Authors: Andrew Porter
In the past three months, her kitchen had been transformed into a kind of office. All of the information the private investigator had acquired lay strewn across the counters, organized in files, taped along the walls. It looked like the house of a crazy person, she’d thought that night as she came home from the bar and poured herself a beer. And of course, most of the leads had turned out to be garbage anyway. Inquiries that had turned up nothing. People of interest who had turned out to be totally useless. Former classmates and friends of Chloe who refused to speak. She had been surprised at how quickly it had all gone away, the way the college had swiftly covered it up, the way the newspapers had soon lost interest. Their sympathies had all been with Tyler Beckwith, after all, and now that he was better, now that he was back in school, finishing his senior year, the whereabouts of Raja and Chloe seemed to fall off their radar. Even the Stratham Police Department had relegated her daughter’s case to a low-priority file. After a somewhat-tertiary investigation in Mexico, an investigation that seemed to involve little more than a few phone calls to the Mexican authorities, they had called her up to let her know that they would be in touch as soon as they learned anything, but that, in the meantime, she shouldn’t keep calling.
We’re pretty sure they’ll eventually turn up
, they’d told her.
Sooner or later, they always do
. And then
they’d given her the number of a detective who had been assigned her case, a man who never returned her calls.
Finally, at Elson’s initial insistence, they had hired the private investigator, a man named Deryck Lowe, who had been recommended to them by Albert Dunn. But after a few fruitless meetings with Deryck Lowe, even Elson seemed to have given up. Even last week, when she’d told him what Deryck Lowe had discovered, that he now had reason to believe that Chloe and Raja were now hiding out in southern Mexico, even then Elson had grown silent on the other end of the phone and then finally asked her, “How much are we paying this guy again?”
“Is cost really an issue?” she’d asked.
“It’s not when we’re getting results,” he’d said, “but it’s been, what, three months now?”
“You want to give up?”
“I didn’t say that, but maybe there’s someone else, you know, another person we can talk to.”
She’d hung up on him then and hadn’t spoken to him now in almost a week. It would be wrong to say he didn’t care. She had had enough conversations with him in the past month to know that he was just as obsessed with the case as she was, maybe even more so. But somehow he had found a way to move on, to keep going to work, to continue his liaison with that twenty-something girlfriend of his. It was a thing she’d come to resent, his resilience, his strength. Wasn’t it always his nature to fall apart in situations like this? Why had it fallen on her? She had never considered herself a jealous person and had never honestly believed that things with Elson would ever work out, not even after they’d slept together, but a part of her still felt tricked, misled into believing he’d actually changed.
In the past month alone, she’d met with him over a dozen times, and each time they met he’d seemed even-keeled, relaxed, hesitant to get overly excited or overly depressed by any of the information Deryck Lowe had supplied. It was just that it all seemed so contradictory, he’d told her the last time they met. One minute he was telling them that she was hiding out in southern Mexico, and the next he was saying that she was back in the States. And she had to admit that Elson was right. The information just didn’t add up, none of it did. And none of it was solid. None of it was verifiable. The last time they’d met, she’d almost conceded this point, but a part of her couldn’t. After all, to give up on Deryck Lowe at this point
would be to essentially give in. It would mean acknowledging that on some level all of the work they’d done together these past several months had been useless, and a part of her just couldn’t do that. And besides, who was to say that the next person they hired would do any better? After all, hadn’t all of her own meager efforts been fruitless? Her attempts to talk to Simone at her store, her countless phone calls to Raja’s parents, who refused to talk to her, her e-mails to Chloe’s classmates at school. She’d even tried to contact the dean of student affairs up at Stratham, a quiet man who had told her that now that Chloe was no longer a student there, there wasn’t much he could do. And yet, in the midst of it all, here was Elson, placid and controlled, thinking it all through, deliberating over it, questioning it, discussing it like he was discussing his latest plans for a new building, not like a man who had just recently—just in the past several months—lost his daughter.
It was this that she was thinking about that night she came home from the wine bar, blitzed out of her mind, and it was this that she was thinking about later as she sat out by the pool and received the phone call from Richard. His voice had seemed nervous at first, talking in clipped sentences, starting and stopping, making her tense. Finally he said that he had some information about Chloe, but that if he shared this information with her, she would have to promise him that she wouldn’t tell anybody, not even the private investigator, and especially not Dad. She could tell that he felt nervous even saying this much, guilty about betraying his sister, and she saw no other choice but to promise.
He paused for a long time after that, and then he finally explained to her that he now had proof that Chloe was alive, and though he wasn’t certain, he was also pretty sure that she was safe. Of course, she’d asked him how he knew this, and of course he’d told her couldn’t tell her. He’d simply said that he thought she should know, that she would want to know, and that he owed it to her to tell her. She’d thanked him for telling her, and then she’d closed her eyes and leaned back in the chair, all of her deepest suspicions suddenly confirmed.
Over the next several days she’d call him again and again, hoping to get more information, and each time she called he would stonewall her and beg her to stop asking. And though she’d wanted to tell Deryck Lowe, too, she’d respected her son’s wishes and not mentioned it. Still there was something that Richard had said to her that first night that stuck with her, that haunted her. She’d been asking him why he was so
resistant to telling the authorities, or Deryck Lowe or Elson for that matter, and Richard had simply paused for a long time and considered this. Then finally he said, “I was thinking about that, Mom, and I was thinking that
maybe we should just let her be lost for a while.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean, maybe,” he’d said, his voice growing quiet then, “maybe she’s not ready to be found.”
“What do you mean she’s not ready to be found?”
“I mean just that,” he said. “Maybe she’s just not ready to be found.”
NOW THAT LORNA
was in her second trimester, he knew that sooner or later he’d have to tell Cadence. Sooner or later they’d run into each other at a restaurant, or sooner or later someone they both knew would see him out with Lorna and report back to her. It seemed inevitable, and yet every time he thought about calling her up, every time he tried to imagine that conversation, a part of him would panic, realizing just how painful it would be for both of them and also understanding what this would mean for their relationship. It would essentially be setting in stone the final chapter of their life together. Not that he wouldn’t still see her. Not that he wouldn’t still be a part of the children’s lives. It’s just that it would never be the same. Any hope they may have once harbored about getting back together, about reuniting as a group, any hope of that would now be gone. And though he wasn’t sure whether Cadence had ever held on to this hope in the same way he had, he knew that it would inevitably unsettle her, maybe even devastate her, the knowledge that in a few short months he would be a father again, that he would soon be embarking on a new life with a new family.
Of course, the fact that he hadn’t told Cadence yet, the fact that he was still keeping it a secret from her, this had been the one source of major contention between him and Lorna these past few months. Lorna of course had seen it as a worrisome sign, a sign of things to come, an indication that he still wasn’t over her, and though he’d tried to explain to her that he was only trying to be sensitive to Cadence’s feelings during what was already a very stressful time, he could tell she didn’t buy it.
You’re still in love with her
, she’d said to him the other night.
It’s so obvious
. And though he’d tried to assure her that he wasn’t, he knew that the only way to truly convince her was to tell Cadence about the child, to make that
final leap. And so he’d walked up to Lorna the night before and put his arms around her. He’d said,
I’ll tell her this week, okay? I promise
.
Still, aside from these occasional fights about Cadence, things had been remarkably smooth between the two of them these past few months. On the night that he moved in she had told him that this would be the first step in what would be a long journey toward regaining her trust. He would have to earn it back, she’d told him, but she would also have to let him. And this gesture of letting him move back in, this would be the first step. She had spoken very solemnly as she said this, and he had taken her admonition to mean that he was on a sort of one-strike-and-you’re-out basis, but also that she was taking this whole thing very seriously, that she not only wanted to try very hard to make it work, but that she also saw him as her partner for the future, the man she wanted to be with. And so he’d tried very hard to be supportive, to be attentive, to show her he cared. He had driven her to all of her doctor’s appointments, had taken her to all of her prenatal exams, had bought her books on parenting, had assured her when she worried that all of the things that worried her—the baby’s kicking, the hiccups—were perfectly fine. He had been through this before, after all, had been through it twice, and though he often wanted to mention this to her, often wanted to compare what she was going through with what Cadence had been through, he never did. Instead, he’d tried his best to be supportive, tried his best to assume the role of a first-time parent himself, and in a way he kind of enjoyed it. The giddiness and uncertainty, the simple pleasure of simple things, like an ultrasound picture or a very first kick. He had even enjoyed some of the less glamorous parts, like driving Lorna to the drugstore when she was feeling nauseous or talking her back to sleep after one of her second-trimester nightmares. This was all part of the deal, after all, all part of the game, and though he occasionally found himself worrying about some of the more practical matters ahead—the financial strain, for example—he tried for the most part to ignore these things. It would all work out in the end. He knew that, just as he had known the minute Richard was born that he would find a way to make things work. Once a child arrived, after all, it was never an issue of
if
it could work, but
how
.
He had been thinking about this the night before when they came home from Lorna’s latest ultrasound test, a test that had revealed to
them both that they’d soon be the proud parents of a lovely baby girl. A daughter. The thought of this had unnerved him at first, had made him think immediately of Chloe, of what this would mean to her, and to him. In a way, it almost seemed like a punishment. A kind of cruel cosmic joke. After all, what would this be if not salt in his wounds, a constant reminder of his own recent failings? Another daughter who would grow up to resent him, another daughter who he’d fail to protect. The more he thought about it, the more agitated he became, and perhaps Lorna had sensed this because after a while she had turned off the lights and gone off to bed without saying good night.
Sitting alone in her kitchen, he had fixed himself a drink and stared out at the yard. In the other room, he could hear Lorna turning on the television and getting ready for bed. He could hear someone on the television saying something about Lyndon Johnson and then wildflowers, and then everything became very quiet, and as he sat there at the table, filling his glass with more Tanqueray, he began to wonder if he wasn’t thinking about this whole thing the wrong way. Maybe this wasn’t a punishment but a gift. Maybe he was being given a second chance, a chance to do things right. Whereas he had just lost one daughter, now he was being given another. And how could he not see this as an opportunity to make good on all the mistakes he’d made with Chloe? How could he not see this as a second chance?
But somehow thinking about the baby this way, and thinking about Chloe this way, made him feel funny. It was a messed-up way of thinking, when you got right down to it, a perverse type of logic informed by gin. And besides, what did the one have to do with the other? Human beings were not like buildings. They could not be replaced and remade. And even if they could, could he have ever imagined a child more perfect than Chloe? Even with all of her recent mistakes, she had turned out so much better than he could have possibly hoped for, had made him proud in ways she’d never know. And when he rehearsed the conversation with her that he rehearsed in his mind at least once every day, it was this that he told her. How proud he was, how unequivocally proud he was of everything she’d turned into. But he wondered then, that night, if he’d ever actually have the chance to tell her these things. From everything Cadence had told him, his daughter had disappeared off the face of the earth. She had erased any trace of herself. She had vanished into the
darkest corners of Mexico or was maybe living back in the States under an assumed name. It didn’t matter. All that mattered now was that she was gone, and when he allowed himself to think about this too much, as he did that night, sitting in Lorna’s kitchen, he felt such an acute sense of sadness, of loss, that everything else in his life seemed to fade away. It was almost dizzying when you tried to wrap your mind around it. That this had happened to them. That their daughter had gone to such an extreme measure to extricate herself from their lives. That she
thought so little of them. That she hadn’t even bothered to call.