Farewell, Dorothy Parker (30 page)

Violet thought hard about how to answer.

“Yes,” she finally said. “I think you do. I think you learn to deal with it. Not that the wound ever really heals—you just find a place to store the pain so you can get on with your life. I hope that doesn’t sound facile. I know it’s different for a child. If there isn’t an adult to help you process it, and to make you feel safe—”

“Then you’re left to cope all alone on a hard cot at boarding school…”

“Or in a big soft bed in your grandparents’ house,” Violet added.

“And either way,” Mrs. Parker said, “your heart turns to brittle stone. We can’t let that happen to your niece.”

“No,” Violet said. “We can’t.”

Violet threw her keys on the hall table and greeted Woollcott, who was literally jumping for joy, as he did every time she came home. She refilled his water bowl and was pouring dry food into his dish when the doorbell rang three quick times followed by serious pounding. It sounded like an emergency. Violet wiped her hands and rushed to open the door.

There stood Sandra, looking hysterical. A police car was parked at the curb. Violet went numb in confusion.

“Where is she!” Sandra demanded, before Violet could get a word out.

“What? Who? Delaney?”

Sandra pushed her way into the house and looked around. “Is she here?”

“Of course not. What’s going on?” Violet watched as two police officers emerged from the cruiser.

“Do you know where she is?” Sandra said. Her eyes looked wild and impenetrable.

Violet’s heart pounded in alarm. “Didn’t she come home from school?”

“Why do you think I’m here!” Sandra screamed.

“Start from the beginning,” Violet pleaded, hoping this was just a matter of Sandra’s tendency toward hysteria. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Where have you been!” the older woman demanded.

“What do you mean? I was at work.”

“I called there, and they said you left hours ago. And you didn’t answer your cell phone.”

“The battery died, and I stopped someplace on the way home. Sandra, what’s going on? Did you call the school?”

“Do you think I’m stupid? Of course I called. They said she didn’t go to any of her classes after first period.”

First period. That must have been when Delaney called her about the screening. Violet felt like she was going to be sick. This was serious.

“And…and the school didn’t call you earlier in the day?” Violet asked.

Sandra waved away the comment in a fury. “My idiot husband left the phone off the hook.”

“Did you try her cell phone?”

“There you go again! Of
course
I called—I’m not stupid. She didn’t answer.”

As belligerent as Sandra sounded, Violet knew it was fueled by terror. And that made her own heart seize in fear. She fished her cell phone from her purse to see if there was a message from Delaney. Meanwhile, the two officers walked toward the house.

“What are you doing?” Sandra shrieked at Violet. “This is no time to check your e-mail!”

“I want to see if she tried to reach me,” Violet said. “I need to plug it into the charger.”

“If you know where she is, you’d better tell me
right now.
”

“You think I would
hide
her?”

Two policemen were now in the doorway. The shorter one, who had a stocky build and black hair, introduced himself as Officer Goncalvez. The taller one, who looked barely old enough to shave, was Officer Valentino.

Officer Goncalvez explained that a detective was at the school,
investigating, and that it would help if the ladies could start calling all of Delaney’s friends to see if anyone had any information.

“
She
has some very strange friends!” Sandra said, pointing a finger at Violet. “One of them stole sixty dollars from my wallet.”

Violet froze. The last thing she needed now was to have any sort of suspicions cast on her. Desperate, she turned it right back on Sandra.

“A woman who was never even in your house?” she said, and then addressed the officers. “Even her husband said she imagined it.”

“I think it would be best if we all just cooperated,” Goncalvez said.

Violet tried to focus and walk down a rational path of thought. Where could Delaney be? Maybe she went to friend’s house and didn’t call because she lost her cell phone or the battery went dead. Maybe she cut out of school with a girlfriend and went to the mall, and just hadn’t called because she didn’t want to get in trouble. That had to be it—something simple like that. But even as she tried to believe it, something deep inside told Violet this was terrifyingly real.

The officers walked back to the squad car to listen for updates on their two-way radio, while Sandra and Violet went into the kitchen to make calls. Sandra sat at the table, and Violet handed her the landline phone. “You call the kids she knows from Smithtown, and I’ll try her old friends.” She opened the cupboard, took out the thick phone book, and dropped it on the table. The thud made her jump.

Don’t fall apart, she coached herself. Just get through this and ignore the paranoia. In all likelihood, the officers will get a message any minute that Delaney is home, safe. Or that she was found at the frozen-yogurt shop with a friend. Goncalvez will burst back inside and give them the news. All of this will be over.

But the door didn’t open again. And Violet was alone in the kitchen with Sandra.

“I don’t
know
who her friends are,” Sandra said. She was sounding less angry and more frightened.

“You must know one or two.”

“I know there’s some girl named Alexis.”

“Rayburn,” Violet said. “She calls her X-ray.”

“Delaney and her damned nicknames,” Sandra said, and started thumbing through the pages of the phone book. Violet nodded. Sandra was filtering her fear through anger, and likely wouldn’t calm down until they found Delaney. And they
would
find her. They had to.

Violet opened her cell phone—now plugged into the charger—and looked through her contact list, where she had stored most of the numbers of Delaney’s old friends.

“Where’s Malcolm?” Violet asked, as she scrolled through the list.

“He stayed home in case she shows up.”

Violet pulled a pad and pencil from the drawer and pushed them toward Sandra. “Try to get the names and numbers of some of her other friends.”

“What are you, the expert?”

Violet reached out and covered Sandra’s hand. “I’m as scared as you are,” she said.

Sandra responded by pulling her hand away and frantically fanning herself—channeling her emotional energy into physical movement so she wouldn’t cry.

Violet nodded, a tacit understanding acknowledged. She started making her own calls, trying to keep her voice steady and even.
Please,
she thought, as she explained the situation to each person who answered,
don’t react hysterically. I need to hold it together.

By the fourth or fifth call, she had perfected a little speech with rote responses:
This is Violet Epps, Delaney’s aunt. We’re a little concerned because she didn’t come home from school today and we don’t know where she is. By any chance, have you heard from her? Can you ask your daughter if she has any ideas where Delaney might be? If you hear anything, please give me a call back.

A half hour later she had no results other than a dozen offers of help and some text messages from Delaney’s friends, who said they were passing around the info.

Violet rubbed her forehead and stared out the window, trying to imagine where the girl could have gone. Soon the sun would set and things would get even more terrifying.

I already came close to losing her once, Violet thought. That’s not going to happen again. It can’t.

She remembered sitting at her niece’s bedside in the hospital the night of the accident. Delaney was in the ICU, one arm in a cast and the other attached to an IV. She was hooked up to monitors that fed information to the nurses’ station for constant surveillance. Still, Violet wouldn’t take her eyes off the screen that showed the girl’s vital signs. She didn’t know what all the numbers meant, but the doctor had explained that Delaney had suffered a heart contusion that could be life-threatening if her pulse rate became too fast or irregular. So as her niece slept, Violet stared at the monitor, watching the girl’s heartbeats displayed as an illuminated green line, jumping up and down in regular peaks that scrolled across the screen. Next to it, the number of heartbeats per minute blinked 83, 83, 84, 83, 83.

Meanwhile, she held her niece’s wrist, feeling for the pulse the way a kind nurse named Cathy had shown her. But she didn’t take her eyes off the screen.

By then, Ivy and Neil were already dead, and grief bore down on Violet like a relentless storm. But she couldn’t even react to it. She had to let it pelt and punish her as she watched and waited: 82, 82, 80, 83, 83, 83, 84.

She was tired and thirsty and hungry. The nurses had been so kind, offering her food and suggesting she get some rest. But she couldn’t. She wouldn’t. As the hours ticked on, the fear and exhaustion began to obliterate her reason. She couldn’t think or focus. She floated in a
strange, detached space where the only things in the world were the pulse she felt in her niece’s delicate wrist, that jagged green line, and those blinking numbers.

And then…the green line went chaotic, and the numbers went haywire, blinking 83, 79, 55, 87, 88, 91, 109, 155, 156. A high-pitched alarm blared from the monitor. Violet wanted to cover her ears, but she held on to Delaney’s wrist, feeling for the regular rhythm. It was getting fainter.

What was going on? And where was Delaney’s pulse? Was she dying?

The green line teased her, jumping even more erratically, while the number rose: 155, 161, 166, 181.

She willed the display to come back to normal. Meanwhile, Delaney’s pulse was undetectable. Violet tried to find it with her sweaty fingers, but it seemed to be gone.

No pulse? Violet leapt from her chair, and Cathy, the kind nurse, appeared at the door. She rushed to Delaney’s bed and looked at the monitor. She turned toward the door, where another nurse now stood. “Atrial fibrillation,” Cathy said. “Call Dr. Marciano.”

Cathy put her stethoscope to Delaney’s chest and listened. Within moments, the doctor was at her side.

“She’s in afib?” he said. “What’s her BP?”

“One-twenty over eighty-two.”

The doctor listened to Delaney’s chest with his own stethoscope.

“What’s happening?” Violet said. “Is she dying? Why can’t I feel a pulse?”

“She has a pulse,” Cathy explained. “It’s just faint.”

The doctor pressed his knuckles into the girl’s shoulder. “Delaney, wake up. Delaney? Can you hear me?”

“Leave me alone,” Delaney said, without opening her eyes. Her voice was thin as vapor.

“How do you feel?” the doctor asked. “Are you dizzy?”

“I just want to sleep.”

The doctor spoke to the nurse. “Put her on oxygen,” he said. “And then I need a twelve-lead EKG.”

The other nurse, a tiny dark-haired woman, came back in and told Violet she would have to wait outside.

“Is Delaney going to be okay?” she pleaded to all three of them.

“We’re doing everything we can,” the petite nurse said. She led Violet into the hallway and tried to coax her into the waiting room, but the distraught aunt refused to go. She didn’t want to leave Delaney.

“I can’t lose her,” Violet said to the nurse, as she thought of her father, her mother, her sister. It was too much to bear. “I can’t. I can’t lose her. I can’t.”

“You’ll be more comfortable,” the nurse said.

“No. No, no, no,” Violet said. She felt sure that if she went into the waiting room, there was only one thing that could happen next: The Talk. She imagined a doctor coming in, smelling of blood and sweat. It would be obvious he was there to deliver bad news, and everyone in the waiting room would be thinking the same thing:
Please, not me. Let him be here for someone else. Dear God, let someone else be dead.

But he would say Violet’s name. He’d put his hand on her shoulder and apologize. And it would all be over.

“I can’t lose her,” Violet said to the tiny nurse. “Don’t you understand?”

“Of course. But the hallway is busy. There’s equipment. And the waiting room—”

“I won’t go.”

“I promise we’ll come and get you the minute there’s any news.”

Violet remained immobile. The double doors to the unit opened, and a rolling bed appeared, being pushed by two orderlies. On top was an old woman who looked awake but blank.

“You see?” the nurse said. “We have to move.”

Violet let herself be led away, feeling like she had no choice but to sacrifice her niece for the old woman on the stretcher. It was irrational, of course, and she soon got the news that Delaney had stabilized, but she never forgot the feeling of sitting in that cold room, thinking her niece was dead and that in some way it was her fault.

And now? Now it just might be her fault for real.

What had she said on the phone that morning that would have upset Delaney enough to make her run away? Was the girl so furious about missing the screening? No, that wasn’t it. Violet had admitted her job was in danger. Delaney was bright enough to understand what that could mean for the custody case. She had run away because she had lost hope that she would ever get to move back home.

But where could she have gone?

Violet wanted to tell Sandra about that morning’s phone conversation so that they could put their heads together and figure out where Delaney might be. She knew there was no way to phrase it that wouldn’t make Sandra lose control, so she just took a deep breath and spit it out.

“She called me this morning from school—wanted me to pick her up and take her to a screening. I was having a bad moment and told her I couldn’t.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“I’m telling you now.”

Sandra slammed the table. “This
is
your fault!”

“You’re not
helping.
”

“If it wasn’t for you,” Sandra said, “she would be home right now, safe and sound!”