Since She Went Away (6 page)

And then they were gone.

CHAPTER SIX

T
hey walked side by side through the dark, close but not holding hands. Jared wanted to reach out, to fold Tabitha’s hand into his, but she walked with her head down, her eyes fixed on the ground as though she was afraid she might trip. And they never held hands in public. She didn’t want someone to see and tell her dad. So Jared didn’t push it.

And Tabitha did this at times, slipped away into someplace in her mind and acted as if the rest of the world, including him, didn’t exist. Jared wanted to chalk it up to the embarrassment of his mom walking in, and then her slip of the tongue about Tabitha’s mom, but he suspected something more. He’d seen her withdraw that way on an almost daily basis, and whenever he’d ask what was wrong, she’d simply say, “I’m fine.”

“I’m sorry about my mom,” he said. “She really is pretty mellow, but sometimes she says stuff. It’s kind of like if there’s an embarrassing situation, she feels the need to acknowledge it or talk about it more instead of just letting it go away.”

Tabitha kept walking, eyes down. In the street beside them, cars zipped by, the headlights catching their figures in the glow and making
Jared squint. He couldn’t wait to get his license, to no longer have to be dependent on walking across town in the cold or rain. Or taking rides from his mom or his friends’ parents.

“She was probably a little shocked to see a girl in my room,” he said. “It’s never really happened. I mean, I’ve been with girls and stuff, just not in my room.”

Tabitha looked up, turning to face him. But she still didn’t say anything.

“Is that okay? Should I have not said that?”

“No, you’re lucky,” she said.

“Lucky?” He didn’t understand what she meant. Lucky? Because he hadn’t had a lot of girls in his room? “You mean because I have a mom looking out for me?” he asked.

She didn’t answer right away, but then she said, “Yes, that.”

“Will your dad be pissed that you’re late? I know you’re supposed to be home before it gets dark.”

Tabitha spoke but barely moved her lips. “I don’t know.”

The nature of their relationship—if he was even allowed to call it that—had always seemed strange to Jared. They spent a lot of time together but only in the most narrow, limited way. Tabitha’s father insisted she come home right after school every day, which meant they rushed out of the building carrying their books. Only a couple of times—including today—had Tabitha defied her father and done something else. Mostly the two of them ate lunch together and talked all through study hall in the cafeteria, to the point that Jared’s best friends—Mike and Syd—had taken to shaking their heads at him for being so quickly and completely in love.

Tabitha texted him from time to time outside of school, but she never called, and the messages stopped in the early evening, long before either one of them would have been going to bed.

They crossed Washington Street, lights glowing in all the houses.
Through some of the windows, Jared saw families sitting down to dinner together or watching TV, like some kind of sickeningly perfect Norman Rockwell scene. He’d never had that in his life, at least not in the ten years since his dad left. But how many kids did? Half of his friends’ parents were divorced, and he’d been in enough homes and around enough families to see the strain and tensions that simmered in even the most normal places.

A few blocks later, the houses started to change. He and his mom lived in what she called a “working-class neighborhood,” which as far as he could tell meant they were surrounded by store clerks and mechanics and men and women who worked in factories. They all took good care of their yards and kept a careful eye on their kids. Occasionally somebody threw a party, and there’d be loud music and whooping and hollering and beer cans in the yard the next morning. But the beer cans always got picked up, usually by the homeowners themselves, tired and looking hungover, sweating out their booze as they tossed the empties into an orange recycling bin.

The few blocks around Washington Street were nicer. The homes were older and bigger, made out of brick with wide front porches and bay windows. Those houses had beautifully cared for yards as well, but the people who lived there didn’t do the work. They paid someone else to cut and trim and weed and plant. Jared knew a few kids from school who lived there, the sons and daughters of doctors and lawyers and executives.

But across Washington, as they headed into Tabitha’s neighborhood, the houses looked different from the way they did anywhere else. They were small and dirty, the yards filled with toys and trash. The cars in the street were dented and damaged, leaking oil and hoisted on blocks. People sat on their porches a lot over there when the weather was nice, but Jared didn’t get the sense it was because they were looking out for anybody else. Those people gave off a
boredom that bordered on desperation, a thick, palpable sense of being lost and adrift. He couldn’t imagine what else they did with their time, if anything.

And with a woman kidnapped in the town, they probably grew more scared, more withdrawn and suspicious.

Tabitha’s house was two blocks ahead on a little side street called Nutwood. He’d walked her home nearly every day for the past three weeks, but not once had he so much as set foot in her yard. At her insistence, they always said their good-byes at the corner, and while she’d once pointed her house out to him—four doors down on the left, a boxy little structure with a cramped porch and a loose shutter—he’d never come any closer than that. He should have known the cave comment would hurt her feelings. Even compared to the modest house he shared with his mom, Tabitha’s looked small and dingy. Was it simple embarrassment that kept her from letting him get any closer?

Once again, they stopped at the corner. Fewer cars went by, and the ones that did pass made their presence known through their apparent lack of mufflers. The houses on Nutwood looked darker too. Most of the shades and curtains were drawn, smothering any light that might have escaped.

“Oh, shit,” Tabitha said.

“What?”

She turned toward Jared, placing both of her hands on his chest and giving him a hard shove that sent him stumbling back on his heels. “Go,” she said, her voice cutting through the dark like a laser. “Just go.”

But Jared stepped forward again, closer to her. “What is it?”

She turned and started hustling down the street toward her house, moving away from him quickly for the second time that afternoon. Jared looked in the direction she hurried, and on the porch of the fourth house on the left, a man stood, pacing back and forth, the red glow from a cigarette burning in the darkness.

Jared couldn’t make out the man’s features. He looked broad, even a little heavy through his chest and stomach. And he paced like a panther Jared had once seen in the Louisville Zoo, a desperate-looking animal that simply moved from one end of its cage to the other. The animal depressed Jared, even as a child, because the big cat seemed so eager to run, to charge, to hunt, but it couldn’t.

Jared jogged after Tabitha. “Wait. If that’s your dad, I can tell him it’s my fault. I’ll say my mom was talking to you—”

She wheeled around. Even in the dark, he saw the tears glistening in her eyes, about to spill over. She jabbed the air with her index finger, the stubby nail pointing directly at his heart.

“Go,” she said. “Please. Go. Now.”

She didn’t wait for a response but turned back around and kept walking away. Jared turned and left, not sure if the smoking man—Tabitha’s father—had seen them together or not. And if he had seen them, what would it mean for Tabitha when she entered her house?

CHAPTER SEVEN

J
enna saw Celia again.

Her best friend walked along the edge of Caldwell Park, wearing a white nightgown. Celia’s hair was down, lifting in the light breeze. The trees were colored by autumn—vivid reds, oranges, and yellows—even though it was dark. The trees practically burned. And on the porch of every house a jack-o’-lantern glowed.

Jenna knew when the scene was taking place. A week after Halloween. The week Celia disappeared.

Jenna watched her friend through thick hedges, the leaves and branches jabbing at her and tickling her face. She tried to extract herself but couldn’t move. She couldn’t slip out of their grip. She couldn’t step forward onto the sidewalk where her friend walked.

And then the car. Always a different car. Sometimes a white van, sometimes a hearse. It pulled alongside Celia, and a hand reached out to grab her. Never a full body. Never a face. Only that bone-white hand, reaching through the dark to take her friend.

Celia looked back. She knew Jenna was there, trapped in the bushes. Celia didn’t speak, didn’t scream or call for help. But she looked back, terror etched on her face like a frozen mask.

Jenna couldn’t make a sound. She tried to shout, tried to scream, but she couldn’t make a sound. Her voice was choked off, silenced—

•   •   •

The chiming of her phone woke her on the couch.

Her heart thumped, even though she’d had some version of the dream . . . how many times? Fifteen at least. She vowed to stop counting, vowed to not let the image of Celia’s terrified face haunt her anymore.

But how could it not? How could she not contemplate, in her darkest, most desperate moments, what must have happened to her friend?

Jenna sat up on the couch. Her neck ached from the crooked angle. She felt lonelier than ever, the dull ache of Celia’s loss worming through her body. She missed Celia so badly. Missed her laugh, missed the sound of her voice. It felt as if someone had cut a piece out of her on that November night.

An empty beer bottle sat on the coffee table, and her head swam a little.
Good work, Jenna,
she told herself.
Puke. Don’t eat anything else. And then drink a beer. And you’re a nurse. Shouldn’t you know better?
For the twentieth time since November, she promised herself to drink less. To maybe—just maybe—stop drinking altogether.

The phone chimed three straight times. She checked her watch. Six ten. How long had she slept? Thirty minutes or so?

The house around her was quiet. She replayed the events that had occurred right before she dozed off. Jared left to walk his girlfriend—
girlfriend?
—home. Jenna’s face flushed with embarrassment, and she had to laugh. What an introduction for that kid. Nowhere to go but up.

“Jared?”

She scrolled through her texts, but they didn’t make sense. They came mostly from her group of friends and a cousin who lived in Ohio.

Nice one, Jenna!

Whoa, you were pissed!

Way to stick it to the media.

Um, call me?

And one from Jared:
I’m staying at Tabitha’s for a while.

Jenna wrote back.
Okay, but not too late. Call if you want a ride.

She hoped things went better on that end than they had gone on hers. Maybe the girl’s dad was cool and smooth, the kind who played old music for the kids and told stories about the summer in college when he followed U2 across the country, hitchhiking and chasing girls. Or maybe he and Jared would talk about sports or cars or Stephen King novels, and the guy would send him away with some poetry by Rimbaud.

“I think you’re ready for this now,” he’d say, clapping her son on the back and shaking his hand, and Jared would go along, accepting his lesson on masculinity.

Someone knocked on the door, and on her way to answer it the landline rang.

“Good God,” Jenna said. “Now what?”

She grabbed the phone first, and before she could even say hello, her mother’s voice came through.

“Are you okay?”

“Mom? Hold on.”

“You really didn’t look that great—”

She laid the phone aside and went to the door. She peeked through the window, and in the glow of the porch light—not burned out, just not turned on while Jared swapped spit with Tabitha—she saw her coworker Sally. Jenna hustled to undo the locks, and when she pulled the door open, her friend stood there with a bottle of wine in one hand and a large grin across her face.

“What’s the occasion?” Jenna asked, and Sally stepped past her and into the living room. “Did you say you were coming over and I forgot?”

“I figured you needed a pick-me-up.”

“Because of today? Sure, I guess. Hold on, my mom’s on the phone.”

Jenna picked up the receiver again. “Mom? Can I call you back? Sally’s here.”

“That’s fine. You don’t have to call me back. I just want you to know, I have no problem with women speaking their minds.” Her mother’s voice was rough and gravelly, a by-product of years of cigarette smoking. “I taught you to do anything a man can do, you know that. I didn’t raise a shrinking violet. I just wish you wouldn’t be quite so
assertive
in public that way. It’s . . . coarse. People judge you for those things.”

Jenna said, “Am I supposed to know what you’re talking about?”

Just then her phone received a few more texts, the chiming sounding more urgent.

“You weren’t watching?” her mom asked. “Oh, boy.”

•   •   •

Jenna watched herself on the television several times. Reena Huffman seemed to be enjoying playing the clip. Jenna saw herself on camera, her face paler than she could ever have thought possible. The lights from Stan’s camera hit her at such an angle that she looked like something that had just crawled from beneath a rock.

“How the fuck do you think I feel, Becky? Jesus.”

The offending words were replaced with long, angry bleeps, leaving it up to the viewer’s imagination to wonder what she had really said.

“I didn’t know they would show that, Sally. I’d literally just puked. I thought they were carrying Celia’s bones out of that barn.”

“I don’t think people around here will mind the ‘fuck’ as much as they’ll mind the ‘Jesus.’ If they can read lips . . .” Sally poured herself another glass of wine. “Everybody’s on edge around here. Everybody’s
scared. It won’t take much to make them angry.” She wore loose-fitting jeans and a bulky sweater, and her hair was piled on top of her head and held in place with a pencil. A pair of glasses dangled from a chain around her neck. Sally was fifteen years older than Jenna, and since Celia’s disappearance, she had been increasingly playing the roles of both mentor and friend. Jenna had a mother, but the phone call about her appearance on TV epitomized their relationship—it never lost its air of judgment, the sense that Jenna needed constant correction and guidance.