No Time for Goodbye Part 11

"You see?" Cynthia said. "It's you, but for some reason, you can't admit it."

I took Cynthia aside and said, "Give me a minute." Then I turned back to the man and said, "My wife's family went missing many years ago. She hasn't seen her brother in years and you, evidently, bear a resemblance. I'll understand if you say no, but if you were to show me some ID, a driver's license, something like that, it would be a tremendous help to me, and it would put my wife's mind at ease. It would settle this once and for all."

He studied my face a moment. "She needs help, you know that," he said.

I said nothing.

Finally, he sighed and shook his head and took his wallet from his back pocket, flipped it open, and withdrew a plastic card. "There," he said, handing it to me.

It was a New York State license for Jeremy Sloan. An address up in Youngstown. It had his picture right on it.

"May I have this for one moment?" I asked. He nodded. I moved over to Cynthia and handed it to her. "Look at this."

She took the license tentatively between her thumb and index finger, examined it through the start of tears. Her eyes went from the picture on the license to the man in person. Quietly, she handed the license back to him.

"I'm very sorry," she said. "I'm, I'm so sorry."

The man took the license back, slid it into his wallet, shook his head again disgustedly, muttered something under his breath although the only word I caught was "loony," and headed off into the parking lot.

"Come on, Cyn," I said. "Let's get Grace."

"Grace?" she said. "You left Grace?"

"She's with someone," I said. "It's okay."

But she was running back into the mall, across the main court, up the escalator. I was right behind her, and we threaded our way back through the maze of busy tables to where we'd had our lunch. There were the three trays. Our unfinished Styrofoam bowls of soup and sandwiches, Grace's McDonald's trash.

Grace was not there.

The woman in the blue coat was not there.

"Where the h.e.l.l..."

"Oh my G.o.d," Cynthia said. "You left her here? You left her here alone? You left her here alone?"

"I'm telling you I left her with this woman, she was sitting right here." What I wanted to tell her was that if she hadn't run off on a wild-goose chase, I wouldn't have been faced with the choice of leaving Grace on her own. "She must be around somewhere," I said.

"Who was she?" Cynthia asked. "What did she look like?"

"I don't know. I mean, she was an older woman. She had on a blue coat. She was just this woman sitting here."

She had left her unfinished salad sitting on her tray, along with a paper cup half filled with Pepsi or c.o.ke. It was like she'd left in a hurry.

"Mall security," I said, trying to keep panic from taking over. "They can watch for a woman, blue coat, with a little girl-"

I was scanning the food court, looking for anyone official.

"Did you see our little girl?" Cynthia asked people at surrounding tables. They looked back, their faces blank, shrugging. "Eight years old? She was sitting right here?"

I felt overwhelmed with helplessness. I looked back toward the McDonald's counter, thinking maybe the woman lured her away with the promise of another ice cream. But surely Grace was too smart for that. She was only eight, but she'd been through the whole street-proofing thing and- Cynthia, standing in the middle of the crowded food court, started to shout our daughter's name. "Grace!" she said. "Grace!"

And then, behind me, a voice.

"Hi, Dad."

I whirled around. "Why's Mom screaming?" Grace asked.

"Where the h.e.l.l were you?" I asked. Cynthia had spotted us and was running over. "What happened to that woman?"

"Her cell rang, and she said she had to go," Grace said matter-of-factly. "And then I had to go to the bathroom. I told you I had to go to the bathroom. Don't everybody freak out."

Cynthia grabbed Grace, held her close enough to smother her. If I'd been having qualms about keeping to myself the information about those secret payments to Tess, I was over them now. This family did not need any more chaos.

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No one spoke the whole way home.

When we got there, the message light on the phone was flashing. It was one of the producers from Deadline Deadline. The three of us stood in the kitchen and listened to her say that someone had gotten in touch with them. Someone who claimed to know what might have happened to Cynthia's parents and brother.

Cynthia phoned back immediately, waited while someone tracked down the producer, who'd slipped out for a coffee. Finally, the producer was on the line. "Who is it?" Cynthia asked, breathless. "Is it my brother?"

She was convinced, after all, that she had just seen him. It would have made sense.

No, the producer said. Not her brother. It was this woman, a clairvoyant or something. But very credible, as far as they could tell.

Cynthia hung up and said, "Some psychic says she knows what happened."

"Cool!" said Grace.

Yeah, terrific, I thought. A psychic. Absolutely f.u.c.king terrific.

11.

"I think we should at least hear what she has to say," Cynthia said. hear what she has to say," Cynthia said.

It was that evening, and I was sitting at the kitchen table, marking papers, having a hard time concentrating. Cynthia had been able to think of nothing else since the producer's call about the psychic. I, on the other hand, had been somewhat dismissive.

I didn't have much to say through supper, but once Grace had gone up to her room do some homework of her own, and Cynthia was standing at the sink, her back to me, loading the dishwasher, she said, "We need to talk about this."

"I don't see much to talk about," I said. "So a psychic phoned the show. That's only a step up from the guy who thought your family disappeared into some rip in the fabric of time. Maybe this woman, maybe she'll have a vision of them all riding atop a brontosaurus or something, or pedaling a Flintstone car."

Cynthia took her hands out of the water, dried them, and turned around. "That's hateful," she said.

I looked up from a dreadfully written essay on Whitman. "What?"

"What you said. It was hateful. You're being hateful."

"I am not."

"You're still p.i.s.sed with me. About today. About what happened at the mall."

I didn't say anything. There was some truth to what she said. We hadn't said a word on the way home after scooping up Grace in the food court. There were things I wanted to say but felt I could not. That I had had enough. That it was time for Cynthia to move on. That she had to accept the fact that her parents were gone, her brother was gone, that nothing had changed because this was the twenty-fifth anniversary of their disappearance, or because some second-rate news show had shown some interest. That while she might have lost a family long ago, and that it was undeniably tragic, she had another family now, and that if she wasn't willing to live in the moment for us, instead of in the past for a family that was in all likelihood gone, then- But I said nothing. I couldn't bring myself to say those things. But I found myself unable to offer comfort once we got home. I went into the living room, turned on the TV, flipped through the channels, never settling on anything for more than three minutes. Cynthia went into a tidying frenzy. Vacuuming, cleaning the bathroom, rearranging soup cans in the pantry. Anything to keep her too busy to have to talk to me. There wasn't much good that came from a cold war like this, but at least the house ended up looking ready for a spread in House & Garden. House & Garden. This call from the psychic hotline, by way of This call from the psychic hotline, by way of Deadline, Deadline, it just p.i.s.sed me off even more. it just p.i.s.sed me off even more.

But I said, "I'm not p.i.s.sed," riffling my finger through the stack of papers I still had to mark.

"I know you," she said. "And I know when you're angry. I'm sorry about what happened. I'm sorry for you, I'm sorry for Grace. I'm sorry for that man, for what I put him through. I embarra.s.sed myself, I embarra.s.sed all of us. What more do you want from me? What more can I say? Aren't I already going to see Dr. Kinzler? What do you want me to do? Go every week instead of every other week? You want to put me on some sort of drug, something that will numb the pain, make me forget everything that's ever happened to me? Would that make you happy?"

I threw down my red marking pen. "Jesus Christ," I said.

"You'd be happier if I just left, wouldn't you?" Cynthia asked.

"That's ridiculous."

"You can't take any more of this, and you know something? Neither can I. I've had enough of it, too. You think I like the idea of meeting with a psychic? You think I don't know how desperate it looks? How pitiful it makes me look, to go down there and have to listen to what she has to say? But what would you do? What if it was Grace?"

I looked at her. "Don't even say that."

"What if we lost her? What if she went missing someday? Suppose she'd been gone for months, for years? And there wasn't a clue as to whatever happened to her."

"I don't want you talking like this," I said.

"And then suppose you got a call, from some person who said she had a vision or something, that she'd seen Grace in a dream, that she knew where she was. Are you telling me you'd refuse to listen?"

I ground my teeth together and looked away.

"Is that what you would do? Because you didn't want to look like a fool? Because you were afraid of looking embarra.s.sed, of looking desperate? But what if, what if there was just one chance in a million that maybe this person knew something? What if she wasn't even psychic, but just thought she was, but had actually seen something, some clue that she interpreted as a vision or something? And what if finding out what that was actually led to finding her?"

I put my head in my hands, my eyes landing on, "Mr. Whitman's most famous writing was 'Leaves of Gra.s.s,' which some people think is probably about marijuana, but it was not, although it's hard to believe that a guy who wrote something called 'I Sing the Body Electric' wasn't stoned at least some of the time."

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The next day, Lauren Wells wasn't wearing her traditional tracksuit. She was in a snug black T-shirt and a pair of designer jeans. Cynthia would have known, at twenty paces, what kind they were. We were watching American Idol American Idol one night, on our tiny, non-high-definition screen, when she pointed to a contestant screeching out her own version of Bette Midler's "Wind Beneath My Wings," and said, "She's wearing Sevens." one night, on our tiny, non-high-definition screen, when she pointed to a contestant screeching out her own version of Bette Midler's "Wind Beneath My Wings," and said, "She's wearing Sevens."

I didn't know whether Lauren was wearing Sevens, but she looked nice, and the male students were craning their necks around, getting a peek at her from behind as she made her way up the hall.

I was coming the other way and she stopped me. "How you doing today?" she asked. "Better?"

I couldn't recall admitting to feeling anything less than perfect the last time we'd spoken, but said, "Yeah, I'm good. You?"

"Okay," she said. "Although I almost took yesterday off. This girl, who was in my senior cla.s.s in high school, she was killed in a car accident up in Hartford a couple of days ago, and this other friend I keep in touch with on MSN, she told me, and I just felt so bad about it."

"She was a close friend, was she?" I asked.

Lauren offered up half a shrug. "Well, she was in my year. It took me a couple of minutes to place her when my friend mentioned the name. We didn't actually hang out or anything. She sat behind me in a couple of cla.s.ses. But it's still a shock, you know, when something like that happens to someone you know. It makes you think, makes you rea.s.sess, which is why I almost didn't come in yesterday."

"To rea.s.sess," I said, not sure Lauren's predicament warranted an outpouring of sympathy. "These things happen." I feel as bad as the next guy when someone dies in a traffic accident, but Lauren was using up my time to discuss a tragedy involving someone that not only did I not know, but it was becoming evident she didn't know all that well herself.

Kids shuffled past, dodged and weaved around us as we stood in the middle of the hall.

"So," Lauren said, "what's she really like?"

"Who?"

"Paula Malloy," Lauren said. "From Deadline Deadline. Is she as nice as she seems on TV? Because she seems very nice."

"She has wonderful teeth," I said. I reached up, touched her arm, motioned her toward the wall of lockers so that we weren't blocking traffic.

"Listen, um, you and Mr. Carruthers, you're pretty tight, right?" she asked.

"Rolly and I? Yeah, we've known each other a long time."

"This is kind of awkward to ask, but in the staff room the other day, he was there, and, well, I think he might have, what I'm saying is, did he mention seeing me put something in your mailbox and taking it out later?"

"Uh, well, he-"

"Because, okay, I did leave something there, but then I thought about it, and thought maybe it was a bad idea, so I took it back, but then I thought, oh great, Mr. Carruthers, Roland, if he saw me, he'd probably tell you anyway, and then I thought, s.h.i.t, I might as well have left it there because at least then you'd know what it said instead of wondering what it said-"

"Lauren, don't worry about it. It's no big deal." I wasn't sure I wanted to know what the note said. I didn't want any further complications to my life at the moment. And I was certain I didn't want complications with Lauren Wells, even if the rest of my life was as smooth as gla.s.s.

"It was just a note to you and Cynthia, that maybe you'd like to come over sometime. I was thinking of having some friends over, and thought maybe it would be a nice break for the two of you, with all you've got to think about. But then I thought, maybe I was being a bit pushy, you know?"

"Well, that's very thoughtful," I said. "Maybe sometime." Thinking to myself, Not a chance Not a chance.

"Anyway," Lauren said, her eyebrows bobbing up for a second. "You going to the Post Mall tonight? They're having some of the stars from the latest Survivor, Survivor, signing autographs." signing autographs."

"I had no idea," I said.