Chapter Seven
Regan
When I arrive at the meeting spot in the town square for the search, it’s a sea of venti macchiatos and Lululemon. Through
the puffer coats and ponytails, I spot Sasha sitting on the concrete steps in front of the fountain, and as I get closer,
I see Andi, standing next to her holding a cup of coffee and looking . . . shockingly pale and, frankly, terrible.
“Morning,” I say, knowing Sasha probably thinks I’ve lost it after running out of the theater, and Andi doesn’t understand
whatever sick joke she thinks I was playing at with the selfie I sent her. They look surprised to see me. I don’t even know
what I’m doing here. I should be in Windsor Locks pounding on every door looking for Jack, but really, where would I begin?
Nobody will believe it was him. Do I even really believe it?
“How are you feeling?” Sasha asks, which is probably code for, did you have to check yourself into a psych ward last night—or what stage are we in of your mental breakdown exactly?—but she’s far too nice to express any of that.
“Fine,” I say, then change the subject. “Is that Drew and Roxie?” I ask, nodding across the square where the two teens sit
by the fountain—Drew is wearing a backpack, and Roxie is next to him, holding a folder of papers they seem to be going over
together. That’s unusual. I know there was an attempt to shield the kids from this, but of course, by now, the whole tri-state
area knows about Tia. There’s no more keeping the kids from it, but they certainly can’t be part of searching for . . . well,
at this point, a body in the woods, because that’s really why we’re here. I guess if I had a teen, I wouldn’t know whether
they should be involved or locked in their room until this was all figured out. I’d want to protect them from the trauma of
it all. But it’s impossible to know how to handle any of this.
“They wanted to help,” Sasha says, and Andi just nods. She looks like she got hit by a Mack truck. I guess she’s taking all
of this harder than I thought. I watch her eyes flick, almost manically, back and forth from a circle of women talking by
the fountain to the Pilates girls handing out whistles and flashlights in case folks need them. I see what she’s seeing. She’s
not just imagining the quiet accusations; they come in glances over shoulders and in the whispers between friends, but the
message is loud. People wonder if she did something to Tia. If anyone knows what unspoken judgment feels like, it’s me.
But Andi doesn’t address it. She casts her bloodshot eyes to the ground, and I feel so much goddamn heartache for what she’s about to go through if Tia isn’t found safe—an innocent person guilty by the court of public opinion. She already knows it. Poor thing.
“So what the hell was with the photo you sent?” she asks, still looking down, poking at the gravel with the toe of her Burberry
sneakers.
Sasha looks at me—a look that tells me she wants to know as well, but is too polite to ask. Instead, she offers a tight, sympathetic
smile, but her eyes tell me that she’s worried about me. I know I scream “unstable” and need to explain.
“I’m sorry I left like that,” I tell Sasha. I pull the hood of my coat up against the crisp air and sit down on the steps
in front of them.
“What happened?” Sasha asks, and I take a deep breath before I speak. I hesitate. I’ve thought about whether I would say anything,
but I have to tell someone. I contemplated going to the cops last night. But there are a lot of reasons I can’t do that yet.
It’s a small town and the police department is all-hands-on-deck with the missing person search. They also think I’m unstable
and won’t take it seriously. Jack was friends with most of the department, and they all attended his funeral. His actual fucking
funeral. Everyone was there, witness to it, so they know he’s not hanging around the back of a community theater in Cloverhill
Lakes.
So I could report what I saw and appear wildly unhinged . . . and at the end of the day, what will they do? What can they really do? Jot down some notes on a form they call a police report between inner eye rolls? No. Not the route for me
to take right now.
I did wonder about my meds. I know at least one of them can cause hallucinations, but I feel like I would know.
I sat up in bed last night looking at the names of each one and googling side effects.
I told myself I would stop going down that rabbit hole, at least when Hallie is home, because it can send me into a full-blown panic attack.
But I just feel like it’s not in my head.
I took acid in college once and saw six elephants having a tea party in my backyard. They morphed into giant anteaters and
sucked up all the grass and trees and the house with their snouts and then they sucked me up and I was in their belly swimming
around with all the living room furniture. It was a hoot. Never laughed so hard. But I was aware that I was hallucinating.
I think I would know if I was just having an average day and out of nowhere started seeing things. I would know.
So I decide to say something, and if Sasha and Andi don’t believe me, I don’t know what the hell I’ll do next. The heaviness
of the depression I can’t claw my way out from under feels so heavy and oppressive, I can’t bear this alone. So I blurt it
out.
“I saw him. It was him.”
Andi snaps her head up. She gives me a look of utter confusion while Sasha’s expression is something closer to pity.
“You freaked out because you saw some guy who looked like him after I pointed it out. A lot of guys have sandy hair and square
jaws. It was dark, Regan. Come on,” Andi says.
And then before I can defend my position, Sandy Milroy starts speaking into a bullhorn to get everyone’s attention.
She’s Tia’s aunt, I think, or maybe just her mother’s friend, I’m not sure, but her name has been all over the organization materials as a contact.
We stop talking and begin moving closer to the fountain, where everyone is beginning to congregate in order to listen.
She thanks everyone and gives some safety instructions, and then she explains the search.
The lake is just under ten miles around.
Folks are assigned to a side, and I see Roxie and Drew purposefully walk over to the side away from us, which I guess is a teenager thing to do, but it still strikes me as a little odd.
Then she gives us printouts of maps of the woods and the route to take so we can spread out correctly and ensure the dense wooded areas that span for miles in some places have a cutoff point.
We’re mostly just focusing on the manageable portion that’s more residential and meets the houses and lake. That way, nobody can get lost.
Andi says she wants to take the west side so she can end at her house because she has a meeting this afternoon, so we grab
our walking sticks and whistles from the supplies table that Sandy has neatly put together and begin our descent into Bramble
Thicket, the three of us together.
The air is heavy with a mist that threatens to turn into rain, and it makes everything more unsettling—more eerie—as we make
our way through the hazy air, poking at wet leaves and branches with our sticks and listening to the hum of melancholy conversations
from the groups in the distance.
“There are black bears out here. Why would she jog these trails? Does she carry pepper spray or anything?” Sasha asks. She’s
probably just filling the dead air and at the same time trying to make sense of what we’re doing, but Andi snaps.
“How would I know?” We both look over at her, but she keeps her gaze away, tapping a tree with her walking stick and letting
out an exasperated sigh, as if she’s inconvenienced that her whacking didn’t yield Tia to somehow materialize. She looks almost
like a teenage boy with her small frame swimming in a vintage hoodie and no makeup on.
“So who was the man?” Andi asks, taking the focus off herself.
I don’t respond. I suddenly feel pathetic telling them something that sounds so outrageous, and it’s not the time anyway.
Maybe I’m starting to doubt it myself. I was there, of course.
In the front row of the church, which was so cold that day.
My mother wrapped her coat around my shoulders.
She had to help me stand up from the pew when it was time to go.
I remember it in nightmarish fragments and blurs—the reception held at Grady Watkins’s house—everyone was drinking scotch and singing along to Jack’s favorite Van Halen songs because “that’s what he would have wanted,” but it all felt wrong.
I drank tepid coffee out of a small white mug in an armchair in a corner and stared at the wall, still in utter shock and denial.
I wouldn’t talk to anyone. I remember it like yesterday.
It’s when the darkness started to set in, and I’ve never been the same since.
So now, the voice telling me to be rational, telling me that the funeral was real and Jack is dead . . . is just a little
bit quieter than the voice screaming at me that I saw him with my own eyes boarding a train to Windsor Locks. It makes me
feel crazy. Andi’s and Sasha’s reactions make me feel deranged. Maybe I can’t trust myself. Maybe the pain is still too blinding
to see it all clearly and I’m just seeing what I want.
“Holy shit.” Andi stops cold and of course so do Sasha and I, at first thinking she found something, but she’s looking at
me with a hand on her hip. “You legit, like, really think it was him,” she says.
“Let’s just keep walking,” I say. I’m freezing.
“Like, you weren’t just traumatized or something because you saw a guy who looks like him and it brought it all back . . .
You think it really was him?”
We’ve all stopped now and are standing by an ancient fallen tree that smells like damp earth. Sasha puts her hand on my shoulder.