Open House(3)

Dean had supported Haley when she accepted an offer from Yarrow’s medical school, and now here they were, back in Waverly where it had all started. Haley knew it was crazy. To want to live in the town she’d grown up in, where her parents still lived, and to walk the campus where they’d experienced their worst nightmare. To fall in love with Dean, who’d also attended Yarrow. But her grief was like a part of her body now, and she felt a visceral need to stay connected to her roots and her pain, and to her sister.

Haley looked down at the slim platinum ring she could just make out beneath her rubber gloves. An engagement. Dean had proposed a few months ago, and Haley knew something needed to change if she was supposed to start a new family. Because how could she move forward when the person she loved could be stuck, buried somewhere underground, her disappearance still a mystery?





TWO

Priya

Priya stared down at her phone to see Josie’s text. Need to talk. She knew that she absolutely, positively shouldn’t reply. She could practically hear Dr. Baker’s voice telling her that it was time to put the phone down . . . break the pattern . . . do something else . . . but the phone was so warm and inviting in her hand, and she couldn’t seem to keep herself from typing.

Please, stop contacting me, she wrote, but then she deleted it. She tried to breathe, to get the air all the way into her lungs like Dr. Baker had taught her to, but wouldn’t Josie already know she’d started a text response because of those ellipses that phones displayed when the other person was replying?

Just breathe, Priya.

In, out, in, out . . .

Her cognitive behavioral therapy sessions with Dr. Baker were never far from her mind, all his tips and tricks for changing her anxious trains of thought, to rewire neural pathways, as Dr. Baker explained it all those years ago. Priya thought about the gift certificate for the sessions that her husband, Brad, had presented to her early one Christmas morning, and the way the smooth, embossed envelope had felt in her hand. Brad loved giving gifts, especially jewelry, but Priya thought the gift certificate was even better because it was what she really needed. She hadn’t been right since Elliot was born. She loved him beyond measure, but she was so anxious, and the week before that Christmas, she’d had a very public panic attack in the parking lot outside Elliot’s music class. She’d had to sit down and clutch her baby while she hung her head between her knees and tried to breathe, right there on the frozen pavement for all the other parents to see. When a well-meaning mother tried to pull Elliot from her arms, Priya lunged at her like a wild animal. After that morning it was even harder to make friends. And even now, nearly a decade later, Priya could never seem to stop the recurrent nightmare that someone would deem her an unfit mother and take away Elliot.

Leave me alone, Josie, please, Priya wrote in the text box, and then pressed send. Her fingers trembled against the phone as she tried even harder to recall the breathing techniques taught to her by Dr. Baker all those years ago. Priya was always trying harder. She knew how lucky she was to have someone as wonderful as Elliot, and though Brad wasn’t perfect, at least he tried to help her. Those sessions were just one of the many examples of his devotion to making her better. In the early days of their marriage he’d seemed so hopeful that he could actually do it. Priya had always wondered if that was the hardest part of his career as a doctor: the frustration that he’d never be able to fix his own wife.

Please, the next text from Josie read, the phone buzzing in Priya’s hand. Something’s changed, and I need to explain.

Priya’s mind drifted back to Brad. Was that even a real thing for him, his inability to make her okay? Or was she just worrying again, her anxiety always ready to rev like an engine and sweep her away?

Can you meet with me? asked Josie, and Priya reached into her bag for her medication, her heart pounding. Could it ever not be this way, with Priya terrified every time she heard her phone chime? Josie’s texts only came through every six months or so. Once, a full two years went by without one, and Priya had felt safe for the first time in forever. She knew she could change her number, but what if that enraged Josie and made her do something unsavory with everything she knew?

Priya opened the yellow bottle and removed a pill with shaking fingers. She popped it onto her tongue and swigged it down with a gulp of tepid tap water. She couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to never, ever again hear from Josie Carmichael.





THREE

Haley

An hour after anatomy class ended, Haley sat inside her parked car with an indie rock station blaring. She stared at the new coffee shop on Main Street. All she wanted to do was head to the police station, but the appointment wasn’t for another hour. Through the coffee shop’s windows, she saw the profiles of her blond, beautiful real estate agents, Josie and Noah Carmichael. They were seated inside at a circular table.

You want this, Haley, don’t you? You want a future with Dean in Waverly, so just go in, please, and try to act normal.

Josie was frowning at something Noah was saying, but then a man stopped at their table, and her expression changed. She tilted her chin and laughed as she stood to greet the person, maybe someone she once sold a home to. Noah stood, too, straightening to his full six feet, three or four inches, and extending a hand. He had a jawbone like an action figure.

It was 1:03, and Haley really needed to turn off her car and go inside, but she just couldn’t yet. Facing them today felt insurmountable. Josie and Noah had been Emma’s best friends back at Yarrow, and in the days after she disappeared, they seemed to have been her only friends, or at least the only ones who came forward with any information to try to help find her, turning over their phones immediately and leading the police to the journals Emma kept. Josie’s brother, Chris, was on record saying something like Anything could have happened to that girl, as if disappearing were somehow Emma’s fault, and the other students at Yarrow seemed to simultaneously obsess over Emma’s disappearance while also distancing themselves from her. There were dozens of students at the party with Emma when she disappeared, but their statements to the police were unhelpful, mostly peppered with observations about how Emma was aloof, and how she and Josie were so insular that it was hard to get to know either of them. It niggled at the edges of Haley’s mind, mostly because no one ever would have described Emma as aloof before college. She’d been incredibly well liked growing up in Waverly, voted homecoming queen her senior year of high school, which she mostly made fun of with self-effacing jokes, but still: it didn’t make sense for her personality to have undergone such a transformation, and Haley had never been able to put her finger on what had caused it.