Gwendolyn Kiste
We’re standing in the cereal aisle at the grocery store, the fluorescent lights blinking nervously above us, a Muzak version of Barry Manilow crackling through the speakers, when Veronica vanishes.
One moment, I’m reaching for a box of Honey Nut Cheerios on the top shelf, making a crack about how I always have to stand on my tiptoes, an inside joke between me and Veronica. The next moment, I turn around, and she’s gone, dissolved like sea foam. Like she was never there at all.
“Veronica?” My voice barely a wisp. It’s a long aisle, and I’m standing in the middle of it. She couldn’t have just walked away. She couldn’t have gone anywhere, not without me noticing.
I abandon the cart, the gallon of milk sweating in its plastic jug, my heart a jackhammer in my chest.
I wander through the store, my head dizzy. “Veronica, where are you?” I try to keep my tone even, to keep myself calm. I don’t want to be that person panicking in public. Especially since she’s probably around the corner in the produce section, picking over the dragon fruit or gooseberries, some secret ingredient she must have forgotten for a new recipe she’s planning to make tonight.
That’s what I tell myself – that she’s still right here. Her black hair the colour of spilled ink, her dark lipstick, her brown Docs. Everything about her more familiar to me than my own face.
Except there’s no sign of Veronica. Not in the store and not outside either. Our maroon Subaru Forester is still parked in the second row of the lot, but she’s not there.
My hands trembling, I sit inside the car, searching through my phone. I try her number first. No answer. I leave a message.
“Please,” I say. “Text me or find me or something.”
Then I start calling everyone we know. “Have you heard from Veronica?” I ask them, but it’s always the same response.
“No, not today. Are you all right, Catherine?”
I don’t say anything. I just lean back in the driver’s seat and close my eyes.
* * *
It was Valentine’s Day three years ago when Veronica and I met at a dive bar. There were paper hearts taped to the walls, all the overpriced drink specials dyed neon pink and rimmed with glitter. She and I were both alone until we weren’t. Until we saw each other.
With a grin, she bought me a drink before I could stop her, before I could buy her one first.
“To the Lonely Hearts Club,” she said, raising her gin and tonic to me, and I flashed her a smile, my cheeks turning red, because I only hoped I wouldn’t be lonely for much longer. At least not lonely for the night.
She kept me waiting, I’ll give her that. It wasn’t until two in the morning, the bartender covering up the taps, before Veronica invited me back to her loft apartment. I drove us there, and she didn’t say a word the whole time, her bright green eyes on the road ahead.
“It’s on the top floor,” she said when we pulled into the parking lot. Inside, her apartment was sterile and streamlined, all metal railings and hard edges. No houseplants, no pets, no sign of life at all.
“I move around a lot,” she told me, and didn’t say anything more about it. I could have asked then. I should have asked then.
But Veronica didn’t seem to worry about questions. She had more than enough answers of her own. In her bedroom, she kissed me until I couldn’t breathe, undressing me one careful piece of clothing at a time. My tight black jeans. My white tank top. Even the crow skull necklace I never took off, not even to shower, not even to sleep. She shattered me into pieces, and I loved every minute of it.
“This won’t last forever,” she said afterward, the sun sneaking up over the skyline, but with the sweet scent of her skin all over me, I pretended not to hear her.
* * *
It’s dusk now, the lights in the grocery store parking lot flickering on, one by one, and Veronica’s still missing.
I’ve called her cellphone a hundred times, leaving dozens of messages, my voice so thin and panicked I can’t possibly sound like myself anymore.
I don’t want to go to the cops. I don’t want to file a police report. That was the one constant in Veronica’s life: she didn’t like people in charge.
“You can’t trust them,” she always said, but I tell myself this is different. This is something I can’t do alone. Veronica needs me. And I need help.
I breathe deep and dial 911.
The men in uniform arrive over an hour later and barely search the store for Veronica before they haul me into the station, their shoulders broad, their eyes narrowed. They wouldn’t normally do this, not if I’d called to report a boyfriend or husband missing. They’d tell me to wait it out, that he’ll probably come home soon. I’m sitting in this station because I’m a woman and so is my partner. I’m already a deviant to them, just for loving who I love. And it doesn’t help that I told the truth: I explained on the phone how she disappeared in plain sight. They’ve already decided that I’m lying or crazy or responsible for this somehow. This is why Veronica wouldn’t have wanted me to call the police. She knows how they look at us.
They inch closer to me. “The woman who’s missing – you said she’s your girlfriend?”
“Fiancée, actually.” I fold and unfold my hands in front of me, my diamond ring catching the light. “We just got engaged last week.”
I’m still not used to saying it, not used to thinking it either. Fiancée. It’s such a simple word. Such a complicated one too, so many hopes and dreams wrapped up in one person.
Veronica, the woman I’m going to marry.
Veronica, the woman who vanished into thin air.
I ask about the surveillance cameras in the grocery store, but of course, it turns out they haven’t recorded anything in years.
“The owners just want to scare off shoplifters,” an officer confides in me, as if we’re bosom buddies now.
Everything goes silent in the station, and I hunch in my chair, waiting for it. For the question I know is coming next.
“Have you called her parents?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know them.”
The lead detective raises a sharp eyebrow at me. “You’re engaged to this woman, and you’ve never met her parents?”
“She doesn’t talk to them,” I insist. “Not for years. Not for anything.”
“Maybe you’re wrong,” he says. “Maybe she’s gone home. She could be reconciling with them.”
Instantly, my blood’s boiling. The way they think they know us. The way they know nothing at all.
“Fine,” I say and grit my teeth. “Call them.”
* * *
“No one’s ever looked at me the way you do,” Veronica said, her voice the sweetest serenade, her heart-shaped face resting on my chest. We were at my apartment this time, three months into a relationship she’d wanted to write off after three weeks. But we kept finding each other, at little dive bars and art galleries and warehouse parties around the city.
I held her closer, our bodies in a tangle in my bed. “And how exactly do I look at you?”
“Like I’ve got a future,” she whispered, “and not just a past.”
* * *
The detective searches an online database, finding a home phone number for Veronica’s parents in less than two minutes.
As he dials the number, I can’t help but roll my eyes. This is a waste of time. It’s been almost twenty years since Veronica spoke to her parents, walking out the door when she was twenty-one and never looking back. In the meantime, she’s been doing her best to keep out of their sight. No social media, at least not under her real name.
“I don’t want them to know anything about me,” she told me a dozen times before, and my chest aches, because it feels like I’m betraying her now, drawing them closer, giving away her location. I’ll explain everything when we find her. How I let the cops contact her family as a formality, so we could continue the search. So we could get her back.
She’ll understand. She has to understand.
The phone rings once before someone picks up. “Hello?”
“Is there a Veronica Brody available?” the detective asks.
A long pause. “That’s me,” says a crystalline voice on the other end. “I’m Veronica.”
Everything in me goes numb. This can’t be happening. This can’t be real.
I stumble forward, my feet knotted beneath me. “Let me talk to her.”
With a snort, the detective passes me the phone.
“Veronica?” I blurt out. “Is that you?”
“Yes, it’s me,” she says. “Who is this? Do I know you?”
The voice sounds so familiar, so real, but it’s still not quite right, something vaguely rancid in the timbre. Like it’s almost her. Almost Veronica.
I want to ask her something else, to ask her anything, but there’s a commotion in the background, and her parents are suddenly on the line.
The police put the call on speakerphone. “Can you confirm we were just speaking to Veronica Brody?”
“Of course,” says her mother. “Our daughter’s here with us right now.”
The detective leans in closer. “Did Veronica just return home today?”
An agonising moment, the silence stretching thin between us.
“Yes,” her father says at last. “She did.”
The cops exchange smug glances, as though collecting on a silent bet.
“That’s what we thought,” the detective says. “Her fiancée claims Veronica was estranged from both of you.”
A pair of harsh laughs, one from her mother and one from her father. “Our daughter doesn’t have a fiancée.”
My fists clench, my heart squeezed tight in my chest. “That’s not true,” I say, but it’s already too late.
“Thank you for your time,” the detective says and disconnects the call. Then he glances at me, pity in his eyes. “It sounds like maybe you were strangers to each other after all.”
I try to argue, try to explain, but they aren’t listening to me anymore. They never listened, so they certainly won’t hear me out when I tell them the one fact that can’t possibly add up.
It’s been three hours since Veronica went missing. Her parents’ house is ten hours away. There’s no airport nearby, not here or there, only a bus station and an interstate. She couldn’t have gotten there already. That couldn’t have been her that I talked to.
Could it?
* * *
It’s Sunday afternoon when I take the long drive up the East Coast, the sun glinting off the Atlantic, my heart gone cold in my chest.
The whole way, I don’t eat, don’t sleep, don’t make small-talk with strangers at gas stations. In fact, I tell myself I shouldn’t do this at all. Everyone else told me the same thing.
“If she wants to take off,” all my friends said, “you’ve got to let her go.”
Then they’d add, with sneers on their faces, “What kind of person disappears in the middle of the grocery store anyhow?”
“Someone I don’t know,” I said. Because that woman on the phone didn’t sound like Veronica.
Or at least she didn’t sound enough like Veronica.
After the call in the police station, Veronica didn’t text, didn’t email, didn’t send for her stuff. She quit her job over Zoom, and the Instagram account she had under a fake name was deleted by morning. Her whole life snuffed out in an instant. Now our apartment looks like an echo, everything in its place. Everything except her.
After three days, I found her parents’ address online. This is the only thing I can think to do. To go to her myself. I arrive in her hometown at dusk, parking on the street in front of the little Cape Cod on the corner, not knowing what to say or do next.
But then I don’t have to decide, because all at once, the front door cracks open, and there she is. Her hair’s different now, back to blonde, back to her natural colour, and she’s plain-faced in tennis shoes, but I’d recognise her anywhere.
I climb out of the car, my legs quivering. “Veronica,” I call out, and she turns to me. Instantly, I want to run to her. I want to hold her. I want to rescue her from this place that’s sucked her back in. But as I start forward, one careful step at a time, a heavy wave of nausea washes over me.
Up close, everything about Veronica shifts. A cleft in her chin that wasn’t there before. A longer face, more gaunt, more pallid. The green in her eyes faded to grey.
“Do I know you?” she asks as we stand two feet apart in the front yard, and I just stare back at her, because I’m suddenly not sure.
“What are you doing here?” Two strident voices in unison, their figures looming on the nearby porch.
Veronica’s parents. They’re exactly the way she described them. Her father with his eyes darker than sin, her mother with a smile like a snake’s. But that’s not what everyone else sees. They have a perfectly respectable life in a perfectly respectable neighbourhood. At a quick glance, they look so sweet, so apple pie American, and that’s precisely why they’re so dangerous.
“Please leave,” her mother says, and I open my mouth to argue, but Veronica is already walking away, disappearing back into the home she spent her whole life trying to escape.
* * *
“I try not to think about that house,” she said to me. It was our first Christmas together, my apartment decked out with stockings and garlands and mistletoe in every doorway, just for us, just for an excuse to kiss her. I was sitting at the table, writing out holiday cards to aunts and uncles and second cousins scattered across the country, family I rarely saw but still loved well enough. But Veronica had no one. Or at least no one she was eager to claim.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked, but I already knew the answer. There was only so much she could say about a past she wanted to forget. The late-night screaming matches, the broken dishes, the slurs about who she was and who she loved. The promises her parents made about how they’d never let her go, that she’d always be their baby.
“I can still feel them,” she said. “The way they’re trying to pull me back.” A harsh laugh. “I’m sometimes afraid to even think about them. Afraid if I let my guard down, they’ll be waiting for me.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, as How the Grinch Stole Christmas buzzed merrily on the television behind us. “You’re safe with me now.”
She forced a smile. “That’ll have to be enough,” she whispered.
* * *
I get the cheapest motel room in town, the kind you can rent by the hour, and once I’m inside, the rusted bolt on the door, I call the accounting firm where Veronica was temping.
“Did you see her when she quit?” I ask.
“Sure,” her boss says. “It was on a Zoom call.”
“But did you see her clearly?”
“I mean, it was Zoom,” she says, the white noise of the office crackling behind her. “It can be a little jumpy and pixelated, and her hair was different, but I’m sure it was her.”
I hesitate. “What if it was only someone who looked like her?”
A long, awkward moment. “Catherine, listen,” her boss says. “I know how hard breakups can be. Especially the way Veronica did it. Just leaving you standing there in a grocery store? I would be freaked out too.”
“She didn’t break up with me,” I say, but I already know how this sounds. A jilted girl who can’t take a hint.
I want her boss to come out here. I want her to see Veronica in the flesh, to see what’s happening to her. But I already know nobody will make this trip. That’s because nobody really cares enough about Veronica to bother.
“Thanks for your help,” I say and hang up the phone. I shouldn’t have expected anything different. Veronica always lived on the edge of the world. A punk rock band when she was in college. A punk rock life even once she finished her degree, jobs coming and going, friends flitting in and out of her orbit, never staying long enough to get to know her. Just how she liked it.
“It’s safer that way,” she used to tell me. Even on the day she disappeared, most of the people I called were my acquaintances, not hers. They only knew her because I did. There’s nobody left to corroborate who she was.
Nobody but me.
* * *
The next morning, I wait until both her parents have left for work. Then I return to Veronica’s house and knock on her front door.
A stranger in my lover’s body answers. “You again,” she murmurs, the quiet look on her face as inscrutable as the sea. “You think you know me, don’t you?”
I gaze back at her. “I’m not sure anymore.”
She leans against the doorway, her arms crossed. “My parents are talking about calling the cops on you. They say you’re delusional.”
“Do you think I am?”
She watches me for a moment before shaking her head. “No,” she says. “I think you’re lonely.”
I wheeze out a laugh. “I think you’re right.”
“I know how that feels,” she says. “We’re all in the Lonely Hearts Club, right?”
My breath corkscrews in my chest, because this feels like Veronica. This feels like the woman I love. The words are suddenly slipping from my lips before I can stop myself.
“Would you like to get coffee with me?”
At first, I’m sure she’ll tell me no. I’m sure she’ll slam the door in my face, sealing me out of her life, out of the truth. But then something shifts in her, and she smiles.
And she says yes.
* * *
Veronica chooses a little place downtown, and we sit together at a corner table, sipping black coffee out of oversized mugs. I stare at her, the way her face is too long, too pale. It’s not her. It can’t be her.
“So you quit your last job over Zoom?”
“I guess so.” She takes another sip of coffee. “I don’t really remember the place very well. I wasn’t there for long.”
That’s at least true. Veronica never held onto jobs for more than a few months at a time. Her whole life, she was ready to run.
But that’s the problem: she was always ready to run away from her past, not straight toward it. Coming back here was the last thing she wanted.
“You were living in the city, right?” I ask. “What about your apartment?”
“I must have moved out.” She gives me a coy shrug. “Like I said, it’s all a bit of a blur.”
I turn away, pain welling up in my eyes. She doesn’t remember anything. She’s no one to me now. And I’m no one to her.
But when I glance back at her, my chest tightens, because there she is. Veronica, my Veronica, the woman I woke up next to every morning for three years. Her hair’s still blonde, but everything else about her has returned. Her heart-shaped face. Her bright green eyes.
Then a cappuccino maker hisses in the background, and she jolts toward the sound, and suddenly, that visage is gone, and she’s only a stranger again.
This isn’t Veronica. This is Veronica. I can’t decide for sure.
We finish our coffee in silence. She looks ready to make an excuse, a reason to get away from me, but instead, she asks a question I’m not expecting. “Can I see a picture?”
“Of what?”
“Your fiancée,” she says. “The one you lost.”
My hands shaking, I pull my phone out of my pocket and scroll through the images of us together, showing her dozens of them. Hundreds even.
“But that isn’t me.” She takes my phone, holding a photo of us together next to her own face. “Does this look like me?”
“Sometimes,” I whisper. “Sometimes it looks like you.”
On the table next to her, her own phone buzzes. A new phone, one without the black glitter case, no crack through the middle of the screen. Another piece of her refurbished life. A gift no doubt from her parents.
She scrolls through the message. “It’s my mom,” she says. “She’s trying to set me up with a guy from their church.”
This sucks the air right out of my chest. “I bet she is,” I murmur.
Veronica was going to marry me. Now her parents are doing their best to make sure she’ll marry someone else. A nice boy for their nice girl.
I drive her home, my hands tight on the wheel. Her parents still aren’t back from work, so she invites me inside and gives me a tour of the house. The place stinks of cinnamon potpourri and beef stroganoff, the curtains all drawn, as if protecting a secret. The dated orange couch is covered in plastic, and the turntable against the wall has a stack of records next to it, Barry Manilow’s Greatest Hits on top.
“The house that time forgot,” I say, and Veronica chirps up a laugh.
“My family likes to reminisce about the past, that’s for sure.”
In the living room, there’s an old family portrait on the wall. Veronica was no more than five years old then. I stare at her face, that innocent face, doing her best to force a smile through the tears she won’t let fall.
She fidgets in the doorway. “You don’t like my parents, do you?”
I heave out a ragged breath. “You never liked them either.”
A flash of pain on her face, as if she’s remembering something. Her jaw sets, and she glances at the picture on the wall. “They don’t look like monsters,” she whispers.
I only shake my head. “They never do.”
* * *
“I don’t have any scars on the outside,” Veronica said. “That’s why nobody believes me.”
The two of us were curled up in the bedroom of our new apartment, the ceiling fan whirring above us, the eggshell white walls bare with possibility.
I entwined my fingers with hers. “I believe you.”
She exhaled a defeated laugh. “You’re the only one.”
But I told myself one person could be enough. This was our new apartment, our new future. Anything was possible now.
“This will be all right,” I told her, and she smiled like she almost believed me. Together, we settled into a routine, bingeing reruns of Mad Men and CSI, ordering takeout from the Italian restaurant down the street, gnocchi for her, linguini for me. The two of us opting to stay in for the weekend and put together 1,000-piece puzzles on the dining room table, the pictures of faraway places. Of oceans and lighthouses and palm trees on desert islands. The two of us dreaming together, planning together.
“We’re like an old married couple,” Veronica said, and all I could do was grin back at her.
But then there were nights when it all came crashing back on her. She’d awaken in the dark, soaked with sweat and grief, crying out from a nightmare that wouldn’t end.
“Sometimes, it’s like they’re all around me,” she whispered, holding me tighter, as though I could anchor her against the world. “Like they’re thinking of me. Like they’re pulling me back to them.”
“They don’t get that choice,” I promised her.
“What if you’re wrong?” she asked, fear pinwheeling in her eyes. “What if I’m the one who doesn’t get the choice?”
* * *
Veronica meets me every day for a week, always sneaking out when her parents aren’t looking. A forty-year-old woman who still needs a permission slip.
“They’re not like other moms and dads,” she confides to me over club sandwiches at the downtown deli.
“I know,” I say and do my best not to grit my teeth.
I ask her about her plans. When she wants to move out or get a job or start a life.
“I don’t know,” she whispers. She still doesn’t remember me. She doesn’t remember anything, the last two decades of her life a vague mist in her mind. But sometimes, when she turns her head just right, her eyes brighten, and she’s still in there, flickering in and out like a firefly glow.
“Please,” I say. “Try to remember.”
“I am,” she insists, but it’s doing no good.
It’s late in the afternoon when she invites me inside again and leads me up to her room. We sit on her bed, our thighs touching, a ceiling fan spinning above us. I glance around at the bubblegum pink walls, a CD player on the nightstand, a Blink-182 poster sagging in the corner. This place is still decorated for a teenager. For the person she was when she left this house.
“Don’t you think any of this is strange?” I ask. “The way your whole life seems to have stopped. The way your parents are okay with that.”
“All of this seems strange,” she says. “But I don’t know what to do about it, Catherine. I don’t even know what’s happening.”
I start to say something, to tell her to leave with me, to leave right now, but a shadow passes over our faces, and the whole world seizes up around us.
Her mother, standing in the doorway, her gaze already black with rage. “Go downstairs, Veronica,” she says. “Now.”
With her head down, Veronica does as she’s told, disappearing out into the hallway.
But I’m not like her. I won’t back down so easily. “This is wrong,” I say, “and you know it.”
“Maybe,” her mother says. “But you won’t take her from us again.”
“Again,” I murmur, my guts tightening. That’s as close to a confession as I’ll ever get. And it’s one that nobody but me will believe.
Across the room on the bright pink wall, there’s a photograph of Veronica. She must be around twenty-one in the image.
“That’s right before she left home, isn’t it?” I ask, and judging from the way her mother grimaces, I know I’m right.
I edge across the room, inspecting the picture closer. It was taken at an odd angle, her face looking a little longer than usual, her hair a little blonder.
“That’s how you remember her,” I say slowly, understanding it all at once. That’s why Veronica looks the way she does, a face that’s not quite her own. Her parents don’t know what she really looks like. They don’t know who she is. All they remember is the girl who left home twenty years ago. She’s their own makeshift creation, a Frankenstein’s monster of a daughter, cobbled together with half-forgotten memories and faded Polaroids tucked in the back of yellowed photo albums.
“Why now?” I ask, sorrow churning through me.
Her mother gives me that snake’s smile. “Why not?”
It’s just like Veronica always feared. Maybe for one fleeting moment in the grocery store, she accidentally let her guard down. Maybe she thought of home. And maybe that was all they needed. After years of wanting to drag her back, to make her their own, to turn her into the obedient girl they expected her to be, they finally got their wish.
A parent’s love. We say it like it’s a good thing, like it’s so beautiful and binding. We never think of the consequences, of what happens when someone takes it too far. When they won’t let go.
“Get out of here,” her mother seethes, pointing to the door. “Before I call the police.”
I start out into the hallway, but Veronica’s waiting there, her eyes wide and verdant. She overheard everything. It’s not much, but it’s enough.
“Pick me up at midnight,” she whispers and squeezes my hand.
* * *
“You can’t fight blood,” Veronica once told me. “Everywhere you go, it’s inside you. You can run your whole life – you can run a thousand miles – but you can’t escape yourself. You can’t escape family.”
“That’s not true,” I said and held her close. “You’re here with me now. We’re here together.”
* * *
Veronica is waiting on the sidewalk at midnight, the streetlight limning her in a halo. She climbs into the passenger’s seat empty-handed, and we start down the street.
“This is probably pointless.” She won’t look at me. “They got me back once. They’ll just do it again.”
“Maybe,” I say. “We’ll drive for a little while. We’ll see how far we can get.”
The dark highway unfurls before us, neither of us speaking a word for a long time.
“I still don’t remember you,” she says at last.
“I know,” I whisper, my heart twisting in my chest. All those years together, erased in an instant. Erased for good.
Together, we head out of town, past the signs for the city limits and the county line and the Last Stop for Gas in the State. Next to me, Veronica’s face is shifting in the moonlight, between who she is and who they want her to be.
“And if they do pull me back?” Her faded eyes are on me now. “What then?”
I smile at her, at that face that’s everything and nothing at the same time.
“I’ll remember you,” I say. “I’ll remember for the both of us.”
“And you’ll come back for me?”
“Always.”
“That’ll have to be enough,” she whispers.
Somewhere behind us, they’ve noticed she’s gone. There are probably breaking dishes and a late-night screaming match and slurs about who she is and who she loves.
But right now, Veronica’s not thinking of them. Her hand finds mine in the dark, the two of us tethered together. I hold her tight, and she holds me too, and with her bright green eyes on the road ahead, neither one of us is letting go.