Before the Fall(69)

“No. I mean it. I can’t just sit around all day. I’m a worker. I’m used to working.”

“You’re taking care of Rachel. You tell me all the time how much work that is.”

She would twist the phone cord between her fingers, keeping her voice down so as not to wake the baby.

“It is. I know. And I just can’t—I’m not going to have my daughter raised by nannies.”

“I know. We both feel that way, which is why it’s so magical that you can—”

“I just—I don’t feel like myself anymore.”

“That’s a normal postpartum—”

“Don’t do that. Don’t make it about my body, like I can’t control myself.”

Silence from the other end. She couldn’t tell if he was being taciturn or writing an email.

“I still don’t understand why you can’t take more time,” she said. “We’re only up here a month.”

“I hear you. It’s frustrating for me too, but we’re in the middle of a big expansion on a corporate level—”

“Never mind,” she said, not wanting to hear the details of his job. It’s not like he enjoyed her war stories—the woman who cut ahead of them at the supermarket, the playground soap operas.

“Okay. I’m just saying—I’m going to try to make it out Thursday night at least twice.”

Now it was she who was silent. Upstairs Rachel was asleep in her crib. Maggie could hear sounds from the other side of the kitchen that made her think Frankie was changing over the laundry. On the edge of things was the sound of the ocean, that tectonic drum, the heartbeat of the earth. At night she slept like the dead because of it, some core genetic pulse once again in phase with the rhythm of the sea.

It was late the following week that Frankie disappeared. She had gone into town to see a movie at the little old art house theater. She was meant to be home by eleven and Maggie didn’t wait up. It was her night with Rachel—rising at her earliest cries and soothing her back to sleep—and her instinct on those nights was always to front-load her sleep, so as soon as the sun went down (sometimes before) her head would be down on the pillow, her tired eyes perpetually reading and rereading the same short pages of her book, without ever making it past the second chapter.

In the morning when she rose with Rachel (who had come to bed with her just after midnight) and Frankie wasn’t up, Maggie thought it was a little strange, but the girl was young and maybe she met someone at the movie or went for a drink after at the old sailor pub on the way home. It wasn’t until eleven when she knocked on Frankie’s door—they’d agreed that Maggie would have the day to herself—and then opened it and found the bed empty and unused, that Maggie began to worry.

She called David at the office.

“What do you mean she’s gone?” he said.

“Just, I don’t know where she is. She didn’t come home and she’s not answering her phone.”

“Did she leave a note?”

“Where would she leave a note? I checked her room and the kitchen. She went to a movie. I called her cell, but she’s not—”

“Okay, let me—I’ll make a few calls, check to see if she came back to the city—remember she was having troubles with that boy—Troy something—and if I don’t turn up anything or she’s still not back, I’ll call the local police.”

“Is that—I don’t want to overreact.”

“Well, we’re either worried or we’re not. You tell me.”

There was a long pause, while Maggie thought it through—during which time she also made a snack for Rachel who was biting at her ankles.

“Babe?”

“Yeah,” she said, “it’s weird. You should call.”

Three hours later, she was sitting across from the local sheriff, Jim Peabody, whose face looked like the last piece of jerky in the jar.

“Maybe I’m just being silly,” she said, “but she’s usually so responsible.”

“Don’t do that to yourself, Mrs. Bateman. Take your power away. You know this girl and you had an instinct. You gotta trust that.”

“Thank you. I—thank you.”

Jim turned to his deputy—female, heavyset, about thirty.

“We’ll visit the theater, talk to Sam, see if he remembers her. Grace’ll go by the pub. Maybe she stopped in there. You said your husband was calling her people?”

“Yes. He phoned some friends and some of her family—nobody’s heard from her.”

Rachel was coloring—mostly on the paper—at a small round kid’s table Maggie had picked up at a flea market, the kind that came with two adorable little folding chairs. Maggie was amazed the girl hadn’t bothered them once during the entire visit, as if she understood the importance of what was happening. But then she had always been a sensitive and serious child, so much so that Maggie sometimes worried she was depressed. She’d read an article about it in the Times—children with depression—and now it hung in the back of her mind, a Big Idea that could tie all the little ideas together—the poor sleeping, the shyness—or maybe she was just allergic to wheat.

This is what motherhood was, one fear eclipsed by another.