Good Girl Bad (12)
“S’okay,” Tabby says, not looking up. Despite volunteering to help, Tabby seems uncomfortable to Nancy. But she keeps trying.
“Do you still see much of the other girls? We haven’t seen them much, have we, Freddy? Lisa and Mona and Cate? What are they up to these days?”
Tabby is silent, and Freddy jumps in: “We hang with them at school, don’t we Tabby? Cate’s seeing Peter, though, so she’s always hanging out with him on the weekends. And without her organizing stuff to do, we just sort of stopped doing it. We should try to organize something. Maybe next weekend I’ll organize a movie night. Could we do it here, Mom?”
“Of course,” Nancy says, relieved. She would love to see all the girls together again, just check how they’re all going, how Freddy is with them. She loves Freddy’s friends, she really does, but also she just wants to make sure Freddy doesn’t put all her eggs in one basket, so to speak. Especially when that one basket seems a bit sketchy of late.
“How’s your mom, Tabby? How’s Genevieve?”
Here Tabby looks up, and stares blankly at Nancy. For a second, Nancy thinks she sees the hint of a sneer, but then Tabby looks back down and mixes the rocky road ingredients with renewed vigor, her little shoulders rigid with tension that Nancy can’t understand.
Later, she’ll ask Freddy if Tabby and her mother or sister fight, and Freddy will shake her head, shrugging. “Just the usual with her mom. Every now and then. But Tabby hates fighting, she’s always really sad if there’s a fight.”
“Well, we all hate fighting, I think,” Nancy muses. “And it’s hard being a teenager. With her dad not there, too. She just seemed a bit quiet here the other day. I hope everything is okay with her.” Nancy is careful not to pry, and leaves a quiet space for Freddy to raise anything, but Freddy seems oblivious, and goes on chatting about other things, and Nancy files her observations away, and gets on with her day.
10
Tuesday
When Nate wakes up on Tuesday, he’s momentarily disoriented.
He’s in the spare room, in the same bed he used to sleep in when things started to go downhill between Rebecca and him. The same picture taunts him from the far wall. The same slash of sunlight creeps in and dazzles him through a gap in the blinds and the wall, which he could never successfully block off, waking him twenty minutes earlier than he wanted to be woken.
Memories rush in through that crack in the blinds, too, burnt into his mind, resurfacing, however much he tries to bury them.
Guilt, mainly.
He pushes them aside though, and swings his legs out of the bed.
He’s a heavy sleeper, and he wants to check that Tabby and Leroy didn’t return while he was sleeping.
He feels a momentary pang of guilt. His daughter is missing, and he slept like he had no cares in the world.
Was something wrong with him?
Padding down the hall to Tabby’s room, he sees that Rebecca has had the same thought. She’s standing in the doorway, and startles when she sees him. She gives a barely perceptible shake of her head.
No Tabby, then.
They’d called the number from the message, of course. Genevieve had gone white, but she’d entered the passcode—one-zero-zero-six. One thousand and six. The tenth of June. October 2006. What did it represent?
But it had gone straight to a recorded message, “the person you have called is not available,” and then a dial tone. There was no option to leave a message. And there was no record of any texts or phone calls to or from that number in Tabby’s phone. Google showed up nothing, and the police hadn’t been able to trace it, either.
They’d searched her room methodically then, not speaking. Trying to find her second phone, while Gen sat resolutely in front of the television, which was off, stony-faced. “We’re just trying to find her,” Nate had said, gently, but Genevieve wouldn’t even look at him, and he couldn’t quite work out what she was angry about. That they were invading Tabby’s privacy? That she wouldn’t want them to invade hers?
He knows he should talk to her, explain it or explore it or something, but he can’t concentrate on all these different threads at once. He just needs to focus on finding Tabby. Then he’ll have a better talk with Gen.
Of course it made more sense that Tabby had taken her other phone with her, and left this one behind. If you had a secret phone, that’s the one you’d keep with you, right?
That’s if she went of her own accord, of course. If it was well-hidden, and she went against her will…
Nate had stiffened at that thought, though, and pushed it aside, too. He can’t tolerate thinking about worst-case scenarios, and consciously lets his mind skip away from them. Being paralyzed by terror isn’t going to help him find his daughter.
Now, he nods at Rebecca, an acknowledgement.
It’s been twenty-four hours.
Something is very, very wrong.
And he’s not sure that he and Rebecca are the people best-placed to make it right.
Somehow, a missing daughter throws everything into stark relief. All the things he’s successfully not thought about for years loom large in his mind. All the things he and Rebecca have gotten wrong, have buried. Of all the times these thoughts could rush to the surface, try to claw their way into his consciousness, why now, when he is least prepared, when he is so poorly placed to deal with them? he wonders.