“What did the police say?”
“It just so happened there was a camera at that train crossing. The police looked at the surveillance footage. Sam,” she explains, looking so sad my heart breaks, “wastelling the truth. He was there. The police saw his car and they saw him—his face—through the windshield. His worst transgression was being on his phone while driving, because there was, indeed, a train stopped on the tracks, just like he said.”
I ask, “Did he know you went to the police?”
“Yes. The police spoke to him. They asked him questions.”
“Was he upset?”
“No. Sam almost never gets upset. He said he understood. He was so forgiving, in fact, that I hated myself for days for even thinking it. If anyone was to blame, it was me. I was the only one home at the time, and Kylie was supposed to be here with me. She’d gone to her friend Abby’s house that day. She rode her bike there, and then later she left on her bike to come home. Her friend saw her leave. Abby remembers how they raced down the street, until eventually she stopped and waved, and Kylie kept going, riding away with no hands, so that I’ve had this image of Kylie for all these years, laughing, tempting fate, her arms held out to the sides, her hair getting carried by the wind.”
I picture that, and the image gets cemented in my mind.
“The night that Kylie disappeared, I told her to be home by five o’clock for dinner. She never came and at first I was upset that she didn’t listen, that dinner was getting cold on the table and that neither she nor Sam was home to eat it,” she says, pausing before going on. “I don’t know if I can ever forgive myself for that. For being angry at her instead of knowing that something was wrong, that something terrible was happening to my child in that moment.”
“How would you have known?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. Instinct? Sam never blamed me. He was never angry that I sat here all that time, feeling upset, instead of getting in my car and going to look for her or calling over to Abby’s house to ask her parents to send Kylie home. I should have known. Kylie was never late. She was always so responsible. It wasn’t like her to be late for dinner. I’ve wondered all these years—if I had gone to look, would I have been able to stop whatever happened from happening?”
“You can’t blame yourself, Joanna.”
“I can. They found her bike three days after she went missing, in the woods. They never found her.”
Tears fill her eyes. I look away to give her space to grieve. My eyes wander, coming to a picture of the three of them on the fireplace mantel. In it, they wear earth tones, Sam in a white shirt and beige pants, Joanna in a camel-color dress, Kylie in dusty pink, a beaded gold chain around her neck. Sam and Kylie make silly faces—Sam cross-eyed with his tongue sticking out, and Kylie with her eyes wide, curling her upper lip under to show her teeth, while Joanna laughs, her smile bright, beaming; it’s the face of someone completely different than the one sitting across from me, one who is happy and carefree.
But there’s something else, something more, something about the picture that’s vaguely familiar. I find myself holding mybreath, leaned forward in my seat, searching, my stomach heavy but I don’t know why. I can’t put my finger on it.
Joanna sees me looking. She says, “That picture was taken the summer that Kylie disappeared. It’s one of the last pictures I have of the three of us together. For the longest time, I regretted that we hadn’t all smiled for the picture, that it wasn’t more formal, more posed. But this,” she says, “is so much more authentic. This is us. This house used to be full of laughter. Sam and I, we don’t laugh anymore.”
She takes me to see Kylie’s room. We step in through the open doorway, and the first thing I see is the light filtering through the louvered blinds and into the room. The bedroom, which is the embodiment of a tween girl, seems to be untouched for the last five years, the bed sloppily made, one side of the wooden bifold closet doors open to reveal the clothes inside: ruffled and eyelet dresses that hang beside graphic tees, none of it any different than what Cass would wear. There are shoes on the closet floor, not placed in a neat row but lying in a messy pile on their sides, and I imagine that’s the way Kylie left them, practically seeing her kick off the pair of pink-and-white-checkerboard Vans in the days before she went missing.
I stand just inside the open doorway, watching as Joanna floats around the room, her fingers running over things. She turns around, and when she does, there are tears in her eyes, which are infectious. “I’m sorry,” she breathes. “You’d think after all this time, I’d get numb to it, that coming in here wouldn’t have this effect on me. This,” she says, “is how I cope, by keeping her bedroom a shrine that I can visit from time to time. Sam,” she says, listening for him, “won’t come in. He won’t even look. He never opens the door.”
“How does he cope?”
“He doesn’t. He keeps everything bottled up, though in the early days, he resigned himself to finding her. He made that his mission, his reason for living. It was all he could do, all he could think and talk about until he became obsessed.Finding her.He wouldn’t give up. He was all over Reddit, trying to find and interact with people who might know something, connecting with parents of other missing kids, finding internet detectives to work with. He kept a shoebox of newspaper articles about her disappearance, as well as evidence that the police dismissed, collected with his own latex gloves and stored in plastic bags. He said if the police couldn’t find her, he would. He was dead set on it, to the point that sometimes I wished she was dead, that we would have proof of it so we could move on. So there could be closure. That’s awful, right?”
I say, “No, it’s not,” and then I ask, “Does he still have it? The shoebox?”
“Yes.”
“Will you show me?” I ask, and she nods, leading me to a den, where she pulls a shoebox from a built-in bookshelf, lifting the dusty lid while I watch. In the box, newspaper articles sit stacked beside miscellanea like bottle caps and chewing gum wrappers.
She picks up one of the bottle caps, kept safe inside a plastic bag, as promised. “He found these on the street where Kylie was last seen. Never mind that it was windy and these things probably just blew out of someone’s trash. I didn’t tell him that because this was a defense mechanism of his, a way to cope, to keep his mind off the fact that our little girl wasn’t ever coming home. He wanted the police to check for DNA. But there was never a suspect to compare it with, and so they said no, that they couldn’t.”
Joanna reaches for a newspaper article, which she unfolds, holding it out to me. There on the newsprint is a picture ofKylie’s sweet face, with a headline that readsThe search for Kylie Matthews enters its second week. The image is one of those overpriced school photos with the stock blue background. Joanna says, “That’s the last school picture Kylie would ever take.”
There are Polaroid photos in the box too. “Sam took these himself, his own crime scene photos.” The Polaroids are pictures of a home, which is inviting, if not small. It has wooden siding and green shutters and is well-kept. Trees surround it, steeping the land, the home, in shade. Some are closeups of the house—of the window boxes that spill over with pink impatiens, the crookedWelcomemat on the porch floor—but others are taken from further away so that the whole property is visible and I see how, at the edge of the property, a green shed sits—the shade of green an exact match to the shutters. “This is Kylie’s friend Abby’s house. It’s where she was the day she disappeared. The police searched it. They searched the shed, the woods, everywhere, in case Kylie never left. They questioned the family, her parents, Abby and her older brother, Josh, but it was all the same: Kylie and Abby biked away together that day. But only one of them came back.
“Greta Dahl came by not long after it happened,” she says, looking up at me all of a sudden. “Do you know what she said?” She doesn’t wait before she says, “She said that Kylie was dead. And that the sooner I started believing that, the better off I’d be.” I feel weighed down, an ache in my throat, picturing Ms. Dahl standing on her front porch like she had mine, saying to her,I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, honey, but your girl’s dead.
“I’m sorry she did that. She had no right.”
On the way out, I walk again past the picture of the three of them, Sam, Joanna and Kylie, on the fireplace mantel. My eyes run over it, that vaguely familiar, elusive thing still sitting on the tip of my tongue, though, no matter how hard I try, my mind can’t retrieve it.
Reese
“What’s that?” Emily asks. It’s the next morning. She and I are outside on the deck, her with her coffee. It’s cool out. Fog rises up over the lake.
