I scroll through a few more emails before I click on one from my wedding planner and freeze.
Hi, Chloe. I’m sorry to keep asking about this but we do need to get the ceremony details nailed down so I can finalize a seating chart. Have you decided who you’d like to walk you down the aisle? Let me know when you get a chance.
My mouse hovers over Delete, but that pesky psychologist voice—my voice—echoes around me.
Classic avoidance coping, Chloe. You know that never eliminates the problem—it only postpones it.
I roll my eyes at my own internal advice and drum my fingers on the keyboard. The whole idea of a father walking his daughter down the aisle is so outdated, anyway. The thought of somebody giving me away makes my stomach lurch, like I’m a piece of property being sold to the highest bidder. We might as well bring back the dowry.
My mind flashes to Cooper, the closest thing to a father figure I’ve had since age twelve. I imagine his hand clutched around mine, his body guiding me down the aisle.
But then I think of his words last night. The disapproval in his eyes, his tone.
He doesn’t know you, Chloe. And you don’t know him.
I shut my computer and push it across the couch, my eyes flickering back to the television playing in the background. There’s a bright red bar stretched across the bottom of the screen: BREAKING NEWS. I grab the remote and turn the volume up.
Authorities are still looking for tips in connection to the disappearance of Aubrey Gravino, a fifteen-year-old high school student from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Aubrey was reported missing by her parents three days ago; she was last seen walking alone near a cemetery on her way home from school Wednesday afternoon.
A picture of Aubrey flashes across the screen, and I flinch at the image. When I was a girl, fifteen seemed so old. So mature, grown up. I dreamed about the things I would do when I was fifteen—but in the years that have followed, I’ve been forced to realize how painfully young it is. How young she is, they all were. Aubrey looks vaguely familiar, though I assume it’s because she looks like every other high school girl I see slumped over in the chair in my office: skinny in a way only adolescent metabolism can achieve, eyes smudged with black pencil, hair untouched by color or heat or any of the other destructive things women do to themselves as they age in an effort to look young again. I force myself not to think about how she probably looks now: pale, stiff, cold. Death ages a body, turns the skin gray, the eyes dull. Humans aren’t supposed to die that young. It’s unnatural.
Aubrey disappears from the TV and a new image appears: an aerial view map of Baton Rouge. My eyes are immediately drawn toward where my home and office are located, downtown near the Mississippi. A red dot appears at Cypress Cemetery, Aubrey’s last known location.
Search parties are combing through the cemetery today, although Aubrey’s parents remain hopeful that their daughter can still be found alive.
The map disappears and a video starts playing—a man and a woman, both middle-aged and severely sleep deprived, stand at a podium, the caption identifying them as Aubrey’s parents. The man stands quietly to the side while the woman, the mother, pleads into the camera.
“Aubrey,” she says, “wherever you are, we are looking for you, baby. We are looking for you, and we are going to find you.”
The man sniffles, wipes his eye with his shirtsleeve, smears the snot under his nose on the back of his hand. She pats his arm and continues.
“To whoever has her, or has any information about her whereabouts, we are begging you to come forward. We just want our daughter back.”
The man starts crying now, heaving sobs. The woman presses forward, never peeling her eyes from the lens. That’s a tactic the police teach you, I’ve learned. Look into the camera. Talk to the camera. Talk to him.
“We want our baby back.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Lena Rhodes was the first girl. The original. The one that started it all.
I remember Lena well, and not in the way most people remember dead girls. Not in the way distant classmates make up stories to seem relevant, the way former friends post old pictures to Facebook, rehashing inside jokes and shared memories, omitting the fact that they haven’t actually spoken in years.
Breaux Bridge remembers Lena solely by the picture chosen for the MISSING poster, as if that one moment frozen in time was the only moment she ever had. The only moment that mattered. How a family chooses one picture to encapsulate an entire life, an entire personality, I will never understand. It seems too daunting a task, too important and simultaneously too impossible. In choosing that picture, you are choosing her legacy. You are choosing the solitary moment that the world will remember—that moment, and nothing else.
But I remember Lena. Not superficially—I really remember her. I remember all her moments, the good and the bad. Her force and her flaws. I remember who she really was.
She was loud, vulgar, cussed in a way I had only ever witnessed when my father accidentally hacked the tip of his thumb off with a hatchet in his workshop. The filth that spewed out of her mouth was at odds with her appearance, which made her all the more mesmerizing. She was tall, slim, breasts disproportionately large compared with her otherwise boyish fifteen-year-old figure. She was outgoing, bubbly, her hair a sunflower yellow that she kept pulled back into two French braids. People watched her when she walked and she knew it; attention inflated her the way it had always deflated me, the eyes gazing in her direction making her glow even brighter, walk even taller.
Boys liked her. I liked her. I envied her, really. Every girl in Breaux Bridge envied her, until her face appeared on the television screen that awful Tuesday morning.
One moment sticks out in particular, though. One moment with Lena. A moment that I will never forget, no matter how hard I try.
After all, that was the moment that sent my father to prison.
* * *
I turn the TV off and stare at my reflection in the dead screen. Every one of those press conferences is the same. I’ve seen enough to know.
The mother always takes control. The mother always keeps her emotions in check. The mother always speaks evenly, steadily, while the father grovels in the background, unable to lift his head long enough for the man who took his daughter to look him in the eyes. Society would have us think it’s the other way around—that the man in the family takes control, the woman cries silently—but it’s not. And I know why.
It’s because the fathers think in the past—Breaux Bridge taught me that. The fathers of the six missing girls taught me that. They’re ashamed of themselves; they think what if. They were supposed to be the protectors, the men. They were supposed to keep their daughters safe, and they failed. But the mothers think in the present; they formulate a plan. They can’t afford to think in the past because the past doesn’t matter anymore—it’s a distraction. A waste of time. They can’t afford to think in the future because the future is too terrifying, too painful—if they let their minds wander there, they may never return. They may break.
So instead, they think only of today. And what they can do today to bring their babies back tomorrow.