I reached over and pushed play on the ancient, yellow CD player. The piano rift that began “I Want a Little Sugar In My Bowl” was barely audible above the cicadas outside. As Nina Simone began to sing about her heartbreaking longing, Roxy returned from the mini refrigerator with a margarita in a pouch, something she routinely stocked up on at the liquor store.
“Now.” Roxy took a long swig. “Tell me everything.”
“There’s nothing to tell. No leads. No ransom notes. No threats. No homegrown terrorist taking credit. All the sex offenders in a twenty-mile radius have been questioned and their homes searched. Now—as Chief Stacks warned us—the attention is turning to us.”
“To you?”
“To the family. You can’t imagine how awful it is. Here are Chris and Anne, in the midst of the worst moment of their lives, having to answer the most awful questions. They asked Anne if Chris is abusing the boys. Not only physically, but sexually. She almost hyperventilated, especially when they said they’d tracked down her old fiancé from college, who claimed that Tom was mentally abusive to all of us.”
“He said that because Tom told him at Thanksgiving dinner that he doubted the punk would ever make more than $12,000 a year.” Roxy raised her index finger before taking a drink. “But regardless, how terrible.”
“And they just circle the boys. They try to talk to Brian, who only sits in his chair and stares. I sat in when they interviewed Greg, and they asked him if he was ever afraid of his mom and dad. He looked at me and Tom in confusion and answered yes. You should have seen the FBI agent stiffen, and when they asked Greg why, he promptly told the story of when the dog pooped in the house, and he used the robot vacuum to try and pick it up, and it spread feces all over the upstairs carpets.”
“He should have been afraid after that. That poor boy.”
“And they know everything. All the times Chris has been sued by unhappy clients, when Brian was suspended from school for a day for bringing a pocketknife, what Anne posted on Facebook about her anger at people who complain about public breast-feeding. About that weirdo from Antioch who kept sending Stella those love letters at the TV station, demanding she friend him on Facebook. Anything—anything at all to indicate problems with our family, or who would hate us.”
“Oh Sis, I’m so sorry. And it probably took them thirty seconds to interview you. You have no enemies and you’ve never made anyone mad, except for me—those pastel garden hats we wore at my wedding were your idea. You may have put off a few of your fellow English students in college when you critiqued their awful short stories, but that’s it. You’re as noncontroversial as anyone could possibly be.”
At that moment, I wanted to take the pouch from her and drain it dry. You’ve been my best friend all my life, and even you don’t know what happened.
Roxy took another long drink. A wasp darted above us. Somewhere nearby, a lawnmower from one of the yard services roared to life.
“No family can survive this.”
“Don’t say that.”
“We won’t. We can’t. Who could? We can’t have Christmas. We can’t have birthdays. How can you celebrate anything when you know he’s out there? How will we ever recover? How can we go on without him?”
“You’ll recover when William comes back. They will find him, Lynn.”
“How? How can they find him? What if they don’t know what they’re doing? What they’re even looking for?”
“Lynn, this is the FBI. That’s what they do.”
“What if they don’t know? I’m so afraid they don’t know.”
“I know you are. We’re all afraid. What do you think they don’t know?”
I rocked instead of answering, and I knew Roxy understood what that meant, just like she knew what it signaled when I ate chocolate at midnight or crunched ice after watching Matthew Crawley on my DVD box set of Downton Abbey. When I rocked, it meant I was trying to work something out.
“Do you remember my father not allowing me to go into the woods?”
“Hmmm?” Roxy leaned back, folding her arms, a nap rapidly approaching. Ever since we were teenagers, it only took a little bit of alcohol to put her right to sleep.
“He absolutely forbid it when I was growing up. Once he told me that when you go into the woods, you don’t come out.”
“Your father was the sweetest and most overprotective man I ever knew. You were his only child. He raised you as a single father after your mom died so young. And let us not forget that he almost lost you too.”
I reached up and let my fingers trace the back of my head, just behind my right ear. I was five when Daddy said the doctors discovered the brain tumor and insisted it be removed, even if the risks were great. My very first memory was waking up and seeing a man smiling at me. I asked who he was, and he barely could manage to say, “Your Daddy.”
Some parents would have crumbled, but Daddy soldiered on and taught me everything about my life before the procedure, repeatedly showing me pictures of my mother to try and prompt me to remember her, which I never did. When I returned to school the next year, my friends (none of whom I remembered either) thought I’d moved away. Nashville was a lot smaller then. Daddy bragged to my teacher that I relearned to read in a week, and I was probably too advanced for kindergarten, but the school made me repeat the grade. Twelve years later, I graduated at the top of my class. In every picture from graduation, Daddy had tears in his eyes.
“He adored you. He didn’t even want you riding in the car with me when I got my license, which, in retrospect, was a real concern. But honestly, do you think your dad could have foreseen this? Because that’s impossible. I know you’re running over every possibility in your mind. Don’t torture yourself.”
“Was that it, then? Him being overprotective?”
“Mmm hmmm.” Roxy spoke in almost a hum.
“Maybe he was just being a helicopter dad. Remember when I came home from Illinois even though it was Tom’s last semester in law school, because I was determined to have my first baby in Tennessee? Daddy never even told me how sick he was. When I was up north, he refused to let me come home and visit, saying that I needed to stay and support Tom in his last year. Even when I told him over the phone I was pregnant, he said I needed to start a new life there. I didn’t even tell him I was coming home, and when I did, he had practically wasted away. He couldn’t speak, write, or even eat on his own. All that time, he was protecting me from the truth about how sick he was.”
I looked over to say more and saw Roxy’s mouth was open enough for a soft snore to escape; her glasses had slipped down her nose. The tequila had kicked in.
“And do you know what else?” A hot wind blew through the trees, and I watched the leaves stir. “Do you know just before he died, he did speak to me? Only once. He said, ‘Don’t you raise that baby here, Lynnie. You go, and you never come back.’ What did he mean by that?”
Roxy’s chest rose and fell.
“I want to tell you.” I want to tell you everything. But once that door is opened, it can never be closed. And you would immediately begin to worry that I’d lost my mind.
“What’s that?” Roxy mumbled. “What… did you say?”
“Nothing.” I took the pouch from her hand, placed it on the floor, and continued to rock. “I didn’t say anything at all.”
SIX
OCTOBER
I could feel the encroachment of night, even though daylight saving time hadn’t officially ended. The only solace to the early dark was that I could go to bed a little earlier each evening, pull up the quilts, and close my eyes. On this night, though, sleep had other plans.