The Girl for Me

It seems disloyal after all these years, but I’ve got to start buying different mascara. The Lancôme one I’ve always used wears so nice and soft—heavy makeup makes a woman my age look like a harridan—but it isn’t waterproof, and I’ve been crying all spring.

When Catherine first disappeared in March, everything was still frozen, but within a week the spring melt began. Rivers of slush ran down the edges of every street and the police came again and again, tracking dirty slush into my foyer. They doubted that an adult, a grown woman with a job and a husband, could be taken—as if such violence were kiddie stuff, or showed a lack of willpower. They kept asking questions about any unhappiness with Grey, an affair, secrets I can’t imagine my daughter would keep from me. Or him. I can’t imagine any of it. And so, helpless, clueless, I wept and wept.

After four weeks, the police don’t feel the need to visit anymore. Like with a bad boyfriend, I call them if I think of anything new to tell them or just to check in, but they never call me. Things are changing, the world is stuttering forward, and these constant tears have to stop. I can cry at night, alone in my big bed full of pillows—perhaps I always will. But I’ve got to be stronger during the day. It will be a relief, maybe even a blessing, as Seva would say, to be back at work, thinking and talking and making people’s lives slightly easier by helping them with their banking. I want to spend the day with people who have never had the person they love most snatched away from a parking lot; I want to pretend to be one of them.

I’ve been such a reliable employee for so many years that Janie has been generous about my leave of absence, even coming by for tea with some of the other girls from the branch. Not that anyone knows what to say, but they’ve come over the past three Friday afternoons, bearing pumpkin loaves and coconut brownies, little bits of news from work, and encouraging smiles. If Catherine had died, if she’d had a straightforward car accident on an icy night or a fall while hiking in the mountains, there would have been some discussion of God, I’m sure—all of that “everything happens for a reason” nonsense, but it would have filled in the silences. I’m not religious, and Seva and Leanne know that, but it’s what they rely on in bad times, and I rely on them. We’ve all been working at the same branch since the strip mall opened.

Even if it had been a more uncomfortable thing, a drug overdose or driving under the influence—and we have certainly had our share of such tragic idiocies around here—there are things you can say. About forgiveness, about moving on, about appreciating the time we had. About never doubting the value of memories.

But Catherine’s disappearance is nothing but doubt. No one knows who would do her harm, but equally no one knows why she would run off. Both options are impossible, and there is no third. There is nothing to say, no question left to ask. I read the poetry Catherine likes—the book she forgot on the sofa, and another by the same poet that I got from the library. The poems are about plates of pasta, cats in the dark, vegetable gardens—nothing to do with me, but they are something that she loved. And they are something to think about other than the empty space where my daughter used to be. No one wants to talk about that, but my colleagues aren’t that interested in poetry either. So on this, the fourth Friday since my daughter disappeared, I ask the ladies about mascara.

“Really, I’ll be glad to be back at the branch. But I’m worried about the…weepy moments.” What I’m thinking of are the tides of tears that come over me without warning, wordless and hot, but we middle-aged ladies are masters of understatement.

Janie taps down her teacup. “I’m sure you can be excused from your wicket a moment if you need it. Any of us would be happy to cover for you; I completely understand.”

She doesn’t understand, of course, and I can’t explain how I feel without taking her son’s phone and throwing it in the lake so that every time she has a question or suggestion for him, or just misses the sound of his voice, there’s no way for her to get in touch. And even then, she could find another way—email, Facebook, his friends—to be certain he was fine and then not worry. There is no real way to explain at all.

“But no one can cover for me long enough for me to completely reapply my face. I need some new mascara that can withstand…everything. And still look professional. Any suggestions?”

Seva nods. “There’s lots of nice mascara at Shoppers these days. These ones that make the curl for you, ones that spread the lashes apart, all kinds of colours… ”

“I just want plain black. What I’ve always worn, but waterproof. Nothing trashy-looking. Buying makeup at the drugstore seems like something teenagers do because they don’t know any better.”

“No, no. There’s a much better selection than they used to have. They’re not even that expensive. You can experiment with a few and find what you like best.”

“I don’t want anything like the garish stuff Catherine bought when she was in high school.”

Leanne pats my hand at the sound of Catherine’s name, and they all open their pale round eyes, waiting for me to say more. I feel like I should resist, but it’s magical to talk about her. It’s all I want to do.

“Catherine was never a rebel, but she did like her little treats—blue eyeliner and glitter lipgloss and all that. This was when she was, oh, fifteen, I guess. She had just started waitressing. She’d come home at night with sore feet, almost limping. I could have told her those cheap Keds did nothing to support her arches, cushion her feet, but she wouldn’t have heard it. Tiny tennis shoes were what girls wore that summer, and she loved them. That was back when she’d say, ‘It’s not like I even really care about shoes,’ which meant, somehow, that those shoes were cool. What they did to her feet was irrelevant. The work was hard, but then she had her own money to spend, to waste. She loved that. She loved those silly lipglosses, those awful shoes.”

The girls are nodding, smiling, but with backs and foreheads tensed. I’ve spoken longer than I should have in the give-and-take of normal conversation, but they love Catherine too. She is the sweet girl they met when she stopped by the bank, occasionally my “date” for the holiday party, always on hand if I hosted a dinner here. They love her, but not the boiling, endless way I do. Which is why I stop the stories there, put the teapot on the tray, and promise to meet Seva at the Shoppers on Sunday, letting our little get-together peter out.

I wait until they’re gone and I’m at the sink washing dishes before I let myself follow my thoughts as far as they’ll go. It’s dangerous to think of Catherine too much, especially when I’m alone. If Grey were here, we’d pick one little topic and go over every detail—how she could never be bothered to blow-dry her thick, heavy hair, how even at the end of the day when she took down her ponytail there would still be a trace of damp. Or that woman poet she liked so much—or maybe she didn’t like her, but she was reading her books over and over in the weeks before…before. She was like that, so much energy, you didn’t always know what she loved and what she just felt strongly about. We can talk and talk about Catherine, Grey and I, and almost always manage to stop before one of us breaks down. We can do that because we both love her equally, if such a thing is possible.

Alone, I worry I’ll go too far, think too much, and then not be able to get up off the floor. But remembering my beautiful girl is devastatingly tempting. Oh, my Catherine. So interesting. So lovely to think about. Her strange theories of how the world works. The rare moments when she wouldn’t do the expected, “normal” thing. Her refusal to get a student loan, so horrified of debt that she took only the courses she could pay for in cash, which was why her degree was stretching out into its seventh year. Her contempt for her friends who competed in figure-skating competitions. Her childhood terror at the idea of French immersion.

She was only four when the neighbourhood school mailed me a flyer about French immersion classes—it seemed a wonderful opportunity to me. One night on the back porch as we played shadow puppets I told her that next year, when she went to school, she would get to learn French. In fact, I had the bunny shadow say it, hopping up and down the crumbling brick of our back wall. I even improvised a French accent, told her she would love French, mais oui.

But Catherine unclasped her hands from making the goose shape and squawked angrily, “No, I will not. I will not learn French.”

I was baffled—still so inexperienced as a mother even after four years. Though Wayne had never contributed much in the way of parenting, he had left only six months earlier and I was feeling especially unmoored. I tried to explain the benefits of learning a new language, something different and exciting, something I myself would have loved to have done. And Catherine in her pink-and-white overalls just plopped right down on her bottom and wailed. I can still picture her hot wet face, sobbing that she would never “say that stuff,” that she only wanted to say “true words.” I never found out where she got the impression that French was a scary language or even where she learned that French was a language.

Years later, she laughed at the story and claimed not to remember her tantrum. When I pressed, she said, “Iria’s a pretty small place, Mom, and I’d never been anywhere. I probably thought I’d have to move away to learn another language.” She was giggling—I hope I laughed too, although I can’t remember that part. The memory of Cat is clear, though—I recall her grinning pink-lipstick mouth as clearly as I recall her childish panic. My memories come into clearer focus every day—I suppose it’s the longing that makes me conjure her so strongly.

They would have let me say all this and more, Seva, Leanne, Janie—they would have listened all afternoon and been glad to. But so much has been taken from me, I have to keep some memories for myself.

LashBlast does not sound like the sort of cosmetic a woman in her fifties—a public face at a major bank branch—ought to be using. But it is only $9 and Seva squeezes my arm encouragingly, so I buy it.

Afterwards, I insist on walking home alone through the rain. I have had more physical contact with Seva in the past four weeks than during the whole seventeen years we’ve known each other—not just arm squeezes and hand pats but full-bodied hugs and tearfully wet kisses on the cheek too. Same with most of the girls from work, actually, not to mention cousins, neighbours…No one knows what to say, so they try to do instead. If they’re not caressing and consoling me, they’re keeping my freezer full of chocolate-chip muffins and tortellini soup just when I have fewer guests to feed than ever before. I always thaw someone else’s muffins when I know a friend is coming over with yet more food. I feed them as they feed me, so at least they feel welcomed and appreciated, and I can make some room in the freezer for the new things. I’ve rarely been hungry since Cat’s disappearance, but even when I was eating normally, what would a single woman do with an entire lasagna?

Tomorrow, I go back to the bank. I feel I should call Grey and tell him I won’t be home, even though we don’t usually get together until Wednesdays. I want him to know where to find me, just in case there’s news. But I think he was scheduled to be back at work soon too—I can’t remember if that was this week or next. Maybe I should finally get a cellphone. Maybe I should leave poor Grey alone. We live the same days, I imagine—days filled with tea and muffins, and brief quiet visits with friends who have nothing to say. Watching game shows and heartbreaking news reports where they don’t mention her. Losing concentration on the second paragraph of a book. I know he hears from the police more than I do—either because they think of him as being closer to her than me, or they think of him as a suspect, he’s not sure which. But if there was anything new to report, I know he would call me. Every moment he doesn’t, I know there is nothing new to say. So I don’t call either.

Today, I will clean the entire apartment and then go downstairs with the battery-powered handheld vacuum cleaner and do the car. It’s terrifying to admit it, but I have done this most days since she’s been gone. Clean has always meant clear to me, meant I could see clearly and get the more important things done.

Catherine, when she lived with me, was messier: jeans on the rug crushed down into the figure eight she stepped out of the night before. Cereal bowls by the bed with a crust of milk hardening. I was never a judgmental parent, never pushy unless there was an urgent need. I tore up those French immersion forms and Cat did terrifically well in regular English school. I didn’t question her decisions, and that made her feel she could talk to me, at least about some things. There was a lot I could never forgive my own mother for, even for the things I knew later were meant to help. She told me on my wedding day that if I married Wayne I would regret it. I did and I did, but who was she to tell me? So I shut up about Catherine’s choices unless she was about to step into traffic, and for that I was rewarded with her walking through my door again and again with all her stories already on her lips.

Wayne hated how, even as a toddler, Cat would come to me and not to him with a picture she’d painted, feathers found in the grass, a cookie. “She’s the girl for you, all right,” I remember him growling.

Once she moved out to be with Grey, somewhere around her twenty-first birthday, and I moved into my new apartment, Catherine rarely called first, just appeared at my door, or already in my living room. She found a tree that grew out back, thick and heavy, which she liked to climb up to reach my second-storey windows. She said she didn’t want to disturb me by buzzing the intercom—she came at odd hours and if I was asleep or out she would just leave again. I offered to give her a key, but she didn’t seem interested and I never got around to it. Though she would never admit it, I knew she wanted to climb the tree for the sake of it. I don’t know everything about my daughter, but I know that much.

Whenever she came with Grey, they entered through the front door. Grey isn’t much of an athlete. I like that fellow, the way he edges as close to her as possible on the couch, on the street, on the bus, smiling into her hair. I’ve not lacked for gentlemen since Wayne, but no one has ever been captivated by me like that. Not romantically, anyway. For the first few years of her life, Catherine often wept if I walked out of the room. She must have stopped doing that around the time she went off to kindergarten, but I just can’t remember when. As much as I remember, there’s so much more I forget.

—

My first day back at work is busy because a computer update for the entire branch doesn’t go well. Programs keep freezing or giving error messages or crashing. I have to reassure any number of harried clients that their funds are safe, that these are only interface problems. Leanne and Seva keep brushing past me, placing a hand on my forearm or on my shoulder, a platter of tea biscuits in the staff room at 2 p.m. They ask, “How are you?” over and over, but it seems like there is no right answer. I just shake my head and say, “Getting through, getting through.”

My eyelashes feel heavy and sticky with my new mascara, but otherwise I am light as air. I thought I would feel naked here with the public teeming in, but I am the person in charge, behind the desk, the one who knows the most about what is happening and what to do next. A few regulars murmur, “Oh, Sue, I heard,” but I only have to nod somberly once and point out the new mortgage promo before the conversation is over. When I go to the ladies, the mirror over the sink shows a smooth, serene face. Even my lashes look feathery and soft. This day of calm professionalism is such a change from sobbing weakly in my bathrobe and staring at her Facebook page. I never understood Facebook and still don’t, but there are so many lovely pictures of her there. I should have taken more pictures.

And yet when my shift is over—the day shift, the most coveted one—and the after-work crowd is bustling in and the younger tellers who work the 12–8 are steeling themselves, I go into the back to get my coat and bag, and I start to shake.

I am alone. I have been so attended to all day, so carefully watched by the girls, but now that I am by myself, my shoulders and back and thighs and stomach tremble under the weight of all those minutes I did not think of my beautiful daughter.

Did I really spend the day answering questions about service fees, bounced cheques, online errors? Did I really smile warmly and say that I completely understood how difficult it was when a woman wearing a silk scarf with cherries on it could not access her loan statement for twenty minutes? Even though my Catherine was taken from a parking lot after a long day of work, taken so quickly and violently she let her beloved yellow Kate Spade purse fall into a puddle and stay there? Taken—I finally let myself think the word I didn’t want to imagine. But really I’ve been circling it since the moment I knew she was gone. There is no other option, no solution to the mystery that makes sense other than a crime, a captor. Catherine was taken.

I lean over the table in the staff room, brace my hands on it. I can’t get my breathing right. I have not seen my daughter in four weeks and three days and yet somehow I didn’t think of her for hours because some people needed American dollar transfers, overdraft protection, postdated bill payments.

I have no idea how long I stay like that—not that long, maybe, since no one else comes in. I want to see Grey, even though it isn’t the right night. He’s probably always known what I have just admitted to myself, that she would never have left him—us—voluntarily. She was so honest that if she’d fallen out of love, she would have just said so. I don’t need to tell Grey any of this. I’ll just go sit beside him and talk about whatever he wants, knowing that we are grieving the same grief.

Back in the washroom, I unzip my makeup case as I walk toward the mirror, prepared to touch up at least my eyes, maybe redo my concealer. I need to look more or less chipper in order for the girls to let me leave on my own. Otherwise I will be in for another night of spaghetti with someone’s husband and kids. But in the mirror, my cool face is still altogether intact—fluttering dark eyelashes and clear bright eyes. I could fool even myself.

—

The walk from the bus stop to Catherine and Grey’s place isn’t far, which was one of the things she liked about living here. At the corner, I see a poster for her—of course there’s more of them in the areas where there are people who love her. The photograph is one Grey provided, the context unknown to me. She’s grinning and reaching for a glass held by someone cropped out of the frame. The same poster has a plea for the boy too, the one who disappeared a month or so before her. He was much younger, only a high-school kid, and his photo shows the awkward grin and styled hair of a school-picture day. His collared shirt is incongruously formal next to casual Catherine. I wonder if I should call his mother. Maybe it would help, pain shared from one mother to another. Or maybe I wouldn’t be able to bear adding a new loss to my nightmares.

When I find myself standing across the street from the house, I wish I’d driven, so I would have somewhere to sit and think for a moment. Standing still on the sidewalk is a strange thing to do—dog walkers and schoolchildren appraise me as they pass, but since I’m still bank-tidy in my pantsuit and hairspray, they keep moving.

I don’t come over often. Even when Catherine was still here and everything was fine, I didn’t, though it’s only twenty minutes away and a charming little house with a flower border and some kind of pink stone tiles on the steps. In the living room are crowded bookshelves and a lovely blue couch. Catherine would always make me a cup of tea and put a plate of cookies in front of me when I visited. She made me feel like a guest, and I hated it. When I was—when I am with Catherine, I like to be the mother. I prefer to see her at my table, eating my cookies.

I hate approaching their red-painted front door when I know she’s not behind it—that knowledge keeps me glued to the sidewalk, staring at the house like a spurned girlfriend. Grey and I tried alternating our Wednesday nights between their house and my apartment, but now he comes to my place every time. He seems not to mind—I told him it was easier for me and he didn’t ask easier how? The answer to that unasked question is that it’s easier to pretend I still have someone to mother if I’m cooking him spaghetti or putting the cookies in front of him. Then we watch an inane TV show about people buying houses. I can’t believe he likes it, much less that Catherine does, but I humour him. I like to see him point out the stylist she likes best just for the sake of hearing her name.

Catherine did love house-hunting, and she loved this house. When they decided to buy a place together, she was still living with me, and she’d wander into the living room with her laptop a dozen times a night, murmuring, “What do you think of this place, Mom?” She liked to talk about square-footage, lathe-and-plaster walls, “good bones,” finished basements. Once, I urged her to go see a listing I liked—pretty garden, wide driveway—and she gently chided me: “Mom, this is a strange layout. You see, the upstairs bathroom isn’t accessible from the hall. You have to go through the master bedroom. Awkward.” “But it’s just the two of you—what does it matter?” “Well, for now it is.” My heart thudded with impossible surprise—of course I’d thought of grandchildren, but I hadn’t dared to hope. Catherine never said a word to me about having kids before or since. But this sweet little three-bedroom house with its sunny fenced yard is the fruit of all that gleeful labour, and I always imagine it bursting with skateboards and puppies and science projects and tutus. My hands shake in horror at how much I’ve lost.

It’s cold, nowhere near the nice part of spring. The yard looks grim, the grass wet and dead, the flowerbeds only mud heaps. When I see a curtain twitch in the kitchen window, I finally cross the street and climb the stairs.

“Sue. Hey, it’s good to see you.” He’s surprised that I’ve shown up unannounced, but we are long past the point of asking each other questions about how we’re coping. Catherine would be pleased, I think miserably, that the awkwardness between me and Grey has finally dissolved. His hug is brief but satisfying—his meaty shoulders are so different from the slender, sweatered ones of my colleagues.

We’ve seen each other every week since she’s been gone, but in my mind, Grey is always how he looked the first few days: wild-eyed, unshaven, dirty hair pushed up in spikes around his bald patch, a nervous hand covering his mouth. I have been remembering him that way even though he pulled himself together, physically at least, very quickly, much faster than I did. Today, like most days, he wears a hoodie and jeans, but his hair is combed, his beard neatly trimmed.

“C’mon in,” he says, but I am already trailing him down the hall. The living room is tidy, or at least not visibly chaotic. He’s either vacuumed recently or he has been avoiding this room. I’ve never known a man like Grey—devoted, beaming to see his wife walking toward him. Someone who vacuums.

“Can you stay?” He waves his hands idly by his sides. “I mean, did you come for a visit, or… ”

I nod and smile, or try to smile, while unwinding my scarf. “Sure, that would be great, if you aren’t busy?”

“Absolutely. Let me put the kettle on, and get us something to eat.”

“Oh, no, don’t trouble yourself… ”

He shrugs and disappears into the kitchen, the words “No bother” drifting behind him. I sit down on the couch that Catherine so loved. The first thing they bought new, together, once they had the house. It is stiff to sit on, but elegant, and such a bright, happy blue.

I hear the clank of the kettle and the whir of the microwave. He comes back with a plate of soggy-looking muffins. “I defrosted these. So many people brought stuff—at the beginning. I don’t know what they thought I’d do with twenty-four muffins.”

He sits down heavily in the complex Ikea chair I gave them, all curved wood bars and flat cushions. I took Catherine shopping when she was moving from my home to this one, and asked what she wanted as a housewarming gift—that chair is what she chose. Somehow, in her mind, it went with the new blue couch. I couldn’t imagine why she liked it; she felt so far from me then, crouching in the store’s fluorescent glare, cooing over that ugly chair. In that moment, we were probably as distant as we’ve ever been because I could not understand why she loved Grey either—the chair was probably just a metaphor. I liked him fine, but back then I couldn’t see what there was to love about this awkwardly boyish but actually much older man. Catherine was inscrutable in her passion for him, and for the silly chair. I understand him now; perhaps one day I’ll get the chair too.

For now Grey seems terribly uncomfortable perched in it. Of course, it might not be the chair.

“How are you, Grey?”

“Oh, well, you know—okay, I guess. I have a lot of muffins. Work’s been easy on me since I went back. You’re back this week too, right? At least it’s something to do, right?”

I nod, surprised that he remembered. “Yes, it’s good to be back. Bought a new mascara for the occasion. Everyone was kind.”

He smiles tightly. “Your eyelashes do look nice.”

“Do you…have you heard anything new?”

He shakes his head slowly. “You?”

“Oh, no. Well, I’m sure they’d call you first.”

He shrugs. “I don’t know what to do anymore. I feel I should be doing something. Like how can I just watch TV and eat salad or whatever. In the evenings and stuff. I should be—I should be… ”

“What?” I lean toward him—I want to know what I should be doing too.

“Out, I guess. Going out, talking to people, looking…It’s ridiculous, I know. But I feel like I should still be looking for her.”

“I’m sure the police are doing everything, well, everything there is to do.”

“Yeah, I know, I know.” He pushes his palms down his thighs like he is sluicing off dirty water. “I trust them, I just don’t have anything else to do. I feel bad watching the shows she liked. She hated when I watched stuff without her. I’ve been reading a lot, but… ”

“Me too. Poetry mainly, things she likes. That Julianna Ohlin, the writer who lived around here.”

“Oh, yeah. I just finished one of hers. Sometimes the Door Sticks—that one?”

I nod a little.

“She was really engrossed in that one right before…Then after she was gone, I searched all over and couldn’t find it. Maybe she had it with her, I dunno. I had to get my assistant to order me a copy.”

“Oh, she left it at my place, actually,” I say. “It’s not bad. I like the one—I like the poem where the speaker is standing at the bus stop and it’s just coming on dawn—that one with the bird?”

“I think it’s called ‘Service Disruption.’ ” Grey picks up a muffin and carefully chews off one side. “I like that one. It’s funny—the gullwing arcing like the socket of a headlamp. I don’t completely get it, but I get why Catherine liked her. Ohlin.”

“When she was first—first gone, I didn’t sleep. Not really at all. I just read the books that were lying around, and she’d left that one on my couch. I read some of those poems over and over. Now they feel, I don’t know, important. Connected with her. I just keep reading them.”

“I know, right? Everything feels like a message. Like the last text she sent me, saying she’d see me soon? Or the clothes she had in the laundry when she disappeared. I didn’t do laundry for almost two weeks, but then I ran out of underwear and when I dumped everything out there were little red panties at the bottom.” He suddenly stands—I can’t tell if he’s just embarrassed that he said the word panties to his mother-in-law or if it’s something else.

“Do you sleep, Grey? Are you getting enough sleep? Or any?”

I see his shoulders hunch up and down in his neat shirt, but he lowers himself back beside me. “Oh, some, I guess. It’s weird. I lived alone for so long before Catherine and never really minded it. Now, I mean, of course I miss her—I love her. But also the bed feels so huge and awkward. There’s no one there to keep the blankets from all lumping up on my side.”

“I’ve lived alone as long as you’ve lived with Catherine, and I half expect I always will. But alone is just a lot of space for your thoughts. If your thoughts are good, being alone is no big deal. Since she’s been gone, my thoughts are…I look forward to our Wednesdays so much, Grey.”

“Me too. You have so many good stories about her.” His jaw trembles slightly around the muffin he is gnawing on.

The tears flood my eyes, quiver a moment, and then spill, filtering through my stiff black eyelashes. A blush creeps up my neck, and I hurry to wipe my face with the back of my hand. When my eyes clear, though, I see Grey is weeping too, glassy tears streaking silently down his chin, but his only action is to gently pat me on the shoulder before pouring us more tea.

“You do too, Grey, you do. I love the stories you tell about her. That one where she got the Great Dane to jump in her lap when you guys were camping.”

He chuckles, a bit hiccupy. “She’s a funny girl, all right.”

“Did I ever tell you about the time I tried to enrol her in French immersion?”

He sniffs and picks up his cup. “No, tell me.” His eyes are still wet, and so are mine, but for once feel I can ignore the tears, and the fact that we both know I’ve told this story so many times before. This is the place to weep for Catherine, for as long as we want.