The Herd(25)
* * *
—
And now Eleanor was…gone. My brain kept bumping up against it, a Roomba stuck in a corner. Half the crowd had dispersed after Hana’s disturbingly poised announcement. Ted, confused, had stopped by with his gear in a little rolly bag to tell us he was heading out.
“She’s okay, though, right?” he kept asking, and Mikki and I nodded blankly. Now she and I were hiding in a corner, with me blocking her from the room lest anyone approach her with questions. This bothered me, which was fully absurd. That Mikki was a celebrity and I was a face in a crowd.
A text from Hana: “Where are you guys?” As if now that one person was unaccounted for, she was eager to keep track of her other kiddos, a mom at the pool doing a desperate headcount. Then another: “Meet me back in the hallway.”
We watched as Hana clattered toward us, heels higher than ever, ankles confident on their stilts, chest and core and muscly shoulders all sculpted into defiance.
“I think we should go over to her apartment,” she announced.
“Is she there?” Mikki called, her voice birdlike with hope.
Hana shook her head. “Daniel’s there now. He said it doesn’t look like she’s been home all day. The last time he’s sure he saw her was yesterday morning.”
“What?” I leaned back against the wall. “Where has he been?”
“He said he worked late yesterday. Spent the night in his office.” Three sets of eyebrows spiked in unison.
“So he’s fucking somebody else.” Mikki said it flatly, like someone reading off a lame fortune cookie.
“Who knows. But if he doesn’t even know what he’s looking for at the apartment, we should get there.”
“Should we call the cops?” I asked, fiddling with a purse strap.
“Daniel said he was about to. We can call on the way too. I just feel like we need to go. Right now.”
“What about the…the event?” Mikki’s voice was small, high up in her skull.
Hana stared like she’d spoken in Dutch. “What?”
“All this.” She gestured toward the dining room. “We just leave?”
Hana shrugged. “Aurelia’s here somewhere. If someone has a problem with us checking on our friend, they can go fuck themselves.”
Hana rarely cursed—it sounded wrong, like a parent using slang. Mikki and I nodded weakly.
“Daniel doesn’t know we’re coming,” Hana said. “Let’s head out.”
* * *
—
Our driver trundled down Seventh Avenue, jamming at the brakes as if every car in front of him were a surprise, and Hana, normally patient, kept letting out frustrated sighs. After a few minutes she gasped and looked around wildly, then called Aurelia and asked her to grab a tote bag Hana had left behind the bar.
“There’s a bunch of folders inside, right?” she asked, then exhaled. “Good. Just bring it tomorrow.”
Hana hung up and then called Eleanor’s parents in Beverly, Massachusetts, who had no idea why Hana was calling or where Eleanor might be. She called 911 while Mikki and I listened uncomfortably; the dispatcher said they’d review this afternoon’s ambulance and arrest (!) records before sending detectives to Eleanor’s address. Outside the window, street signs slowly counted us down: Sixteenth Street, Fifteenth, Fourteenth. Fear was fanning out inside of me, working outward from my gut.
“Do you still think Eleanor is okay?” Mikki asked.
“She has to be. She has to be.” Hana hung her head. “Eleanor is somewhere. We just don’t know where yet.”
The driver jerked to a stop and turned on his hazards, and we listened to their metronomic clacking: tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. Together, we gazed out at Eleanor and Daniel’s townhouse. The curtains were drawn across the bay window, with a strip of yellow light leaking through. They’d bought the place shortly before their wedding, and while it probably looked charming on normal evenings, tonight it was all angles and peaks, a haunted house.
Hana rang the doorbell, which echoed inside, and then we stood, listening as car horns and engines and distant bass lines made the air around us quiver. A hand appeared in the bay window and ripped the curtain aside. Mikki jumped.
Daniel cupped his hands over his brow and leaned into the window, squinting, and Hana waved. The front door swung open, moving ominously. The city soundtrack seemed to crescendo as Daniel stood before us, all six-foot-three of him, his thick black hair and tailored suit and boyish face all equally rumpled.
He caught the door with one foot and stepped forward with the other, and instinctively I reared back—but it was to unfurl his wingspan to Hana, curling her into a hug. She stepped past him and Mikki and I hugged him in turn, a receiving line. The realization that I knew almost nothing about this guy resurfaced like something bobbing up from the bottom of a lake.
We stood in the vestibule, mirrored closet doors everywhere and the walls around them painted in stripes of gold and white. One closet door faced a floor mirror, so there were a million versions of the four of us, unbuttoning coats and yanking off gloves as Daniel lurched around, hanging things up. The silvery mirror world, the endless identical lines of us shooting out in every direction, sent a shiver up my scalp. Maybe Eleanor’s lost in here, my brain shot out.