What if someone is keeping her in there?
I make my way to Joanna.
“Excuse me,” I say, my voice bridled, her back to me as I approach. She straightens and turns, and as she does, I’m taken aback by her hollowed-out cheeks and the wasting away of her body. Knobby collarbones bulge at the base of her neck; there are half-moon-shaped shadows beneath her eyes. It takes my breath away and I see another version of myself in a few years from now, one that scares me. “Are you Joanna?” I ask, my words a whisper.
She nods.
“I’m so sorry to bother you. I just... I’m Courtney,” I say, struggling to get my words out. “Reese—the girl we’re looking for—she’s my niece.”
“I know,” she says, explaining how she saw my car pull up before and how she saw me speaking to Detective Evans. “I’m sorry for what you’re going through,” she says. Then she sighs exasperatedly and adds, “I’m sorry.I shouldn’t have said that. It’s such a cliché, if not a completely inadequate thing to say.Sorry.When my daughter went missing, everyone wasso sorry.”
I feel her anger, her grief. “I heard about your daughter,” I tell her. “Someone in my group mentioned her.”
Before I can say more, a man comes up from behind, his face—like hers—sad, with sunken eyes, their slender bodiesnot only thin, but atrophied, like people who are dying, and they are, I think, not of any physical thing, but of anguish and grief. He sets a gentle hand on her shoulder. She turns and looks back at him, her smile sad and full of regret. “This is Sam, my husband,” she says before bringing her gaze back to me. Neither Sam nor Joanna can be much older than me, and yet it’s clear that tragedy has aged them, making them appear much older than they are.
“It’s nice to meet you, Sam.”
“This is Courtney,” she says to him. “Hers is the girl who’s missing.”
“Reese. My niece. Her parents—” I start to say, but I can’t get the words out. They get lodged in my throat like gravel, making it hard to speak and even harder to breathe. I see the blood on the walls again, Emily’s bent shape and the color of her skin, the same color as the mauve nail polish on her toes, taking me back to us getting pedicures together less than two weeks ago, in another lifetime, back when she was alive, sitting side by side on spa chairs, talking about things that don’t matter anymore, like her annoying coworker, some new diet she wanted to try that supposedly reverses signs of aging, and whether we should both get Botox.
“Will you tell me about your daughter?” I ask instead, changing the subject. “Will you tell me what happened to her?”
Sam closes his eyes for a minute. He breathes. When he opens his eyes, he says, “I’m going to go see if they need any help,” his stare distant and empty.
Joanna looks up at him and says, “I’ll catch up with you later,” before watching him go. “He doesn’t like to talk about it,” she says, once he’s far enough away that he can’t hear.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, the words slipping out, feeling guilty. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I shouldn’t have asked.”
“No. Please. Don’t be sorry.” Joanna pauses. When she speaksagain, she says, “I like talking about her. It keeps her alive in my mind. Kylie was bold, a free spirit,” which reminds me of Reese. She stares down at her empty hands. “It was five years ago this August that it happened, that she left us. There are days that the pain is so real and raw it feels like it was just yesterday, and then there are other times when I struggle to remember the sound of her voice or what her face looked like when she laughed, and it feels like it’s been an eternity since I last saw or held my child. They never found her.” She pauses, gazing up at the horizon, searching as she says, “She could still be out there somewhere. I’d like to believe that.” And then she brings her eyes back to mine and says, “Or maybe she’s not. Maybe she’s dead. They say mothers have some intuition about this, about whether their child is dead or alive, but I don’t. I don’t have that gift.”
“Did they ever have any suspects?”
“Some, but nothing that ever panned out. Without a body, it was hard to say what really happened to her. The police said they couldn’t be sure she hadn’t just run away, though I knew she hadn’t. She wouldn’t do that. Kylie was happy.”
I nod, wanting her to go on, to say more, and she does. “Kylie was eleven when she disappeared. She would be sixteen now, going on seventeen. Her birthday is next week. Every year, I bake a cake, red velvet because it was her favorite. Sam,” she says, turning to look at him in the distance. He’s rejoined his group, searching the forest floor for signs of Reese, combing through pine needles and leaves. “He wants nothing to do with it. Every year on her birthday, he leaves the house early and stays at work longer than he needs to because he can’t stand to be at home.”
She looks back at me. “Sam was the one who suggested we come today, to look for your niece. To be honest, I said no. I wasn’t sure I could do it, that I could mentally go back to those days of searching for Kylie. But Sam and I know what it’s like to lose a child. We know what you’re going through,” she says,and I feel grateful for her, to have someone here who knows what I’m experiencing and feeling.
“How do you survive it?”
She’s quiet at first. “It gets easier the longer they’re gone,” she eventually says. “But that’s when the guilt and the shame kick in, because it shouldn’t ever get easier. The day that Kylie went missing wasn’t all that different than this. In fact, it was almost exactly the same, sunny, warm with a gentle breeze. It was the summer that Kylie started her period and got her braces off, that she discovered boys and had her first crush,” she says, and I think of Cass at age ten, just a year or two younger than Kylie and not so far away from any of these things. Braces. Her period. Boys.
“Kylie was a wonderful contradiction at that age. She wanted to be independent, to wear makeup and real bras—not sports or training bras, but ones with wires and lace. But at the same time, she needed to sleep with her stuffed animals at night. She would climb into our bed during thunderstorms and lay in the space between Sam and me, her arm around my waist. She had a bin of Barbie dolls that she kept hidden under her bed in case she ever wanted to play with them alone, in private, so as not to let her friends see. She was growing up fast and excited about it, but she didn’t want to let go of her childhood either. Not yet.”
She hesitates before going on, the nostalgia transforming into something different, something darker.
“The not knowing,” she says, holding my stare, “is the hardest part. Even if the answers you get are not the ones you want, they’re still answers. Sam and I don’t have that. Maybe we never will.”
Reese
All of a sudden, he changes. His shoulders slouch, he cracks a smile. The tautness of his face disappears just like that. Like magic.
He laughs.
“I’m just fucking with you. You know that, right? I’m not really gonna hurt you,” Daniel says, his voice all of a sudden different too, and I believe him.
The smell of weed carries through the air. Up close, I see in his eyes that he’s stoned, not like super, super stoned, but he’s definitely been toking a joint.
