I was impressed she had remembered. We didn’t entertain much, and that evening with Larry and Jenna Rogers was more than a year before. “It’s the one.” I’d set down the spoon and crossed to her, stood behind her, and folded my arms around her midriff. I’d nosed her hair off the column of her neck, pressed my lips to her nape, inhaled. “Coriander.” I kissed the sweet spot of skin beneath her earlobe. “Cumin.” She tilted her head back, and a light moan slipped from her mouth. I shifted her, turned her to me, and slid my tongue down the underside of her jaw, tasting the salt of her sweat. “Ginger,” I said. I had a hard-on before I reached her throat.
She pressed herself against me. “A chef and lover, too. Careful, Will, if the word gets out, you’ll have them lining up at the front door.”
I kissed her deeply, pulled away only to unbutton her blouse. That was the last carefree moment we had.
Her hand stayed mine. “Lucy,” she said. “Is she upstairs?”
“Didn’t she come in with you?”
We pulled apart. A flicker of unease but even then it was no more than that, a flutter, while we tried to sort out what lapse in communication there had been. Sophie buttoned her blouse.
“I thought you were driving her home after French club and hockey,” I said.
Sophie scowled. “No. She wasn’t there. I assumed she must have called you earlier to pick her up. I thought maybe she didn’t feel well. Remember how yesterday she said she thought she was coming down with something?”
“I’ll check upstairs,” I said. “Maybe she slipped in earlier when I was in the studio. Maybe she fell asleep.” I allowed myself to be reassured by the knowledge that occasionally in the past Lucy had done that after school, fallen into a sleep as deep as that of an infant until one of us had had to wake her for dinner. She would be slow to stir, as if rising up from a coma.
“I’ll go with you,” Sophie said.
“No need,” I said. “I’ve got it covered.” But she followed me from the kitchen. As we crossed the hall, I checked the chair by the sideboard where Lucy often flung the blue L.L.Bean tote she used as a book bag. Not there. I forced myself to take the stairs calmly.
“Lucy?”
Her room was just as she’d left it that morning: PJs hanging on the door that led to her bath, the bed neatly made, teddy bear propped on the duvet, curtains pulled open. Everything in it was a reflection of her—our daughter—half girl, half woman. Another bear, this one an oversized panda, on the armchair next to a bed. Atop the wicker basket she used for laundry I saw a pair of balled-up pink underpants and the Boston College sweats she liked to wear while studying. Her iPod was on the desk next to an empty apple juice box. On the shelf hanging above the desk were small stuffed animals from infancy and plastic figures from cartoons and movies, a collection of the toys we had given her over the years. A small basket of cosmetics and another of jewelry were on top of the dresser flanked by two photos, one of Lucy with her best friend, Rain, and the other of the three of us, taken in Camden that summer, the rocky coastline a blue cradle in the background, Sophie and Lucy and me in the foreground, tanned and happy. A family.
The room smelled of her. Nothing was missing. Except Lucy.
I turned to check the bathroom, but Sophie was already ahead of me.
“Lucy?” she called.
“Lucy?” I said.
“Where do you think she is?” Sophie asked, and still there was no fear in her eyes or in her voice, just the slightest apprehension.
“Are you sure she didn’t say she was going to Rain’s after school?”
“No, but that’s probably where she is.”
We returned to the kitchen. I started to turn the heat off under the lamb, as if dinner was going to be long delayed, and stopped myself. Lucy would show up any minute. An hour from now the three of us would be sitting down at the table as we did every night, reviewing our days, sorting out where the mix-up had occurred. Sophie insisted on this. “Families that eat together stay together,” she said. And Lucy teased her about this. “What are we, the Brady Bunch?” But I knew she liked it as much as we did.
I stirred the stew, fought a growing unrest. Until Lucy was born, I had never thought of myself as a person given easily to fear, but taking her infant body into my arms was like holding eight pounds and three ounces of naked vulnerability that was my charge and duty to protect. And I had. I held to all the rules my mother had enforced in my own childhood. No swimming for a half hour after eating. No running with a Popsicle stick. Or scissors. “If you’re not careful, you’ll turn her into a neurotic worrier,” Sophie had said. She was the more carefree one of us, more trusting that all would be well. Behind me she switched off the music and picked up the phone; I listened as she questioned Rain. “She hasn’t seen her since their seventh-period class,” she reported after she hung up.
“Try Christy,” I said, but she was already dialing.
I checked Lucy’s room again, as if we’d somehow missed her the first time, checked the bathroom, even looked in our bedroom. Sophie stayed on the phone. Other friends and classmates. The principal. Coach Davis. “He said she didn’t show up for hockey scrimmage,” Sophie reported, her voice tight. “No excuse or anything. She just didn’t show up.” She didn’t have to say what we both were thinking. That was not like our Lucy. So responsible. So dependable. Even last year on the officially sanctioned “Freshman Skip Day,” she had gone to class.
At six we called the police.
I would go over and over that morning, searching my memory for some clue I had missed and still not believing it possible that she was gone. The missing child. It was a story that was a staple for made-for-TV movies and on the big screen, in novels and on the front page of city papers and the six o’clock news, horribly, unthinkably trite in its familiarity. A mother weeping, pleading for anyone with news of her child to call the police, a father—stoic and strong at her side, jaw tight. If you’ve seen our daughter . . . Kelly, please, if you are hearing this, please come home . . . Amanda, please come home . . . Jessica, we’re not mad. We love you . . . Please, everyone, please help us find our daughter. Please, if you have our daughter, bring her back to us.
It was a standard plot line of fiction. And of heartbreaking fact.
One you never thought could ever happen to you. Not to you.
Seven months.
I knew I should go home. I thought again of the promise I’d made to Sophie. No more heavy drinking. In the far corner where the men were playing darts, I caught the glimmer of steel as a missile flew toward the segmented board. Gilly waited for my order. The noise in the room grew in volume, and the ringing in my ears started again. Go home, I told myself. Make some coffee. Have a glass of wine. And then what? Sit before the television. Alone. Judge me for my weakness if you will, but then think, what would you do in my place? How would you go on if someone had murdered your child? You cannot imagine what it takes to go on. “Bourbon,” I said. “Straight.”
“Bourbon?” Gilly said. “You sure?”
“Positive.”
The barman paused. “Bar brand okay?” he finally asked.
“Fine.”
“You want something with that? Burger? Fries?”
“Just the drink.”
“Okay. Bourbon. Straight up. On its way.”
Seven months.
CHAPTER SIX