Chapter 59
My first thought at finding the house dark and locked was that they’d gone up the road for dinner.
I sat on the stoop, reasoning that it was a matter of time before they came back, not wanting to chase them down.
I could hear the television blaring next door.
After twenty minutes or so, I knocked on the neighbor’s door.
“Who is it?” came the voice that I’d first heard asking Louise if she needed a maid.
“I’m looking for my daughter and the old woman.”
The door cracked open. “Your mother?”
I hesitated. “Yes. Where are they?”
Through the crack in the door, she smiled thinly, her face permeated with dislike. “How would I know?” Then the door shut.
I stood for a moment, trying to decide what to do.
I climbed back into the car and drove into the small neighborhood beyond Louise’s, slowly passing the bodega, the tiny churchyard.
Several people were queued up outside the woman’s house for tamales, and stopping, I rolled down the window, calling to her with an acrid taste in my mouth, “Has my mother been here?” “Not tonight,” the woman answered.
Unable to think of anywhere else to look, I went back to Louise’s.
Finally, at half past eight, I drove home alone.
Tom was having a drink in the living room.
“Where’s Ida?”
“They weren’t there,” I said. “They must have gone out somewhere. Maybe she took her to a friend’s or something.”
“No,” Tom said. “This is completely unacceptable.”
“What, then?”
We would go back together. Henry was sound asleep and never awakened in the night; besides, we’d only be gone a short while.
I sat in the passenger seat, distractedly twisting my hands in my lap, starting to speak and then stopping.
I was anxious about leaving Henry, but also taking Tom somewhere I’d been without him, where I existed as someone else.
“It’s just there,” I said as we neared the building site.
Tom cast me a look, widening his eyes. I could see a vein working tensely at the side of his neck. The house was still dark. After we’d parked, I knocked at Louise’s door, after which Tom nudged me aside, banging his fist loudly.
“What the fuck?” he said.
“Maybe the back patio door is open,” I suggested. We went around the side, standing at the tall wall that enclosed the patio. Along the top edge, at random distances, jagged pieces of glass were affixed in the concrete. “You’ll have to hoist yourself over.”
He looked up, assessing the possibility, shifting his position left and right. There was a small shrub of some kind and, stepping on top of it, he was able to place his hands between two shards. With a heavy effort, he swung a leg up.
“Careful!”
He had managed to hoist himself over, his fingers still clinging on for seconds; then I saw them release.
“Did you cut yourself?”
“No,” he answered in a strange voice. A pause. “It’s open. What now?”
“Come through to the front door and let me in.”
There was another hesitating silence before his voice came back, still from the same place, “Should we be doing this?”
It seemed like a false question to me; we’d already crossed a crucial line.
And so, without answering, I walked back to the front, and after a few seconds, he opened the door.
Stepping past him into the darkened, empty house, I was gripped by a terrible foreboding.
A crushing emptiness, as though I had ceased to exist. I switched on a small table light, the room coming dimly into focus.
“We need to get back to Henry,” Tom said.
“Yes.”
“I can’t believe this.”
“Should I leave her a note?”
“Yeah. Tell her to call as soon as they’re home.”
“She doesn’t have a phone.”
“This is utterly fucked; who even does this?”
We went back and forth like this. Since coming inside the house, my voice and manner had become increasingly cowering, his terse and pressing, so that it was only as I was turning toward the small, hidden room to look for a piece of paper that I noticed: Allan’s painting was gone. The Navarro also.
Seeing my face, Tom said, “What is it?”
I ran to the stairs, taking them quickly.
I threw open her closet, her dresser, ran into her bathroom to check the cabinet.
She hadn’t taken everything; fleetingly I comforted myself with that fact: She’s not vanished; it isn’t permanent.
Tom was calling to me from the bottom of the stairs.
I hurried back to her bedroom, roughly pulling aside the covers, searching her bedside table.
There it was, beside a stack of books: my bracelet.
She’d set it atop a small piece of paper on which was written in her domineering hand: FOR MIA, WITH LOVE.
I was numb, struck through with terror. The bracelet, the words of parting.
My first thought was that she had killed herself and Ida.
I ran back down the stairs, into the living room, searching frantically for anything to reassure me: her cigarettes, the record of La Nina de los Peines, her black leather bag. All gone.
Tom kept repeating the same phrases: Talk to me, what’s happened, what’s going on?
As a last hope, I ran onto the patio, searching for Bella. When I saw she wasn’t there, I felt all the blood leave my face at once, replaced by ice, ice filling my limbs, my legs buckling.
“What is it? What’s happened?” He had grabbed hold of my shoulders and begun shaking me, like in an old movie where the man slaps the woman. “Speak to me!”
Still I couldn’t dredge up the words, Ida’s gone.
It had occurred to me that saying them would make them irrevocably true.
Whereas if I continued to say nothing, it might prove otherwise; Louise would walk through the door, calling to me warmly, Mia, my love, you’re here!
And I would let her call me that. To get my daughter back, I would pretend to love her.