Oblivion (35 page)

My shoulders begin to shake with intensifying tears. “He’s the one she was talking about.”

“Who?” Guidry asks.

“It’s him.” Tears blur my vision. When I wipe them away, streaks of mascara line my fingertips. “Palmer buried him under the cobblestones behind Holy Promise. Ask my mother. She’ll tell you. She left Palmer for this guy. She met him at the Vagabond. He played guitar.” I hear it in my head, the memory now as plain as day:
Let my love open the door
. “She had his baby. Palmer killed him and buried him.”

“Behind Holy Promise?” Guidry asks. “What’s his name?”

Ewing places a hand on my shoulder.

“I don’t know his name.” I can’t believe I never asked. “I was just a little girl … two or three. I don’t remember. But he’s been missing for fourteen years. John’s cousin. The watch. Look.”

I hand the photograph to Ewing, who scrutinizes it, as if it contains the answer to all the world’s mysteries.

“Could be the same watch you showed me in session,” he concedes. Then to Guidry: “Do you still have the watch?
The one you found at the harbor that night?”

While Guidry and one of his men confer in a sidebar, I pick up the next piece of evidence. It’s my mother’s diary. I flip open to a random page and read her poetry:

Staring into mirrors

At the image of myself
.

Not missing, not gone, not yet
.

I’m right here
.

I close the book, but my head starts spinning.

“Warren?”

His hand lands on my shoulder again.

“Hannah said Palmer called her Serena.”

“Hmm.”

“At first, I thought it was just because my mother was gone, and in some twisted way, he wanted to replace her. But maybe …”

Detective Guidry’s listening now.

Palmer put my mother away. What better security for his crimes than to declare her insane? So her word couldn’t be trusted? And maybe she’s crazy. Maybe she is. But maybe he made her that way. After one year, Hannah had forgotten who she was. What if …

“Ask my mother if she knows who she is.”

I’m met with furrowed brows.

“Ask her what her name is!” I push away from the table
and stand. “I want my phone. She’s Lorraine Oh, the name on the back of the rosary.”

“Callie,” Dr. Ewing says.

“Where’s my rosary?”

Guidry’s thumbing through files. “It’s here.”

“I want to talk to John.”

“I’ll bring him in,” Guidry says.

But he isn’t moving fast enough.

“Warren, can I borrow your phone? I’m not trying anything funny. I’ll put it on speaker. You’ll hear everything.”

Guidry slides an evidence envelope across the table and hands me a phone.

I snatch it up. Dial. Pray John will answer a number he doesn’t recognize. I know he’ll help me.

“Hello?”

“John, it’s Callie.”

“Callie. Hi. I’m sorry I can’t be th—”

“Listen, Johnny, listen. I need you to look up a missing girl who’d now be thirty-two. Named Lorraine. Born November twentieth. Can you do that?”

“It’ll take a minute, but … I’ve already—”

“Please!”

Guidry hails another officer, whispers into her ear.

I hear John clicking computer keys through the speaker on Guidry’s phone.

Dr. Ewing slides a notebook in front of me.

As heady as I am, strangely, I don’t feel the compulsion to write.

“Oh my God,” John says.

An officer appears at the doorway, looking stunned.

“Oh my God,” John says again. “I never looked this far back before, not in relation to the rosary, but …”

“Her prints match,” the officer at the doorway says.

“Match what?” I ask. My head is spinning faster now.

“Callie.” John’s voice sounds urgent through the speaker.

Guidry’s thumbing through a file.

John again: “Oh my God …”

The detective slides a sheet of paper across the table for my viewing.

I blink through the dizziness.

I can’t believe what I’m seeing.

I
’m looking at a picture of a younger version of myself. Talia Jane Bliss.

I see a page of my notebook in my mind:

Bliss bliss bliss bliss bliss bliss bliss …

Talia Jane Bliss. Missing at age nine from Lorain, Ohio. Usually, when I look at images of my mother, I’m staring into what might as well be mirrors of the future, but this time, I’m looking into the past.

“I think we can place a call to Lorain PD now,” Guidry says.

“Lorain’s a place, not a person.” I spill the rosary from the evidence envelope and flip over the crucifix: Lorraine Oh. I remember what she said about the rosary, that it
would help me remember where I came from, even if she’d forgotten. “Look.”

I read the details of Talia’s abduction: She’d been rehearsing for a choir concert at church after school. She never returned home. Last seen wearing a yellow sundress with imitation pearl buttons, ruffle-cuffed socks, and black patent leather Mary Janes. In her possession: her family’s heirloom rosary. Assumed to be with the choir director, Deacon Holden Rush, sketch provided, also missing.

My gaze travels to the inset at the bottom of the paper.

Eerily, the candid snapshot of the perpetrator resembles the sketch my mother was working on the last time I saw her at the Meadows: the sketch of Palmer, but without the beard.

Oh, Mom. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t listen hard enough, sorry I didn’t look long enough, sorry sorry sorry sorry for not noticing …

Sobs rack my body now. I press my knuckles to my lips, but nothing will silence my tears now. “Mom, mom, mom … Oh, God.”

Dr. Ewing gathers me into his arms, where I dampen his shirt with my tears, but within moments, I hear the door open. I hear my mother’s voice:

“I’m not trying to be difficult—I’m not—but I haven’t said my name in over twenty years.”

“I want my mom,” I manage to say. “God, I want my mom.”

“I don’t even know if I can remember it,” she says. “He made sure I forgot.”

“Mom!”

Within moments, one of Guidry’s men leads my mother into the room, and I catapult into her embrace.

She’s raking through my hair, pressing kisses to the crown of my head.

S
ounds of drums beat through the Vagabond Café, and the scent of the lake carries in on an autumn breeze. Calming, serene. Uncharacteristically warm for late October, but then, it’s about that time of year, a last-minute reminder of summer before the cold snaps throughout the lakes region, and breathes frost into every wave that washes up on the shores.

“What color is the grass?” my mother asks me.

“Green.” I don’t know why she’s asked, but I know she’s trying to explain things to me in terms she can articulate, in terms she thinks I’ll understand.

“It’s green, it’s green, it’s green. But he would say it’s orange. After a while, if you know what’s good for you,
you say the grass is orange, but of course it isn’t, and you know it isn’t, but that’s what he wants to hear, so you say it. And orange becomes green—he made it green—but there’s hell to pay because you’re wrong. The grass is green, and he’ll prove it to you.”

I take a sip of my iced cocoa.

Mom shrugs. “Believing in him was necessary.”

“For survival?”

She flickers a glance up at me, but quickly looks back to the table. She fingers the words I wrote years ago, long before I’d seen reason to forget what they meant. They’re the words of a child …

Travel on, yellow brick road … wind her past throughout her soul.

 … but they suggest that I’d sensed, even when I was very young, that my mother had been trying to remember what she’d forgotten.

Everyone I know is here, at the event Mrs. Hutch organized both to honor Thomas Fogel and my half sister, Cleo, and to celebrate Palmer Prescott’s surviving victims. She rushed home from her charity trip the moment she heard of my ordeal—because Lindsey convinced her we needed her.

I close a fist around my rosary and the baby ring beneath it. “Hey … you understand, right? About the Hutches?”

Her lips press together; she doesn’t answer. It’s sort of a rhetorical question, anyway, as I don’t want to hear how I’ve hurt her by deciding to stay in Lake Nippersink with
the Hutches, when she returns to Lorain with the aunt, two uncles, and grandparents I’ve just met—the people gathered around the largest table on the floor.

“I’ll always be your daughter,” I remind her. “I’ll visit.”

My mother picks up her cards, pulls off the sock, which I now know belonged to Thomas Fogel. It was all she had left of him.

The moment Thomas crosses my mind, my gaze trails to the other side of the café, where John shares a table with his family. He looks at me the moment I look at him. Smiles.

“Listen, Calliope.”

I redirect my gaze to my mother.

She begins to shuffle the deck. She’s going to offer me a reading because she doesn’t know how else to say what she has to say. “Concentrate on a question.”

“Can you tell me how it all happened?”

Her hands freeze for a few moments before she finishes the formation.

“I know he took you.” I also know she’s yet to make sense of everything she’s remembered. Have to be careful. Can’t push. “You were nine.”

And Palmer was about twenty-four.

“Can you tell me about Thomas Fogel?”

She looks to the platform, where musicians and poets perform on open mic nights, as if she expects to see him there. “I killed him.”

Just as I’m about to contradict her, she adds:

“He’s dead because he loved me.”

“Well, that’s considerably different, isn’t it?”

She strikes me with a stare, the type I’ve come to recognize as a borderline between illusion and reality—downward slanting brows, lower lip descending, vacant eyes, as if she’s confused.

I shut up.

“They’re taking me back,” she says.

“I know.”

“Callie?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re home, baby.” She glances back at her family. I see in her pained expression that she’s torn between the life she had before and the life she created with her perpetrator.

“I’ll always be your daughter.”

“I need to …” She slithers out of the booth, already gravitating toward the family she’d all but forgotten until Guidry’s team reminded her with a slew of photographs.

I wonder how many times she’d tried to remember via her art, her music, her words. Already, we know she attempted to scratch the name of her hometown into her rosary, which she’d managed to keep hidden from Palmer for nearly two decades. She was right. She’d planted a clue, even if she couldn’t remember where it was supposed to lead her.

“May I?”

I blink away from the scene across the Vagabond and
meet John’s glance as he’s sliding into the booth next to me.

“Heard you’re staying.”

I tuck a ringlet of hair behind my ear. “Yeah.”

“That’s good.”

If I concentrate, I can feel my roots pushing into the earth here, I taste the soil that has nourished me, I hear my name in the gusts of breeze whipping inland from the lake. Besides, I can’t imagine life without Lindsey—even when she’s hopping mad at me. She’ll always be my sister.

And my mother, whether she’s Serena or Talia, will always be my mother.

John wraps an arm around my shoulders. His lips brush my temple when he says, “Talia—or rather Thalia, with an
h
—is the Greek muse of comedy.”

“Dude.” Lindsey’s sliding into the booth, taking the place my mother recently abandoned. She’s wearing a dark green, form-fitting tank dress, and ridiculous high-heeled pumps. Tied around her waist is a black hoodie, which I know reads
Free to Bleed, Free to Weed
in an emblem on the front pocket. “What is
with
this useless
h
in names? Less is more.”

Elijah’s sliding in after her. He flashes me a grin. “How you holding up?”

“Hanging in there.” I feel a familiar synergy in my head. A phrase traipses through my mind. I pull my notebook and a pen from my backpack and write: