The Lost Girls

by Jessica Chiarella

  “Are you working tonight?” she asks.

  “No,” I reply. “It’s my night off.”

  “Me too,” she replies. “Want to get dinner somewhere? Ted is out of town for a conference, and I could really use some company. My treat.”

  I glance down at the muddy soup in the pot on my stove. There’s no contest here.

  “Yeah,” I reply. “Where should I meet you?”

  * * *

  * * *

  FOR THE FIRST time since I met her, Ava looks rough. Puffy and worn out and tired. It’s almost a relief, to know that she’s as human as the rest of us. That the long shifts at the hospital and the strain of Colin’s situation do actually have an impact, even if the rest of the time she manages to look as polished as a runway model. We’ve decided on Chicago Diner, because Ava says she needs comfort food, and she hasn’t quite found anything as comforting in the city as fake meat and vegan milkshakes.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she says as we shuffle through the narrow aisle and into our booth. “I don’t want to think about anything to do with the case tonight.” It seems a strange sentiment, given she’s chosen me as a dinner companion. But it occurs to me then, between Ted and her job and Colin’s case, that perhaps she doesn’t have anyone else to call when she’s on the precipice of falling apart. It’s sort of thrilling, actually, to imagine myself as one of Ava’s only friends. If that’s what we are.

  Plus, it lets me off the hook for deciding not to bring up Dylan in our call earlier. If Ava doesn’t want to talk about the case, I don’t feel remiss in not mentioning it now.

  “So I didn’t realize you were married,” she says as an unshaven waiter in a stocking cap slaps two menus down on the table.

  “Where did you hear that?” I reply, and it occurs to me that Ava and I haven’t had much occasion to discuss our personal lives. If we’re not talking about the case, I’m not really sure what we have to talk about.

  “Andrea. We were chatting when you two came to the hospital to record. She mentioned you were getting a divorce.”

  “Yeah,” I say, thinking of the divorce papers that are still sitting, unread, on my kitchen table. “Eric. We met in college. It fell apart about a year ago.”

  “What happened?” Ava asks, and it seems like an intrusive question, except that we’ve spent a decent amount of time already discussing—among other things—her brother’s sex life.

  “How long do you have?” I ask, trying to dodge. But Ava simply waits, her patience both calming and slightly unnerving. The posture of a good listener, with a keen ear for bullshit.

  “I think I got really good at pretending to be normal,” I finally reply. “That what I wanted was to be married, and have a beautiful apartment, and take vacations to Thailand, and have babies and take pictures of them for Instagram. And then, this body was dumped outside a hospital, and I couldn’t pretend anymore. Because really, I’ve never wanted anything but my sister back. There’s nothing in my life I wouldn’t have traded for that.” It’s a strange admission, when I hear myself say it. More the truth than I will usually admit, even to myself. Most of the time, I pretend the answer to what happened to Maggie will be enough. But really, deep down, I know it’s a lie. I will always want her. I want Andrea to be dazzled by her. I want to know what she thinks of Eric. I want to tell her all the things I’ve done in the name of finding her, because I know she may be the only one who would not hesitate to forgive me.

  “So what does that look like?” Ava asks. “When you stop pretending?”

  “It generally involved a lot of irresponsible behavior,” I reply. Trying to be coy, to hide the pain beneath it. Not regret, not exactly. I think of grappling on the mat, the way it feels to slip free of someone’s grip. You can’t think about what will happen next. You react, you get free, and then you’re faced with your next decision. You stay and fight, or you run. The thing I still can’t figure out though, is whose grip I was fighting. “Some drugs. A lot of men. Not, admittedly, my finest hour.”

  “Sounds like college,” she says, though her eyes are wide in a way that looks like she’s half surprised, half impressed. And I wonder if she’s also lying. If her college experience had little to do with drugs and boys, and was really an endless string of long nights in the library, hunched over biology textbooks the size of shoeboxes. “How long did it take your husband to find out?”

  This is the awful part of the story. The part that Andrea and I never really talk openly about. The part that meant the end of my marriage, no matter how much Eric still loved me. I remember that afternoon in Andrea’s car, when I was already six days late and half convinced of what was about to happen. When I finally told her the terrible suspicion that had been bubbling like tar in my stomach for days.

  “I’m late,” I said, watching Andrea for some sort of reaction. Andrea, whose belly grazed the steering wheel as she drove. Andrea was a month away from her due date. So pregnant that the difference between her and me seemed so much more expansive and encompassing than simply the progress of another six or seven months. She seemed transformed, in a way I couldn’t imagine for myself.

  I had been spiraling downward for five months by then. Lying my way through couple’s therapy sessions with Eric, after I’d told him about the podcast but not about the men. Not the hours chasing down leads on CrimeSolversOnline, or the vodka in increasing proportions. Not the days I spent wandering the city, hoping a turn down an alley or a stretch of vacant lot would lead me to my sister. I could not explain to him why I’d kept the Jane Doe from him for weeks, and he had been so disturbed by my withholding that I could not fathom trying to explain the rest. Only Andrea knew, and even she could do nothing to stop me from falling further.

  The Jane Doe had finally been identified as a concert violinist and opioid addict from Bloomington, Indiana, a month after my DNA test. She’d given birth to a son only six weeks before she died. A son who was now being raised by his grandparents. She’d become addicted to Oxycontin after she broke her foot playing tennis, they said, and had been battling with her addiction for years.

  Until she found out she was pregnant. She’d stopped using then, at least until he was born. She’d wanted her son to be healthy. I, on the other hand, was six days late and had pounded four cocktails the night before. And burned with the shame of it.

  “How late?” Andrea asked. Unflappable as always. Almost preternaturally cool.

  “Almost a week,” I replied. And then I did the thing I’d been avoiding for months, through all the podcast recording sessions, and in the moments after the DNA results came in, and every night as I lay in bed next to Eric, thinking about my sister. I started to cry. Surprising even myself, that this would be the thing that did it. That sent me into fits. That made me fall apart.

  I bent forward, covering my face with my hands as my shoulders shook, as fat, salty tears slipped down my palms and between my fingers. I could feel my nose already running.

  “Oh, Jesus, sweetie,” I heard Andrea say, her hand on my back as she pulled onto a side street and double parked, punching the button that triggered her emergency flashers. “I thought you were on the pill,” she said.

  I shook my head, my hair eclipsing my face so she could not see how wretched I’d become. “I stopped taking it. Just before the Jane Doe.” My voice broke with hiccupping sobs. “I went off it.”

  “Why?” Andrea could not hide the incredulity in her tone.

  “Because he wants to have a goddamn baby, why do you think?” I said, nearly shouted actually, in the small interior of the car.

  “But why would you agree to it?” Andrea asked, her voice gentler now, as she brushed my hair back, tucking it behind my ear.

  I dropped my hands from my face, holding them out, palms up. Offering my own bemusement. “I have no fucking idea. Maybe I didn’t expect it would really happen? I certainly never expected a body t
o show up in the morgue.” I shut my eyes, dropping hot tears onto the front of my shirt.

  “Oh, honey,” Andrea said. She would be a good mother, I thought as she gathered me up, let me sob into her shoulder, both of us stretched across the center console. And I, of course, would not.

  “A week isn’t so long,” she cooed into my hair. “We can go get a test right now, and find out one way or another, okay?”

  I nodded, wiping wet hands across my eyes, trying to take a deep breath without its hitching.

  And I allowed myself to imagine it, doing the wrong thing, just once. Giving birth to a buttery-cheeked boy, with eyes close enough in color to Eric’s to make everyone note their similarity, even if the comparison was not perfect. A boy who looked like me in my baby pictures, who had Maggie’s childhood laugh. A grandchild for my mother, that final balm. What poetry it could be, to have her hold a child again, to give her back something of what had been taken. Some innocence. Some sense of the rightness of the world.

  But I could not allow myself to take up motherhood as a way of keeping myself in check. Because I knew myself better than that; I knew that raising the stakes—making the consequence for my failure huge and terrible: a child, oh Christ, a child—would not keep me from failing. I could not be made a mother simply by giving birth. Or, at least, I could not be made a mother that anyone would want. I knew that for certain, because in all my imaginings, I could not allow myself to imagine that I’d have a girl.

  “I can’t be pregnant,” I whispered, angry at myself, my wretched state.

  “It’s okay,” Andrea replied, her hand running up and down my spine.

  “I can’t do it, Andrea,” I said, my voice more certain now, and full of tears. “It’s more than I could take.”

  “You don’t have to be pregnant if you don’t want to be,” Andrea said into the hair at the crown of my head.

  “Eric would never understand.”

  Andrea pulled back then, taking my face in her hands and looking me straight in the eyes. Andrea. The closest thing I had to a big sister.

  “Eric would never have to know,” she replied.

  * * *

  * * *

  I DEBATE FOR a moment whether to confide in Ava. It’s been a long time since I’ve told the whole truth of it to anyone. And I worry that when it happens, once one detail comes out, everything else will bubble up. I always want to see how much I can reveal before someone grows disgusted with me.

  “He found out after a few months. About as long as it took me to get pregnant,” I reply. “It was really the most obvious possible outcome. Right out of an after-school special. By that point Eric and I were barely having sex.”

  “And you were . . . ,” Ava says.

  “Having sex with other people. A lot of them. Yeah,” I reply, raking my fingers through my hair, trying to fight the embarrassment that always seems to go hand in hand with vulnerability.

  “Yeah. I got pregnant once too,” Ava says. “During residency. Right after Colin’s conviction, actually.” I watch her as she speaks and realize how young she is. Only a handful of years older than me. She sometimes looks like a girl who got so good at playing dress-up that the world suddenly forgot she was a child. And I realize how much we have in common, then. Each of us mistaken for the person she is pretending to be.

  “I remember thinking that it might kill me, actually kill me, to have a baby right then,” she says. “Those were the words that went through my head when I found out. I felt like if I had to do one more difficult thing, I wouldn’t survive it. My heart had been so wrung out.”

  “And Ted understood?” I ask.

  “He did,” she says. And then, “At least, he said he did. But also I think he knew, deep down, that it was too much for me, after Colin’s conviction. I think it was the only time he’s actually been afraid for me, that I’d lose it and he’d have to call the men in white coats. So he agreed.”

  “Ted’s a good guy,” I say, and I see the fondness in Ava’s eyes at the sentiment.

  “I’m assuming Eric wasn’t as understanding?” she asks, a preparatory wince already creasing her brow.

  “I considered trying to hide it from him. Or telling him it was his. But it turned out, I couldn’t live with that. Apparently, I do have limits to what I’m capable of,” I say. Even now, I can’t forget Eric’s blankness. The way he repeated my words back to me, as if it were a language he was learning by practicing its foreign sounds before he could grasp its meaning. I wondered for a moment if I had hurt him to the point where even his capacity for language had begun to fail him.

  His anger was a relief. His clasped fists, held before him, resting on his knees. That I could take. His breath hot as it hissed out of him. But it didn’t last, even though I wished it would. He had never been one for anger, my Eric. It burned out of him, until he was crumpled forward, his face in his hands. I knelt before him, on that floor, unable to be the one to comfort him. Begging him to tell me what I should do.

  “Andrea went with me.”

  “Good friend,” Ava says. And I nod, but really, she doesn’t know the half of it.

  “She was three weeks away from giving birth to her daughter,” I reply, remembering the heavy sweater she wore that day, how there was no hiding her belly, even despite her best efforts. “Have you ever seen a woman who is eight months pregnant walk into an abortion clinic?”

  “Protesters?” Ava asks.

  “Yeah. I’ve never seen people like that. It was like dangling red meat in front of a pack of dogs. And Andrea just grabbed my hand and walked me through it. Eight months pregnant, and she was still the strong one.”

  I stop, because my throat is so tight with tears. But it feels good, thinking about that day. To remember the depth of Andrea’s strength and the far reaches of her compassion. To understand what it must have cost her, to be the one to save me. Because that’s the truth of it. That day saved me. From every sorry, reckless thing that I’d done in the wake of my sister’s disappearance, from being a mother even more grief-ridden and inadequate than my own. From bringing a child into the world who would be made to suffer for Maggie’s disappearance, as I had suffered, in penance for being the one to survive.

  Ava reaches across the table and takes my hand. And I think of Maggie. I can’t stop myself from thinking of Maggie. Not her disappearance, but her. Sitting on my bed with an arm around me, after a group of boys on the school bus told me I was ugly. Finger-combing my long hair, in preparation for a braid. Carrying me across a beach’s gravel parking lot to the public bathrooms when I’d lost my sandals in the surf. Always my protector.

  “You’d never believe how close I came to getting my tubes tied after that,” I say.

  “Because you never wanted to go through that again?” Ava asks.

  “No,” I reply, shaking my head. “Because when I think about having a child . . .” I let the thought hang, sucking a raw patch on my lower lip. Worrying it with my tongue. I think of Olive. “There is so much danger, in loving anything that much.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  I spend the next few days so caught up in Dylan’s case—trying to track down his relatives, reaching out to his friends in Milwaukee for interview requests—that I almost forget that this weekend is the annual benefit dinner for the Chicago Foundation for Missing and Exploited Women. The benefit is always a bit of a painful affair, a hotel ballroom full of wealthy people who want nothing more than to throw money at a sob story, with a slideshow of missing girls playing on a continual loop at the back of the stage. Plus, it’s black tie, which means I’d have to rustle up a ball gown somewhere, despite the fact that my bank balance is dipping dangerously toward double digits. And my family, as members of the board of the Margaret Reese Foundation, will be attending.

  I try to beg off. Call my mother, leave her a message informing her that I don’t hav
e any way of procuring a ball gown this year and asking that she give my regrets to the rest of the board—meaning, mainly, my grandmother and Uncle Perry. Which, of course, prompts a knock at my door the next morning. A messenger, delivering a high-necked Marchesa Notte gown in gold lace, along with a pair of ankle-strap stilettos. Both of which fit like a dream. Checkmate.

  I bike to the gym that morning and whale on the heavy bag for the better part of an hour, until my T-shirt and shorts are soaked and one of the trainers asks me if everything’s all right.

  “Family stuff,” I reply, and he gives me a very understanding nod. I feel like I could go for another hour, but I also don’t want my arms to be lead tonight, so I unwrap my hands and shake them out—hoping they won’t swell from all the abuse—and head for home.

  * * *

  * * *

  I’M TEMPTED—REALLY tempted—to take the L down to the Palmer House Hilton in the finery my mother has bought for me, just to be obstinate. But it’s been a long while since I’ve spent any time in four-inch heels, and as it turns out, there’s no hope of walking more than a block at a time without wanting to amputate my feet at the ankles, so I settle instead for an Uber.

  The ballroom is all burgundy carpeting and crystal chandeliers, the bread and butter of old money, and I catch sight of my family’s table as soon as I enter. It’s just to the right of the center of the stage, as it is every year, and through the crowd I can see my mother chatting with the mayor’s chief of staff, who appears to be artfully trying to extricate himself from whatever tirade she’s on. Good luck, buddy. I head in the opposite direction, to the bar—intent on a drink before I dive into this night’s particular torture—and order a vodka martini.

  “Would you be able to help me find my table?” says a familiar voice behind me. I turn to find Detective Olsen, resplendent in his class A uniform, standing behind me.