Life and Other Inconveniences(34)

Then Garrison died, and the last bit of my violated heart died with him. Or no, it petrified; it was there but utterly useless. I did my best for Clark, and it was a paltry effort. Thank God I hired Donelle, who loved him.

Every day, Sheppard’s beautiful, perfect face filled my mind. My arms were useless without him to hold. My mind was constantly buzzing. I imagined him living with another family—foreigners who didn’t speak English. They’d found him; he had fallen and hit his head and had amnesia. Desperate for a child of their own, they took him. At first he was frightened, but they treated him well. They took him back to their country—Portugal, I imagined—and Sheppard learned their language. They had children after that, and in my mind, Sheppard played with his dark-haired siblings as he had once played with Clark. The memory of his other life would fade away, but some long-hidden part of his heart was still with me.

I would accept that, I told God, if only I could see my firstborn again. Even if it was his bones I saw, I had to know. It would not be possible for me to die without seeing my boy one more time. As the years passed, this was the bargain I struck with God—I could live without my son so long as He let me know. Either I would look into those blue, blue eyes once more and tell my little boy, now a man, how much I loved him, how I never, ever stopped looking for him . . . or I would have his remains to bury next to Garrison.

I spent tens of thousands of dollars on private investigators who specialized in missing children. I had dogs flown in from around the world who were supposedly able to discern the tiniest bit of human remains. Four times a year, I walked those woods around Birch Lake. If my son had ended up in a shallow grave, I wanted to know. I would finally know.

With an empty heart and a shrewd eye, I founded my company. It was the one place I could concentrate on something that was not Sheppard, the place where the Missing stepped aside and I could escape the grief, the terror, the loneliness. Clark grew. Donelle became a fixture. My employees at Genevieve London Designs revered and feared me. I continued to hire investigators and cooperated with the occasional journalist who wanted to do a story, made all the more salacious now that I was a successful CEO, an important contributor to the fashion world.

More time passed. Years. Decades. When DNA testing became a way of finding people or identifying bodies, I gave the FBI a strand of hair from Sheppard’s hairbrush. Nothing in their system matched. Ever. I hired artists to sketch what he would look like at fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty.

When Clark brought me his child to raise—Clark, ever useless, ever slightly stupid—I accepted. It was my duty, of course. I wasn’t about to let my granddaughter go neglected or be raised by that other side of the family, the side that had produced April, a young woman so desperate and afraid that she abandoned her only child. Honestly, how dare she? Had I resorted to suicide, I who had lost a child? Did people think it hadn’t been tempting?

Here was I, a mother who still searched the forest each year, decades after her child went missing, and Clark’s wife had been given a healthy child and left her. Oh, I understood clinical depression and its lies, its reach . . . but could she not have stayed for that child? No. She left her daughter alone with Clark, of all people, my inept, spoiled son, he who was best defined by the word incompetent.

For a moment, when I saw Emma standing in the foyer, her hair greasy, her coat too small, something in my petrified heart stirred.

Then I realized she was one year older than Sheppard was the last time I’d seen him, and my heart once again turned to stone.

When Sheppard went away, he’d taken everything good with him.

I provided for Emma. I got her a decent haircut and bought her appropriate clothes. She appreciated living at Sheerwater, got decent marks in school. She was not unattractive, though she was timid and startled easily. She answered when spoken to but kept to herself.

Frankly, I was disappointed in her. After a year, one would’ve thought she’d have snapped out of her self-pity, but no, she seemed to view herself as a tragic orphan, and not the heir to Sheerwater, to the London dynasty. She didn’t view herself as lucky at all, and it was both maddening and wearing at the same time.

Still, she was my grandchild. When she was thirteen, I sat her down and told her about sex, hormones, her menstrual cycle. I told her about birth control. I told her I expected her to remain a virgin well into college at the very least. I told her that at the first sign of depression, she was to tell me and we would take her to the finest doctors and therapists, that we would smite it. I talked about reputation, education, marriage.

I wanted to send her to Foxcroft Academy, but she made the case that Sheerwater was her home, and she’d just gotten comfortable here. “Please, Gigi,” she had said. “Let me stay.

I did. In a rare error in judgment, I let her stay.

Though she wasn’t quite the gleaming academic or social star I’d hoped she would be, she did well enough. With the money from my family and Garrison’s, she could go anywhere, frankly. I would send her to Harvard, where my father had gone, or possibly Columbia, Garrison’s alma mater. She could go to Bryn Mawr or Smith or Stanford and get an MBA, perhaps live in Paris or Copenhagen for a year or two, then join me at Genevieve London Designs, in marketing, I thought. Eventually as creative director and then, when I saw fit to retire, as CEO.

She never objected to these plans. She had the right pedigree and was on the road to success. I tolerated her dating Jason; at least she’d chosen a dimwit whose influence wouldn’t last once she left for college. Smith had been her decision in the end, and I approved.