Maggie
When she felt the hand on her shoulder, Maggie thought it was part of her dream, in which she was in a museum, employed as a docent, shepherding students through exhibits as they kept trying to touch and upend masterpieces. Then, gathering consciousness, she blinked her eyes, sloughing off slumber, trying to wake.
“Emma?” she said, heart pounding, turning in the low light.
“It’s Sarah,” a soft voice whispered.
She exhaled her disappointment and sat up on one elbow. The room, still empty. The hall, still quiet.
Sarah sat down at the foot of the bed, barely making an impression with her thin frame. The soft waves of her brunette hair, even uncombed, tousled from sleep, shone in the light. She was one of those girls who hadn’t peaked yet, who would seem prettier every year.
“You didn’t answer your phone. I figured you might be here.”
“Yes,” Maggie said, sitting all the way up and rubbing her neck, “but if the police had their way, I’d be home. Or in an insane asylum. I can’t believe I slept through your call.”
“Well, you were exhausted, I’m sure.”
“These girls,” Maggie sighed, “are avoiding me.”
“They’re avoiding the police, to be honest. I mean there’s probably three illegal things just lying around. And girls are paranoid. At least that’s what the RA said when I called him. Asshat.”
“You should have called me, Sarah. Not him, me.”
Sarah looked down, just as she had when she was in middle school and Maggie had admonished the girls for shrieking in the car or throwing food in the kitchen or one of a hundred small annoyances that didn’t matter anymore.
“Yeah, well, I was hoping for a logical explanation first. Like her roommate snored so she’d moved down the hall. Or she had the flu and went to the health center.”
“There’s a little too much logic floating around for my taste. Too much logic, not enough hunch.”
“Hunch equals paranoia, I guess.”
“So, Sarah, is there anywhere around here that serves pancakes?”
Sarah smiled. Maggie knew pancakes were Sarah’s favorite, knew because she’d always told Maggie she made them better than her own mother, knew it from years of requests, years of making sure there was buttermilk in the fridge, baking powder, real maple syrup. Was there anything a mom wouldn’t do to make a kid eat happily, even if she wasn’t her own?
“I know a place,” Sarah said. “Not as good as yours, though.”
“Well, of course not.”
It was nearly 6:00 a.m., and the dorm was still empty, as were the hallway and common room. No one home still. The floor felt tacky beneath Maggie’s shoes, as if she needed another reason to be uncomfortable in the wedges. As they waited for the elevator, Sarah looked down at her feet, and Maggie shook her head.
“Long story,” she said.
“When in Rome?”
“Yes,” she sighed. “Something like that.”
Mabel’s Diner was on the south edge of campus, tucked underneath one of the school’s banners, lending it an official air. It proudly stated that it had been there for over fifty years, long before the campus sprang up around it, but it had clearly adapted for the students, serving breakfast all day, for one, and on the weekends, it was open twenty-four hours. And from the looks of it, it was staffed by waitresses who took no shit from drunk college kids but happily took their parents’ money and added gratuity to every check automatically. Smart.
The coffee was fresh and hot, and Maggie drank it gratefully. She ordered scrambled eggs and home fries; Sarah ordered a short stack and sausage and promised to give Maggie a bite of pancake. There were plenty of fancier things on the menu—s’mores waffles, pumpkin spice scones, and something truly Philadelphian, highlighted as the house special: scrapple pie.
“A meat pie made of scrapple?”
Sarah made a face. “Only boys are stupid enough to eat that.”
Maggie smiled. Anyone watching them—not that anyone was; the diner was empty—might think they were mother and daughter, with their long, dark hair, but if they looked closely, they’d see the awkward silences, the threads of guilt and anger that held them to the spot. Maggie had already admonished her for not calling her first, but Sarah seemed like something else was weighing on her. She took deep breaths between sips of her coffee, like she was gathering strength. It reminded Maggie of the night the girls had confessed they’d had a party when Maggie was out. Maggie had already known, of course, but she had wanted them to come clean, wanted them to suffer through that conversation, because that’s what growing up was all about. Difficult conversations. Now, she could see, they might be about to have another one.
“What is it, Sarah? What do you know?”
Sarah shook her head violently, as if she was trying to shake away a memory.
“Nothing specific,” she said. “Nothing at all, really.”
“What then?”
She shrugged her shoulders, sniffed away a tear. “I just…I know she wasn’t as happy at school as I was.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, my roommates are nicer than hers, more fun. More open. She was spending a lot of time alone in her dorm, and I wasn’t.”
“Well, that’s natural, that your experiences wouldn’t be identical.”
“That’s what my mom said, too.”
Maggie smiled. She didn’t know Sarah’s mother well, but she’d always liked her.
“I thought maybe it was the usual stuff, you know, borrowing clothes without asking, not doing dishes, or getting sexiled—”
“Sexiled?”
“When your roommate brings a guy home and locks you out?”
“Clever.”
“Yeah, it happens.”
The food arrived, and they each picked up a fork, paused, took bites. The eggs were creamy and the pancakes fluffy. Maggie took the offered bite, dipped it in more syrup, and nodded her approval. She was surprised by the force of her hunger. Some things didn’t change, didn’t stop, no matter what else was happening.
“But I…just feel as if I didn’t make enough time for her. Once, at a football game…” Her voice trailed off and cracked. “I feel like maybe she needed me, and I wasn’t there.”
Maggie reached across the table and took her hand. One of them had syrup on her fingers, and they stuck together a bit, which made both of them smile.
“I’m sure that’s not true,” Maggie said. Another mother would blame the first girl who confessed to contributing to the problem, but Maggie knew, instinctively, that this was not the girl to blame.
“We can’t be sure.”
“Did you miss a call in the middle of the night? Forget to answer a text last week?”
“No, never.”
“Well, honey, Emma knew you well enough to be honest with you. If she needed something or someone to help her, she would have told you.”
“Maybe.”
“Yes,” Maggie said firmly. “I know it.”
“Well, I think the same of you. That she would have told you.”
Maggie shook her head. “I’m not sure of that at all.”
“Then you know how I feel.”
They ate a few more bites. Outside, a few more students yawned as they walked down the sidewalk. The city was starting to come alive, inching toward 7:00 a.m. More people awake now, going somewhere. An 8:00 class. A breakfast meeting with a professor.
“So, tell me about this boy she hasn’t mentioned to me,” Maggie said.
“There’s no boy that I know of.”
“The police seem to think she has a boyfriend. Based on something someone told them.”
“Well, it wasn’t me.”
“She was working for the newspaper, though? Did you know that?”
“Yeah, I knew that. She was searching for something to write about, and she called me a while ago, saying she found it. Something juicy.”
“What?”
“That’s just it, she didn’t tell me. We were supposed to get coffee one day, and she cancelled, and I didn’t follow up and—” Tears filled her eyes.
“Sarah,” Maggie said. “That doesn’t sound like something to feel guilty about.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes things feel worse than they sound, you know?”
“I suppose.”
“During move-in week, we had this, I guess, psychology seminar? Where they explained that high-achieving kids are good at masking their problems. Everyone expects them to have it all together, so they act that way.”
“Is that how she was acting? Like everything was perfect?”
That didn’t sound like Emma to Maggie. Emma moped when things were wrong, got quiet. And when she was trying to lie or cover something up, she got chatty, nervous, overcompensated. And the blushing! Emma was not adept at hiding what she was feeling; she was actually terrible at it.
“No,” Sarah sighed. “I’m grasping at straws, I know.”
“How about this,” Maggie said. “Let’s both stop blaming ourselves. Because we can’t do anything about those missed coffee dates or missed signals. We can only go forward, pay more attention now.”
Sarah nodded.
“Gosh, I sound like a priest,” Maggie said.
Sarah laughed. “I wish more priests sounded like that,” she said.
Maggie thought of the church on campus, how she’d pointed it out to Emma on a map, saying that if she ever felt stressed or needed a quiet space in the midst of all these people living together, to remember that she could go there. To sit, reflect. That was Maggie’s primary worry, that her only child would not do well surrounded with other people. That she would feel encroached upon, overstimulated. Had she been right? Was that all this was? Was Emma somewhere holed up in an Airbnb just so she could be alone and could get some work done? Did she have a paper due, some reading to finish? Were the police right?
Maggie laid out this theory to Sarah, explained that the police believed Emma was staying somewhere else, on purpose, and just hadn’t told anyone.
Sarah shook her head with frustration. “She would have told us.”
“That’s what I thought, too. But onward. I’ll need some help, if you can spare it?”
“We need posters,” Sarah said. “We need searchers, we nee—”
“Yes.”
“I’ll help you,” she said. “And there’s an organization on campus that will help me get the word out.”
“Good.”
After breakfast, they went to the computer center and worked on large flyers, printed them out. Maggie bought plastic sleeves, thumbtacks, waterproof tape at the bookstore and gave most of the stack to Sarah. Maggie would cover the dorm area and head to the journalism building. Sarah would hit the rest of campus, focusing on the cafeterias, library, and student union.
They vowed to keep in touch, and as they hugged goodbye, each of them stifled a sob, nearly broke down.
“We have to stay strong,” Maggie whispered, and Sarah nodded.
Maggie went first to the journalism building, lingering outside the door until a boy headed for it, slipping in behind him. He glanced at her briefly, sizing her up as teacher or parent, not threatened. Not questioning. She brandished the posters, asked if he knew her daughter, and he said no. She asked if he worked on the paper, and he shook his head.
Inside, the corridors were quiet. The door to one classroom was open, a female teacher gesturing at the front of the room, and Maggie ducked away, out of sight. Kids might not think anything of an unfamiliar parent roaming the halls, but teachers were another problem entirely.
She stopped another student, a short girl whose backpack was stretched beyond the point of ballast, threatening to pull her over backward.
“Do you know where the newspaper offices are?”
“Third floor,” she replied.
“Great, thanks.”
“But they’re closed.”
“Closed?”
“Yeah, they distribute Tuesdays, so they always take Wednesday off.”
“Do you work for the paper?”
“My roommate does.”
Maggie pulled a poster from her stack, asked if she recognized her daughter, and the girl said no, then added wistfully, “She’s pretty.”
Maggie took a deep breath. Yes, her daughter was pretty. She had to be honest about that salient fact and how much it weighed on her. If you looked carefully, beyond the painted and polished archetypes of young women today, Emma, fresh-faced and healthy, was pretty. Many might see that in her. A certain person might prefer that. And that fact made Maggie both proud and very, very worried.
“Does she have a boyfriend?” the girl asked.
Maggie released a small shrug. “Maybe.”
“I bet she does,” the girl said.
“What’s your roommate’s name?”
“Liz Cameron.”
“Would you ask her if she knows Emma? Or where she might be?” She handed her the flyer, pointed out the phone number at the bottom.
“Sure,” she said. She took a picture of it on her phone, then handed it back.
Maggie headed up to the third floor. It was arranged differently than the other floors, with several classrooms combined in one. She pulled on the locked door, stared through the glass. She taped up a few posters, left.
She spent the rest of the day walking around, asking students if they’d seen Emma, if they knew anyone who worked on the paper or lived in Emma’s building. Thousands of kids on this section of campus alone, and she’d only connected with one person whose roommate worked on the paper. One.
At dusk, she went back to the dorm, slid in behind a group of girls, headed to Emma’s floor. She was hanging posters in the common room and outside the elevators when she felt a tap on her shoulder. The RA.
“Hi,” she said. “Are the roommates back?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Have you checked?”
“Look, Mrs. O’Farrell,” he said, then hesitated, took a deep breath.
“Yes?”
“You can’t be here,” he said. “Someone said you spent the night in the dorm. I don’t know how you got in but—”
“The door was open,” she said hotly. “Do you not counsel the girls in the dorm to lock their doors? Do they realize that someone could be kidnapped and go missing in a heartbeat?”
“We don’t know that Emma is actually missing,” he said with a sigh. “Please, we can’t have this rampant fear. We can’t have you whipping these girls into a frenzy. There are all these rumors about a rapist, about a serial killer. It’s no—”
“I,” she said forcefully, “am trying to find my daughter. And if I scare somebody else’s daughter into being careful along the way, well, great.”
“Look, you can’t be here. Only residents can be here. It’s completely against university rules, and the girls are complaining.”
“Oh, are they? The girls are unhappy that a mother dares to worry when her daughter is missing for days? Well, tell them to stuff it.”
“Look, the police are on top of this—”
“The police,” she said through gritted teeth, “are most certainly not on top of it.”
“I spoke to college administration, and they said—”
“Oh, you did, did you? Well, I think I need to go there next! Straight to President Leandros. Because I have rights, too! And you,” she said, poking him in the chest, “you are part of my problem.”
“Don’t touch me.”
She poked him again, sending him back a few inches, and turned to leave. She was aware of him making a call or taking one as she headed for the elevator. She pushed the button, and as she waited, the door to the stairs opened, and a security guard appeared.
“I’m leaving, don’t worry,” she said, but the man stood next to her, got in the elevator with her.
“I said I’m leaving,” she repeated.
She walked out of the building and sat on the bench outside.
“Ma’am, you have to leave campus,” he said.
“Fine,” she said. She stormed off. She thought about how much a hotel might cost. She thought about how much a disguise might cost and how she could sneak back to campus the next day to go to the journalism building.
She went to a bus shelter on the edge of campus and put up another poster, then sat down and waited for more students to come by. How long could she keep doing this alone? She decided to wait an hour, until it was dark, then sneak back.
Under cover of darkness, she felt more powerful. Long strides, head held high. The power of criminals, the strength of shadows. Anonymous in the invisibility of midnight. Dark sky, dark clothes, it added up to power, and she, with her early nights and her extra half glasses of wine that didn’t count, rarely made it past nine. She didn’t know this power any more. She only knew the weakness of twilight, the fading of willpower that came the moment she left the salon for home.
She curled up on the bench outside her daughter’s dorm and watched the door. The roommates had to come home eventually, if only to get clothes. It was dark. I’ll stay outside, she thought. And I’ll leave before it’s light.
She wasn’t sure when she fell asleep, but once again, a woman’s voice woke her. She opened her eyes, blinked. Dark shoes. Dark uniform pants. Dark hair. Olive skin, a mole near her mouth. The streetlight on now, illuminating everything about them both.
“Hello, Maggie, I’m G—”
Maggie held up one hand, stopped her. “I know exactly who you are.” She stood up, brushed herself off. “So I guess you’re here to help Kaplan get rid of me?”
“Hell no,” Gina said. “I’m here to help you get rid of Kaplan.”