It was the truth. I hadn’t eaten Pixy Stix since I was a kid, but I loved them.
She told me about herself, about the job, house, and hobbies I already knew about. I told her the same stories I told all of them. As the morning sun rose, we decided to finish our hike together. We were silent most of the way, and I liked it. My life was almost never silent.
She declined my invitation to lunch, but we did exchange numbers. I gave her the number to the phone I use when I am Tobias.
Lindsay texted me once, a few days after the hike. Hearing from her made me smile.
It was great to meet you last week, hope we can hike together sometime.
We did.
A different trail the second time, farther north and near Indian Lake State Forest. She brought the Pixy Stix again; I brought a blanket. We stopped to rest in an area where the sun was blocked by heavy foliage. As we sat down, I smiled at her, and it was real.
“You’re cute,” she said.
No, you’re the cute one.
She texted a few days later, and I ignored it. By then, Millicent and I had agreed that Lindsay was the one.
Now, a year later, Lindsay is back on TV. They found her.
I go straight home from the bar. Millicent is already there, sitting on the front porch. She is still dressed in work clothes, and her patent leather pumps match the color of her skin. She says they make her legs look longer, and I agree. I always notice when she is wearing them, even now.
After working all day and then being cooped up in the car watching Naomi, I realize how badly I need a shower. But Millicent doesn’t even turn up her nose when I sit down next to her. Before I can speak, she does.
“It’s not a problem.”
“Are you sure?” I ask.
“Positive.”
I do not know if this is true. We were supposed take care of Lindsay together, but it didn’t work out that way. And I don’t have any options to argue with.
“I don’t understand how—”
“It’s not a problem,” she says again. She points up, gesturing to the second floor of our house. The kids are home. I want to ask more, but I can’t.
“We have to wait on the next one,” I say. “We shouldn’t do anything now.”
She does not answer.
“Millicent?”
“I heard you.”
I want to ask her if she understands, but I know she does. She just doesn’t like it. She is upset Lindsay has been found now, right when we were planning another. It’s like she has become addicted.
She is not the only one.
When I met Millicent on the plane, it wasn’t love at first sight. Not for her. It wasn’t even mild interest. After saying hello, she looked away and continued staring out the window. I was right back where I’d started. I leaned back on the headrest, closed my eyes, and berated myself for not having the courage to say more.
“Excuse me.”
My eyes flew open.
She was looking at me, her green eyes huge, forehead wrinkled.
“Are you okay?” she said.
I nodded.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. I don’t understand why you’re—”
“Because you’re knocking your head against this.” She pointed to the headrest. “You’re shaking the seat.”
I hadn’t even realized I was doing it. I thought all that mental berating was just that: mental. “I’m sorry.”
“So you’re okay?”
I recovered enough to realize the girl I had been staring at was now talking to me. She even looked concerned.
I smiled. “I’m okay, really. I was just—”
“Beating yourself up. I do the same thing.”
“About what?”
She shrugged. “Lots of things.”
I felt an urge to know everything that made this girl beat her head in frustration, but the landing gear had just dropped and we didn’t have time. “Tell me one,” I said.
She considered my question, even putting her index finger up to her lips. I bit back another smile, not just because it was cute but because I had her attention.
After the plane landed, she answered.
“Assholes,” she said. “Assholes on planes who hit on me when all I want is to be left alone.”
Without thinking, without even realizing she was talking about me, I said, “I can protect you from them.”
She stared at me, stunned. When she realized I was serious, she burst out laughing.
When I realized why she was laughing, I did the same thing.
By the time we walked up the jet bridge, we had not only introduced ourselves; we had exchanged phone numbers.
Before walking away, she said, “How?”
“How what?”
“How would you protect me from all those assholes on planes?”
“I would force them into the center seat, hog the armrests, and give them paper cuts with the emergency information card.”
She laughed again, longer and harder than she had before. I’m still not tired of hearing her laugh.
That conversation became part of us. The first Christmas we spent together, I gave her a huge box, big enough to fit a giant TV, all wrapped up and tied with a bow. The only thing inside was an emergency information card.
Every Christmas since, we have tried to come with up with the most creative reference to our inside joke. Once, I gave her an underseat life jacket. Another time, she redecorated our tree with drop-down oxygen masks.
Whenever I get on a plane and see that emergency card, I still smile.
The strange thing is, if I had to pick a moment, the exact moment everything went into motion and brought us to where we are now, I would have to say it was because of a paper cut.
It happened when Rory was eight years old. He had friends but not too many, a middle-of-the-road kid on the popularity scale, so it came as a surprise when a boy named Hunter gave Rory a paper cut. On purpose. They had been arguing about which superhero was strongest, when Hunter got mad and cut Rory. The cut was in the crease between the thumb and index finger of his right hand. It was painful enough to make Rory scream.
Hunter was sent home for the day, and Rory went to see the nurse, who bandaged his hand and gave him a sugar-free lollipop. The pain had already been forgotten.
That night, after the kids were asleep, Millicent and I talked about the paper cut. We were in bed. She had just closed her laptop, and I turned off the TV. School had just started, and Millicent’s summer tan hadn’t completely faded. She didn’t play tennis, but she loved to swim.
Millicent picked up my hand and rubbed the thin stretch of skin between my thumb and index finger. “Have you ever had a cut here?”
“No. You?”
“Yes. Hurt like hell.”
“How did it happen?”
“Holly.”
I knew very little about Holly. Millicent almost never talked about her older sister. “She cut you?” I asked.
“We were making collages of all our favorite things, and we cut pictures out of magazines and pasted them all on big pieces of construction paper. Holly and I reached for the same piece at the same time, and”—she shrugged—“I got cut.”
“Did you scream?”
“I don’t remember. But I cried.”
I picked up her hand and kissed the long-healed cut. “What favorite things?” I asked.
“What?”
“You said you cut out pictures of your favorite things. What were they?”
“Oh no,” she said, taking her hand back and turning out the light. “You’re not going to turn this into another crazy Christmas thing.”
“You don’t like our crazy Christmas thing?”
“I love it. But we don’t need another.”
I knew we didn’t. I was trying to avoid the subject of Holly, because Millicent didn’t like to talk about her. That’s why I asked about her favorite things.
I should have asked about Holly.
Five
Lindsay dominates the news. She is the only one who has been found, and the first surprise is where her body is found.
The last time I saw Lindsay, we were in the middle of nowhere. Millicent and I had taken her deep into the swamp near a nature preserve, hoping the wildlife would find her before any people did. Lindsay was still alive, and we were supposed to kill her together. That was the plan.