LAINE
I’d never been able to find my way out of a cardboard box without assistance, but Ben had a natural sense of direction, and he wove us from street to alley to underpass with efficiency. Searching on foot wasn’t as fast as being in the car, but we could see more, and we were able to stop and ask shopkeepers if they’d seen my mother. But no one had, and my last conversation with my mother kept going off like a fire alarm in my brain: “I guess this is goodbye.”
I desperately wanted to believe she was just trying to teach me a lesson, but that had never been her way. No, I’d hurt her—not just in leaving—and she’d fled. She may have wandered off before, but she’d never gone further than Bashir’s or Ben’s before returning home.
This was about me telling her I wasn’t going to live with her, as I told Ben while we walked. And that made this feel twice as bad as it would’ve otherwise.
“You don’t really think that, do you?” he said as we crossed back over the Kane Street bridge, which connected the corner of the neighborhood that was cut off by the highway. The sound of cars whooshing past filled my ears, and I had to raise my voice for him to hear me.
“Sure, I do,” I said. “I mean, there’s the issue with your dad, too—she didn’t deny it, and I told her it was up to her to tell my sisters.”
“Think she’s going to?” he asked.
“I doubt it.” I shaded my eyes to try to see if the older woman approaching us was my mother. My heart sank yet again when I saw that it wasn’t.
“I feel terrible about telling you that,” he said as we made our way down Hicks Street. “I don’t know if I should’ve, but there didn’t seem to be any other way to explain why I’d come to see things differently. Laine?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m really sorry I said those things about your mom all those years ago. I was just so mad, I couldn’t see straight.”
“About?”
He glanced away. “I was in love with you.”
My stomach dropped, and I couldn’t speak right away. “You were?”
“For the longest time,” he said, meeting my gaze again. “You must have known.”
“No,” I said.
But then I thought about the summer between our junior and senior years of college. We’d both passed up internship opportunities elsewhere to come home—to be together, though neither of us had come out and said that. During those hot, lazy days, he’d started looking at me longer than he used to—not just once, like that night after high school graduation, but regularly. And when we touched, even if it was just our hands grazing, it felt different.
Because it was.
“I was, and you left me. And, Laine—you knew that was my thing. I never let anyone get close to me because of my mom taking off. But I let you, and then you just . . . ran.”
It hurt so much to hear him say this, because every word was the truth. “I know,” I said. “I’m so sorry, Ben. I was so upset that you’d pointed out that I worried more about other people than myself—and in this case, more than you. I always thought you accepted me for who I was. But when you said that, it made me think you looked at me like some dumb puppet, and that made me kind of hate myself,” I confessed.
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“I didn’t want to develop feelings for you, you know,” he added quietly. “But looking back, it was kind of inevitable—you’d been my favorite person since the day I walked up to you in front of your apartment.”
I blinked back unexpected tears. “Me, too,” I confessed.
“Thank you,” he said. “I think I knew that, which is why I was so crushed when you said you just wanted to be friends. I needed someone to blame, and it was easier to be mad at your mom than you.”
“But she did come between us. And she probably was racist at times, even if I couldn’t see it.”
“I didn’t have to say the things I did, though.”
“I’m not going to lie—selfishly, I do wish you hadn’t. I told myself I didn’t, but I resented her for years. I couldn’t stop looking for evidence that you were right. That’s part of the reason I stayed in Michigan after graduation.”
His face fell. “I’m really sorry.”
“Me, too,” I said.
We’d just slowed down to peer into an alley. “Mom?” I called. “Sally Francis?” The sun was beginning to set, and I was feeling increasingly desperate. Where could she possibly be?
“Let’s keep walking,” said Ben, who’d sensed my mental state and had picked up his pace even more. “You never suspected anything, though?”
“I mean, my dad worked too much, but they never fought,” I said. But as soon as I said this, it came rushing back to me—how she’d try to engage him in conversation, only for him to respond with one grunt after another. How she’d put on a new dress or do her hair differently and waltz around him trying to get him to notice her. And as I thought about it, he’d never been the one to book those vacations to the Berkshires. She had.
I hadn’t been the only one who’d felt neglected. But the pain shooting through me now had a second source. Because I’d just realized that all the things my mother should have said to my father—please pay attention to me. I want to matter as much as your work does. I need you—were many of the things I should’ve said to Josh.
I felt wretched.
“Laine,” said Ben. “Having troubles doesn’t make their marriage a lie. It just makes them . . . human.”
Now there was no blinking it away; my face crumpled, and tears began streaming down. That might be true, but I still wished that they’d been happy and that my mother’s affair had never happened. Maybe then Ben and I wouldn’t have avoided each other all these years, and our relationship would be different. And I never would’ve had to confront my mother, which meant she wouldn’t be missing right now.
Before I knew what was happening, his arms were around me. “Hey,” he said into my hair. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”
“Not if I keep crying,” I sniffled. It was hot—too hot, even late in the day, the city was a sauna—and I was perspiring all over him. I didn’t care. It was so good to have him here with me. And as much as I was trying to push the thought down—I had far bigger fish to fry at that moment—I couldn’t help but think about his confession. He didn’t just have feelings for me.
He’d been in love with me.
But then I immediately thought of my mother. I pulled away from him. “We need to find my mom.”
Ben wiped his forehead with his sleeve and surveyed Court Street. “Where haven’t we been yet? Can you think of anywhere our parents used to go together?”
“Yeah—Carroll Park,” I said after a moment. “But we already checked there. And our stoops, but obviously she’s not there, either.
“What about Prospect Park?” I said as it started coming back to me. “Remember how they’d always sit on that bench, right near the northwest entrance off Third Street, and tell us to go get lost for a while?”
He nodded. “You’ve got a hunch?”
“It might be nothing . . .”
“No, we should follow it,” he said. His arm was already out to hail a cab. Miraculously, one stopped right away, and in spite of this being a complete crapshoot, my hopes were rising. As we sped through Park Slope, I texted Piper and Hadley to let them know what we were doing. Five minutes later, Ben and I were standing at the edge of the park. While Prospect Park wasn’t quite as large as Central Park, it was still too vast for us to cover on foot in a few hours, even a full day.
“We don’t need to search the whole park,” said Ben, reading my thoughts. “She couldn’t have gotten that far.”
“You’re right,” I said.
“Sally!” I called as we started along a path. Please, I thought. Please be here. Please answer us.
“Sally Francis!” said Ben. “Sally, can you hear us?”