How distant it seemed to her now, just seven years later, the unemployed mother of a toddler or, more precisely, the pampered wife of a millionaire.
As soon as they arrived at the house, she and David would go to the market and stock up on supplies, while Frankie stayed home with Rachel. Montauk at this point wasn’t the brand-name scene of the Hamptons, but you could feel it creeping in. The local general store now sold specialty butters and artisanal jams. The old hardware store stocked heirloom linens and had been remodeled in distressed white bead board.
From a roadside stand they bought tomatoes, fat and cracked, and went home and sliced them thick and ate them with sea salt and olive oil. There was no such thing as hardship anymore, certainly nothing more than a fleeting inconvenience, and yet when she reflected on it late at night Maggie was amazed by how her sense of life’s difficulties ebbed and adapted to fit her new circumstances. Whereas, before David, she would have to bike home in the rain some days through gridlock traffic and scour her apartment for pennies to do laundry (and even that couldn’t truly be considered hardship in a world where children went to bed hungry), now she found herself exasperated by foolish things—misplacing the keys to her Lexus, or being told by the clerk at D’Agostino that he didn’t have change for a hundred. When she realized this, how soft she was becoming, how privileged, Maggie felt a wave of self-loathing. They should give all their money away, she told David, raise their kids hand-to-mouth with the proper values.
“I want to go back to work,” she’d say.
“Okay.”
“No. I mean it. I can’t just sit around all day. I’m a worker. I’m used to working.”
“You’re taking care of Rachel. You tell me all the time how much work that is.”
She would twist the phone cord between her fingers, keeping her voice down so as not to wake the baby.
“It is. I know. And I just can’t—I’m not going to have my daughter raised by nannies.”
“I know. We both feel that way, which is why it’s so magical that you can—”
“I just—I don’t feel like myself anymore.”
“That’s a normal postpartum—”
“Don’t do that. Don’t make it about my body, like I can’t control myself.”
Silence from the other end. She couldn’t tell if he was being taciturn or writing an email.
“I still don’t understand why you can’t take more time,” she said. “We’re only up here a month.”
“I hear you. It’s frustrating for me too, but we’re in the middle of a big expansion on a corporate level—”
“Never mind,” she said, not wanting to hear the details of his job. It’s not like he enjoyed her war stories—the woman who cut ahead of them at the supermarket, the playground soap operas.
“Okay. I’m just saying—I’m going to try to make it out Thursday night at least twice.”
Now it was she who was silent. Upstairs Rachel was asleep in her crib. Maggie could hear sounds from the other side of the kitchen that made her think Frankie was changing over the laundry. On the edge of things was the sound of the ocean, that tectonic drum, the heartbeat of the earth. At night she slept like the dead because of it, some core genetic pulse once again in phase with the rhythm of the sea.
It was late the following week that Frankie disappeared. She had gone into town to see a movie at the little old art house theater. She was meant to be home by eleven and Maggie didn’t wait up. It was her night with Rachel—rising at her earliest cries and soothing her back to sleep—and her instinct on those nights was always to front-load her sleep, so as soon as the sun went down (sometimes before) her head would be down on the pillow, her tired eyes perpetually reading and rereading the same short pages of her book, without ever making it past the second chapter.
In the morning when she rose with Rachel (who had come to bed with her just after midnight) and Frankie wasn’t up, Maggie thought it was a little strange, but the girl was young and maybe she met someone at the movie or went for a drink after at the old sailor pub on the way home. It wasn’t until eleven when she knocked on Frankie’s door—they’d agreed that Maggie would have the day to herself—and then opened it and found the bed empty and unused, that Maggie began to worry.
She called David at the office.
“What do you mean she’s gone?” he said.
“Just, I don’t know where she is. She didn’t come home and she’s not answering her phone.”
“Did she leave a note?”
“Where would she leave a note? I checked her room and the kitchen. She went to a movie. I called her cell, but she’s not—”
“Okay, let me—I’ll make a few calls, check to see if she came back to the city—remember she was having troubles with that boy—Troy something—and if I don’t turn up anything or she’s still not back, I’ll call the local police.”
“Is that—I don’t want to overreact.”