Don't Look for Me(10)

I go to the bathroom and close the door. I take off my wet clothes, put on the dry clothes of a strange woman. Back in the bedroom, I hang my wet clothes on everything I can find. A chair. A radiator. A dresser. A bedpost.

I climb beneath the quilt and sheets. I curl myself into a ball. The tiniest ball I can make myself into. I leave the lantern on at the foot of the bed because I am not quite ready to be in the dark.

I let the fear show its face and then I tell it exactly what it is. Just like my unreasonable thoughts are remnants from the past, this fear is just guilt. That’s all. Just guilt. I did something stupid and now my family will worry and the police will come looking. But I will make it right in the morning. Like the man said. As soon as the sun is up.

Facts are facts and the facts add up. Fear is just guilt finding a way in. Finding a way to masquerade because I don’t want to face it.

It folds around me like another blanket. A familiar blanket.

This blanket of guilt.





4


Day thirteen





Hastings Pass.

Nic hated this road. She hated the way it fell off at the shoulder into dirt and gravel and how the dirt hung in the air long after being kicked up. She hated the thick, brown cornfields that stood high on either side like a scene out of a Stephen King novel. She hated how it was straight as an arrow, but rose and fell over the small hills so she could never pass a car that was driving too slow.

Hastings Pass intersected Route 7 at the Gas n’ Go. It was a left-hand turn coming from the south. A right-hand turn coming from the north.

Her mother had been coming from the north. The car parked just under thirty feet from the station. Parked on the shoulder and abandoned.

The call had come the day after the storm. Friday. Midmorning, before they’d even noticed that she hadn’t returned home. Nic had been sleeping off one of her nights. Her father had gone to the office like it was any other day. Never thought about the meat thawed on the counter, or the dry cleaning hanging on the door, or the dogs not fed, or the coffee not made. He said he assumed she’d gotten in late and was asleep in the guest room. How considerate she was not to wake him. He didn’t check for her car. Didn’t think to. Didn’t notice. His mind had been preoccupied with relief, Nic imagined. It must be hard to look at your wife after being with another woman.

She wanted to hate him for that. But there was no road map for what their family had been through. Molly Clarke reminded her husband of his dead child. Molly Clarke reminded Nic of the way Annie died, and the role she’d played in the series of events that led to her death. And wrapped up in the horrible memories of that horrible day were the sweet memories of sweet moments, and there was no way to untangle them.

Strong arms holding her. Soft hands brushing her hair. The smell of homemade bread and bubble bath. A loud voice cheering on the sidelines. A soft voice whispering in the dark. It’s okay, I’m here. So many sweet, sweet memories that were now too twisted with grief to be remembered.

Molly Clarke’s voice and face and smell could provoke feelings that were at war inside her. Agony and bliss. Rage and love. Nic had avoided her, just like her father had. It was painful to be with her.

Two miles down Hastings Pass was the police station. Past the inn and the diner. Past the bar, the auto body shop.

After the downtown were strips of houses on small lots of land—ranches, capes, colonials, in various states of disrepair. A scarce few seemed cared for, but in a way that evoked desperation, a last, futile breath. Flower baskets hanging on a broken porch.

Then came the station and town hall. After that, Hastings Pass continued to the river, with dirt roads on either side leading into the woods where there would be bleaker dwellings, deeper poverty.

The gray sky added to the grimness, an exclamation point on the despair. Nic remembered now, how it crept inside.

They had never gone down Hastings Pass before the disappearance. Her mother said it made her uneasy. The few times Nic had gone with her to visit Evan, they had not even stopped at the gas station.

And now Nic knew everything about this town they had always driven past. Hastings was built to support a chemical company in the 1950s. The company used the river to dispose of its waste. No one knew any better. Or no one gave a shit. A pharmaceutical manufacturer eventually took its place and sustained the town until the recession pulled it under. And then the dominoes fell.

Towns like this were littered all the way up the Housatonic River, into New York State, up to the Canadian border—left abandoned like a jilted first wife, trying to take care of its children with whatever resources it could find. Farming, mostly. And then unemployment and government jobs. Cops, clerks, construction workers.

Nic pulled into the small gravel lot at the police station and parked her mother’s car. She looked in the rearview mirror out of nothing more than habit, really. Her hair was in a ponytail and she’d stopped wearing makeup years ago. There wasn’t much to see, or to check, or to fix.

Not that she would bother if there was.

She closed the mirror, irritated with this relic from her former life.

She left the car and walked inside.

The department consisted of four people—a secretary, a chief, and two uniformed officers. The state provided troopers when additional resources were required, like the night of the storm. Like her mother’s disappearance.

Inside, the secretary, Mrs. Urbansky, was at a desk behind a tall counter.