Eloise didn’t know if Amanda was talking about Alfie and Emily, or the vision Eloise had had, or that there was a girl fallen in a well whom no one could find. She suspected that she meant all of it. And she was so right.
“No. Life’s not fair. We just do our best. Okay? We have each other.”
“For now.”
Amanda was too smart to be mollycoddled.
But Eloise said anyway, “Forever. We’ll be together forever. All of us.”
Even though she didn’t know if that was true, that’s what she said. She knew they were promised nothing. Now was the only gift anyone was guaranteed to receive. She envied people who had faith in the stories of religion, faith in a heaven where all good souls were reunited with their loved ones. Life would be so much easier if she could believe in all that, so much easier to explain to her daughter. But she didn’t have that brand of faith.
That night they slept together in Eloise’s bed the way they had since she came home from the hospital. She slept well that night for the first time. She didn’t wake with pain in her back or her hip or her neck as she often did. She didn’t need any medication to get through the night. Amanda slept, too. No nightmares where she experienced the horrible crash over and over, even though neither of them could remember what happened after Alfie pulled from the driveway. Neither of them saw the tractor-trailer that glanced off their car when the driver fell asleep at the wheel and drifted into oncoming traffic. Neither of them remembered rolling five times to be stopped by a great oak tree. Mercifully, neither of them remembered a thing. Except poor Amanda, in her dreams.
In the kitchen the next morning, they turned on the television to watch
“Is this why He took them?”
“Who? Took who?”
“Is this why God took Dad and Emily?”
“Amanda-” She didn’t know what to say.
“Don’t you think that’s why? Maybe it’s them telling you what they see. You know-from the other side.”
Amanda’s eyes were welling with tears. “Do you think, Mom? Maybe?”
“I don’t know, honey. I don’t understand what happened to me yet.”
“But it’s possible, right? Emily always wanted to help people, right? She was such a good person.”
“That’s true.”
“That would be something good, right?” And then her daughter’s face fell into pieces and she started to cry. And Eloise went to her, and they clung to each other weeping in a way they hadn’t together. It was cleansing, washing over and through them. As they stood there like that, the phone started ringing. After that it never really stopped ringing.
But that was a hundred years ago, or so it felt. Jones Cooper had left, and Eloise was online, searching for information on current missing women. Oliver sat contentedly on her lap. And although it was a bit of a nuisance to have him there-she had to lift up her elbows awkwardly to reach the keyboard over his ample frame-she didn’t have the heart to move him. She cruised the usual news sites, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The Amber Alert site had been a big help in recent years. But today nothing was jogging her frequency; she remained stubbornly tuned in to the present.
Lots of times, after a powerful vision like the one she’d had yesterday, she’d cruise those sites and see a face she recognized. Then she might get another vision. She hoped for that to happen, that it might be someone else. Maybe it was Marla Holt, the woman she’d seen running. She’d assumed it was, and Ray seemed to think so, too. But maybe not. For whatever reason, Eloise really didn’t want it to be. She hadn’t wanted this case, had tried to convince Michael to let his mother go. But he wouldn’t hear her. Something powerful was driving him. She had a bad feeling about all of it. Scrolling through the faces of the missing, though, she didn’t see anyone she recognized.
She visited the sites daily. Sometimes later on she’d get a vision or hear something, as if the Internet could connect her to the energy that gave her her peculiar abilities. Then she’d make a proactive call to the authorities. More these days than in the beginning, they worked with her. She had a reputation now. Plus, the whole psychic thing wasn’t such an oddity; it was part of the public consciousness. People thought that it was possible, were more open to it. Occasionally they gave her a hard time, were very rude. She didn’t care. She just did what she had to do.
Sometimes people called her, finding her through referrals or an online search. Sometimes then the visions came as if in answer to the need. And as often they didn’t. People were frequently disappointed in her. They got angry. Eloise understood.
She’d been angry once, too, when Alfie and Emily were taken from her. She’d wanted to lay blame, seek restitution. The anger was a worm inside her, gnawing at the back of her throat, squirming in her gut. She’d wanted the driver of that tractor-trailer to pay. He had a problem with pills, taking amphetamines to stay awake, then downers to sleep. That morning his addiction caught up with him. He’d passed out at the wheel, drifted into oncoming traffic, and sent their car rolling. He emerged from the accident unscathed.
Eloise had wished him dead; she had hoped for him to lose everything he loved-his family, his money, his whole world. She wanted him to know all her pain, times ten. It kept her up at night. Once, before his trial began, she considered buying a gun and bringing it to the courthouse and shooting him dead. The only thing that stopped her was Amanda, her pale-faced angel. Eloise was all she had left. She thought of how her daughter had managed everything with such stoic acceptance. She’d bear that, too, so bravely. And at some point she’d self- destruct and there wouldn’t be anyone left to save her.
Then Eloise met him, Barney Croft, the man who’d killed her family. And when she looked in his face, she saw how broken, how undone he was-by addiction, by regret, by his hardscrabble existence. She saw him standing outside the courthouse with his lawyer. The lawyer had his hand on Croft’s shoulder. Croft smoked a cigarette. Eloise had been coming in from a crying jag in her car, to listen to the rest of the testimony. She walked over to him; she couldn’t help herself. She wanted him to see her. She wanted him to see what he had done to her.
The lawyer saw her first, put up a hand as if to ward her off. Then Croft turned around. She saw the color drain from his face as her own heart started to pound and her throat swelled.
“Oh, Lord,” he said. And all she smelled was his cigarette smoke and his misery. “Forgive me. In the name of the Lord, please forgive me.” He put his head in his hands then and started to weep, his whole body shaking with it, the cigarette still clutched between his thick fingers.
Maybe that was where it started. Because looking at him, she
“I do,” she said. “I forgive you.”
She meant it. The worm in her gut got smaller. At the sentencing she spoke for leniency and offered him her forgiveness in front of the judge and television cameras. The worm grew smaller still. But that’s when she started to lose Amanda.
On her desk was a photograph of her daughter, grown now with her two young children, Alfie and Emily (over Eloise’s protests-she didn’t believe in naming the living for the dead). Amanda was happily married, a successful accountant, a wonderful mother-and living as far away from Eloise as possible, in Seattle.
Downstairs, she heard the door open and close, then heavy footfalls on the stairs. Ray had a distinctive way of entering her home when she neglected to lock the door, as if knocking were beneath him.
“Eloise?”
Oliver jumped from her lap, annoyed by the intrusion. They passed each other in the doorway.
“I hate that cat,” said Ray.
“I don’t think he’s overly fond of you.”
He sat across from her desk, put down a paper bag he was carrying, and steepled his fingers. “So.”
