Authors: Alison Gaylin
Still, Carol felt a tinge of worry.
How long have you been here?
she almost asked.
What did you see?
But then she noticed the look on his face, that same bland acceptance he always wore, and it was enough to calm her. “I was cold.” Carol put her back to her husband and moved toward the window . . .
After the Koppelsons’ barbecue, the setting sun had poured through this window, made it glow gold like something out of a dream. If she concentrated, Carol could still feel that otherworldly glow from eleven years ago, she could still hear Nelson’s feet hurrying up the stairs, fleeing for his computer as he always did, as he still did to this day whenever they came home, rushing to stare into a screen.
Incredible
. Had Nelson called Carol that, ever, once? In the before or in the after?
If Carol closed her eyes tight, she could travel back to the before—to the very last moments of it, with the setting, glowing sun and the breeze through the open living room window and herself, moving to close it. She could look through that window and she could see the two little girls crossing the street, walking hand in hand.
Two children alone at sunset, the taller one’s hair shining black like her mother’s . . .
Carol squeezed her eyes shut. “Go away,” she told the memory.
“What?” Nelson said.
She swallowed hard. Her mouth was very dry. “Nothing.”
For days, weeks, months after Iris’s disappearance, Carol had waited, her heart dropping whenever the phone rang.
But no call came, and Carol was able to keep her secret, keep it for months and then years as the search parties thinned and Lydia Neff grew quiet and heavy, the fire dimming in her black eyes, her hair graying until she was a faded copy of herself, until she aroused nothing but pity and even Nelson couldn’t look her in the eye. Two years ago—three years after the police had officially closed the case—Lydia had left town. For where, nobody knew.
You got what you wanted
, said the mean little voice in Carol’s head.
No Iris. No Lydia. You made it happen, and you will never be able to set it right
.
“I’m going up to bed,” Nelson said.
Carol squeezed her eyes tight. “Okay. I think I’ll read for a little while.”
No answer. Nelson was already upstairs. Carol picked up the book she’d been reading for her group—a memoir called
Safekeeping
. She opened it to the page she’d marked and let her eyes run over the words as she listened to the rush of water in the upstairs bathroom, the groan of the pipes, the hum of Nelson’s electric toothbrush . . . As adept as she’d grown at keeping secrets, Carol was still a terrible liar and somehow, going through the motions of what she claimed to be doing made it feel closer to the truth.
Finally, the bathroom noises stopped. Carol heard the light squeak of the floor in the upstairs hallway, the bedroom door brushing the carpet, and finally the creak of the bed as Nelson slipped in. Carol closed the book. She crept up the stairs and paused there, waiting for Nelson’s breathing to slow, waiting for sleep. Only then did she walk into Nelson’s office, turn on the computer he thought she didn’t know how to work; only then did she go online and call up her chat room and sign on. Families of the Missing, New York State, the chat room was called and now, just two months after she’d found it, they felt like Carol’s family, her only family. There were eight of them in the room tonight, and when Carol typed in her greeting, it was as if they’d all been waiting for her.
Welcome
, they typed, and Carol imagined them shouting it in unison.
Welcome, Lydia!
C
arol fell asleep in front of the computer. Only for about ten minutes, but it scared her. What if it had been more than ten minutes? What if the sun had risen and Nelson’s alarm had gone off and he’d woken up in an empty bed and walked across the hall to find his wife at
his
computer, asleep at the keyboard he never knew she could
use,
remnants from last night’s chat scrolling up the screen?
Don’t give up the fight, Lydia. We’re here for you.
Lydia, you’re the strongest person I know.
Lydia, I found my daughter after twelve years. You can find your daughter, too.
How would she ever explain that?
Carol shuddered. She said a quick
Night
to her friends and signed off, standing up before she could drift again.
AlbanyMarie had mentioned the name of a private investigator specializing in missing persons cases—Brenna Spector, who had an office in New York City. Marie’s husband had been missing for five years, presumed dead in a small plane crash, and Brenna Spector had just found him.
In Vegas of all places
, Marie had typed.
If all goes as planned, I’ll see him in a few days!
Without thinking, Carol had typed,
Are you happy about that?
After LIMatt61 had typed,
Wouldn’t you be happy, Lydia, if your husband was found alive?
Carol had sat there for what had to be a full minute, her fingers hovering over the keys. Finally, she’d come up with this:
Brenna Spector. That name sounds familiar.
Carol winced. Had that sounded strange? Cold?
Oh well. Can’t take it back
. She shut down Nelson’s computer and switched off the lights.
Gazing into the bathroom mirror as she applied moisturizer to her face, Carol realized that she did, in fact, know the name Brenna Spector. She wasn’t sure from where, but she did.
I
n the middle of the night it came to Carol, jolting her out of a dream in which she was chasing a tiny, scared puppy through a computer screen, the two of them running wildly between lanes of typed words . . .
Brenna Spector
. It was from one of her book club books, a nonfiction account by a psychiatrist (Lieberman? Leo-pold?) about children with special mental abilities. The case studies had all been from the seventies and eighties and one was a teenage girl named Brenna Spector.
Could it have been the same . . .
Carol heard an electronic trill, and she realized it wasn’t the name recognition that had woken her up at all, but the ringing phone at her bedside. She looked at the clock: 3
A.M.
Carol’s breath caught. Nelson was sound asleep as she picked up the phone, and she was aware of the contrast. Her husband’s deep, easy breathing and her own pounding heart. “Hello?”
She heard nothing, just static. A cell phone maybe. “Hello? Is anyone—”
The reply was barely audible—a push of air with no voice behind it. Words she couldn’t distinguish, one with an “el” sound. It could have been “hello” or “hell” or “cell” . . . It could have been “help.”
Carol’s chest tightened. “Who is this?”
Beneath the static, more whispered words—still all breath, but clearer now. Carol could hear what was being said.
There was a click on the other end of the line, and for several seconds after the phone disconnected, she sat there frozen, the receiver in her hand, unable to hang it up or stop the tingling in her skin or the rush of blood to her ears.
“You’re not my mom,” the caller had said. “You’re not my mom, Carol.”
“A
re you ready, Brenna?” Dr. Lieberman says.
“Yeah.”
Dr. Lieberman presses play and record on the tape recorder that sits on the far left edge of his desk. Lots of tape recorders in this office, Brenna thinks. It’s June 29, 1985. This is her forty-sixth trip to this psychiatrist, and each time she comes here, the tape recorders seem to multiply.
There are three small, battery-operated ones in his top desk drawer, and then there’s the reel-to-reel on the wall behind the desk, next to the black-and-white photo of Bob Dylan in a cowboy hat—an original Elliott Landy, according to Brenna’s mother (whoever Elliott Landy is supposed to be. And then there is the plug-in on the desk with the big silver microphone attached that Dr. Lieberman uses to record all of Brenna’s sessions. Such a weird feeling that recorder gives her. Like Lieberman is Friday from
Dragnet
, and she’s some hippie he’s interrogating. (Brenna likes reruns.)
“Your name,” says Dr. Lieberman.
Brenna shifts in her chair. The air-conditioner is up full blast, but it’s a hot day outside, and she’s wearing her aqua Dolphin shorts. When she moves, the leather sticks to the back of her bare legs and then releases, making an embarrassing snapping sound. She’s sweating. Who wouldn’t be, when he’s about to . . . Well, Mom calls it “important research,” but Brenna prefers “screwing with my brain.”
“Name.”
“Brenna Nicole Spector.”
“Age?”
“Fourteen and seven-eighths.”
Dr. Lieberman gives her a smile. “Well aren’t we specific today?” He’s wearing a bright red tie with dogs and fire hydrants all over it. Dr. Lieberman has a million of these ties, which Brenna’s mother calls “whimsical,” but Brenna calls dorky—each one exponentially dorkier than the next. She wonders if Dr. Lieberman wears these idiotic ties because he actually likes them, or if he thinks they put his young patients at ease. She hopes it’s the former because on her they have the opposite effect and she’s about to tell him exactly this when Dr. Lieberman says, “March 13, 1982,” and Brenna gets knocked back three years and three months, just like that.
She was eleven and a half, and it was her third visit to this office. Instead of Bob Dylan, there was a print on the wall, with a picture of a stained glass window—flowering branches over a blue lake and the words “New American Wing. Metropolitan Museum” underneath.
On March 13, 1982, the office smelled like Brenna’s kitchen did when her mom forgot to clean out the coffeepot. Dr. Lieberman was wearing a brown tie with a giant Superman S at the center and when he smiled, Brenna noticed a poppy seed stuck between his two front teeth. She still wasn’t sure she liked him. It was very hot in the office, and her head hurt a little. Brenna wanted to ask for an aspirin but she didn’t feel she knew him well enough for that, and so she just sat there, hurting, as he pushed play and record on the big tape recorder.
“
Alrighty, Brenna, I’m going to put some blocks out,” Dr. Lieberman said. Then his phone rang . . .
“On March 13, 1982, I took some blocks out of a box and set them in a line on my desk,” Dr. Lieberman says now. “Do you remember the order?”
“How is your dog?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your dog, Shelly? She had pythiosis. Your wife, Gwen, said the doctor prescribed Natamycin?”
Dr. Lieberman stares at her. His mouth is tight, and Brenna can see his throat moving under the collar of his blue and yellow striped shirt. Slowly up, slowly down. He removes one of the tape recorders from his top drawer, as well as a cassette with a piece of masking tape on it marked “MARCH 13, 1982.” He puts it in the recorder and presses play, and Brenna hears his voice—exactly the same as she’d heard it in her head, the same cracks and cadences. “Alrighty, Brenna, I’m going to put some blocks out—” The voice is interrupted by a ringing phone. “Sorry, Brenna. Just one moment. Hello? Gwen? I’m with a patien—Oh, how’s Shelly? What? That’s pythiosis, Gwen, not pathosis . . . Yeah, I’m familiar with—No, no, no. Natamycin is perfectly safe for a dog—”
He clicks the tape recorder off. “Amazing,” he whispers.
Brenna says, “Can I be blunt with you? It’s about your tie.”
B
renna Spector felt something purr against the top of her thigh. It took her several seconds to identify it as her cell phone, to get that this was September 29, 2009, rather than June 29, 1985, that she wasn’t in Dr. Lieberman’s office at 250 West Fifty-seventh Street in New York, but . . . God. She was working.
Brenna was in Las Vegas, at an off-the-strip casino named Nero’s Playground that Caesars Palace needed to sue for both copyright infringement and defamation of character.
Nero’s Playground smelled a little better than the public restrooms at Nassau Coliseum, but that was only because it was less crowded. It was also a hotel, which terrified Brenna a little, as did the name of the lobby bar she was standing in right now: Orgi. With an I. Which somehow made it worse.
Honest to God, this whole place could benefit from a good, long liquid nitrogen bath.
Brenna was leaning against a papier-mâché Corinthian column (painted gold, to match the waitress’s mini togas and gladiator sandals) holding the world’s largest glass of cheap white wine—the Emperor’s Goblet, the shivering waitress had called it—and she was standing face-to-face with her missing person—Larry Shelby aka Rod Clement, John Thomson, Julio Vargas, and no doubt several other identities she’d yet to unearth. Because Larry had supposedly perished in a single-engine plane crash in the Berkshires five years ago, Brenna and her assistant Trent had been referring to him as the Dead Guy, which was ironic considering all the living he seemed to have done since then.
“You checkin’ out on me, babe?” the Dead Guy asked.
“I’m . . . getting a call.”
“At five-thirty in the morning?”
Brenna shrugged. “Eight-thirty my time.” She slipped her vibrating phone out of her pocket and glanced at the screen. Trent. He could wait. “Telemarketer. Once they get hold of your cell number, they’re relentless.”
“They haven’t found me yet.”
Why am I not surprised?
“Lucky.”
“You’ve got a real sweet smile, you know that?”
“Thanks.” Brenna normally didn’t talk to her subjects—it was best if they didn’t see her at all—and here she was, drinking with one of them in Orgi at dawn. But her job was, by nature, unpredictable, and the best thing to do in a situation like this was to act naturally, ignore the prostitute in hot pants at the end of the bar who kept glaring at her like she was competition, and to not, under any circumstances, lapse back into another memory.