Still Missing

Part of me was scared to rock the boat, but I had to think long-term gain.

'You said her name was Juliet. Did your mom pass away?'

The smile left his face. He rolled over and stared up at the ceiling.

'She was taken from me when I was just eighteen.' I waited for him to elaborate, but he looked lost in thought.

I said, 'She sounds like she was someone very special. It's nice you were so close. My mom never abandoned me, like your real one did, but the doctors kept giving her drugs after the accident, so she was pretty messed up. I had to go live with my uncle and aunt for a while. I know what it feels like to be alone.'

His eyes flicked to me, then away. 'What was it like, living with these relatives? Were they kind to you?'

I did some therapy in my twenties to deal with my feelings about the accident and to work through my issues with Mom--fat lot of good that did me--but no matter how many times I told the story, it never got easier. I hadn't even discussed those feelings with Luke.

'My aunt is my mom's sister, they're always trying to one-up each other, but she was nice enough, I guess. My cousins were older and pretty much ignored me. But I didn't care.'

'Didn't you? I bet you cared a lot.' There was no mockery in his voice. 'Wasn't there any other family you could stay with?'

'Dad's family is all dead and Mom just has her sister.' She actually had an older stepbrother too, but he was in jail for robbery and Mom sure as hell didn't consider him family. 'It was hard, but now that I'm older I try to understand what my mom must have been going through. Back then, people didn't go to counseling or grief support groups. The doctors gave out pills.'

'She sent you away.'

'It wasn't that bad.' But I remembered my cousins' whispers and the way my uncle and aunt would stop talking when I came into the room. If Mom was a blurred version of herself, my aunt was hard edges and crisp lines on the same canvas. Both were blond and small-framed, all the women in my family are blond except me, but Aunt Val's lips were just a little thinner, her nose longer, and her eyes narrower. And where Mom was all emotion, good or bad, Aunt Val was calm, cool, collected. Not a lot of comforting hugs there.

'And then your mom sold your house, didn't she? Half your family is gone and so is your home?'

'How do you know--'

'If you want to get to know someone, really get to know them, there are many ways. As there were many ways your mother could have dealt with the situation.'

'She had to sell it, Dad didn't have any life insurance.' Six months after the accident Mom finally came and got me, and that's when I found out my home no longer existed.

'Perhaps, but it couldn't have been easy moving when so much had already changed. And into such a small house?'

'It was just the two of us. We didn't need a lot of space.'

We moved to a cramped two-bedroom rental in the worst part of Clayton Falls, with a view of the pulp mill. The pill bottles had been replaced with vodka bottles. Mom's pink silk robes were now nylon and her Estee Lauder White Linen perfume was a knockoff version. We may have been tight on money, but she still managed to scrape up enough for her French cigarettes--Mom thinks anything French is elegant--and her not-so-elegant vodka. Popov isn't Smirnoff.

Not only had she sold our house, she'd also sold all Dad's things. Of course she kept Daisy's trophies and her costumes, which hung in Mom's closet.

'But it wasn't just the two of you for very long, was it?'

'She was going through a lot of stuff. It's hard for a single mother. There weren't a lot of options back then.'

'So she thought she'd found a real man to take care of her this time around.' He smiled.

I stared at him for a second. 'She worked...after the accident.'

As a secretary with a small construction firm, but mostly she just worked hard at looking good. She never left the house without a fully made-up face, and she was usually half cut when she was applying the stuff, so it wasn't uncommon to see her eyes smudged or her cheeks too bright. Somehow it worked for her, in a broken-down-doll sort of way, and men looked at her like they wanted to rescue her from the big bad world. Her recently widowed status didn't stop her from smiling back.

Four months later I had my new stepdad, Mr. Big Shot Wannabe. The sales guy for the firm, he drove a Caddy, smoked cigars, even wore cowboy boots--which might make sense if he was from Texas, or even Alberta, but I don't think he's ever left the island. I suppose he's rough-around-the-edges handsome in an aging Tom Selleck way. Mom quit her job right after they got married. Guess she thought he was a sure thing.

'What did you think of your new father?'

'He's okay. He seems to really love her.'

'So your mother had a new life, but where did you fit in?'

'Wayne tried.'

I wanted at least some of the closeness with him I'd had with my father, but Wayne and I didn't have anything to talk about. The only things he read were girlie magazines or flyers for get-rich-quick schemes. Then I learned I could make him laugh. As soon as I realized he thought I was funny, I turned into a total goof around him, doing anything I could to crack him up. But if he did, Mom would get pissed off and say something like, 'Stop it, Wayne, you're just encouraging her.' So he stopped. Hurt, I'd make fun of him whenever I could, just being an all- around smart-ass. Eventually we just ignored each other.

The Freak was staring at me intently, and I realized that my attempts at learning more about him had served only to further his knowledge of me. Time to get things back on track.

'What about your father?' I said. 'You haven't mentioned him.'

'Father? That man was never a father to me. And he wasn't good enough for her either, but she didn't want to see it.' His voice rose. 'He was a traveling salesman, for God's sake, a fat hairy salesman, who...'

He swallowed a couple of times, then said, 'I had to set her free.'

It wasn't just his words that sent the shiver up my spine, it was the flatness of his voice when he said them. I wanted to know more, but my instincts told me to back away. It didn't matter. Whatever storm was stirring in him had passed.

He leapt out of bed with a smile, stretched, and after a sigh of contentment said, 'Enough talk. We should be celebrating the beginnings of our own family.' He stared hard at me, then nodded. 'Stay there.' He threw on his clothes and coat and disappeared outside. When he opened the door, the smell of rotting leaves and wet dirt drifted over to the bed--the scent of a dying summer.

When he came back in, his skin was flushed and his eyes glittered. One hand was behind his back. He sat next to me, then brought his hand out. His fist was closed.

'Sometimes we have to go through difficult times in life,' he said. 'But they're just a test, and if we stay strong, we're eventually rewarded.' His eyes met mine. 'Open your hand, Annie.' Maintaining eye contact, he pressed something small and cool into my palm. I was scared to look at it.

'I gave this to someone long ago, but she didn't deserve it.' My palm itched. He raised his eyebrows. 'Don't you want to see?' I slowly looked down at my hand, and in it a fine gold chain glistened. His finger reached out and touched the tiny gold heart that lay at the center. 'Beautiful, isn't it?' I wanted to throw the necklace as far away from me as I could.

I said, 'Yes, yes, it is, thank you.'

He took it out of my hand. 'Sit up, so I can put it on you.' My skin crawled as the chain tickled against me.

I wanted to ask what happened to the girl who owned the necklace, but I was scared he might tell me.

SESSION EIGHT

All righty, Doc, I'm seriously starting to question my attitude--yeah, yeah, I knew I had one. But now it's really beginning to get in the way of things. You know, things like my life. See, I may not have always been Little Mary Sunshine before all this went down, with some damn good reasons--dead sister, dead dad, drunken mom,