Chapter Ten
Regan
“A birthday party from hell, poor kid,” one of the caterers jokes as they try to maneuver food trays and equipment through
the pouring rain and safely into my kitchen. They have to dodge Hallie as she spins in her birthday tutu, unperturbed, and
still over the moon that all of her friends are coming even though the bounce house had to be canceled.
I give the caterers an apologetic look and tell them where they can set up the bar and chafing dishes.
Then I take advantage of the short amount of time I have before guests brave the weather and start trickling in.
Kids’ birthdays are equal parts squealing ten-year-olds and tipsy parents.
Most of us hire an attendant to run the games and cake patrol so we can take photos and enjoy the moment, and once you experience the luxury of this particular approach to kids’ events, it’s hard to go back.
So I let Kathy “the party princess” deal with all the work and duck into my bedroom.
First, I check inside the en-suite medicine cabinet to make sure I’ve hidden all my prescriptions and none of the moms can
come snooping in here. I can just see Vicky Wallen snapping a photo of all the shit I take and posting it to Instagram. That’s
probably unfair, maybe I’m just paranoid, but I worry every day that Hallie could be taken from me if I can’t keep this panic
under control, if I can’t manage this depression enough to keep getting out of bed and at least going through the motions
so she doesn’t feel the weight of any of this.
Once I’m satisfied everything is secure, I sit at the edge of my bed, open my laptop and check one more time if anyone has
responded to my many posts on message boards from Wallingford to Windsor Locks—and any surrounding areas I could find with
community boards or social media pages with local groups that let me join. Any site where I could cut and paste my plea to
anyone who has seen Jack—with a photo of him smiling at a gastropub in Jersey we went to once. I don’t remember why I took
the photo, but he looks happy in it. I click around, looking at pages, Facebook and even a page Andi told me
about on Craigslist called “Missed Connections,” which is a terribly sad place where people who met someone at a concert or
an outlet mall or Tom Thumb post a short appeal, hoping that random person they wished they connected with will think to look
at this bizarre place on the internet to find them back.
Just when I think to myself again that it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of and the last place anyone would reunite with someone, I get a notification.
My heart skips a beat as I open the message.
It’s from a woman named Beatrice who lives near Windsor Locks and has a profile picture of herself in a purple crochet hat holding a ferret. I click to open it.
Dear anonymous woman, it starts, because I didn’t leave my name, only an encrypted email they can respond to.
I’m such a hopeless romantic that I usually check the chance meeting section and the missed connection board every day in hopes that some handsome prince out there might have seen me reading on a park bench somewhere or maybe
lost sight of me just as the bus doors were closing . . . or something else romantic like that, and sadly, I have not yet
found my knight in shining armor, but I did see your post and I recognized the man.
I scroll down and see she’s attached a photo. Of Jack. Oh, my God. I don’t believe what I’m looking at. She goes on.
I snapped a photo of him this morning after I saw your post. He’s sort of turned away in the shot, but I didn’t want him to
think I was stalking him. Been there, done that. Anyway, I work at the Bluebird Café and he comes in all the time. Orders
coffee. Cream no sugar, and an apple turnover.
I stop reading and clasp my chest at the utter shock. That’s him. That’s his coffee order. Apple turnovers are his favorite.
What is happening? I finish reading.
I asked if his name is Jack and he said no, but he looked freaked out by the question and has never given me a name even though I’ve asked once or twice before.
He just changes the subject and that’s why I started calling him Apple Turnover when I see him come through the door.
I get a good chuckle out of it. Anyway, how romantic.
I hope you find him. He usually comes between eight and nine in the morning, when he does.
Please let me know if you find him and fall in love.
Electricity buzzes between my ears and I feel lightheaded and enraged all at once and I think I could almost faint but simultaneously
feel like punching the drywall on all of the walls into dust and screaming until my throat aches, but I can’t do any of that
or even respond back to this very kind but lonely-sounding woman because the doorbell rings and I hear Hallie calling, “Mom,
come on,” and I have to go put on an act for at least an acceptable three hours before I’m allowed to fall to pieces.
Once things are in full swing and Kathy has exhausted a balloon dance party and painting activities, the kids have moved on
to running around and screaming, hopped up on cake sugar, I guess playing some form of tag. The parents poke toothpicks into
cocktail wieners and stand around with wineglasses, although most of the men are out on the deck watching the game on the
big TV or playing pool. Andi looks like a ghost across the living room sitting in an armchair. Sasha sits next to her stirring
a martini and hollering at the pack of wild-eyed ten-year-olds chasing each other around the coffee table to “take it to the
rec room” . . . which they do, the hoots and squeals disappearing down the hall.
I perch on the edge of the coffee table opposite Andi and place my hand on her knee. “No word about Tia yet?” She shakes her head and looks out the window at the fingers of drizzle streaming down the glass.
“No one’s blaming you,” Sasha says, even though word is that Tia wouldn’t have gone on that run if she wasn’t blowing off
steam from the argument with Andi that the whole world apparently knows about now, and some people probably are sort of blaming
her.
“Obviously, she’ll turn up,” I say, but I don’t know that at all. I didn’t think Andi would be in this much despair over Tia.
I mean, of course it’s human decency to worry about someone who’s missing even if you hate them—you don’t want them dead or
anything, but Andi’s barely functioning, it seems. Having your name in people’s mouths is very unsettling.
I’m sure she’s most worried about how it affects her kids, but we’re talking about Cloverhill Lakes. The crime rate has to
be near zero. Until recently, of course. Still, surely Tia will turn up.
“Yeah,” Andi says mindlessly. We all sit in silence and listen to the sound of small talk from the folks mingling and the cheers from a football audience muffled through the glass doors.
I stare out at Carson and Tom, clinking their beer bottles together at what I imagine is a touchdown.
I think about how Ray should be here and wonder where he is exactly?
Driving around hopelessly, bawling his eyes out at home, drunk somewhere.
My heart aches for what he’s going through.
And then I think about how Jack should be here, too, and usually that’s when grief starts to take over and I have to excuse myself a moment, and sometimes it happens with bursts of white-hot rage, but right now I’m just very numb from the double dose of lorazepam, and I wish everyone would leave my house so I can process Beatrice and the Bluebird Café and what the hell it all means.
I do think twice about telling the girls about the message until I know more, but I feel like they’re a part of this now.
It was Sasha’s idea to ask around online. I want to have allies and not go it all alone, even if they are starting to wonder
if I need to be committed somewhere. I need their support.
“I have something to show you,” I say, looking over my shoulder to make sure nobody else is within earshot. I click open the
message from Beatrice and turn my phone around for them to see. They both lean in and read it. Sasha scrolls past my initial
post and I watch them read the woman’s reply.
“No fucking way,” Andi says, perking up a little bit. She grabs the phone and zooms in on the photo of Jack, who is turned
slightly away, sitting at a café table with a cup of coffee, but you can still tell it’s him. She squints at it. “Jesus, fuck,
Regan.”
“I know,” I say. Sasha didn’t know him, so it’s hard for her to offer much feedback, I’m sure, but she gives a sympathetic
shake of her head and hands the phone back.
“How is that possible?” she asks.
“I’m gonna say something you probably won’t like,” Andi says. “Not to be a total dream-crusher dick here, but . . . we attended
his funeral, honey. This is someone who looks like Jack. What other explanation could there be?”
I grab my phone back and sigh. “Something. It’s something,” I say.
“Reg, he was transported by air . . . by a US consular officer,” she says, I guess to remind me that what was recovered of his body was officially chaperoned from Colombia by the US Government.
She thinks that should shake me out of thinking his death was a hoax.
It’s not like he’s missing. We were all there.
He was said to be unrecognizable so I didn’t see his face, but I got his clothes and his watch and his wallet, and I threw a rose on his casket.
The US Consulate doesn’t bury the wrong guy.
“We’ll go with you,” Sasha says.
“What?” I say.
“To that coffee shop. We’ll go with you. We’ll find him,” Sasha says with kindness and optimism in her eyes.
“Dude,” Andi says. “If that’s him. Big giant-ass if. Then that woman who wrote you asked him if his name is Jack. If it is him, she spooked him. You think he’ll go back there if he’s on the run?” she asks, and
my heart sinks. I hadn’t thought of that, but she’s right.