Lovely Girls(51)

“She didn’t want to play tennis anymore?”

“No, she loved playing tennis. She still does. But she started having other interests. And Alex is good, but she’s not Serena Williams. And I think Alex knew that. She started to talk about going to college and possibly graduate school after that. And I thought at the time, great, this will finally be the end of it. But instead, Ed just pushed harder. He went too far. He started waking her up to train before school, and he’d interrupt her homework in the evenings to make her watch videos of her matches. He even tried to stop me from buying her a birthday cake, because he wanted to cut sugar out of her diet. It was too much. He was too controlling. And I . . .”

I stopped and inhaled deeply. I remembered Alex accusing me of not crying for her father. She had been wrong. I cried plenty. For the mental illness that had taken over and that he’d refused to get treatment for. For the end of our marriage. For the future our family wouldn’t have together. It’s just that I had run out of tears by the time Ed died.

“I told him we needed to separate,” I said. “And that I was going to request to be the custodial parent, at least until he got his mental health under control.” I pressed my hands to my temples. “I know that must sound harsh.”

“It doesn’t sound harsh at all. You were trying to protect your daughter.”

“It was like throwing gasoline on a fire. Ed was furious. And that day, the day of the accident, I told him I’d hired a divorce attorney.” I closed my eyes. “I should never have let Alex go with him to the courts that day. And she didn’t want to go. But Ed wanted her to work on her serve, and he talked her into it. If I was home, I might have stopped him, but I was at work. And by that point, I was so tired of fighting.”

I looked up to see Joe pulling over at a deserted playground. Light pooled on the outdoor basketball court. I could see a fenced yard with swings and a slide just beyond it.

“What are we doing here?” I asked.

“Sometimes kids hang out here. But it looks pretty deserted tonight,” Joe said.

Two teenage boys walked by, their shoulders hunched forward, their hands in their pockets. Both wore hoodies, and one had his hood pulled up over his head. I glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It was 11:32. What were these two boys, who looked like they were only fourteen or fifteen years old, doing out walking around in the dark on a school night? And what was Alex doing out this late?

Joe rolled down his car window and called to the boys. “Have either of you seen a girl around? Tall, thin, long dark hair?”

The boys looked spooked. They glanced at one another, and then the taller of the two said, “Nah. We haven’t seen no one.”

“Thanks.” Joe rolled up his window and looked over at me. “Where do you think we should go next?”

“Home,” I said. “I should be there in case Alex comes back. Maybe she’s already there.”

Joe nodded, and we drove back to my house in silence. But when we got there, the house was still empty. There was no sign of Alex. And she still hadn’t replied to my calls or texts. I dialed her number again, but it just rang and rang and eventually went to voice mail.

I sat heavily on the living room sofa. Joe went to the kitchen and poured us each a glass of water. He brought one to me and then sat down. “She’ll be okay,” he said.

I shook my head numbly. “I don’t know if that’s true. She’s changed so much.”

“Since the accident?”

I nodded. “Something happened between the two of them out there on the tennis court that day. I’ll probably never know what exactly because Alex doesn’t remember any of it. But I do know they left the tennis courts earlier than planned, and Alex was driving Ed’s car. She’d gotten her license that summer. On the way home, she ran a red light just as a young man in a pickup truck was crossing the intersection. He hit the passenger side of Ed’s car. Ed died on impact.”

“That’s terrible.” Joe squeezed my hand.

“Alex briefly lost consciousness, but in the end, she only had a mild concussion, thank God. But now she has all the guilt of having caused the accident and none of the resolution of knowing what happened. And after the accident, she changed. She withdrew. She stopped spending time with her friends or participating in any of the activities she enjoyed before the accident. Except for tennis. And I’ve always wondered if that’s because she feels like she owes it to her father to keep playing. But honestly, she’s not the same on the court either. She just seems so . . . joyless. And now she’s disappeared in the middle of the night. Which she’s never done before.”

“She’ll be back,” Joe said. “She’s only been gone for a few hours.”

I nodded mutely, remembering the chilly dinner we’d shared. I’d made pasta carbonara, and Alex had picked at it, twirling the spaghetti around her fork without eating much. Then she’d told me she had calculus homework and gone up to her room. I hadn’t seen her since. I couldn’t even remember having heard her. When had she sneaked out? While I was doing the dishes? When I was in the shower? Or had she become adept at moving silently through the house?

“Sometimes it feels like I don’t know her anymore,” I admitted. “Not really.”

Tears began sliding down my cheeks. I wiped at them with the back of my hand, but now that I had finally begun to cry, I couldn’t seem to stop.