The Walters family stayed in Washington for a month, hoping for news. But there was nothing for them to do and her father’s boss was losing patience. So they went back to Portland. The house was strange without Lulu. Dee could never remember to lay three places for dinner, not four, and it always made her mother cry.
Her mother left soon after. Dee knew she couldn’t stand the sight of Dee, the pale copy of her lost daughter. She emptied the checking account and was gone. Dee couldn’t blame her, although her father felt differently. Then the other thing happened.
The night before, snow fell like ash from the quiet sky. Her father was building a model airplane below in the living room. Dee could smell the epoxy drifting up the stairs. He would sit there for hours, until his eyes were red-rimmed with fumes. He would not come up to bed until the night was almost worn out. I’ll talk to him tomorrow, Dee thought. I have to.
She was a term late for Pacific, but she could catch up. Money was tight, but she could get a job, couldn’t she? Her father didn’t need her to make model airplanes and stare into the dark, after all. Dee breathed through the guilt that stabbed at her. The air was laden with mingled scents of hot glue and despair. She thought, This cannot be my life. This is a ghost life. Tears traced burning lines down her cheeks.
In the morning Dee made the special coffee to take to her father in bed. The special coffee was made with the fancy glass thing from San Francisco, and it took a long time to drip through. It was bitter and gritty like river sediment and her father loved it. Maybe he put all his love into the coffee maker because the bigger things were too painful. Dee hated the coffee maker because it reminded her of when they were all together. She poured the scalding water over the coffee grounds. The dark-brown scent filled the kitchen. This morning she was going to speak to him, she really was.
She pulled back her long sleeve and poured a little boiling water over her wrist, gasping. She watched the bracelet of red blisters rise on her flesh. That helped. She let the sleeve fall down to hide it, and finished putting everything on the tray. She would tell him today. He would be mad, he would be hurt. But she couldn’t keep it to herself any longer. Pretty pebble.
She went into her father’s room and put the tray on the table. She thought it would put him in a good mood, if the scent of coffee led him out of sleep. She opened the curtains to the white world. Houses, mailboxes, cars – the edges of everything were blunted with white snow. She turned to say, Look how much fell in the night! Then she saw him. His body lay very straight in bed, still in the blinding snowlight. His face wore an expression that for a moment she could not place. Then she recognised it as a welcome.
It was a stroke, they said. They didn’t say it was brought on by Lulu’s vanishing, and then Dee’s mother leaving. They didn’t need to. So the person who took Lulu also took Dee’s mother, and then her father. Dee was taken too. For how much of her remains, after everything? She feels like a big, dark, empty room.
There was no ballet school because there was no money to pay for it. She didn’t finish high school either. Dee got a job at the drugstore. But she had her real work, which was to look for the person who took her sister. All the men who had been at the lake that day, all the glances, the roll call of suspects. They are her job now.
She calls tired Karen each week, sometimes more. Tired Karen is the detective in charge of Lulu’s case and she always sounds both exhausted and frantic. Her face is expressive; it shows all the hurt she has seen; every back she has patted, every tissue handed over, every screaming face pushed close to hers.
She and Dee were close, for a time. The detective felt sorry for Dee, a young girl with no one. Call me Karen. She told Dee things when she called. Now she just says, ‘We’re working on it.’
Ted
I can’t always tell, but this time I’m pretty sure I am about to do something important. I am going to find a friend. I go away more and more, these days. Who will look after Lauren and Olivia if I don’t come back, one day? I’m only one person, and it’s not enough.
Mommy took me to the forest three times. The last time she sent me back alone. Yes, I still feel her under the dark canopy of leaves. She is in the scatter of light across the forest floor. And yes sometimes she’s in the cupboard under the sink. But really, I have been on my own since that day.
I tell myself that this is for Lauren and Olivia, and that’s true. But also it’s because I don’t want to be alone any more.
I pick a time when Lauren isn’t around. If she knew what I was doing – well, that wouldn’t be good. I take the padlock off the cupboard in the living room where I keep the laptop. The screen is a square of ghostly light in the dark room, like a door to the dead.
Finding a site is easy. There are hundreds of them. But what comes next? I scroll through. Faces race by, eyes and names and ages, little snatches of existence. I think hard about what I need, about what would be best for Lauren. Women are more nurturing than men, they say. So, a woman, I guess.
