All the Missing Girls(60)

“Maybe you should’ve figured that out before you called, scaring the shit out of me.”

I glared at him. “I was scared.”

He did that deep-breathing technique, trying not to explode at me. I felt my shoulders tightening, like his did when he was tense. “Your eyes are all bloodshot. Have you been sleeping?” he asked. I could tell he didn’t quite trust me. As the time grew between then and now, I didn’t quite trust myself, either.

“A little . . . I can’t, really,” I said. “I can’t sleep here—”

“I told you to come stay with us, Nic. Come stay with us.”

I started to laugh. “Because that would solve everything, right? When did you get the gun, Daniel?”

He picked at the pile of receipts on the table, narrowing his eyes, putting them back where they’d been. “Laura told me what happened at the shower. She feels terrible. Let her take care of you. She’s driving me crazy.”

“And how would you explain that? Why I suddenly want to stay?”

“Air-conditioning,” he said, the side of his mouth quirking up for a second.

“I can’t, Daniel. Besides, and no offense, but Laura is really nosy.”

He shook his head but didn’t argue. “Listen, I have to be on-site tomorrow, but I’ll swing by in the morning to check on you. If you can’t reach me, you know you can call Laura. She can handle it.”

“Right.”

“You don’t give her enough credit, Nic.”

I saw the outline of the gun as he walked away. “It’s a family trait,” I called after him, but he shook his head and kept moving. “Daniel?” He stopped, spun around. “Thank you for coming.”

He turned back around and waved in acknowledgment as he walked away. At the car, he rested his arms on top of it. “Did you get the affidavits?”

“One for two,” I said. “Working on the other one.”

He nodded. “The gun was Dad’s,” he said. “I didn’t think it was safe for him to have it anymore. I took it from him so he wouldn’t hurt himself. Or someone else.”



* * *



SO WE HAD A father who drank too much. So he didn’t come home sometimes. So he forgot to get groceries. So he left us to our own devices. We were lucky. In the grand scheme of life, ten years later, I could see: We were lucky.

Corinne was not that lucky. We never knew this. Hannah Pardot was the one who broke Corinne’s father open, let him weep out all his secrets. Hannah Pardot knew how to push and where. Probably because of what my father had told her. It’s a family matter, he’d said, lowering his voice, giving it meaning.

Corinne had two much younger siblings. She was eleven when her parents had Paul Jr.—PJ, Corinne called him—and Layla followed two years after. They were little kids, seven and five, when Corinne went missing. Silent and stoic, unusual for children—that’s what Hannah Pardot told Bricks and what Bricks told everyone else. Hannah asked them questions as they sat on the white sectional sofa in their living room and their mother handed out lemonade and they looked at their father, waiting for their orders. They looked at their father when Hannah asked if Corinne had seemed sad or upset, or if they’d heard her say anything. Any little thing at all, she’d said. Anything about her state of mind. They looked at their father, questioning. They looked at him like the answer.



* * *



CORINNE’S MOTHER HAD TAKEN her to the hospital twice. Hannah Pardot read the reports out loud to Corinne’s father: once for a dislocated elbow—climbing out the window, Corinne had told us, rolling her eyes; another for a laceration at the hairline—river jumping, damn slippery rocks.

“Yes,” her dad said to Hannah Pardot. “Because of me.” Sobbing big, ugly tears. Hannah Pardot called Bricks and Fraize in because she was so sure he was going to confess to everything.

He wasn’t the kind of drunk to sit at the bar, like my father, getting lost in himself. He was the kind who drank whiskey in the living room, finding people to be pissed at instead of himself.

“I didn’t hit her,” he claimed. “I never hit her.”

No, her mother said. He never did. Just punished her. Pushed her if she tried to talk back. Once he pushed her down the stairs. Just the once. That was the elbow.

His grip was tight and unyielding. He threw dishes at walls, near their heads. One time he missed. He was full of threat and menace, and at some point, Corinne grew immune. Immune to the sound of a bird flying into a window, its wings beating relentlessly upon the ground.

She’d leave her house, coming over to mine, telling me we had plans. I can see it now, the meaning under her words. What, did you have a mind-f*ck or something? We have plans. I was supposed to sleep over.

Eventually, I stopped going along with it. I pushed her away, too.

They searched her house for blood. For evidence. For signs that there was another accident that her father covered up.

I couldn’t imagine Corinne giving the fake stories at the hospital; I fell. I was sneaking out the window and I fell. Letting her father win. I couldn’t picture that Corinne. The one who cowered, keeping her eyes on the floor. Her power, I realized, was not limitless, as we had all believed. It had borders, and when she left that house, she refused to give another inch. It was a learned trait: how to push, how to manipulate. She knew the line to walk. She learned that from her father—push but not too hard; crack but do not break. The darkness lives in everyone. She knew this better than anyone. Everyone had two faces, and she looked deep into us each until she found it.