All the Missing Girls (17 page)

Tyler was the only answer that was safe.
Please be Tyler.

I turned the AC dial down and listened to the walls. Nothing. No catch, no
whoosh
, no rattling vents.

Daniel's knuckles were white. He was right beside me, and his voice was eerily low. “Tyler works. He doesn't need to sneak
around or use a key when we're out. I'm sure he can talk his way in here pretty easily. Bet he doesn't even have to talk.”

I pushed him in the chest, gently, just for space. Another inch. So we were going to fight about Tyler again. That, at least, was an argument we knew the lines of already.

“He'd call first,” he said. “Did he call you?” At my silence: “Did he?”

“No, but we're not . . . he's not really talking to me right now.”

Daniel let out a bark of laughter. “Un-fucking-believable. You've actually done it, Nic. You've pissed off the one person who seemed immune. You've finally gone too far. Congratulations.”

“You're an asshole.”

“And you're so fucking stupid sometimes, it's infuriating.”

He stared at me and I stared back, my head tilted to the side—his cheeks bright red, his neck splotchy, his fists balled up, something dark and ugly coursing through my veins. “Are you going to hit me now?” I asked.

He breathed heavily, furiously, and whatever fragile ground we stood on shattered.

One question, creating so much distance between us yet pulling us
right there.
His knuckles colliding with my cheek and the beginning of the end of everything.

Daniel walked around me in a wide berth. He left the front door ajar.

I SLOUCHED AGAINST THE
wall, cradling my phone to my chest.

This place messed with me. Made me forget myself. I called Everett, but his cell went to voicemail. I called the office and kept my voice practiced and steady as I talked to the secretary, Olivia, who'd become one of my closest friends. A tied-to-Everett friend but a friend.

“He's prepping witnesses,” she said. “I'd love to chat, but this place is falling apart this week. Can you hear that?” And I could: the ringing phones in the background, the low hum of voices. She went on, “Jesus Christ, I need a girls' night so bad. When are you coming back? Shit. I gotta go. I'll tell him you called.”

I stared at my phone, wondering whom to call to ground myself. The truth is, I'm not good at close friends. I'm great at casual, at meeting up after work and bringing lasagna to the potluck. I'm excellent at being friends with Everett's friends. But not at exchanging numbers and calling up just to talk.

I always leave people behind. Holiday greeting cards last one apartment, and then I move, no forwarding address. Emails go unanswered. Phone calls unreturned. It's a habit. It's easier. I'm the friend in the group they'll throw a going-away party for but never keep in touch with. I had ladder rungs to climb, debts to repay, a life to create.

And whom did I have after so many moves? Everett, for a year. My college roommate, Arden, but she was a doctor, and busy, and every decision she made was life-or-death, which made everything I said seem trivial. My thesis adviser, Marcus. I could call him, vent my issues in a normal way. Surface level. Not like this:
My best friend disappeared when I was eighteen, and it's all coming back, and I'm losing my dad, and someone's been in this house. Maybe the cops, but maybe not.

They were the people you called with news:
I met a guy. I'm engaged. I got a new job.
To share the highs and the lows. But friends to call for the deep things, the things that live in the dark spaces of our hearts? Those people didn't exist for me any longer. Not since I'd left Cooley Ridge.

EVERETT CALLED BACK AT
night, when I was cleaning the house—guilted into action by Daniel's disapproval. I heard voices
in the background, fading as he walked away. “Hey, sorry. I thought it was earlier. You weren't sleeping, were you?”

“Nope,” I said. “What's going on there?”

“Boring legal stuff. Boring but relentless.” He sighed. “I miss you. How's it going with the filing?”

“Papers have been submitted, and we're waiting for a court date. Working on the house. How's the case?”

“Oh, you know. Be glad you're not here. I'm still at the office. You'd be furious.”

I checked the clock, saw that it was nearly ten. “I'd show up and bring you dinner.”

“God, I miss you.” And then another voice—a woman's. Mara Cross. “Hold on,” he said. His hand was over the speaker. “Uh, the Pad Thai. Yeah. Thanks.” Then to me: “Sorry. We're ordering food.”

“Mara's there?” I asked.

“Everyone's here,” he said, not missing a beat. Everett had a painfully healthy relationship with his ex—at least he thought so. But her smile was too forced when she looked at me, and everything about her was too stiff when she walked by him, knees to shoulders to neck. They weren't really friends, despite what Everett wanted to believe. Olivia couldn't stand Mara, the way she talked down to her and then to me. It's probably how we became friends.

I'd asked Everett ages ago why he and Mara had broken up, because she was always smiling and attractive and smart and
there.
“We weren't compatible,” he'd said, which made no sense to me at first. They seemed perfectly compatible. Equals, even. She had strong opinions and worked even longer hours than he did, and they could talk about the same things: torts and motions and appellate courts. Words that I understood but that held no real meaning for me.

I liked to imagine they were incompatible in some other way—in bed. Whenever I saw her, whenever I caught her looking at
Everett like she knew him too well, I held tight to the word
incompatible,
picturing something awkward and unsatisfying. Her name became synonymous with this vision, and I found myself legitimately surprised when she won cases.
Her? She's so awkward. Her arguments so unsatisfying.

Easier than to think that I must be none of those things: strong, opinionated, dominating in a room. Otherwise, we would not be compatible, or so goes the logic. What did he see in me? Someone he could mold, create, introduce, and place in his world exactly like he wanted? What did he see in the painted furniture and the long conversation in Trevor's apartment? A blank slate?
You have to come from nothing,
I'd told him. Maybe he took it too literally. He didn't know I was already something.

I knew things about Everett the same way he knew things about me. From what he chose to share. Or what his family shared in a
Ha-ha, remember the time
way. Where were his skeletons?

He had friends, guys mostly, who varied in degrees of never growing up—which was obnoxious but not harmful. Not haunting. Not defining. They'd tell stories of Everett doing keg stands, and that one time he swallowed a goldfish whole, which was repulsive but not the same as a missing best friend and a family of suspects. If Corinne had never disappeared, maybe we'd meet up for drinks when we were all back in town, share stories like this with our boyfriends, our husbands.
And then Bailey puked on Josh Howell's sneakers . . .

There was a difference, a chasm, between that type of story and a real past.

Did something like this exist beneath Everett, too?

Where were the stories that defined him, that broke him open, that laid him bare?

Who was this man I had agreed to marry?

“Tell me something about you,” I said. “Something no one else knows.”

I heard his chair squeak as he leaned back; I imagined him sliding his feet out of his shoes and placing them on the dark wood. Stretching his arms up over his head, the buttons of his shirt pulling, the outline of his bleach-white undershirt beneath.

“Is this a game?” he asked, and I could hear the yawn in his voice.

“Sure,” I said. “Or it doesn't have to be.”

“Okay. Let's see. Okay. Don't laugh. I tried to use my dad's credit card in middle school to buy porn online. It didn't occur to me that his statements would have the purchased information.”

“That's gross,” I said, laughing. “But it doesn't count. Your dad knows.”

“Ugh. Don't remind me. Still can't look him in the eye when I think about it.”

“You're cute. But that's not what I meant. I meant something more, you know? That nobody else knows.”

His chair squeaked a few more times, and I didn't think he'd answer. But then he did: “I watched a man die once,” he said. The air in the room changed. His voice dropped, and I felt his mouth coming closer to the phone. “I was in high school. There was a car accident on the highway, and I wasn't supposed to be out. There was a crowd of people already around, helping. An ambulance on the way. I couldn't look away.”

Yes,
I thought.
Here he is. Here's Everett. Can he feel it?
“More,” I said.

A deep breath. I heard footsteps, a door closing, the squeak of his chair again. I didn't dare interrupt. “I don't know if I have the stomach for my job,” he said. “I like dealing in the facts and the law, and I believe that everyone is entitled to the best representation. A fair trial. I do my job well, don't get me wrong. But sometimes there's a moment. A moment when you realize the person you're defending is guilty. And you can never go back. And then justice is this double-edged sword. Like I'm upholding justice with my
‘unyielding drive,' to quote my dad. But which is the real justice, Nicolette? Which is it?”

“The Parlito case?”

“Just anyone,” he said. He sighed. “I'm a better lawyer when I don't know.”

“You can do something else,” I said.

“It's not that easy,” he said.

“Yes, it is,” I said. “I don't care what you do. You know that, right? I don't give a shit if you're a lawyer or not.”

He paused. “Right. If you say so. We don't all have that luxury. I'm thirty. I'm a
partner.
This is my life.”

“What I'm saying is, it doesn't have to be.”
Change your hair, leave everyone behind. Go someplace new and never look back. You can do it. We can do it.

He laughed as if mocking himself. Putting distance between himself and the conversation. “So tell me, Nicolette, did you always want to be a counselor?”

“No way. I wanted to be a country singer.”

“Wait,” he said. “You can sing? I feel like this is something I should know.”

“Not even a little.”

His laugh was soft, like cotton.

Truth is, I was a terrible counselor in terms of actual counseling. Said the wrong things, never had the right advice to give. But I excelled at listening, so I learned not to speak much. I could direct students to the right resource or the resource to them, to find the help they needed. I saw what they were hiding and let them show it to me. They spilled their collective adolescent guts in my office. On paper, I was an excellent counselor.

Perhaps it was because they sensed a kindred spirit or saw something inside me, like what I saw in Hannah Pardot—the feeling that she knew more because she once was one of us.

Maybe they knew I had seen darker things. That I would understand.

Or perhaps they would sense that I am an excellent keeper of secrets.

I am.

I ENDED THE CALL
when Everett's dinner arrived, already feeling he was unreachable, in a world too far away. With Tyler, it had been the opposite. I'd had to delete his number from my phone to keep from calling him on impulse after a drink at the bar, after a bad date, and especially after a relatively good one.

But one second off the phone with Everett and all I could feel was the distance between us and him turning insubstantial, a figment I had conjured up out of hope that something so good could happen to me.

I slept fitfully, until I gave up. Too many thoughts swirling through my mind, too many names. I thought of anyone who'd have reason to break into this house, to look through Dad's things or to rifle through Daniel's old room. The list spanned ten years. I wasn't sure I was solving what had happened then or what had happened now. Maybe Dad was right, that time wasn't real. Just a thing we created to move on. Just a label to make sense of things.

“IF I WERE A
monster,” Corinne had told us on the front porch with the lanterns swinging and the shadows dancing, “I'd pretend to be human.”

Bailey had laughed, and Daniel had smiled. She'd walked up to him, taking his chin in her hand, turning his head side to side, squinting as she stared into his eyes. “No,” she said to him, “human through and through.”

She looked at Bailey next, running her fingers through her long black hair as she did it, which was because Daniel was there and she always put on a show. Her nose touched Bailey's, and Bailey didn't flinch. We'd learned to let her have her way.
Go along for the ride, and it turns out all right. There's a plan that only Corinne knows, and we're a part of it.

“Hmm,” she said. “No, no, not here, but he's been here. He visits sometimes. What does he make you do, Bailey? Does he make you kiss other people's boyfriends?”
That was you, Corinne,
I thought but didn't say. Neither did Bailey. “Does he make you like it?” Her hand was on Bailey's back, under her shirt, her body pressed to Corinne's, and Daniel's eyes had gone dark and hazy, under a spell. “Does he make you dream of him at night? Of boys who aren't yours?”

She stepped back, breaking the spell. Bailey blinked twice, and Daniel walked into the house.

Corinne smiled like nothing had changed. She took my chin, looked deep into my eyes. I could see myself reflected in her pupils from the lantern swinging overhead. She blinked and pressed her cheek against mine, facing away from Bailey, and whispered in my ear, “There you are.”