Things We Didn't Say (15 page)

“Good night. I’ll wake you if I hear anything.”

I’d already called the police just after Casey left for her walk. They were sending the paperwork to the cell phone and e-mail companies and said they’d call when they knew more.

They were neutral and businesslike, and I know that’s how they should be, professional. In fact, that’s how I always act when I have to report on a tragedy. But now, on the other side of trauma, their coolness is infuriating.

“Mike?”

“Yeah.”

“You ever going to bed?”

I’d forgotten I was just standing there, hovering over Mallory. I give her a halfhearted wave and go upstairs.

Where the hell is Casey? I don’t want her tromping into the house late at night and waking everyone up.

The light is still on in Dylan’s room, from our earlier rummaging.

I should be telling him to turn out the light, close his laptop, and go to bed. I should be talking to him about band practice.

I try to imagine where he is. I picture him someplace relatively safe. Maybe he somehow got a motel room with this girl—with no credit card? Underage? Well, he got on a bus—and he’s warm and sleeping.

I can see him in his bed now as clearly as if he really were there. I can smell Dove soap on his skin. He takes a shower at night because it’s impossible to get in there around Angel in the morning, so every night he smells of Dove. We always used that on him, back to his toddler days when we were doing the scrubbing. It was good for his sensitive skin, which always seemed to break out red with the slightest dryness.

I bet he didn’t take his Eucerin. He’s going to be itchy.

I run lightly down the steps and grab my sneakers out of my gym bag. My hands buzz with unused energy. If I could run to Cleveland now, I would. I’ll drive there right now. When the police find him I’ll be partway there, then, and we won’t have to wait as long to be reunited. If Cleveland doesn’t pan out, I’ll drive to New York by the likeliest route and stop in every hotel lobby and show his picture. I’ll visit every bus station.

Casey and Mallory can watch the kids. Or not, my parents can, whatever.

My shoelace breaks. “Fuck.” I try to knot it, but one side is too short.

I slump over, leaning against the back door, defeated by a shoelace.

As my blood rush slows, reason resumes its seat. At the very least I need Casey here. I can’t dash off while she’s still out walking, or whatever the hell she’s doing.

I look at the clock. Nearly midnight. I should be worried about Casey, too. A young woman—a small, slight woman, at that—alone walking in the dark city, and I went and confiscated her cell phone.

I ignore my loose sneaker and grab my coat off the hook, slipping out the back door so I don’t wake Mallory.

My plan is to go around the block, her favorite walk route—and a route that would never take this long—when I happen to glance at the house and see something on our porch. Human-size, like some derelict has snuck up onto our porch swing to sleep.

I approach slowly, because if someone is nuts or high enough to sleep on a stranger’s porch . . .

“Casey?”

She rolls herself up to sitting in the porch swing. She’s shivering hard, her wet hair plastered to her head. From here her lips look blue, where they’re not red with the blood from her lip, which has split again.

“What are you doing?”

Her words are clumsy, like she’s been at the dentist and her mouth is numb.

“I’m l-l-locked out.”

I pull her up off the chair and get my own keys out of my pocket. “Didn’t you knock?”

“No one heard me.”

When I get her inside the warmth, she shivers harder. I wonder, with Mallory right there on the couch, why she didn’t hear the knocking. But I look over, and she seems to be snoring already.

“Go upstairs and take a bath. I’ll make you some tea.”

She nods and walks hunched, as if she’s frozen so stiff her joints won’t stretch.

After I make Casey some tea, I’m going to the computer to map a route to Cleveland. I’m not going to sleep until I know he’s safe.

I bring up Casey’s tea, and she’s wrapped in her bathrobe, the running tub steaming up the small bathroom. She nods her thanks.

Before I go, I take out her phone and rest it on the bathroom counter.

Our eyes lock for a moment, her face passive, watchful, before I close the door. I’m weary, and my sleepiness causes me to prop up for a moment against the hallway wall and close my eyes.

I’m a caretaker again, still, always.

Chapter 17
Mallory, 1995

N
ot until I heard Angel squeal “Daddy!” did I even notice Michael was in the house. I’d been concentrating so hard on Dylan’s little forehead. He’d been staring at me as he sucked away on his bottle like he was trying to figure me out and I was thinking, Join the club, kid, and my stitches hurt and Angel was jostling me as she pretended to read me
Goodnight Moon
and said good night to all the things in our living room.

I wondered how long he’d been standing there, staring at us. I imagined how we looked sitting there, how very domestic, and found myself amazed again at how normal things were.

He swung Angel up and nuzzled her neck, then as Angel wrapped her arms and legs around him to hold on like a barnacle told me, “Guess what I found out today?”

“Yeah?”

“I got the job!”

I hadn’t meant to startle Dylan, but I couldn’t help but shout with joy. He’d been slaving at that internship for too long, with a little money but no benefits, while his dad had been paying all our hospital bills.

Dylan shrieked fit to make my ears bleed, ignoring the plastic nipple. I teased his lips with it, and a shivery panic started to creep up my spine. But Michael untangled from Angel and scooped up his baby in his big hands, and I swear Dylan took one look at those clear blue eyes and settled right down.

“You’re amazing,” I told him, ignoring the whispering thought in my head,
He loves his daddy better than you.
“Professional reporter and father of the year, too.”

I rose gingerly, wincing at the stitches pulling, and gave him a peck on the cheek. “How are you today?” he asked me.

“Fine,” I answered breezily.

He didn’t answer, and when I met his eyes, he was staring hard at me. “Better,” I answered. “Pretty good.” And it was true.

Michael interrupted my thoughts by suggesting we go out and celebrate. I told him yes please, as long as I could shower.

I should have known dinner wouldn’t go well. Angel had missed her nap and Dylan was fussy, but I didn’t mind taking off early with doggie bags, since it made Michael so happy to take his family out at all. He was celebrating being a provider for us, with a steady income and everything.

On the way home now, with our still-warm food in Styrofoam containers in our laps and the kids dozing in their car seats, I stole a glance at Michael, the early autumn sun glowing in the car. I found myself stunned nearly every day that he loved me, was still with me, even knowing my sordid past, how I’d buried myself in sex with half strangers as a way to forget, maybe punish myself.

He always insisted it didn’t matter. He also insisted—the ever-practical doctor’s son—that we both get tested.

For this I bit down my impulse to be insulted and hurt, and made myself think differently and so far I’d been rewarded with a loving, attentive husband, if a bit stuffy at times, with a tendency to be critical.

Forcing myself to think differently was exhausting, though, and that’s how I thought of those dark periods. I needed to hibernate sometimes, to recover from that effort. When I felt the darkness creeping up—like in that old horror movie,
The Blob
, it would rise from the ground and gradually swallow me—I would call Michael to tell him I needed rest and crawl into bed for a few days.

That was better than the alternative, because if I ignored the Blob, it would go the other way, and soon I’d be throwing things, screaming, and this would make Angel cry.

It was easier to be different when pregnant, so that’s why I convinced Michael to have another baby, even before graduation. For one thing,
he
was different when I was carrying a child: even more careful and solicitous, treating me like blown glass.

Maybe now, I thought, tipping my head back on the headrest, the warm pasta heating my thighs, NPR softly on the radio, maybe now it will stick better, the even-keel feeling, because I’ll have so much to do. Two children, and a whole house to clean and maintain.

The Blob was so much more common when I was bored. Like it wanted to fill the emptiness.

Michael had been talking about his new job at the
Herald
, so I tuned back in.

I squeezed his thigh. “I’m so proud of you.”

He blushed a little, and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He always reacted that way to praise, having gotten so little from that stuffed-shirt father of his.

In the house, after we slurped down our leftover meals, I gratefully let Michael take over with the kids. I stretched out on the couch, on my side, the only way I could rest that didn’t seem to hurt somewhere. I flipped channels and listened to him read to Angel, taking breaks to coo at Dylan in his bouncy seat . . .

The next thing I knew the house was quiet, and Michael was nudging me to make room on the couch. Dylan was dozing in his car seat at our feet, sucking on a pacifier.

I shifted slightly to make room for him, and then rested my head in his lap, facing the television. He stroked my hair back from my face.

He reported to me about all he’d done for the bedtime routine, as if I were going to grade his report card. I just murmured, still in the fog of dinner and my doze.

The telephone shrilling made me jump. Michael leaned forward to answer the cordless, sighing, both of us hoping it wasn’t the newspaper.

“Oh, hi Kate,” he said.

I felt my body go stiff. I pulled myself up, away from him, and listened to his side of the conversation.

“I can’t now,” he said. “I’m with my wife and kids.”

Oh yes, he’s twenty-two years old and already tied down with me, the fat, bloated cow, and the babies. Little Katie—I’d met her, she had round perky boobs and wore the shortest skirts I’d ever seen in an office—was practically shouting, so I could hear her just fine as she said, Oh, come on, he was allowed to go out and celebrate a new job, wasn’t he? The wife could watch the kids?

Michael flicked his eyes over at me. Was that guilt? It sure wasn’t a loving gaze.

“I should go,” he said. “I’ll see you at work.” He hung up and turned to me, and I could see him searching for explanations.

“Go then,” I spat. “Go have a drink with your little slut.”

“She’s not a slut, she just—”

“Oh, it’s perfectly normal for a single girl to call up a married man while his wife’s stitches are still healing from labor to ask him out for a drink? Go then, don’t let the ball and chain stop you.”

“She just doesn’t know how it works, she’s practically a kid.”

“She wouldn’t have called here if she didn’t think you might go. So is that who you have lunch with every day? And a drink? Is that why when I call you at the office I can’t reach you?”

“No! I’m not interested in her, okay? Not in the least.”

“Bullshit, you’re not. You’d have to be blind or gay not to be.”

He scooted closer to me. “I don’t want you to be upset. I will tell her not to call here ever again. I love you, Mal.”

“No matter what?” I asked, feeling the tears spill over then, my fear of his answer loud like drumbeats in my head.

“No matter what,” he said, pulling me back to him, tucking me in the crook of his arm.

He let me cry on his shirt, and he kissed the top of my head.

Then he said quietly, almost murmuring, as if he thought I wouldn’t hear, “I wish I knew how to make you believe me.”

I wish I did, too.

Chapter 18
Michael

C
asey and I passed the night together in the kitchen, neither of us willing or able to sleep.

While Casey was still thawing out in the tub, I’d abandoned the idea of driving all night toward Cleveland, feeling too tired and scattered to focus, afraid I’d end up crashed on the side of the road, compounding tragedy with rash, pointless action. The Cleveland police were looking, the Grand Rapids police checking out the phone and e-mail records. That was their job.

Yet the idea of sleeping in my warm bed felt like a betrayal, not knowing where my son was, whether he was safe and warm himself. I kept returning to the missing children stories I’ve reported and read over the years, and wondered anew how the parents survived it. At least Dylan checked in once, at least we’re pretty sure he left on his own.

How could you ever go on with your life, the mundane things like eating, showering, mowing the lawn? Yet people do, especially if they have other kids depending on them. Birthday parties, school plays. All the while, not knowing.

We didn’t speak, Casey and I, the whole night. What else was there to say?

We moved in restless circles like hummingbirds from the kitchen chair, to the office chair, to the counter by the phone, steering clear of Mallory on the living room couch.

I eventually changed out of my work clothes, grabbing some sweatpants in the dark of the room.

The sun rising behind the cloudy sky provided no beautiful views, just a gradual erasure of darkness.

The phone shrills at 7:30, and I run for it.

“Mr. Turner? It’s Detective Wilson.”

My throat is frozen. I cough out, “Yes.”

“We got the information from the cell phone and e-mail companies. The phone and e-mail are both registered to a Harper household in Cleveland. We called the number and also talked to the Cleveland police.”

I grip the countertop. “And?”

“Ed Harper, the owner of the phone and computer in question, has also reported his daughter, Tiffany, missing. This should be some sort of relief for you, sir, as we’re satisfied that he is indeed with a girl as he believes.”