She's Not There by Joy Fielding
It was barely eight A.M. and the phone was already ringing. Caroline could make out the distinctive three-ring chime that signaled a long-distance call even with the bathroom door closed and the shower running. She chose to ignore it, deciding it was probably a telemarketer or the press. Either alternative was odious, but given a choice between the two, Caroline would have opted for the telemarketer. Telemarketers were only after your money. The press wanted your blood.
Even after all this time.
Fifteen years tomorrow.
She buried her head under the shower’s hot spray, the lather of her shampoo oozing across her closed eyes and down her cheeks. That couldn’t be right. How could fifteen years of seemingly endless days and sleepless nights have passed by so quickly? At the very least, she would have thought public curiosity in her would have waned by now. But if anything, such interest had actually increased with each successive anniversary. Reporters had been calling for weeks, some from as far away as Australia and Japan: What was her life like now? Were there any new leads? Any new men? Another suicide, perhaps? Did she still harbor hopes of seeing her daughter again? Did the police still consider her a suspect in the child’s disappearance?
Except Samantha would no longer be a child. Barely two when she’d vanished without a trace from her crib at an upscale Mexican resort while, according to the press, her parents cavorted with friends at a nearby restaurant, her daughter would be seventeen now.
Assuming she was still alive.
So, in answer to some of their questions: there were no new leads; she would never give up hope; she no longer gave a hoot what the police thought about her; and her life would be a lot better if the vultures of the press would leave her the hell alone.
Her head bowed, water dripping from her nose and chin, Caroline reached up to turn off the shower taps, satisfied that the phone’s intrusive ringing had finally stopped. She understood it was just a temporary respite. Whoever had called would call again. They always did.
Stepping onto the heated white-and-gray marble floor of her bathroom, she wrapped herself in her white terry-cloth bathrobe and swiped at the layer of steam that coated the large mirror above the double sink with the palm of her hand. A forty-six-year-old woman with wet brown hair and tired green eyes stared back at her, a far cry from the “beautiful” and “reserved” young woman “with haunted eyes” that the newspapers had described at the time of Samantha’s disappearance, somehow managing to make the words “beautiful” and “reserved” ugly and accusatory. Around the ten-year mark, “beautiful” became “striking” and “reserved” morphed into “remote.” And last year, a reporter had demoted her further, referring to her as “a still attractive middle-aged woman.” Damning her with faint praise, but damning her nonetheless.
Whatever. She was used to it.
Caroline rubbed her scalp vigorously with a thick white towel, watching her new haircut fall limply around her chin. The hairdresser had promised the bob would result in a more youthful appearance, but he hadn’t reckoned on the stubborn fineness of Caroline’s hair, which refused to do anything other than just lie there. Caroline took a deep breath, deciding that tomorrow’s press clippings would probably describe her as “the once attractive mother of missing child Samantha Shipley.”
Did it even matter what she looked like? Would she be any less guilty—of neglect, of bad parenting, of murder—in the court of public opinion because she was less attractive than she’d been at the time of her daughter’s disappearance? Then, she’d been excoriated in the press for everything from the cut of her cheekbones to the shortness of her skirts, from the shine of her shoulder-length hair to the sheen of her lipstick. Even the sincerity of her tears had been called into question, one tabloid commenting that at one press conference, her mascara had remained “curiously undisturbed.”