Evidence of Life

Chapter 9



“I think you have to let Louise and Nina go ahead with the service.” Abby’s mother shook that morning’s coffee grounds around the hydrangeas.

“A lot of this thyme has died, Mama.” Abby rested on her knees nearby. “We could go to the nursery, see if we can find more. I don’t know though, at this time of year—”

“Abby, did you hear me? It’s been five months.” Her mother came to stand beside Abby in the grass.

She looked at her mother’s feet. “You shouldn’t be out here in your slippers, Mama. You could fall.”

“Abigail, if it were you who had disappeared—” Abby’s mother’s voice trembled a little “—wouldn’t you want Nick and the children to do what was necessary to bring themselves to terms, to find peace? It’s what Jake needs, honey. And as much as you resist the whole notion of a service, it’s what’s done. It’s the appropriate thing. It sends a kind of signal, can you see?”

“But we’re not religious. Where would it be?”

“Nick was raised Baptist, wasn’t he?”

“But he hated it, having to go every Sunday. Louise wanted us to be married in that huge Baptist church she belongs to in Dallas. Nick refused, remember?”

“But this isn’t for Nick, is it? I mean in terms of whom it will serve. It’s for everyone who wants to show how much and how well your family was—is—loved. It would be a kindness to Louise, especially, I think, to let her have her way in this.”

“What does Jake want?”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

Abby got to her feet, brushing the knees of her jeans. Jake hadn’t come home once all summer, and now classes had resumed. He and Abby seldom talked. He was wary of her now. Like everyone else, he wished she would get on with her life. Stop asking questions, stop jumping for the phone when it rang, stop deluding herself. Go home. Be normal.

“We argued the last time he called,” Abby said.

“About?”

Money, Abby thought, but it would only worry her mother to hear it. She would ask how Abby was managing, which would then force Abby to admit that rather than go back to work, she’d been raiding her and Nick’s joint savings account to cover her bills. Her mother would then say how unwise it was and ask what Abby intended to do when the savings was gone. Abby didn’t know, and, probably even worse, she didn’t care. And she didn’t need anyone to tell her how dumb that was either.

“Abby?”

“It was nothing, Mama. He needed tires for his car. I took care of it.”

“I know your head is full of questions, sweet. I wonder too, what happened, but given how long it’s been, I mean without any sign....”

“I know, Mama.” How illogical it is to go on hoping.

“I think they’ll have the service whether you agree to it or not.”

Abby looked into thin air. “Nick wants to be cremated.” She couldn’t let herself think what Lindsey might have wanted. “There’s nothing to cremate.”

“I know, sweet.”

“I don’t believe they’re gone, Mama. I just can’t.”

Her mother took Abby’s hand. “I know,” she repeated.

* * *

Abby sat in front of the church between Jake and her mother. Louise sat on Jake’s other side, one jeweled hand clutching his knee, the other pressing a lace-trimmed handkerchief to her nose. She was every inch the proper grieving mother and grandmother. Abby admired her for it. Louise would be rewarded as a result with the elusive closure everyone talked about. Now you can move on, they kept saying. As if Nick and Lindsey were a town or a vegetable stand, a booth at the county fair. Abby was sick of that advice: move on.

A number of people, Joe among them, eulogized. Abby didn’t listen. Any moment Nick and Lindsey would come through the door. She felt the possibility run through her blood, cool and light, like quicksilver. She heard the collective gasp from the mourners who were gathered, heard herself say she had never lost faith. She felt the prick of tears, and, reaching into her purse for a tissue, she encountered the book of matches from Nick’s desk, the one with Sondra written inside it, in Nick’s hand. Sondra with an “o” rather than the more familiar “a.” Or had Nick gotten it wrong?

Was she here? The possibility skittered through Abby’s mind. Suddenly she was convinced that if she were to turn, she would find the woman staring at her.

Abby jumped when her mother touched her arm. “It’s over, sweet.”

“Thank God,” Abby said.

But it wasn’t over. On Abby’s way out of the church, people approached her. They pressed her hands, murmured their condolences. Several of the women bent their perfumed cheeks to Abby’s, and the combined scents were overwhelming and made it hard to breathe. Some were weeping, and they were taken aback, even disapproving to find Abby dry-eyed. It unsettled them, but that was just too bad, she thought. They were wrong to do this, to condemn her family to an eternal rest without proof, without evidence.

She asked to be taken home, but Louise and Nina insisted that Abby, together with her mother and Jake, attend a luncheon at the Metropolitan Lawyers Club in downtown Houston. Abby took one look around the private dining room and thought how Nick would hate it, the tables padded in layers of embossed white linen, the redundancy of silver and china and heavy-bottomed crystal. It would remind him of his childhood, his mother’s daily insistence on formal dining.

Abby picked at the main course, a serving of Chicken Cordon Bleu. Beside her, her mother patted her hand. “I’m going to the ladies. Do you—?”

Abby shook her head. “Can we go home when you come back? Have we stayed long enough?”

“I think so. You can blame me,” her mother said. “You can say I’m tired.”

Louise took the seat Abby’s mother vacated as if she had been waiting for the opportunity. “I’ve opened the beach house,” she said.

“When?”

“Last week. I couldn’t stand being in Dallas another second. You and Jake should come. A family should be together in a time like this.”

“Maybe later this fall,” Abby said, although she doubted it. “Have you ever heard Nick mention anyone named Sondra?” she asked.

“Sondra? No, I don’t believe so. Who is she?”

“No one,” Abby answered. “It’s nothing.” But if it was so nothing, why hadn’t she tossed the matchbook?

Louise smoothed the tablecloth. “Am I a bad person?”

Abby frowned. “Why would you ask that?”

“There are people on this earth who are truly evil, yet I’m the one who is punished. Like Job, I suppose.” Louise sighed.

“I don’t understand.”

“God took Philip,” she explained as if Abby were dim. “Now He’s taken Nick.”

It wasn’t true. Nick’s father wasn’t dead. Even Louise knew it. But she preferred to think of him as dead. She preferred the role of widow to that of jilted wife. It was more socially acceptable. Abby had been appalled when Nick told her the story, that his father had left on a business trip one day and never returned. Nick and his mother hadn’t known what had happened to him, and police efforts to find out had proven fruitless. Finally, seven years later, when Nick was sixteen, Louise had the man declared legally dead, clearing the way to cash in his one-million-dollar life insurance policy. She’d been living like a queen ever since. Nick had been in law school when he’d learned the truth, that his father was alive and well and living off the coast of Tampico, Mexico on a yacht with a second wife and three children. Abby could not imagine how hurt and angry Nick must have been, but he’d also felt sympathetic to Philip.

My dad had debt up to here, Nick had told Abby, slicing his hand across his neck. He had my mother on his back. “I don’t know why he didn’t take me with him,” Nick had said that, too. He’d been wistful, and Abby had felt incensed on his behalf, that his parents had treated him with so little regard. He’d mentioned the love of sailing he shared with his father. Abby had seen how saddened he was to have lost that along with everything else. She’d wanted so badly to make it up, to love sailing, too. At least that.

But she didn’t. She’d tried, but she couldn’t take the sun; she was afraid of the water. Nick had finally given up on her and sold the Blue Daze. He had said he was fine about it, but suppose he wasn’t? Suppose he had left her the way Philip had left Louise, because Abby harped on him and acted the queen and forced him to give up things he didn’t want to, like his boat.

Abby turned to Louise. “Do you think Nick is like his father? That he could have—?”

“Could have what, dear?”

But Abby shook her head and said, “Never mind.” It wasn’t possible. She wasn’t Louise and Nick wasn’t his father, and Nick’s disappearance wasn’t a matter of genetics or history repeating itself. He wouldn’t have left her, or if he had, he wouldn’t have taken Lindsey. When a man did such a thing, when he left his wife, he didn’t take his child. Like Nick’s father had done, he left his child at home.

* * *

At first Abby didn’t know what was making the noise. The sound was bleating, dissonant, and she bolted upright, gaze bouncing wall-to-wall in the night-darkened room. She couldn’t think where she was. Dreaming? She climbed out from the narrow twin bed where she’d slept all through her girlhood and crossed to the vanity stool where she’d left her purse.

She watched herself pull out her cell phone, place it against her ear. Did she speak, say hello? She wouldn’t remember anything except the static that greeted her and then out of that, a voice.

A small voice, a definitely female voice, whispered: “Mommy?”

“Lindsey?”

More words came, and Abby struggled to filter them from the background noise. Then, breathily—singing? Crying?—“You’ll never find me, find me, find me….”

The hair rose on the back of Abby’s neck, on her arms. “Lindsey, honey, please, just tell me where you are.” She pressed the phone harder to her ear.

But there was nothing. More static. That same liquid-sounding sigh as last time.

“Lindsey, talk to me! Where are you?” Abby could have sworn she was screaming loud enough to wake the dead, but no one appeared. Not Jake and not her mother. Shaking badly, she lowered herself to the side of the bed, fighting for composure.

“Please, Lindsey,” she said more calmly. “Is Daddy there? Can he tell me where you are? Mommy will come, I promise.”

Nothing. Breath. Abby heard breathing and the low-grade interfering static that was like the hum of insects, like fever. “Lindsey? Please, sweetheart, please, talk to me.”

But she didn’t, and just as before, after what seemed an eon had passed, but was probably only a matter of moments, there was a click, the softest click, and the connection was severed.

Abby whimpered and pressed her fingertips to her mouth; she kept the phone in place, waiting, waiting, but Lindsey didn’t come back. Abby looked at the ID. Out of Area. She hit call-back. Nothing. She went into the living room to tell Jake that his sister had called. See, Abby intended to say, I knew they were alive, but then watching Jake sleep, she couldn’t bring herself to waken him. Abby had the same reaction when she looked in at her mother.

And they were both kind the next morning when she told them, when she showed them a call had, indeed, come in at 3:42 a.m. They didn’t disagree, but Abby saw in their eyes that they didn’t believe it had been from Lindsey.

“A wrong number?” her mother ventured.

“Some crank.” Jake was more definite.

But Abby couldn’t imagine it. Who would be so cruel?