The Forgotten Girl (6 page)

Nora looked surprised when she saw Jason approaching the circulation desk of the Ednaville Public Library at four thirty. She had been bent over a stack of books, using a stubby pencil to make a note on a scrap of paper. Jason cleared his throat as he walked up, and Nora straightened, her eyebrows raised in greeting, expecting a library patron.

“Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”

“It’s me.”

“Did you get out of work early?”

“A little. They probably won’t even notice that I snuck away.”

Nora folded the scrap of paper and laid it aside. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “I think Sierra could use a distraction. I mean, I’m assuming you’re here to spend time with her. Right?”

Jason looked around the first floor. He didn’t see his niece. “Why does she need a distraction?”

“She’s worried about Hayden. She hasn’t really said it. You know, she’s chatty, but still a little guarded.”

“Most teenagers are guarded, aren’t they?” Jason asked.

“She’s tried to text and call her mom, and Hayden hasn’t responded since this morning.”

Something cold passed through Jason when he heard that. “Was she supposed to hear from her?”

“I’ve got two people on the phone here,” Nora said. “Sierra’s upstairs reading or studying or something. Why don’t you go up and talk to her?”

“Okay. I will.”

“You’re her uncle. She
wants
to talk to you.”

“We’ll see you at home, then.”

“Oh, wait,” Nora said. “There’s something else I have to tell you.” She stepped closer and lowered her voice. “There’s a dead cat in our backyard.”

“A dead cat?”

“Yeah. It’s right on the patio. I thought it was sleeping there at first, but then . . . It’s dead, Jason. I don’t know what happened to it.”

“Do you know who it belongs to?” he asked.

“It might be the neighbors’. I didn’t have time to deal with it, and I didn’t look closely. We went out to buy groceries. I cooked, and then I took the garbage out and the cat was there.” She shuddered a little. “I thought maybe you could move it so I don’t have to see it again.”

“Why do I get all the shitty jobs?”

“Because you’re a big, strong man.”

Nora picked up the scrap of paper and bustled away. Jason walked across the thin carpeting and through the hushed, air-conditioned silence to the stairs. When he was a kid, the library looked very different. They had remodeled the place sometime after he went away to college, and he never quite felt comfortable in the new space, even though Nora worked there.

When he reached the top of the stairs, he looked around. He saw a scattering of what he considered typical library patrons.
Older men and women, browsing slowly. Mothers trailing small children. Disaffected teens slouching in corners. It took him a few moments to find Sierra. She sat alone at a table in the far right corner of the room, books and papers spread in front of her. She stared at a laptop screen, earbuds sticking from the sides of her head, the tinny chords of a band Jason knew he’d never heard of leaking out. She wore a black “Free Pussy Riot” T-shirt and had her hair pulled back in a ponytail. When she didn’t notice Jason, he waved his hand in front of her face to get her attention.

She pulled the earbuds out, the music growing slightly louder. “Hey.”

“I don’t mean to interrupt you.”

“It’s cool.” She shut the music off. “I’m just doing this work they assigned me.”

“Have you been here a while?” Jason asked.

“Since one o’clock. I hung out at the house with Aunt Nora this morning. She made us lunch. She’s a good cook, you know?”

“I know.”

“Oh, right. Of course you do. It’s a good thing I ate before I saw the dead cat.”

“It happens. I’m hoping a hungry dog will pass through and save me the trouble.”

“Gross.” She made a face. “Anyway, I figured I’d spend the day here rather than sitting at home. I mean, your home. I like libraries. I don’t know if I’ve ever been in this one.”

“Maybe when you were little.”

“Maybe.” She started chewing on her thumbnail.

“How old were you when you moved away from Ednaville?” Jason asked.

“Which time?” Sierra asked. “We lived here more than once.”

“I guess I was wondering when you last went to the Owl.”

“The Owl?” Sierra’s face brightened. “I haven’t been there in forever.”

“If you’re hungry, we could go and get something to eat.”

“Are you kidding?” She started packing up her things. “You don’t have to ask me twice.”

*   *   *

In the Midwest, people called a place like the Owl a creamy whip. It was a freestanding, low, concrete building that dished up soft-serve ice cream, shakes, hamburgers, and fries through a walk-up window. No one knew why it was called the Owl, except for the presence of a comical owl, one with large eyes and ruffled feathers, painted on the sign out by the road. People usually ate in their cars after ordering or else they sat at the sticky red picnic tables in the parking lot, shooing away flies and avoiding the sun. Jason and Sierra both ordered through the tiny window, the heat from the fryers and the grill brushing against their faces. They picked up their burgers and fries, then found a spot in the shade. It was just before five, and the flock of families who came by for after-dinner ice cream hadn’t arrived yet.

During the short car ride over, they engaged in small talk. What was Sierra studying? What were her favorite subjects? The girl seemed a little distracted. She stared out the window of the car, observing the passing scenery and occasionally saying, “I remember that” or “They tore that down.” Jason tried several times to bring up Hayden and hadn’t found the right entry point. But as they ate, Sierra checked her phone over and over. The fifteenth time she did it, Jason spoke.

“Anything from your mom?” he asked.

“Not since this morning.” Sierra shrugged. “She told me last
night that she might not be responding to all of my texts. I think she just didn’t want me to worry.”

“Does she always answer right away?”

“No. She forgets sometimes. She turns the sound off on her phone at work and then she forgets to turn it back on. I’ll text her a bunch of times and be like, ‘Mom, turn your phone on.’ Of course, she can’t hear me when I say that.”

“If she told you she might be out of touch . . .”

“I know. You’re worried too.” She tilted her cup into the air, swallowing milk shake. She smacked her lips. “Whole milk. Nice. Mom started buying skim.” She wrinkled her nose. “Anyway, I’m used to things being a little adventurous with Mom. Sometimes I look at my friends, and I think, ‘What would it be like to have normal parents?’ I don’t mean two parents in the house or money or any of that stuff. I just mean parents who are . . . I don’t know.”

“Predictable?”

“Exactly.”

“But your dad’s done okay, hasn’t he?”

“Dad? Okay?”

“Lately he has.”

“I guess you’re right,” she said. “And you don’t have to sugarcoat anything for me. Mom told me all about his police record. I know he got arrested for assault once and did a little jail time for DUI and reckless driving. I get it.”

“That was mostly before you were born.”

“Mostly. But, yes, he’s doing okay. I know he loves me and all of that. He’s a nice guy when he’s around.” She picked at her fries. “Mom will call. She always does.” She smiled as though at a private joke.

“What?”

“It’s stupid. When I was a kid, my mom got me this video with all these stupid little-kid songs on it. One of them was called ‘Mommy Always Comes Back.’ It was supposed to teach kids that when your mom drops you off at day care or school or whatever that she’ll eventually come back and pick you up. You know—she’ll be predictable. Most kids don’t really need that, I guess.”

“Do you know why she brought you here?” Jason asked. “You’re seventeen. You’re obviously capable of taking care of yourself. She could have left you at your house and let you finish the school year.”

“Good question. I asked, but I didn’t get an answer. Mom can be evasive when she wants to be. She kept saying that family is important. That was all I got out of her.”

Jason looked down at his food. He had reached the point in any meal he ate at the Owl at which he started to regret what he had eaten so far but still felt incapable of stopping his forward progress through whatever remained. The breeze picked up, and it pushed a greasy odor from the back of the restaurant ahead of it. The fetid smell should have killed his appetite but didn’t.

“Maybe you can try again tonight,” Jason said.

“You don’t believe she’s better, do you?” Sierra said.

“What’s that?”

“Mom,” she said. “You don’t believe she’s better.”

Jason couldn’t lie. “I’m not sure, Sierra. Recovery from a drinking problem is a long process. Lifelong. She’s just at the beginning.”

“Mom said you’d say something like that.”

“Did she?”

“Yeah. She told me about the wrecked car and all the crazy stuff in high school. Did she really get suspended for mixing scotch with her chocolate milk in the cafeteria?”

Jason stopped eating. “Scotch and milk. I’d forgotten about that one. You’d think I’d remember. It sounds like the most disgusting drink ever made.”

Sierra pushed her empty plate aside and used a napkin to wipe her hands. She threw the napkin on the plate and then seemed lost in her own head. Finally she said, “I know part of the reason I’m here is because she wanted to see you again. She didn’t say that, but I could tell. She wanted you to see how she’s doing. And she wanted me to get to know you and Aunt Nora. Mom’s been all into family stuff since she got out of rehab. Showing me old pictures, talking about Grandma and Grandpa. And you.”

Jason pushed his own plate away, across the cracked and blistered surface of the picnic table. His parents had brought him and Hayden to the Owl countless times every summer, and he remembered their smiling and sticky faces, laughing and joking while finishing every bite of ice cream like there was no tomorrow. He couldn’t help but be moved by Sierra’s words about Hayden. Jason hadn’t been the best student growing up, but he’d always been a good kid, and he knew that part of Hayden’s troubles came from being compared to him by every adult she encountered. Her rebellion made sense in hindsight. She ran in the opposite direction from him, with the opposite crowd. It was the only way to create her own identity.

“I know it could be tough on your mom, being my sibling.”

“Why?”

“She was the youngest, so she was always compared to me. I was the good kid, and she was the bad kid. I played that up with our parents sometimes, took advantage of it. It made things tougher on your mom than they needed to be.”

“Why didn’t you and Aunt Nora have kids?” Sierra asked.

“Our careers came first a lot of the time,” he said. “We talked
about it a lot. And I mean
a lot
. We always thought we would, but we kept putting it off. And then one day it just seemed like we weren’t going to do it. It happens.”

“That’s cool,” Sierra said. “I don’t know if I want kids or not.”

“Your aunt Nora and I had some struggles with our marriage.”

“You did?”

“Sure. We kind of fell into a rut, took each other for granted. There were money troubles when I lost my job. Pretty typical stuff for a couple at a certain point. Nobody cheated. Nobody did anything weird. We just . . . kind of lost our way. We’ve been doing better back here in Ednaville. Who’d have thought it . . . Ednaville is for lovers. I’m not sure if having a kid would have made our marriage troubles better or worse.”

“I don’t know,” Sierra said. “Mom acts like you guys are the perfect couple.”

“Hardly. But we figured it out. We’re still kind of figuring it out, but it’s good. We love each other. That’s all that counts. And I think you have plenty of time to figure out if you want kids or not,” Jason said. “But we’re glad you’re staying with us.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Because you didn’t seem that cool with it last night. You looked at Mom like she was throwing a grenade into your lap.”

“You’re an only child, right?” Jason asked.

“Sure.”

“Imagine if you did have a sibling, and you hadn’t seen that sibling for five years, and then she just shows up on your porch. Out of the blue. Would that freak you out a little?”

“Point taken,” Sierra said. She looked around. More families were arriving. Fathers carried multiple ice-cream cones and stacks of napkins. Mothers wiped at faces and shirts while the
kids squirmed and fussed, their voices squeaky and thin. “I missed this whole scene when I was growing up. Dad was gone when I was five. Mom was . . . You know how Mom was.” She started gathering up their wrappers. Before she could take them away, her phone dinged. She quickly put the trash down.

Jason waited, watching Sierra as she read the screen.

“It’s from Mom,” she said.

Sierra kept staring, as though it was a long message. She raised her index finger to her mouth and started nibbling on the nail. Jason tried to keep quiet, but finally he couldn’t wait anymore.

“What does it say?” he asked.

Sierra turned the phone around so Jason could read the message.

Remember—I love you, baby!
Always!

Jason drove with no destination in mind. He considered going home but decided that Nora was right and what Sierra needed more than anything else was distraction. She didn’t speak as they drove away from the Owl and back toward downtown. She stopped commenting on passing sights. She didn’t say anything. She pulled her feet up onto the seat and stared out the window, her fingernail in her mouth again.

“Do you want to see the house your mom and I grew up in?” Jason asked.

“Always,” Sierra said.

“You’ve always wanted to see it?”

“Why did she say ‘always’?” Her voice was hollow. She kept her head turned away from Jason. “It would be one thing if she just wrote and told me that she loved me. She does that kind of stuff all the time. But why did she say she’d
always
love me? Isn’t that what you say to someone when you think you’re never going to see them again?”

Jason couldn’t dismiss Sierra’s concerns. When he saw the text, he too thought it sounded like a farewell. If Hayden had ended up in some kind of danger, some situation she wasn’t going to be able to get out of on her own, then why not ask for help in
the text? Why not dial 911? And if she wasn’t in danger, what did the message mean? Had she chosen some other path in her life, one that Sierra couldn’t be a part of?

“I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about,” he said. “She probably just meant it like a regular ‘I love you.’”

Sierra whipped her head around. “I think we should go to the police. I think she’s in danger.”

Danger?
Jason thought.
Or trouble?
There was a huge difference between the two.

“Hold on now,” Jason said. He had made two turns away from downtown, and they were now on Park Street, heading into the residential neighborhood where he had lived as a child. “We have no reason to get the authorities involved. I think you’re just nervous and worried, and that’s fine. But what would we tell the police if we called them?”

“Tell them about that text. Tell them we think Mom’s in danger.”

“That’s not really enough to bother the police with.” Jason turned east on Eighth Street and slowed the car to a stop in front of a brick house with a wide front porch. Sierra didn’t look outside the car. She was still turned to Jason, her face intensely focused. “Your mom said she’d be back in forty-eight hours, right? And it hasn’t even been twenty-four. I think we just need to give her that time.”

Sierra turned away. She looked straight ahead, across the hood of the car. In profile, she resembled her father, Derrick, a little. They both had the same rounded tip of the nose, the same slightly raised upper lip.

“You were freaked out by the text too,” Sierra said without turning her head. “I saw it on your face.”

The kid was smart—he had to give her that. She didn’t miss a damn thing.

“Forty-eight hours,” Jason said. “Forty-eight hours.” He pointed across Sierra toward the house. “See that?” he asked. “That one there?”

Sierra didn’t look. “I’ve seen it. I’ve been inside.”

“When you were little?”

She nodded. Jason understood why she had withdrawn, but he also felt compelled to try to draw her out. Did all parents feel that way when confronted with a moody or unhappy teenager? Did they strive for anything that might engage the child?

“Your mom and I had rooms on the top floor,” Jason said. “Mine was on the left and hers was on the right. It was convenient for her.” Jason pointed again. “See that tree over there? She used to go out the window and climb down when she wanted to sneak out of the house.”

Sierra looked at the house, following the line indicated by Jason’s finger. She pulled out a tube of lip balm, the cap making a little snapping noise as she opened it, filling the car with the scent of strawberries. Sierra asked, “Do you think about the past a lot?”

“Sometimes,” he said. “I live in the town I grew up in. I’m middle-aged. That’s a combination that leads to thinking about the past.”

“I want to ask you something, then,” Sierra said.

“Something about your mom?”

“Something about you,” she said, turning back around to face him. “Maybe it has to do with Mom.”

“Okay. We’re kind of on memory lane anyway. Shoot.”

“I want to know about this friend of yours who disappeared.”

Jason sat back in his seat. If he’d been given one hundred guesses at what Sierra was going to say, the statement she uttered wouldn’t have been one of them.

“What are you talking about?”

“Mom told me once that you had some friend, some guy, and on the night of your high school graduation he just up and left. He got pissed at everybody here, and he just walked away and never came back. I’m curious about it.”

“He didn’t disappear,” Jason said. “‘Disappear’ suggests something else, something sinister. Like he was kidnapped. He just left like you said.”

“Can you tell me about it?” Sierra asked.

“Why are you so curious?”

“Mom brought it up one time. Years ago. I was a little kid. And then for a long time it never came up. To be honest, I guess I just forgot about it. But maybe six months or so ago I remembered that she had mentioned this guy who disappeared from her hometown, and that he was a close friend of yours. What was his name? I forget. Was it Larry or something?”

“Logan.”

“Logan. That’s it.” Sierra appeared lost in thought.

Someone on the street started a leaf blower, its droning howl cutting through the otherwise pleasant evening.

“So you asked her about it six months ago?” Jason said, prompting her.

“Right,” Sierra said. “She got a little pissy when I brought it up. She told me I shouldn’t ask about things like that, that they were none of my business. That wasn’t like Mom. She never minded if I asked her questions, even about the most personal stuff. I know a lot of things about her I don’t want to know.”

Jason remembered his sister’s frankness, especially the disclosures from their family therapy sessions. “I hear you,” he said.

“So why was Mom bent out of shape about me mentioning this guy?” Sierra asked. “Was she in love with him?”

“She wasn’t in love with him,” Jason said. “She was dating your dad in high school.”

“Was she dating Dad all the time? Were they exclusive?”

“Your mom wasn’t—” But Jason stopped himself before he said,
Your mom wasn’t exclusive with anybody, even your dad.
He said, “Your mom knew a lot of people in high school. She was popular.”

“I can guess what that means.”

When Logan came to their house—the very house they sat before—he and Hayden engaged in a fair amount of flirty banter. Hayden acquired the habit of answering the door wearing just a towel or a pair of skimpy shorts, and she greeted Logan by saying his name with a kittenish purr. But Logan wasn’t the only one of his friends Hayden acted that way around. It was just that Logan was Jason’s best friend, and he spent the most time at their house. Did anything happen between them? Anything more than hormonal teenage verbal jousting? Jason would have known, wouldn’t he? Somebody—either Logan or Hayden—would have told him. And Hayden did spend the majority of her time with Derrick, Sierra’s father.

“Are you just curious about the story?” Jason asked. “Or do you think it has something to do with why your mom is here?”

“Mom came back here out of the blue, and she bawled me out when I asked her about the guy. Doesn’t that seem odd?”

“Did your mom use the word ‘disappear’?” Jason asked.

“I was trying to remember. The first time I heard the story . . . I guess I can’t remember what words she used. Maybe I just inferred that she meant disappeared. When I asked her this last time, six months ago or whatever, I know
I
said ‘disappeared,’ and she didn’t correct me.”

“But she didn’t say anything else about it, right?”

“No, she didn’t. She told me to get lost. So, come on, who was this guy?”

A blur of images of Logan scrolled through Jason’s mind. Swinging a golf club or a tennis racket. Throwing back a beer or a shot. He thought of his conversation with Regan and her claim that Jason “hero-worshipped” Logan and didn’t see the real him. Was it possible to remember a complete picture of someone, to see a person with his flaws and his strengths? Did he think of Hayden as anything but the lost and wild child? Did he only see the other side of her—intelligent, loving, perceptive—when he was forced to? Was it the same with Logan? Jason knew that the people who left when they were young remained forever frozen in place, never touched by the ravages of time. Aging. Graying. Gaining weight. Losing options.

“He was my best friend,” Jason said. “We were best friends since the sixth grade. Our families were very different. His was pretty well-off, but I guess we met each other before anyone really thought about all of that. I don’t know—we were kids. We played sports together. We rode our bikes. In high school, we partied together. The usual stuff.”

“And that’s it?” Sierra said.

“Pretty much.”

But Jason remembered the first time Logan took him to the Shaws’ country club. He remembered the huge chandelier, the waiters in their sharply pressed white shirts, the way everyone called him “sir” as though he were already an adult, even though he must have been about twelve. Jason worried over which fork to use and whether to rest his elbows on the table. His hands almost shook as he reached for water or bread. It felt to Jason then—and it still felt that way to some extent—as though Logan
opened the door to another world for Jason, one he would never have seen without their friendship.

“What about when he disappeared? Or left. Whatever you want to call it.”

“It’s not important,” Jason said. “There’s nothing to tell.”

“Nothing?” Sierra asked.

Jason shifted around in his seat and put the car in gear. “We should be getting home. Nora’s going to be getting off work, and it’s kind of been a long
day.”