Where I Lost Her (24 page)

A
fter he is gone, I stand outside, not wanting to go back into the camp. Not wanting to interrupt the reunion between Effie and Plum. I don't belong to this family. I am nobody's mother. And soon, I will be nobody's wife either.

What I want is a drink. Just a big tumbler full of wine. I want to forget the panic that has dissipated now into a terrible, lingering hum, which trills in my limbs. And nagging at me is the one feeling I can't seem to shake. No matter how hard I try. When I am finally able to put my finger on what I am feeling, I am ashamed. Even horrified.

I'm
jealous
.

I am jealous that Effie got Plum back. It's ridiculous. Insane. Of course, I wanted to find her. For her to be safe. It's not that. But what about me? What about all those things that I have lost, those irretrievable things? It seems that everything
I
lose remains lost. For years now, I have had to resign myself to forfeiture. I am always, always relinquishing things. Whether stupidly squandered or foolishly misplaced, whether abandoned or stolen, so much of what I have loved and wanted has been consigned to oblivion.

I go back into the camp and find the dusty bottle of whiskey I spotted next to the dish soap and bleach in the bottom cabinet below the sink. I grab one of the metallic tumblers from the cupboard, a wave of nostalgia flooding me. I remember Effie and me bringing these same cups filled with Diet Cokes and stolen vodka out to the front yard one summer, getting drunk and falling asleep in the sun, the sunburns so terrible that we couldn't sleep on our backs for a week. I always chose the green one, Effie the blue.

I pour the cup halfway with whiskey then top it with ice and lemonade.

I just want to stop feeling this way. I want to stop thinking about all those lost things. I want to be able to let go. I want to loosen my grip, to stop fighting. It has all been so futile. I have wasted years of my life hanging on to a dream, chasing something so ethereal, impalpable. I've been clinging to ghosts. I think about Plum and the fairy, her realization, the sad resignation. She's ten years old, and she already knows better, has learned the lesson that it has taken me a lifetime to learn.

I go outside to one of the Adirondack chairs and sit facing the water. The lake is still tonight, the moon's reflection aglow on the surface.

As I drink, I feel the ache in my shoulders subsiding, the muscles in my legs and arms and back relaxing. This is better than a chiropractor, I think. Better than yoga. When Devin arrives home, it's almost midnight. Effie has put Plum to bed, and I can hear the soft sounds of their voices, see their silhouettes, their bodies clinging to each other in this terrible relief. And I drink.

Effie comes outside not long after, bringing me a blanket, which normally lies draped over the arm of her couch.

“You okay?” she asks.

I nod. I know that if I try to talk, to explain what is going on inside my head, I'll ruin everything. To begrudge her this, to admit to the wickedness that lives inside of me, would be irresponsible. Cruel. She is my best friend. She is the one person in the world I trust. I may be angry, and I may be drunk, but I am not stupid.

“I'm fine,” I say. “I'm so sorry. About the fairy house. About everything. I'm so glad she's home.”

She nods and sits down in the empty chair next to me.

“You could stay here,” she says. “With us.”

I am confused.

“I mean, instead of going back to New York.”

Tears fill my eyes. Even my home is not my home anymore. I try not to think about what will happen to the brownstone now. I squeeze my eyes shut, and see the antique tub with its perpetually drippy faucet, the ceilings laced with cobwebs I could never reach, the smudgy windows and chipped paint on the crown molding. I think about the first night we spent in the house, back before we even owned a couch. When we sat on pillows on the floor, too afraid to start a fire in the fireplace, we'd lit a bunch of tea lights. We did love each other once.

I think about the extra room, the way I'd stood at the hardware store around the corner looking at the paint-chip display, the spectrum of possibilities. I'd gone back three or four times before settling on the lilac color, the one that I thought might remind her of jacarandas.

I remember the smell of the paint as I rolled it onto those old walls, covering the water stains and cracks in the ancient plaster. The heft and heave of the window I opened to get some fresh air and how the sounds of the city flooded the room. I recall the toddler bed I special ordered and the antique dresser I found at the flea market and rolled on a dolly fifteen blocks home. I remember the framed illustrations from the children's books I found in the used bookstore around the corner, how I'd cut the pages out with a razor blade before placing them behind glass. I think of the paper cranes I folded: a thousand of them, which I hung from the ceiling, each one tethered by an invisible string, creating the illusion of flight. And I remember the blanket Shirley knitted for me arriving in the mail, the soft white cabled blanket she must have worked on for months, folded and tethered with a pale purple ribbon.

“Did I make a mistake?” I ask, and I am not even sure which mistake I am referring to. There have been so, so many.

Effie reaches for my hand.

“No,” she says, shaking her head.

Effie leaves me and goes to bed, and I drink. I drink until the ground feels uneven beneath me. Until my limbs, my entire body, feel separate from myself. I struggle out of the Adirondack chair and make my way across the grass, the blanket wrapped around me. I stumble down the path to the cottage and after fumbling to get the door open, to get my clothes off, I collapse into the bed, kicking the heavy covers off of me. The smell of Effie's laundry detergent suggests she's washed the linens recently, most likely while I was with Jake and his mom. Shirley. My heart aches. I stare up at the tongue-in-groove cedar ceiling and begin to spin. I fight off the urge to vomit, simply because I'm not sure I can get out of the bed again. I fight the waves of nausea, press my hand flat against the wall to anchor myself on this rocky sea. And then, thankfully, finally I pass out.

I dream of Guatemala. I dream the smell of jacaranda, the nauseating sweetness of mangoes, of the violent beauty of dragon fruit. I dream her flesh in my arms. I dream of dogs ripping and tearing each other apart, an arena of hurt. Of the needles, of the couple on the porch, smiling with teeth like dogs. Of Plum, of panic. Lieutenant Andrews standing over me,
I'm going to need you to calm down now, ma'am,
he says. Threatens.
Just calm down.

“T
en calma.
Please,” the lawyer says.

 

I
wake up later—minutes? hours?—consumed with anxiety.

This is when the self-loathing sets in. After the giddy thrill is gone, after the release, after the alcohol has run its course through my body, metabolized, turned into sugar. It is with this jolt that I have awoken nearly every night for years now. Every fear, every regret, every sorrow amplified in this miserable hour of the night. In this terrible abyss. At home, I used to press my hand against Jake's back, count his heartbeats in order to distract myself. To keep from reciting the litany of failures and fears.

But Jake is not here. And I am afraid that if I search for my own heartbeat, that I will find nothing: the ticktock of this clock stopped. It is irrational, I know, but this is the mad hour, the manic hour. A time to endure, to survive. I feel like a warrior in a battle with myself, my brain and heart locked in conflict.

There is no logic to any of this. The thoughts that consume me are fragmented. I think of Plum, the fairy. I worry not about the danger she could have been in, all of the terrible things that could have happened to her, but about the gumdrops. How do I get the gumdrops there so that she will still believe? So that I can salvage that wonder, that magic, that I have somehow stolen by my own selfish concerns. And I wonder if this is why Jake is sleeping with another woman, because I am selfish. Because after a while I stopped caring about him, stopped giving to him, stopped feeling anything but disappointment. Every wish and want and demand I had of him left unanswered.
I'm so tired of failing,
he'd said. I try to imagine Jess, conjure her. I wonder if she will move into the house when I am gone. I try to picture her in that lilac room. Which inevitably transports me to Guatemala. And then there I am again, my brain circling endlessly to this vortex. Like water to a drain. No matter how far I stray, my mind is determined to return to that moment. That horrifying moment. That black hole, rabbit hole, inside which I find myself every single night. But even as I let it consume me, it becomes confused by a new pit, the widening aperture, the depths of which I cannot even fathom.

But when morning comes, as the darkness dissipates, so too does the madness. And I am gifted with a sort of amnesia. A forgetting. Until night falls again.

 

As the sky lightens with the first hints of dawn, I feel like shit. I feel dour: my mouth, my breath sour. I fumble around in the pocket of my jeans crumpled on the floor looking for some gum. A hard, stale stick of Juicy Fruit that floods my mouth with a terrible sweetness. I spit it out into my hand and chuck it into the wastebasket by the door.

I am parched, and my head is pounding. I don't want Plum to see me like this. I don't want anyone to see me like this. What I need to do is to get some fresh air, to run, to maybe even take a dip in the lake. A baptismal dunk in the cold water. I want water inside me, but I also want to be submerged.

And so I pull on my bathing suit, a pair of shorts, a T-shirt, and quietly make my way to the road, careful to steer clear of the camp.

The sky is opaque, the trees filmy with mist. It must have rained last night, though I don't recall hearing it. Everything is wet, and the dirt road is muddy. As I start to run, I have to dodge puddles and potholes. I leap across one particularly large puddle, and my head pounds when I land. If I run hard enough, I wonder if I can sweat the rest of the toxins out of my body.

I run on the left side of the road, so that any oncoming cars will see me, though it is early and the summer people have not yet begun to arrive in earnest. It is the last Saturday of June, though, and by next weekend, the camps around the lake will be full: the Fourth of July celebrations in full swing. But for now, I am completely alone.

While my brain is fuzzy, my head still thick with the hangover, my body seems to be revived. I am hardly even out of breath when I will myself to keep going as I pass Sharp's driveway and push farther, to the place where the road curves away from the water. Where I lost her.
I lost her
.

I consider running past, just continuing on. Past Lisa's driveway (I picture the note on the door, battered, tattered, and flapping in the breeze). I imagine the journey to Hudson's, where I can buy a huge bottle of Gatorade, sit outside at one of the picnic tables, and replace my electrolytes. Rehydrate. But my legs are slowing.

We may have gotten Plum back yesterday. But that doesn't change a single thing about the fact that there
is
a wolf in these woods, and a little girl. I feel myself tumbling headlong into the rabbit hole, into that awful abyss.

I peer into the trees, into the thick green tangle. She is out there somewhere. I believe this. I have to believe this. But still, I feel the inklings, the awful tickle of doubt that scratches away at my certainty. I stop and bend over, breathless. I hold on to my knees and try to keep from passing out. My eyes fill with stars.
No,
I think.
Keep it together, Tess
.

I walk across the road to the edge of the woods, and look again. The rising sun burns through the trees, creating scattered beams of light. It is like a cathedral. Jake and I honeymooned in Italy, and we spent an afternoon at the Duomo di Milano. Of course, it was majestic, ostentatious, overwhelming. But more magical than any of the architectural feats were what the stained glass windows somehow did to simple sunlight. How nature and man seemed to merge in these colored beams. How light was transformed, imbued with grace. I remember thinking that this could be enough, for some, to prove the existence of God. I remember being stunned into silence by it.

And like a penitent, I am drawn to the light again.

There is no path here. I am waist high in ferns and other foliage. I push through the brush, twigs scratching at the bare skin of my legs. I dodge the low-hanging branches, the rain that has gathered on the leaves spilling onto my skin, cooling it. These are the woods between Sharp's house and Lisa's house. If I am correct, she was here. After I saw her, she would have had to pass through this patch of woods to get to Sharp's trailer, where I found the barrette. I think about Alfieri driving past me that night. Maybe he was headed to Sharp's. If she stumbled onto Sharp's property, then maybe he found her? I think of the dog growling at me through the window, baring its teeth.
Sharp
.

I walk with purpose, though I have no idea where I am going, only what I am looking for. Others have searched here,
I
have searched here, but we must have missed something. Of the thousands of clues left behind, what did we not see?

A bird calls out loudly, startling me. I clutch my chest and then laugh. It's just a bird.
Jesus, get a grip
. But then I hear something else. At first it sounds like the low rumble of thunder. But the sky beyond the tops of the trees is bright. There are no storm clouds looming. The sound is incongruous with the sky.

I hear it again, and I stop, wonder if my ears are playing tricks on me. Birds call out, and I proceed. But then I hear it again; it sounds almost like snoring, a sort of gargling and croaking sound. And then I hear movement through the brush.

It's something growling.

My heart starts to pound hard in my chest. My legs opt for flight before my brain has time to react. But I don't run back to the road. I run deeper into the trees. The growling sound intensifying.

I run as fast as I can, stumbling over exposed tree roots and brush, slipping on the damp pine needles that carpet the forest floor. I run blindly, deeper into the woods, stupidly thinking I am somehow going to lose whatever it is that is tracking me if I disappear into the forest. Is this what was going through her mind when she fled from me? That she could lose me if she herself were to become lost?

Tears are streaming down my eyes now, but in the distance I see something, which makes my pace quicken. There's some sort of clearing, a place where the trees open up. And in that clearing is a building.

It's red. Just a sliver of scarlet, like a shimmery red piece of glass in the light.

It's hard to see, between the fog and the trees. But there is a spot of color in the distance, and I know that if I can just get there I will be safe.

I can't hear the growling sound anymore, but I worry it is simply because my ears are occupied with the sound of my blood pulsing in them. I don't turn around. I don't stop. I just run and run until I reach the clearing and see now that it is a house. A dilapidated one-story house, a shotgun house. Red clapboards. Red roof. It is encircled by red quince bushes, red and pink columbine. An aneurysm of red. There is a grassy hill on the other side of the house, and sitting in the driveway is a broken-down red pickup truck.

So much red,
Mary had said. Could this possibly be what she saw?

I turn around, peering into the woods behind me as if to confirm with the trees what it is that I'm seeing, and that's when I see the dog.