All it would take was one act of God. One error in judgment. One irrevocable mistake. And the two beings she loved most in the world could be taken from her for good. She felt this with terrifying certainty. She felt it too often. She felt it in her marrow.
Her close friends Violet and Finn had lived next door until they moved out of state last year, and Violet especially had found this quirk of Caitlin’s as amusing as Caitlin did frightening.
“I don’t remember you being so much of a worrier when we first met,” Violet remarked.
Well, she hadn’t been. And these days, she really worried about only one thing. She just happened to worry about it incessantly, in a thousand different scenarios. Caitlin tried to keep her concerns bottled up, but sometimes the worries piled so high that she couldn’t help voicing one or two.
Of course, now that Violet’s own life had inexplicably fallen out from under her, it was almost embarrassing to think back on the unfounded fears Caitlin had once confided to her friend. Never much for worrying, Violet had always been the one to try to talk Caitlin back down to ground level. In Caitlin’s memories of Violet’s last visit—not two months ago, at the beginning of the summer—Violet seemed … not flippant, exactly, but almost luxuriously self-assured. Unencumbered.
“Now I’ve heard everything. Your new childproof doorknob cover seems dangerous?”
“It’s just that … well, this cover is designed so they can’t get out of their room.”
Violet had laughed. “Right. Which was the point, remember? Because now that they’re in big-boy beds, they occasionally wake up and wander the house without you knowing?”
“Well, right. But what if there’s a fire or something? They’ll be stuck in there!”
“Oh, come on, now.” Violet’s eyes had twinkled. “A fire or something? Is that the best disaster fantasy you can come up with?”
Violet knew her too well. In truth, what Caitlin was envisioning was far more elaborate. It involved a tree falling in the night, crashing through the roof and into the master bedroom, pinning her and George painfully beneath its limbs, and little Leo and Gus waking in the morning and calling and calling for her. But she’d be too weak to answer loud enough for them to hear. How long might they all remain that way? Would the neighbors see the tree and check to make sure everyone was okay, or would they see no cars in the driveway (wouldn’t you know they’d finally cleared out enough space in the garage to actually park in it) and assume no one was home and things were being taken care of? Would they all wither away, she and George eventually bleeding out from their injuries and Leo and Gus slowly starving to death, never knowing that she was just down the hall, loving them, shedding tears for them, willing to give up her life if it would mean someone would come and save them? And all because of a little plastic doorknob cover to keep them from … well, actually from other hazards, such as drowning in the tub or gorging themselves on gummy vitamins or running into the street?
Caitlin had stared blankly at Violet, refusing to give her the satisfaction of sensing that she’d been right, and finally Violet had sighed. “But Caitlin,” she’d said more gently, “back when they were in their cribs, they wouldn’t have been able to escape either.”
That was the same argument George had made. She’d bristled. “But in an emergency maybe they could have climbed out! I mean, if they really needed to.”
“So just to make sure I have this right, your worry is that your children will not be able to defeat the safety device? When you hear it that way, doesn’t it seem a bit silly?”
It hadn’t at the time. But today it did seem silly compared to what Violet was going through. Caitlin immediately felt guilty. How could she be caught up in the slim odds of a tornado or a lightning bolt striking when Violet’s worst fears had come true? No—not her worst fears. That wasn’t right. The thing she had never had a reason to fear, something far worse. Her husband gone. Her child gone—today marked a week. The police, and now the FBI, eventually treating it as a parental abduction, presumably an interstate one (they could only hope Finn and Bear were still in the country), all the while continuing to grill Violet herself as if she were a criminal. Had she and Finn been having marital problems? Was she a good mother? Was Finn a good father? If he did in fact do what she said he had done, why on earth did he do it? How could any wife be as truly blindsided as Violet had been?
That was the question.
Caitlin had left her boys behind for the first time in their lives to drive from Ohio to North Carolina to be with Violet, who was inconsolable. Even now that Caitlin was back home—especially now that she was back home—she couldn’t stop imagining what it must have been like for Violet that day, coming up to the hotel room in the midst of what she felt was an ordinary, enjoyable family vacation and finding nothing but her own belongings. Violet had relayed it to her again and again, until Caitlin could almost picture it as if she’d been there too. The confusion. The panic rising when she called Finn’s cell phone, over and over, and over and over got the same message that it had been disconnected. The helplessness when she ran down to the parking garage and saw that their rental car was missing, when she called the rental agency and learned that the car had just been returned. Violet had done everything that Caitlin herself would have done. She had searched for signs of foul play, looking for anything out of order, checking the trash cans. She had called the front desk and come up empty. No one had spoken with Finn or noticed a man and a child acting strangely. At a loss, she had frantically hailed a taxi to the airport, running aimlessly down the flight checkin lines all the way to the security checkpoint, begging a security guard to have Finn paged, waiting with humiliation at the security desk when the pages went unanswered, when she was denied a request to have outgoing flights’ passenger lists checked for their names. She had repeated the scene at the bus station, then returned to the room with some glimmer of hope that she’d walk in to find everything as it had been that morning, before the nap. Hoping that this was a bad dream, a sick joke.
It was real.