Chapter 13
EMILY WOKE UP EARLY on Monday morning with a start, sweating.
She wiped her neck with her hand, and for a moment she was hit with a sudden overwhelming sense of doom.
She had the sense she’d been having a terrible dream, but she couldn’t quite remember it.
Something was wrong, everything was wrong.
What’s wrong? She couldn’t exactly put her finger on it in the first moments after waking.
Right. She had really fucked everything up: Cee had read through all her texts and was angry with her for still coming to Coronado this year.
Julia was late to arrive and was getting divorced.
The air conditioner was broken, and it was unusually hot for May.
Was that true, or was she falling into early menopause on top of everything else?
She’d read an article somewhere that said your age at menopause was mostly genetic.
Whatever age it hit your mother, it would probably hit you too.
But how would she ever have any way to know that?
It wasn’t something that had occurred to her to ask Grandma Vera as a teenager.
She wondered if Julia was already having hot flashes, and maybe that would be something to ask her. If she ever showed up.
She got out of bed, briefly thinking maybe Julia had snuck in in the middle of the night.
But her body didn’t quite believe it, and the doom pervaded her, making her limbs feel heavy as she lumbered down the hall toward Julia’s room and gently pushed open the door.
The room was dark and quiet, the bed was still made. No suitcase either. No sign of Julia.
Emily needed fresh air, and outside on the porch, she was greeted by the cool burst of the gray morning.
A chilly breeze blew off the ocean; she was suddenly surrounded by low clouds that made the island, and ocean, look almost white.
But she exhaled with relief at the temperature change, with the way the cool air instantly made her feel a little lighter.
And then she walked slowly into town, to the Clayton’s to-go window to order a double Americano and a jelly donut.
Back on the porch a half hour later, she sipped her tall espresso, letting the caffeine slowly seep into her veins and wake her up. It was six thirty here, but nine thirty in Florida. The boys would be at school. Cee would already be at work.
Now didn’t seem like the right time to call her wife. Instead, she picked up her phone and typed out a text, staring at it for a moment, deciding if she should hit send: I know you’re mad at me, but I didn’t cheat…
The word cheat made her feel sick to her stomach, even typing it like this in a text, and she paused. She heard her wife’s angry voice in her head: An emotional affair is still an affair!
The sudden squawk of a seagull interrupted her thoughts, and she looked up. A beautiful large gray-and-white bird sat on the top porch step, staring up at her. “Hey, Vera,” she said. The bird cocked its head and stared at her hard, like it too agreed with Cee.
“Thanks,” Emily said. “Obviously, you would take her side over mine.”
It was Julia who had first insisted Grandma Vera was coming back to them as different birds.
A few months after Vera died, the night Ted proposed to her, Julia had found herself stalked by a red-tailed hawk that had recently relocated to the tree outside her apartment.
She’d noticed it peering in her open window that night, just as Ted got down on one knee.
Later, Nora would be walking up Seventh Avenue, to her very first audition in New York City, when a pigeon would poop on her head.
Though Julia insisted that was supposed to be good luck, Nora hadn’t gotten the part, and then Nora believed Grandma Vera had been trying to tell her it wasn’t the right part for her.
When Emily first moved to Florida, there was a gorgeous heron that she would often find standing outside her apartment building, eyeing her as she’d walk to class.
In a way, it had started as a joke between the sisters, but then, over the years, it had started to feel a little bit real too.
Sometimes the three sisters didn’t text for months, and then one of them would send a picture of a bird they’d spotted. Grandma Vera says hi!
Emily moved away from the half-composed text to her camera and took a picture of the seagull now. She popped it into the sisters’ chat: Grandma V is ready for sisters’ week to begin.
No one immediately responded, which told her Nora was likely still asleep and Julia was… well… she really didn’t know. She swallowed back that feeling of doom again as it started rising up in her chest, to her throat, and then she went back to the text she’d typed out to Cee and reread it.
“This isn’t right, is it?” she said to the seagull, who continued to stare at her from the step, its head tilted.
She deleted the text and simply typed instead: I miss you.
She hit send quickly before she could change her mind, and then she watched three dots appear briefly, then disappear. She stared at her phone for a few minutes, willing Cee to respond. Something. Anything was better than nothing. But she didn’t. At least not right away.
And when Emily looked up again the seagull was gone.
Nora arguably had always had the best bedroom in Grandma Vera’s house.
Though it was the smallest of the three upstairs bedrooms by far, which was why her sisters had probably stuck her with it in the first place, it was the only one that sat directly in the front of the house, which meant when she opened her blinds each morning, she was looking straight out at the ocean.
As a kid, she hadn’t really appreciated that, and she hadn’t liked the way being in the front of the house had magnified the noise of the military planes and helicopters flying drills just off the beach.
But over the years, even the noise had become a thing of comfort.
Although she had fallen asleep last night worrying about Julia, she had slept remarkably well, the way she always did in this room, this bed.
But then as she stretched, got up, cracked the blinds this morning, she noticed not the Pacific Ocean but Emily sitting out front on the porch. Alone. Was Julia still not here? What was going on?
Nora went and picked up her phone and saw the text Emily had sent to the sisters’ chat nearly an hour earlier: a seagull picture.
Julia hadn’t responded there. Or to the text Nora had sent her directly yesterday.
Nora liked the picture of the bird, and then felt her heart thudding in her chest as she grabbed her robe and ran down the hallway toward Julia’s room.
But Julia’s bed was still made, the room looked untouched, empty.
It was now Monday morning. Nora could think of no logical reason why Julia wasn’t here, and plenty of terrible reasons ran through her brain instead.
She tried to push them away as she ran downstairs, outside to the porch.
“We should call the police,” she blurted out, breathless, as she tumbled outside.
Emily turned from her spot on the steps, looked at Nora, and frowned. “What?”
“What if something terrible has happened to her?”
Emily forced herself to take a slow, deep breath, trying not to succumb to Nora’s panic. “Why don’t we try Ronnie first?” She glanced at her phone. “It’s ten thirty on the East Coast. Reasonable time to call a college student, right?”
Nora shrugged. She had no idea. She’d texted Veronica on her birthday last November and sent her a Starbucks gift card, but hadn’t interacted with her niece since then.
“I’ll call her,” Emily said.
“Put her on speaker,” Nora said. Unlike Ted, whom Nora had no desire to ever talk to, the sound of her niece’s clear, sweet voice always made her happy. And she was worried Emily wasn’t going to handle this right. “Let’s try not to freak her out,” she added.
“Says the one freaking out,” Emily retorted.
“Well, maybe the seagull came because she knows something’s wrong,” Nora said softly, as she listened to the line ringing through Em’s speaker. “Vera is trying to tell us something.”
Emily gave her a look. “The seagull came because the beach is across the street and seagulls live at—”
“Aunt Em, is that you?” Veronica’s sleepy voice suddenly came through the phone, and they immediately stopped arguing about the seagull. “What’s wrong?”
“Hey, Ronnie!” Emily said, her voice pitched with false brightness.
“Hi, Ron, I’m here too,” Nora chimed in, too cheerful.
“Oh!” Veronica said. “It’s the last week in May.” Like it suddenly dawned on her exactly where her aunts were and why they were together, calling her. “Is Mom there too?”
Emily and Nora looked at each other, and they locked eyes for a moment, as if battling out who was going to speak next.
What exactly they were going to say. Nora sighed and finally spoke.
“Well, actually, sweetie, that’s why we’re calling.
Your mom is a little late getting here and we haven’t been able to get in touch with her. Do you know where she is?”
Veronica was silent on the other end of the line for what was probably only a few seconds but felt to Nora like an hour. “That’s weird,” she finally said.
“Right,” Emily said. “Your mom is almost always the first one to arrive in Coronado.”
“No, I mean… I had her on Find My, but now she’s just… gone.”
“What do you mean gone?” Emily asked.
Veronica cleared her throat. “Well… to be honest. We kind of got in a fight about Find My a few weeks ago. She kept tracking me and like was a little obsessed about knowing where I was. You know how she is.” Emily and Nora both murmured in agreement.
They did know. “And I um…” Veronica continued.
“I might have told her to get a life and stop looking on Find My. So, I guess maybe she did?”
Nora tried to decide if Veronica’s voice was thick now with alarm or sadness or just sleep. Then she wondered if Veronica even knew about her parents’ impending divorce or whether Julia and Ted hadn’t told her yet either.
“So she just like didn’t show for sisters’ week?” Veronica said.
“Well…” Emily floundered. “Aunt Nora and I only got here yesterday afternoon. But yeah, she’s not here yet.”
“And she’s not answering our texts,” Nora added. “Has she been texting you at least?”
Veronica sighed. “It’s been a few weeks. Like I said… we kind of got in a fight. And I told her I needed some space.”
Nora felt herself flinching, for Julia. She wasn’t a mother, and she would probably never understand the complicated mother-daughter relationship, not having had a mother herself.
But she knew how much Julia loved Veronica.
When she thought about the last thing Julia had yelled at her the previous May, she immediately understood one thing about Julia with her whole heart.
That Veronica telling her she needed space had hurt Julia pretty badly.
Was that enough to explain her disappearing act now?
Or was Nora herself the one to blame? Her entire life she had brought the sisters together whenever they’d fought, and then she’d let this whole year go by without reaching out to Julia to try to fix things.
It wasn’t that she hadn’t wanted to, it was more that she hadn’t known how.
“Did you guys ask my dad?” Veronica said.
Nora and Emily exchanged a look. “He wasn’t really sure about her travel arrangements,” Emily finally said.
“That tracks. They hate each other,” Veronica said matter-of-factly.
Hate each other? That felt both strong and unexpected. And Emily and Nora exchanged another look that was part fucking Ted and part a newly genuine worry for Julia. Where was she that she hadn’t told any of them? How bad had things really been between her and Ted?
“You know, she did this once before,” Veronica was saying now. “I think I was like five or six?”
“Did what?” Emily asked. “She has always shown up in Coronado on Sunday for sisters’ week. Since we started doing it in 2000.”
“Yeah,” Veronica said. “But you know about that one year where she just didn’t come home after your sisters’ trip, right?”
Emily raised her eyebrows and Nora shook her head. No. Neither of them knew about this.
“What do you mean didn’t come home?” Emily asked.
“She came home eventually. But it was like three or four weeks late. I was five or six at the time, so I don’t know the whole story. But I just remember there was like this gap of time where it felt like she had disappeared into thin air.”
“Disappeared into thin air,” Emily repeated softly, suddenly thinking about the secret that she’d accidentally stumbled upon herself when she was a teenager.
It threatened to rise up, to spill out of her now.
“Your mother would never do that,” Emily added.
Veronica had been young. Whatever had happened, she was probably remembering it wrong now.
“No, she did,” Veronica insisted. “Ask Dad if you don’t believe me.”
Emily rolled her eyes and Nora chewed on her bottom lip. There was no way in hell either of them was going to call Ted back.
“I asked her about it once, a few years ago. And she said she just needed a little time alone to think. That she kind of freaked out and didn’t mean to leave me, but she needed that time to herself.
I mean… that’s probably what’s happening now too…
?” Veronica’s voice trailed off into a question, as if she was suddenly considering the possibilities of where Julia could be.
That something more sinister, more terrible could be going on.
“Probably,” Nora said too brightly, a lame attempt to reassure her niece.
“I bet if you call her office, they’ll know where she is,” Veronica said. “She might disappear on us, but she would never do that to work.” Nora thought she detected a trace of bitterness in Veronica’s voice, but maybe she was imagining it.
“Okay. We’ll do that,” Emily said. “And if you get in touch with her, will you let us know? Even if she’s not planning on coming here this week…
” She stopped talking, as if saying it out loud could make that a reality.
How could Julia just not show up? After all this time?
Without even telling them. They had promised each other they would come every year, no matter what.
“Nora and I at least want to know she’s okay. ”
“I’m sure she’s okay,” Nora added, again too brightly. “But, it would be great to know where she is.”
“Knowing Mom, she’ll probably just… show up in Coronado today with some very reasonable and logical explanation,” Veronica said. But then she added, her voice a little softer: “Tell her to text me when she does, okay?”