So Will and I got into his truck, a beater with worn Mexican blankets over the seats, and at my request he drove slowly up and down the icy streets, up and down, back and forth, prowling. The streets were fairly empty of traffic, only the silence of blinking Christmas lights on house fronts and in yards. There were teams of reindeer pulling sleighs, yellow outlines of bells.
Now and then someone would honk behind us or angrily pass, swerving to make a point. It felt as bleak as it looked, the houses spread out, the odd signal flashing the white walking figure to an empty corner. But I had it in my head that I needed to drive every street, and Will was willing to humor me, likely knowing I was on the edge of hysteria.
There was a worn map in the glove box, there was a half-dried-out pink highlighter in the armrest compartment, and Will pulled over and showed me how to mark the route we’d already driven. Even though it signified nothing, since we weren’t knocking on doors or looking in windows, I colored furiously. As he drove I stared out the window, checking driveways for black SUVs, trying to imagine the potential of each business or house to be harboring her. I tried to intuit Lena’s presence. Would I feel it? Would the other animals’ senses come to my aid now—detection of the Earth’s magnetic field, navigation by smell?
When we stopped at a stop sign or rare traffic light I’d trail the highlighter down the map, along the road we’d driven, which gave me a brief, businesslike feeling. Then I’d raise my face from the map. The next moment, I thought, the next moment it will be . . . I willed myself to see a face at the window, to see her small figure in the puffer coat.
“We need to stop now and go home,” said Will after a while. He said it bluntly but kindly.
I was a child myself now: as soon as you were a victim, as soon as you were deeply hurt, you were a child again.
Helplessness was the one true fountain of youth.
IT WASN’T CLEAR what Ned wanted to accomplish. He’d ordered me to cancel the divorce filing, sure, but that could easily be restarted once Lena was returned. And any contract would have been signed under duress, and not binding.
After his first texts I heard nothing for days. Christmas passed without anyone seeming to celebrate it. Or if they did, I didn’t see. It passed and faded and never was.
I went over and over how my girl must be feeling, alone with someone she barely knew, whether her father loomed as a threatening figure or had made himself charming and likable to reassure her. I worked to craft this kind of picture for myself, Ned as a babysitter, performing an imitation of affection—I sculpted this image painstakingly, smoothing my fingers along the edges, pushing it into a shape I could live with. But it collapsed whenever I wasn’t vigilant and I wondered what he was telling her, what particular architecture of lies she was living in and what part of them she believed.
I couldn’t help recalling Ned’s phone conversation with my mother, his sly undermining of me, whether he was doing the same with Lena. But it was her relation to the whole world I feared for most, the way she might be changed. I got a prescription for tranquilizers the day after she was taken and tried, with Will’s help, to make a routine for myself around the investigators’ progress reports, which they gave to me twice a day.
Not even the voice had affected me like this, made my whole body weak with terror or my knees buckle whenever the knowledge of it struck me. It was my abject state that took me to Don’s meetings. Between the kidnapping and the first meeting I attended there was only one exchange with Don about the hearing of voices—one moment when he bowed his head to me and apologized for having kept me out.
“You’ve been in recovery longer than most of them,” he said. “You’ve done far better with it. For them it’s still new. They didn’t bring you in before because they weren’t ready.”
I said nothing to Will about the meetings, didn’t even intend to go myself—I only started to attend them because I’d been by myself in my room and, without Lena, was hit by the lightning bolt that had been striking me constantly since she was taken. It was a stupefaction that refused to diminish: as soon as I had a loose, idle moment I was scorched down the center by remorse, burnt black by the feeling of guilt. My fault. My fault.
At those moments I’d do anything for distraction, and so it happened that one time I left my room headed for anywhere—looking for the moving figures of people, the sounds they made, the industry of normal lives—and as I passed through the lobby I saw the café door cracked open.
The tables had been pushed back to the walls, chairs set out in a circle. I’d been to an Al-Anon meeting once keeping a friend company, and this had the same encounter-group feeling. There were baked goods and coffee arrayed on one of the tables, a hot-water container and a basket of tea bags. I settled myself on a chair a bit back from the rest—an outlier, satellite chair—and as the fog of panic receded, I took hold of myself and worked not to think of Lena. One minute, I said to myself, one minute first, then two; one minute at a time, one day was an eternity.