madman. She wondered if getting it all out and hashing it all up had lessened the terror she felt in remembering that night when she had had to bash a man’s head in with a tire iron in order to save her own life.
She wondered how Anne managed to seem so normal after all of that. Lauren hadn’t felt normal one day, one hour, one minute since her daughter had been taken. She hadn’t been able to pretend otherwise. She had watched most of her so-called friends move farther and farther away from her as she had failed to crawl out of the emotional snake pit, as she failed in their eyes to even make an attempt.
They seemed to think losing a child was something one recovered from, got over. Lauren couldn’t see that happening. It struck her as obscene to think it, let alone do it.
It wasn’t normal to have a child violently snatched away. It wasn’t normal to have to live through the searches, the public pleas, the press conferences, the spotlight of suspicion that had been turned back on them. It wasn’t normal to watch the man who had taken your daughter and done who knew what terrible things to her walking around free to live his life.
And if none of what she was living through was normal, how was she supposed to be normal? Why would anyone expect her to be normal? Why would she try to pretend to be normal? To make the normal people with normal lives feel less guilty that they weren’t her?
That was true from her own perspective, Lauren thought. She had long ago ceased to care what anyone thought of her, or of what she said or did. But she knew she routinely embarrassed Leah with her raw bluntness, and she routinely offended people she had to deal with. Not everyone would subscribe to Anne Leone’s philosophy.
Bump and Sissy Bristol had been the only people to really stick with Lauren through the never-ending “worst” of it (as if there was “better” of it). Bump had called earlier in the evening to check up on her and Leah.
“Hey, beautiful, how’s my second favorite lady in the world?”
“Hey, Bump, I’m okay.”
“I don’t like the way that sounded.”
“Some days are better than others,” she lied. There were no good days. There were just days to be gotten through.
“How’s my Leah doing?”
She was always amused by Bump’s proprietary claim to all females in his circle—like a lion with his pride of lionesses. That was kind of how she pictured him too: big, handsome, masculine, with a wild mane of steel gray hair and a roaring voice.
“She’s at a sleepover,” Lauren said. “She made a friend.”
“You let her out of the house?”
“Well supervised.”
“I’m still surprised. You must be doing better, sweetheart.”
“Don’t get carried away. I’m not exactly happy home alone.”
“You shouldn’t be alone, Lauren,” he said firmly. “Sissy is out of town, but I can come over. I can be there in an hour.”
“You don’t need to do that, Bump.”
“It’s not a problem. I should come over and check on the place anyway. You’ve probably got half a dozen things on the honey-do list by now.”
“Everything is fine. I’m fine.”
“You’re sure? I’m ready to get in the car.”
“No, really, don’t.”
“Well, I’m coming over there soon. I want to see my little Leah. I’ll take her someplace special. We’ll have a day, just her and I.”
Bump had been almost as despondent over Leslie’s disappearance as Lance and Lauren. He had sat in their family room and sobbed like a baby the day they found out Leslie’s bike and shoe had been found.
He had doted on Leah in the years since, which had been nice for her, especially after Lance had died. He had stepped in as a surrogate father.
“Her birthday is coming up,” he said, as if Lauren needed reminding. “We’ve got to do something special.”
“She’ll like that.”
They would all celebrate Leah’s birthday and pretend to be normal for a few hours.
Sissy’s belief was that there could be no real normalcy without closure. Lauren didn’t know that there could be normalcy with closure, either.
What did
Getting Leslie back? She still held out some hope that could happen, but it wouldn’t mean closure. One door would close, and another would open. There would be a long, long journey of healing ahead for Leslie—for all of them.
Did closure mean finding Leslie’s remains? One question would be answered, but the grief would be overwhelming and never ending.
Did it mean bringing Roland Ballencoa to justice?
What was justice?
She thought of her hour spent at the shooting range.
She had wished him dead a thousand times. Ten thousand times. She had imagined torturing him to death as he may have done to her daughter. She had imagined a dozen different ways to do it. Two dozen. But would she have closure after?
The stark, depressing truth was there was no such thing as closure. Tragedy was a heavy stone dropped in an ocean as still as glass. The effects rippled out and kept going and going and going . . .
Exhausted by the conundrum, Lauren walked out of the office. Too restless to go to bed, she wandered the house.
She had told Anne she would be fine to stay alone. After all, Leslie had not been taken from their home. No one had violated that space. But this house, on the end of a dead-end road, seemed even bigger at night. It was at night that she noticed all the large windows on the first floor and wondered why she hadn’t pushed Sissy to put in plantation shutters or drapes or something.
At night the views the windows had framed in daylight became gaping black holes. What was inside the house became the view to whatever eyes looked in from outside.
Chilled by the idea, Lauren pulled Lance’s old black cardigan sweater around her slender frame, imagining that it was Lance’s embrace wrapping around her, reassuring her. She hadn’t washed it in two years. She liked to believe it still smelled like him.
Even as she surrounded herself with the memory of him, she cursed him for leaving her, for leaving Leah. Now Leah had left her—if only for the night—and she was truly alone.
Like a cat in the night, Lauren prowled the first floor of the house in the dark. Beyond the house, a huge fat moon hung like a Chinese lantern in the sky, its quicksilver glow spilling over the countryside and in through the windows.
It was after two in the morning.
She turned the lights on in the kitchen/great room and hit the Play button on the answering machine as she poured a glass of wine. After Bump’s call early in the evening she had left the phone to answer itself. One telemarketer and a solicitation from the conservation league, then a voice that made her cringe despite the rough sexiness of the tone.
“Lauren, it’s Greg Hewitt. I’m just checking in on you. Call me.”
She went to the faded blue antique console table she had situated behind the oversized sofa. She had placed it there with the idea that Sissy would come inside and toss her handbag on it, and her grandkids would come in and throw their book bags on it. It was where both she and Leah usually discarded their purses when they came in—except hers wasn’t there.
