Since She's Been Gone, page 2
“We can do that,” she told him. “Do you want any decorations on it? Edible flowers? Animals? Sprinkles? Balloons? We do themes too.”
He stood there looking at her like a deer in headlights.
“I’m not sure,” he said.
“Do you want to think about it, and I can help this other customer?” she asked him, pointing to me.
“Okay,” he said.
When he stepped to the side, I noticed tears in his eyes.
“How can I help you?” she asked me.
“Hang on,” I said to her and walked over to the man. “Are you all right?”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to make a scene,” he said. “It’s my daughter’s fifth birthday, her first since my wife died. Her mom was always the one in charge of her birthdays. I don’t know what little girls like.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss. Can I help you?” I offered.
He nodded. “Okay.”
We walked back to the counter and stood side-by-side. “Before I pick up my cake, I’d like to help him finish his order,” I told the store clerk.
“So far, he has a rainbow-shaped cake with chocolate frosting and purple writing on top,” she said.
“My daughter likes rainbows,” the man told me.
“Is there any way to do rainbow-colored frosting on the rainbow cake?” I asked the woman.
“Sure, we can do that. How about toppings?” she asked.
I spotted some cakes inside the refrigerated glass counter below with long rainbow-swirled lollipops.
“I think those lollipops would be great on top of the cake to keep with the rainbow theme,” I told the man. “What do you think?”
“Okay,” he said.
She totaled his bill, and he paid her.
“Thank you,” he said to me.
“I’m sure her mom would be happy you’re celebrating your daughter’s special day,” I said.
He nodded, the tears still in his eyes, and left.
Later that day, I checked my phone for messages between sessions and saw one from a number I didn’t recognize. I figured it was a prospective new patient. But it was the man I’d helped at the bakery. His name was Eddie.
He’d gone back to get my name from the bakery clerk, Googled me, and found my therapy website. He asked if he could take me out for lunch to thank me.
I wouldn’t characterize that first lunch together as a date, since he had asked me out to thank me. So it felt pressure-free, and we got to know each other without all the usual dating stressors.
I remember leaving the lunch thinking I liked him, not romantically, but as a person. He was hurting, in pain, and trying to do right by his daughter, just like Dad had tried to do with me, and I admired him for it.
When he asked me out again, I thought it was the beginning of a friendship. It wasn’t until a couple months later, when he kissed me for the first time in front of my house, that I realized he felt something more.
The truth was that I had wanted him to kiss me for a while but wasn’t going to go there since he was grieving his late wife.
In the middle of the kiss, he pulled away from me.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not sure I can do this. It feels like I’m cheating on Helen.”
“It’s okay,” I told him. “We can take things slowly or just be friends.”
“Thank you for understanding,” he said. And then he pulled me in close again, kissing me for a long while. We’ve been together ever since.
When we arrive at my office in Beverly Hills, I knock on the building manager’s office door.
“Coming,” the manager shouts before opening the door. He only has a few strands of white hair left on his head. I notice a couple of dated security television screens behind him.
“Yes?” he asks.
I take out my driver’s license and show it to him. “Hi, I’m Dr. Beatrice Bennett from suite 301. I saw a new patient today who didn’t give me her last name or contact information, and I need to call her. It’s an emergency. I’m wondering if you have any footage of her,” I say.
He looks confused. “I might,” he says. “But how’s that gonna help?”
Eddie holds up his phone. “We can scan her face using a facial recognition app to figure out who she is.”
“I’m not sure I’m allowed to do that. You’re not the police. What kind of danger are we talkin’ ’bout?” the manager asks.
“A danger to herself,” I say.
He raises his eyebrows. The hairless skin on his scalp bunches up in surprise. “Okay … but do it fast. Don’t want trouble if the owners come by,” he says.
“I’m a software engineer,” Eddie explains. “If you allow me to scroll through the footage, I can do it quickly and leave it exactly as is after we’re finished.”
The manager motions for us to proceed. We walk over to the dated security screens, and Eddie takes control of the panels.
“What time do you think she arrived?” he asks me.
“Sometime between six thirty and six forty-five,” I say.
He scrolls back through the footage of the first screen, which covers the exterior of the building. A couple of people walk by the entrance, someone walking their dog, another holding a Starbucks to-go coffee cup, and then at the 6:44 AM mark, I spot a woman with a black baseball cap.
“That’s her,” I tell Eddie.
He goes slowly through the footage of her approaching the building. We watch her enter, but her hat obscures her face. No luck.
Eddie moves to the second screen that covers the lobby and scrolls back to her entering it. She steps inside the building with the cap still on, presses the elevator button, and disappears inside—still, no luck.
At 7:03 AM, we watch her run out of the stairwell back into the lobby as I chase after her. And then it happens—for a split second, her baseball cap falls off.
Eddie zooms in on the moment the hat drops and grabs a screenshot of her face on his phone. It’s not a great image, but it’s something.
“Got it,” Eddie says.
“Time to get goin’,” the manager tells us.
“Thank you,” I say.
“No need to thank me ’cause this never happened,” he says.
CHAPTER
3
THERE’S ONLY ONE thing about losing my mom at fifteen that I have ever felt lucky about: I wasn’t younger when she died. Had I been, say, five years old, I probably wouldn’t have any memories of her, but because I was a teenager, and my brain was more fully formed, thankfully, I do.
Eddie and I are upstairs in my office. He’s busy downloading facial recognition apps on his phone while I’m methodically going through every memory I have with my mom, especially from the year before she died, to see if there was any sign that she might’ve been in trouble.
The problem is, when I think about her, the last thing that comes to mind is trouble. Dad used to tease her for being a goody-two-shoes. She once got a parking ticket, and he jokingly announced at the dinner table, “She’s going to prison, Beans.”
They were graduate school sweethearts who met at UCLA in their first semesters. He was in law school, and she was getting her PhD in psychology. He said when he saw her in the cafeteria, laughing with a couple of her girlfriends, it was love at first sight for him.
“She was so full of life, so luminous, I knew I had to introduce myself,” he told me.
They married after each of them finished their respective graduate programs. I was born shortly after that. My dad never lost his marvel of my mother. As far as he was concerned, she walked on water and could do no wrong.
When I entered adolescence and began acting out at times, he always defended her. “You’ve got the best mother in the world. Listen to her,” he told me.
I only ever heard them fight once. A couple of months before she died, it was late at night, and they thought I was asleep, but I wasn’t. The fight was so unusual that I got out of bed to see what was happening. I remember approaching their bedroom quietly, placing my ear on the closed door to hear what they were arguing about.
“Don’t we matter?” Dad asked Mom.
“It has nothing to do with you,” she said.
“It has everything to do with us!” I had never heard him raise his voice with her before.
“I’m spending the night at Pearl’s,” she announced. Pearl was her oldest friend in LA. As Mom approached their bedroom door to open it, I quickly ran back to my room before they could discover me eavesdropping.
The following day, when I woke up, she wasn’t there. Dad told me she’d left early for work due to a patient emergency, but I knew that was a lie. When I came home from school later that afternoon, she was in the kitchen unpacking groceries. I told her I’d overheard her and Dad fighting the night before.
“I’m sorry you heard it, but everything’s fine now,” she said, trying to reassure me, even though she looked worried.
“What did Dad mean when he said, ‘Don’t we matter?’”
She looked at me, taken aback. She hadn’t realized I’d heard what they were saying to each other.
She paused before responding. “Your father would prefer if I didn’t work as much and were home more, but I love my job. Please don’t bring it up to him. It’ll just upset him more.”
At the time, I remember what she said struck me as odd for two reasons. First, I was well into my teenage years, about to start taking driving lessons, and even thinking about college, not a toddler who needed my mom around all the time. Second, she had never asked me to keep anything from my father before. But she looked upset, so I let it go.
Now, thinking back on that fight, I can’t help but wonder if it was really about her staying at home or whether it was about something else. Did she want out of her marriage? Was she unhappy with her life? Was she thinking of leaving us?
At her funeral, her friends, colleagues, and relatives came up to me and told me how no parent had ever loved their child more than she loved me.
If she’s still alive, how can that be true? Who abandons a child they supposedly love? The burning in my chest from earlier returns.
“The image quality isn’t good enough for these apps,” Eddie says. “We need more sophisticated software. I’ll call Paul. He’ll be able to help us.”
Paul is Eddie’s best friend. They met at the University of Michigan as roommates freshman year and quickly bonded as fellow technophiles. He was Eddie’s best man at his wedding with his late wife, and he’s also Sarah’s godfather.
Paul works in some capacity for the FBI that he’s not allowed to disclose and lives in New York with his husband, Anthony, a professor at NYU. I haven’t met them because Anthony has been ill over the last couple of years, and they haven’t been able to travel. Eddie has talked about Sarah, him, and me making a trip to the Big Apple now that Anthony is doing better.
“Do you think contacting Paul is safe?” I ask Eddie. “The woman warned me to stay away from law enforcement, that it would be dangerous.”
“It’s Paul. If I explain the situation to him, he won’t tell a soul,” he says.
“But what if the FBI tracks what he’s doing?” I ask.
“He knows how to cover his tracks,” he says.
I quickly mull it over. What other choice do I have?
“Call him,” I say.
* * *
Eddie left Paul a phone message and then went home for a Zoom work meeting.
I have an hour and a half before my first afternoon session starts, and something’s gnawing at me. If Mom’s truly still alive, she couldn’t have staged her disappearance alone. We buried her casket—doesn’t that mean there was a body involved?
I argued with Dad at the time, saying I didn’t care if her body was in bad shape. I still wanted to see her one last time. But he was adamant that I couldn’t.
“I’m your parent, and it’s my responsibility to keep you safe,” he told me. “Seeing your mom’s disfigured body could traumatize you for the rest of your life. I won’t allow it, Beans.” So that was that.
Now I’m wondering if maybe he didn’t want me to see it because there wasn’t a body at all. That’s why I’m parked in front of Frank Esposito’s funeral home, where we held Mom’s memorial service and where I also held Dad’s service a decade later.
Frank is the undertaker and was the husband of one of Mom’s colleagues, who has since passed away. He presumably would’ve seen Mom’s body.
I remember how at her service, he came up to me and said, “Just because people are gone, doesn’t mean they leave us.” When I returned a decade later to bury Dad, he repeated it. I haven’t seen him since Dad died, but I still get a yearly holiday card from the Esposito family.
When I step inside the funeral home, a dark wooden casket is prominently displayed in the entryway. Dated red-and-white flower arrangements are everywhere, like a sad Christmas.
“Hello?” I call out since nobody’s around.
Frank walks out from the back, older than I remembered him. “Beatrice?” he asks. “Is that you?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Everything okay?” he asks, which is understandable considering the last two times I was here was to bury my parents.
“I’m okay,” I say. “I have a question for you.”
“All right …”
Might as well be direct. “Did you see my mom’s body after she died?”
He shifts his weight from one leg to another. “Why do you ask?”
I don’t respond, but I clock his discomfort.
“Are you wondering if she could have been saved?” he continues. “Because that’s a common response after losing someone we love, holding onto the hope that things might’ve turned out differently.”
I note that he didn’t answer my question and instead responded with one of his own. I decide to keep quiet. In therapy, pregnant silences can often lead to profound patient revelations. “Irene was my friend. I couldn’t stomach seeing her body, so, no,” he finally replies. “An employee dealt with her body.”
He seems a bit hedgy.
“Can I speak with them?” I ask.
“Oh, they’re long gone,” he says.
“Can I have their contact information?” I ask.
He narrows his eyes. “What’s going on?” he asks me.
“Nothing,” I say.
“To be honest, I don’t remember who was working back then,” he adds. “And even if I did, we deal with so many funerals. They wouldn’t remember one from twenty-six years ago.”
I nod, even though I’m not sure I entirely believe him. It took him a while to tell me he never saw Mom’s body, and he was visibly uncomfortable when I first asked him about it.
“I wish I could talk more,” he says. “But we’re getting ready for a memorial service now. I hope everything’s okay with you.”
I nod.
“Remember, just because people are gone—” he says.
“Doesn’t mean they leave us,” I say.
CHAPTER
4
I’M IN SESSION with my patient, Tom, putting on an Academy Award-worthy performance, acting as though a woman didn’t barge into this office a few hours ago to tell me my dead mother is still alive.
“I told her I got the promotion,” Tom says about his mother. He’s thirty years old and has spent the last year in therapy coming to terms with having a narcissistic mother.
“How did it go?” I ask.
“She made it all about herself, like usual. Barely acknowledged it and then asked if I knew she was leaving for Sedona next week.”
As he’s speaking about his mother, I can’t help but think about my own. If Mom is still alive, deserting Dad and me twenty-six years ago is whatever comes after narcissistic.
Could she really be alive?
“The good news is I didn’t expect her to react any other way,” Tom continues. “Something clicked in our last session when you told me to think of her narcissism as unchangeable, just like her eye color. It helped me not take her response personally—”
My cell phone buzzes on my desk, interrupting him. I usually silence it before seeing patients, but with everything that happened this morning, I forgot.
It buzzes again and again and again—it won’t stop.
“Excuse me,” I say. “I forgot to turn my phone off. My apologies.”
As I lift my phone, another text blooms, adding to the stream that’s already there:
LIE
LIE
LIE
LIE
LIE
LIE
LIE
LIE
LIE
LIE
LIE
LIE
Lie? My palms immediately clam up in a sweaty panic. Who’s sending me these texts? I don’t recognize the number.
Who is this? I text back.
Message undeliverable.
“That light just went on,” Tom says, pointing to the call light next to the door, alerting me that my next patient has arrived, even though my next session isn’t supposed to start for forty minutes.
“Do you have another patient now?” Tom asks.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I think there might’ve been a mix-up with scheduling today. I’ll be right back.”
I leave my office, confused by the texts and the call light. A police officer stands by himself in the waiting area.
“Are you Dr. Bennett?” he asks me.
My heart pounds like I’ve done something wrong, even though I haven’t done anything.
“Yes …” I say.
“Detective Thompson,” he says, showing me his badge. “Do you have a minute?”
“I’m in the middle of a session now.”
“It’s important,” he says. “Based on street camera surveillance, apart from the janitorial staff, only two people entered this building before seven this morning. One of them was you, and the other was a young woman wearing a baseball cap …”
He’s here about the fake patient?
“Did you meet with her?” he asks pointedly, meeting my eyes and not letting go.
LIE, the texts said.
