“I found your umbrella outside the hotel door,” he said. “How much did you hear?”
Having already thrown up twice before his arrival, my tone was as cold as a January morning. I explained that no one would be taking me underground or anywhere away from my family and friends. I wasn’t going to live my life skulking from one remote location to the next. And how dare he talk about me like some kind of trophy girlfriend? And I certainly wasn’t going to cook for him or anyone in that underground world. This was goodbye.
He practically got down on his knees, begging for forgiveness; he said all he wanted to do was to protect me. That without me, he wouldn’t join whatever this secret organization within the Researchers was.
I leaned in close and said I never needed anyone’s protection in my life. From this moment on, he was no longer part of it. He’d helped me realize whom I needed to be with, and that was my husband.
He chased me down to my car, grabbing my arm and imploring me to listen. I snatched my arm away and slammed the door.
I drove away, and only allowed the tears to come when the sight of him standing in the rain and holding my unopened umbrella had vanished from my rearview mirror. I just can’t, Steven, I remember thinking. I just can’t raise a child in that world.
More than forty years later, I was coming back to him.
I flicked on my blinker in a startled realization that we had reached the exit. I swerved to make it, and saw with relief that Barbara was far enough behind that the sudden jerking of my car didn’t throw her.
I followed the ramp and crossed over the interstate, looking for the glowing Holiday Inn logo.
The green-and-white sign with the cursive capital H beamed in the dark, and I pulled into the circle drive. My heart was beating faster than I would have liked.
Barbara parked and stepped out of her car, looking tired. “He already has a room. 404. He’s waiting inside.”
Glass doors opened at our approach. The smell of steam-cleaned carpet and soap wafted through the lobby and stayed with us in the elevator, up to the fourth floor, and down the hallway. I didn’t have to ask if Barbara had a key.
A quick swipe, a beep, and Barbara motioned me in. “I’ll be down in the lobby,” she said, shutting the door. “I’ll give the two of you some privacy.”
I slowly walked in, past the bathroom and into the bedroom. The man sitting on the edge of the bed stood.
He wore a tan jacket of a style popular in the late 1990s, with a button-over collar and slightly too short sleeves. His jeans were from the same era as well, though his Reeboks were of this decade. His hair had gone completely gray, and he was shorter than I remembered. But he had become more handsome as he aged.
He pushed up his glasses from the side, not in the middle as he had done throughout our time together.
“Hello, Lynn.”
I breathed through the slight purse of my lips. “Hello, Steven.”
“You look good. Great, actually.”
“What do you know about the disappearance of my grandson?” I clutched my purse in both hands.
Steven blinked. “He… has my hair, or the color, at least, which didn’t last long after you left. And your oldest daughter looks just like my mother, from what I’ve seen in the papers and on TV—”
“My husband, Tom, is the father of my children and grandfather to our grandchildren.”
“I never had a chance to be Anne’s father.”
“Is that what this is about? Because if I need to beg for forgiveness, I’ll beg—if it means getting information about what happened to William.” I hated that my voice was cracking. “I want him back.”
“I wish I had him to give to you, Lynn. But I don’t.”
“Then why am I here?”
“Because I failed to keep a promise to your father, and now our grandson is gone because of it.”
“What are you talking about? My father? You didn’t know my father.”
He reached inside his coat and pulled out a yellowed envelope. “I never met your father. But I did know him.”
“You know nothing about my father.”
“You think it was by chance that your father, this landscaper, could pull strings at a university two states away and get you a job in the astronomy department, of all places? I got a call from a colleague in St. Louis who said he knew of a young woman looking for a job at the university, and that her father supported our work. What do you think that meant?”
“This is insane.”
“Read this.” He held out the envelope. “He only had one request of me, and I failed him. Please, Lynn.”
He held up the envelope to show the handwriting on the front. In Daddy’s bold, decisive letters, were Steven’s name and the address of the astronomy building.
I took the envelope and slowly opened it. The pages inside were rigid with age and still smelled faintly of pipe smoke.
Dear Dr. Richards,
I want to thank you for bringing Lynn into your fold. I am not at all surprised to hear that she is exceeding all of your expectations. My girl has always been remarkable.
I also want to thank you for so readily taking my phone call all those months ago. I didn’t know if you would, given that I had to limit my interactions with your peers for many years now.
I simply couldn’t risk what happened to my wife happening to Lynn.
Daddy’s words began to blur, and I blinked, holding the paper closer.
As I told you on the phone, Lynn doesn’t know the truth, and I honestly hoped she never would know. Yet I’ve always been plagued with guilt that she doesn’t know her own true story. When you become a father, all you ever want to do is protect your children. I thought that when she moved to Illinois, she would finally be safe. But I fear that one day she will return to our land, and I beg you, sir, to do everything in your power to keep that from happening. I am not a well man, and if it comes to it, you must explain to her why she must never move back. In order for her to understand why, you have to know what happened.
Lynn was five when they took her. There had been a wicked storm, and she and I were on the porch, watching the fireflies come out, late on an August evening. She wanted so desperately to chase them. I must have dozed off, and the next thing I knew, I awoke to a terrible light in the trees and ladybugs swarming everywhere. I couldn’t find Lynn, and when I went to look in the woods, I found her shoe. My wife, Freda, and I looked through the night. You have to remember how remote our home was then—we barely have neighbors now, almost twenty years later. There was no one to call for help that late.
My wife and I didn’t sleep, and I was preparing to head into town to find help the next morning when this man shows up. Dr. Rex Martin. He said he was a professor who lived in St. Louis and had received several reports from the area of power outages and lights coming from the heavens. I told him that all I cared about was finding my missing daughter. He calmly put his hand on my arm and said that my daughter was gone. But he thought he knew where she would be.
Those words would change my life. I would regain my daughter and lose my Freda.
What happened over the next six months is something that I still cannot fully comprehend. Where Dr. Martin led us, and what we found. Freda kept pushing us until we found Lynn. My brave, brave wife would never would stop. She sacrificed herself in the end so we could escape.
It is a story perhaps for another time. It’s still too painful for me to think about. In the end, I returned home with only my little girl.
I had to concoct two stories: that Lynn had gotten sick with a brain tumor and we took her to have it removed in St. Louis, and that Freda died of a sudden heart attack and was buried in her home state of Missouri. Of course, there was no surgery; nothing was ever removed from Lynn, but it was all I could come up with to explain our absence and Lynn’s lack of memory when we finally found her. And thanks to Dr. Martin, I was even able to produce forged medical records for Lynn and a death certificate for Freda. We were private country people with almost no family, so there weren’t many who even knew us well enough to mourn.