Arlette knew: if something terrible had happened to Cressida, Zeno would blame himself. Though there could be no reason, no logical reason, he would blame himself.
Already he was saying to whoever would listen I wasn’t even there, when she left. God!
In a voice of wonder, self-reproach Maybe she’d have told me—something. Maybe she’d have wanted to talk.
COUNTLESS TIMES they’d gone over Saturday evening: when Cressida had left the house, on her way to the Meyers’ for dinner.
Casually, you might say indifferently calling out to her mother and her sister in the kitchen—Bye! See you later.
Or even, though this was less likely given that Cressida wouldn’t have stayed very late at Marcy’s—Don’t wake up for me.
(Had Cressida said that? Don’t wake up for me?—intentionally or otherwise? Wake up not wait up. That was Cressida’s sort of quirky humor. Suddenly, Arlette wondered if it might mean something.)
(Snatching at straws, this was. Pathetic!)
Certainly it was ridiculous for Zeno to reproach himself with not having been home at that time. As if somehow—(but how?)—he might have foreseen that Cressida wouldn’t be returning when she’d planned, and when they’d expected her?
Ridiculous but how like the father.
Particularly, the father of daughters.
EACH TIME the phone rang!
Several phones in the Mayfield household: the family line, Zeno’s cell, Arlette’s cell, Juliet’s cell.
Always a kick of the heart, fumbling to answer a call.
Deliberately Arlette avoided seeing the caller ID in the hope that the caller would be Cressida.
Or, that the caller would be a stranger, a law enforcement officer, possibly a woman, in Arlette’s fantasizing it was a woman, with the good news Mrs. Mayfield!—we’ve found your daughter and she wants to talk to you.
Beyond this, though Arlette listened eagerly, there was—nothing.
As if, in the strain of awaiting the call, and hearing Cressida’s voice, she’d forgotten what that voice was.
DRIVING TO THE BANK, fumbling with the radio dial, in a panic to hear the “top of the hour” news—almost colliding with a sanitation truck.
Recovering, and, in the next block, almost colliding with an SUV whose driver tapped his horn irritably at her.
And, in the bank, bright-faced and smiling in the (desperate, transparent) hope of deflecting looks of pity, waiting in line at a teller’s window exactly as she’d have waited if her daughter was not missing.
This fact confounded her. This fact seemed to mock her.
Wanting to hide. Hide her face. But of course, no.
“Arlette? You are Arlette Mayfield—aren’t you? I’m so sorry—really really sorry—about your daughter . . . We’ve told our kids, one is a junior in high school, the other is just in seventh grade, if they hear anything—anything at all—to tell us right away. Kids know so much more than their parents these days. Out at the lake, and in the Preserve, there’s all kinds of things going on—under-age drinking is the least of it. All kinds of drugs including ‘crystal meth’—kids don’t know what they’re taking, they’re too young to realize how dangerous it is . . . I don’t mean that your daughter was with any kind of a drug-crowd, I don’t mean that at all—but the Roebuck Inn, that’s a place they hang out—there’s these Hells Angels bikers who are known drug-dealers—but parents have their heads in the sand, just don’t want to acknowledge there’s a serious—tragic—problem in Carthage . . .”
And not in the bank parking lot, can’t let herself cry. Not with bank customers trailing in and out. And anyone who knew Arlette Mayfield, including now individuals not-known to her who’d seen her on WCTG-TV with her husband Zeno pleading for the return of their daughter, could stare through her car windshield and observe and carry away the tale to all who would listen with thrilled widened eyes That poor woman! Arlette Mayfield! You know, the mother of the missing girl . . .
CALLS CONTINUED TO COME to police headquarters.
Though peaking on the second day, Monday, July 11: a record number of calls following the front-page article, with photos, in the Carthage Post-Journal. And the notice of the ten-thousand-dollar reward.
Myriad “witnesses” claiming to have sighted Cressida Mayfield—somewhere. Or to have knowledge of what might have happened to her and where she was now.
In some cases, making veiled accusations against people—(neighbors, relatives, ex-husbands)—who might have “kidnapped” or “done something to” Cressida Mayfield.
Zeno had wanted these calls routed through him. It was his fear that a valuable call would be overlooked by someone in the sheriff’s office.
Detectives explained to Zeno that, where reward money is involved, a flood of calls can be expected, virtually all of them worthless.
Yet, though likely to be worthless, the calls have to be considered—the “leads” have to be investigated.
The Beechum County Sheriff’s Department was understaffed. The Carthage PD was helping in the investigation though this department was even smaller.
If kidnapping were suspected, the FBI might be contacted. The New York State Police.
Was offering a reward so publicly a mistake? Zeno didn’t want to think so.
“Maybe the mistake is not offering enough. Let’s double it—twenty thousand dollars.”
“Oh, Zeno—are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. We have to do something.”
“Maybe you should speak with Bud McManus? Or maybe—”
“She’s our daughter, not his. Twenty thousand will attract more attention. We have to do something.”
Arlette thought But if there is nothing? If we can do nothing?
There was Zeno on the phone. Defiant Zeno on two phones at once: the family phone, and his cell phone.
“Hello? This is Zeno Mayfield. We’ve decided to double the reward money to twenty thousand dollars. Yes—right. Twenty thousand dollars for information leading to the recovery and return of our daughter Cressida Mayfield. Callers will be granted anonymity if they wish.”
IN CRESSIDA’S ROOM. Drifting upstairs in the large empty-echoing house as if drawn to that room.
Where, if she’d been home, and in the room, Cressida would have been surprised to see her parents and possibly not pleased.
Hey, Dad. Mom. What brings you here?
Not snooping—are you?
“Her bed wasn’t slept-in. That was the first thing I saw.”
Arlette spoke in a hoarse whisper. They might have been crouched in a mausoleum, the room was so dimly lighted, so stark and still.
In the center of the room Zeno stood, staring. It was quite possible, Arlette thought, that he hadn’t entered their daughter’s room in years.
Detectives had asked Arlette if anything was “missing” from the room. Arlette didn’t think so, but how could Arlette know: their daughter’s life was a very private life, only partially and, it sometimes seemed, grudgingly shared with her mother.
Detectives had searched the room, as Arlette and Zeno stood anxiously by. As soon as the detectives were finished with any part of the room—the closet, the old cherrywood chest of drawers Cressida had had since she was six years old—Arlette hurried to reclaim it, and re-establish order.
With latex-gloved hands they’d placed certain articles of clothing in plastic bags. They’d taken a not-very-clean hairbrush, a toothbrush, other intimate items for DNA purposes presumably.
Cressida’s laptop. They’d asked permission to open it, to examine it, and the Mayfields had said yes, of course.
Though reluctant even to open the laptop themselves. To peer into their daughter’s private life, how intrusive this was! How Cressida would resent it.
The detectives had taken it away with them, and left a receipt.
Almost Arlette thought I hope they return it before Cressida comes back.
Almost Arlette thought, unforgivably, I hope Cressida doesn?
??t come back before they return it.
Zeno said, falsely hearty: “It’s good that you woke up, Lettie. That something woke you. Thank God you came in here when you did.”
“Yes. Something woke me . . .”
That sensation of a part of the house missing. A part of her body missing. Phantom limb.
Arlette’s thought was, seeing the room through Zeno’s eyes, that it didn’t have the features of a girl’s room, as a man might imagine them.
Cressida’s clothes were all put away and out of sight—neatly folded in drawers, on shelves, hanging in closets. And her small stubby-looking shoes, neatly paired, on the floor of the closet.
One of the detectives, meaning to be kind, had remarked that his teenaged daughter’s room looked nothing like this one.
Zeno had tried to explain, their daughter had never been a teenager.
Years ago Cressida had cast away the soft bright colors and fuzzy fabrics of girlhood and replaced them with the stark black-and-white geometrical designs and slick surfaces of M. C. Escher, that so strangely entranced her. She had so little interest in colors—(her jeans were mostly black, her shirts, T-shirts, sweaters)—Arlette could wonder if she saw colors at all; or, seeing, thought them sentimental, softhearted.
Zeno was peering at the labyrinthine Descending and Ascending as if he’d never seen it before. As if it might provide a clue to his daughter’s disappearance.
Did he recognize himself in the drawing?—Arlette wondered. Or were the miniature humanoid-figures too distorted, caricatured?
Zeno’s eye was for the large, blatant, blinding. Zeno had not a shrewd eye for the miniature.
Arlette slid her arm through her husband’s. Since Sunday, she was always touching him, holding him. Very still Zeno would stand at such times, not exactly responding but not stiffening either. For he dared not give in to the rawest emotion, she knew. Not quite yet.
“Whatever happened, with Cressida’s math teacher, Zeno? Remember? When she was in tenth grade? She never told me . . .”
“ ‘Rickard.’ He was her geometry teacher.”
Arlette recalled days, it might have been weeks, of veiled exchanges between Zeno and Cressida, about something that had happened, or hadn’t happened in the right way, at school. It might have been that Cressida had brought a portfolio of drawings to school—beyond that, Arlette hadn’t known.
When she’d asked Cressida what was troubling her, Cressida had told her it was none of her business; when she’d asked Zeno, he’d told her, apologetically, that it was up to Cressida—“If she wants to tell you, she will.”
Their alliance was to each other, Arlette thought.
She’d hated them, then. In just that moment.
She’d asked Juliet, out of desperation. But Juliet who wasn’t living at home at the time—who was a freshman at the State University at Oneida—had soared so far beyond her tenth-grade sister, she’d had little interest in the sister’s emotional crises—“Some teacher who didn’t appreciate her enough, I think. You know Cressida!”
Arlette didn’t, though. That was the problem.
Zeno said hesitantly, as if even now he were reluctant to violate any confidence of their daughter’s, that when Cressida had first become so interested in M. C. Escher she’d created a portfolio of pen-and-ink drawings using numerals and geometrical figures, in imitation of Escher’s lithographs.
“This one—Metamorphoses”—Zeno indicated one of the pen-and-ink drawings displayed on Cressida’s wall—“was the first one I’d seen, I think. I didn’t know what the hell to make of it, initially.” Arlette examined the drawing: it was smaller than Descending and Ascending and seemingly less ambitious: moving from left to right, human figures morphed into mannequins, then geometrical figures; then numerals, then abstract molecular designs; then back to human figures again. As the figures passed through the metamorphoses from left to right their “whiteness” shaded into “darkness”—like negatives; then, as negatives, as they passed through reverse stages of metamorphoses, they became “white” again. And some of the scenes were set on Carthage bridges, with reflections in the water that underwent metamorphoses, too.
“It’s based upon an Escher drawing of course. But how skillfully it’s executed! I remember looking at it, Metamorphoses, following with my eyes the changes in the figures, back and forth . . . It was the first time I realized, I think, that our daughter was so special. You can’t imagine Juliet doing anything like this.”
“Juliet wouldn’t want to do anything quite like this.”
“Of course. That’s my point.”
“Cressida’s drawings are like riddles. I’ve always thought it was too bad, her art is so ‘difficult.’ Remember when she was a little girl, not four years old, she drew such wonderful animals and birds with crayons. Everyone adored them. I’d always thought I might work with her, I’d thought we could create children’s books together. But . . .”
“Lettie, come on! Cressida isn’t interested in ‘children’s books’—not now, and not then. Her talent is for something more demanding.”
“But she seems to have quit doing art. There’s nothing new on the wall here, that I can see.”
“She didn’t take art courses at St. Lawrence. She said she didn’t respect the teachers. She didn’t think she could learn anything from them.”
How like Cressida! Yet she didn’t seem to have made her way otherwise.
Arlette asked what had happened with Mr. Rickard?
From time to time Arlette encountered the rabbity moustached Vance Rickard on the street in Carthage, or at the mall. Though Arlette smiled at him, and would have greeted him warmly, the high school math teacher invariably turned away without seeming to see her, frowning.
“That bastard! He’d seen some of Cressida’s drawings in her notebook, and praised her; he said he was an admirer of Escher, too. So Cressida put together a portfolio of her new work and brought it to school to show him, and the son of a bitch wounded her by saying, ‘Not bad. Pretty good, in fact. But you must be original. Escher did this first, so why copy him?’ Cressida was devastated.”
Arlette could well understand, their sensitive daughter would be devastated by such a heartless remark.
Yet, she’d wanted to ask Cressida something like this herself.
“He might have meant well. It was just—thoughtless . . . I’m sorry that Cressida was so upset.”
“That was why she did so poorly in geometry that semester. She stayed away from class, she was so ashamed. She’d ended with a barely passing grade.”
Arlette remembered: that turbulent season in their daughter’s life.
“Cressida came to me and told me what he’d said. She was utterly demolished. She said, ‘I can’t go back. I hate him. Get him fired, Daddy.’ I was furious, too. I made an appointment to speak with Rickard who professed to be totally unaware of what he’d said, or even if he’d said it; he told me that if he’d made such a remark to Cressida it must have been meant playfully. He said he’d been impressed with her drawings and with her work in his class though he worried that she was ‘inconsistent’—‘too easily discouraged.’ ”
Arlette thought yes, that is so. But Zeno was still indignant.
“I wouldn’t have tried to get the bastard fired, of course. Even if—maybe—I could have. The man was just crude, and thoughtless. Cressida changed her mind, too: ‘Maybe we should just forget about it, Daddy. I wish we would. I don’t deserve any higher grade than the one I got, really.’ But that was ridiculous, she’d certainly have earned an A, if the damned Escher misunderstanding hadn’t happened.”
Zeno didn’t need to add: Cressida’s grade-point average would have been considerably higher without a D+ in sophomore math.
For often it happened that Cressida did well in her high school courses through a semester and then, unaccountably, as if to spite her own pretensions of excellence, she failed to complete the course, or failed to study for the final exam, or even to take the f
inal exam. She was often ill—respiratory ailments, nausea, migraine headaches. Her high school record was a zigzag fever chart that culminated in her senior year when, instead of graduating as class valedictorian, as the teachers who admired her observed to her parents, she graduated thirtieth in a class of one hundred sixteen—a dismal record for such a bright girl. Instead of being accepted at Cornell, as she’d hoped, she was fortunate to have been accepted at St. Lawrence University.
Her first year away from home, in the small college town of Canton, Cressida had been homesick, lonely; a girl who’d scorned conventional “clichéd” behavior, yet she’d found herself missing her home, the routine and safety of her home. Still, she hadn’t emailed or called her parents often and when Arlette tried to contact her, Cressida was elusive; if Arlette managed to get her to answer her cell phone, Cressida was remote, taciturn.
“Honey, is something wrong? Can you tell me? Please?” Arlette had pleaded, and Cressida had made a sound that was the verbal equivalent of a shrug. “You aren’t having trouble with your courses, are you?” Arlette asked, and Cressida said coldly, no. “Then what is it? Can’t you tell me?” Arlette asked, and Cressida said, mimicking her, “ ‘What is’—what?” Arlette had been reading about suicidally depressed undergraduates, and Cressida’s reaction worried her. (When she mentioned the subject to Zeno he’d laughed at her. “Lettie! You never fail to catastrophize.” When she’d seen a TV documentary on suicide among adolescents, in which the word epidemic was used, she dared not mention it to Zeno.)
When she returned home at winter break, and again at spring break, Cressida had been listless and withdrawn; she’d barely made the effort to visit with high school friends like Marcy Meyer who’d had to call Cressida repeatedly, and finally to come to the house to see her. She’d been stricken with fugues of depression, angry melancholy. She’d spent much of her time in her room with the door pointedly shut. While Juliet basked in the happiness of her engagement to Corporal Brett Kincaid, and the Mayfields and their friends spoke of little else except the upcoming wedding, Cressida was detached and indifferent. And when news of Brett’s injuries came, she’d said, after a moment of surprise and shock, “Well—Brett is a soldier after all and he was at war. You can’t always expect to be the one who does the killing.”