“My fault? My fault?” Catherine Siskel said it out loud to her empty kitchen, knew if she threw the framed photo of Lanna across the room it would serve only to shatter the glass, thereby destroying another part of their lives. Early this morning, her husband called to inform her that he’d “again” “unexpectedly” been “called” to meet with a client. And he “might be” “very delayed” coming home. So her photo-throwing drama would be wasted. What’s more, she’d have to clean up all that broken glass.
Seemed she was always cleaning up something. The most internecine messes at City Hall were easier to manage than her own life.
It wasn’t just Greg, she had to admit. Often she herself stayed late at the office, an explainable side effect of her job, but recently more an excuse to keep from having to go home to their daughter Lanna’s forever-empty bedroom and her husband’s empty eyes. What was he caring about these last months? Not her.
Now she was by herself, in their empty house. Tenley wasn’t home yet, and if Greg found out, somehow he’d make even that her fault. In this morning’s call, he’d insisted, as always, she make sure their daughter was home that night. Because of Lanna, he always said.
What else was new?
She was always concerned about Tenley. Greg hardly had to remind her of that. But Tenley had to live in the real world. She and her husband could not protect her from imaginary dangers. She’d be home soon.
“The girl is eighteen,” she’d reminded Greg, unnecessarily, this morning. Now she shoved a bottle of sauvignon blanc into the fridge. At least it could be cold, even though she’d have to open it alone. She slammed the stainless steel door. Taking her hostilities out on the fridge. Helpful.
“She has a job at City Hall, a job I managed to finagle for her,” Catherine had said. “Why is it my responsibility to make sure she’s home at some random time you happen to select? No. Just, no. We need to let her have a life.”
Catherine steadied herself against the countertop. Using the toe of her left black patent pump, she pried off the heel of her right shoe, then, with bare toes, slipped off the other. She left both shoes toppled over in the middle of the kitchen floor and paced by them, fuming. Taking off her heels was always such a relief, and the cool tile felt soothing under her feet. But this was no time to relax, she couldn’t relax any part of her.
She replayed more of the morning’s conversation—if you could call it “conversation”—in her head.
“I resent this, Greg,” she’d said. “You go away, you call me from where the hell ever, you expect the world to work just the way you want and demand, and when it doesn’t, it’s everyone’s fault but yours.”
She leaned against the counter, the empty house deafening. She’d tried to be patient with her husband. He was still in mourning, still upset, relentlessly, viciously upset. Catherine knew the most effective way to handle an unhappy constituent was to listen, evaluate, and then design a solution. She did that every day at City Hall.
But finally she couldn’t listen to one more word. “You lost a daughter?” Her scorn had pinged off the shiny windows of her City Hall office, and then against the framed photos on her office wall. “I’ve lost a daughter, too, Greg. We’ve both—I mean—not a day goes by that I—”
The kitchen floor tile no longer felt cool under her tired feet. She dropped her head back and closed her eyes, remembering, searching for new meaning in this impossibly recycled and reprocessed conversation. How many times could they talk about the exact same thing in different ways? How long would the loop of sorrow and guilt continue before it destroyed them both? All three of them, she amended.
How her husband’s brain worked she could no longer fathom. Twenty-seven years ago, was it now? when she was still Kate O’Connor, they’d met and married when they both attended the Kennedy School’s public policy program. They’d cuddled in the common TV room watching the presidential elections and told each other “don’t worry, be happy” every time they had a big paper due. She rebranded herself Catherine, took her husband’s name in a fit of neofeminism, and went into local politics. He went into political consulting. They’d been the happy activist couple, making a difference in people’s lives every day. Now they lived in a nice, but fringey, part of town, the mayor insisting it would prove that every part of the City of Boston welcomed everyone. The mayor lived in the welcome of Beacon Hill. But the woods nearby had been lovely. Until Lanna.
“How about this, Greg,” she’d said, trying to use her calm-the-constituent voice though she knew he’d recognize that and be further annoyed. “How about if you come home tonight? For once?”
“I’ll try,” he’d said. “I will.”
Catherine replayed those words, “I’ll try,” as clear as if her husband—where was he?—had just said them. She’d open that wine now and pretend nothing bad had happened, nothing bad had touched them, and nothing bad would ever touch them again.
She took a step toward the fridge and tripped over one of her shoes, stubbing a toe and almost falling against the drain board. All she needed. All! She paused, feeling her tears. Why did she always have to be the conciliatory one? She was hurting, too, and trying her best to cope. Huh. Maybe she’d even be better off without Greg. Let go of the past. Let go of him. Start over.
“Greg?” She’d finally interrupted whatever he’d been saying. “Forgive me here for the outrageous notion—but if you cannot manage to come home, how about if you pick up your phone and call Tenley yourself? Remind her you exist?”
A hang-up moment if Catherine had ever heard one, and it took every bit of her willpower not to do it.
“Tell Tenley I love her,” Greg had said. And then he was gone.
* * *
“Never? Never?”
Jane tried to remember the last time she’d seen her sister like this. Over many years, Melissa had perfected annoyed-petulant and demonstrated it whenever she didn’t get her way.
“You’re saying this has never happened before?” Melissa stood next to a striped wing chair in Robyn and Lewis Wilhoite’s living room, one hand on her navy silk hip and the other gesturing, underlining every time she said “never.” Jane could picture the identical stance in a courtroom, Melissa as prosecutor, grilling some poor defendant on the witness stand.
Melissa’s target now was suburban housewife Robyn Wilhoite, perched on the center cushion of her almost-gaudy chintz couch, alone, hands in her lap, fingers intertwined.
“Never happened that I don’t know where they are?” Robyn pouted, fussed with the black cardigan draped around her shoulders. “Well, not really. I mean, lately Lewis is trying to be, well, he calls it spontaneous. He thinks Gracie should be more … flexible. Live for today, all that. They go on adventures.”
Jane, standing by a multiwindowed mahogany breakfront, waited for her cue, not certain of her role. Melissa had asked her to come, her pleading voice on the phone making Jane’s presence seem urgent, but after a brief two-cheek air kiss, Melissa’d essentially ignored her. Still, the best way to understand a story was to listen. Any good reporter knew that.
“Flexible?” Melissa was saying. “They go on ‘adventures’? My question was: Has it ever happened before? A fairly binary question. Yes or no?”
Robyn flattened herself against the couch, pressing into the flowered cushions as if she were trying to get farther away from her new—what was she about to become? Jane tried to parse the relationships. Robyn was little Gracie’s mother, and Melissa would soon be Gracie’s stepmother. So Robyn and Melissa were … there was no word for that, Jane realized.
“Gracie left her cell phone at home.” Robyn’s voice was a mix of whine and whisper. “Lewis isn’t answering his, and I’ve left message after message. But he thinks the phone is silly. He says it’s a ‘technological noose.’ Strangling real life.”
Lewis sounded like quite the piece of work.
Jane tried to catch Melissa’s eye, but her sister focused on Robyn.
“I see. I suppose. Still.” Melissa slapped the back of one hand into the palm of the other, like a politician making a point. “Daniel arrives from Geneva tomorrow now, if all goes as planned, and we’re all supposed to fly back to Chicago. What if they’re not back in time for that? It’s the wedding!”
“Why is she here?” Robyn pointed to Jane.
Jane saw Melissa shake her head, quickly, as if to clear it, change the tone. She stopped her rapid-fire interrogation and lowered herself onto the wing chair, tucked her silk skirt under her, then reached out a conciliatory hand. Not quite touching Robyn but coming close.
“I’m so sorry, Robyn,” Melissa said. “I tend to accelerate right into lawyer mode. It’s the wedding. I’m a little on edge. Jane’s here simply in case we need to call someone. We’re family, right? She’s family. But the easiest solution is most often the correct one. That’s why I’m asking—before we make any major decisions—if it’s possible your husband just forgot to call to update you? That his cell battery is dead? That he and Gracie are, I don’t know, getting pizza?”
A tiny jagged streak of black mascara blotched one of Robyn’s cheeks, and she yanked her pale hair behind her ears, twisted it up on the back, let it fall. “Pizza?”
“Robyn?” Jane took a few steps closer. “You’re saying Lewis and Gracie have never been off your radar? He picks her up at school for lunch?”
“Well, not totally. Of course I don’t always know where they are,” Robyn said. “Why would I?”
Well, Jane thought, I would know where my daughter was. So any suspicious mind—and Jane was proud of hers, a necessary quality in a reporter—would wonder if the reportedly manipulative and clingy Robyn was truly upset over Gracie’s whereabouts, or simply trying to screw with the woman about to keep her daughter from her for three months a year. A suspicious mind would also speculate whether obviously skeptical Melissa was upset over Gracie, or over Robyn’s center-ring disruption of her own prenuptial plans.
Jane had a glimmer of the wrenching dominoes of divorce. Melissa had confided to her that Daniel missed his daughter. The little girl wrote him loopy-lettered postcards about kittens and school and being the flower girl.
Daniel’s impending marriage to Melissa, who Gracie thought was “awesome,” Melissa had confided, was a chance for father and daughter to reconnect. But reconnecting with her father—while living with stepmother Melissa—meant being yanked from her mother, leaving the stepfather she seemed to love, moving to another city every summer, and being made to live a semi-schizophrenic life. Not uncommon, but maybe not the best for a nine-year-old. Maybe not the best for anyone. But the couple, bolstered by Melissa’s know-how of the legal system, had pled their case to a probate court, a judge had ruled, and so it was.
Jane watched the mother and bride-to-be as they continued their familial tug-of-war. How did anyone know what was overreacting and what was a real emergency?
“Lewis didn’t want Gracie to go, you know? That’s what’s beginning to worry me.” Robyn took out a cell phone, tapped some numbers with manicured thumbs. “He was bulls—I mean, so upset about it. ‘She’s my daughter, too,’ he kept saying. And I know he was upsetting Gracie. Talking about how she’d miss school and her friends and her cat. I didn’t know how to handle it, but I truly thought he’d get over it. I mean, if it has to be, it has to be. We made our beds, I guess.”
“Was he ever … inappropriate with her?”
Had to give Melissa credit for asking that, flat out. Jane had been wondering the same thing, puzzling over how to phrase it. Lawyer Melissa had probably phrased it many times, in and out of court.
“What? No, oh, absolutely no.” Robyn was shaking her head, even while Melissa was talking, waving the question away. “Are you serious? No. He was never, never … he’s been wonderful, until the judge—anyway. He’s just sad, I guess. You know accountants, they’re all about logic and planning and making things turn out the way you want. But Lewis recently decided to break out of the mold. Show his emotions. Try new things. Experiment. ‘Live to the fullest,’ he started saying. ‘Life is short.’ Anyway. I’m texting him, again.”
Jane watched these players inhabit their roles, trying to analyze whether what she was seeing and hearing was blanketing some complicated emotional subtext. But theoretical motives and familial chess games aside, where was Gracie? If Lewis Wilhoite was a manipulative emotion-hiding planner, those were not reassuring attributes. Was Robyn protesting too much? Hiding from reality?
A nine-year-old and her stepfather were not where they were supposed to be. The stepfather didn’t answer his phone. Not a good thing. If they were out getting ice cream, fine, they’d all have a good laugh, someone would get yelled at, and it would all be happily ever after.
If not?
“Ah, Melissa?” Jane wasn’t sure of the protocol here, but she was sure their focus should be on Gracie. “Robyn? Do you think we should call the police?”