Leah returned to her apartment staggering, dazed. Saw with a thrill of alarm she’d left the door ajar. Every light in the apartment appeared to be on. Almost, she thought Marissa must be home now, in the kitchen.
She hurried inside. “Marissa...?”
Her voice was eager, piteous.
The kitchen was empty of course. The apartment was empty.
A new, wild idea: Leah returned outside, to the parking lot, to check her car which was parked a short distance away. She peered inside, though knowing it was locked and empty. Peered into the back seat.
Am I going mad? What is happening to me...
Still, she’d had to look. She had a powerful urge, too, to get into the car and drive along 15th Street to Skatskill Day School, and check out the building. Of course, it would be locked. The parking lot to the rear...
She would drive on Van Buren. She would drive on Summit. She would drive along Skatskill’s small downtown of boutiques, novelty restaurants, high-priced antique and clothing stores. Out to the highway past gas stations, fast-food restaurants, mini-malls.
Expecting to see — what? Her daughter walking in the rain?
Leah returned to the apartment, thinking she’d heard the phone ring but the phone was not ringing. Another time, unable to stop herself she checked the rooms. This time looking more carefully through Marissa’s small closet, pushing aside Marissa’s neatly hung clothes. (Marissa had always been obsessively neat. Leah had not wished to wonder why.) Stared at Marissa’s shoes. Such small shoes! Trying to remember what Marissa had worn that morning... So many hours ago.
Had she plaited Marissa’s hair that morning? She didn’t think she’d had time. Instead she had brushed it, lovingly. Maybe she was a little too vain of her beautiful daughter and now she was being punished... No, that was absurd. You are not punished for loving your child. She had brushed Marissa’s hair until it shone and she had fastened it with barrettes, mother-of-pearl butterflies.
“Aren’t you pretty! Mommy’s little angel.”
“Oh, Mommy. I am not.”
Leah’s heart caught. She could not understand how the child’s father had abandoned them both. She was sick with guilt, it had to be her fault as a woman and a mother.
She’d resisted an impulse to hug Marissa, though. At eleven, the girl was getting too old for spontaneous unexplained hugs from Mommy.
Displays of emotion upset children, Leah had been warned. Of course, Leah hadn’t needed to be warned.
Leah returned to the kitchen for another beer. Before dialing 911. Just a few swallows, she wouldn’t finish the entire can.
She kept nothing stronger than beer in the apartment. That was a rule of her mature life.
No hard liquor. No men overnight. No exposure to her daughter, the emotions Mommy sometimes felt.
She knew: she would be blamed. For she was blameable.
Latchkey child. Working mom.
She’d have had to pay a sitter nearly as much as she made at the clinic as a medical assistant, after taxes. It was unfair, and it was impossible. She could not.
Marissa was not so quick-witted as other children her age but she was not slow! She was in sixth grade, she had not fallen behind. Her tutor said she was “improving.” And her attitude was so hopeful. Your daughter tries so hard, Mrs. Ban try! Such a sweet, patient child.
Unlike her mother, Leah thought. Who wasn’t sweet, and who had given up patience long ago.
“I want to report a child missing...”
She rehearsed the words, struck by their finality. She hoped her voice would not sound slurred.
Where was Marissa? It was impossible to think she wasn’t somehow in the apartment. If Leah looked again...
Marissa knew: to lock the front door behind her, and to bolt the safety latch when she was home alone. (Mommy and Marissa had practiced this maneuver many times.) Marissa knew: not to answer the door if anyone knocked, if Mommy was not home. Not to answer the telephone immediately but to let the answering machine click on, to hear if it was Mommy calling.
Marissa knew: never let strangers approach her. No conversations with strangers. Never climb into vehicles with strangers or even with people she knew unless they were women, people Mommy knew or the mothers of classmates for instance.
Above all Marissa knew: come home directly from school.
Never enter any building, any house, except possibly the house of a classmate, a school friend... Even so, Mommy must be told about this beforehand.
(Would Marissa remember? Could an eleven-year-old be trusted to remember so much?)
Leah had totally forgotten; she’d intended to call Marissa’s teacher. From Miss Fletcher, Leah would learn the names of Marissa’s friends. This, the police would expect her to know. Yet she stood by the phone indecisively, wondering if she dared call the woman; for if she did, Miss Fletcher would know that something was wrong.
The ache between Leah’s eyes had spread, her head was wracked with pain.
Four-year-old Marissa would climb up onto the sofa beside Leah, and stroke her forehead to smooth out the “worry lines.” Wet kisses on Mommy’s forehead. “Kiss to make go away!”
Mommy’s vanity had been somewhat wounded, that her child saw worry lines in her face. But she’d laughed, and invited more kisses. “All right, sweetie. Kiss-to-make-go-away.”
It had become their ritual. A frown, a grimace, a mournful look — either Mommy or Marissa might demand, “Kiss-to-make-go-away.”
Leah was paging through the telephone directory. Fletcher. There were more than a dozen Fletchers. None of the initials seemed quite right. Marissa’s teacher’s first name was — Eve? Eva?
Leah dialed one of the numbers. A recording clicked on, a man’s voice.
Another number, a man answered. Politely telling Leah no: there was no one named “Eve” or “Eva” at that number.
This is hopeless, Leah thought.
She should be calling ERs, medical centers, where a child might have been brought, struck by a vehicle for instance crossing a busy street...
She fumbled for the can of beer. She would drink hurriedly now. Before the police arrived.
Self-medicating a therapist had called it. Back in high school she’d begun. It was her secret from her family, they’d never known. Though her sister Avril had guessed. At first Leah had drunk with her friends, then she hadn’t needed her friends. It wasn’t for the elevated sensation, the buzz, it was to calm her nerves. To make her less anxious. Less disgusted with herself.
I need to be beautiful. More beautiful.
He’d said she was beautiful, many times. The man who was to be Marissa’s father. Leah was beautiful, he adored her.
They were going to live in a seaside town somewhere in northern California, Oregon. It had been their fantasy. In the meantime he’d been a medical student, resentful of the pressure. She had taken the easier route, nursing school. But she’d dropped out when she became pregnant.
Later he would say sure she was beautiful, but he did not love her.
Love wears out. People move on.
Still, there was Marissa. Out of their coupling, Marissa.
Gladly would Leah give up the man, any man, so long as she had her daughter back.
If she had not stopped on the way home from the clinic! If she had come directly home.
She knew this: she would have to tell police where she had been, before returning home. Why she’d been unusually late. She would have to confess that, that she had been late. Her life would be turned inside-out like the pockets of an old pair of pants. All that was private, precious, rudely exposed.