CHAPTER 10
Genevieve
I won’t tell you about my son’s disappearance because, frankly, it’s none of your business. Who wants to read about someone else’s worst nightmare, anyway? I don’t approve of this voyeuristic time we live in where everyone feels obliged to write a memoir about their drunken blackouts, their miserable childhoods, their cheating spouses. What good does it do, really? Social media is responsible for half of the misery in this world. All that sharing. Spare me.
That being said, I will tell you about how hope erodes. What it takes from you. You might view yourself as a strong person. You’re from a good family with an excellent education. You think you have the ability and skills to handle life, make a home, a family, a marriage. And you’re right. You are strong. Up until a point.
When the police arrived at our house to inform me that my son had “wandered off,” I remained calm. They drove me to Birch Lake, and when I saw Garrison’s too-wide eyes and Clark’s dirty face streaked with tears, I wasn’t afraid. Sheppard had just found something fascinating. He had a singular ability to concentrate, my son. Perhaps it was a fox den, and he was waiting to see the kits. Surely it was something innocent. He would be firmly lectured so he understood the danger he could have faced, not to mention the worry he put his parents through. Being the sweet boy he was, he’d apologize. Perhaps he’d write a note to Garrison and me. We would laugh about it someday. “Oh, such a free spirit, our Sheppard! Did he ever tell you about the time he got lost at the lake? He scared us nearly to death!”
Even as I called his name, my voice clear and strong, I imagined that—telling his beautiful fiancée this story over dinner, just the four of us, candles flickering, the young woman laughing gently, putting her hand over Sheppard’s, my grandmother’s diamond winking on her left hand. She’d be the daughter I never had. We’d be fast friends, certainly. Garrison would smile at me, and Sheppard would say, “Mother, please, not that story again.”
Within hours, the police brought in bloodhounds, and even then, I was positive the dogs would find him. The fox den theory had been replaced with a broken ankle, at least in my mind. But no, that wouldn’t explain his silence, so I amended it to be that my son had slipped and hit his head on a rock, concussing himself. He would be fine. There was no other acceptable alternative.
Then came the divers . . . well, I suppose they had to be called, but I wouldn’t tolerate that scenario. And I was right. They didn’t find my son, because he was not in that lake.
When darkness fell that night, when there was no sound of a little boy calling out or crying, I still hoped. But now, a dark spot had wormed its way into my heart, like mold.
I went home from the lake sometime before dawn to check on Clark. It was only then, standing in front of Sheppard’s empty bedroom, his bed neatly made, that I felt truly afraid. Fear dropped me to my knees, and I covered my head and bit down on the yawning, ravenous terror that wanted to swallow me.
But I had to be strong. This was taking longer than it should, but Sheppard would be fine. He wouldn’t have fallen in the lake without Garrison noticing, for heaven’s sake! He could swim! He was quite a good swimmer, in fact.
The next day, since the dogs had found nothing, and the divers had found nothing, they dragged the lake. And found nothing. Thank God, they found nothing. The silt was deep, though, they said. It was possible that—“No,” I said firmly, calmly. “He’s not in there. But thank you.”
Ugly phrases were used. Posthumous gases. Floating patterns. Facedown. I ignored them all. My son was not in that lake. I knew it with all my heart, and mothers have a gift this way.
Sheppard was out there somewhere. Surely he would come home. He’d gotten lost. We walked, lines of us, through those woods, time after time, day after day, and still I hoped. No, I knew my son was alive. I would be the one whose voice woke him from his deep sleep. He would be scared but so glad to see us, and Garrison and I would wrap our arms around him and say, “All that matters is that you’re safe now, darling. We’re here. We’ve got you.” He would be hungry and dirty, and I’d give him a bath and make potato soup myself, his favorite.
More than a dozen times, we walked the woods. There was nothing. No shoe, no scrap of fabric, no scent for the dogs to pick up. They dragged the lake again. Still nothing.
My theory became that someone had mistaken him for a lost child and brought him somewhere. He was in a police station in a town very close by, and it was bureaucratic incompetence that was keeping us from our reunion. I may have snapped at the police chief. I may have suggested his force was failing to do their job, that they were incompetent idiots. I seem to remember slapping someone’s face.
The police were treating it as a missing person, then as a possible abduction. Garrison and I went on the news, pleading with the person who had taken our son, holding pictures of him. “Bring back my son,” I said. “We love him so much. Please. Please.”
A detective interviewed us and asked about any predators—the human kind. Had we seen anyone giving Sheppard any special attention? A teacher? A priest? “We’re Protestants,” I snapped. “And no! Of course not.”
The days became a week. Ten days. Twelve. Two weeks. Nineteen days. Three weeks. Four and a half, and it was stunning that this was still going on. Stunning! Sheppard was listed in the registry of missing children, and I called in daily. Nothing. No one was reported as matching his description.
Nine weeks after he . . . went away, they found the boy in Boston, and my heart soared. I would make it all right. I would heal his wounds, soothe his fears, and we would be together again, and . . . and . . .
It wasn’t my son. Someone else’s son had been found, but not mine, and I hated that other mother who was granted such mercy, such joy. I hated her so that if I had seen her, I might have attacked her, screamed at her, begged her to give me her son so I could pretend he was mine. I hated God with all my heart.
We resorted to psychics who told us nothing. “I see a tree,” said one, and it was all I could do not to slap her. Another said, “He’s very close to water,” but could not say whether she felt he was alive or dead. Another told us he was not in pain.
No one told us where he was.
Garrison accepted things in inches. I heard him sobbing in his bathroom, saw the emptiness behind his eyes. We held each other so tightly at night, the only time I could be honest, when I shook so hard my teeth chattered, and Garrison cried quietly. His hair turned white, and he started drinking three cocktails each night instead of two.
Three months.
Five months.
Seven.
A year. A year. Three news appearances, all starting with “Today marks the anniversary of the mysterious disappearance of Sheppard London, a beautiful little boy who went missing at Birch Lake in Stoningham. With us today are his parents . . .”
There were three calls after that first anniversary. All dead ends.
Grief is an ice pick, chiseling you to nothing bit by bit. All I could think of was my lost boy. When Clark came to me for his story time one night, Peter Pan clutched in his chubby little hands, I snatched the book and threw it in the fireplace. There would be no Lost Boys in my home. “Go to bed,” I snapped. Then, later, when he was asleep, I climbed into bed with him and silently apologized to him for loving Sheppard more.
It seemed impossible that the days kept coming. How could there be a spring, an autumn, the holidays, when our boy was out there, somewhere? If he was dead, wouldn’t I have felt it? Wouldn’t he come to me in a dream, my angel, my son? I had loved him with every molecule in me. Wouldn’t he do me that favor, at least?
Then Garrison died, and the last bit of my violated heart died with him. Or no, it petrified; it was there but utterly useless. I did my best for Clark, and it was a paltry effort. Thank God I hired Donelle, who loved him.
Every day, Sheppard’s beautiful,
perfect face filled my mind. My arms were useless without him to hold. My mind was constantly buzzing. I imagined him living with another family—foreigners who didn’t speak English. They’d found him; he had fallen and hit his head and had amnesia. Desperate for a child of their own, they took him. At first he was frightened, but they treated him well. They took him back to their country—Portugal, I imagined—and Sheppard learned their language. They had children after that, and in my mind, Sheppard played with his dark-haired siblings as he had once played with Clark. The memory of his other life would fade away, but some long-hidden part of his heart was still with me.
I would accept that, I told God, if only I could see my firstborn again. Even if it was his bones I saw, I had to know. It would not be possible for me to die without seeing my boy one more time. As the years passed, this was the bargain I struck with God—I could live without my son so long as He let me know. Either I would look into those blue, blue eyes once more and tell my little boy, now a man, how much I loved him, how I never, ever stopped looking for him . . . or I would have his remains to bury next to Garrison.
I spent tens of thousands of dollars on private investigators who specialized in missing children. I had dogs flown in from around the world who were supposedly able to discern the tiniest bit of human remains. Four times a year, I walked those woods around Birch Lake. If my son had ended up in a shallow grave, I wanted to know. I would finally know.
With an empty heart and a shrewd eye, I founded my company. It was the one place I could concentrate on something that was not Sheppard, the place where the Missing stepped aside and I could escape the grief, the terror, the loneliness. Clark grew. Donelle became a fixture. My employees at Genevieve London Designs revered and feared me. I continued to hire investigators and cooperated with the occasional journalist who wanted to do a story, made all the more salacious now that I was a successful CEO, an important contributor to the fashion world.
More time passed. Years. Decades. When DNA testing became a way of finding people or identifying bodies, I gave the FBI a strand of hair from Sheppard’s hairbrush. Nothing in their system matched. Ever. I hired artists to sketch what he would look like at fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty.
When Clark brought me his child to raise—Clark, ever useless, ever slightly stupid—I accepted. It was my duty, of course. I wasn’t about to let my granddaughter go neglected or be raised by that other side of the family, the side that had produced April, a young woman so desperate and afraid that she abandoned her only child. Honestly, how dare she? Had I resorted to suicide, I who had lost a child? Did people think it hadn’t been tempting?
Here was I, a mother who still searched the forest each year, decades after her child went missing, and Clark’s wife had been given a healthy child and left her. Oh, I understood clinical depression and its lies, its reach . . . but could she not have stayed for that child? No. She left her daughter alone with Clark, of all people, my inept, spoiled son, he who was best defined by the word incompetent.
For a moment, when I saw Emma standing in the foyer, her hair greasy, her coat too small, something in my petrified heart stirred.
Then I realized she was one year older than Sheppard was the last time I’d seen him, and my heart once again turned to stone.
When Sheppard went away, he’d taken everything good with him.
I provided for Emma. I got her a decent haircut and bought her appropriate clothes. She appreciated living at Sheerwater, got decent marks in school. She was not unattractive, though she was timid and startled easily. She answered when spoken to but kept to herself.
Frankly, I was disappointed in her. After a year, one would’ve thought she’d have snapped out of her self-pity, but no, she seemed to view herself as a tragic orphan, and not the heir to Sheerwater, to the London dynasty. She didn’t view herself as lucky at all, and it was both maddening and wearing at the same time.
Still, she was my grandchild. When she was thirteen, I sat her down and told her about sex, hormones, her menstrual cycle. I told her about birth control. I told her I expected her to remain a virgin well into college at the very least. I told her that at the first sign of depression, she was to tell me and we would take her to the finest doctors and therapists, that we would smite it. I talked about reputation, education, marriage.
I wanted to send her to Foxcroft Academy, but she made the case that Sheerwater was her home, and she’d just gotten comfortable here. “Please, Gigi,” she had said. “Let me stay.
I did. In a rare error in judgment, I let her stay.
Though she wasn’t quite the gleaming academic or social star I’d hoped she would be, she did well enough. With the money from my family and Garrison’s, she could go anywhere, frankly. I would send her to Harvard, where my father had gone, or possibly Columbia, Garrison’s alma mater. She could go to Bryn Mawr or Smith or Stanford and get an MBA, perhaps live in Paris or Copenhagen for a year or two, then join me at Genevieve London Designs, in marketing, I thought. Eventually as creative director and then, when I saw fit to retire, as CEO.
She never objected to these plans. She had the right pedigree and was on the road to success. I tolerated her dating Jason; at least she’d chosen a dimwit whose influence wouldn’t last once she left for college. Smith had been her decision in the end, and I approved.
And then the stupid girl got pregnant a week before high school graduation and insisted on keeping the baby. I told her it was foolish. I was furious. A teenage mother? When she had every opportunity in the world waiting for her? How would she support a child? She had options—abortion, a grim choice, but better than throwing away her life. Adoption, even; I would send her to Switzerland or London for the duration, and she could defer college for a year.
No. For the first time ever, she stood up to me and said she was keeping the baby. It was not open for discussion.
I kicked her out. Oh, yes, I did. I hadn’t wanted to raise Emma. I hadn’t asked for her, this daughter of a sick, tormented woman and my useless other son. But I did, I took her in and gave her the best of everything, and she defecated on it all. Keeping the baby? Fine! If she wanted to pretend to be an adult, she could do it on her own dime, thank you very much.
It was much more peaceful without her.
Except it wasn’t. Without Emma, Sheppard became my focus once more, the ten-year reprieve of Emma’s care now over.
After Emma left, I ached for my son all over again. But I never broke. I never became a lush, though it was tempting, or addicted to sleeping pills or pain medication. I never needed hospitalization for grief, because I was a strong woman. I waited instead for Emma to come back, to beg for forgiveness and admit she was wrong, and I waited for something, anything, to change with Sheppard’s case. I waited for God to grant me His side of our bargain—to let me see my son one more time.
Instead, I have a death sentence. It looks as if God left me, just like everyone else.
I know it wasn’t fair to ask Emma back here. She had a point when she said I didn’t deserve to meet her child. So I used what I always used when love failed me—money. And I know that wasn’t fair, either, but by the time this all spins out, I’ll be dead, and at least I won’t have died alone.
CHAPTER 11
Emma
“Dad!” Riley flung herself out of the car and ran up the steps to Jason, who opened his arms and gave her a big hug, laughing.
I got out more slowly. We were having lunch at a restaurant so Riley could meet her half brothers in person. Jamilah was there as well, just getting out of the car, and I suddenly felt self-conscious. After all, I was the dopey teenager who’d been careless with her birth control pills. Hey. We’d also been using condoms . . . except for that one time. One pre-graduation-party screw, and I was preggers. I somehow knew Jamilah would never have been that dumb.
Jamilah was beautiful, which I knew from pictures and the occasional glimpse o
f her on Skype. She’d shaved her head since I got the Christmas card, and she looked brilliant and sophisticated, which she was. A tech genius who’d graduated in the top 10 percent of her class at MIT.
Her boys were being introduced to Riley, shaking hands sweetly, then hugging her as my child laughed. It was painfully wonderful to witness.
“Hello, Emma,” Jamilah said, and I tried to assess her tone and failed.
“Hi,” I said, running a hand through my hair. The wind blew it across my face. Should’ve thought of that. Also, I was wearing jeans and a sweater; Jamilah was in something long and flowing and white.
“It’s great to finally meet you in person,” she said, shaking my hand.
“Same here. Your sons are so beautiful.”
“Mom!” said Riley. “This is Owen, and this is Duncan. My brothers!” They were clutching her hands, and it was adorable.
“Hi, boys! I’m Riley’s mom. Remember when we talked on the computer last week? It’s nice to meet you in person. How do you like your sister so far?”
“She’s great!” Owen said. Duncan was swinging Riley’s hand, and my daughter was smiling. Beaming.
“Hey there,” Jason said, giving me a hug. He smelled good. Felt good, too, still lean, the same as ever. And gorgeous. Had I mentioned his looks?
“Nice to see you,” I said, stepping back. Weren’t we all so modern! Jason, his wife, their separation, their sons, our daughter, me . . .
“Are you staying for lunch?” I asked Jamilah.
“No, unfortunately, I have some work to do.” She was an advisor to Google but, according to Jason, worked from home only a few hours a month. Her parents had a summer home in Stoningham, which was how they met. The summer Riley was six.
I wondered why they were separated.
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