Leo had argued back and forth about how these distinctions would label every parent a “narcissist” or a “borderline” or something equally onerous. Maybe Judy Martin was just a shitty mother, or a selfish bitch. That was how they managed to hide from the world. Exactly like that. But he would not be swayed. And without the backup from the lead investigator, the theory had been dismissed.
But she was not wrong.
She heard the echoes now as she entered the Martin house. She was certain of it. A story had unfolded here—a story aboutCass, a story about Emma. Judy Martin had a starring role. And maybe Jonathan Martin. Maybe his son, Hunter. And it was more than a little troubling that this story was not among those being told—not by Cass or Judy or even Owen. Cass kept insisting that her mother be present for her interviews. It was as if she didn’t want to talk about the past, to tell the one story that most needed to be told.
Yes. Abby was certain.
The only question that remained in her mind—what did this mean for finding Emma?
SEVEN
Cass
I have always liked the expression “rude awakening.” It’s one of those perfect expressions that says everything about something in very few words.
The first time I heard it was during my parents’ divorce. The woman who talked to us about where we should live said it to me during one of our meetings. I had already told her that I thought we should live with my father, and why I thought that, and she kind of smiled and leaned back in her chair.
She asked me if my father had told me to say those things about Mr. Martin and his son, about how I felt weird around them and about how Hunter looked at Emma. And she asked whether he told me to say things about my mother that were unmotherly. I told her no, and that I had not said these things to my father, ever, so how could he have told me to repeat them? But I could see she didn’t believe me. She told me how it was very common for parents to coach their children during a custody fight and how shesees it all the time.She said it was hard for her to believe me because Mr. Martin was very genuine in his desires to make a nice family for us and because my mother had devoted herentire life to raising us, giving up her career and her life in New York to be a stay-at-home mother.
Mrs. Martin cleaned up very well for the custody fight. She stopped sleeping late and napping and began driving us to school every day. She made us hot food for breakfast and sometimes even did our laundry herself. She came to every event at the school, cheering like a crazy fan, and she made us do our homework the minute we walked in the door. Our house was spotless and orderly. And she and Mr. Martin stopped drinking before five o’clock and going into their bedroom during the day.
I suppose I should have been grateful for this. Our mother was finally acting like the kind of mother we saw when we went to our friends’ houses and the kind of mother our half brother, Witt, had, which is why Witt is one of those people who does not have a scream inside him.
It was hard to imagine Witt having this other, normal life because we never saw him in that life. Before our father and mother got divorced, we saw Witt those ninety-six hours a month when he came to stay with our father for his visitation, and after the divorce, we saw him for ninety-six hours at our father’s new house when we went to visit him. The rest of the time, he was with his mother and we were not a part of that life. But he described it in a way that made sense of things, and it was that sense of things that made it impossible for me to be grateful for our mother’s sudden turnabout during the divorce.
This isn’t normal, Cass,Witt said to me one night when he had come for a weekend visit. It was before the divorce, and our mother had dragged our father out to the club for dinner.The way you and Emma take care of yourselves—it’s not normal. Most kids wake up to breakfast and a ride to school. They come home to dinner and clean clothes and someone hassling them about their homework andturning off the TV or getting off their video games. It’s not like it makes you happy all the time. But here, I always have one eye open. When I go home, I close both eyes at night.
I used to have to imagine what that would be like, to have someone watching over me. To close both eyes at night. When the custody battle happened, and our mother did start doing all those things for us, I still kept one eye open. And that was when I understood what Witt was trying to tell me. It wasn’t about the things he described. I know there are a lot of kids whose parents work all the time and have to do the things Emma and I did for ourselves. But they still close both eyes. It’s not the many things. It’s the one thing that’s behind the many things. I don’t even know what to call it. It didn’t matter that Mrs. Martin started doing our laundry and checking our homework, because she was only doing it for herself, for the case. It was not for us—that was the one thing that was still missing.
Emma didn’t seem bothered by this the way I was. She started wearing three outfits a day and throwing them on the floor of the laundry room. She wasted food so we ran out of things before the housekeeper was coming. One time she even poured out an entire gallon of milk, right down the drain. And she created stuff to do that required rides and waiting around. She joined the cast of a school play. She started playing field hockey again. She started a study group that met at the library.
She came to me one night the way she used to do, after our mother was asleep. She crawled into my bed, under the covers, and pressed her cheek against my cheek. I could feel her heart beating fast like she was excited, and I could feel her face smiling against my skin.
Did you see the look on her face when I told her I needed a ride to rehearsal at six and then a ride home at eight? Wait until she has tocome to the show on both a Friday and Saturday night. She’ll miss the whole weekend at the club. And I signed her up to help with costumes!
Emma was making her pay, and it made her happy.
When it stops and she stops taking care of you, Cass, I’ll do it. You know that, right? I’ll always take care of you.
I felt my own heart beating faster then because even though I didn’t know if she actually would take care of me, if she would be able to even if she tried, she meant it with her whole heart.
I closed both my eyes that night.
Our father was not happy. He nearly went insane watching all this unfold. He would pace back and forth, his face bright red, talking to his lawyer on the phone, trying to explain that everything our mother was doing was a charade.Hehad driven us to school every morning.Hehad gone to the events, and gone alone.Hehad supervised our homework, coached our sports teams, watched movies with us on Saturday nights. He had moved out only to prevent fighting in front of us, and now he never got to see us. This woman from the court was coming into our lives, looking at one picture, a snapshot, and deciding our fate based on a façade, a lie. She couldn’t, or didn’t want to, see all the other pictures taken on all the other days when Mrs. Martin hadn’t prettied us all up for the lens.
My mother used to hire a professional photographer every fall to take our portraits. He came all the way in from the city and charged not only for his time, but also for the black-and-white prints that would come to hang in white wooden frames on the walls of our hallway upstairs.
The hallway has a balcony on the other side, which opens to the foyer below. My mother liked that people could see from the foyer to the wooden railing that lined the balcony and then just above it to the wall of portraits. There were over thirty of them bythe time Emma and I disappeared, starting from when we were born to that last fall when Emma was seventeen and I was fifteen.
I used to wonder what people thought when they saw those photos from the foyer, people who didn’t know us well enough to come upstairs, but could see our photos from the foyer as they were greeted by Mrs. Martin at the front door. The photos were so expensive and so beautiful—our faces always looked peaceful and angelic. Some of the worst fights between Emma and our mother came on the days of the photos. Every time the photographer came, Emma would refuse to wear what she was told or to put her hair back or to smile. You could not know that from just looking at them from below. And you would think that the person who went to all this trouble to pay for these pictures and frame them just right and hang them just so must cherish their subjects more than life itself.
That’s how I felt about the woman from the court. How she was seeing only the pictures that my mother had hung on the wall and drawing conclusions from them that were not even close to the truth. Just like the guests who caught glimpses of us from the foyer.
My father eventually conceded, settling the case and making us live with Mr. Martin and Hunter. The woman had recommended this to the court, and fighting her would mean another year in a legal battle, making me and Emma talk to more people and take all kinds of psychological tests. Our father said he would have to call witnesses at a trial, including friends and relatives, and try to get them to say bad things about Mrs. Martin and how the woman had told him that all of that would be very harmful to me and Emma. He said he was settling to save us from more pain. When he told me this, I wanted to scream at him,No! I want to fight! Lead me into battle and let me get bloody!He was ourgeneral and we were his soldiers and I, for one, was willing to die for the cause.
I would not learn until years later, after combing through my past with Witt, that what my father was really afraid of had nothing to do with me and Emma. He had become so upset about the affair and the divorce that he had started smoking pot again the way he did in high school. My mother had no proof, but she knew my father very well and she was very clever. Her lawyer threatened to file a motion to force my father to take a drug test. He surrendered the next week. Looking back, I think it would have led me to the same conclusion about my father, and that is that as much as I loved him, he was a weak man. I don’t think it matters that his weakness made him smoke pot to ease his pain rather than the fact that he was just weak. The result was the same for me and Emma.
The woman said to me,It can be a rude awakening to see the truth about your parents during a divorce. People will stoop to low levels just to punish their spouse for leaving them.I knew what she was implying—that our father was making up all these bad things about Mrs. Martin and these good things about himself because he wanted her to pay for cheating on him and leaving him. But because I knew the truth, because I knew what all the other pictures looked like—the ones that didn’t make it to the wall in our hallway, the ones that were never even taken at all—the rude awakening was not what she had said, but instead the realization that grown-ups can be wrong, they can be stupid and inept and lazy at their jobs, and that they won’t always believe you even when you are telling the truth. And when they have power over you, these stupid, inept people who can’t see what’s right in front of them, when they don’t believe you when you tell them, bad things can happen.
