I said nothing.
Finally, he sighed and shook his head and took his wallet from his back pocket, flipped it open, and withdrew a plastic card. “There,” he said, handing it to me.
It was a New York State license for Jeremy Sloan. An address up in Youngstown. It had his picture right on it.
“May I have this for one moment?” I asked. He nodded. I moved over to Cynthia and handed it to her. “Look at this.”
She took the license tentatively between her thumb and index finger, examined it through the start of tears. Her eyes went from the picture on the license to the man in person. Quietly, she handed the license back to him.
“I’m very sorry,” she said. “I’m, I’m so sorry.”
The man took the license back, slid it into his wallet, shook his head again disgustedly, muttered something under his breath although the only word I caught was “loony,” and headed off into the parking lot.
“Come on, Cyn,” I said. “Let’s get Grace.”
“Grace?” she said. “You left Grace?”
“She’s with someone,” I said. “It’s okay.”
But she was running back into the mall, across the main court, up the escalator. I was right behind her, and we threaded our way back through the maze of busy tables to where we’d had our lunch. There were the three trays. Our unfinished Styrofoam bowls of soup and sandwiches, Grace’s McDonald’s trash.
Grace was not there.
The woman in the blue coat was not there.
“Where the hell…”
“Oh my God,” Cynthia said. “You left her here?
“I’m telling you I left her with this woman, she was sitting right here.” What I wanted to tell her was that if she hadn’t run off on a wild-goose chase, I wouldn’t have been faced with the choice of leaving Grace on her own. “She must be around somewhere,” I said.
“Who was she?” Cynthia asked. “What did she look like?”
“I don’t know. I mean, she was an older woman. She had on a blue coat. She was just this woman sitting here.”
She had left her unfinished salad sitting on her tray, along with a paper cup half filled with Pepsi or Coke. It was like she’d left in a hurry.
“Mall security,” I said, trying to keep panic from taking over. “They can watch for a woman, blue coat, with a little girl-”
I was scanning the food court, looking for anyone official.
“Did you see our little girl?” Cynthia asked people at surrounding tables. They looked back, their faces blank, shrugging. “Eight years old? She was sitting right here?”
I felt overwhelmed with helplessness. I looked back toward the McDonald’s counter, thinking maybe the woman lured her away with the promise of another ice cream. But surely Grace was too smart for that. She was only eight, but she’d been through the whole street-proofing thing and-
Cynthia, standing in the middle of the crowded food court, started to shout our daughter’s name. “Grace!” she said. “Grace!”
And then, behind me, a voice.
“Hi, Dad.”
I whirled around. “Why’s Mom screaming?” Grace asked.
“Where the hell were you?” I asked. Cynthia had spotted us and was running over. “What happened to that woman?”
“Her cell rang, and she said she had to go,” Grace said matter-of-factly. “And then I had to go to the bathroom. I told you I had to go to the bathroom. Don’t everybody freak out.”
Cynthia grabbed Grace, held her close enough to smother her. If I’d been having qualms about keeping to myself the information about those secret payments to Tess, I was over them now. This family did not need any more chaos.
No one spoke the whole way home.
When we got there, the message light on the phone was flashing. It was one of the producers from
Cynthia phoned back immediately, waited while someone tracked down the producer, who’d slipped out for a coffee. Finally, the producer was on the line. “Who is it?” Cynthia asked, breathless. “Is it my brother?”
She was convinced, after all, that she had just seen him. It would have made sense.
No, the producer said. Not her brother. It was this woman, a clairvoyant or something. But very credible, as far as they could tell.
Cynthia hung up and said, “Some psychic says she knows what happened.”
“Cool!” said Grace.
Yeah, terrific, I thought. A psychic. Absolutely fucking terrific.
11
“I think we should at least hear what she has to say,” Cynthia said.
It was that evening, and I was sitting at the kitchen table, marking papers, having a hard time concentrating. Cynthia had been able to think of nothing else since the producer’s call about the psychic. I, on the other hand, had been somewhat dismissive.
I didn’t have much to say through supper, but once Grace had gone up to her room do some homework of her own, and Cynthia was standing at the sink, her back to me, loading the dishwasher, she said, “We need to talk about this.”
“I don’t see much to talk about,” I said. “So a psychic phoned the show. That’s only a step up from the guy who thought your family disappeared into some rip in the fabric of time. Maybe this woman, maybe she’ll have a vision of them all riding atop a brontosaurus or something, or pedaling a Flintstone car.”
Cynthia took her hands out of the water, dried them, and turned around. “That’s hateful,” she said.
I looked up from a dreadfully written essay on Whitman. “What?”
“What you said. It was hateful. You’re being hateful.”
“I am not.”
“You’re still pissed with me. About today. About what happened at the mall.”
I didn’t say anything. There was some truth to what she said. We hadn’t said a word on the way home after scooping up Grace in the food court. There were things I wanted to say but felt I could not. That I had had enough. That it was time for Cynthia to move on. That she had to accept the fact that her parents were gone, her brother was gone, that nothing had changed because this was the twenty-fifth anniversary of their disappearance, or because some second-rate news show had shown some interest. That while she might have lost a family long ago, and that it was undeniably tragic, she had another family now, and that if she wasn’t willing to live in the moment for us, instead of in the past for a family that was in all likelihood gone, then-
But I said nothing. I couldn’t bring myself to say those things. But I found myself unable to offer comfort once we got home. I went into the living room, turned on the TV, flipped through the channels, never settling on anything for more than three minutes. Cynthia went into a tidying frenzy. Vacuuming, cleaning the bathroom, rearranging soup cans in the pantry. Anything to keep her too busy to have to talk to me. There wasn’t much good that came from a cold war like this, but at least the house ended up looking ready for a spread in
