No Time For Goodbye

upstairs and down and in the garage again and out in the backyard.

“That sure is odd,” Mrs. Jamison said. She didn’t quite know what to think, so, somewhat reluctantly, she called the Milford police.

They sent around an officer, who didn’t seem all that concerned, at first. But soon there were more officers and more cars, and by evening, there were cops all over the place. Cynthia heard them putting out descriptions of her parents’ two cars, calling Milford Hospital. Police were going up and down the street, knocking on doors, asking questions.

“You’re sure they never mentioned anything about going anyplace?” asked a man who said he was a detective and didn’t wear a uniform like all the other police. Named Findley, or Finlay.

Did he think she’d forget something like that? That she’d suddenly go, “Oh yeah, now I remember! They went to visit my mom’s sister, Aunt Tess!”

“You see,” the detective said, “it doesn’t look like your mom and dad and brother packed to go away or anything. Their clothes are still here, there are suitcases in the basement.”

There were a lot of questions. When did she last see her parents? When had she gone to bed? Who was this boy she was with? She tried to tell the detective everything, even admitted she and her parents had had a fight, although she’d left out how bad it was, that she’d gotten drunk, told them she wished they were dead.

This detective seemed nice enough, but he wasn’t asking the questions Cynthia was wondering. Why would her mom and dad and brother just disappear? Where would they go? Why wouldn’t they take her with them?

Suddenly, in a frenzy, she began to tear the kitchen apart. Lifting up and tossing placemats, moving the toaster, looking under the chairs, peering down into the crack between the stove and the wall, tears streaming down her face.

“What is it, sweetheart?” the detective asked. “What are you doing?”

“Where’s the note?” Cynthia asked, her eyes pleading. “There has to be a note. My mom never goes away without leaving a note.”

1

Cynthia stood out front of the two-story house on Hickory. It wasn’t as though she was seeing her childhood home for the first time in nearly twenty-five years. She still lived in Milford. She’d driven by here once in a while. She showed me the house once before we got married, a quick drive-by. “There it is,” she said, and kept on going. She rarely stopped. And if she did, she didn’t get out. She’d never stood on the sidewalk and stared at the place.

And it had certainly been a very long time since she’d stepped through that front door.

She was rooted to the sidewalk, seemingly unable to take even one step toward the place. I wanted to go to her side, walk her to the door. It was only a thirty-foot driveway, but it stretched a quarter century into the past. I was guessing, to Cynthia, it must have been like looking through the wrong end of some binoculars. You could walk all day and never get there.

But I stayed where I was, on the other side of the street, looking at her back, at her short red hair. I had my orders.

Cynthia stood there, as though waiting for permission to approach. And then it came.

“Okay, Mrs. Archer? Start walking toward the house. Not too fast. Kind of hesitant, you know, like it’s the first time you’ve gone inside since you were fourteen years old.”

Cynthia glanced over her shoulder at a woman in jeans and sneakers, her ponytail pulled down and through the opening at the back of her ball cap. She was one of three assistant producers. “This is the first time,” Cynthia said.

“Yeah yeah, don’t look at me,” Ponytail Girl said. “Just look at the house and start walking up the drive, thinking back to that time, twenty-five years ago, when it all happened, okay?”

Cynthia glanced across the street at me, made a face, and I smiled back weakly, a kind of mutual what-are-you-gonna-do? And so she started up the driveway, slowly. If the camera hadn’t been on, is this how she would have approached? With this mixture of deliberation and apprehension? Probably. But now it felt false, forced.

But as she mounted the steps to the door, reached out with her hand, I could just make out the trembling. An honest emotion, which meant, I guessed, that the camera would fail to catch it.

She had her hand on the knob, turned it, was about to push the door open, when Ponytail Girl shouted, “Okay! Good! Just hold it there!” Then, to her cameraman, “Okay, let’s set up inside, get her coming in.”

“You’re fucking kidding me,” I said, loud enough for the crew-a half dozen or so, plus Paula Malloy, she of the gleaming teeth and Donna Karan suits, who was doing all the on-camera stuff and voiceovers-to hear.

Paula herself came over to see me.

“Mr. Archer,” she said, reaching out with both hands and touching me just below my shoulders, a Malloy trademark, “is everything okay?”

“How can you do that to her?” I said. “My wife’s walking in there for the first time since her family fucking vanished, and you basically yell ‘Cut’?”

“Terry,” she said, insinuating herself closer to me. “May I call you Terry?”

I said nothing.

“Terry, I’m sorry, we have to get the camera in position, and we want the look on Cynthia’s face, when she comes into the house after all these years, we want that to be genuine. We want this to be honest. I think that’s what both of you want as well.”

That was a good one. That a reporter from the TV news/entertainment show Deadline-which, when it wasn’t revisiting bizarre unsolved crimes from years past, was chasing after the latest drinking-and-driving celebrity, or hunting down a pop star who’d failed to buckle her toddler into a seat belt-would play the honesty card.

“Sure,” I said tiredly, thinking of the bigger picture here, that maybe after all these years, some TV exposure might finally provide Cynthia with some answers. “Sure, whatever.”

Paula showed some perfect teeth and went briskly back across the street, her high heels clicking along the pavement.

I’d been doing my best to stay out of the way since Cynthia and I’d arrived here. I’d arranged to get the day off from school. My principal and longtime friend, Rolly Carruthers, knew how important it was to Cynthia to do this show, and he’d arranged a substitute teacher to take my English and creative writing classes. Cynthia had taken the day off from Pamela’s, the dress shop where she worked. We’d dropped off our eight-year-old daughter, Grace, at school along the way. Grace would have been intrigued, watching a film crew do its thing, but her introduction to TV production was not going to be a segment on her own mother’s personal tragedy.

The people who lived in the house now, a retired couple who’d moved down here from Hartford a decade ago to be close to their boat in the Milford harbor, had been paid off by the producers to clear out for the day so they could have the run of the place. Then the crew had gone about removing distracting knickknacks and personal photos from the walls, trying to make the house look, if not the way it looked when Cynthia lived there, at least as generic as possible.

Before the owners took off for a day of sailing, they’d said a few things on the front lawn for the cameras.

Husband: “It’s hard to imagine, what might have happened here, in this house, back then. You wonder, were they all cut up into bits in the basement or something?”

Wife: “Sometimes, I think I hear voices, you know? Like the ghosts of them are still walking around the house. I’ll be sitting at the kitchen table, and I get this chill, like maybe the mother or the father, or the boy, has walked past.”

Husband: “We didn’t even know, when we bought the house, what had happened here. Someone else had got it from the girl, and they sold it to someone else, and then we bought it from them, but when I found what happened here, I read up on it at the Milford library, and you have to wonder, how come she was spared? Huh? It seems a bit odd, don’t you think?”