Still Missing (13 page)

He chewed slowly. Finally he paused, wiped his mouth on his napkin, took a sip of water, and said, "Doctors ask questions." Her wails reached heart-wrenching levels.

"I know, but you're smart--smarter than any doctor--you'll know what to say so they never suspect a thing."

"Exactly. I
am
smarter than a doctor, that's why I know she doesn't need one." He stomped toward her bed, with me right on his heels. His voice rose to compete with her cries as he said, "She just needs to learn some respect."

"Why don't you relax, and I'll quiet her?"

"I don't think so, Annie. Obviously you've been doing something wrong." As he picked her up from the basket, I gripped the fabric of my dress at my thighs to stop my hands from pounding on his back and prayed she'd calm down for him. But when he bounced her, the wails only grew frantic.

"Please just give her to me." I held my shaking hands out. "
Please.
She's scared."

One minute he was staring at me, his face burgundy with rage, and the next his hands were up and she was dropping. I managed to catch her, losing my balance and falling hard on my knees at the same time. Whether from surprise or finally fatigue, the baby gave an exhausted hiccup and was quiet in my arms. He knelt down, putting his face close to mine, so close I felt his breath against my face.

"You've turned my daughter against me. Not good, Annie. Not good at all."

My voice a shaky whisper, I said, "I would
never
do anything like that--she's just confused, because she's not well. She loves you. I know she loves you, I can tell." His head was cocked to the side. "When she hears your voice her eyes move in that direction. She doesn't do that for me when you're holding her." Total bullshit, but he
had
to buy it.

His eyes drilled into mine for an excruciating minute, then he clapped his hands and said, "Come on, our breakfast is getting cold." I placed her in her basket and followed him, my body tensed for her screams. Thankfully, she'd fallen asleep.

After breakfast he stretched his hands over his head and patted his stomach. I had to try again.

"Maybe if you let me look through the books I could find some herbs or plants that grow up here for medicine. That's natural, and you could look at the books too and check what's okay to give her."

He glanced at her bed and said, "She'll be fine."

But she wasn't. Over the next couple of days a fever raged through her. Her silky skin burned against my hands and I didn't have a clue what to do for her. Coughs left her gasping, and I put hot cloths on her chest in an attempt to loosen her congestion, but that just made her cry more, and cold cloths made her scream even louder. Nothing worked. She started waking up every hour at night, and I never went all the way to sleep--I lay half awake in a constant state of fear. Sometimes I heard her breath hiccup in her throat, and my heart froze until I heard her take another.

The Freak decided that if she cried during the day we had to ignore her so she would learn self-control, but he usually only lasted maybe ten minutes before he stormed outside while screaming, "Deal with her!" I was quick to get her when she cried at night, but if he did wake up, he'd throw the pillow--at her, at me, or put it over his head. Sometimes he punched the bed.

So he could go back to sleep, I'd hide in the bathroom with her until she calmed down. One night, hoping the steam would help her breathing, I ran the shower, but I never found out whether it would have worked--he came tearing in, yelling at me to shut it off.

After a few of these nights, I was a zombie. On the fifth night she was sick, it felt like she was waking up every half hour and it was getting harder for me to stay awake in anticipation. I remember my eyelids feeling so heavy I just wanted to rest them for a second, but then I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up with a start. My first thought was how quiet the cabin was, and, glad she was finally resting, I let my eyelids drift closed. Then I realized I didn't feel The Freak next to me and I bolted up.

The cabin was dark. Even though it was summer, it had been cool the night before, so he'd had a small fire going, and from the glow of the embers I made out his shape at the foot of the bed. He was hunched over slightly, so I thought he was picking her up, but when he turned around, I realized he was holding her. Groggy, I reached out.

"I'm sorry, I didn't hear her cry."

He handed her to me, turned on the lamp, and started getting dressed. I didn't understand why. Was it already time to get up? Why hadn't he said anything? The baby lay quiet in my arms, and I pulled the blanket away from her face.

For the first time in days it wasn't twisted in discomfort and her cheeks weren't red or sweaty. But their paleness didn't seem right either, and her rosebud mouth was tinged blue. Even her eyelids were blue. The sounds of his dressing were muffled by my heart whooshing in my ears, and then everything grew quiet in my head.

When I laid my cool hand against her cheek, her cheek was colder. She didn't move. I brought my ear to her mouth, and my chest tightened as my own lungs fought for breath. I heard nothing. Felt nothing. Then I put my ear to her small chest, but the only sound was my own racing heart.

I pinched her tiny nose, blew into her little mouth, pushed on her chest. I was aware of mewling sounds in the room. My heart surged with joy--until I realized they were coming from me. In between CPR attempts, I pressed my ear to her mouth.

"Please, oh, please, just breathe.
God help me, please
."

It was too late. She was too cold.

I sat frozen at the foot of the bed and frantically tried to deny the fact that I was holding my dead daughter in my arms. The Freak stared down at us with an impassive face.

"I told you she needed a doctor. I TOLD YOU!"
I screamed at him while pounding on his legs with one hand and clutching her to me with the other.

He slapped me across the face, then in a flat voice said, "Give me the baby, Annie."

I shook my head.

He gripped my throat with one hand and curled the other under her body. We stared at each other. The hand around my throat began to squeeze.

I let go.

He lifted her out of my arms and brought her to his chest, then stood up and walked toward the door.

I wanted to say something, anything, to make him stop, but I couldn't make my mouth form words. Finally I held her blanket up in the air, thrust it toward his retreating back, and choked out,
"Cold--she's cold."

He stopped, then came back and stood in front of me. He took the blanket but just stared at it in his hand, his expression unreadable. I reached for my baby, eyes pleading. His gaze met mine and for a moment I thought I saw something cross his face, a slight hesitation, but in the next second his eyes darkened and his face grew hard. He brought the blanket up to cover her head.

I began to scream.

He was headed out the door. I leapt off the bed, but it was too late.

My fingernails clawed, desperately, uselessly, at the door. I kicked it and threw myself at it until I couldn't lift my bruised body off the floor. Finally, I lay with my cheek against the door and screamed her secret name until my throat was raw.

He was gone for about two days. I don't know how long I spent pressed against the door, screaming and begging for him to bring her back. I bloodied my fingers, destroyed every one of my nails scrabbling at the door without managing to make even a mark on it. Eventually I made my way back to the bed and cried until there were no tears left inside me.

In a pathetic bid to buy time against the pain, my mind tried to reason out what had happened and make sense of it, but all I could think was that it was my fault she died--I'd fallen asleep. Had she cried? I was so in tune with her every sound, surely I'd have heard her. Or was I just so exhausted I slept right through? It was my fault, all my fault, I should have woken up and checked on her during the night.

When he opened the door, I was sitting up in the bed with my back against the wall. I wouldn't have cared if he'd killed me right then. But when he strolled toward me I realized he was holding something in his arms and my heart lifted.
She was still alive!
He handed the bundle to me. It was her blanket, only her blanket.

I hurled myself at The Freak's chest and hammered on it. With every blow, I repeated,
"You sick fuck, you sick fuck, you sick fuck!"
He gripped the upper part of my arms, lifted me up, and held me away from him. Like a demented alley cat I clawed at the air.

"Where is she?" Spit flew from my mouth. "Tell me right now, you bastard.
What did you do with her?
"

He actually looked confused as he said, "But I brought you her--"

"You brought me a blanket.
A blanket?
You think that's going to replace my daughter?
You idiot!"
Hysterical giggles bubbled through my lips and turned to laughter.

He let go of my arms, my feet hit the floor with a thud, and I staggered forward. Before I was able to regain my balance, his arm cocked back and his fist slammed into my jaw. As the floor rushed toward me, the room turned black.

I woke up alone on the bed, where he must have placed me, my jaw throbbing. My baby's blanket was neatly folded on the pillow next to me.

To this day no one knows my baby's name--not even the cops. I've tried to say it out loud, just to myself, but it stays locked in my throat, in my heart.

When The Freak walked out that door with her body, he took everything left of me with her. She was only four weeks old when she died--or was killed. Four weeks. That's not enough time to have lived. She lived nine times longer in my belly than she did in the world.

I see pictures in magazines of kids the same age she would be now, and I wonder if she'd have looked like them. Would her hair still be dark? What color eyes would she have? Would she have grown up to be a happy or a serious person? I'll never know.

My clearest memory of that night is him sitting at the foot of the bed with her in his arms and I think,
Did he do it
? Then I think even if it wasn't intentional, he killed her by refusing to get any help for her. It's easier to hate him, easier to blame him. Otherwise I go over and over that night trying to remember how she was lying when I last placed her back in her bed. For a while I'll convince myself that she was on her back and it was my fault because she probably had pneumonia and drowned in mucus. Then I think, no, I must have placed her on her stomach, and I wonder if she smothered while I lay sleeping not five feet from her. I've heard that a woman is supposed to know when her child is in trouble. But I didn't feel
anything
. Why didn't I feel it, Doc?

Sorry I missed the last couple of sessions, but I really appreciate how understanding you were when I canceled, and I have to say, it sure surprised the shit out of me when you called last week to see how I was doing--didn't know shrinks ever did that. It was nice.

After our last session I needed to retreat for a while. Looks like I finally hit the depression stage--or actually, it hit me. And not with some gentle tap. Nope, that bitch hauled off and knocked me to the ground, then sat on me for good measure. I've never talked about my feelings around my baby's death before--cops just want the facts, and I refuse to discuss it at all with reporters. Most people know not to ask about her, I guess people still have some sensitivity, but once in a while a dumbass reporter steps over the line.

Sometimes I wonder if people don't ask because it doesn't occur to them that I might have loved her. When I'd just got back home and was staying at Mom's, I overheard her and Aunt Val whispering in the kitchen one afternoon. Aunt Val mentioned something about my baby, then Mom said, "Yes, it's sad she died, but probably for the best in the end."

It was for the best? I wanted to storm in there and tell her how wrong she was, but I didn't even know where to begin. With the pillow clamped against my ears, I cried myself to sleep.

I feel like a hypocrite, letting everyone believe he killed her and I'm the innocent victim--all the while knowing it's my fault she died. And yes, you and I already talked about this on the phone, and I liked that article you e-mailed me about survivor's guilt. It made sense, but I still thought,
How nice for the people this applies to
. It doesn't matter how many books or articles I read, I've already tried and convicted myself for not protecting her.

I tried writing my baby a letter like you suggested, but when I got out my note pad and pen, I just sat at my kitchen table and stared at the blank page. After a few minutes, I looked out the window at my plum tree and watched the hummingbirds hover at their feeder, then I stared back at the page. All those thoughts I had about her being a monster when I was first pregnant ate at me--did she feel them in my womb? I tried to focus on my happy memories of life with her and not how she died, but my mind wouldn't cooperate, it just kept going over and over that night. Finally I got up and made myself a cup of tea. The goddamn note pad and pen are still sitting there. "I'm sorry," just doesn't seem to cover it.

For the first few days after our last session, I didn't do much but cry. It didn't even take anything in particular to set me off. Emma and I could be walking in the woods and the pain would hit me so hard I'd be doubled over with the sheer force of it. On one of our walks I heard what sounded like a baby crying, but when I whipped around on the trail, I saw it was a baby crow up in a fir tree. Next thing I knew I was lying in the middle of the trail, hands clawing into the dirt, sobbing into the earth, with Emma trying to shove her nose into my neck and wash my face.

As if I could outrun my pain, I sprinted for home, and the feel of my feet thudding against the earth felt right and solid. The jingle of Emma's collar as she ran in front of me brought back memories of us jogging together in the past, another thing I'd forgotten I enjoyed. Now I run every day. I run until my body is coated in sweat and my only thoughts are of my next breath.

Luke called a week after our last session--he used to leave messages asking me to give him a call if I felt like it, but I didn't return them. He stopped leaving the messages but he still called at least once every couple of weeks even though I never picked up the phone. It's been about a month since the last call, just before I saw him with that girl, and I didn't think he'd try again.

When the phone rang, I was down in my laundry room and I had to run around to find the cordless. As soon as I saw his number, my already racing heart hit overdrive, and I almost set the receiver back down in the cradle, but my finger was on the talk button and he was saying, "Hello?" before I realized what I'd done. Then I didn't realize I hadn't responded until he said, "Annie?"

"Hey."

"You answered. I didn't know if you would..." He paused and I knew I should say something, something that sounded friendly, something that said,
I'm glad you called.

"I was doing laundry." Jesus, I might as well have told him I was in the bathroom.

"Did I interrupt?"

"No, I mean yeah, but it's okay. It can wait."

"I saw you a few weeks ago and I wanted to call then, but I didn't know if you'd want me to."

"You saw me?"

"You were just leaving the grocery store, I tried to catch up to you but you were moving too fast." My face burned. Shit, he
did
see me leave the store.

I waited for him to say something about the girl but when he didn't, I said, "Really? I didn't notice you. I just stopped to get something in a hurry, but the store didn't have it."

We were both silent for a few beats, and then he said, "So what are you doing these days? I keep expecting to see your signs in someone's yard." I fought the urge to be mean and say the last sign I ever had in someone's lawn was at the open house where I was abducted. I knew he hadn't meant to hurt.

"You might have a long wait."

"I miss driving by them--your four-leaf clovers always made me smile." I'd thought I was so clever when I put four-leaf clovers on my signs, business cards, and car door. My logo was, "Annie O'Sullivan has the luck of the Irish." Luck was my whole damn marketing campaign. Now, that's irony for you.

"Maybe one day--or maybe I'll do something else." Like throw myself off a bridge.

"You'll be successful whatever you do, but if you ever get back into it, you'll be right up there again in no time. You were so good at it."

Not as good as I'd wanted to be, not as good as my mom thought I should have been--the entire time I was in real estate she showed me the ads for every other Realtor in town and asked why I didn't get that listing. And I wasn't as good as Christina, who was one of the main reasons I got into real estate in the first place. After high school I had a series of shitty jobs--waitress, cashier, secretary--but then I got one I liked, working in the back room of a newspaper creating ad layouts. There wasn't any money in it, though, and by the time I was in my later twenties I was tired of being broke. Especially when Christina and Tamara made killer money, which Mom kept pointing out, and hell, I wanted to drive a nice car too.

"I've been seeing a shrink." Man, first the laundry, now my therapy--all I'd wanted to do was stop talking about real estate.

"That's great!" Yeah, now I can pee more during the day, I can actually eat when I'm hungry, and up until I had to talk about my dead daughter, I'd gotten that whole closet-sleeping thing down to a couple of times a week. Wasn't that
great
? But I choked back my bitter words--he was just trying to be nice, and who the hell was I kidding? I did need a shrink.

"You still there?" And then with a sigh he said, "Crap, I'm sorry, Annie. I'm saying all the wrong things, aren't I?"

"No, no, it's not you, it's just, well, you know...stuff. So how are things going at the restaurant?"

"We have a new menu. You should come in sometime? Customers seem to like it."

We talked for a while about the restaurant, but it felt like having one of our old conversations through a fun-house mirror--everything was distorted and neither of us knew which door was the safe one. I opened an unsafe one.

"Luke, I never said--and I know I should have before now--but I'm really sorry about the way I was to you when you first came to the hospital. It's just that--"

"Annie."

"The guy who took me, he'd told me things, and..."

"Annie--"

"I didn't find the truth out until later." When I kept refusing to see Luke, Mom wanted to know why. Then she told me not only did Luke not have a girlfriend, he actually held fund-raisers for searches at his restaurant with Christina right up until a week before I came home. Mom also told me the police questioned him for a few days, but he proved he was at the restaurant when I was abducted. She said that even after they let him go, a lot of people still treated him like he had something to do with it.

I remembered my reaction when The Freak told me Luke had moved on with another girl--while he'd actually been accused of hurting me and then kept trying and trying to find me. The least I could do was agree to see him.

I said, "But then I made such a mess of the visit."

"
Annie!
Sshhhhh, it's okay--you don't have to do this." But I did.

"And then when you saw me at Mom's..." I didn't even know how to begin to explain what happened there. Only out of the hospital for two weeks, I was napping in my old room at my mom's when I heard voices in the kitchen and stumbled out to ask her and Wayne to keep it down.

Mom's back was to me as she stood at the stove with a big pot of something in front of her and a man next to her. The man, whose back was also to me, bent down as she fed him something from a spoon. I began to back out of the room, but the floor squeaked. Luke turned around.

Distantly I heard Mom say, "Good, you're up just in time! Luke was just tasting some of my Spaghetti Surprise, and he wants the recipe for his restaurant. But I told him, if he wants it, he's going to have to name the dish after me." Her husky laugh filled the air already heavy with oregano, basil, tomato sauce, and tension.

Luke's honest face had been one of the things I'd loved about him, and now it paled with shock. He'd seen me in the hospital, and I'm sure he'd seen my photo in the paper, but I'd lost more weight and in Wayne's old tracksuit I probably looked even thinner than I was. My eyes were ringed by dark circles and I hadn't washed or brushed my hair in days. Of course, Luke looked even better than I remembered. His white T-shirt set off the tan on his forearms and the muscles in his chest. His dark hair, longer than when I was abducted and perfectly tousled, shone in the kitchen's bright lights.

"I brought you flowers, Annie." He waved a hand toward a vase on the counter full of roses.
Pink
roses.

"I put them in water for you, Annie Bear." Mom was looking at the roses, eyes narrowed--slightly, not enough for anyone else to see, but I know my mother. They had been measured against her own roses and found wanting.

I said, "Thanks, Luke. They're pretty."

For a few seconds that felt like hours, the only sound in the kitchen was the bubbling of the sauce on the stove, then Wayne swaggered in and thumped Luke on the shoulder.

"Luke! Great to see you, boy. You staying for dinner?"

Mom, Wayne, and I looked at Luke as a flush rose in his face. He looked at me and said, "If Annie--"

"Of course Annie wants you to stay," Wayne said. "Shit. Do the girl good to have some friends over." Before I could say anything one way or another, Wayne had his arm around Luke's shoulders and was leading him out of the kitchen. "Let me get your opinion on something...."

Mom and I were left staring at each other. "You could have warned me he was here, Mom."

"And when was I supposed to do that? You never leave your room." She wobbled slightly and braced a hand against the counter.

Now I saw it--Mom's face wasn't just glowing from the heat of the stove. Her eyelids drooped slightly and one--the right one, as always--drooped lower. My eyes found what they were looking for behind the container of pasta but within reach, a glass of what I knew would be vodka.

I'd noticed that Mom's predilection for "blurriness" seemed to have achieved new heights in my absence. After I'd been home for only a couple of days, I surfaced out of my bedroom when I smelled something burning. I discovered a batch of what I think were peanut butter cookies in the oven and Mom passed out in front of the TV, where they were replaying an interview with me--taken when I was just released and shouldn't have been talking to anyone. I had turned my face to the side so my hair fell like a curtain and shielded me from the camera. I turned the TV off.

Her pink robe--or, as she would say in a really bad French accent, her
peignoir
--gaped, revealing the skin of her neck and the upper swell of her small breasts. I noticed that her skin, always her pride and joy, although there weren't many parts of her body she didn't consider her pride and joy, had begun to turn crepey. In her hand she gripped a vodka bottle--my first sign things had changed; she used to at least mix the stuff. She must have just fallen asleep, because the cigarette between her full lips was still burning. The ash at the end was over an inch long, and while I stood there it quivered, fell, and landed on her exposed chest. Transfixed by the cigarette cherry glowing closer to her lips, I wondered if she'd even wake up when it began to burn her, but I gently removed it. Without touching her, I leaned over and blew the ash from her chest, then threw the cookies out and went back to bed. I figured her drinking would abate some once I'd been home for a while.