People LIke Her(79)

It genuinely felt like a glimpse of some version of hell. All that fury. All that malice. All that jealousy. All that hate.

“She never . . . ,” I said. “I didn’t . . .”

I kept saying I had to take a minute, try to process all this, and then I realized there was just too much to process, that it wouldn’t matter how many minutes I had.

On Irene’s screen was a message from a woman who literally kept sending my wife pictures of dog shit. A silhouette in a grey circle who kept demanding to debate her in person about mental health issues. A man who wanted her to mail him a bottle of her breast milk.

Emmy could be in the hands of any of these people. Emmy and Bear. Two of the people I loved most in the world. My little boy, an eight-week-old baby who couldn’t quite lift his head or even turn it, who’d barely even learned to smile. The most helpless, beautiful, placid, innocent creature in the world. My wife. The woman with whom I’d chosen to spend the rest of my life, the person I’d known I was going to marry the moment I met her. Who was still, in spite of everything, my best friend.

And then it hit me that the last thing I had said to Emmy as she was leaving was not I love you or I’ll miss you or Let’s talk about things properly when you get back—it was some snippy little comment about her luggage.

And for the first time in several days, the only thing I thought about when I thought about Emmy was nothing to do with how complicated our lives had become or the problems in our marriage or whether there was anything we could do to save it.

Instead I thought about the night I first met Emmy. Her smile. Her laugh.

I thought about our first date, about the color of the sky that late summer evening as we walked back from the zoo along the canal, hand in hand.

I thought about all our private in-jokes, all the secret references no one else in the world would ever get, all the catchphrases and funny names for things that Bear and Coco would grow up thinking were normal and would one day realize were peculiar to our particular family unit.

I thought about our honeymoon, the first night, when we got so drunk at that place on the beach we had to carry each other back to the hotel, and the next morning we woke up fully dressed and facedown in a tangle of unraveled towel animals on a bed covered in rose petals. I thought of the morning we discovered that Emmy was pregnant with Coco, the tears of joy, the fierceness with which I could feel her hugging me, the test stick still in her hand. I thought of all those nights in front of the TV, a whole winter of Netflix and hospital visits and scans and alcohol-free beers. I remembered the day Coco was born, that first moment they handed her to us to hold, the look on Emmy’s face, the glow. I remembered that afternoon, after we got home, alone in the house with the baby for the first time, that terrifying feeling of not having a clue what to do.

At least then I’d had somebody else to share that feeling with.

The police said they’d host a press conference the following morning. Did I have a picture of Emmy and Bear and me together, a picture of all of us smiling? they asked.

I told them I thought I could probably find one. I don’t think they even realized the irony of their question.

Irene and I left. I assumed we were heading home, and we’d been in the cab for about ten minutes before I realized we were going in the wrong direction.

I said something like, “Hey,” and swiveled in my seat.

“Settle down, Dan,” said Irene. “We haven’t got time to fuck about.”

She’d put up a post on Emmy’s feed before we had even left the police station. It was a simple, straightforward message saying when Emmy had vanished, describing the car and the driver, describing what she was wearing and asking if anyone had seen her and Bear.

It took us about fifteen minutes to get to Irene’s place. All the way there we were both glued to our phones. I was aware of the driver asking us a friendly question at one point and getting no answer and muttering to himself. We both ignored him. Under Irene’s post on the Mamabare account, comments were flooding in more quickly than I could even scroll through them. A lot of them were lengthy rambles about how much they hoped Emmy was safe and sending her love and letting her know they were thinking of her. Within about five minutes there were loads of people announcing the whole thing was a Hoax!!!! Within ten minutes all sorts of people were speculating wildly about what was going on, on the basis of absolutely nothing.

It can really rob you of your faith in the human spirit, sometimes, the internet.

On the other hand, by the time we got to Irene’s flat, someone had already spotted a road sign in one of Emmy’s Instastories, expanded it, and identified the bottom half of the letters enham. There was a lot of buzz about Cheltenham for a bit. Then someone mentioned Twickenham. That seemed more likely, given how long Emmy would have been traveling by the time she’d posted it.

Irene’s car was parked around the side of her building. I had never seen where she lived before. It was an art deco block, somewhere in Bayswater, with brass handles on the front door and a marble desk in the lobby with a bloke behind it. The car was a classic two-seater MG, pale blue. Inside, it smelled strongly of old cigarettes.

It was getting dark by the time we hit the A316. I’d spoken to Doreen. Coco was in bed, and Doreen had agreed to stay the night. We passed Chiswick. We crossed the river. By the time we hit Richmond, someone had identified a service station in the background of one of Emmy’s Instastories as the one off the A309, just before you pass through Thames Ditton.