And then in early May she came to. Like someone awakening from a nap, she opened her eyes and said, “I want to go home.”
No disorientation, no asking what had happened. It seemed as if she’d been aware all along.
As I looked at her I felt my initial burst of joy wither in the cold certainty that Ellie wasn’t back. Not really. Not my Ellie.
As I was hustled out of the unit by the nurses flocking around her, I heard her voice rise about the hubbub: “Mother? Mother, did you hear me? I want to go home!”
Ellie has never called me “Mother.” Never.
I stood in the doorway, staring back at my younger daughter, and thinking this has to be the strangest moment of my life. But I was wrong. So, so wrong. Things hadn’t begun to get strange.
Shaken and sweaty, I retreated to the waiting room and relived that week in December, looking for a clue as to when things had started to go wrong.
2
Bess had begged us to spend Christmas week in the city.
“It’s the best time to be in New York,” she’d said.
“The city’s beautiful,” she’d said.
“You’ll love it,” she’d said.
Why, oh, why, did I listen?
Bess was a second-year student at NYU. She’d always dreamed of attending college in Greenwich Village, though how a girl from rural Missouri got that idea into her head I’ll never know. Maybe it came from devouring the Beat poets like Ginsberg and Corso. Maybe from incessantly playing Dylan’s early albums. She knew well that the Village of the Beat Generation was long gone, but still she wanted to be there.
Ellie missed her older sister and loved New York almost as much as Bess, but for different reasons. The Museum of Natural History was like Mecca to her, and a trip to NYC her Hajj.
So we decided to make it a major holiday outing. Bess used Airbnb to secure us a ten-day rental on a two-bedroom apartment in the East Seventies that perfectly suited our needs. We cabbed in from JFK on Thursday the 18th to find Bess waiting for us at the front door. We all walked to the local Gristedes to fill the refrigerator, then went out for an early dinner at a little Tex-Mex place on Second Avenue.
How different my two girls. Bess takes after me: long-faced, wavy, honey-blonde hair, brown-eyed, a bit on the plump side, but pleasingly so, I like to think. Ellie is lanky with a round face, straight black hair, and can’t stand contacts so is never without her owlish tortoise shell rims. Bess fancies herself a Bohemian, while Ellie the scientist turns her nose up at “artsy-fartsy stuff.”
After dinner Bess left us to return to her dorm and Ellie and I went to bed. The start of what looked to be a perfect family trip. If I’d had any hint of what was coming, I’d have packed us up right then and caught the next non-stop back to St. Louis.
I’ve always gotten along well with my two daughters, but we’ve become especially close since Ray’s sudden death five years ago. He was stopped at a railroad crossing when a texting teenage girl rear-ended him and pushed his car into the path of the oncoming freight train. He died instantly. Over the years he’d made a fairly good living as an insurance salesman and, true to his own sales pitches—and taking advantage of his employee discount—he’d accumulated a number of valuable term policies on himself. His death benefit came to a little over three and a half million dollars.
So financially, he left us very well off, though I’m sure the girls would much prefer to have their father around instead. I take a different view. I’ve never told them that one of the clerks at the coroner’s office—an old rival from the high school cheering squad—made sure I overheard her mention that when they extricated the bodies from the car, Ray’s young secretary, killed along with him, was found with her face buried in his lap.
I wasn’t all that surprised. So as a consequence I’ve managed to find perfect contentment in the money, and spend it lavishly on the girls.
In New York, the first hint of the strangeness that lurked ahead came the very next day as we cabbed down to Washington Square Park to meet Bess for a personalized tour of the Village. We were making our way along Fifth Avenue past the lower reaches of Central Park when Ellie, who’d been immersed in Snapchat with her friends back home, suddenly straightened and looked around, her blue eyes wide behind her round glasses.
“What is that?” she said.
“What’s what, honey?”
“That noise.”
I listened but heard nothing beyond typical traffic sounds.
“I’m sorry. I don’t hear anything special. What’s it sound like?”
Her expression turned annoyed. “You really can’t hear it?”
“Hear what?”
She rolled down the window, letting in the cool air. “Now do you hear it?”
I shook my head. “Sorry.”
After a frustrated growl, she said, “It’s like a hum but real loud and real low, you know like those bass beats when Phil Oliver drives by with his rap blasting?”
I knew. Thumping notes so loud and low you felt them as well as heard them, even when his windows were up.
“Got it.”
“Okay, it’s like that, only steady—one steady note.”
I strained my ears but finally had to shrug. “Sorry.”
Another growl, and then the driver rapped on the Plexiglas partition between front and back seats.
“Maybe you hear Balto,” he said, grinning.
The license info taped to the divider said his name was Zarim Sheikh, but his English was good and obviously he’d been listening.
“Who’s Balto?” Ellie said.
“A hero dog who helped children.” He pointed into the park. “He has statue past those trees.”
“That’s right where the noise is coming from.” Smirking, she turned to me. “See? He hears it too. So I’m not crazy.”
“No, miss,” he said. “I do not
