrible grief and longing? And as time passed, as the fall weather cooled and no more phone calls came and no further signs of any kind appeared, Abby felt her certainty slip.
Lindsey’s terrified cries echoed from the walls of Abby’s nightmares. She was in a dark corridor lined with ringing telephones, and she would run from one to the next shouting, “Hello hello?!” She would scream Lindsey’s name to no avail and eventually wake herself, heart throbbing, in a sweaty tangle of sheets. She began to dread the nights. The sight of her bed made her anxious. Days were more tolerable. At least they had settled into a pattern, proving that even catastrophe can become routine. Abby and her mother did the household chores, they washed clothes and vacuumed. They cleaned closets and manured the flowerbeds in readiness for winter. Abby ran errands. They didn’t see much of Jake. He avoided spending time with them—with her, Abby thought.
So when she came home from the grocery store one day in early October and saw his black Mustang parked in her mother’s driveway, her heart stopped. She backed her foot off the accelerator and thought: They’ve been found!
Why else would Jake have come here, in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of the week? When he hadn’t once shown his face since the memorial service? When all she’d had from him were excuses?
Nick’s BMW crept forward, but then, all at once, a swirl of bright yellow leaves curtained Abby’s vision, scattering across the windshield, drawing her attention, and she turned, in relief, to watch them. The way they fluttered and fussed in the pale autumn light was somehow reminiscent of the pert flight of small birds. But then her view cleared and Jake’s car was still there. Dark and inevitable. She waited to feel something, panic or anger or grief, and felt nothing but an odd sense of deflation. She had imagined there would be more of a show. A phalanx of patrol cars and flashing lights bearing an entire squadron of uniformed officers. The result of too much television, she guessed. Was it possible someone—Dennis, ma
ybe?—had just phoned with the news? Could it really end so quietly?
But it wasn’t news of their family that had brought Jake home, after all.
When Abby found him in the kitchen, her mother was there, too, and they seemed reluctant to look at her. They seemed guilty. Jake went to look out the window, and her mother set aside the makings of coffee and handed Abby an envelope.
“I should have shown this to you before,” she said.
Abby saw that it was addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Bennett and that the return address was Texas A&M University. “What is it?” she asked, but, truly she knew. Of course it was more fallout. Collateral damage. Additional proof, if she needed it, that when one bad thing happened, a door in the universe opened to let out ten thousand more bad things.
“I’m in some trouble at school, Mom.” Jake turned from the window. “I thought maybe Gramma and I could handle it ourselves.”
Abby sat at the table and scanned the single page. She raised her gaze. “You were caught cheating?”
“One class. Economics. I can fix it. At least I’m trying to.” Jake sat across from Abby.
“This is postmarked two weeks ago.” Abby folded the letter, returned it to the envelope and pushed it into the center of the table with her index finger.
“It was forwarded,” Jake said, “from home. If you were there instead of here, you’d have known.”
“Where I live isn’t the issue. I thought you told me you were working with a tutor.” Abby was certain that he had mentioned it a few weeks ago.
He didn’t answer.
“You lied to me, is that it?”
He didn’t deny it.
The pause became awkward. Her heart stumbled at a hectic pace. She thought about the groceries she’d left in the car; the peach ice cream was probably melting all over the floor. She thought if Jake could lie about cheating, something so huge, so shameful and damaging, he could lie about anything. His father, for instance, what Nick had been doing in the Hill Country. Fresh suspicion broke over the surface of Abby’s mind. She had tried hard to dismiss it. She had excused as figments of her imagination Jake’s odd looks, his avoidance of her, and the sense that he wasn’t being truthful when he claimed to know nothing more than she did about what had happened to their family. But now she had proof that he could lie, bald-faced, and she was so gullible, she would believe him.
“Jake?” she prompted, and she did not regret the anger that blistered her voice.
He brought his gaze around, and it was as sharply caustic. “It doesn’t matter.”
“What do you mean?” Abby blazed. “Of course it matters.”
“No, Mom, it really doesn’t because I’m quitting school. I’m not going back after the Christmas break.” Jake bent toward her. “I can’t stand A&M. I can’t take the Aggie rah-rah bullshit. You don’t have the money to pay for it, and I’m not making my grades anyway.”
“Since when, Jake? Last semester you were on the dean’s list.”
His mouth curled. “See? You don’t know a damn thing. I haven’t made the dean’s list since the fall semester of my freshman year. I screwed up on my finals when you made me go back there last spring, and I’ve been screwing up ever since.”
“I didn’t make you go back, Jake. It was best.”
“You want life to be the same and it isn’t.”
“How am I supposed to know you’re having problems if you won’t talk to me? If all you do is lie to me?”
“What about your problems? You can’t even live by yourself.”
“So your cheating and lying is my fault?”
“You think Lindsey’s calling you all the damn time.”
“Oh, no, don’t make this about me, mister.” Abby rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “Does it never stop? Haven’t I been through enough?”
“That’s what I’m talking about! You act like it’s all about you, like you’re the only one who lost your family. But it happened to me, too, Mom, and sometimes I feel like I’m— But goddamn! What the hell am I thinking?” Jake hit his head with his fists. “Dad and Lindsey aren’t dead! They’re on fucking vacation, and every so often Lindsey phones home to talk about her tan and say what a great time she’s having.”
Abby couldn’t breathe, and in the sudden widening crack of silence, she felt weightless, untethered. At the sink, her mother stirred. Abby prayed she would say something, anything. But she didn’t. It wasn’t her way to interfere.
Jake got up. “I have to get back to campus.”
Abby tapped the envelope. “What about this?”
“I’ll handle it.”
“If you aren’t careful, you’ll ruin your chance at getting into law school.”
“That was Dad’s fantasy. Not mine.”
“Can’t we talk, Jake? The way we used to?”
He looked at her. With pity, Abby thought, and he said, “Nothing’s the way it used to be, Mom. When are you going to figure that out?” And then deliberately, carefully, he pushed his chair toward the table, walked over to his grandmother and hugged her, and a moment later, Abby felt his hand on her shoulder, his light, firm touch. But before she could reach out to him, somehow hold on to him, she heard the back door close, and he was gone.
“Should I go after him?” Abby appealed to her mother. But her expression said if Abby had to ask, the opportunity had passed.
* * *
The next morning, Abby told her mother she was going home, and when her mother asked, “Why now?” Abby blamed Jake. The sting of his words, the truth in them had kept her up most of the night.
“Thanksgiving is coming,” Abby said. “I should cook, try to make it normal for him.”
“We could go out to Luby’s. My treat.”
Abby smiled. “You saved my life, Mama.”
Her mother cupped her cheek. “I miss Nick and Lindsey, too, you know. So much. But if they were here, they would say we should go on. They would say we should make a new life.”
“But I don’t want a new life, Mama. I want to know what happened to the old one.”
* * *
The house offered her nothing but its history, its record of what had been. She walked through the silent rooms and heard her family’s laughter in every creak of the floorboards. She startled at every shift of light. The past hung in every corner, a boogeyman waiting to crack her across her eyes. In the kitchen, the air seemed redolent with the smell of French toast and bacon, the last meal they’d shared. In her mind, Abby walked around the memory of herself from that morning. Her smiling, smug self with her silly plans, her belief—clearly naïve—in the sanctity of her home, her family.
But her memories were no longer the source of joy or comfort they had been, and this house was not her refuge. It was alien to her, a house of questions, of ghosts, mysteries. And she was the one who had disappeared, Alice down the rabbit hole. How could she stay here? What sort of life could she have?
Abruptly, she left the kitchen, swiftly making her way down the front hall, anxious to get outside. She was at the front door when she felt it, an odd ripple of unease that caused her to turn and look up the stairs, and when she saw the light spilling through the doorway of her and Nick’s bedroom, the hair on her scalp rose. She wasn’t sure why she was afraid, but she was. She had to make herself climb the stairs, hand gripped like a vice to the banister. As if she expected to be attacked...by what? Did ghosts turn on the lights in the houses they haunted? She remembered her brief sojourn here when she returned from Kate’s. After the flood...ATF....
That time she had found the light on in the dining room, a room that was seldom used, and a window had been cracked open in her and Nick’s bedroom. She had turned off the light and shut the window and hadn’t thought a thing of it. Why think anything of this? It was only her sense of the house, that
it was so foreign, so unwelcoming of her now; it made her anxious. If its walls could talk, they would ask her to leave. To vanish without a trace like the rest of the Bennetts.
She paused in the bedroom doorway. The lamp on Nick’s nightstand glowed like a beacon. She hadn’t turned on that lamp. She hadn’t come into this room at all except out of necessity, to get a change of clothes, her toothbrush. The sense of the life she and Nick had shared, their most intimate marital moments, was strongest here and made it impossible to linger. She hadn’t once been able to bring herself to go near the bed. But now the soft blue duvet cover was rumpled, and Nick’s pillow was pulled out of place and scrunched as if it had cushioned someone’s cheek.
I didn’t do that. The thought whispered through Abby’s mind.
But she must have. Who else could it have been?
In her grief, she must have lain there and pushed her face into Nick’s pillow. She’d worn his shirts, hadn’t she? Put on his leather jacket...
She brought her fingertips to her eyes. “Where is my family?” she whispered.
Presumed drowned in some unknown location more than three hundred miles away.
Presumed...that word.
It left so much room for conjecture, for doubt.
Back downstairs, she fished the book of matches from her purse and studied the raised silver lettering that spelled out Riverbend Lodge and Bandera, Texas. Why would Nick write down a local fax number in a book of matches that came from a location that was a near six-hour drive west of here? But maybe it wasn’t a fax number, Abby thought, searching in her purse for her cell phone. Maybe she had misdialed.
Holding open the tiny flap, she carefully picked out the number Nick had written there with the tip of her finger, then she waited with breath held, only to hear the same rhythmic bleating of a fax machine as last time. She tried to imagine the place where it was, in her mind’s eye seeing an office, a woman named Sondra. But where? In what location? Houston or Bandera? Abby stowed her phone and the matches in her purse and shouldered it. There was only one thing she knew for certain: She would never find the answers to her questions by staying here. And something else she knew: If Nick and Lindsey were still alive, they weren’t coming home on their own.
Evidence of Life Page 10
