by Lisa Unger
What happens to a marriage? Before the baby, we were truly happy—with our lives, with each other. After he came, we just started to come apart. Would it have happened anyway? Maybe parenthood is a crucible; the intensity of its environment breaks you down to your most essential elements as a couple. Rather than bind, we destabilized. Maybe any other stressor would have done that to us. Maybe we were neither the people nor the couple we believed ourselves to be when times were good.
It was the birth control thing that really started to unstitch us. He felt so betrayed when he realized that I’d been taking the pill for the year he thought we were trying for another child. I had put on a charade for him, feigning disappointment each month, pretending to track my ovulation, taking prenatal vitamins. I’m ashamed of it now, the act I put on. Why did I do it? he wanted to know, utterly mystified. Why didn’t I just tell him that I didn’t want another child? Why didn’t you know? I asked. Wasn’t it obvious that I didn’t? In motherhood, I am half the woman I was before. Couldn’t he see that?
But that afternoon, both of us together on the couch, all of those arguments and the high emotion that caused them seemed distant and far away. We lay in the sunlit living room, giving ourselves a little vacation from our problems. Yes, I still loved him, the scent of him, the feel of his hands on me. Then we heard my mother at the door, our son’s high-pitched voice. Is Mommy home? We quickly gathered up our clothes and bolted to the bedroom, naked and laughing.
“We’re home!” my mother called.
“We’re home!” he echoed. I heard him try the knob to our bedroom, which we had luckily remembered to lock.
“We’ll be right out, sweetie,” I said.
“Why is the door locked?” He tried it again, harder. I could hear him pushing his body against the door. Once, twice, three times.
“Just a minute,” I said, pulling on my clothes. “Mommy’s changing.”
He gave a hard kick to the outside. “Fine,” he said. I heard him storming off. My instinct was to rush after him, to comfort him. He wanted me and I wasn’t there. I took a deep breath. Loving and caring for your child doesn’t mean you owe all of yourself to him, every second, my shrink had said. She worried that I was overfocused on my son, that it was hurting both of us, fostering the unnatural dependence in him. She posited that all the trouble he was having in school might just be a ploy to stay home with me.
I looked over at my husband and saw that all the laughter had died from his eyes.
That night when I was tucking the baby into his bed, I saw him staring hard at the wall behind me.
“What is it?” I asked.
“There’s a man behind you.” I turned to look, but I knew there wasn’t anyone there. There never was.
“Time for sleep,” I said.
“He’s a bad man,” he said. His face was grim, but not alarmed. No. Never that.
This was not new. There were imaginary friends and pets, people lying at the bottom of our pool, lingering outside our windows. There were voices that told him to do things—like unlock and open the front door in the night, setting off the security alarm and rousing us from deepest sleep.
“What does he want?”
One of the psychologists to whom we’d taken him had advised us to go along, let the fantasy play itself out. Insisting that what he was seeing wasn’t real, wasn’t there, was a guaranteed red-faced, arched-back rage. Of course, said the doctor. How would you feel if someone told you that what you were certain you were seeing wasn’t there? He had a point. But at the same time, weren’t we just enabling these delusions?
“He wants you to know that he’s sorry,” my son said. “He didn’t mean to kill those girls.”
My whole body froze, all the moisture drained away from my mouth and my throat.
“But he said he’d probably have to do it again, if he could.”
“Okay,” I said. “Try to get some sleep.”
It was critical not to overreact. Any show of high emotion filled him with a kind of manic energy. He’d never go to sleep. And those few hours that he slept in his own bed, before he came to stand in my doorway, were where my whole life was lived.
“Can you stay until he goes away?”
I lay down on the floor beside his bed, where I often lay until he fell asleep. The carpet was plush beneath me. Sometimes I read. Sometimes I tried to meditate. Tonight I just stared at the blue wall, my mind reeling and racing. How does he know? I wondered. Had he overheard a conversation between my mother and me?
After a while he turned over and fell asleep. I lay there, for I don’t know how long, staring at the ceiling, trying not to shake apart.
13
I crouched behind the desk and started inching my way along the wall toward the exit at the front of the structure. There were some bulging boxes blocking my way, though, and I found myself in a junk maze—an old file cabinet, a dusty CPU, a stepladder, some rusted buckets of paint. I made myself very small and wished I had brought the Mace that Ainsley always wanted us to carry. It sat uselessly on the table by the door where we all kept our keys.
Someone was rustling in the leaves and litter outside, then creaking up the steps. Then silence. I couldn’t control my breathing, which was coming deep and panicked, except to hold my breath.
Then there was a loud cracking sound, and a string of expletives issued in a deep male voice, one I recognized. I had a feeling those floorboards weren’t going to hold. I made my way toward the door, and saw Langdon pulling his foot out from where he’d stepped through the porch. All the tension and fear drained from my body, leaving me weak with relief.
“Hey!” he called. “Lana, come out here. I know you’re in there.”
I pushed open the door, and he gave me an annoyed look.
“What in the world are you doing out here in the middle of the night?” he asked.
“What are you doing here?” I said. He looked funny, angry and embarrassed. I tried not to laugh.
“I was leaving the library and I saw you take your bike off campus,” he said. “What are you thinking?”
I looked off to the road and saw his Volkswagen Touareg hybrid (the SUV for people who don’t want to admit that they drive an SUV). I was puzzled how he could have seen me, gotten into his car, and followed before I had ridden out of sight. Maybe I wasn’t as fast as I thought I was. Or maybe he hadn’t been leaving the library. Whatever, I was glad to see him. This had been a much scarier errand than I thought it would be. I’m not always as tough as I think I am.
“You know,” he said. He’d extracted his foot from the broken wood and was now sitting on one of the steps massaging his injured ankle. “There’s a girl missing and you’re out here in the freezing cold night on your bike. That is not the action of the intelligent person I know you to be.”
“Are you okay?” I asked, sitting beside him.
“What are you doing here, of all places? And how the hell did you get in?”
He often smelled of cigarettes, but only faintly. A secret smoker like Rachel, hiding their deadly little habit, telling themselves lies about how much they smoke and why it’s not so bad for them. I had always found this a little disappointing about him. I considered him so forthright, such a straight arrow. But then it’s not actually as if he had ever lied about it. He’s never claimed not to be a smoker. And it was really none of my business. I thought about the rumor Beck had reveled in sharing with me. That wasn’t my business, either.
“Lana,” he said. And now he sounded stern, like a father. “What are you doing here?”
I was ashamed to tell him why I was there. It was ridiculous really. But since I couldn’t come up with an even remotely believable lie, I told him the truth about Luke’s game. When I was done, he looked at me, awestruck.
“How could you let yourself get caught up in something like this with him?” he asked. He looked so surprised, so disappointed, that I flushed with shame. He was right. How could I? I thought of myself researching chess m
oves and looking up clues, running around in the night. It was embarrassing.
“It’s harmless,” I said lamely. “It’s just a game.”
“Is it?”
“What else?” I said. “He’s eleven.”
Langdon shook his shaggy head and rubbed his jaw vigorously, the stubble there rasping like sandpaper.
“He’s an emotionally disturbed child and you’re an adult in his life, his babysitter. You’re enabling him.”
I hadn’t thought about it that way. To me, it seemed like Luke was calling the shots. It was his game, and I was doing his bidding. He was home asleep in bed, and I was running around in the night following clues. But, of course, Langdon was right. He was a kid. I was the adult, the supposed rational, reasonable one, the one who set the limits. I didn’t have anything to say. I just sat there, feeling like an asshole.
“Let me see the poem,” he said. I handed it to him and he took the wrinkled card and key in his hand. “Where did he get this key?”
I told him I didn’t know. But Langdon didn’t acknowledge me, just sat staring at the words in the beam of my flashlight. I was shivering from the cold.
“So what was the secret?”
I was tired of saying that I didn’t know, so I just lifted my shoulders and shook my head. Langdon kept his eyes on me; it was a searching stare, a puzzle-solving gaze. He was trying to figure me out, to solve this odd situation in which we’d found ourselves.
“How are you going to find out?” He looked suddenly interested, curious.
“I’m not sure I am.”
Obviously, it was the right thing to do to call off the game, just give up. I’d just admit to Luke that he was smarter than I was. That was his agenda, right? He just wanted to prove that he could get me to do what he wanted, create puzzles that I couldn’t solve? Whatever burning competitiveness I was feeling was patently ridiculous. I needed to get over it.
I could tell that Langdon was curious, too, though. He was curious about Luke. After all, he was a geek like me. He was a man who studied, pondered, and treated the abnormal human psyche. And the psyche was, of course, the ultimate puzzle. Each individual person a brand-new mystery to solve—how did mental illness come to take root in this mind, how would it manifest itself, how could it be treated? Could it be treated or cured through therapy, medication, or alternative methods? Or must it merely be managed so that a person might be less of a danger to himself or others? Diagnosis and treatment, especially with children, were as slippery and elusive as eels. Young people were always changing, growing, and learning. So their illnesses were always evolving—sometimes worsening, sometimes disappearing altogether.
“Did you find the next clue?”
“No,” I lied. I don’t even know why I lied. But part of me felt like this was my game with Luke. It was up to me to continue it or not.
“There was nothing in there?” he said, nodding back toward the small building. He held out his hand for the light. “Let me take a look.”
I handed him the light, and stood there shivering while he banged around inside. He was clumsy; I heard him trip twice, knock against something once. I could feel that envelope burning against my chest in the pocket of my coat. I could hear Beck crying, How can you be so cold? I saw my father’s hands gripping a shovel, digging and digging and digging. I saw Elizabeth looking at me, angry and disappointed, as I sometimes saw her in my dreams. Detective Ferrigno was right; we did argue that night. I was trying to comfort her, I think, and she lashed out at me. The memory was foggy and strange, if it was a memory at all. There was a perpetual merry-go-round of misery in my mind. I never have been able to figure out how to get off.
Finally, Langdon returned. “I didn’t see anything.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’m going to tell him that I don’t want to play. We’ll go back to chess. Or maybe Scrabble. I’m better at that.”
“That’s best,” he said. He stepped down from the porch and offered me his hand, gave me a little pull up. “The last thing we want to do is feed a damaged psyche. He’s getting something out of this. And you don’t know what it is. Chances are it’s not healthy.”
I didn’t say that we were both getting something out of it. I wasn’t certain it was healthy for either one of us.
“I suggest you resign your position, find something else.” His slight smile told me he knew I wouldn’t listen. He knew I had a problem with male authority. But maybe he also understood that I was so deeply hooked in to Luke and Rachel already, I couldn’t have walked away if I wanted to. Which I didn’t, not really.
We started walking and came to where he’d parked his car beside the bike. He opened the hatch and lifted it inside.
“This is not your bike,” he said, looking at it and then back at me.
I told him that it was Beck’s and why I didn’t have mine.
“So what’s going on with that?”
“No one’s heard from her,” I said. There was a hard place of anger against Beck in my heart. “Her parents are here. The police have been talking to me and Ainsley, probably others, too.”
“I thought there was a development tonight,” he said. He shut the hatch and the sound of it echoed loud in the quiet night. “I heard she posted on Facebook?”
I shook my head. Beck didn’t have a Facebook page, of course. As far as I knew. Maybe she had one now and hadn’t told me. “I hadn’t heard that.”
“You don’t seem worried,” he said. Again, that stare, the scientist examining a sample.
“She’s done this before,” I said. I was trying for a nonchalance that I didn’t feel. I was worried about Beck, really worried. But if I showed it, she won.
“Still,” he said. “The police are taking this very seriously. A campus search is starting at first light tomorrow.”
“Oh,” I said. Why hadn’t the detective told me about that? I always hated the little games they played.
I climbed into the passenger seat. And the car dipped as he got in beside me. “Don’t hold all this in, okay? Don’t cloak yourself in denial,” he said.
He started the car and it came to life with lights and soft chimes, but otherwise it was nearly silent the way new cars are, almost as though there’s no engine under the hood. “Make sure you’re talking about everything with your therapist.”
“I am,” I said. “I saw her today.”
“Okay,” he said. “Good. This must be hard for you.”
Langdon knew more about me than almost anyone. I had told him part of my secret during a mini-breakdown I’d had in my sophomore year. He almost never brought it up, knowing how painful it was for me to think about, let alone discuss.
“Elizabeth two years ago,” he said, musing. “Your difficult history. You can talk to me, too, you know. We’re friends, right?”
As we pulled away, I saw what I knew I couldn’t have seen. My mind was playing tricks on me—not a new thing. I thought I saw a small, slim form slip into the trees to avoid the roving beam of the headlights as Langdon shifted the car into drive. I stared at the night for a long moment, but there was nothing.
“I know,” I said. I tried for a smile. “Of course, I know that.”
He gave me a quick, awkward pat on the shoulder, very boyish, buddy-buddy. Totally chaste, no sexual charge at all. I’ve always been grateful for him. I think we draw people into our lives. It’s as though we broadcast our deepest needs, and certain people hear the signal somewhere in their own subconscious and heed the call. For better or worse, we attract our teachers, our allies, and sometimes even our nightmares. Some of us have louder signals. Some of us have more sensitive receptors.
That night my sleep was hard won and restless. I dreamed of Beck’s kiss and felt her hands on me, woke up thinking she was beside me. I drifted off to sleep again, only to be awakened once more. Why are you doing this to me? I heard a voice screaming. And it was my voice, and my mother’s and Beck’s—a chorus of misery and desperation. When I slept again, I
went back to the night my mother died.
When’s the last time you saw your mother? The cop had been a woman, and I remember thinking how mannish and rough she seemed. She had a pockmarked face and orange-red hair, cut as short and square as any of her male colleagues. She was large, not overweight, but broad, with big shoulders and a deep voice.
In the morning before I left for school, I said, just as my father had instructed me to say. The lie felt like cotton in my mouth, surely she could see the bulge. I wanted her to see. Please, I thought. Please know that I’m lying. Please help me.
My father sat in a chair by the gray wall, watching, always watching me. Don’t say any more than necessary. Answer their questions and offer nothing more.
And was everything all right? Did she seem strange to you, upset about anything?
No, I said. She was the same as she had always been. What I didn’t say was that my mother suffered from chronic depression, although she had some manic episodes. That morning, her mania was in full throttle and she was cheerfully clutter-clearing and scrubbing the whole house.
Leave my room alone, okay? I asked her. Just don’t touch my stuff.
But she just kept singing and scrubbing and scrubbing the kitchen floor, which was spotless to begin with, and nothing was ever even remotely dirty or out of place.
Mom, I said. Okay?
A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, she sang gaily, her blond hair a sweaty mess, her face flushed. I remember really hating her in that moment.
The cop had her eyes on me, and there was no softness, no humor or kindness there. They were just two black lasers, boring in, seeing everything. Was she afraid of anyone? Had she mentioned anyone wanting to hurt her, or anyone following her?
