But there were no calls, other than one from a woman who said her own family had been abducted by aliens, and a man who theorized that Cynthia’s folks had stepped through a tear in the fabric of time, and were either on the run from dinosaurs, or having their minds erased in some Matrix-like future.
No credible tips came in.
Evidently no one who knew anything saw the show. Or if they did, they weren’t talking.
For the first week, Cynthia called the Deadline producers every day. They were nice enough, said that if they heard anything, they’d be in touch. The second week, Cynthia held off to every other day, but now the producers were getting short with her, said there was no point calling, they’d had no responses, and that if anything did come up they’d be in touch.
They were on to other stories. Cynthia quickly became old news.
2
Grace’s eyes were pleading, but her tone was stern.
“Dad,” she said. “I’m. Eight. Years. Old.” Where had she learned this? I wondered. This technique of breaking down sentences into individual words for dramatic effect. As if I needed to ask. There was more than enough drama to go around in this household.
“Yes,” I said to my daughter. “I’m aware.”
Her Cheerios were getting soggy and she hadn’t touched her orange juice. “The kids make fun of me,” she said.
I took a sip of my coffee. I’d only just poured it but it was already verging on cold. The coffeemaker was on the fritz. I decided I would pick up a cup at the Dunkin’ Donuts on the way to school.
“Who makes fun of you?” I asked.
“Everybody,” Grace said.
“Everybody,” I repeated. “What did they do? Did they call an assembly? Did the principal stand up there and tell everyone to make fun of you?”
“Now you’re making fun of me.”
Okay, that was true. “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to get an idea how widespread this problem is. I’m guessing it’s not everybody. It just feels like everybody. And even if it’s only a few, I understand that can still be pretty embarrassing.”
“It is.”
“Is it your friends?”
“Yeah. They say Mom treats me like I’m a baby.”
“Your mom’s just being careful,” I said. “She loves you very much.”
“I know. But I’m eight.”
“Your mom just wants to know that you get to school safely, that’s all.”
Grace sighed and bowed her head defeatedly, a lock of her brown hair dropping in front of her brown eyes. She used her spoon to move some Cheerios around in the milk. “But she doesn’t have to walk me to school. Nobody’s mom walks them to school unless they’re in kindergarten.”
We’d been through this before, and I’d tried talking to Cynthia, suggested as gently as possible that maybe it was time for Grace to fly solo now that she was in third grade. There were plenty of other kids to walk with, it wasn’t as though she’d be walking all by herself.
“Why can’t you walk me instead?” Grace asked, and there was a bit of a glint in her eye.
The rare times when I had walked Grace to school, I’d fallen behind the better part of a block. As far as anyone knew, I was just out for a stroll, not actually keeping an eye on Grace, making sure she got there safely. And we never breathed a word of it to Cynthia. My wife took me at my word, that I’d walked with Grace, right alongside her, all the way to Fairmont Elementary School, and stood on the sidewalk until I’d seen her go inside.
“I can’t,” I said. “I have to be at my school by eight. If I walk you to school before I go, you have to hang around outside for an hour. Your mom doesn’t start work till ten, so it’s not a problem for her. Once in a while, when I get a first period spare, I can walk you.”
In fact, Cynthia had arranged her hours at Pamela’s so that she’d be around each morning to make sure Grace was off to school safely. It had never been Cynthia’s dream to work at a women’s clothing store owned by her best friend from high school, but it allowed her to work part-time, which meant she could be home by the time school let out. In a concession to Grace, she didn’t wait for her at the school door, but down the street. Cynthia could see the school from there, and it didn’t take her long to spot our often-pigtailed daughter in the crowd. She had tried persuading Grace to wave, so that she could pick her out even sooner, but Grace had been stubborn about complying.
The problem came when some teacher asked the class to stay after the bell had rung. Maybe it was a mass detention, or some last-minute homework instructions. Grace would sit there, panicking, not because Cynthia would be worrying, but because it might mean her mom, worried by the delay, would come into the school and hunt her down.
“Also, my telescope’s broken,” Grace said.
“What do you mean, it’s broken?”
“The thingies that hold the telescope part to the standy part are loose. I sort of fixed it, but it’ll probably get loose again.”
“I’ll have a look at it.”
“I have to keep a lookout for killer asteroids,” Grace said. “I’m not going to be able to see them if my telescope is broken.”
“Okay. I said I’ll look at it.”
“Do you know that if an asteroid hit the Earth it would be like a million nuclear bombs going off?”
“I don’t think it’s that many,” I said. “But I take your point, that it would be a bad thing.”
“When I have nightmares about an asteroid hitting the Earth, I can make them go away if I’ve checked before I go to bed to make sure there isn’t any coming.”
I nodded. The thing was, we hadn’t exactly bought her the most expensive telescope. It was a bottom-of-the-line item. It wasn’t just that you didn’t want to spend a fortune on something you weren’t sure your child was going to stay interested in; we simply don’t have a lot of money to throw around.
“What about Mom?” Grace asked.
“What about her?”
“Does she have to walk with me?”
“I’ll talk to her,” I said.
“Talk to who?” Cynthia said, walking into the kitchen.
Cynthia looked good this morning. Beautiful, in fact. She was a striking woman, and I never tired of her green eyes, high cheekbones, fiery red hair. Not long like when I first met her, but no less dramatic. People think she must work out, but I think it’s anxiety that’s helped her keep her figure. She burns off calories worrying. She doesn’t jog, doesn’t belong to a gym. Not that we could afford a gym membership anyway.
Like I’ve mentioned, I’m a high school English teacher, and Cynthia works in retail—even though she has a family studies degree and worked for a while doing social work—so we’re not exactly rolling in dough. We have this house, big enough for the three of us, in a modest neighborhood that’s only a few blocks from where Cynthia grew up. You might have thought Cynthia would have wanted to put some distance between herself and that house, but I think she wanted to stay in the neighborhood, just in case someone came back and wanted to get in touch.
Our cars are both ten years old, our vacations low key. We borrow my uncle’s cabin up near Montpelier for a week every summer, and three years ago, when Grace was five, we took a trip to Walt Disney World, staying outside the park in a cheap motel in Orlando where you could hear, at two in the morning, some guy in the next room telling his girl to be careful, to ease up on the teeth.
But we have, I believe, a pretty good life, and we are, more or less, happy. Most days.
The nights, sometimes, can be hard.
“Grace’s teacher,” I said.
“What do you want to talk to Grace’s teacher for?” Cynthia asked.
“I was just saying, when it’s one of those parent-teacher nights, I should go in and talk to her, to Mrs. Enders,” I said. “Last time, you went in, I had a parent-teacher thing at my school the same night, it always seems to happen that way.”
“She’s very nice,” Cynthia said. “I think she’s
a lot nicer than your teacher last year, what’s-her-name, Mrs. Phelps. I thought she was a bit mean.”
“I hated her,” Grace concurred. “She made us stand on one leg for hours when we were bad.”
“I have to go,” I said, taking another sip of cold coffee. “Cyn, I think we need a new coffeemaker.”
“I’ll look at some,” Cynthia said.
As I got up from the table Grace looked at me despairingly. I knew what she wanted from me. Talk to her. Please talk to her.
“Terry, you seen the spare key?” Cynthia asked.
“Hmm?” I said.
She pointed to the empty hook on the wall just inside the kitchen door that opened onto our small backyard. “Where’s the spare?” It was the one we used if we were taking a walk, maybe a stroll down to the Sound, and didn’t want to take a ring loaded with car remotes and workplace keys.
“I don’t know. Grace, you got the key?” Grace did not yet have her own house key. She hardly needed it, with Cynthia around to take her to and from school. She shook her head, glared at me.
I shrugged. “Maybe it’s me. I might have left it next to the bed.” I sidled up next to Cynthia, smelled her hair as I walked past. “See me off?” I said.
She followed me to the front door. “Something going on?” she asked. “Is Grace okay? She seems kind of quiet this morning.”
I grimaced, shook my head. “It’s, you know. She’s eight years old, Cyn.”
She moved back a bit, bristling. “She complains about me to you?”
“She just needs to feel a bit more independent.”
“That’s what that was about. She wants you to talk to me, not her teacher.”
I smiled tiredly. “She says the other kids are making fun of her.”
“She’ll get over it.”
I wanted to say something, but felt we’d had this discussion so many times, there weren’t any new points to make.
So Cynthia filled the silence. “You know there are bad people out there. The world is full of them.”
“I know, Cyn, I know.” I tried to keep the frustration, and the tiredness, out of my voice. “But how long are you going to walk her? Till she’s twelve? Fifteen? You going to walk her to high school?”
“I’ll deal with that when it comes,” she said. She paused. “I saw that car again.”
The car. There was always a car.
Cynthia could see in my face that I didn’t believe there was anything to this. “You think I’m crazy,” she said.
“I don’t think you’re crazy.”
“I’ve seen it two times. A brown car.”
“What kind of car?”
“I don’t know. An average car. With tinted windows. When it drives past me and Grace, it slows down a bit.”
“Has it stopped? Has the driver said anything to you?”
“No.”
“Did you get a license plate?”
“No. The first time, I didn’t think anything of it. The second time, I was too flustered.”
“Cyn, it’s probably just somebody who lives in the neighborhood. People have to slow down. It’s a school zone up there. Remember that one day, the cops set up a speed trap? Getting people to stop speeding through there, that time of day.”
Cynthia looked away from me, folded her arms in front of her. “You’re not out there every day like I am. You don’t know.”
“What I do know,” I said, “is that you aren’t doing Grace any favors if you don’t let her start fending for herself.”
“Oh, so you think, if some man tries to drag her into that car, that she’s going to be able to defend herself. An eight-year-old girl.”
“How did we get from some brown car driving by to a man trying to drag her away?”
“You’ve never taken these things as seriously as I do.” She waited a beat. “And I suppose that’s understandable, for you.”
I puffed out my cheeks, blew out some air. “Okay, look, we’re not going to solve this now,” I said. “I have to get going.”
“Sure,” Cynthia said, still not looking at me. “I think I’m going to call them.”
I hesitated. “Call who?”
“The show. Deadline.”
“Cyn, it’s been, what, three weeks since the show ran? If anyone was going to call in with anything, they’d have done it by now. And besides, if the station gets any interesting calls, they’re going to get in touch. They’ll want to do a follow-up.”
“I’m going to give them a call anyway. I haven’t called for a while, so maybe they won’t get so pissed off this time. They might have heard something, figured it wasn’t important, that it was some crank, but it might be something. We were lucky, you know, that some researcher even remembered what had happened to me, decided it was worth a look back.”
I turned her gently, lifted her chin so that our eyes could meet. “Okay, whatever you want to do, do,” I said. “I love you, you know.”
“I love you, too,” she said. “I—I know I’m not easy to live with about this stuff. I know it’s hard on Grace. I know my anxieties, that they kind of rub off on her. But lately, with that show, it’s made it all very real for me again.”
“I know,” I said. “I just want you to be able to live for the present, too. Not always fixate on the past.”
I felt her shoulders move. “Fixate?” she said. “Is that what you think I do?”
It was the wrong word. You’d think an English teacher could come up with something better.
“Don’t patronize me,” Cynthia said. “You think you know, but you don’t. You can’t ever know.”
There wasn’t much I could say to that, because it was true. I leaned in and kissed her hair and went to work.
3
She wanted to be comforting in what she had to say, but it was just as important to be firm.
“I can understand you might find the idea a bit unsettling, really, I do. I can see where you might be feeling a bit squeamish about the whole thing, but I’ve been here before, and I’m telling you, I’ve given this a lot of thought, and this is the only way. That’s the way it is with family. You have to do what you have to do, even if it’s difficult, even if it’s painful. Of course what we have to do to them is going to be difficult, but you have to look at the bigger picture. But it’s a bit like when they said—you’re probably not old enough to remember this—that you have to destroy a village to save it. It’s something like that. Think of our family as a village. We have to do whatever it takes to save it.”
She liked the “we” part. That they were a kind of team.
4
When she was first pointed out to me at the University of Connecticut, my friend Roger whispered, “Archer, check it out. That is one seriously fucked-up chick. She’s hot—she’s got hair like a fire engine—but she’s majorly screwed up.”
Cynthia Bigge was sitting down in the second row of the lecture hall, taking notes on literature of the Holocaust, and Roger and I were up near the back, close to the door, so we could make a break for it as soon as the professor was done droning on.
“What do you mean, fucked up?” I whispered back.
“Okay, you remember that thing, a few years ago, there was this girl, her whole family disappeared, nobody ever saw them again?”
“No.” I didn’t read the papers or watch the news at that time in my life. Like many teens, I was somewhat self-absorbed—I was going to be the next Philip Roth or Robertson Davies or John Irving; I was in the process of narrowing it down—and oblivious to current events, except for when one of the more radical organizations on campus wanted students to protest something or other. I tried to do my part because it was a great place to meet girls.
“Okay, so her parents, her sister, or maybe it was a brother, I can’t remember, they all disappeared.”
I leaned in closer, whispered, “So what, they got killed?”
Roger shrugged. “Who the fuck knows? That’s what makes it so interesting.” He tipped his head i
n Cynthia’s direction. “Maybe she knows. Maybe she offed the bunch of them. Haven’t you ever wanted to kill off your entire family?”
I shrugged. I guessed it crossed everyone’s mind at some point.
“What I think is that she’s just stuck up,” Roger said. “She won’t give you the time of day. Sticks to herself, you see her in the library all the time, just working, doing stuff. Doesn’t hang out with anybody, doesn’t go out to things. Nice rack, though.”
She was pretty.
It was the only course I shared with her. I was in the School of Education, preparing to become a teacher, in case the whole bestselling-writer thing didn’t happen immediately. My parents, retired now and living in Boca Raton, had both been teachers, and had liked it okay. At least it was recession-proof. I asked around, learned Cynthia was enrolled in the School of Family Studies at the Storrs campus. It included courses in gender studies, marital issues, care of the elderly, family economics, all kinds of shit like that.
I was sitting out front of the university bookstore, wearing a UConn Huskies sweatshirt and glancing at some lecture notes, when I sensed someone standing in front of me.
“Why’re you asking around about me?” Cynthia said. It was the first I’d heard her speak. A soft voice, but confident.
“Huh?” I said.
“Somebody said you were asking about me,” she repeated. “You’re Terrence Archer, right?”
I nodded. “Terry,” I said.
“Okay, so, why are you asking about me?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“What do you want to know? Is there something you want to know? If there is, just come out and ask me, because I don’t like people talking about me behind my back. I can tell when it’s going on.”
“Listen, I’m sorry, I only—”
“You think I don’t know people talk about me?”
“God, what are you, paranoid? I wasn’t talking about you. I just wondered whether—”
“You wondered whether I’m the one. Whose family disappeared. Okay, I am. Now you can mind your own fucking business.”