Bette set down the receiver and walked into her living room where her two cats, Chai and Oolong, lay curled into a single ball of gray fur. Chai’s head perked up when she entered, but when Bette didn’t whip out a can opener or shake the bag of treats, she nestled her face into her sister’s back and returned to her nap.
Without turning on the lights, Bette walked to the easy chair by the window and sat down. It had been their father’s chair. It was old and ugly, with the seams frayed and one side bearing deep scratches from her cats’ claws. She should have gotten rid of it, years earlier, when their dad left the house and abandoned the chair. But she couldn’t let it go. She had memories of the chair. Memories of sitting on her mother’s lap, fighting for space with Crystal as their father climbed a ladder to put the star on the Christmas tree.
Bette rocked back and forth in the chair, listening to the creaks and groans, unable to stop her legs from trembling. She braced her hands on the worn armrests, feeling the wood frame poking through.
Beyond the window, the street lay dark and quiet. Occasionally headlights passed. Sometimes two or three minutes elapsed between cars, and every set of headlights made her tense, her fingernails digging into the chair; but each car drove by, disappearing into the darkness.
Crystal had spoken of dying young for as long as Bette could remember. She’d been saying the words years before it was cool—only the good die young, and all the nonsense teens started to pick up as more and more rock stars perished before they reached twenty-five.
Bette remembered Crystal leaning close to their mother’s casket at the funeral and whispering, “I’ll see you soon, Mama.”
It had upset Bette so much she’d run from the funeral home and taken shelter in the foyer, where her mother’s best friend, Lilith, had stood talking to Bette’s Uncle Jerry.
“But that’s just Crystal,” Bette insisted to the quiet room.
Chai looked up, eyes going hopefully to Bette’s hands before again returning her face to Oolong’s fur.
A car passed, break lights shining, and Bette jumped up, ready to run to the front door. The car pulled into Bette’s driveway and her stomach leapt into her throat.
Mingled joy and anger erupted in her mind as she flung the front door open, but the car had already begun to reverse into the street. It was only a stranger turning around. She watched it drive several houses down before pulling into the Hammonds’ residence. Their boys, who had gone to school with Bette and Crystal, were both grown and away at out-of-state universities.
Bette watched the doors of a car that was not Bette’s swing open. An older woman climbed out, reaching back in for a paper bag before walking to the front door.
Bette stood on the doorstep, watching driveways illuminated by porch lights. A few people were out and about. Cecilia Gomez walked an envelope to her mailbox. When she spotted Bette, she lifted her hand and waved.
Bette waved and slid into the house, unable to close the door behind her. She left it open. The night breeze ruffled the papers on Bette’s kitchen table and sent them in a whoosh to the floor.
The phone rang, and she jumped, running to the kitchen and startling both cats who stood, backs arched, as she snatched up the phone.
“Hello!” she half-yelled.
“Bette?” her father asked slowly. “Is everything okay, honey?”
Bette sighed.
“Dad, have you talked to Crystal?”
“No, not for a few days. She called me on…” He paused, and Bette assumed he was looking at the day planner next to his phone. He was a meticulous record keeper. He wrote down appointments, phone calls, even what he ate for breakfast most days. “Tuesday.”
“Not since Tuesday?” Bette sagged against the wall.
“What is it, Bette? Is something wrong with Crystal?”
Bette imagined their father, the person she could thank for her neuroses, on the other end, tapping his fingernails on the side table next to his reclining chair. His dog Teddy would be snuggled in the chair beside him, head resting on her father’s lap, ears perked when he sensed Homer’s distress.
Bette wanted to lie and appease him. She’d done it a thousand times before. She’d learned to manage her father’s emotions, in the years after their mother died, when a spat between her and Crystal might send him pacing up and down the driveway for more than an hour, hands jittery, anxious eyes watching the house for signs of the inevitable storm.
But that night she couldn’t bring herself to tell the lie. She needed someone to commiserate with her, she needed someone who would understand.
“Dad,” Bette paused and took a deep breath. “Crystal is missing.”
She couldn’t hear the tapping, but she imagined his fingers, drumming seconds before, suddenly pausing in mid-air.
“What do you mean, she’s missing?”
“Well today is—”
“I know what today is,” he said.
Homer never spent the anniversary of his wife’s death with his daughters, not since they were girls, but he marked the date in his own way. The year before he’d been leaving the cemetery just as Crystal and Bette had arrived with flowers.
“She was supposed to meet me here at the house at five,” Bette explained. “She never showed. I’ve been to her apartment, the Hospice House, the bookstore, the coffee shop. Nothing, not a trace.”
On the other end, her father’s chair creaked.
“Get down Teddy, there you go,” her father told his dog. “Have you called her girlfriends? Or how about the boy across the hall? The one who came to Thanksgiving last year. What’s his name again? Grady?”
“Garret. Yes, I’ve talked to everyone. The last person to see her was a guy from the coffee shop, Rick. She got a coffee at nine this morning. That’s all I’ve got.”
“How about the boyfriend? Western? She seemed quite taken with him.”
Bette sighed and tugged on the phone cord. “Weston Meeks. I don’t have his number.”
“Don’t have his number? Well, look him up in the phone book, Bette. He probably knows right where she’s at.”
“I tried to look him up in the phone book. His number wasn’t listed. I called the university where he works and again, no number on record. I know he teaches Poetry 101 on Monday at nine a.m., but that’s days away.”
“Monday morning?” Her father thought out loud. “I’d best drive up. Right? I mean if she’s been in an accident … Yes, okay, I’m on my way.”
Bette didn’t bother arguing with her father. He’d made his mind up the moment she said Crystal was missing. His doggedness made him a good archeologist. He didn’t let things go, and she needed a partner. She couldn’t go it alone on this one.
“Dad, I already went to the police.”
Silence on the line.
“Okay. That was the right thing to do. I’m leaving now.”
6
Now
Bette walked down the driveway and looked in the mailbox, though she’d already retrieved the mail that day. It had been a stupid thought. Maybe Crystal had tucked a note in the mailbox, in such a hurry she hadn’t even bothered to walk it up to the house, but no. It stood empty. A little black cavern of nothing.
She walked back to the house and then returned to the road. On her next lap, she slipped into the side yard where a shed, formerly the sisters’ childhood playhouse, held the push lawn mower, rakes, a snow shovel and the necessities of a life. Bette had arranged the tools by the season. A section for winter items, including the bags of salt and the shovel, another section for the summer with pouches of flower seeds and her mother’s big red watering can.