Pretty Girls

Claire let out another shaky breath. Lydia resisted the urge to do the same. Paul hadn’t just taken away Claire all those years ago. He’d taken away the connection that came from looking into someone else’s eyes and knowing that they understood exactly what you were feeling.

Claire asked, “Did you have kids?”

“No,” Lydia lied. “You?”

“Paul wanted to, but I was terrified of . . .”

She didn’t have to put a name to the terror. If family planning was the sort of thing Lydia had been capable of in her twenties, there was no way in hell she would’ve had Dee. Watching how the loss of a child had pulled her parents apart—­not just pulled them apart, but destroyed them—­had been enough of a cautionary tale.

Claire said, “Grandma Ginny has dementia. She’s forgotten how to be mean.”

“Do you remember what she said to me at Dad’s funeral?”

Claire shook her head.

“ ‘You’re fat again. I guess that means you’re not taking drugs.’ ”

Claire took in Lydia’s shape, leaving the obvious question unspoken.

“Seventeen and a half years sober.”

“Good for you.” There was a catch in her voice. She was crying. Lydia suddenly realized that despite the designer outfit, her sister looked like hell. Her dress had obviously been slept in. She had a cut on her cheek. A black bruise was under her ear. Her nose was bright red. The rain had soaked her through. She was shivering from the cold.

“Claire—­”

“I have to go.” Claire started walking toward her car. “Take care of yourself, Pepper.”

She left before Lydia could think of a reason for her not to.

iii.

The sheriff arrested me today. He said that I was interfering with his investigation. My defense—­that I could not interfere with something that did not exist—­left him unmoved.

Years ago, to help raise money for the local humane shelter, I volunteered myself to be pretend-­arrested at the county fair. While you and your little sister were playing skee ball (Pepper was grounded for mouthing off to a teacher) all of us villains were held in a roped-­off part of the fair while we waited for our significant others to bail us out.

This time, as with the pretend-­time, your mother bailed me out.

“Sam,” she said, “you can’t keep doing this.”

When she’s anxious, your mother twists her new wedding ring around her finger, and every time I see this I can’t help but feel she is trying to twist it off.

Have I ever told you just how much I love your mother? She is the most remarkable woman I have ever known. Your grandmother thought she was a gold digger, though there was hardly a scrap of silver in my pocket when we first met. Everything she said and did delighted me. I loved the books she read. I loved the way her mind worked. I loved that she looked at me and saw something that I had only ever glimpsed in myself.

I would’ve given up without her—­not on you, never on you, but on myself. I suppose I can tell you this now, but I wasn’t a very good student. I wasn’t smart enough to just get by. I wasn’t focused enough in class. I rarely passed exams. I skipped assignments. I was constantly on academic probation. Not that your grandmother would ever know, but at the time, I was thinking of doing what you were later accused of doing: selling all my belongings, sticking out my thumb, and hitchhiking to California to be with the other hippies who had dropped out and tuned in.

Everything changed when I met your mother. She made me want things that I had never dreamed of wanting: a steady job, a reliable car, a mortgage, a family. You figured out a long time ago that you got your wanderlust from me. I want you to know that this is what happens when you meet the person you are supposed to spend the rest of your life with: that restless feeling dissolves like butter.

I think what breaks my heart the most is that you will never learn that for yourself.

I want you to know that your mother has not forgotten you. Not a morning passes that she does not wake up thinking about you. She marks your birthdays in her own way. Every March 4, the anniversary of your disappearance, she walks the same path you might have walked when you left the Manhattan Cafe that night. She leaves a night-­light burning in your old room. She refuses to sell the house on Boulevard, because, despite her protests, she still holds out the slim hope that one day, you might come walking back up the sidewalk and find your way home.

“I want to feel normal again,” she once told me. “Maybe if I pretend I am for long enough, it might actually happen.”

Your mother is one of the strongest, smartest women I have ever met, but losing you cleaved her in two. The vibrant, caustic, witty, contrary woman I married splintered off into silence. She would tell you she gave in to mourning you for too long, let the pity and self-­hate drag her into that black pit that I still crawl around in. If she did, her stay there was temporary. Somehow, she managed to wrench a piece of her former self out of the ground. She tells me that the other, miserable half, the chipped-­off, cast-­off half, still follows at a respectful distance, ready to take over the second she stumbles.

Only through sheer strength of will does she manage to never stumble.

When your mother told me she was marrying another man, she said, “I can’t sacrifice the two daughters I have left for the one that I’ll never see again.”

She didn’t say that she loved this man. She didn’t say that he moved her, or that she needed him. She said that she needed the things that he could offer: stability, companionship, a glass of wine at night without the drowning sense of sorrow.

I do not resent this other man for taking my place. I do not hate him, because I do not want your sisters to hate him. It is remarkably easy for a divorced parent to make remarriage a smooth transition for his or her children. You just keep your mouth shut and let them know that everything is going to be all right.

And I really feel that it will be—­at least for the remaining part of my family.

Your mother has always been a good judge of character. This man she chose is kind to your sisters. He goes to Pepper’s riotous, perplexing concerts and pays attention to Claire. I cannot begrudge him attending PTA meetings and carving pumpkins and putting up Christmas trees. They visit your sisters once a month in Auburn (I know, sweetheart, but they couldn’t go to UGA because it reminded them too much of you). I cannot blame your mother for moving on while I stayed rooted in the past. I have widowed her. I would just as soon ask her to stay with me as I would ask her to lay with me in my grave.

I suppose the sheriff called her to bail me out because left to my own devices, I would’ve stayed in the cell until he was forced to either arraign me or let me go. I was trying to make a point. Your mother agreed, if I meant that the point I was making was that I am a stubborn asshole.

You of all ­people will know that this exchange means that she still loves me.

But she has also made it clear that this is it for her. She no longer wants to hear about my wild-­goose chases or my crazy searches or my meeting strangers in dark corners and interrogating young women who knew you back then but are now married and gainfully employed and trying to start families of their own.

Should I fault her for this? Should I blame her for giving up on my windmills?

Here is why I was arrested:

There is a man who works at the Taco Stand. He’s the manager now, but he was busing tables the day you disappeared. The sheriff’s men cleared his alibi, but one of your friends, Kerry Lascala, told me that she’d overheard this man at a party talking about how he saw you on the street the night of March 4, 1991.

Any father would seek out this man. Any father would follow him down the street, let him know what it felt like to have someone behind you who was stronger and angrier and had an agenda that involved taking you somewhere more private.

Which sounds li

ke harassment, but feels like investigating a crime.