Don't Look for Me(51)

I think that maybe I will sing to myself one day so she can overhear it, and that maybe she will come to me and ask me to sing. Yes, I think. I will lure her into asking me to sing to her like her first mommy. Maybe I can get close enough. Maybe it will reach her, even just a little.

There are other things she says, and I make a note of all of them.

But my thoughts keep drifting back to the antifreeze under the sink in my bathroom, poured into the teacup which I carried back to my room.

Antifreeze contains ethylene glycol, which breaks down in the body by forming sharp crystals. Those crystals shred human tissue, especially the kidneys. I taught some of this to my students when I introduced basic chemistry. Of course, I did not share the rest of it.

How death does not always occur. But severe illness does. Incapacitating illness. The kind that makes it impossible to move, or run. The kind that would allow someone to lock you in a room behind metal bars and then drive away.

It has a sweet taste.

Sweet, like sugar.

Sweet, like Alice. I must believe this. I must hold her close.

And then this sweet girl tells me, in a sleepy voice, “Do you know that it’s selfish to have children?”

I am very quiet now as I whisper, “What do you mean?”

“Well,” she says, “you had children so you could have someone to love. So you could have football games to watch every other Thursday.”

I am still. Perfectly still as I always am in these moments when Alice reveals something new to me. I fear if I move she will stop talking. But she stops anyway.

“I do love watching my son’s football games. Do you know where I go to see them?”

But she doesn’t bite. She doesn’t care about my desperate need to understand what is going on, how they know these things about me—so many things, like he’s been watching me. But how?

“That’s not the point!” she says. She wants to finish her story. Her theory.

“Okay, Alice. I’m sorry. You think it’s selfish to have children?”

“It’s not what I think. It’s just what is. It’s selfish to have children because they’re just going to die one day.”

I don’t know what to say to this. She is right and wrong all at the same time. But then I think she is just right, so I have nothing to say.

But this is not the end of her little story.

“You should know that better than anyone,” she says. “You got to watch it happen.”

I feel my arms release just a little, wanting to hold this child just a little less. As little as I possibly can without prolonging this night. Without undoing my work.

I wonder who put this thought in her head, and if she knows how deeply she has wounded me. I think, then, that wounding me was her intention. Now she can feel sorry for me.

The muscles in my face quiver as I fight to keep them steady.

I feel her drift off, and then I drift off too, not to sleep, but to thoughts.

Thoughts about how we are born to die. Thoughts about death, period.

And what I have hidden under my bathroom sink.





22


Day fourteen





Officer Reyes met Nic in the business center of the hotel. He was off duty and Nic sensed that she’d pulled him away from something.

“Are you okay?” he asked. He sat down next to her then slid his chair closer to see what had captured her attention on the computer.

“I really don’t know,” she said. “But you didn’t have to come here. I could have explained it on the phone.”

Reyes nodded. “I know. But I was just watching a game.” He looked up then, around the empty room. “I’ve been here plenty of times. Never knew it had an office until…”

He stopped himself from saying it. Until your mother disappeared.

Nic moved them forward.

“It’s actually a business center.”

“Ahh,” Reyes said, smiling now. “A business center. Very upscale. And clearly a big hit with the clientele.”

Nic felt her shoulders drop with an exhale. The bite of sarcasm was soothing.

She pulled up the satellite image of the property behind the inn. Reyes leaned in closer. His arm brushed hers, then pulled away.

“I’m not sure what you want me to see.”

Nic pointed to the screen—to the inn, the fence she’d seen on her run, how it turned away from Booth’s property and seemed to encircle a large parcel of land behind it. Then she traced the line of the driveway all the way up to a house.

“Okay. So there’s a property with a fence and a house on Abel Hill Lane. I don’t get why this helps figure out what happened to your mother.”

Nic sat back in her chair. “It’s a tall fence, with barbed wire. Someone cut a hole into it, making a kind of flap. And the property isn’t listed on Zillow. It isn’t listed anywhere on the internet.”

“Huh.” Reyes was curious now. He leaned in closer—again brushing her arm. This time he did not pull it away as quickly.

“It doesn’t look familiar—this driveway or fence. I’m trying to think about the houses on Abel Hill…”

“Isn’t there some way you can search for it—on the police systems or something? I’m wondering if anyone even lives there. Kurt Kent from the bar—he said maybe some neighborhood kids were looking for a cut-through to town … which means maybe it’s abandoned, and then maybe…”