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“Dave-” This was Chet’s real role in their lives, more peacemaker than policeman. But Dave already felt contrite. A year ago-well, 364 days-he had thought losing his wife would be the great tragedy of his life. Hunched over the bar at Monaghan’s, he had experienced the cuckold’s usual emotions-anger, vengeance, self-pity, fear. He’d played with the idea of divorcing Miriam, confident that he was one father who could retain custody of his children, considering the circumstances. Instead he lost his children and kept his wife.
Given a choice-but he hadn’t been given a choice. Who really was, when it came to anything that mattered? But if he had been asked to choose, he would have sacrificed Miriam in a heartbeat if it meant getting Su
He said good night to Chet and took his drink to the back porch, studying the tire swing that hung from the one truly sturdy tree in the yard, the pile of sticks and timber near the fence line. When the girls were little, they’d been fond of building forts in the backyard, lean-tos of limbs and branches, with “carpets” made from moss that they transplanted from other parts of the yard, and stores of onion grass and dandelions for their food supply. The girls had outgrown such things years ago, but their last fort had stood until this past winter, when it collapsed from the weight and moisture of the snow. Dave felt as if he lived in a house of broken sticks, as if he were, in fact, impaled on the sharp ends, the moss long dead, the supply of wild onions depleted.
CHAPTER 17
Alone at last-alone again, naturally, as the song would have it, a song that Su
The sink was directly beneath a large window that overlooked the backyard, the only change that Miriam had sought during the house’s renovation. A woman has to have a window over the sink, she argued when she saw Dave’s original plans, in which the sink was to face a backsplash of Mexican tile. This was her mother’s dictate, and Miriam had inculcated this principle in her own daughters. She remembered Heather, arranging her Creative Playthings dollhouse. A modular affair, this open-air rectangle of blue wood was quite different from the furbelowed Victorian that Heather would have picked out for herself. It even had Danish modern furniture, made from sturdy hardwoods. “The sink has to go in front of the woman,” the rubbery mama doll told the rubbery daddy doll when Heather set it up the first time, and Miriam hadn’t corrected Heather’s mangling of her edict. The dolls had been the only flimsy things in that set, crumbling and drying as rubber inevitably does, the paint on their faces melting away. But the house and the furniture were still in Heather’s closet, waiting for…what? For whom?
Overall the girls’ rooms remained as they had been, although Miriam had finally broken down and washed the linens, making the beds that had been left tumbled and tossed, in Heather’s case, smooth and barely wrinkled in Su
In the immediate aftermath-But no, “aftermath” was the wrong word, for it suggested a tangible event, something definitive. Where was the “math” in their situation, what was the “after”? In the first forty-eight hours, when nothing was known and everything was possible, Miriam felt as if she had been plunged into a cold, rushing stream, and her only instinct was to survive the shock of it all. She ate nothing, she seldom slept, and she stoked her body on caffeine because she needed to be ready, alert. The one thing she assumed, in the early going, was that an answer would be forthcoming. With the ringing of the telephone, a knock on the door, all would be revealed.
How grandiose that expectation turned out to be.
Detective Willoughby -he was not yet Chet to her, just the detective, the police officer-Detective Willoughby thought she was so brave and selfless to admit, before the weekend was over, exactly where she’d been that afternoon. “The natural instinct is to lie,” he told her. “About the smallest things. You’d be amazed how naturally and automatically people lie to police.”
“If it helps find my daughters, then who cares? And if it doesn’t…who cares?”
This was the Sunday after the girls had disappeared. The first twenty-four hours, the first forty-eight hours-everyone seemed to have a rule of thumb about the crucial window of opportunity. And everyone seemed to be wrong. There were no rules, Miriam found out. They didn’t have to wait, for example, to report the girls missing. The police had taken them seriously from the very first call, sending officers to the house and then to the mall, where they walked through the thi
What other promises did she make that Saturday evening? She would find her way back to some sort of spiritual life. Not Dave’s Fivefold Path, but maybe Judaism or, in a pinch, the Unitarian Church. And she wouldn’t hock Dave anymore about the path, wouldn’t tease him about the fact that he had adopted a spiritual practice because he envied the material goods of the people who introduced him to it. Much as she was grateful to the Turners, she didn’t share Dave’s gaga admiration of them. Their generosity to the Bethanys had been rooted in selfishness, contradictory as that might sound.
Other promises. She would be a better mother, making good meals, relying less on Chinese takeout and Marino’s pizza. The girls’ laundry would be done with meticulous care. Perhaps it was time to redecorate Su
All of this was going through Miriam’s head that evening when the sight of the blue denim bag, which looked like a stain in the dim light of the parking lot, brought her back from the future with an abrupt, sickening thump. She gave a little cry and fell to her knees in the parking lot, but the young officer had restrained her.