Good as Gone (3 page)

When the doctor finally comes, she sends everyone out of the room over Tom’s and my objections.

“I just need her for two seconds,” she says. “You—Mom, Dad—don’t go anywhere.”

Needless to say, we don’t, but Jane takes the opportunity to find a restroom. The doctor emerges from the curtained room after a hushed conversation I strain unsuccessfully to hear, and I glimpse Julie in the background, awake but flushed and disoriented, before she pulls the curtain shut behind her. Julie is dehydrated, the doctor tells us, suffering from exhaustion and exposure, and hasn’t eaten for a few days, but there don’t seem to be any injuries or illnesses, no substances in her bloodstream. “After the fluids take effect, most likely she’ll be right as rain,” she finishes, her use of the expression
right as rain
proving she cannot possibly have read the chart, or she has never watched the news, or she is so calloused by her job that she lacks the power to think past a stock phrase indelibly associated in her mind with the word
fluids
. “Just get her to the clinic for a follow-up after a few weeks. They’ll schedule her when she’s discharged.”

As we file back into Julie’s room, there’s a knock on the wall, and a police detective steps in after us. Fortyish, with dark hair, looking not unlike a police detective from a TV show but far less attractive, he leaves the curtain open a foot and stares at Julie from the improvised doorway.

“Julie Whitaker,” he says. “Unbelievable.”

Julie doesn’t take any notice of him, but on seeing Tom and me again, she collapses back onto the pillow, crying tearlessly. Tom rushes to enfold her in his arms. Noting my expression, the doctor says they’ll move Julie to a room with a door as soon as one opens up, and then she hustles out. The cop introduces himself as Detective Overbey and starts asking me questions about the circumstances of Julie’s arrival, which I answer as best I can considering that, for all I know, she could have come straight out of the glowing orange sunset or a god’s forehead or the side of a man opened up while he was sleeping. The question of how she was delivered to us seems that unimportant.

In the background, I hear Tom repeating the words “You’re safe now. It’s okay. The doctor says you’re going to be okay.” He is talking to himself as much as to her, and though the words aren’t meant for me, they’re so comforting that I let my attention drift toward them and away from Detective Overbey’s questions.

He notices. “I’d like to talk to Julie alone for just a few minutes.”

“No,” Julie says, clutching Tom’s arm but looking at me. “Don’t go.”

“This won’t take long.”

Tom stands directly in front of Julie’s bed. He’s a tall, broad man, imposing even with a gut. “Absolutely not. We left her alone once tonight, for the doctor. We’re not leaving her again.”

Tom and the detective begin to argue back and forth, and the tiny curtained room shrinks. The same words keep coming up, and at first I think Detective Overbey is questioning our mental health or Julie’s; he is talking about the
sane
, the
safe
. Finally, he addresses Julie directly, speaking right through Tom. “I know you’re not feeling well, ma’am, and I hate to bother you right now,” he says. “But I need to ask: Were you sexually assaulted?”

Julie just looks at the detective and nods. Tom sets his jaw, and I find a moment to be glad Jane is still not back from the restroom.

Detective Overbey explains about the forensic exam, and I realize SANE and SAFE are acronyms. “The sexual assault nurse examiner has already been dispatched,” he says. “She should be here soon to set up the exam room. The minute you’re off the IV, she can get started.”

Julie shakes her head no, and Tom steps forward, looking ready for a fistfight.

Detective Overbey, equally imposing, stands his ground. “If there’s any evidence of sexual assault, it’s best to collect it—”

“Listen,” Tom says, pointing his finger at the detective for emphasis. “We’ve done everything the police told us to since day one and never asked a single question we weren’t supposed to. Eight years later, after we’ve—” He chokes. “Years since we’ve heard any news, and our missing daughter shows up on our doorstep, no thanks to you. And now you want to keep her up all night asking her questions, treating her like a crime scene?” He snorts. “We’ll come in tomorrow.”

Detective Overbey starts to answer but a faint noise from Julie’s bed stops him.

“The last time was—a long time ago,” she says quietly. “At least six months.”

Detective Overbey sighs as if the news that our daughter hasn’t been raped in six months is disappointing but acceptable. “Okay, then. We still recommend you come back for the exam, but from a forensic perspective there’s no rush. Rest up, and we’ll get a full statement from you folks at the station tomorrow.”

Julie nods weakly. Tom slumps forward, hands on knees.

Jane comes in, a juice box in her hand. She must have gotten it from the nurses’ station. When she sees Julie awake, she smiles shyly and says, “Welcome back.”

Six hours later, in the middle of the night, Julie is discharged, fully hydrated and wearing hospital scrubs to replace the scruffy T-shirt and jeans the police took for evidence. She leans on Tom’s arm while I sweep everything into my purse: prophylactic antibiotics for chlamydia and gonorrhea, a prescription for Valium in case she has trouble sleeping, and a folder stuffed to bursting with pamphlets on sexual assault and Xeroxed phone lists for HPD Victim Services and various women’s shelters. It also holds Detective Overbey’s card, tucked into four slits in the front of the folder so it won’t get lost. I remove it and slip it into the back pocket of my jeans.

Tom drives us home, Julie sleeping in the back seat of the SUV on the disposable pillow they let her keep. Jane, who slept quite a bit in the hospital, now stares at Julie silently. Nobody talks—in part because we don’t want to wake Julie, but also because we ourselves do not want to wake up. Or maybe that’s just me.

It’s 3:00 a.m. when we open the back door and walk into the kitchen through the laundry room. It looks like some other family’s house preserved on a perfectly normal day, a museum of ordinariness: over the washing machine, a blouse drips dry; on the cutting board, a heap of glistening red chopped tomatoes lies next to a knife in a puddle of red juice. Through the doorway to the dining room, Jane’s elaborate homecoming meal sits forgotten on the dining-room table, the salad wilted, the breading on the fried shrimp gone soggy, the sauce jelled on the cold, gummy pasta. As the others pass through the kitchen into the living room, I head into the dining room and start picking up the dishes full of pasta. It takes only a moment for me to stack the evidence that we were surviving in the kitchen sink.

When I join them in the living room, Jane and Tom are standing awkwardly by the sofa with Julie, like people putting up a distant relative for the night. Tom is shaking his head, red-faced, and when I realize what they are discussing, my efforts in the dining room seem futile.

Tom moved his office into Julie’s room seven years ago. He did not discuss it with me first; nor did he let me know he was quitting his accounting job, the job we moved to the Energy Corridor for in the first place, to go into private practice as a tax consultant. One day I passed her room and saw it had been transformed from bedroom to carefully tended shrine, a desk and file cabinet where her bed used to be, posters replaced with framed pictures of Julie. I understood without being told that this new office was to be his command center for the search, that he was turning his longing for her into a full-time job. Only now, with Julie standing in front of us, does it look like an exorcism.

“I don’t mind the sofa,” Julie is saying.

“She can have my room,” Jane says, still hanging back, like she’s afraid to stand too close. Clutching her elbow awkwardly, she looks more like her ten-year-old self than I would have thought possible, though I notice with a pang that she’s taller than Julie by quite a few inches. Jane stares at Julie, not hungrily, like Tom, who looks as if he’ll never let her out of his sight again, but with a wary expression. “I don’t mind.”

“No, please,” Julie says. “I don’t want to take anyone’s room.”

I have a sudden longing to bed her down between Tom and me, like we did when she was a seven-year-old with a fever and couldn’t stop shivering. This, however, is not practical, and meanwhile, the living room yawns open like a mouth around us, the windows dark behind the curtains.

“Tom, the air mattress?” I offer. “She could be in her room until we can move your desk out.”

“A door that closes would be nice,” she says, and it’s decided. She has no toiletries or luggage, and no one wants to ask why, so Jane gives her a T-shirt and shorts to sleep in and I scrounge up a spare toothbrush still in its package. After the bustle is over, Julie disappears behind the door of Tom’s office like the sun behind a cloud. I wonder if she is comforted or disturbed by all the pictures of her in there.

By the time we have seen Jane to bed as well, with reassurances that she can decide if she wants to come to the station when she wakes up, it’s almost dawn. The bedroom door closes and my legs want to buckle under me, but I also feel more awake than I have for years. My mind is racing, or rather somersaulting, tumbling over itself as I go through my bathroom routine.

Tom says, “Anna?” in a way that suggests it is the second or third time. I come out of the bathroom and see him lying on his side of the bed, looking up expectantly.

Instead of finding out what he wants, I surprise myself by saying exactly what I’m thinking: “What are we going to do?”

“She’s back,” he says. “We don’t have to do anything anymore.”

I slide out of my jeans, keeping my T-shirt on to sleep in.

“She’s back,” he repeats, like a stubborn child.

“We don’t know what she’s been through.” I think of the detective’s card tucked into the pocket of my jeans as I hang them on the back of the closet door. “We have to be careful.”

“We should have been more careful then.” His voice breaks a little.

I emerge from the closet. “She may not be—the same.”

“None of us are,” Tom says. There’s a long pause. “You didn’t believe she would ever come home.”

I sit down on the edge of the bed. I can feel his eyes burrowing into the back of my head, and I close my own, tasting the accusation.

After a moment I turn to face him. “I didn’t believe we would
find
her,” I say, trusting him to know the difference.

He doesn’t answer. But as I lean over to turn off the light on my nightstand, I feel something shift, just a little piece of the night air between us moving aside, like a breeze wafting through a chink in a wall. He turns onto his side, facing away from me, but there’s something about this argument that reminds me of the marriage we used to have, the arguments that bubbled up only when we were in bed together. How gamely we entered every fight back then, knowing we’d still wake up next to each other in the morning.

Now, staring at Tom’s back, I think,
Julie is home. Anything can happen.

I see her face again the way I saw it on the front porch, just barely familiar, the flesh melted away from her cheekbones and jaw, leaving a butterfly of bone.

“Good night,” I say.

I sleep until noon and wake to the noise of pans clattering downstairs, voices in the kitchen.

I know this dream. It’s the one where Julie shows up, and I say, “I’ve dreamed about you so many times, but this time you’re really home.” Now I get up and splash water on my face in the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror, waiting for the features to distort, to drift. Everything stays put. This one is real.

A chill runs through me and a faint headache alights in my frontal lobe. I pull on my jeans from last night and head downstairs.

The kitchen table is bathed in light. My radiantly blond daughter sits on the side nearest the window, still wearing Jane’s T-shirt, which is too big on her. Tom beams at her from the head of the table as they talk—about nothing, it seems: orange juice, the weather, does anybody want more eggs. For a moment it looks almost normal. Then Jane comes in with a glass in her hand and sits across from Julie, and a shiver walks down my spine as I observe the odd regularity that has returned to our family: a girl for each side of the table, four sides for four people. The words
fearful symmetry
pop into my head.

“Good morning,” I say from the doorway.

“You slept forever,” Jane says, but Julie is already getting up and in three long strides she has embraced me. It takes me aback. How long has it been since a daughter of mine came rushing into
my
arms from across the room? Just as I am starting to notice the scent of her hair, she pulls back and looks at me, her hands sliding down my arms to grasp my hands. “Hi, Mom,” she says, a little awkwardly, and for a moment we are looking straight into each other’s eyes.

I have become accustomed to looking at Jane, who shares my distinctive features, my sharp nose and deep-set eyes. As I stare into Julie’s woman’s face, I realize there are no moles, no bumps or blemishes or wrinkles.

She’s
perfect.

She breaks away, embarrassed, and I realize I have been staring.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I haven’t seen your face in so long.”

“I know,” Tom says.

“Sit down, I’m just getting some coffee,” I say. “Did you sleep okay?” There’s a big pan on the stove with some scrambled eggs left in it, and I put some on a plate, suddenly ravenous.

“I slept very well,” she says, like a polite guest. “The air mattress was comfortable.”

“She’s only been up for a few minutes,” Tom says. “I’ve been fielding phone calls from the police department all morning.
Come in whenever you want
apparently means ‘If you’re not here by nine you’ll be hearing from us.’” His face darkens. “I suppose it makes sense. They’re worried about the press. I’m sure that’ll be starting anytime now.”

Julie’s smile fades. “I guess we should probably go, now that Mom’s awake.”