All the Missing Girls(37)

Mark had been fourteen when I left. The only thing I really remembered about his personality was that he was exceptionally goofy in that immature-boy way in his own home. Outside, he was morose and quiet. And when I ran into him outside of his house, away from his family, he blushed when he saw me, like he was embarrassed that I knew the other version.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

His cheeks tinged red, and I was glad to see I still had that effect. It would make him overcompensate by oversharing. “Got a tip,” he said, staring past me. “From a nurse. About a potential crime. We’re required to follow up.”

I nodded, tried to steady my hand, tried to slow my breath. Could be anyone. How many patients are there? What did that brochure say? Six hundred and twenty? Maybe two hundred and sixty. Still, less than a one percent chance.

“So how’ve you been? Still living in town?”

“Nah. Just work there. I live a few miles from Bailey. Nice area. You know.”

He was acting like I had a clue about Bailey. I didn’t know where she lived or what she did. Didn’t want to ask around, to draw attention to the uncomfortable truth: Bailey and I didn’t speak. Not after Corinne had disappeared. Hardly ever a day since.

That box in the police station, it does things to people. Makes you tell things about each other. Becomes a permanent record of your betrayal, with your signature below.

“Well,” I said, “it was really good seeing you, Mark.”

I was almost at the door when he called after me. “Hey, Nic,” he said, using some voice I’d never heard from him. His cop voice. “You in town for a while?”

I shrugged. “Just taking care of some loose ends.” I gripped the papers tighter to keep my hands from shaking.

He didn’t ask why I was here or who I was visiting.

He already knew.

As soon as the doors shut behind me, I raced to my father’s room.



* * *



DAD WAS PARTICULARLY DISORIENTED, or rattled, or both.

He sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the wall, faintly rocking back and forth. I knocked on the open door, but he didn’t answer. “Dad?” I called. He turned to look at me, then went back to the wall and the rocking. He was shutting down.

There was no imminent danger. No reason for the director to call Daniel or schedule a meeting or explain her concerns. They were probably quite pleased with themselves.

But for me, this was scarier. He wasn’t clawing for sanity, or fighting for understanding, or raging against the unfamiliar. He was letting go.

On the wall across from the bed were pictures of us, of me and Daniel and the nurses and doctors, people he shouldn’t be afraid of. People he should remember. He was staring right through them now. I stood beside my picture. My hair was shorter in it, and I was smiling, and Dad had his arm slung over my shoulder. It was from when we brought him here last year, taken in this very room, because we couldn’t find any recent photos of the two of us. With daughter, Nic, it said underneath in Daniel’s handwriting.

Dad kept rocking. He was mumbling something—repeating words to himself, all strung together in nonsense. “Dad,” I tried again, but he still looked right through me.

Then he stopped, paused, focused. “Shana?” he asked.

I closed my eyes, and he went back to rocking.

There was no picture of my mother on the walls. It had been a hard decision, the one Daniel and I wavered over the most—whether to put her up there and fill him with the hope that she still existed. Or whether to pretend she never did. Which was worse? Daniel and I debated it over dinner the night before we moved him in. I was the one who made the decision, because I knew: The losing. The losing of something you thought you had. That was far, far worse.

I stepped into the hallway, the light too bright, the buzzing from the fluorescence drowning out the low hum of voices in the other rooms. “Hey,” I said to the first official-looking person walking down the hall. No scrubs, business casual, hair loose, and a birdlike face. I recognized her from the last time I was here. I grabbed her arm as she tried to walk past with a stiff smile. “What did you do to him?” I asked.

Maybe it was the way I grabbed her arm, or maybe the look in my eye, but she blinked slowly and said, “I’ll page the doctor.”

“No. I want to speak with Karen Addelson,” I said firmly, trying to summon my best impression of Everett, calling the director by her full name.

“She’s in a meeting.”

If Everett were here, he’d have her pulled out of that meeting without it seeming like his idea. He’d let this woman talk herself in circles: She shouldn’t be long; oh, I see the problem here; well, maybe I’ll just peek my head in, see if she can spare a moment. Make it seem like her idea all along.

“I need to talk to her,” I said.

“I’ll let her know as soon as she’s done.”

“Now,” I said. “I need to talk to her now. Has someone been to see my dad? Is that why he’s silently rocking back and forth on his bed right now? Is this what you all mean by”—I raised my hands in makeshift quotes—“exceptional patient care?”

Her cheeks flushed. “Fine. You can sit in the waiting room. I’ll tell her you’re here.”

I followed her determined steps down the hall. “Why were the police here?” I asked.