“Never mind,” I said. To Cynthia, I said, “Tell me what he looks like, and I’ll just casually turn around and get a look at him.”
“He’s got black hair, he’s wearing a brown jacket. He’s eating Chinese food. Right now, he’s eating an egg roll. He looks like a younger version of my dad, an older version of Todd, I’m telling you.”
I swiveled slowly on my backless chair, made like I was taking in the various food kiosks, thinking about going to get something to eat. I saw him, catching some sprouts with his tongue that were falling out of the half-eaten egg roll. I’d seen a few pictures of Todd from Cynthia’s shoebox of mementos, and I suppose it was possible that had he grown up to be in his late thirties, early forties, he might look a bit like this guy. Slightly overweight, a doughy face, black hair, maybe six foot, although it was hard to tell with him sitting down.
I turned back. “He looks like a million other people,” I said.
“I’m going to get a closer look,” Cynthia said.
She was on her feet before I could protest. “Honey,” I said as she walked by me, making a halfhearted attempt to grab her by the arm and failing.
“Where’s Mommy going?”
“To the washroom,” I said.
“I’m going to have to go, too,” Grace said, swinging her legs back and forth so she could catch glimpses of her new shoes.
“She can take you after,” I said.
I watched as Cynthia took the long way around the food court, heading in the opposite direction from where the man sat. She walked past all the fast-food outlets, approaching him from behind and to the side. As she came up alongside him, she walked straight ahead, went to the McDonald’s and joined the line, glancing occasionally, as casually as possible, at the man she felt bore an amazing resemblance to her brother Todd.
When she sat back down, she presented Grace with a small chocolate sundae in a clear plastic cup. Her hand was shaking as she put it on Grace’s tray.
“Wow!” said Grace.
Cynthia showed no reaction to her daughter’s expressions of gratitude. She looked at me and said, “It’s him.”
“Cyn.”
“It’s my brother.”
“Cyn, come on, it’s not Todd.”
“I got a good look at him. It’s him. I’m as sure that’s my brother as I am that that’s Grace sitting there.”
Grace looked up from her ice cream. “Your brother’s here?” She was genuinely curious. “Todd?”
“Just eat your ice cream,” Cynthia said.
“I know what his name is,” Grace said. “And your dad was Clayton, and your mother was Patricia.” She rattled off the names like it was a classroom exercise.
“Grace!” Cynthia snapped.
I felt my heart begin to pound. This could only get worse.
“I’m going to talk to him,” she said.
Bingo.
“You can’t,” I said. “Look, it doesn’t make any sense that it’s Todd. For Christ’s sake, if your brother was just out and about, going to the mall, eating Chinese food in public, you think he wouldn’t have gotten in touch with you? And he’d have spotted you, too. You were practically Inspector Clouseau there, wandering around him as obvious as all hell. It’s just some guy, he’s got some passing resemblance to your brother. You go over to him, start talking to him like he’s Todd, he’s going to freak—”
“He’s leaving,” Cynthia said, a hint of panic in her voice.
I whirled around. The man was on his feet, wiping his mouth one last time with a paper napkin, crumpling it in his hand and dropping it onto the paper plate. He left the tray sitting there, didn’t take it over to the wastebasket, and started walking in the direction of the washrooms.
“Who’s Inspector Cloozoo?” Grace asked.
“You can’t follow him into the can,” I cautioned Cynthia.
She sat there, frozen, watching the man as he wandered down the hall that led to the men’s and ladies’ rooms. He’d have to come back, and she could wait.
“Are you going into the men’s room?” Grace asked her mother.
“Eat your ice cream,” Cynthia said.
The woman in the blue coat at the table next to us was picking at her salad, trying to pretend she wasn’t listening to us.
I felt I only had a few seconds to talk Cynthia out of doing something we’d all regret. “Remember what you said to me, when I first met you, that you were always seeing people you thought might be your family?”
“He’s got to show up again soon. Unless there’s another way out. Is there another way out back there?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “It’s perfectly normal to feel this way. You’ve spent your whole life looking. I remember, years ago, I was watching Larry King, and they had that guy on, the one whose son was killed by O. J., Goldman I think it was, and he told Larry that he’d be out driving, and he’d see someone driving a car like his son used to drive, and he’d chase the car, check the driver, just to be sure it wasn’t his son, even though he knew he was dead, knew it didn’t make any sense—”
“You don’t know that Todd is dead,” Cynthia said.
“I know. I didn’t mean it to come out that way. All I’m saying is—”
“There he is. He’s heading for the escalator.” She was on her feet and moving.
“For fuck’s sake,” I said.
“Daddy!” Grace said.
I turned to her. “You stay right here and do not move, you understand?” She nodded, a spoonful of ice cream stopped frozen en route to her mouth. The woman at the next table glanced over again and I caught her eye. “Excuse me,” I said, “but would you mind keeping an eye on my daughter, just for a moment?”
She stared at me, unsure what to say.
“Just a couple of minutes,” I said, trying to reassure her, then got up, not giving her a chance to say no.
I went after Cynthia. I managed to spot the head of the man she was after disappearing, descending the escalator. The food court was so crowded it had slowed Cynthia down, and there were half a dozen people between her, as she got onto the top step of the escalator, and the man, and another half dozen between Cynthia and me.
When the man got off at the bottom, he started walking briskly in the direction of the exit. Cynthia was straining to get around a couple ahead of her, but they were balancing a stroller on the precarious steps, and she couldn’t get past them.
When she hit the bottom, she broke into a run after the man, who was nearly to the doors.
“Todd!” she shouted.
The man was oblivious. He shoved open the first door, let it swing shut behind him, threw open the second, proceeded on to the parking lot. I’d nearly caught up to Cynthia as she went through the first door.
“Cynthia!” I said.
But she was giving me no more attention than the man was giving her. Once she was out the door, she called “Todd!” again to no effect, then caught up to the man, grabbing him by the elbow.
He turned around, startled by this out-of-breath, wild-eyed woman.
“Yes?” he said.
“Excuse me,” Cynthia said, taking a second to catch her breath. “But I think I know you.”
I was at her side now, and the man looked at me, as if to ask, “What the hell’s going on?”
“I don’t think so,” the man said slowly.
“You’re Todd,” Cynthia said.
“Todd?” He shook his head. “Lady, I’m sorry, but I don’t know—”
“I know who you are,” Cynthia said. “I can see my father in you. In your eyes.”
“I’m sorry,” I said to the man. “My wife thinks you look like her brother. She hasn’t seen him in a very long time.”
Cynthia turned angrily on me. “I’m not losing my mind,” she said. To the man, she said, “Okay, who are you then? Tell me who you are.”
“Lady, I don’t know what the fuck your problem is, but keep me out of it, okay?”
I tried to positio
n myself between the two of them, and using as calm a voice as possible, said to the man, “This is a lot to ask, believe me, I understand, but maybe, if you could tell us who you are, it would help put my wife’s mind at ease.”
“This is crazy,” he said. “I don’t have to do that.”
“You see?” Cynthia said. “It’s you, but for some reason, you can’t admit it.”
I took Cynthia aside and said, “Give me a minute.” Then I turned back to the man and said, “My wife’s family went missing many years ago. She hasn’t seen her brother in years and you, evidently, bear a resemblance. I’ll understand if you say no, but if you were to show me some ID, a driver’s license, something like that, it would be a tremendous help to me, and it would put my wife’s mind at ease. It would settle this once and for all.”
He studied my face a moment. “She needs help, you know that,” he said.
I said nothing.
Finally, he sighed and shook his head and took his wallet from his back pocket, flipped it open, and withdrew a plastic card. “There,” he said, handing it to me.
It was a New York State license for Jeremy Sloan. An address up in Youngstown. It had his picture right on it.
“May I have this for one moment?” I asked. He nodded. I moved over to Cynthia and handed it to her. “Look at this.”
She took the license tentatively between her thumb and index finger, examined it through the start of tears. Her eyes went from the picture on the license to the man in person. Quietly, she handed the license back to him.
“I’m very sorry,” she said. “I’m, I’m so sorry.”
The man took the license back, slid it into his wallet, shook his head again disgustedly, muttered something under his breath although the only word I caught was “loony,” and headed off into the parking lot.
“Come on, Cyn,” I said. “Let’s get Grace.”
“Grace?” she said. “You left Grace?”
“She’s with someone,” I said. “It’s okay.”
But she was running back into the mall, across the main court, up the escalator. I was right behind her, and we threaded our way back through the maze of busy tables to where we’d had our lunch. There were the three trays. Our unfinished Styrofoam bowls of soup and sandwiches, Grace’s McDonald’s trash.
Grace was not there.
The woman in the blue coat was not there.
“Where the hell…”
“Oh my God,” Cynthia said. “You left her here? You left her here alone?”
“I’m telling you I left her with this woman, she was sitting right here.” What I wanted to tell her was that if she hadn’t run off on a wild-goose chase, I wouldn’t have been faced with the choice of leaving Grace on her own. “She must be around somewhere,” I said.
“Who was she?” Cynthia asked. “What did she look like?”
“I don’t know. I mean, she was an older woman. She had on a blue coat. She was just this woman sitting here.”
She had left her unfinished salad sitting on her tray, along with a paper cup half filled with Pepsi or Coke. It was like she’d left in a hurry.
“Mall security,” I said, trying to keep panic from taking over. “They can watch for a woman, blue coat, with a little girl—”
I was scanning the food court, looking for anyone official.
“Did you see our little girl?” Cynthia asked people at surrounding tables. They looked back, their faces blank, shrugging. “Eight years old? She was sitting right here?”
I felt overwhelmed with helplessness. I looked back toward the McDonald’s counter, thinking maybe the woman lured her away with the promise of another ice cream. But surely Grace was too smart for that. She was only eight, but she’d been through the whole street-proofing thing and—
Cynthia, standing in the middle of the crowded food court, started to shout our daughter’s name. “Grace!” she said. “Grace!”
And then, behind me, a voice.
“Hi, Dad.”
I whirled around. “Why’s Mom screaming?” Grace asked.
“Where the hell were you?” I asked. Cynthia had spotted us and was running over. “What happened to that woman?”
“Her cell rang, and she said she had to go,” Grace said matter-of-factly. “And then I had to go to the bathroom. I told you I had to go to the bathroom. Don’t everybody freak out.”
Cynthia grabbed Grace, held her close enough to smother her. If I’d been having qualms about keeping to myself the information about those secret payments to Tess, I was over them now. This family did not need any more chaos.
No one spoke the whole way home.
When we got there, the message light on the phone was flashing. It was one of the producers from Deadline. The three of us stood in the kitchen and listened to her say that someone had gotten in touch with them. Someone who claimed to know what might have happened to Cynthia’s parents and brother.
Cynthia phoned back immediately, waited while someone tracked down the producer, who’d slipped out for a coffee. Finally, the producer was on the line. “Who is it?” Cynthia asked, breathless. “Is it my brother?”
She was convinced, after all, that she had just seen him. It would have made sense.
No, the producer said. Not her brother. It was this woman, a clairvoyant or something. But very credible, as far as they could tell.
Cynthia hung up and said, “Some psychic says she knows what happened.”
“Cool!” said Grace.
Yeah, terrific, I thought. A psychic. Absolutely fucking terrific.
11
“I think we should at least hear what she has to say,” Cynthia said.
It was that evening, and I was sitting at the kitchen table, marking papers, having a hard time concentrating. Cynthia had been able to think of nothing else since the producer’s call about the psychic. I, on the other hand, had been somewhat dismissive.
I didn’t have much to say through supper, but once Grace had gone up to her room do some homework of her own, and Cynthia was standing at the sink, her back to me, loading the dishwasher, she said, “We need to talk about this.”
“I don’t see much to talk about,” I said. “So a psychic phoned the show. That’s only a step up from the guy who thought your family disappeared into some rip in the fabric of time. Maybe this woman, maybe she’ll have a vision of them all riding atop a brontosaurus or something, or pedaling a Flintstone car.”
Cynthia took her hands out of the water, dried them, and turned around. “That’s hateful,” she said.
I looked up from a dreadfully written essay on Whitman. “What?”
“What you said. It was hateful. You’re being hateful.”
“I am not.”
“You’re still pissed with me. About today. About what happened at the mall.”
I didn’t say anything. There was some truth to what she said. We hadn’t said a word on the way home after scooping up Grace in the food court. There were things I wanted to say but felt I could not. That I had had enough. That it was time for Cynthia to move on. That she had to accept the fact that her parents were gone, her brother was gone, that nothing had changed because this was the twenty-fifth anniversary of their disappearance, or because some second-rate news show had shown some interest. That while she might have lost a family long ago, and that it was undeniably tragic, she had another family now, and that if she wasn’t willing to live in the moment for us, instead of in the past for a family that was in all likelihood gone, then—
But I said nothing. I couldn’t bring myself to say those things. But I found myself unable to offer comfort once we got home. I went into the living room, turned on the TV, flipped through the channels, never settling on anything for more than three minutes. Cynthia went into a tidying frenzy. Vacuuming, cleaning the bathroom, rearranging soup cans in the pantry. Anything to keep her too busy to have to talk to me. There wasn’t much good that came from a cold war like this, but at least the house ended up looking ready for a sp
read in House & Garden. This call from the psychic hotline, by way of Deadline, it just pissed me off even more.
But I said, “I’m not pissed,” riffling my finger through the stack of papers I still had to mark.
“I know you,” she said. “And I know when you’re angry. I’m sorry about what happened. I’m sorry for you, I’m sorry for Grace. I’m sorry for that man, for what I put him through. I embarrassed myself, I embarrassed all of us. What more do you want from me? What more can I say? Aren’t I already going to see Dr. Kinzler? What do you want me to do? Go every week instead of every other week? You want to put me on some sort of drug, something that will numb the pain, make me forget everything that’s ever happened to me? Would that make you happy?”
I threw down my red marking pen. “Jesus Christ,” I said.
“You’d be happier if I just left, wouldn’t you?” Cynthia asked.
“That’s ridiculous.”
“You can’t take any more of this, and you know something? Neither can I. I’ve had enough of it, too. You think I like the idea of meeting with a psychic? You think I don’t know how desperate it looks? How pitiful it makes me look, to go down there and have to listen to what she has to say? But what would you do? What if it was Grace?”
I looked at her. “Don’t even say that.”
“What if we lost her? What if she went missing someday? Suppose she’d been gone for months, for years? And there wasn’t a clue as to whatever happened to her.”
“I don’t want you talking like this,” I said.
“And then suppose you got a call, from some person who said she had a vision or something, that she’d seen Grace in a dream, that she knew where she was. Are you telling me you’d refuse to listen?”
I ground my teeth together and looked away.
“Is that what you would do? Because you didn’t want to look like a fool? Because you were afraid of looking embarrassed, of looking desperate? But what if, what if there was just one chance in a million that maybe this person knew something? What if she wasn’t even psychic, but just thought she was, but had actually seen something, some clue that she interpreted as a vision or something? And what if finding out what that was actually led to finding her?”