It makes me angry to think of this, makes me feel a burning anger. Remembering his disinterest I can’t believe a court will ever side with him when it comes to my little girl, I can’t believe it’s a realistic possibility. Even if his constituency were to believe him, I think, even if he did successfully paint himself as a victim in the eyes of electors, surely a court would not, I tell myself.
So while Don’s family lawyer made up the papers—I could file from Maine, as it turned out—I stalled, putting off Ned’s voicemails and texts with short texts of my own. I’d tell him on Tuesday, not a minute before I’d said I would, and meanwhile Lena and I spent time with the others at the motel and with Will; we weren’t alone much. We kept busy, went to a movie in the afternoon, to dinner in the motel café.
I envisioned a hard, bad conversation with Ned when the deadline came. Because of that I was constantly nervous, I almost trembled with a brimming anxiety. I picked at my food, I tried to keep busy so that I didn’t have time to succumb to fear, and on Sunday night I could barely sleep.
I had dreams of small, furry dogs being mauled by something they couldn’t see.
Don suggested Lena and I could switch rooms and stay right off the lobby. We could trade with Burke and Gabe, there was no difference between our room and theirs except for location, and that way we’d be near Don—near help, in other words, in the event that Ned started banging on our door Tuesday night. Lena was jubilant, when we told her about the change, at the thought of trying a new room—it might as well have been a trip to Disneyland. She fantasized about trying all the rooms, one at a time. “Then Don’s room, then Kay’s room, then the Lindas’ . . .”
We would move Tuesday morning, before I called Ned and told him I was filing for divorce; by Monday night, on the momentum of Lena’s excitement, we had our small bags neatly packed and waiting just inside the door.
But we didn’t move to Gabe and Burke’s room the next day, because I woke up Tuesday morning and Lena was gone.
IT WOULD BE futile to try to evoke the desperation I felt when I saw she wasn’t there.
My head was pounding—I’d been drugged—sharp pains like nails or tacks in my temples. Still that was nothing to what I felt, nothing, and I picked up the phone as soon as I saw her empty bed, the wrinkled sheets, as soon as I called her name and got silence, and then I sat up and saw her suitcase was gone too, Lucky Duck, her puffer coat. The chain on the door hung in two pieces.
All this took five seconds—less.
And then I was standing and running to the door, I was throwing it open and running up and down on the cement walkway in nothing but underwear and the long T-shirt I slept in, calling her name. Bare feet on ice, on the ridges in the pavement. I tore the pads on my toes, fell in a panic and scraped the skin off my knees, flailing.
I found Don in the lobby and I called Ned, hysterical, but of course he didn’t pick up. Don sat me down on a brown-and-orange couch with coarse upholstery, whose pattern I still remember well, how I picked at the threads as I sobbed . . . I’ll spare myself writing more about this. The point is she was gone, and the worst time in my life started.
I didn’t keep a written record during the days after she was taken, but it’s not those days anymore and it helps me to write now.
So Will came, Don was there, Kay and the Lindas, Burke and Gabe, even the well-dressed couple with two expensive cars. Everyone was around me after that, though I only half-noticed them. They were a blur of people who weren’t my little girl, the blur of irrelevance.
They said things, they called the police and the police were coming, they said, hovering—we’d stay right here and wait for them. A blanket? A heating pad for my feet? I was in shock, said one of them.
I registered goodwill but I hadn’t known what desolation was, before Ned took Lena, I’d never known what it felt like to be destroyed.
THERE CAME A TEXT on my phone while I was still almost catatonic. It was a text from Ned, I understood when Will held the phone up for me, though it didn’t have Ned’s name beside it, only a string of unfamiliar digits. Don said it was probably a prepaid.
The text bubble read Call off the lawyer.
“So he already knew she was filing,” I heard Don murmur to Will.
“Surveillance,” nodded Will.
“And sedation to make them both sleep through it,” said Don. “How? The bottled water in the room? Something I cooked?”
He was on edge: everyone was.
There were security cameras, of course, the motel had a camera aimed at the parking lot, one in the lobby, a couple more. But when Don tried to view the footage his software told him the files had been damaged and couldn’t be retrieved.
Beside me was an egg-salad sandwich on a paper plate. I remember it distinctly: the pores and craters of the beige whole-wheat bread, the fact that it looked nothing like food. I realized, seeing it, that there was no food for me—no food existed, in this world, nothing would ever be eaten.