As soon as she could, Tabitha retreated into Davy’s bedroom, the place she’d wanted to go since hearing the sheriff’s news that morning. She’d wanted to be alone with him, or as close to him as she was able to be.
They’d kept his room intact. At first because they’d truly believed he’d be coming back, and how would it look if they’d turned his room into a guest bedroom? If he’d come home to find they’d removed all his personal effects just because he’d been gone too long? And then it became, at what point did you give up? When did you pronounce that he was never coming back? It wasn’t like they needed a guest room anyway.
Over the years his room had become something of a shrine, not just to Davy but to her activism regarding missing children. There were clippings of interviews and photographs of various politicians and minor celebrities who’d shown up to this hearing, to that fundraiser. There were the photos of her at the North Carolina capitol and at the U.S. Capitol in Washington. There were the missing posters of Davy, the various age progressions of him lined up at age fifteen, age eighteen, age twenty-one, and age twenty-five. They’d spent their own money for some of those, but to Tabitha it was no different from commissioning a portrait. She’d rationalized that it was just reallocating all the money she hadn’t spent for school pictures through the years, pictures of her son as he might’ve been instead of as he was.
But now they knew he’d never been any of those ages. The theory was that he’d been killed within hours of the abduction. She reached up to tear those photos from the wall, intending to shred them with her bare hands. But as her hand got close to Davy’s face, she softened and, instead, reached out to caress his cheek, remembering as she did how baby soft his skin had been, even at eleven.
Small for his age, he’d still been a long way from adolescence when he’d been taken, his round face and unshed baby fat making him look much younger than he really was. She stood there stroking the photo and thought of being the first person to greet him when he’d entered the world.
When Thaddeus was born, the doctor held him aloft as he’d screamed his indignation at being evicted from his cozy, warm refuge into the glaring white lights and coldness of the delivery room. But with Davy everything had been different. Because they’d been new in town, they’d had no help when she went into labor early, so Daniel had stayed home with Thaddeus and waited for her mother to arrive from Ohio, hoping her labor would last long enough that he’d make it in time. But Daniel had missed his son’s birth, a disappointment she knew he carried with him to this day. Just another time, he’d said to her late one night toward the end of their marriage, he hadn’t been there for Davy.
But Tabitha hadn’t minded being alone for Davy’s birth. In fact, she treasured the time. She’d expected another angry, red-faced tiny human. But beyond a few initial sputtering coughs, Davy hadn’t made a sound. Because she thought all babies cried at birth, she’d panicked, asking the doctor and nurses if he was ok. As they put him, bundled and warm and utterly content, in her arms, they’d assured her he was just fine. And so it was that she’d been the only one in the family there to welcome Davy. It had been, in its own way, the perfect reception.
Her initial meeting with Thaddeus had been an investigation of the other person with a sense of “Who are you?” complete with all the wariness and uncertainty that comes with any introduction. But with Davy, mother and son had relaxed into each other, each seeming to say, “Oh, I know you.” She couldn’t recall any noise as that transpired; it was as if the world had fallen away. It was one of the most holy moments of her life.
As she stood in Davy’s room she imagined that, in heaven, God and the angels had paused to watch the scene of his birth. That God had said to the angels, “This one’s special. He won’t be there for long.” She lowered herself to Davy’s bed, pulled his pillow to her face, and grieved a loss she finally had to accept. Though she had returned to this room many times, her son never would.
* * *
A presence in the room awoke her. Disoriented, she struggled to sit up, frightened by the large form looming over her, confused about where she was. But before she could get a word out, she felt a blanket falling over her.
“Shh,” the figure said. “It’s just me.” Daniel. She blinked him into focus. “You fell asleep. You looked cold.” She wasn’t surprised she’d fallen asleep. She’d been exhausted from the moment the sheriff woke her. She’d lumbered through the day like a zombie, all sensation but no feeling.
She looked down to see that it was Davy’s airplane bedspread Daniel had covered her with. She was in Davy’s room. She remembered curling up on his bed and sobbing herself to sleep. The bedsprings protested as Daniel lowered himself on the edge of the little twin-size bed.
“I’m going to go home,” he said. “Unless you need me to stay.”
Sorrow bloomed in her chest, spreading its tendrils down into her stomach and out into her shoulders. She had to admit, she’d liked having them all there, enduring this together like the family they’d once been. Of course she’d known it would end, but she wasn’t ready.
“No, it’s ok,” she said, her voice still thick with sleep. “There’s really no need for you to be here anymore.” In a factual sense, this was true. And the emotional sense no longer applied.
“Thank you,” she said. “For speaking today. I just didn’t have it in me.”
He looked down. “I should’ve done that a long time ago. I shouldn’t have made you do all the talking for us. It wasn’t fair to you.”
She leaned back on her elbows. “I didn’t mind, back then. It made me feel like I was doing something.” She thought about all of Daniel’s searches, of the late-night phone calls with the psychic, of him hanging on her every word. He’d wanted to feel like he was doing something too. If only they could have done something together. Maybe if they had, he wouldn’t be returning to his own place now, leaving her alone in the house they once shared.
“You sure you don’t need me to stay?” Daniel pressed. She wondered if perhaps he wanted her to ask him to stay. Don’t be ridiculous, she scolded herself. He had a life of his own to get back to, someone waiting for him. With a pang she wondered if he would bring the girlfriend to the funeral. Probably, she decided. And that’s to be expected, she told herself.
“Go,” she said. “I’m fine.”
Daniel gave a little laugh. “Now, we both know that isn’t true.”
She smiled. “Ok. As fine as I can be. How’s that?”
His smile disappeared and he leaned forward, crooking one arm around her as, for the briefest moment, he pulled her to him and planted a kiss on top of her head.
“You always were,” he said into her hair. He pulled back and she saw tenderness in his eyes. “Go back to sleep,” he said. She watched him rise from the bed and walk toward the door. As it clicked shut, she closed her eyes and did exactly what Daniel ordered.
* * *
The doorbell rang, startling her out of sleep for the second time. Confused, she looked around to see that it wasn’t the middle of the night as she had supposed. Instead, night was just beginning to fall, the darkness gathering at the edges to begin its slow creep inward, pushing the light back.
She guessed she’d been asleep an hour, tops. She waited for the sounds of someone else in the house going to the door, the protesting sound of it being tugged open. But no sounds came. The doorbell rang a second time and Tabitha, with an angry sigh, got up to see who was there. Maybe Anissa was back. Maybe some stupid reporter was daring to come to the door. Maybe it was just another casserole delivery.
She hurried to the door and pulled it open to reveal . . . no one. The reporters turned at the sound of the door opening, their faces eager at the hope of something happening. She stood there blinking at them as they blinked back. One of them snapped a photo she hoped they wouldn’t use. She hadn’t looked in a mirror, but she knew she looked frightful. Seeing her, one of them, a woman, broke away from her conversation and began striding toward her, purposeful.
She almost closed the door in the woman’s face. But something—perhaps intuition, perhaps mere curiosity—made her hold the door open to see what she would say.
“Hi,” the woman said. She was pretty with the fresh face and bright eyes of a young person that life had not yet beaten down. Tabitha knew she’d had the same look at one point in her life.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” the woman continued. “I was just asking them”—she glanced over her shoulder at the members of the press—“If they knew if you guys were home. I tried calling first but got no answer.”
Calling? Tabitha was confused. Why would a reporter expect to call and get an answer? They’d made it plain that they would make statements only through the police.
She peered inside the house, over Tabitha’s shoulder, then looked back at her expectantly. “So is Thaddeus here?”
“Thaddeus?” Tabitha asked.
The woman wrinkled her brow. “Didn’t he tell you I was coming?”
“No,” Tabitha said and hoped she sounded kind even as irritation at Thaddeus sparked inside her. “He must’ve forgotten.”
She gave the girl a second once-over and restrained herself from rolling her eyes. It was just like Thaddeus to have some woman show up, now, in the middle of everything, without asking if it would be an inconvenience. Kristyn was arriving tomorrow with her children and husband in tow. There was, she thought with a pang, a funeral to plan. She could not add a strange houseguest.
The woman’s face turned a shade darker underneath the porch light. “I’m so sorry. You must be so confused, me just showing up here like this, at a time like this.” She extended her hand and Tabitha shook it.
“I’m Nicole, Thaddeus’s publicist. His editor asked me to come here, just to help navigate everything, assist with the press and . . . whatever needs to be done. She said she was going to inform him that I’d be coming.” A pained expression crossed her face. “Gosh, I hope she did.” She chewed her lip. “I’m not sure he’s going to be happy, me surprising him like this.”
Tabitha suspected there was more to this story. The thought of Nicole being an unpleasant surprise for Thaddeus caused her to open the door wider. “Please, come in,” she said with a smile. She thought it was perhaps the first time she’d smiled that day and was grateful to the girl for providing a moment—however fleeting—of levity, even if it was at her firstborn’s expense. She loved her son, but she also recognized that he could benefit from the occasional dose of humility, and she was happy to be complicit in this one.
She directed the woman to have a seat so she could go fetch Thaddeus. As she turned toward his room, she glanced over her shoulder at the woman perched on her couch, looking stricken. She had identified herself as his publicist, but Tabitha had a feeling she was more than that to Thaddeus, or could be.
She entered Thaddeus’s room without knocking and, as expected, found him curled up on his bed, fast asleep, oblivious, looking like a living, breathing age progression of the boy he’d been when he lived in this room—just elongated, widened, darkened. He slept on top of the covers, as if he’d not expected to fall asleep or stay that way. As if sleep had come for him against his will.
She lowered herself onto the side of his bed, a queen-size they’d bought him when he’d outgrown his twin. The bedspread was the same one he’d had in high school, a blue-and-white seersucker she’d chosen. She’d put up a wallpaper border with sailboats and hung a painting of the ocean on the wall. She’d been proud of her decorating efforts, surprising him when he returned from baseball camp the summer before Davy disappeared. Instead of thanking her for her efforts, he’d grumbled about it. He wanted a less-coordinated bedroom, something nondescript, a place he could hang posters of nearly naked girls and rock stars. But she’d told him to get over it. And, she guessed, somewhere along the way, he had. Because, like Davy’s, the room had never changed.
She placed her hand on his arm, and he opened his eyes, startled. “Jeez, Mom, you scared me.” He rolled over, giving her his back. “I’m trying to sleep,” he grumbled.
She poked him in the bicep with her finger, admittedly a bit too hard. “You can’t go back to sleep,” she said. “You have a guest.”
He turned back to face her, his thick, dark eyebrows connecting just over the bridge of his nose. “Guest? Who?”
“She says she’s your publicist. That your editor told you she was coming.” She tried to keep an accusing tone out of her voice, refrained from saying, “Some warning might’ve been nice.”
He groaned and buried his head in his pillow but continued talking, his voice muffled but audible.
“My editor mentioned it this afternoon, but she was in a hurry and gave me no details. I figured I’d find out more tomorrow.” He emitted something best described as a growl. Tabitha stood and took a few steps backward.
He turned and looked at her. “She’s here? Now?”
She nodded. “Do you want me to tell her to leave?”
He covered his face with his hands. “No.” The word came out like a plaintive moan. He sat up. “Will you tell her I’ll be there in a minute?”
“Sure,” Tabitha said. She left the room and went back to find Nicole intently pressing buttons on a BlackBerry that matched Thaddeus’s. She wondered if the publisher handed those out to everyone. “Sorry that took a bit. He was sleeping.”
Nicole stopped typing and dropped the device into her lap like she’d been caught doing something wrong. “Oh gosh, you didn’t wake him, did you?”
“Well, yes. I told him he had a visitor.”
Nicole looked nervous. “I could’ve just come back if he was sleeping,” she said. The same pained expression from before crossed her face. “I should’ve just waited to come tomorrow.” She leaned forward. “Was he mad?”
Tabitha gave her what she hoped was an encouraging smile even as she thought of Thaddeus’s deep growl. “Of course not. Just surprised, is all. Would you like some water? I can get you some water,” she offered, anxious for an excuse not to be in the room when Thaddeus entered. “Or tea. I could get us some tea?” She would take her time fixing the tea; she would snip mint from the spot by the back door where she grew it to add to the tea. By the time she came back, Thaddeus and Nicole would be past their awkward greeting.
“Yes, sure,” Nicole said weakly, no longer the confident young woman who had rung her doorbell. “That would be nice. Thank you.”
Tabitha nodded and walked through the kitchen and out the back door to the spot where the mint grew. She squatted to pluck some, wondering how long it had been since she did this, since she took the time to make something nice, to care about the added details like she once had.
Ignored, the mint patch had held on without her assistance. She was grateful it was still there despite her neglect. So many things left untended, too many things left to slip away. The words she wrote each week played in her mind: je ne regrette rien. Nothing could be more untrue. She laughed at herself as, clutching the mint, she went back inside to tend to their uninvited guest.