Things Unsaid: A Novel (24 page)

The rain clouds were clearing. Still sleepy, Jules sped down Highway 101—on her way to search for her daughter for the fourth time that week. Palo Alto was a two-hour drive from Carmel. Jules yearned to clear out the toxins, the insane anxiety she was feeling. She had read about a glymphatic system of mental mine sweeping, dumping the brain’s waste products so the mind could function more efficiently. She could use something like that.

No more bailouts
. She had to make it up to her husband and daughter somehow, some way. Were those tears in her eyes, or floaters from
being groggy? Maybe it was both. She clutched the steering wheel, staring straight ahead, slugging back Starbucks. Blinking. Spots before her eyes.

Jules pushed the visor down and pulled her baseball cap lower; the sun was starting to peek through. She fumbled for her sunglasses in the side compartment and unzipped her rain jacket.

Please, Buddha, Kuan Yin, the deities of the universe, let Zoë be safe and not come to harm
, Jules prayed. Her little girl—now a phenomenal young woman—was still her sunshine. But did she know it? There was so much Jules wanted to say but never had. Only when Zoë was very little, more a sweet little pet, had Jules felt entirely free to share her feelings with her. Not when she had to really be there, when Zoë needed answers and a mother’s love.

Please, Zoë, don’t give up on me
. She chanted the mantra to herself.
This time I am going to find you. No more turning back
. Her daughter had needed someone to watch over her. How could she have let this happen? What was she thinking? Maybe she needed to hire a private investigator if she didn’t find Zoë this time. If the police did nothing. How had she let her family come to this?

All those months they had talked about colleges—Berkeley, San Jose State, other UCs where Zoë could get in-state tuition. She had such good grades. She had been accepted at Stanford, so she certainly would be accepted at some of the other California universities. Just for a while. Until they developed a plan for how to pay for Stanford. Then she could transfer, and be where she really wanted to be.

I failed
, Jules thought. An epic failure, Zoë would call it.

What had she been thinking? To leave her daughter swinging in the breeze, abandoned by her own mother? The road blurred. She rubbed her eyes and squinted until it came back into focus.
Just a few miles to go
. She was almost to campus.

She called Zoë for what must be the twentieth time that morning. Zoë picked up.
Oh my God, she picked up!

“Hi, sweetheart.”

No response. Jules felt the silence. Loud and clear. The kind of silence she didn’t want to interpret.

“Oh, it’s you,” Zoë finally said.

Jules glossed over that. “Just wanted to check back with you.” She waited for some kind of response. More silence. “You know, you haven’t responded to any of my texts.”

Zoë was silent again. Then, “I’ve been busy.” Her daughter’s voice sounded slurred and amorphous. Wounded.

“Honey, are you all right?” Jules could hear voices in the background. Rough voices. Male. Tough. “I’m on my way. Driving as fast as I can to see you.”

“Don’t bother. Gotta go.” Pause. “Sorry about Grandpa. Grandma told me he’s been strange. Stranger than usual.” Pause. “I’ll let you know where I am. Could use some money, though.” Jules would have to check online. What could her daughter be spending so much money on? “Sorry about Uncle Wilson, too. Didn’t know his inheritance was a secret from Grandma.”

Jules heard shouts in the background, but couldn’t understand the words. Laughing. Fuzzy speech like her daughter’s. “But, wait …”

Click. That was the end of her contact with the light of her life. But Jules was not leaving her now. That light was not going out. She pulled off the freeway and dialed a second number.

“Officer Hyde speaking. Division of Missing Persons and Runaways.”

“Hello, Sergeant Hyde. You asked me to contact you within two weeks if there has been no contact with my daughter. But I still would like a ‘voluntary missing adult’ investigation report filed. The City of Palo Alto or East Palo Alto has got to help me.”

“I need to have the specifics, ma’am. We have so many inquiries a day.”

“Yes, I’m so sorry but I’m extremely worried and upset, Sergeant Hyde. I’m Julia Foster and we talked last week about my eighteen-year-old daughter, Zoë, who is somewhere in Palo Alto or East Palo Alto. She does not want to communicate with me. I have no forwarding address and only a bank account for wiring funds to her. The bank refuses to give me her address. But, as I said last week, she is almost certainly in danger. We just finished talking and she sounded inebriated or under the influence of drugs. You must help me. I don’t know what else to do.”

Jules remembered her first trip to the East Palo Alto Police Department. Sergeant Hyde had explained that Zoë was not considered
a runaway because she was no longer a minor. Plus, since she’d left of her own free will, she was a “voluntary missing adult.” He had taken the information and the photo from her, but Jules knew he was just being patient.

“I have a file number …”

“There is nothing more I can do for you, Mrs. Foster. Your daughter left of her own free will, after a domestic dispute with you, and your husband has had contact with her. She seems to be unharmed. If she is taking drugs, as you’re suggesting, we can search the premises, since that would be considered suspicious circumstances and a criminal act endangering the individual.”

“Yes, I want you to search for her.” Jules didn’t want a criminal record for her daughter, but what else could she do?

“Do you have an address?”

“But Officer Hyde, that’s the point. I don’t have any knowledge of her whereabouts.”

“Until you do, Mrs. Foster, we cannot proceed with an investigation. I am very sorry.”

The skies were as gray and moist as the underbelly of a fish. Jules grabbed her handbag, still open, and caught sight of Mike’s note, a stark white rectangle, like a small dead white thing against the darkness of the paisley interior lining. She reached for her keys and buckled it closed. She put the top of her copper-colored Le Mans Sunset Nissan 350Z down before pulling back onto the road. The wind cooled off her sweat, but it couldn’t blow away her panic.

No more bailouts
. She had to make everything up to her husband and daughter somehow, some way. If only Zoë hadn’t told her mother about Uncle Wilson’s money.

Jules drove around and around down the main street, University Avenue, which joined Palo Alto with East Palo Alto. Where could her daughter be? She’d keep on driving in the hope against hope that she might find her. Young people liked to hang out. Maybe she was walking with friends window-shopping, hanging out near local coffee shops.
Jules squeezed her car into a very tight parking spot—the kind of spot her Chilean friend called
un suppositorio
. Zoë always had advised her to make a circuit around her Nissan to remember the little scratches and the keyed scar some brat had made when she last parked the car. Some kind of class warfare, Zoë had told her. Young people who couldn’t afford nice cars deeply resented those who could, perhaps.
Is that really true?
Jules asked herself.
Do people resent others’ happiness?
She hoped not. She had felt a little foolish liking her car so much. Maybe it was some residue of growing up in Akron. Why hadn’t she realized what was really important in her life until now?

Jules thought of their credit cards, their line of credit, the past-due notices for their mortgage payments, the fines and penalty fees. This had to stop, and fast. She had been generous to the point of being ridiculous: taking out a second mortgage, using their daughter’s college fund for her parents’ recklessness. And now Mike and Zoë had left her. Jules couldn’t blame them. How had she been so blind, so stuck? Her parents didn’t seem to care what they were doing to her.
I’m a good person. But this? Really?
Did her parents even care about her? And if her actions were making Zoë and Mike suffer, how good could they possibly be? Was it dementia?

Joanne had benefited most from their mother’s addictive shopping and love of beautiful, expensive things. She’d helped support her when she wanted to open her store, A Real Gem. And then there were all those luxurious teenage treats for Sarah and Megan: the latest shoes, hats, cosmetics. For Zoë, though, only a birthday card with a crisp ten-dollar bill inside. Still, Zoë was always excited to receive these tokens, and never failed to call her grandparents immediately and thank them. And all of Uncle Wilson’s inheritance now gone. For nothing and everything. More baubles for her mother, exorbitant medical bills to pay for her sister, and her parents’ care at SafeHarbour. And now no funds left for Zoë.

She pulled out her phone. She had called five, six, seven times—during the day, night, middle of the night, twilight—but until now, Mike hadn’t answered. Sometimes it was hard to interpret his silence. But this time the meaning was unmistakable.

Still, Jules hoped he would answer—and he did. There was the
sound of his familiar voice on the other end of the line. Maybe he was ready to talk to her now, to forgive.

“Do you care about your own family?” Mike began without preamble. “Are we even in the picture? Our daughter has saved every summer to help pay for some of her Stanford tuition. How do you think she feels about this? Huh? What kind of mother chooses her sister and parents over her own daughter? Tell me that!”

“I never
wanted
to do this—to you, to us—don’t you see? I just wanted to meet my obligations since I knew my father hadn’t met his. I thought I had no other choice, but I was
so
wrong. I should have listened to you. I don’t know why I didn’t. I really don’t.”

“I told you over and over again. Unbelievable! Debts are debts. And now, because of you, we have them. Giant ones. A second mortgage. Tuition coming up next fall. Aren’t we allowed to have dreams, too? They blew their chance to have theirs come true. Now you’ve turned your back on us, just like your mother always turned her back on you. There isn’t always love in a family. You know that. Open your eyes, goddamn it. You chose us last.” Pause. “I have nothing more to say to you.”

“Mike—” Jules began. But he had already hung up.

“You’ll see,”
Mike had been telling her for months now.
“You’ll see. There’s no happy ending to any of this. You’re just enabling them and screwing us over.”

That was exactly what she had done. She had thought she had to choose her mother first. How could she have known that this would happen if she did?

“H
ave hired a private investigator. Hope I can do better finding Zoë.”

Mike’s text was small comfort. Jules had driven in the pouring rain around East Palo Alto from midnight until four a.m. before finally giving up and coming home. No luck finding Zoë. She was losing her mind.
I’ve lost her
.

Jules hadn’t heard from Zoë, except for texts asking her to send money to different East Palo Alto addresses. Thank God for those; at the very least they let her know that Zoë was alive and nearby. And she was still getting text messages from Mike, in spite of everything.

How could she have fooled herself into thinking she was doing the right thing? Jules hadn’t been there for her daughter or her husband. Now Zoë had left, and Mike as well. There was no one to call family.

She needed oxygen—lots of it—for what she had to do now. Zoë was nowhere to be found in East Palo Alto, so she had driven back to Carmel. She needed desperately to take a long walk to meditate, clear her head. Give herself a chance to think straight before she took further action. Breathing in the sweet marine air, Jules recalled how some of her foreign patients had become so used to the polluted air in their own countries that the coastal air in Northern California sickened them. It made them nauseous, they said. It was too fresh. She hoped in every cell of her being that life would be fresh again for her family. Safe. Loving. But the air was rotten.

Her parents were on their way out. Eviction was a possibility. Perhaps they would move in with Joanne, even though their cognitive
faculties might soon decline further, which would make things difficult on Joanne. If they refused that option, and if Andrew wouldn’t help, maybe they would go into some kind of government-subsidized public housing. And her sister—Joanne would have to figure out for herself how to get her health costs covered. Jules had her own family to think about. Her
real
family, and her karma, the consequences of her actions. Why had it taken her so long to see how wrong she had been?

Jules slowly slipped into her jeans and pulled on her old gray T-shirt. The material was silky, like Zoë’s cheeks when she was a baby. She walked briskly up the canyon road behind her house, then sat down near a stunning waterfall, wildflowers in neon purples and oranges laid out on the hills like slabs of gigantic mosaic tiles. Jules looked past the hills to houses with spectacular ocean views—postcard perfect. She had always loved this spot. But nothing was as it had once been.