As soon as she stepped out of the car, Janine could hear the boisterous sounds of several hundred happy Girl Scouts. The lot was close to the lake, and the girls laughed and shrieked as they played in the water. Sophie would not have been one of those girls, Janine thought. She wouldn’t have been able to swim in the lake because of her catheter. If Janine had been there to clean the tube that protruded from her belly, wrap it in gauze and tape it to her body again, she might have allowed it, but she’d told Sophie not to get it wet at all over the weekend. That and sticking to her diet were Sophie’s end of the deal.
As she listened to the mirthful noise from the girls in the lake, Janine wondered if Sophie was capable of making such joyful sounds. Could she shriek that way, with such complete abandon? Janine had never heard her do so, and the thought weighed heavily on her mind. She wanted to know.
They met briefly with the camp director and the counselors in charge of Sophie’s cabin, the same people they had met with the night before, along with the sheriff. They were patient and sympathetic with Joe and Janine, and they exhibited real concern over the missing Scouts, but they had not been able to remember any new facts that might help to find them.
“Sophie’s a little doll,” one of the counselors said, and the other nodded in agreement.
“She’s much more mature than the other kids, even though she’s so much tinier than they are,” the second counselor added. “She knows when it’s time to play and when it’s time to work, and she does both with equal zeal.”
Janine liked that the counselors spoke about Sophie in the present tense, but the words themselves made her cry. She leaned against the wall of the director’s cedar-smelling office, and Joe put his arm around her. The intimacy in his touch was unfamiliar after three long years, but she felt the sincerity in the gesture and allowed herself to take comfort from it.
“The last three years of her life have been all work,” she said. “I was afraid she wouldn’t know how to play anymore.”
“Oh, she does,” the first counselor assured her.
“Did she shriek at all?” Janine asked.
They looked at her in confusion.
“I mean, the way the girls are doing out in the lake,” she explained. “You know, shrieking and yelling and giggling.”
“I don’t know about shrieking,” the second counselor said, “but she definitely had a great time.”
“She was amazing about not being able to go in the water,” the director said. “She sat on the pier and played ball with the other girls from there. She never complained.”
“She’s not a complainer,” Joe said.
“When I heard she got dialysis, I expected her to have one of those, you know, big veins in her arm,” the first counselor said.
“A fistula,” Janine said.
“Right. That’s what my aunt has. But Sophie told me all about how she gets hooked up to that machine at night through the tube in her stomach. She knew all the terms and everything.”
Janine nodded. “We’ve kept her informed every step of the way.”
“You know, Mrs. Donohue—” the second counselor looked Janine squarely in the eye “—I don’t know where Sophie is, but I know she’s safe. I feel that really strongly.”
Janine felt mesmerized by the young counselor’s gaze.
“She’s sort of psychic.” The first counselor nodded toward her co-worker with a laugh. “She does tarot cards and all, and I used to think she was full of it, but I think she’s right about Sophie. They just got lost going back or something.”
“Thank you,” Janine said. “I hope you’re right.”
After leaving the director’s office, Janine insisted they walk around the camp before returning to the car. The place was so lively with gleeful girls that it was hard to imagine anything ominous resulting from a stay there. Although she knew she was being ridiculous, she found herself searching the face of every little girl they passed, as though she might find Sophie hidden just beneath that child’s features. It was both eerie and wonderful to be here, where Sophie had played and laughed most recently, and Janine had an almost visceral sense of her daughter’s presence.
“Can you feel her here?” she asked Joe, a bit shyly, since she knew the question would sound absurd to him. “I mean, can you feel that she was here just a day ago? Like there’s still a little bit of Sophie’s spirit in the air?”
He looked at her oddly. “No, not really,” he said.
“That counselor is right about Sophie being safe,” Janine said.
“I hope so.” Joe pointed toward the path that would take them back to the parking lot.
“No, I mean I know she’s right.” The feeling was so strong, she was smiling. “She’s alive, Joe. I can sense it.”
“It’s best to think positively, I guess,” Joe said, and she knew he didn’t understand her feeling at all.
Lucas would have. Lucas would have known exactly what she meant.
Back in the car, they studied the map, trying to locate other routes Alison might have taken back to Vienna. They developed a system: once on an alternate route, they peered into the woods as far as their vision allowed, and they stopped at every shop or eatery they could find. Then they backtracked and followed the same routine on a different road. Two people—one a waitress, the other a customer who’d overheard their query at a produce stand—told them they’d heard about the missing girls on the radio that morning. That was encouraging. At least the word was getting out. But the going was slow and otherwise disheartening.
This would be easier from the air, Janine thought, as they walked back to the car from an unproductive stop at a small restaurant. She couldn’t question people from a helicopter, but she could cover more territory in more time, and she would be able to see more easily off the beaten track.
They were driving down a narrow road, a highly unlikely route for Alison to have taken, when they came to a fork. Janine stopped the car, not even bothering to pull onto the shoulder, since no one else seemed interested in driving on this road.
“Let’s look at the map,” she said. “I don’t know which way to go.”
Joe leaned over and turned off the ignition, but he made no move to look at the map lying on his thighs. Instead he closed his eyes and rested his head against the headrest.
“God,” he said, eyes squeezed tightly shut. “Who the hell knows which way she went? I feel like we’re getting farther away from finding them with every damn turn we make.”
She reached out to lightly touch his arm. “We can’t give up,” she said, although she certainly empathized with his frustration. “We can’t just sit home, twiddling our thumbs.” Nothing could be worse than this, she thought. Nothing. To know that something terrible must have befallen her child, yet have no idea how to help her, or even find her. Or which road to take. A bit of Joe’s helpless panic seeped into her, but she shook free of it. If she gave in to it, she would lose her ability to function. To think clearly. And that would get them nowhere.
“You know what I was thinking?” she said.
He rolled his head on the headrest until he was looking at her. “What?”
“That this would be a lot easier in a helicopter. We wouldn’t be able to talk to people, but we could at least visualize all the roads. It would take us a much shorter time to check out the roads from above.”
He was quiet for a moment, his gaze still on her. “Are you talking about flying it yourself?” he asked finally.
“Yes.”
“When’s the last time you flew?”
“When I left Omega-Flight. Three years ago.” She didn’t say When Sophie got sick, or, When you had an affair. “I bet I could borrow one of their helicopters.”
“If you flew, I couldn’t be with you,” Joe said quietly.
How could she have forgotten his terror of flying?
“Still, Joe?” she asked gently.
“Still and forever,” he said. “I’m not even willing to fight it anymore. I
had to go to California on business last year and I took the train. Three days there, and three days back.”
“I’m sorry.” It hurt to see so much fear in such a tough guy. For as long as she’d known him, Joe could barely watch a plane sail across the sky, much less fly in one. The plane crash that had taken his father’s life had left scars that would never go away.
“Paula had to go to the conference, too,” he said, “and she took the train with me, so it wasn’t that terrible.”
“That was very nice of her.” She was not surprised. She thought that Paula would do just about anything for Joe. “Can I ask you something?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“Are you and Paula…?”
“Just friends.” He smiled. “I thought you knew that.”
She had seen Paula and Joe together numerous times these past three years, mostly at Sophie’s bedside or at Joe’s house when she went to pick Sophie up there after a visit. She’d seen the way Paula looked at Joe, with a gaze that held admiration and yearning. Why was that look so easy for one woman to read in another, yet men could be so blind to it?
“But you drove down to Florida with her after her mother died,” she said.
“She really needed a friend right then.”
“But…” she said, hesitantly, then decided to blurt it out. “I always thought she was the woman you had the affair with.”
He looked truly surprised. “You’re kidding. I had no idea that’s what you thought,” he said. He shook his head with a half smile. “No, it wasn’t Paula. It was someone who worked for us temporarily, and it wasn’t an affair, really. I…slept with her once.” He looked uncomfortable saying those words to her. “I was screwed up, Janine. I wish it had never happened.”
“And all this time I thought it was Paula,” she said.
“Paula would never do that to another woman. Her husband cheated on her, which is why she left him.”
“So Paula and I have something in common.” She instantly regretted her words. They were having a good conversation, and she’d just taken it below the belt. But Joe didn’t seem disturbed.
“Yes, you do,” he said. “I wish you’d told me you thought it was Paula. I could have saved you from…I don’t know, you must have felt awkward around her.”
“At first, I did,” she said. “But it’s been a long time. So, if not Paula, then…is there someone else?”
“Now, you mean? A girlfriend?” He smiled again, this time ruefully. “Lord knows, I’ve tried,” he said. “I’ve gone out with a few women. They all say…” He shook his head.
“They all say what?” she prodded.
“It’s hard to talk about.”
“What?”
“They all say I’m still in love with you.”
They were the last words she’d expected. “Are you?” she asked.
“Let’s just say I would do anything to erase the past and make us a family again.” He took her hand in his. “Is there any chance of that?” he asked.
Again, she felt a surge of sympathy toward him. His words, his obvious honesty and sincerity, were seductive to her, and she allowed herself one brief moment’s fantasy of being his wife again. But then she thought of how he would react if she mentioned that, at this very moment, Sophie should be at Dr. Schaefer’s office receiving her infusion of Herbalina. And she thought of how, despite his momentary kindness, he held her responsible for Sophie’s disappearance, and she knew she could never be that close to him again.
“Now is not the time for this conversation,” she said, squeezing his hand. She took the map from his lap and looked out the window at the two roads stretching out in front of them. Neither looked promising.
“Let’s go back,” Joe said with a sigh. “Let’s just go to the police station and get ready for the press conference.”
She hesitated, looking down at the map, trying to determine exactly where they were.
“It doesn’t mean we’re giving up,” Joe said. “Just changing our strategy.”
She handed the map back to him. “All right,” she said.
Joe looked at his watch. “It’s after twelve,” he said. “We told your parents we’d call before noon. Might as well do it before we start driving again.”
She nodded and took her phone from her purse, pressing the memory button for the mansion.
“Hello?” Her mother’s voice had that brittle, anxious quality that Janine knew all too well.
“Hi, Mom. We—”
“Let me talk to Joe.”
Janine sucked in her breath as though her mother had punched her. “I just wanted to let you know that we haven’t found anything,” she said quickly.
“Put Joe on,” her mother insisted.
Janine shut her eyes. “She won’t talk to me,” she said, handing him the phone. Her throat was so tight she could barely breathe, and she reached into her shorts pocket for a tissue.
“Hi, Mom,” Joe said. “No, no word at all. Any news there?”
She listened as Joe told her mother about the press conference scheduled for that afternoon. When he hung up, he looked at her, and she knew her nose was red from her quiet crying.
“How about I drive back,” he suggested.
She shook her head and started the car. She needed something to engage her mind. Yet as she drove, all she could think about were the countless other times she’d done something to elicit the sting of her mother’s silent anger.
After she lost the baby on the banks of the Shenandoah, she suddenly noticed babies everywhere. Janine had never paid much attention to them before, not even during the seven and a half months of her pregnancy. But suddenly babies slept in strollers in the shopping malls, reached from carts for forbidden items on the shelves at the grocery store and were carried in sacks against their mother’s chests in the bank, where Janine had taken a job to help Joe pay their expenses. Mothers cooed at their little ones, smiled at them, comforted them when they cried, and played peekaboo with them on the counter at the bank. Each time Janine was witness to one of these interactions, she felt the pain of losing her own infant. She had not felt that pain at the time; she had felt nothing, actually, since she had somehow managed to deny to herself that she was about to become a mother. But now she saw, in vivid detail before her, how she had taken that precious life for granted. How could she have gone canoeing that day? How could she have had so little regard for the miracle happening inside her? Her feelings both sobered and depressed her. For a while, she functioned like an automaton, a little Stepford wife, doing everything Joe asked of her, as if complete obedience were her penance for her transgression. Her parents had stopped helping them financially now that there was no baby to consider. She and Joe needed to learn to make it on their own, they said, and, of course, Joe agreed. That was only the beginning of Joe’s agreements with her parents.
She was coming to realize that, had it not been for her pregnancy, she and Joe’s relationship probably would have died a natural death after high school. They were so dissimilar. He was straight-arrow, goal-oriented, money hungry. He weighed every move before he made it, thinking through every possible consequence. Yet, she did love him, despite his stodginess. He was handsome and kind, and she could talk easily to him—as long as she didn’t talk about things that upset him, like her longing for adventure or her boredom with her bank job. She liked that she was helping to put him through school. Once he was out, though, and had made a little money, it would be her turn. She planned to study aviation—although that was one of those things she couldn’t talk to him about.
She knew the very day her depression began to lift. She was getting ready for work, watching the early-morning news in their studio apartment, when an ad came on the TV.
“Learn a trade,” the announcer said, “and earn money for school at the same time!”
The images on the screen were of young men and women, Army Reservists, dressed in camouflage, crawling on the ground with rifles, pushing buttons on huge
computers and…flying planes! Her heart pounded against her ribs as she watched the ad, as if it were beating life back into her body after a long illness, and she longed to rip off her stuffy bank teller clothes and dial the phone number displayed on the screen right that minute. She managed to wait until her afternoon break at the bank before making the call, but within a week, she had signed up for the Army Reserves—without the knowledge of Joe or her parents.
It was another week before she dared to tell Joe what she had done. They were in their apartment, sitting at opposite ends of the sofa, eating their dinner of canned chicken soup and grilled-cheese sandwiches. He had a textbook on his knee, as usual; he was always studying.
“Joe?” she said, when she was halfway through her sandwich.
It was a moment before he looked up, and he kept his finger on his place in the book.
“I did something this week that I’m really excited about,” she told him.
“What’s that?” He glanced down at the book again, obviously distracted.
“I enlisted in the Army Reserves.”
He actually laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”
She shook her head. “I saw an ad on TV, and I—”
He withdrew his finger from the book and shut it. “Why would you do anything so stupid?” he asked.
“I don’t think it’s stupid. I’ll be getting training and money for college, so it won’t cost us as much for me to—”
“We aren’t—” Joe hunted for the words “—we’re not army kind of people. Your father even refused to fight in Vietnam, remember? Do you know what he had to go through to get that conscientious objector status? And here you join up? We don’t even know anyone in the military.”
She looked at him curiously. “When did you get so bigoted?” she asked.
“I’m not bigoted. I’m just being…realistic. I mean, can you really see yourself in a uniform, taking orders? You, of all people?”
“Yes, actually, I can.” She felt herself toughening up as she spoke. “And it’s only the reserves. I’ll just have to be away from home for one weekend each month, although I’ll have to be on active duty for a while first, while I’m in Warrant Officer Candidate Development.” She spoke very quickly, hoping that by talking rapidly, she could make the long separation seem much shorter. “That’s kind of like basic training,” she said. “And then I’ll go to flight school.”