“You know what I mean. There’s a similar issue ofDoesn’t he want to know who I am?”
I feel a niggling of guilt, thinking of all the times my daughter has asked this. But no. She accepts. She understands, and only in part from the books we read of the why-don’t-I-have-a-daddy type. In time she came to see how many of her friends were being raised by single parents, making me no different at all. But my niggling remains. It’s the guilt that I feel, me, personally. It’s in subjecting my daughter to the same insecurity I felt myself about my own roots.
But this is the memory that’s just beyond my grasp, and curt Jack isn’t done with his questions.
“Doesn’t he? Want to know her?”
“He doesn’t know she exists,” I snap, annoyed that he has so quickly dredged up my guilt. “That’s how it works. You see characteristics and a number, never a name. Why are you making a big deal about this, Jack?”
He doesn’t have an answer for that. But the fact that he’s been so blunt gets me going. He wants me to stand up for myself? Fine. Fair is fair. “Sodoyou know where Elizabeth is?”
He stares at me, then looks away and scratches the back of his head. By the time he returns, he is quiet. “Not one word since she disappeared from your father’s boat. How ’bout you? Did you find the gun?”
“We just got here. I haven’t had time to look. Do you think she’s dead then?”
“What else can I think? She was never a family person, but what kind of mother would leave her husband and son without a word?” His voice is deeper than when we were kids but vulnerable still, even after all these years. “I mean, no note, no call, no email, no text. Ever.”
Again, I think to touch him. Again, I hold back. But I do feel his pain. My sensitivity to him hasn’t changed. “Your dad heard nothing?”
He makes a throaty sound that doesn’t quite mesh with the tranquility of the sleepy waves trickling close by our feet. “He’d be the last one to hear. They barely talked. He could have been a renter in the house, for all she cared.”
“Did he look for her?”
“He? No. He just waited to see if she’d show up. He was like that. Mr. Passive. Me? Yeah, I looked. All that fall, I looked. I drove from one little coast town to the next. I read their newspapers and talked with their cops. I figured that if she’d washed up somewhere with no memory, someone would report it. Same if a boat picked her up, and she didn’t know who she was.”
“How could anyone for miles not know who she was?” I ask, astounded. “Okay, twenty years ago Google wasn’t what it is now. But her disappearance made headlines.”
“Yeah, well, I kept asking myself that, too,” he says, hanging a hand on the back of his neck while his dark eyes hold mine, “only not everyone reads the paper or watches the news. Some people live with their heads in the sand.”
Like ignoring dementia? Ignoring the risk of a gun?
He may not be thinking those things at all. I’m probably being oversensitive. But he was headed in this direction earlier, when Joy was here, and it was a dead-end street. “Please don’t go there again,” I beg and, in a more coolheaded voice, return to the larger discussion. “Wouldn’t her body have washed up somewhere?”
“Not if it was weighted.”
“Weighted?”
“We all watchedThe Sopranos.”
I’m appalled. It isn’t that he didn’t talk about murder back then, or that I haven’t considered it lately myself. But a gun is one thing.Weightedis something else.Weightedmeans tying something heavy to a body and pushing it overboard.Weightedmeans premeditated.
I wish I could see his eyes to know if he’s serious, but the sliver of moon isn’t cooperating just then. “You’re saying my father shot her, then made sure the body would never surface? That issick,Jack.” Turning, I start back toward the dock.
“Still running away?” he calls in a taunt that stops my flight.
He’s right. I whip back, needing this discussion. “He wouldn’t kill her. He loved her.”
“Lovers kill. They kill all the time.”
“I didn’t say they were lovers. I said he loved her. There’s a difference.”
“You don’t think they had sex?”
“Maybe before they were married, but not after. I remember us all together—cookouts, boat rides, even just sitting here on the beach. There were no secret looks, no sneaking off.”
“No? I remember my father barely talking to yours and your mother barely talking to mine. I remember your father touching mymother’s hand. I remember her touching his arm. Did they touch their own spouses? Ever?”
They did. Of course, they did.
