“Who?”
I started shuffling, and Grace giggled. “Bye, Dad,” she said, and started pouring on the speed. I kept my eyes on her as I took my tiny steps, being overtaken by other children walking and on bikes and skateboards and inline skates.
She didn’t glance back. She was running to catch up with friends, shouting, “Wait up!” I slipped my hands into my pockets, thought about getting back to the house and having a few private moments with Cynthia.
That was when the brown car drove past.
It was an older American model, fairly generic, an Impala I think, a bit of rust around the wheel wells. Windows tinted, but it was one of those cheap tint jobs, the glass covered with air bubbles, like the car had measles or something.
I stood and watched as it headed down the street, down to the last corner before the school, where Grace was chattering away with two of her friends.
The car stopped at the corner, a few yards away from Grace, and my heart was in my mouth for a moment.
And then one of the brown car’s rear taillights started to flash, the car turned right and disappeared down the street.
Grace and her friends, aided by a crossing guard in a bright orange vest and wielding a huge stop sign, made it across the street and onto school property. To my amazement, she looked back and waved at me. I raised my hand in return.
So okay, there was a brown car. But no man had jumped out of it and run after our daughter. No man had jumped out and run after anyone else’s kid, either. If the driver happened to be some crazed serial killer—as opposed to a perfectly sane serial killer—he wasn’t up to any serial killing this morning.
It appeared to be some guy going to work.
I stood there another moment, watched as Grace was swallowed up by a throng of fellow students, and felt a sadness wash over me. In Cynthia’s world, everyone was plotting to take away your loved ones.
Maybe, if I hadn’t been thinking that way, I’d have had a bit more of a spring in my step as I walked back in the direction of home. But as I approached our house, I tried to shake off my gloominess, to put myself into a better frame of mind. My wife, after all, was waiting for me, very likely under the covers.
So I sprinted the remainder of the last block home, walked briskly up the driveway, and as I came through the front door I called out, “I’m baaaaaack.”
There was no response.
I thought that had to mean Cynthia was already in bed, waiting for me to come upstairs, but as I hit the base of the stairs I heard a voice from the kitchen.
“In here,” Cynthia said. Her voice was subdued.
I stood in the doorway. She was sitting at the kitchen table, the phone in front of her. Her face seemed drained of color.
“What?” I asked.
“There was a call,” Cynthia said quietly.
“Who from?”
“He didn’t say who he was.”
“Well, what did he want?”
“All he said was he had a message.”
“What kind of message?”
“He said they forgive me.”
“What?”
“My family. He said they forgive me for what I did.”
7
I sat down next to Cynthia at the kitchen table. I put one hand over hers and could feel her shaking. “Okay,” I said, “just try to remember what he said exactly.”
“I told you,” she said, clipping her words. She bit into her upper lip, then, “He said—okay, wait a minute.” She pulled herself together. “The phone rang and I said hello, and he said, ‘Is this Cynthia Bigge?’ Which threw me, calling me by that name, but I said it was. And he said, I couldn’t believe he said this, he said, ‘Your family, they forgive you.’” She paused. “‘For what you did.’
“I didn’t know what to say. I think I just asked him who he was, what he was talking about.”
“Then what did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything else. He just hung up.” A solitary tear ran down Cynthia’s cheek as she looked into my face. “Why would he say something like that? What does he mean, they forgive me?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s probably some nut. Some nut who saw the show.”
“But why would a person call and say something like that? What would the point be?”
I pulled the phone over closer to me. It was the only high-tech one we had in the house, with a small caller-ID display screen.
“Why would he say my family forgives me? What does my family think I did? I don’t understand. And if they think I did something to them, then how can they even tell me they forgive me? It doesn’t make any sense, Terry.”
“I know. It’s crazy.” My eyes were on the phone. “Did you see where the call was coming from?”
“I looked and it didn’t say, and then when he hung up I tried to check the number.”
I pressed the button that displayed the call history. There was no record of a call in the last few minutes.
“It’s not showing anything,” I said.
Cynthia sniffed, wiped the tear from her cheek, and leaned over the phone. “I must have…what did I do? When I went to check where the call came from, I pressed this button to save it.”
“That’s how you delete it,” I said.
“What?”
“You deleted the last call from the history,” I said.
“Oh shit,” Cynthia said. “I was so flustered, I was upset, I just didn’t know what I was doing.”
“Sure,” I said. “So, this man, what did he sound like?”
Cynthia wasn’t listening to my question. She had a vacant look on her face. “I can’t believe I did that. I can’t believe I deleted the number. But nothing showed up on the screen anyway. You know when it says it’s an unknown number?”
“Okay, let’s not worry about that anymore. But the man, what did he sound like?”
Cynthia half raised her hands in a gesture of futility. “It was just a man. He was talking kind of low, like maybe he was trying to disguise it, you know. But there wasn’t really anything.” She paused, then her eyes flashed with an idea. “Maybe we should call the phone company. They might have a record of the call, maybe they’d even have a recording of it.”
“They don’t keep recordings of everybody’s phone calls,” I said, “no matter what some people may think. And what are we going to tell them? It was one isolated call, from a nut who probably saw the show. He didn’t threaten you, he didn’t even use obscene language.”
I slipped an arm around Cynthia’s shoulder. “Just…don’t worry about it. Too many people know about what happened to you. It can make you a target. You know what we should look into?”
“What?”
“An unlisted number. We could get an unlisted number, then we wouldn’t get calls like this.”
Cynthia shook her head. “No, we’re not doing that.”
“I don’t think it costs that much more, and besides—”
“No, we’re not doing it.”
“Why not?”
She swallowed. “Because when they are ready to call, when my family finally decides to get in touch, they have to be able to reach me.”
I had a free period after lunch, so I slipped out of the school, drove across town to Pamela’s, and went inside the store with four takeout cups of coffee.
It’s not what you’d call a high-end clothing store, and Pamela Forster, who at one time was Cynthia’s best friend in high school, was not aiming for a young, hip clientele. The racks were filled with fairly conservative apparel, the kind of clothes, I liked to joke with Cynthia, preferred by women who wear sensible shoes.
“Okay, so it’s not exactly Abercrombie & Fitch,” Cynthia would concede. “But A&F wouldn’t let me work whatever hours I want so I can pick up Grace after school, and Pam will.”
There was that.
Cyn was standing at the back of the shop, outside a changing room, talking to a customer through the curtain. “Do you want to try that in
a twelve?” she asked.
She hadn’t spotted me, but Pam, standing behind the register, had, and she smiled. “Hey.” Pam, tall, thin, and small-chested, carried herself well on three-inch heels. Her knee-length turquoise dress was stylish enough to suggest that it had not come from her own stock. Just because she was appealing to a clientele unfamiliar with the pages of Vogue didn’t mean she had to completely tone it down herself.
“You’re too kind,” she said, looking at the four cups of coffee. “But it’s just me and Cyn holding down the fort at the moment. Ann’s on a break.”
“Maybe it’ll still be warm by the time she gets back.”
Pam pried off the plastic lid, sprinkled in a packet of Splenda. “So how’s things?”
“Good.”
“Cynthia says still nothing. From the show.”
Was this what everyone wanted to talk about? Lauren Wells, my own daughter, now Pamela Forster.
“That’s right,” I said.
“I told her not to do it,” Pam said, shaking her head.
“You did?” This was news to me.
“Long time ago. When they first called about doing it. I told her, honey, let sleeping dogs lie. No sense stirring up that shit.”
“Yeah, well,” I said.
“I said, look, it’s been twenty-five years, right? Whatever happened, it happened. If you can’t move on with your life after this much water’s gone under the bridge, well, where are you going to be in another five years, or ten?”
“She never mentioned this,” I said. Cynthia had caught sight of us talking and waved, but didn’t move from her post outside the changing-room curtain.
“The lady in there, trying shit on she can’t hope to fit into?” Pamela whispered. “She’s walked out of here before with stuff she didn’t pay for, so we keep an eye on her when she’s here. Lots of personal service.”
“She shoplifted?” I said, and Pamela nodded.
“If she stole, why don’t you charge her? Why do you let her back in?”
“Can’t prove it. We just have our suspicions. We kind of let her know we know, without saying it, never let her out of our sight.”
I started forming an image of the woman behind the curtain. Young, a bit rough looking, kind of cocky. The kind of person you’d pick out of a lineup as a shoplifter, maybe a tattoo on her shoulder or—
The curtain slid back and a short, stocky woman in her late forties, early fifties maybe, stepped out, handing several outfits to Cynthia. If I had to stereotype her, I would have said librarian. “I just don’t see anything today,” she said politely, and walked past Pamela and me on her way out.
“Her?” I said to Pamela.
“A regular Catwoman,” Pamela said.
Cynthia came over, kissed me on the cheek, and said, “A coffee run? What’s the occasion?”
“I had a free period,” I said. “Just figured, you know.”
Pamela excused herself to the back of the store, taking her coffee with her.
“Because of this morning,” Cynthia said.
“You were kind of shook up after the phone call. I wanted to see how you were doing.”
“I’m good,” she said, with limited conviction, and took a sip of her coffee. “I’m okay.”
“Pam said she tried to talk you out of doing Deadline.”
“You weren’t all that sold on the idea, either.”
“But you never mentioned her talking against the idea.”
“You know Pam isn’t afraid to offer her opinion on anything. She also thinks you could lose five pounds.”
She’d blown the wind out of my sails. “So that lady, the one who was trying on clothes? She’s a shoplifter?”
“You just can’t tell about people,” Cynthia said, taking another sip.
This was the day when we met with Dr. Naomi Kinzler after work. Cynthia had arranged to drop Grace off at a friend’s house after school, and then we headed over. We’d been seeing Dr. Kinzler once every two weeks for the last four months, after being referred to her by our family physician. He’d been trying, without success, to help Cynthia deal with her anxieties, and felt it would be better for her to talk to someone—for both of us to talk to someone—rather than see her becoming dependent on a prescription.
I’d been skeptical from the beginning whether there was anything a psychiatrist could accomplish, and after coming here for almost ten sessions, I hadn’t become any more convinced. Dr. Kinzler had an office in a medical building in the east end of Bridgeport that had a view of the turnpike when she didn’t have the blinds closed, as she did today. I suppose she had noticed me looking out the window during previous visits, my mind drifting as I counted tractor trailers.
Sometimes Dr. Kinzler met with us together, other times one of us would step out to allow her some one-on-one with the other.
I’d never been to a shrink before. About all I knew came from watching The Sopranos ’ Dr. Melfi help Tony work through his problems. I couldn’t decide whether ours were more or less serious than his. Tony had people disappearing around him all the time, but he was often the one who’d arranged it. He had the advantage of knowing what had happened to these people.
Naomi Kinzler wasn’t exactly Dr. Melfi. She was short and plump with gray hair pulled back and pinned into submission. She was pushing seventy, I guessed, and had been at this kind of thing long enough to figure out how to keep everyone else’s pain from burrowing under her own skin and staying there.
“So, what’s new since our last session?” Dr. Kinzler asked.
I didn’t know whether Cynthia was going to get into the crank call from that morning. At some level, I guess I didn’t want to, didn’t really think it was that big a deal, felt we’d smoothed it over in my visit to the shop, so before Cynthia could say anything, I said, “Things are good. Things have been very good.”
“How’s Grace?”
“Grace is good,” I said. “Walked her to school this morning. We had a nice talk.”
“About what?” Cynthia asked.
“Just a chat. Just talking.”
“Is she still checking the night skies?” Dr. Kinzler asked. “For meteors?”
I waved my hand dismissively. “It’s nothing.”
“You think?” the doctor asked.
“Oh yeah,” I said. “She’s just very interested in the solar system, in space, other planets.”
“But you did buy her the telescope.”
“Sure.”
“Because she’s worried an asteroid will destroy the Earth,” Dr. Kinzler reminded me.
“It’s helped put her fears at ease, plus she uses it to look at the stars and the planets,” I said. “And the neighbors, too, for all I know.” I smiled.
“How about her anxiety level overall? Would you say it’s still somewhat heightened, or is it dissipating?”
“Dissipating,” I said, as Cynthia said, “Still up there.”
Dr. Kinzler’s eyebrows went up a notch. I hated it when they did that.
“I think she’s still anxious,” Cynthia said, glancing at me. “She’s very fragile at times.”
Dr. Kinzler nodded thoughtfully. She was looking at Cynthia when she asked, “Why do you think that is?”
Cynthia wasn’t stupid. She knew where Dr. Kinzler was going. She’d gone down this road before. “You think it’s rubbing off me.”
Dr. Kinzler’s shoulders raised a fraction of an inch. A conservative shrug. “What do you think?”
“I try not to worry in front of her,” Cynthia said. “We try not to talk about things in front of her.”
I guess I made a noise, a snort or a sniff or something, enough to get their attention.
“Yes?” Dr. Kinzler said.
“She knows,” I said. “Grace knows a lot more than she lets on. She’s seen the show.”
“What?” Cynthia said.
“She saw it at a friend’s house.”
“Who?” Cynthia demanded. “I want a name.”
“I don’t know. And I don’t think there’s any point beating it out of Grace.” I glanced at Dr. Kinzler. “That was just a figure of speech.”
Dr. Kinzler nodded.
Cynthia bit her lower lip. “She’s not ready. She doesn’t need to know these things about me. Not now. She needs to be protected.”
“That’s one of the toughest things about being a parent,” Dr. Kinzler said. “Realizing that you can’t protect your children from everything.”
Cynthia let that sink in a moment, then, “There was a phone call.”
She gave Dr. Kinzler the details, offered up a near-verbatim account. Dr. Kinzler asked a few questions that were similar to mine. Did she recognize the voice, had he ever called before, that kind of thing. Then, from Dr. Kinzler:
“The caller said that your family wants to forgive you. What do you think he meant by that?”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “It was just a crank call.”
Dr. Kinzler gave me a look that I took to mean, “Shut up.”
“That’s the part I keep thinking about,” Cynthia said. “What’s he saying they forgive me for? For not finding them? For not doing more to find out what happened to them?”
“You could hardly be expected to,” Dr. Kinzler said. “You were a child. Fourteen is still a child.”
“And then I wonder, do they think it was my fault that it happened in the first place? Was it my fault that they left? What could I have done that would make them leave me in the middle of the night?”
“There’s part of you that still believes that it was somehow your responsibility,” Dr. Kinzler said.
“Look,” I said before Cynthia could respond. “It was a crank call. All sorts of people saw that show. It shouldn’t be a surprise that a few nutcases would come out of the woodwork.”
Dr. Kinzler sighed softly and looked at me. “Terry, maybe this would be a good time for Cynthia and me to speak one-on-one.”
“No, it’s okay,” Cynthia said. “He doesn’t have to go.”
“Terry,” Dr. Kinzler said, trying so hard to be patient that I could tell she was pissed, “of course it may have been a crank call, but what the caller said can trigger feelings in Cynthia just the same, and by understanding her reaction to those feelings we have a better chance of working through this.”