Stay With Me (17 page)

“Who are you talking to?”

Mark looked up. Most of the lights in the room were off, but there was one on right behind her. His eyes were blurred from tears and so he couldn’t make out her features. She looked like a shadow with a halo.

“Have you had visitors?”

“Yes.”

“Did you tell them my name?”

He couldn’t remember her name. “Why are you wearing a nurse’s uniform?” he said.

“Because I am a nurse.”

She slipped the blanket off him, undid the front of his hospital gown. Her movements were brisk, efficient.

“What are you doing?”

“Did you tell them my name?”

“No.”

He felt a ripping sensation at the center of his chest, like a Band-Aid being yanked off. Then another, a little lower.

“What are you doing to me?”

“Did you tell them about Maya?”

Rip, rip . . .

“No, I swear.”

Rip, rip . . .

He winced.

“Just a few more,” she said.

He said it again. “What are you doing?”

“Taking you off the monitors, then turning them off,” she said. “We don’t want any alarms.”

“
What?
”

“Sssh.” She put a hand over his mouth, cool and firm. He cried out, but the hand clamped tighter. She removed something from her pocket. It glistened in the dim light. A needle. Mark didn’t like needles. Not anymore. They made him think of his older brother. When Mark closed his eyes sometimes, he’d remember waking up and seeing Steven on the floor, white and still. He’d remember the needle next to him, like some bug who’d had its fill of Steven’s blood, and now it was just lying there, sated. And then he’d have to take pills to make the image go away.

“No needles.” He said it into her hand.

She jabbed it into his neck. He felt a hard pinch, like stitches being pulled too tight. “You’ll like this,” she said.

He didn’t like the pinch or the sting. But he liked the familiar warmth, running through his veins, filling his body. She brought her face close to his. Her eyes were clear and kind in the soft light. “I’ll stay with you till you’re gone.”

Her hand came away from his mouth and stroked his arm, and Mark remembered sitting in the front seat of her car, just as the oxy was kicking in. It had been earlier tonight, and,
really? Only tonight? Feels so long ago . . .

When you smoked it, it had such a sweet smell. “Are you a happy person?” she’d asked him, and he’d cast a glance at her daughter in the backseat, the gas station light illuminating the dried tears on the girl’s face. This had been before she’d caught the girl using her phone, before she’d taken the phone away and put the girl in the trunk and . . . How far had they driven? How long before she’d needed to go for gas?

She took his hand in hers. Her grip was strong. “Let go,” she said. Mark thought of his brother again and how he’d cried over Steven’s body, how he’d said, “Don’t leave me” to Steven, even though he was already gone.

She brushed her hand over Mark’s eyes, closing them. He wished he could remember her name.

Blackness poured into his ears, his mouth, his head. There was nothing Mark could do but what she’d told him to do and so he did. He let go, thinking of the slight smile on his dead brother’s face and the tears on the girl’s face and the girl’s lip, how it had trembled, how she had mouthed the word,
Help
.

All he wanted was for everyone to be okay.

13

“Maybe,” said Geoff, the late-night doorman in Lindsay Segal’s building. He said it to Maya’s picture, Brenna holding it out in front of him, her hand trembling from nerves and fatigue and swelling frustration. She realized how unfairly she’d judged the other doorman, who’d at least tried to be friendly. This guy made him look like a superhero.

Brenna clutched her wrist to steady it. “Could you please look at this a little closer?” she said. “This is my daughter. She’s missing. This apartment building may be the last place she was seen.”

“Yes, you told me all that.” He said it as though Brenna were asking him about a missing set of keys. Maybe the ennui came from too many late-night jobs in the city, or maybe he was on too much medication. Maybe he was just an asshole. He wore glasses with very thin silver frames. He adjusted them languidly, the frames glistening like spiderwebs in the soft lobby light. “She doesn’t look familiar,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you say that to begin with?” she said. “Why did you say maybe?”

His gaze went to a framed picture placed on the front desk—a long-haired dachshund, posing on a carpety lawn. “There was a party here,” he said, addressing the dachshund, not Brenna. “Kids coming and going all night. Neighbors complaining. I don’t remember your daughter’s face. But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t here.”

“Do you have surveillance videos?”

“Maybe,” he said again.

Maybe? Really?

“Can I look?” Brenna said. “I would need last night from around 6
P.M.
to . . . about twenty-four hours’ worth.”

“I’d need to talk to my supervisor about that.”

“So talk to him.”

“It’s three in the morning.”

Brenna moved closer to him, her whole body filling with anger, vibrating with it. “Maybe you didn’t hear me when I told you my daughter is missing.”

“I heard you,” he said. “But I’m not going to wake up my supervisor at three in the morning over some girl who’s probably at her boyfriend’s place. It hasn’t been that long since the party, lady, and you’re not the first parent I’ve talked to. You’re not the first parent who’s complained, only to call back later and—”

“Here’s the thing,” she said, very quietly. “If you don’t let me see those surveillance videos
now
, I will scream loud enough and long enough to wake up your entire building.
Maybe
get you fired.
Maybe
even get you arrested.”

She locked eyes with Geoff. Still with the ennui. Still without the slightest hint of concern behind the spiderweb frames. “You’re not going to do that and we both know it.”

“How do we both know it?”

“Get some rest, lady.”

In the real world, Brenna had long been known for her interrogation skills. Her memory had always been a plus in this area, allowing her to trip up her subjects with their own perfectly recalled words or actions while enabling Brenna to stick to the facts, to keep her own emotions at bay.

But this wasn’t the real world. The world hadn’t been real since 6
P.M.
, when she’d read the first word of Maya’s text, and it had been getting less and less real ever since. Brenna wasn’t herself, and so she had no other choice than to be the broken, desperate person she’d become—to be that person, for all it was worth. Brenna kept her eyes on Geoff. She took a breath. She screamed.

In Faith’s dream, her mother was screaming. Faith was back in her old house and she was getting her books to go to school and her mother was in the kitchen, shrieking like a scared cat.

“What’s wrong?” Faith said.

Her mother pointed at the door, at Maya running out of the house, into the street, an eighteen-wheeler roaring down their quiet suburban street, headed straight toward her. Faith fell to her knees as the truck sent Maya flying and Faith’s mother shrieked, “I told you not to let her out!”

I told you!

Faith woke up in a sweat, shaking, thinking not about her mother but of the call she’d gotten, just before her interview with Ashley Stanley. The phone call from that weird female fan.

She reached out to touch Jim, but he wasn’t there. “Jim?” she said.

No answer.

She said it louder, and he said, “In here!” Faith got out of bed, followed the sound of his voice to the room he used as a home office. He was on his computer, a picture of two young girls in bandage dresses filling the screen. Faith blinked a few times before she realized one of them was Maya.

“Where did you get that?” she asked.

“Brenna sent it,” he said. “She sent both of us a whole series of them. They’re on Maya’s computer, taken two days before she . . . before she told me she was going on the sleepover.”

Faith peered at the girl in the cobalt blue dress, fingers curled around Maya’s waist. She looked at the way she leaned her head into Maya’s, Maya wearing an identical dress, standing beside her in front of a three-way mirror. In the photo, the other girl’s smile was so big and friendly Faith nearly didn’t recognize her at first. But then she looked at the made-up eyes and it all came together.
Lindsay
. Lindsay, that trashy girl who had told Faith and Jim she barely knew Maya, that she was just a freshman . . .

“She was invited on that sleepover,” Faith said.

“My thoughts, too. I mean . . . whether she showed up or not is a different matter. But Maya didn’t lie to me.”

He turned and looked at Faith. His eyes were bloodshot and full of pain.

“Honey, you should take a pill. Try to sleep. It’s best in the long run.”

“I know,” he said. “But I feel like if I let go for one minute . . . If I don’t sit by the phone and watch the computer and . . .”

“I understand.” She swallowed hard, her dream in her head again.
I told you not to let her out . . .
“Jim?”

“Yeah?”

“I got a phone call when I was interviewing Ashley Stanley. Someone telling me not to let Maya out because if I did, something bad would happen.”

Jim swung away from the computer and stared at her. “Are you serious?”

She nodded.

“Well . . . why didn’t you say anything earlier?”

“I get lots of calls like that. E-mails, too. All the time.”

“About Maya?”

“About all of us.”

“Jesus.”

“I figured it was someone who knew I was interviewing Ashley, someone trying to scare me. The person said they like to watch me. I get that a lot, too.”

“How did they get your cell phone number?”

“I guess they called the station. Claimed to be Maya’s teacher.”

“Was it a man or a woman?”

“A woman,” she said. “I think.”

“Faith.”

“I know.”

“Honey.”

“I know, Jim. Let’s just . . .”

“You get these calls all the time?”

“Jim.”

He closed his eyes. Faith’s phone was in the kitchen. She grabbed it, along with Detective Plodsky’s card.

“What are you doing?” he called out.

“I’m calling that detective.”

She tapped Plodsky’s number into the phone. She moved back into Jim’s office before hitting send.

The call went straight to voice mail. “She’s got her phone off. Can you believe that?”

She hit redial. “Seriously, what if this was someone important? What the hell am I talking about,
I am someone important
.”

Voice mail again. She ended the call.

Jim looked up at her. “Call Brenna.” She shouldn’t have noticed the readiness with which he’d said Brenna’s name, the look in his eyes as he said it . . .

Faith was messed up. Brenna being back in both their lives after all these years was made less strange by the awful situation—but it still did feel strange, incredibly so, as though someone were rearranging the foundation of a structure that had stood just fine for years . . .
Should I ask Jim how he feels about that?

She shook the thought out of her mind. She hit redial and got voice mail and left a message for Plodsky asking her to please call. “Honestly. There’s a child missing and what? She wants her beauty sleep?”

“Are you going to call Brenna?”

“It’s 3
A.M.
, Jim,” Faith said. “She’s as emotional as we are, and if she’s managed to get to sleep at all . . .”

“I bet she’s up,” he said. “She’s a night owl. Like me.”

“How do you know that?”

He shrugged, looked away.

Faith swallowed hard. “I mean, are you talking about when you were married to her? Because that was a long time ago and you were both a lot younger . . .”

“Forget it.”

“Okay.”

She turned back toward the bedroom, and then Jim was up, putting his arms around her.

He said, “It isn’t a big deal.”

“What isn’t a big deal?”

He exhaled. “A couple of times last year, I was up late working on one assignment or another and she was up, too, and so we . . . we instant messaged each other.”

She pulled away from him. “You . . . what? Seriously?”

“We talked about Maya, work . . . stuff like that.”

She shook her head. “I thought she couldn’t talk to you without getting hit by some memory.”

“She couldn’t. She couldn’t hear my voice or see me. But instant messaging was different.” He sighed. “Don’t look at me like that, Faith. It was just a way to catch up. And we only did it a couple of times.”

She forced a smile. “God bless modern technology,” she said, thinking,
If it wasn’t a big deal, then why didn’t either of you tell me?

He put his arm around her, and together, they walked back to the bedroom, but they stopped at Maya’s room, her empty room. They stared into the darkness, at the moonlight pouring in through the window, resting on the neatly made bed. Maya’s bed.

Faith rested her hand on his shoulder and closed her eyes, hot tears forming under the lids. She put her arm around his waist and held him tight. Too tight. “What will we do?” she whispered.

He didn’t answer.

Diane Plodsky was listening to a rebroadcast of
Prairie Home Companion
when—after two hours of her sitting in the parking lot, waiting—she saw Dr. Clark leaving the ER.
Thank you.
Even though NPR had long been Diane’s stakeout soundtrack of choice, she preferred Harry Shearer or
Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me
, or even the
BBC News Hour
. Lake Woebegone had always worked like a tranquilizer on her, and between the car heater, Keillor’s voice, and the fact that it was past three in the morning, Diane had been thisclose to surrendering to sleep when Clark finally strode across the parking lot, got into his car, and drove off.

“Hurry home,” she whispered, shaking off the drowsiness before stepping into the cold night.

There was a new nurse at the front desk. A confused-looking little thing with chubby baby cheeks and granny glasses who practically fell out of her chair from shock when Diane walked through the door.
Piece of cake
.

Diane smoothed her hair. She squared her shoulders and leveled her gaze at the girl in the sternest of ways, heading for the front desk without hesitation.

“Can I help you?” the nurse said.

Diane slipped her badge out of her jacket pocket and showed it to her. The girl’s mouth dropped open.

“What room is Mark Carver in?” Diane asked.

“Did you want to—”

“C-A-R-V-E-R.”

The nurse tapped at her computer. “Seven-oh-one East?”

“How do I get there?”

“Take the elevator up to the seventh floor, go all the way down to the end of the hall, and make a right.” The nurse looked at Diane as though she were a train speeding toward her and there was no time to jump off the tracks. Amazing how far a badge and a little confidence can get you at three o’clock in the morning—
especially
at three o’clock in the morning, when no one expects an oncoming train. For the umpteenth time in her adult life, Diane realized, her patience had paid off.

“Thank you,” she told the terrified nurse, and headed straight for the elevator, hit floor seven, and walked down the hallway with a stride so deliberate, no one bothered to stop her—not the two doctors, going over files at the first nurses station, or the group of orderlies who came up behind her, wheeling a gurney full of medical equipment, or the blue-eyed nurse who passed her as she neared the end of the hall, her gaze just as hard as Diane’s.

A lot of the detectives Diane knew—the ones who worked out of the precincts like she used to before she’d gotten divorced and decided her whole life needed changing, the ones investigating homicides and acts of grand larceny and all those other crimes that involved real people rather than the lack of them—those detectives tended to be condescending toward Missing Persons. They dismissed Diane and her ilk as pencil pushers who filled out the appropriate forms and went home at 5
P.M.
Bureaucrats
, they’d say.
Not real cops.

If they could see her now, though, those precinct detectives. If they were to get a load of the swagger and the don’t-mess-with-me glare on Diane Plodsky, moving like a champion through these hospital corridors, wide awake and all-powerful at three o’clock in the morning. If they could see her now, those detectives would surely regret every dismissive thought that had ever dared pass through their narrow little minds.

If Bruce could see her . . . Well, Bruce probably wouldn’t be all that surprised.

Diane caught sight of room 701. There was a uniformed guard in front of it, half asleep. She flashed her badge at him and opened the door quickly, slipping in like she belonged and then shutting it softly behind her. One fluid movement.

Mission accomplished.

“Hi, Mark,” she said, once the door was closed and her breathing had slowed.

No response.

The lights were dimmed, the room very quiet. He was sleeping, she figured. But that was fine. More waiting was fine, long as she was in the right place. She could stay awake. The stress of getting up here and looking confident doing it had shaken the sleepiness out of her and besides, this quiet, deathly though it was, was a better stimulant than
Prairie Home Companion
. She sat in a chair near the door, folded her hands in her lap. “You go ahead and rest, Mark,” she said. “Don’t mind me.”