Instead, she went alone, hopped on the bike she’d retrieved from behind the Dunkin’ Donuts, had chained to a lamppost around the corner from Peter’s. How she crossed town unnoticed that morning, not once but twice, she of the flaxen hair that shone so brightly in the daylight—I don’t get it. The whole town knew she was missing—or at least half the town did—but this is what I think: you only see what you expect to see. Your brain lets the rest go. Because life’s tumult, with its infinite sounds and smells and signs, rushes around you like a river in flood: you can only take in, you can only grasp, so much. And if you’ve already consigned Cassie to the ranks of the disappeared—all those girls and women snatched by loners or neighbors, battered by fathers, dismembered by jilted lovers, raptured from the bike path or the shopping mall or the late-night bus stop to an invisible and unimagined and nonexistent hereafter—well, if she was already gone, you wouldn’t see her, would you? That’s what I think.
The house—the cul-de-sac—stood empty in the late morning: Bev’s hospice work, the work of Death, waited for no man; and Anders, mercifully for Cassie, was up at the hospital. The Aucoins’ bitch barely stirred in the yard as Cassie, a familiar sight, a familiar scent, slipped past. She took a shower; she changed her clothes; she fixed a box of mac and cheese and downed a couple of slices of toast with peanut butter. She left the dirty pot on the stove.
She didn’t turn her phone on, not then or later, maybe because the phone had come to seem like an evil portal, the wormhole through which anyone could reach her, when she didn’t want to be reached. Aside from Peter—and, I’d like to think, from me, but she wasn’t thinking of me—she didn’t want to be in contact with anyone just then.
In the two hours before Bev came home, what was Cassie doing? What was she thinking? I say I can slip inside her skin and yes, it’s true; I say I knew her better than she knew herself, and yes, it’s true; but when I try to go there, in those moments, all I get is a deafening, meaningless blur of sound. She didn’t know for sure that Bev would come home first, even if she knew it was likely. She didn’t know how Bev would react to finding her runaway daughter returned; but first off, she didn’t know how she, Cassie, would react. Don’t plan it, don’t overthink it, just let it happen, you’ve got to find a way to bridge the chasm from here to there, from this unthinkable present to some unthinkable future . . . But no, I don’t believe there was any thought for the future, not a bit. Betrayed by her mother, denied by her father, she didn’t even know what she felt—raw, alone, heartsick, broken, raw—so how could she think? I don’t believe there was any thought at all, just sound, the roar, the deafening white noise.
At around two, Bev came home. I only have her version. She didn’t plan to stay; she’d forgotten some paperwork pertaining to her 4:30 p.m. home visit, something about the meds. Because it came up again later. I remember that she used the word “pertaining,” and how weird that was to me. I picture her bustling, her long skirts swirling and her stethoscope draped around her neck, rising and falling on her always breathless bosom—but maybe there’s just time for a quick snack?—and suddenly, around the corner, there’s Cassie, tiny in her puffy parka (she didn’t have her parka when she ran away, did she? Bev thinks), her wet hair hanging limp, perched on a high stool at the kitchen island, cool as you please.
That’s not my daughter, Bev said she thought—just for a second she thought it was an imposter, from the look in Cassie’s eye. I almost dropped dead, she said, I think I clutched at my heart, it scared the living daylights, her so quiet, like a thief, in the kitchen. Like a thief or a ghost.
Bev, she said, her voice quiet still, and almost menacing, like she was amused: Bev, you’re home.
Yes, I am, and so are you, Bev said back. I think I had tears, but it’s true, I didn’t step around the island and give my girl a hug. I can’t explain it. In the moment, I was scared of her, it was like she was an imposter. A changeling. Like they’d given me back a different girl.
Is it, she said. What did that mean? I mean, really?
Is it my home? she said then, low and cold. Bev was angry. Sure I was. What she’d put us through, Anders and me. I’d hardly slept. For days. All over a curfew, can you imagine. Well you might ask, I said, after all your shenanigans. (How well I, Julia, remember that: the word “shenanigans” pulled from another country, another century—who says shenanigans?) But Cassie wasn’t fazed.
I want to ask you about a few things, Bev, she said, with an emphasis on Bev that was, Bev later said, frankly sinister. And then, as Bev told it, they weren’t questions at all, they were accusations: Bev was a liar, she’d kept Cassie from her father, she’d made up a fake story just so she wouldn’t have to confront the terrible truth: she’d been impregnated by a man who’d never loved Bev and didn’t want to have a child with her, Cassie was a mistake, she wasn’t wanted . . . well, Bev said, you can imagine what it felt like, such wounds inflicted by my own child, the baby girl for whom I’ve sacrificed everything, and then she repeated it for effect: everything.
Did I, Julia, did any of us, know whom to believe or what was true? None of us was there, there were no witnesses. So that when Bev then explained that Cassie, in her blue parka already before Bev came in the door, as if she was on the verge, already, of leaving—when Bev explained that Cassie had thwacked the counter and called her mother a fucking lying bitch and then had taken off out the door at a run into the chill spring afternoon (a weak sun pushing through the gray, the forsythia neon in the yard), slinging her backpack onto her shoulders, slamming the front door behind her and leaving not a trace, that was the expression Bev used, like something out of a TV show or a detective novel, as in “vanished without a trace,” a rubric for all the armies of vanished girls and women, inevitably traceless—well, it was tough, in that time, to know what Bev meant, or to know how the scene had really unfolded. It just didn’t seem quite right.
Peter and I weren’t the only ones to wonder. Even on Thursday there were rumors that the police were suspicious. They spent a long time interviewing not only Bev but also Anders Shute, even though he had an alibi; I mean, he was at work.
My parents, on the face of it, remained reticent and sober. They were trying to be adult, to be calm, trying not to give in to the hysteria that had gripped Royston, already, just a day after Cassie had gone for the second time. They were trying to make me feel there was a precedent for this—one that didn’t end with a corpse on a beach or a rattle of bones among the embers of a fire, or a girl with a needle in her arm in a squat down an alley in Boston. My mother said, “The police are doing their job, is all. They need to know all the people Cassie knows, all the places she might have gone.” And then, “Are you sure, sweetie, she didn’t send you a text? Nothing? To your friend Peter, even?”
“She closed it all down, Mom. She turned it all off, days ago. She doesn’t want to be found.”